Convenient half-truths
Former US vice-president Al Gore's ludicrous scaremongering contains exaggerations, half-truths and falsehoods, says Andrew Bolt
Al Gore says his hot new film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, should alert us to a threat that risks "ending all human civilisation". Instead, the hosannahs the former American vice-president is getting on his visit to spread his ludicrous scaremongering reveals a more immediate danger. Is healthy scepticism and fidelity to facts dead in this country?
Of course, to challenge Gore's claims is to risk being denounced as evil. I found that out when I once pointed out to the holy roller a couple of flaws in his argument and watched him pop. Yet how sad that even our scientists are too cowed or too evangelical to note more than a flicker of concern that Gore's film tortures truth to scare the be-Gaia out of our youngsters. So who dares to point out that Gore is just one of the worst of the fact-fiddling Green evangelicals?
Well, here are just 10 of my own "minor quibbles" with Gore's film. These are my own "inconvenient truths", and judge from them the credibility of Gore's warnings of the end of all civilisation.
1: Gore claims that a survey of 928 scientific articles on global warming showed not one disputed that man's gasses were mostly to blame for rising global temperatures. Only dumb journalists and bad scientists in the pay of Big Oil pretended there was any genuine debate. In fact, as Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University has demonstrated, Gore relies on a bungled survey reported in Science. Peiser checked again and found just 13 of those 928 papers explicitly endorsed man-made global warming, and 34 rejected or doubted it. The debate is real.
2: Gore says the man who first made him realise we were heating up the earth was his late professor, oceanographer Roger Revelle, who noticed carbon dioxide levels were increasing. In fact, Revelle shortly before his death co-authored a paper warning that "the scientific basis for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time". And some warming might even be good, he added.
3: Gore says ice cores from Antarctica, that go back 650,000 years, show the world got warmer each time there was more carbon dioxide in the air. In fact, as the University of California's Professor Jeff Severinghaus and others note, at least three studies of ice cores show the earth first warmed and only then came more carbon dioxide, many hundreds of years later. So does extra carbon dioxide cause a warming world, or vice versa?
4: Gore shows a series of slides of vanishing lakes (like Lake Chad) and snow fields (like Mt Kilimanjaro's) and blames global warming for it all. In fact, Lake Chad is so shallow it nearly dried out as far back as 1908, and again in 1984. So many more people depend on it now that the water pumped out for irrigation has quadrupled in 25 years. No wonder it's drying. And Mt Kilimanjaro was losing its snows more than a century ago, not because of global warming, but-says a 2004 study in Nature-largely because deforestation has cut the moisture in the air. And that worrying picture Gore shows of vanishing glaciers in the Himalayas? Newcastle University researchers last month said some glaciers there are now getting bigger again.
5: Gore shows scary maps of how New York and Shanghai would drown under 20 feet (600cm) of water if all Greenland's ice melted. In fact, various studies say Greenland's snow cover-and Antarctica's-is increasing or stable. The scientists of even the fiercely pro-warming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict seas will rise (as they have for centuries) not by Gore's 600cm by 2100, but by between 14 and 43cm.
6: Gore claims the seas have already risen so high that New Zealand has had to take in refugees from drowning Pacific islands. In fact, the Australian National Tidal Facility at Tuvalu in 2002 reported: "The historical record from 1978 through 199 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year." Or the width of a hair. Says Auckland University climate scientist Chris de Frietas: "I can assure Mr Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas."
7: Gore claims global warming has helped cause coral reefs "all around the world" to bleach. In fact, new research from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the seas rapidly cooled from 2003 to 2005. And most bleaching is caused by El Nino events.
8: Gore claims hurricanes are getting worse because of global warming, and he shows pictures from Hurricane Katrina. In fact, America has this year had fewer hurricanes than usual. And most hurricane experts agree with Dr Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Centre, who says "there has been no change in the number and intensity of (the strongest) hurricanes around the world in the last 15 years".
