New Zealand gets the full story

The Christchurch glossy lifestyle monthly magazine AVENUES has taken the laudable initiative of starting a debate on global warming, which will run over 5 months. Dr Gerrit van der Lingen was invited to write the first article, titled "Global Warming and Cooling", which appeared in the February issue. With an editorial introduction and some photographs added by the magazine, it covered 8 pages. Unfortunately, the magazine does not make its articles available on its website. Dr Gerrit van der Lingen studied geology at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. From 1991 to 2002 he was involved in paleoclimate research, studying ocean sediment cores from the Tasman Sea and Southern Ocean. He has now retired from paid research. Another instance of it being only the oldies who can afford to speak out. A few excerpts from his article below

The miraculous survival power of the polar bear

Polar bears have become the poster animals of the catastrophic MMGW movement, like the panda is for the World Wide Fund for Nature. Many environmental organisations are predicting the imminent extinction of polar bears because of MMGW. The Australian activist Tim Flannery recently predicted that polar bears could be extinct in 25 years.

However, as with so many of the `predictions' by global warming alarmists, a reality check shows this to be highly unlikely. First, some facts from the real world. Yes, the Arctic has been warming. However, it was warmer in the thirties and forties. The North-West Passage was open to shipping in 1945 and Amundsen sailed through it in 1903. Much of the Arctic sea ice had also disappeared in 1817. There seems to be a natural variation between warming and cooling.

Sixty years ago, polar bear numbers had decreased to about 5000, mainly due to hunting. Since then hunting has been more strictly controlled and numbers have increased to about 25,000. According to research by the US Geological Survey, polar bear numbers may be near historic highs. Of the thirteen polar bear populations in Canada (home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears), eleven are stable or increasing in numbers. Notwithstanding this, some environmental organisations want to have polar bears listed as `threatened.' Their arguments are not based on real-world data, but on predictions from non-validated computer models.

But just assuming for a moment that people like Flannery are right about the imminent demise of the polar bear. That would mean that polar bears must have become extinct many times before, during the last interglacial (when it was 4 to 5 degrees warmer than today for thousands of years), during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (4000-7000 years ago), and during the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. Why would it be that the polar bears are still with us? The answer is obvious. Like most bears they are very adaptable. For instance, their food sources range from seals to berry fruits.

Psychic glaciers

We are being told that many glaciers around the world are retreating and that this is caused by MMGW. Yes, most glaciers (and ice caps) have been melting, but they have been doing this for the last 18,000 years (since the so-called Last Glacial Maximum), resulting in a sea level rise of 120 metres(!). But there have also been periods of cooling during the present Interglacial warm epoch, like during the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850 AD), when glaciers advanced again.

But many glaciers must have anticipated the coming MMGW, as they started to retreat already, well before greenhouse gases started to increase. For instance, the Franz Josef Glacier started to retreat in 1750 and the Himalayan Gangotry Glacier in 1780. I already mentioned the snow cap on Kilimanjaro. I therefore call these glaciers `psychic.'

Triumph of the will.

From the British High Court and Lord Monckton's identification of many (and no doubt deliberate) errors in Al Gore's movie, it's clear that his movie can be classified as a propaganda documentary. During the court case, council for the claimant drew comparisons with Nazi and Leninist/Stalinist propaganda films. Although this seems a bit far-fetched, one cannot help but draw comparisons with that (in)famous Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), made by the legendary German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Her propaganda documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party was made on the order of Hitler. It was a slick, superbly made film, setting new technical and artistic standards for documentary film-making, notwithstanding the fact that it was blatant Nazi propaganda. It was awarded several international film awards. As such it can be compared with Gore's movie, which is also a very well-made, slick propaganda movie, rewarded with an Oscar.

There are other parallels. Riefenstahl's film was shown in German cities to record audiences and, like in the U.K., school children were obliged to see it. However, there is one major difference. Riefenstahl's film was in German and was mainly shown to the German public, and as such can be considered as having had limited propaganda value in a global sense. Gore's movie, on the other hand, has a huge global propaganda reach.

