CLIMATE CHANGE HAS GONE 'FROM A SCIENCE TO A RELIGION'

A northern Alberta geologist has embarked on a crusade to stop what he says is the madness of the prevailing wisdom that human activity is heating the Earth. "The truth has to start somewhere," said Bruno Wiskel in an interview with the Sun yesterday. Wiskel, who teaches a University of Alberta faculty of extension course, says climate change is an eons-old force that has nothing to do with people. Current global warming, he said, has been going on for about 18,000 years, with glaciers retreating and sea levels rising ever since. "If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern," said Wiskel. "But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years."

Wiskel's comments came a day after opposition MPs and environmentalists blasted as inadequate Canada's efforts to combat global warming. A Bonn-based development group, Germanwatch, placed Canada 51st out of 56 countries that were assessed for their performance and policies on climate change.

Wiskel says climate change has gone "from a science to a religion" that preaches carbon dioxide from human activity is to blame for increasing temperatures - something with which he soundly disagrees. He blamed people grubbing for research dollars for perpetuating what he says is a myth. "If you funnel money into things that can't be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed."

Wiskel, touting his latest book The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming, teaches a U of A course called Building an Energy Efficient Home for Less. He started to research climate change while building a "Kyoto house" in which he now lives near Athabasca, about 150 km north of Edmonton. He claims his house is 5,500 square feet and uses less than 10% of the natural gas that a regular home in Edmonton would use. In building the house, he says, he was seeking to prove that Kyoto Protocol targets could be met by people making small changes in their lives, without touching industry. Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and "red flags," and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.

Source






Every silver lining has a cloud

A freelance science writer asks why greens seem so opposed to one scientist’s proposal for stabilising global temperatures

Little is certain in the field of global climate prediction. But one thing is for sure: if all those worst-case scenarios made so much of by environmentalists come true, we really are screwed. So you might expect those same environmentalists to be rather excited by a project that claims to be able to stabilise global temperatures at the push of a button, and keep them stable while the world makes the transition to energy sources of the future. Except that they’re not. In fact, if their reaction to the project is anything to go by, either they don’t believe their own press releases, or trying out new things in order to save the planet is not one of their top priorities.

There has been no shortage of suggestions over recent decades for large-scale ‘engineering fixes’ for global warming, some more outlandish than others. They have ranged from seeding the oceans with iron filings to draw down atmospheric CO2, to the launching of billions of aluminised balloons to reflect the sun’s rays away from the Earth, to the installation of giant mirrors in space that intercept those rays before they reach us. Atmospheric physicist John Latham’s idea is perhaps more down-to-Earth than most, although whether it can provide a ‘solution’ to climate change remains very much up for debate. In the 1980s, Latham, professor emeritus at Manchester University, and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, realised that the Earth already had the hardware in place for reflecting sunlight back into space.

While some types of cloud have an insulating effect on the planet, others, such as the low-altitude stratocumulus variety that covers much of the world’s oceans, reflect incoming sunlight. Latham’s idea, which he first published in the science journal Nature in 1990, is to make the silver linings of those stratocumulus clouds a little bit more silvery, by injecting salt crystals into the atmosphere to seed the formation of the water droplets that comprise them. In this way, he claims, ‘one can produce a degree of cooling in a controlled way, to try and balance the warming produced by the burning of fossil fuels’. He calculates that to achieve the desired effect on cloud reflectivity would require treating them with ‘a cupful’ of salt per km2 per hour.

‘It’s a very interesting idea, and one that is based on sound cloud physics’, says Alan Gadian, climate scientist at the University of Leeds. He is impressed that, because the technique would be augmenting a natural process (breaking waves are constantly throwing vast quantities of salt up into the atmosphere), it carries relatively little risk. And should things go awry, he says, ‘you could just stop producing these salt crystals and the system would return to its normal state’. John Shepherd, director of the University of Southampton’s Earth System Modelling Initiative, agrees. ‘In principle, the idea is sound’, he says. ‘The big question is whether they can get enough sea salt nuclei into the atmosphere.’