9: Gore claims warming is causing new diseases and allowing malarial mosquitoes to move to higher altitudes. In fact, says Professor Paul Reiter, head of the Pasteur Institute's unit of insects and infectious diseases: "Gore is completely wrong here." Reiter says "the new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago" and "none of the 30 so-called new diseases Gore references are attributable to global warming".
10: Gore never even hints at other possible explanations scientists have given for the warming globe. And here's just one: increased solar activity. That's a theory suggested by leading American scientists such as Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences. Some even predict we're about to suffer a new bout of global cooling. Says Professor Bill Gray, world hurricane authority from Colorado State University: "My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again." Or as Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Russian of Sciences astronomical observatory, warned last week: "On the basis of our (solar emission) research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth's climate by the middle of this century."
I'm sorry to raise these inconvenient truths just when so many of our scientists seem to prefer the certainties of faith over the uncertainties of evidence. But can we please have an adult discussion about global warming without the usual shrieks of outrage from people who think demanding this evidence is blasphemous? We are talking about science, right? But too much of this talk now sounds far too religious to me.
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U.S. climate researcher: We've got 10 years left
NASA scientist urges action to stop catastrophe, but records show summer of '36 hotter than '06
While a leading U.S. climate researcher claims there's a decade at most left to address "global warming" before environmental disaster takes place, the federal government issued a report showing the year 1936 had a hotter summer than 2006. "I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Addressing the Climate Change Research Conference this week, Hansen said if "business as usual" continues, world temperatures will rise by 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit and "we will be producing a different planet."
Ironically, a report issued yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that while the summer of 2006 was the second-warmest on record, the hottest year for the contiguous 48 states since statistics began in 1895 was 1936 - seven decades ago. "The average June-August 2006 temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 2.4 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) above the 20th century average of 72.1 degrees F (22.3 degrees C)," said the NOAA report. "This was the second warmest summer on record, slightly cooler than the record of 74.7 degrees F set in 1936 during the Dust Bowl era. This summer's average was 74.5 degrees F. Eight of the past ten summers have been warmer than the U.S. average for the same period." Looking back to the winter and spring months of this year, NOAA points out, "The persistence of the anomalous warmth in 2006 made this January-August period the warmest on record for the continental U.S., eclipsing the previous record of 1934."
Hansen, who has claimed previously the Bush administration tried to silence him about his findings on the climate, says the U.S. "has passed up the opportunity" to impact the world on global warming. He's now urging not only more energy efficiency, but a reduction in dependence on carbon-burning fuels. "We cannot burn off all the fossil fuels that are readily available without causing dramatic climate change," Hansen said. "This is not something that is a theory. We understand the carbon cycle well enough to say that."
NASA this week also released the results of two studies suggesting large reductions in the amount of winter Arctic sea ice. Dr. Son Nghiem, who led one of the projects at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, "the change we see between 2004 and 2005 is enormous." British professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, said the variations shown by the U.S. studies were "huge," but he told the Independent newspaper, "It remains to be seen whether the rate of change is maintained in future years." As if to allay fears of rising waters, the paper pointed out: "The melting of the Arctic ice will not itself contribute to global sea-level rise, as the ice floating in the sea is already displacing its own mass in the water. When the ice cube melts in your gin and tonic, the liquid in your glass does not rise."
Despite the recent claims, the idea the Earth is heating up is hardly a universal belief. As WND previously reported, another NASA-funded study noted some climate forecasts might be exaggerating estimations of global warming. The space agency said climate models possibly were overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms. The theory many scientists work with says the Earth heats up in response to human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, causing more water to evaporate from the ocean into the atmosphere.
WND also reported that Dr. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, maintains there has been little or no warming since about 1940. "Any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential," Singer wrote in a climate-change essay. "In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture."
In July 2004, the London Telegraph reported on a study by Swiss and German scientists suggesting increased radiation from the sun - not human activity - was to blame for climate changes. "The sun is in a changed state," said Dr. Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany. "It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
The research adds credence to the beliefs of British professor David Bellamy, president of the London-based Conservation Foundation. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," Bellamy told the Telegraph. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not. "Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming, I say this is poppycock."