Several commentators have pointed to more sinister aspects of the present MMGW hysteria. Proposals made to curb greenhouse gas emissions will result in a substantial reduction of democratic and personal freedoms. For instance, the British Government has proposed measures along the lines of what is called "Contraction and Conversion" (see www.gci.org.uk/main.html). Under this system, each individual on Earth would be allocated a permit to emit an equal amount of greenhouse gas. This means that an Amerindian in the warm Amazon jungle would be allocated the same allowance as a person in cold Helsinki. If the person in Helsinki wants to use more than the person in the Amazon, he would have to buy emission permits from the Amazonian. This system is proposed under the principle of global equity. This would mean a return to war-time ration books. Almost all human activities would be strictly controlled, from air travel (air miles), to food consumption patterns (food miles), to the choice of cars, housing, etc. All this would require an immense, all-pervasive, global, bureaucratic control and administration system. Stalin and Hitler would have been green with envy. All these measures will also put severe breaks on economic developments. The cost of living will go up dramatically and poor people will be hit the hardest.

There are other matters in the MMGW debate that hark back to the Nazi era. People who dare to criticise the catastrophic MMGW dogma have been compared to Holocaust deniers. Even worse, some MMGW promotors are demanding that these `deniers' should be dragged before a Nuremberg-type tribunal. They maintain that "the science has been settled." Apart from the fact that science is never settled, they refuse to debate the science in public. Several prominent academics have challenged Al Gore to a public, televised debate. He always refuses. This is not surprising, as he must know that he cannot win such a debate.

The simple truth is that there is no scientific evidence for catastrophic global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. The only `evidence' is based entirely on computer models. Because climate is a chaotic, non-linear system, it does not lend itself to computer modelling. No wonder these models give wildly different results. They depend on what initial parameters are being used. Such parameters can be tweaked to obtain the desired outcome. I therefore call these modellers `tweakers.' Their virtual world has nothing to do with the real world.

Nature refuses to obey the IPCC and its computer models. Take for instance the temperature record of Christchurch for the last one hundred years. Temperatures have fluctuated, but there has been no overall increase. Global warming is passing us by.

MMGW believers also spread the myth that there is virtual unanimity among scientists that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing catastrophic global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are thousands of scientists who disagree with this dogma and hundreds of them are actively involved in debating the science. In New Zealand they have organised themselves in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (www.climatescience.org.nz).

Global warming and cooling.

There is no correlation at all between temperature and carbon dioxide. In recent years many peer-reviewed, scientific articles have been published, pointing to good correlations between the present 11-year sunspot cycle and various weather patterns, such as rainfall. Climate is extremely complex. It would take me far too long to discuss other important natural factors, like El Ninos and La Ninas. Climate science is still in its infancy. The IPCC and its accolytes are doing science a big disservice by basically saying that the natural causes of climate change in the past have stopped working, and have now been replaced by a simplistic, singular cause: human carbon dioxide emissions.

As it is very likely (to borrow a favourite term from the IPCC) that the sun is the major driver of climate change -- always has been and always will be -- one wonders what the future holds. Astrophysicists from the UK, Finland, The Netherlands, Germany and Russia have been predicting that we are entering a cooling period, because of an anticipated decrease in solar activity. Their opinion is based on the analysis of sunspot cycles. Such an analysis has a large degree of uncertainty, of course. But world temperatures have not gone up over the last eight years (Figure 1D) while carbon dioxide levels have.

Two months ago, the European Alps received the largest snow dump in forty years. South America just went through its coldest winter in decades. Sea ice around the Antarctic reached its largest extent since satellite measurements began in 1979. On January 11 it snowed in Baghdad, an event not seen in living memory. All this could still be coincidental, of course. The belief that we can control the climate is too absurd for words. All we can do is try to adapt to climate change, be it warming or cooling.