And that’s down to Stephen Salter, professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, who is best known for his invention of ‘Salter’s duck,’ a device for harnessing energy from waves. For the current project, he has designed a fleet of specialised ocean-going yachts. ‘They’ll look like steam ships with big funnels’, he says. But these are no ordinary funnels. They will be spinning rapidly on their vertical axis, a feature that serves two important functions.

The first is propulsion. When wind hits a spinning cylinder, it generates a sideways thrust. As well as allowing the boats to be positioned optimally, this force would propel them fast enough to drive a water turbine that powers the conversion of seawater into a very fine mist. As the mist rises, the water evaporates from the droplets to leave the airborne salt crystals. To do their job, the crystals must be within a narrow size range, which means producing droplets that are consistently about one millionth of a metre in diameter. This will involve vibrating the surface of a seawater reservoir to create a network of fine ripples. ‘If you make these ripples big enough, drops are thrown off’, says Salter. The size of those drops is determined by the frequency of the vibrations.

And there lies another technical challenge. To produce the ripples, the surface of the seawater reservoir must be smooth – not easy to achieve on a pitching, rolling boat. This is where the spinning funnels really come into their own. They will be filled with seawater, which gets thrown against the walls by centrifugal force, producing a smooth, vertical surface on which the ripples can be generated. Fans inside the funnels will then blow the resulting mist up into the sky like smoke rising from a chimney.

The yachts will carry no crew, but will be controlled via satellite. Salter estimates that a fleet of up to 40,000 of these hi-tech Mary Celestes would be required to offset the temperature rise predicted to result from a doubling in atmospheric CO2. Even if CO2 concentrations were to increase according to worst-case scenarios, this, he estimates, would provide several decades’ respite – which might provide time to develop non-carbon energy sources; research the intricate workings of climate systems; and plan long-term strategies to cope with a changing climate.

It would also be relatively cheap. ‘I can’t see these things being more than a million quid a go’, says Salter. That still adds up to £40billion. However, the investment would be spread over the time it takes for CO2 to double. ‘You’d only need to spend perhaps three per cent of that every year to stabilise things’, says Salter. ‘That would be an incredible bargain.’ Indeed, it is a tiny fraction of the expense of the Kyoto Protocol, for example, which is expected to shave off just a few tenths of a degree of temperature rise over the next hundred years.

Stabilisation of global temperatures? Little risk? At a fraction of the cost of Kyoto? It sounds like it at least worth trying, and it sounds like an environmentalist’s wet dream. So why are green organisations so unimpressed with the idea? ‘It’s one of those crazy engineering solutions to climate change that we ignore really’, says Friends of the Earth (FoE) climate campaigner Bryony Worthington. ‘It’s not something we think we should be spending money and time on.’ Worthington denies she’s being dismissive. ‘It’s not a question of being dismissive; it’s a question of whether this is worth any time and effort even thinking about.’

Over at Greenpeace, Mark Strutt, who was until recently senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK (he’s now Greenpeace International’s agriculture spokesperson), takes a similar stance. ‘Greenpeace wouldn’t be interested in this sort of thing. We’re looking for reductions in the use of fossil fuels rather than these technologies that in all likelihood would come to nothing.’

Of course, the project might indeed come to nothing. There are good reasons to think that we cannot control the climate – a chaotic system influenced by a host of inputs – by tweaking a single variable. And yet tweaking a single variable – CO2 emissions – is precisely what environmentalists are themselves urging us to do. However, the environmentalist case against engineering fixes for global warming does not rest on the underlying science. It has more to do with a view of science as the cause of the world’s problems, and not something that might provide a solution. ‘We don’t take these ideas very seriously because the idea that we’ll somehow come up with a man-made fix is fanciful’, says Worthington. This sentiment is echoed by Charlie Kronick, Greenpeace UK’s climate change coordinator. ‘The idea of interfering with another natural system to compensate for the nearly catastrophic interference we’ve already done is not an enticing prospect’, he says.

Despite these seemingly Luddite sentiments, Worthington claims to have science on her side. ‘The models are showing that reducing the concentrations of greenhouse gases is the only sensible response to climate change.’ Really? Latham has been collaborating with the UK Meteorological Office to test the theory behind his project using their powerful computer model of global climate. This suggested that treating clouds covering just three per cent of the Earth’s surface would cool the planet sufficiently to compensate for a doubling of CO2. Alan Gadian is sufficiently impressed that he is now embarking on a project to replicate that study.