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A skewed vision of trees from team green
Australian commentator Alan Oxley says Greenpeace is using misleading claims to cut down logging in PNG -- Australia's near Northern neighbour
Greenpeace is running a campaign that is raising eyebrows. It is accusing one large company of rape, enslaving its workers, abusing human rights, employing police brutality and corruption. In the worst criticism Greenpeace heaped on Shell over oil drilling in the North Sea and on Monsanto for developing and selling genetically modified oilseeds, it never resorted to such abuse. So who is the target now?
It is a company called Rimbunan Hijau, one of the largest foreign investors in Papua New Guinea and its largest forestry business. Greenpeace's attack on the company is a proxy attack on commercial forestry in PNG, which it wants to stop. Greenpeace has been joined by the Centre for Environmental Law and Conservation in PNG and the Australian Conservation Foundation. A recently released CELCOR-ACF report claims to present new evidence of the human rights abuses of the forestry industry. But all that is new are claims of five instances of abuse in nine years, all of which are unsubstantiated.
Conveniently, CELCOR and ACF report the complainants need to remain anonymous for their own safety. This means that none of the claims can be tested for truthfulness. Otherwise, the report repeats old claims, some of which have been made for a decade, about corruption, sexual abuse and enslavement in forestry in PNG. It repeats unsubstantiated reports published by Greenpeace in the past four years and unsubstantiated claims of human rights abuse in PNG aired by SBS, which has since removed the transcript of the program from its website.
To freshen the green campaign, the CELCOR-ACF report carries insinuations that Australian military forces and forestry companies are responsible for distribution of arms throughout PNG. This is a calculated distortion of an ugly reality in PNG. Personal safety in the country has never been poorer. Businesses across the country are calling in help from police forces to keep order. For forestry (and other) companies operating in remote environments, this is crucial. These businesses frequently transport citizens, officials and firefighters.
If Greenpeace succeeds in this campaign, it will be bad luck for the poor. Commercial forestry is an important contributor to PNG's economy. Evidently Greenpeace considers it is better to be poor and green than to reduce poverty and educate children. Rimbunan Hijau is a Malaysia-based group whose activities include the biggest forestry business in PNG. Greenpeace says the company is "acting as ruthless robber barons, plundering the rainforest with impunity" and that most of the company's logging (and therefore most logging in PNG) is illegal.
Greenpeace is also trying to orchestrate global pressure against the company. Recently, activists climbed on top of the Cabinet Office in London and called on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to stop imports of timber from PNG because Greenpeace has labelled them illegal. In Australia it is lobbying the Government to do the same thing. The organisation also wants a global consumer boycott. It has accused the chief executive of one of the largest timber importers in Britain of complicity in the destruction of PNG's forests by importing PNG timber. The company has buckled and agreed not to buy any more.
The PNG Government vehemently denies that most forestry activity in its country is illegal. Our consultancy has completed an exhaustive analysis of these claims and concluded the PNG Government is right. There have been irregularities in forestry administration, as expected in a low-income developing country, and they have been corrected.
The way Greenpeace decides what is illegal is a set-up. It contends logging is illegal if, at the time it occurs, not all relevant government laws and regulations have been fully applied, not all provisions of all relevant international treaties have been implemented and not all relevant (presumably according to Greenpeace) human rights and labour rights have been provided. Consider what this means. If a government agency doesn't do its job properly, any transaction made by a business operating under regulations administered by that agency is illegal. In our system of law, everybody enjoys the presumption of innocence. The way Greenpeace seems to want it, someone is automatically guilty if a government official is incompetent. This is a ruse. When applied in a poor, developing country where all government administration is rickety, it reflects a callous calculation.