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Ethanol policy threatens to starve the world

Drought. War. Poverty. These are leading causes of hunger, according to the United Nations. Soon we may add another. Ethanol. Across the globe, people are discovering it's a new contributor to world hunger. Led by the United States, governments are paying companies billions to make ethanol from corn and other crops. The result: these crops are diverted from the food supply, creating artificial shortages and higher prices.

Even record harvests haven't suppressed food prices. Instead, prices are soaring to all-time highs. Corn that traded around $2 a bushel just two years ago is now well over $5 a bushel. The impact ripples through the food chain of milk, butter, eggs, flour, pasta and everything else, because dairy cattle, beef cattle, poultry and swine depend on the corn for their feed. When chicken feed doesn't cost chicken feed anymore, then neither does anything else. Other grains, like wheat, are also at record highs because farmers are planting less wheat and more corn, thanks to the ethanol incentives. Less supply, plus more world demand, means higher prices for wheat products, too, from flour to bread to pasta.

Full-scale food riots may arise in some parts of the world, as more and more grain is diverted into fuel production. The Earth Policy Institute reports that ethanol-related food protests occurred last year in Mexico, Italy, Pakistan and Indonesia. A price-driven stampede killed three and injured 31 at a supermarket in China. "We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history," the EPI proclaimed in January. "The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before."

Roundup

This problem became five times worse in December when the new "energy bill" became law. It dictates that Washington will pay a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy on 36 billion gallons of ethanol each year, up from the previous 7.5 billion gallon limit. Even before this incentive expanded, official U.S. Department of Agriculture reports showed that ethanol was "eating up" 20 percent of the corn grown in America in 2006 - up from 6 percent in 2000 - a figure expected to rise in 2008 to 25 percent.

A 2007 report from International Food Policy Research Institute, or IFPRI, concludes that "Biofuel production currently adversely affects the poor through price-level and price-volatility effects." IFPRI's report also noted, "Since the beginning of 2000, butter and milk prices have tripled, and poultry prices have almost doubled." EPI's president, Lester R. Brown, says, "We're putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling station for the output of the farm. The result is that more people will go hungry."

As a Purdue University study noted, "This leap in corn prices is leading to an emerging opposition to ethanol subsidies on the part of animal agriculture, export markets and other corn users." Those groups have created a coalition to spotlight the ever-widening costs of ethanol, including a website at http://www.balancedfoodandfuel.org/.

As oil prices approached $100 per barrel, market incentives for producing more ethanol increased dramatically. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the subsidy lobby. Hence they pressed Washington to decree that we must use five times more ethanol and pay them for the privilege. That will raise the annual taxpayer-paid subsidy to over $18 billion per year, even though they're already profitable thanks to high oil prices. The energy bill converts ethanol manufacturers' simple profits into super-profits, at taxpayer expense. Yet somehow they've escaped headlines - and the outrage - oil profits attract.

Gradually, however, the media are "discovering" that ethanol subsidies are sending the worldwide cost of food through the kitchen ceiling. USA Today reported, "In a bid to reduce oil dependence, many countries are requiring additional use of biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel. That, in turn, competes with food destined for the table - and increases the prices of what consumers eat."

Americans won't starve because we have better supplies than the Third World does. But as the Christian Science Monitor recently reported, "As usual, it is the poorest people in the world who suffer most, because food takes up a bigger share of their daily shopping bill than it does for richer people." That prompted the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization to issue "warnings about the dangers of turning too much food into fuel." Their conclusion? "The era of cheap food is over."

Ethanol advocates are also promoting other biofuels whose cellulose can be used in place of corn. But the "food vs. fuel" problem isn't solved if farmers remove acreage from corn production to plant these instead. The ethanol lobby claims that the higher costs of food are being pushed mostly by the higher costs of energy. Of course, subsidizing ethanol while suppressing domestic oil and gas drilling and halting construction of oil refineries and nuclear power plants is a big reason why energy costs keep climbing!

As usual, free enterprise offers the best solution. As The Heritage Foundation's Ben Lieberman and others have suggested, we should be repealing the ethanol man-date instead of expanding it. Taxpayers would save billions that now flow out of the federal Treasury, plus our food would be more affordable. And the Third World wouldn't face as many food shortages.