It is at this point that Worthington is forced to express her discomfort with the very models on which the environmental case depends. ‘But he can’t be certain’, she says, ‘they’re only models.’ Yes, and green activists’ predictions of climate change disaster are also based on models.

There may be other reasons for FoE and Greenpeace’s discomfort with such projects. After all, a successful engineering fix would deprive the green movement of its most valuable political currency – urgency. If the world were to have a few decades of stable temperatures, the urgency of green politics would have to give way to a genuine, rational political debate. Their discomfort also points to a lack of faith in man-made solutions; we are seen as giving rise to climate chaos and thus must apparently take a hands-off approach from nature.

Engineering the climate might yet prove impossible, for scientific or practical reasons. Latham’s team is now planning a small-scale pilot experiment further to explore the project’s viability. ‘We don’t know yet what fraction of the drops we make will actually get up to where the clouds are’, says Salter. But there is surely something noble about the aspiration to control the climate. We don’t need climate models to tell us that Mother Nature has plenty to throw at us, whether or not the planet warms as predicted. And in that respect, projects such as Latham’s could be seen as valuable developments, regardless of whether the elements have even more nasty surprises in store for us.

No doubt environmentalist groups would abhor the prospect of controlling the Earth’s climate on the basis that, in the words of Kronick, we’d be interfering in a ‘natural system’. Environmentalists’ aspirations are very different: through rain or shine, they seem determined to stick to the mantra that we should be reducing CO2 emissions and, in doing so, leave us even more vulnerable to the whim of Mother Nature. Worthington and Strutt both claim that the search for engineering fixes for global warming only serves as a distraction, making people and governments less inclined to reduce CO2 emissions. And yet Worthington herself doesn’t seem to have much faith that reducing emissions will be particularly effective: ‘If we can see global CO2 emissions peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ve still got a slim chance of holding [temperature increases] down to two degrees’, she says.

A slim chance of avoiding climate catastrophe? Environmentalists, it seems, don’t need any help when it comes to disinclining the world to reduce carbon emissions.

Source






CLIMB-DOWN: EU SAYS RADICAL CHANGES TO EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME WILL WAIT UNTIL 2013

And that the scheme so far has done little

The European Commission said Monday that any radical changes to its carbon dioxide emissions trading program would have to wait until 2013. The program includes a plan to bring airlines into the scheme and link up with trading in other parts of the world - including several U.S. states. It said it wanted to expand the scheme to new sectors and gases, giving few details beyond mentioning aviation and methane released from coal mining and nitrous oxide from ammonia production. It would also examine how it could count more carbon capture initiatives.

In a report, the EU executive suggested a single EU cap on emissions after 2012, replacing 25 separate targets put forward by each EU nation. The report said the EU would look into similar trading programs in other countries and will see how they could link up with the European Union. Several U.S. northeastern states have formed an initiative to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and California is moving in the same direction. However, formal plans will only be put forward in late 2007 after experts report back next June, it said.

The EU report acknowledged that the first years of the scheme have been disappointing as some governments gave out too many allocations, meaning industry made few real efforts to cut back. "Robust compliance and enforcement" is needed, it said, including independent checks on emissions reports. On paper, the scheme was a success last year as less emissions were released than expected. But the report discounted that, blaming targets that were too high. "However to the extent that it reflects an overestimate of baseline emissions, it means that the environmental outcome of the scheme in the first period will not be as large as it could have been or as large as will be necessary to adequately address climate change," it said.

The commission is fine-tuning plans for the second stage of the program that will run from 2008 to 2013.

Source






DARN DROUGHT DATA

We have all heard the news that droughts will certainly become longer, more frequent, and more severe thanks to global warming. Higher temperatures will surely increase rates of potential evapotranspiration, and even if precipitation patterns remain unchanged, the odds will favor more droughts in the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states in the 2001 Summary for Policymakers that it is "Likely" that "Increased summer continental drying and associate risk of drought" has occurred in the later half of the 20th century and "Likely, over most mid-latitude continental interiors" to occur during the 21st century.