Greenpeace's rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the hollowness of its claims. PNG is lush with forests; they cover 65per cent of the country. Greenpeace claims these forests could be cleared within a decade. That is impossible. Only 31 per cent of PNG forests have been marked for commercial use; that is, forestry and clearance for agriculture. Among the remaining forest, 5 per cent has been reserved to protect biodiversity and 37 per cent remains unallocated. PNG's forests are not endangered, nor is its natural biodiversity.
We also examined every one of Greenpeace's allegations of rape, police brutality and abuse of labour rights and corruption made against the company. We concluded they are baseless or cannot be properly substantiated. Greenpeace says the company practises slavery. The PNG labour department reported that the targeted company pays its work force 2.7 times the PNG minimum wage. Slavers don't do that. The allegation of police brutality is based on claims by one former police officer who has left the country. Forestry companies in PNG work closely with the police. Greenpeace well knows that law enforcement breaks down regularly in parts of PNG. Forestry businesses regularly transport police to remote areas because they have aircraft, while the police don't. They are performing a public service.
Greenpeace wants commercial logging in PNG's native forests replaced with eco-forestry or subsistence forestry. Yet the consequences would be immense. The commercial forestry industry in PNG employs about 10,000 people, generates about 5 per cent of the economy, earns about $250 million year in exports and adds $100 million to tax revenues. In addition, companies such as Rimbunan Hijau provide roads, airfields, air services, wharves and schools and medical clinics in remote areas.
Not only would this all be lost if the industry were closed down, but the PNG Government would have to subsidise the replacement eco-forestry. For 10 years there have been efforts to demonstrate the commercial viability of eco-forestry in PNG and all have failed. Even WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature), Greenpeace's partner in its forestry campaigns, says eco-forestry can succeed only if government pays for it. PNG needs more growth and revenue, not less. Seventy per cent of people in PNG live on less than $US2 ($2.66) a day. Three out of four children in rural areas do not go to school. The Asian Development Bank reported in 2004 that, per capita, gross domestic product in PNG was 10 per cent lower than in 1975. Recently, Patrick Pruaitch, PNG's Minister for Forests, said that if Greenpeace had its way, "the people of PNG would pay the price". He said the Government would resist efforts by international green non-government organisations to weaken PNG's economy.
What is driving Greenpeace to propose such a strategy? It opposes commercial forestry in natural bush, yet there is no environmental science that tells us this is necessary. Native forests can be sustainably logged, as they are in Australia. PNG has plenty of forest to get the environmental balance right. To Greenpeace, PNG is just a pawn in a bigger campaign. For more than 15 years, Greenpeace and WWF have hankered for a global forest convention to implement their goal of replacing commercial forestry with eco-forestry worldwide. Only some European countries support this. Developing countries mistrust their motives and the US does not support it. So the strategy is to whip up concern about illegal logging and goad governments into using trade sanctions to bring developing countries to heel.
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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
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Monday, September 18, 2006
SCIENTISTS PREDICT SOLAR DOWNTURN, GLOBAL COOLING
It is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century. The French army used frozen rivers as thoroughfares to invade the Netherlands. New Yorkers walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across the frozen harbour.
Sea ice surrounded Iceland for miles and the island's population halved. It wasn't the first time temperatures had plunged: a couple of hundred years earlier, between 1420 and 1570, a climatic downturn claimed the Viking colonies on Greenland, turning them from fertile farmlands into arctic wastelands.
Could the sun have been to blame? We now know that, curiously, both these mini ice ages coincided with prolonged lulls in the sun's activity - the sunspots and dramatic flares that are driven by its powerful magnetic field.
Now some astronomers are predicting that the sun is about to enter another quiet period. With climate scientists warning that global warming is approaching a tipping point, beyond which rapid and possibly irreversible damage to our environment will be unavoidable, a calm sun and a resultant cold snap might be exactly what we need to give us breathing space to agree and enact pollution controls. "It would certainly buy us some time," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London.