Ending the subsidy is easier said than done, of course. As the New York Times has noted, the ethanol lobby is now "an entrenched political force." Years of multi-billion dollar subsidies have turned a small group into a wealthy and effective lobby on Capitol Hill. Washington should give an ear to some common sense instead. But expecting that to happen may be just plain ... corny.

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Keeping a cool head about hot weather

Ignore the panicky headlines about a new UK government report on higher temperatures in Britain - it actually contained good news.

`Climate change soon could kill thousands in UK', declared the Guardian in a news item about a new report from two UK health bodies, the Department of Health (DoH) and the Health Protection Agency (HPA). But even a quick glance at the report itself suggests this is a rather misleading summary. In fact, the report suggests that, on balance, a warmer climate will be good news - for the UK, at least.

Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK 2008 is an update on an earlier report published in 2002. It looks at a range of areas that might be affected by rising temperatures: flooding and windstorms; vector-borne diseases like malaria and food-borne diseases like salmonellosis; water quality; the direct effect of temperature on health; air pollution; and sunshine.

The most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the world will continue getting warmer and that human activity plays a major part in this warming trend. The DoH/HPA report supports this view; by the end of the century, average temperatures in the UK may be two degrees Celsius warmer at night and four degrees Celsius warmer during the day. Cold spells will decrease in length while heatwaves will become longer and more intense. Rainfall may decrease in one or two areas, but isn't likely to change much overall. Flowing from this general outlook, the report notes:

* Floods will become less frequent in spring but more common in late summer, but few people die in such events and the wider health effects are uncertain;

* Outbreaks of insect-borne diseases will remain rare, and will be as much due to changes in land-use and activity - like spending more time in wooded areas - than climate change;

* Warm summers could increase the risk of food poisoning, so further improvements in food hygiene standards are desirable;

* The quality of untreated water might decline as more bacteria will be present, but this is `unlikely to pose a threat to well-managed water treatment plants';

* Air pollution problems caused by small particles, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide will be unaffected or will fall, but periods of high ground-level ozone will increase deaths and hospital admissions.

So, in most of these areas there is little to worry about. Some potential areas for improvement are identified, which is useful for health professionals, but no cause for the rest of us to be concerned.

Even in the area that the Guardian and others picked up on, the direct effect of temperatures, there is plenty of good news. As the Guardian says, the report suggests that the prospect of a serious heatwave in south-east England - possibly leading to 3,000 deaths - at some time in the next 10 years is about 25 per cent. Hence, the horror headlines.

However, actual experience over nearly 40 years suggests good news overall. For example, `mean annual heat-related mortality did not rise as summers warmed from 1971 to 2003'. That means we're able to adapt to warmer temperatures. Indeed, the authors note: `Heat-related mortalities are substantial throughout Europe, but the hot summers in southern Europe cause little more mortality than the milder summers of more northerly regions.' If we're prepared for warm weather and we take simple precautions, then heat shouldn't be a problem. So, for different UK regions, the authors estimate the following decline for hot weather-related fatalities (cases per million of population, 1971-2003):

* South-east England from 258 to 193 in 2003;

* Rest of England and Wales from 188 to 93;

* Scotland from 125 (in 1974) to only eight in 2003.

Meanwhile, deaths due to cold weather fell dramatically - overall, by more than 33 per cent. Far more people are affected by cold snaps than by heatwaves, so the change is more significant than for hot-weather deaths. Here is how cold-weather deaths fell between 1971 and 2003:

* South-east England from 9,174 to 5,903;

* Rest of England and Wales from 9,222 to 6,088;

* Scotland from 9,751 in 1974 to 6,166 in 2003.

We should be shouting this from the rooftops: far fewer people are dying because of the temperature than in the past. Milder winters are far more important than hotter summers in achieving this, along with other changes to how people live. Where there have been calamities, like the heatwave deaths in France in 2003, there have been other factors involved. In the case of France, the higher temperatures arrived just when the working population all went on holiday, leaving city-dwelling old people without anyone to keep an eye on them.