Figure 1 below shows the current state of affairs as of November 4, 2006, and generally, widespread drought in the mid-latitude continental interior is absent. In fact, as we look at the Great Plains, we find more areas in the "Extremely Moist" category than the "Extreme Drought" category. We would all agree that one snapshot of soil moisture conditions in the United States is not an adequate way to test the idea that global warming will lead to an increase in drought in mid-latitude continental interiors. What is needed, of course, is a longer perspective with drought information over hundreds of years.

Our wish for longer term information on drought in the United States has come true given a recent article in The Holocene. Celine Herweijer and her associates at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University used a combination of proxy data (e.g., tree-ring data), historical accounts, limited instrumental records, and climate models to reconstruct the drought patterns of the past. Not surprisingly, they found "The two major long-lasting droughts of the 1930s and 1950s covered large areas of the interior and southern states and have long served as paradigms for the social and economic cost of sustained drought in the USA. Both had severe environmental and social impacts, in the Great Plains and southwest, respectively." Note that the two major drought periods occurred 50 to 70 years ago, long before the celebrated global warming of the last three decades.

The team states "These events are not unique to the twentieth century" and that "three distinct periods of widespread and persistent drought stand out in these records for the latter half of the nineteenth century: 1856-1865, 1870-1877 and 1890-1896." Note that these three drought periods occurred during the Little Ice Age which was anything but a period of warmer temperatures. Furthermore, Herweijer et al. note that "Analysis of mid- to late-nineteenth century instrumental and proxy records from the tropical Pacific reveal prolonged La Nina-like conditions during each of the persistent droughts:1856-1865, 1870-1877 and 1890-1896." In case you have forgotten, El Nino is the condition that is associated with warm water in the eastern Pacific and La Nina is a period with exceptionally cold water in the eastern Pacific. So the droughts of the 19th century not only occurred during a cold century, but they occurred in relatively cold periods of that century (Figure 2).

The team expands on this link to cold sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) stating "It is well known that changes in the configuration of tropical SSTs on interannual timescales can strongly influence extratropical precipitation: during La Nina winters there is reduced precipitation across much of the northern subtropics and mid-latitudes, with large deficits in particular in the southwest USA, extending into the Great Plains" and that "persistent drought conditions in the Great Plains were primarily influenced by the tropical part of the SST forcing, with a tendency for drought when the tropical Pacific SSTs are cold." They also note that "During each of the mid- to late-nineteenth century droughts, the upper tropospheric geopotential heights are lowered in the tropics consistent with cooling at these latitudes."

Next, the team explored droughts that may have occurred 1,000 years ago during what they called the Mediaeval period (not to be confused with the current Media Evil period). Coral provide proxy information about the past sea surface conditions, and they used a coral-based reconstruction to demonstrate "the potential link between a colder eastern equatorial Pacific and the persistent North American droughts of the Mediaeval period." They found "that the present multiyear drought in the western USA pales in comparison with a 'Mediaeval Megadrought' that occurred from AD 900 to AD 1300. This drought reconstruction also shows an abrupt shift to wetter conditions after AD 1300, coinciding with the 'Little Ice Age', a time of globally cooler temperatures, and a return to more drought-prone conditions beginning in the nineteenth century."

It becomes obvious that major droughts occur during warm and cold periods, but the evidence suggests that relatively cold periods in the tropical Pacific control prolonged droughts in the United States, whether at present, during the Little Ice Age, or during the Mediaeval Warm Period 1,000 years ago.

Since some climate models suggest El Nino will be more frequent than La Nina in the future, perhaps the outlook for future droughts is not so dreary!

Source






The truth about Australia's latest drought

By economist Ross Gittins. He doesn't even mention global warming, funnily enough

Talking to farmers about drought is like talking to fishers about the one that got away. This one is always much bigger than those that went before. And since the hyperbole merchants told us the drought of 2002 was the biggest in 100 years, this one must be the biggest in 1000 years. Yeah, sure. Thank goodness for the assessments of narky economists, who don't try to humour farmers the way ingratiating politicians and a superlative-seeking media do.