Global average temperatures have risen by about 0.6 °C in the past century, and until recently almost all of this has been put down to human activity. But that may not be the only factor at work. A growing number of scientists believe that there are clear links between the sun's activity and the temperature on Earth. While solar magnetic activity cannot explain away global warming completely, it does seem to have a significant impact. "A couple of years ago, I would not have said that there was any evidence for solar activity driving temperatures on Earth," says Paula Reimer, a palaeoclimate expert at Queen's University, Belfast, in the UK. "Now I think there is fairly convincing evidence."
What has won round Reimer and others is evidence linking climate to sunspots. These blemishes on the sun's surface appear and fade over days, weeks or months, depending on their size. More than a mere curiosity, they are windows on the sun's mood. They are created by contortions in the sun's magnetic field and their appearance foretells massive solar eruptions that fling billions of tonnes of gas into space. Fewer sunspots pop up when the sun is calm, and historically these periods have coincided with mini ice ages.
The number of sunspots and solar magnetic activity in general normally wax and wane in cycles lasting around 11 years, but every 200 years or so, the sunspots all but disappear as solar activity slumps (see "Field feedback"). For the past 50 years, on the other hand, the sun has been particularly restless. "If you look back into the sun's past, you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity," says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Fortunately, an indirect record of the sun's moods stretching back thousands of years has been preserved on Earth in the concentrations of rare isotopes locked into tree rings and ice cores. The story begins way out beyond the orbit of Pluto, at the boundary of the sun's magnetic field. While the sun is magnetically calm, its field extends around 12 billion kilometres into space, but the field puffs up to 15 billion kilometres when the sun is active. Cosmic rays - the high-energy particles from deep space that are constantly hurtling towards us - are deflected by the field, so at active times far fewer of them reach the Earth.
Cosmic correlation
The rays that do reach our planet leave traces in the form of carbon-14 and beryllium-10, isotopes that are only created when cosmic rays slam into the Earth's atmosphere. Plants and trees then absorb carbon-14, while beryllium-10 settles onto the polar ice sheets and becomes incorporated into that year's ice layer. So by measuring the levels of the isotopes in tree rings and polar ice cores, we can work out how many cosmic rays were reaching Earth when the rings or ice layers were formed, and so estimate how active the sun was at those times.
Sami Solanki and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, have looked at the concentrations of carbon-14 in wood and beryllium-10 in ice as far back as back 11,000 years ago. The similarity of the fluctuations in both isotopes convinced them that they were seeing effects due to the sun. The peaks and slumps showed a recognisable pattern: "Periods of high solar activity do not last long, perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," says Weiss. "It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon."
Although another crash is likely, predicting the sun's activity with any certainty is difficult because of the chaotic way in which the solar magnetic field is generated. If anyone can do it, though, it's solar physicist turned computer programmer Leif Svalgaard, from Stanford University in California, who has been forecasting solar activity for nearly three decades. In the 1970s, he pioneered the best forecasting method yet devised, which uses the strength of the magnetic field at the sun's poles to predict future levels of solar activity.
He too expects a crash. The sun's polar field is now at its weakest since measurements began in the early 1950s, and to Svalgaard, the latest figures indicate that the sun's activity will be weaker during the next decade than it has been for more than 100 years. "Sunspot numbers are well on the way down in the next decade," he predicts. He expects fewer than six new sunspots per month, less than half the average number seen over the past decade.
This is hardly the sunspot crash that observations from 1645 to 1715 suggest. Back then, the appearance of even a single sunspot was major astronomical news, sparking hurriedly penned communications from one observatory to another. Nevertheless, it's a sign of things to come. "Sunspot numbers will be extremely small, and when the sun crashes, it crashes hard," says Svaalgard. "The upcoming sunspot crash could cause the Earth to cool"
Hot link
So what does the sun's magnetic activity have to do with the climate on Earth? To pin down the connection, Solanki and his colleagues compared records of solar activity derived from tree rings with meteorological records from 1856 to the present day. They found that the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere changed in step with sunspot numbers until 1970. This is the evidence that has done more than anything else to convince climatologists to take the link seriously. What's more, the most recent calculations by Solanki's team suggest that the sunspot crash could lead to a cooling of the Earth's atmosphere by 0.2 °C. It might not sound much, but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol.