If warm weather is that bad, why does it seem to be the dream of every retiring person in Britain to move to the south coast or, better still, Spain or Australia? Unsurprisingly, in a temperate country accustomed to miserable weather, with cold winters and often poor-quality housing, higher temperatures are almost certain to have a net benefit for the UK. Yet this doesn't fit in with the general atmosphere of climate change alarmism that encloses newspapers like the Guardian. Even the BBC, which is hardly shy about climate alarmism, gave the story a more balanced headline: `Global warming "may cut deaths"'.

This report also brings into relief a side of the climate change debate that is under-discussed: the ability of society to adapt to changing weather patterns. A quick glance at the huge variety of human societies shows a capacity to operate successfully in a range of conditions. Bustling Bangkok rarely dips below 30 degrees Celsius while average temperatures in Moscow and Helsinki are in low single digits. Even in a single, very successful city like New York, temperatures can range from the bitterly cold in winter to the blazingly hot in summer. There is little or nothing that climate change can throw at us that we don't already deal with successfully.

If temperatures do change substantially over the next few decades, there will be some disruption and humanity will need to adapt to new problems, as it has always done. But in spite of all the gloom and doom about global warming, we can chill out about a warmer Britain.

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When poor people pollute - the Tata Nano and eco-crime

It's small, it's cheap, it's low emission so... the arrival of the Tata Nano, India's new 'people's car', has been greeted by a wailing and a gnashing of the teeth from the environmental aristocracy. The prospect of millions of the global peasantry driving, emitting and pushing up 'our' gas prices is a nightmare. It promises to be, said Yale environmental law professor Daniel Esty, "an environmental disaster of substantial proportions."

In fact, the size, or even existence, of this environmental disaster is doubtful. A few millions of a car that emits 30 g CO2 per km simply isn't even an influence upon global CO2 emissions, let alone a disaster of even insubstantial portions. At that emission rate, doing 20,000 km a year each car will produce 600 kg of CO2: one hundred million of them on the roads would be less than 1 per cent of current emissions of over 6 Gtonnes. No, not substantial then.

But whether it is a substantial addition or not is dwarfed by the seeming ignorance of other commentators: "In none of our reports did we assume there'd be a car like this," said Judi Greenwald, a researcher with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Well, OK, cut Judi a little slack, no one did predict a car exactly like this: but everyone has indeed predicted that something similar would happen, that the peons would at some point be able to get off Shank's Pony and move around in the same way us civilised folks do. Indeed, all the concerns we have about global warming are rather based upon predictions that this will happen.



Apologies, but this is where a little economics becomes necessary. Yes, we've all heard of the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, those people who issue the reports containing the scientific consensus on the issue (yes, we are assuming they are correct here). Greenland's ice disappears sometime around 2,500, East Antarctica a couple of centuries later and boy, then we all really are in trouble. But all too few people, and unfortunately all too few environmentalists, stop and wonder where those numbers come from. Yes, we've got lovely computer models to tell us what the temperature rises will be if we stick x amount of methane into the atmosphere, y amount of CO2 and so on: but someone, somewhere, has had to work out how much methane, how much CO2 is likely to be so emitted. And that comes from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, the SRES.

The SRES is a series of economic models based upon four families (again divided into scenarios but we're not going to worry about that level of detail). The A1 family assumes that in 2100 the world output (GDP) will be $550 trillion for some 7 billion people. That is, that the world will be at least ten times richer in 92 years than it was eight years ago (essentially, growth goes on as it has since 1850). A2 (what the Stern Review uses and, umm, the low globalisation model) has 16 billion people and $250 trillion in GDP. B2 10 billions and $250 trillion, B1 $350 trillion and 7 billion again. These are the economic assumptions upon which everything we are told about climate change rests. Yes, there are different assumptions in them about how technology develops but all of them are entirely without any attempts at all at mitigation. That is, all the numbers we work with assume that we don't have carbon taxes, we don't ban patio heaters, we don't abolish the aeroplane. Anything we do along those lines reduces the damage that might be done.