The Reserve Bank offered a dispassionate assessment of the likely severity of the drought in a statement last week. It's pretty bad, but not as cataclysmic as some would have us believe. The severity of droughts can be judged in different ways. One way is to compare the share of the nation's prime agricultural land suffering deficient rainfall this year with previous years. By that measure this one seems less severe than the droughts at the time of Federation, in the 1940s and early 1980s and in 2002. It's significant, however, that this drought comes so hard on the heels of the 2002 drought, thus limiting the opportunities for recovery in growing conditions and water storage. One way to account for this factor is to take for each year the average degree of drought-affected land during the previous five years. Measured this way, the area of land with deficient rainfall in this drought is exceeded only by the drought of the mid-1940s.

A second way of judging the severity of droughts is to look at average rainfall. By that measure, rainfall this year is not as low as in many previous droughts. But, again, if you switch from annual figures to the average rainfall for the previous five years you find that rainfall in the present drought is the lowest on record. So, by one measure at least, you can say it looks like being the worst we've seen. Phew, that's a relief.

This drought is worst in NSW, Victoria and southern Queensland. But some pastoral areas of northern Australia have experienced a significant increase in average rainfall over the past decade, including more recently. (You'll wait a long time before any bushie tells you that.)

Of course, judging the severity of a drought by looking at the lack of rain and the amount of area affected isn't the same as looking at the amount of lost agricultural production. Using the latest forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Reserve judges that production of wheat and other cereals may be down by 60 per cent on last year. The biggest fall should be in NSW, though a substantial fall is also expected in the largest wheat-producing state, Western Australia. Wool production is expected to be down 7 per cent, but the production of meat and growing of livestock are likely to be little affected. All told, gross farm product is expected to fall by 20 per cent in 2006-07 compared with last financial year. So, in terms of impact on rural production, this drought is likely to be less severe than the 2002 drought, which saw farm product fall by 26 per cent.

Remember, however, that agriculture accounts for less than 3 per cent of total gross domestic product these days. So a 20 per cent fall in 3 per cent of the economy amounts to a subtraction of about 0.5 percentage points from growth in GDP. Of course, that's just the direct effect of the drought. What about the indirect effects of farmers' reduced incomes and spending on the rest of the economy? Farmers hate it when hard-nosed economists remind starry-eyed city slickers that, thanks to the huge growth in the services sector over the past 30 years, agriculture is now such a small part of the economy (about a quarter the size of our small manufacturing sector). So rural lobbyists like to claim that agriculture has a big "multiplier effect" through the rest of the economy. I think I've heard it claimed that this takes the sector to the equivalent of 12 per cent of the economy. Rubbish. All spending has a multiplier effect through the economy, not just spending by farmers. So this is a trick everyone can play. And if each industry similarly estimated its overall effect on the economy, the figures they gave would total way more than 100 per cent of GDP.

No. The Reserve Bank estimates the drought's direct effect in reducing GDP growth by 0.5 percentage points rises to 0.75 percentage points when you include the indirect effect on other parts of the economy. When you remember that real GDP has grown at an average rate of about 3.5 per cent a year, that loss is significant but not the end of the world.

The drought's likely effect on the economy's growth isn't the same thing as its effect on the incomes of farmers, of course. After allowing for inflation, net farm incomes are expected to decline substantially to around their lowest level in more than a decade. But for many farmers there'll be a saver. The Federal Government runs a farm management deposit scheme where farmers can reduce their income tax in good years by depositing some of their income. They then withdraw that money in bad years, pay tax on it and spend it. The amount farmers have put away in this scheme has grown strongly since 1999 and is now about $2.5 billion, almost the highest it's been. Why have our poor, struggling farmers been able to stash away so much? Because grain growers did so well from the large harvests of recent years, while beef producers did well from the earlier strength in cattle prices.

Another line we are hearing in the combined efforts of farmers, politicians and the media to give city slickers an exaggerated impression of the effects of the drought is that we're about to see big increases in food prices. Nonsense. The effect on prices will be small. Why? Because, for instance, the cost of flour accounts for only a small part of the retail price of bread. And because, though grain prices rise during a drought, meat prices usually fall as more animals are sent to be slaughtered. I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't so many people laying it on too thick.

Source

***************************************

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 Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************