There is still a big puzzle, though. Astronomers and climate scientists have always struggled to understand exactly how solar activity could influence the temperature on Earth. Whatever the variations in the sun's magnetic activity, the total energy it emits changes by only 0.1 per cent - too small a change to have any direct effect. As a result, the sun's role in climate change is highly controversial. "People have been arguing over this for years," says Reimer.
What other factor is at work? Important clues have emerged recently from solar observatories, including the SOHO spacecraft operated by NASA and the European Space Agency for the past 10 years. Although the change in overall solar energy is small, measurements made by SOHO and other solar observatories have revealed much greater variation in the levels of ultraviolet radiation, which can peak at up to 100 times its minimum level. "This means that there is scope for ultraviolet to have a much larger effect on our atmosphere," says Haigh, who for the past decade has been studying the impact of the sun's variability on climate.
According to computer models she has developed, ultraviolet radiation heats the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere by energising atoms and molecules there. This drives chemical reactions involving ozone and other molecules, which can release still more heat. This heating changes the temperature structure of the atmosphere at all altitudes, although the details are unclear because of the sheer complexity of Haigh's model. "By varying the amount of ultraviolet radiation, solar activity changes the circulation of the whole atmosphere," she says. Change the circulation, and you change the weather.
Haigh's work may help to explain one of the most puzzling aspects of the Little Ice Age: "Europe was badly hit, but other parts of the world may not really have noticed it," says Solanki. This might have been due to the different distribution of land masses in the northern and southern hemispheres. While Antarctica is surrounded by a wide belt of ocean, the distribution of land and oceans in the northern hemisphere is much less regular. This means that the interaction between the circulating atmosphere and the ground is more complex in the northern hemisphere. It gives rise to the North Atlantic Oscillation, an interplay of low and high pressure that dictates the movement of storms across the continents bordering the north Atlantic.
Haigh has found that at times of low solar activity the air pressure over the North Pole is higher than normal and forces storms south, funnelling colder weather to lower latitudes. What happens in the southern hemisphere is less well known, but Haigh says she wouldn't be surprised if the reaction here to changes in solar activity is different.
Solar activity might also influence climate through its effect on cosmic rays. In another study, Solanki has found an intriguing correlation between the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and the number of cosmic rays striking it, with lower temperatures in periods of high numbers of cosmic rays.
How could cosmic rays lead to cooler temperatures? Enter a theory proposed by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen almost a decade ago. They suggested that cosmic rays create an electric charge in particles in our atmosphere that then act as seeds for the formation of clouds at low altitudes. A spell of low solar activity would mean more cosmic rays and therefore more clouds and lower temperatures.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's idea is controversial, however (New Scientist, 11 July 1998, p 45). Most climatologists accept that more low clouds would reflect more radiation back into space, thus lowering temperatures.
But many dismiss Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's evidence of a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover as coincidence (see "Cloud cover"). Others want the theory investigated, if only to rule it out. To this end, an international group of more than 50 scientists have proposed an experiment at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to begin in 2008.
No room for complacency
The coming years could settle the sun's role on temperatures once and for all. If the expected sunspot crash does takes place, Solanki's work could receive dramatic confirmation. "Having a crash would certainly allow us to pin down the sun's true level of influence on the Earth's climate," says Weiss.
None of this means that we can stop worrying about global warming caused by emissions into the atmosphere. "The temperature of the Earth in the past few decades does not correlate with solar activity at all," Solanki says. He estimates that solar activity is responsible for only 30 per cent, at most, of the warming since 1970. The rest must be the result of man-made greenhouse gases, and a crash in solar activity won't do anything to get rid of them.