Just as an aside we might note that these models all assume that the less trade we have, the more regionally based the world economy, the more self-sufficient we all become, buying locally, the worse the outcome. Campaigning to reduce globalisation to counter global warming is like fucking for virginity.

While none of the families specifically predicts the Tata Nano, all of them predict that the great unwashed will indeed have transport: and no, none of them predict that that transport will not be fossil fuel based. So while those folks at the Pew Center might be correct that this specific thing was not predicted, something very like it was. In fact, the existence of growing wealth and thus mobility is rather written into the plans that worry us. Which leads us to the glorious George Monbiot. In a recent column he said:

"So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat."

Leave aside his (known) ignorance of economics: growth is not defined by nor is it dependent upon the consumption of resources. It's defined as the addition of value to them: making sandpaper and a computer chip both consume sand, but one is the addition of rather more value than the other. Thus economic growth is not constrained in the way that he thinks by resource availability. Look rather to his "this is of course impossible".

In talking about climate change and the dangers thereof he tells us that a continuation of past economic growth is impossible. But as we can see above, the world's largest report on the subject, indeed the scientific consensus, is that said growth is indeed possible. In fact, the terrors of climate change depend upon it being so, for the whole science is based upon the outcome of economic growth. Thus George has either, by showing the impossibility, told us that climate change isn't a problem or that, perhaps more likely, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Which brings us back to those worrying about the Tata Nano: it isn't a horror for the climate, it isn't a disaster. It's actually one of the things already built into our models which lead us to our current understanding of what will happen. We've already taken account of it in our calculations, you see? As we have all those other things: more flights, more people, more wealth. We even know the solution, a Pigou Tax, but that's a matter for another day.

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China thumbs nose at global warming

A Chinese energy company is poised to open a chemical plant to make liquid fuels for cars and aircraft from coal, a move that has alarmed environmental campaigners who say it will increase carbon emissions and worsen global warming. The plant, in Inner Mongolia, will use technology developed by Germany during the second world war to convert coal directly into synthetic diesel, dubbed "Nazi fuel". China says the process will help break its booming economy's reliance on foreign oil, and that it will build more such plants.

The US and India are also investing heavily in the technology, which is being heavily promoted by coal companies across the world as a cost-effective solution to soaring oil prices and concerns about energy security.

The Chinese facility, operated by Shenhua Corporation, will be the first of its type in the world. Shenhua would not say when it expects the plant to open, but industry experts said it would be within weeks. Last month, company officials said construction work was 99.5% complete. Three similar plants were built in South Africa to beat the apartheid-era oil sanctions, and still produce almost a third of South Africa's energy needs.

Gordon Couch, of the International Energy Agency's clean coal centre in London, said the plant's opening was "imminent". and that it marked a surge of interest across the world. An IEA report on the technology, due to be published this spring, will highlight similar projects planned or under way in Japan, the US, Australia, China, New Zealand, India, Botswana, Indonesia, the Phillippines and South Africa. The US Air Force is very interested, and recently flew a B-52 bomber on fuel made from coal.

Couch said: "There is now considerable interest in these types of fuels, mainly in countries like China and the US that have large reserves of coal and are worried about relying on imported oil." He said the high price of oil could persuade more companies to turn to the coal conversion technology, which has traditionally been too expensive to compete with conventional petroleum-based fuel.

Analysts say the fuel could be economic if oil prices stay consistently above US$25-40 a barrel. Oil currently costs double that, and briefly touched $100 a barrel last month.

Nick Rau, a climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said the move was "in totally the wrong direction". He added: "We have great concerns about the rush to develop new sources of energy-intensive energies such as synthetic fuels from coal. We know they are technically feasible and it looks like they are going to happen, unless more people emphasise the sustainable options available."

Luke Warren of the World Coal Institute, admitted the process was "carbon dioxide intensive", but said the greenhouse gas could be captured and stored underground. But the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change says that large-scale carbon capture and storage remains unproven, and will not be available for decades.

FULL STORY here

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