What might happen is that the sun gives the planet a welcome respite from the ravages of man-made climate change - though for how long, nobody knows. During the Little Ice Age, the fall in average global temperature is estimated to have been less than 1 °C and lasted 70 years. The one before that persisted for 150 years, but a minor crash at the beginning of the 19th century lasted barely 30. For now, we will have to keep watching for falling sunspot numbers. "The deeper the crash, the longer it will last," Weiss says.
There is a dangerous flip side to this coin. If global warming does slow down or partially reverse with a sunspot crash, industrial polluters and reluctant nations could use it as a justification for turning their backs on pollution controls altogether, makingmatters worse in the long run. There is no room for complacency, Svalgaard warns: "If the Earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing, when the sun's magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance."
Field feedback
Sunspots and solar activity are driven by the strength of the sun's complex magnetic field. Although solar scientists are still debating the detail, most believe that the magnetic field is generated in a shell of hot gas 35,000 kilometres thick and buried some 200,000 kilometres deep inside the sun. Known as the tachocline, this layer is made of plasma - a gas so hot that the atoms break up into charged electrons and ions.
Material at different latitudes and depths of the tachocline rotates at different rates. This variability moves electric charges and generates the sun's magnetic field. Once created, the magnetic field is strong enough to influence the movement of the electrically charged gas that creates it, a feedback mechanism that can either strongly amplify or diminish the overall strength of the field. For the past 50 years the field has been building, and the sun has been experiencing a period of unusually high magnetic activity.
Predicting future solar activity is tricky because of this complexity. The best method in use today was formulated in the 1970s by Leif Svalgaard, then at Stanford University. He showed that the magnetic field at the sun's poles is the best predictor. "The polar field is the magnetic seed for solar activity," Svalgaard says.
The polar fields are the accumulation of dead sunspots, transient dark patches on the sun's surface that have immense magnetic fields. When a spot fades from view, its residual magnetic field is gradually swept polewards by a surface current of solar gas known as the meridional flow. At the poles, this flow turns down into the sun, where astronomers believe it sinks to the tachocline and begins a return journey towards the sun's equator. En route, the magnetic field is rejuvenated by the tachocline to produce new sunspots.
Cloud cover
In 1997, meteorologists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen analysed weather satellite records from 1979 to 1992. This was long enough for the sun's activity to complete one of its regular 11-year cycles.
The researchers found that the Earth was 3 per cent cloudier when the sun's activity was at a minimum than when it was at its peak. They also noted the influx of cosmic rays at five experiments across the globe and found that it was as much as 25 per cent higher at the solar minimum. They called their discovery a "missing link in solar-climate relationships" and argued that cosmic rays were responsible for increasing cloud formation by electrically charging the lower atmosphere.
Intriguing as this link is, it is far from proof that solar activity and cloud cover are connected. "You have to demonstrate such an effect with an experiment, otherwise it is not physics," says Robert Bingham, a physicist at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Bingham is part of an international collaboration building an experiment called CLOUD to test the idea that cosmic rays seed clouds. CLOUD will start up in 2008 using a particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva as a source of simulated cosmic rays. The researchers will fire charged particles through a chamber holding a mixture of gases similar to the Earth's atmosphere to determine how often the particles trigger cloud formation. "CLOUD will go a long way towards understanding the microphysics of droplet formation," says Bingham.
New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006
RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE REPORT WARNS OF GLOBAL COOLING in 6-9 YEARS
Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences' astronomical observatory's report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.
Environmentalists and scientists warn not about the dangers of global warming provoked by man's detrimental effect on the planet's climate, but global cooling. Though never widely supported, it is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation. "On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth's climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate's global warming at the start of the 22nd century," said the head of the space research sector.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century - when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland - could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060.
He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today because "climate cooling is connected with changing temperatures, especially for northern countries."
"The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times," he said, referring to an international treaty on climate change targeting greenhouse gas emissions. "The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth's global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol," Abdusamatov said.
MosNews, 25 August 2006
Kyoto 'a slogan, not a solution'
Some lip service to global warming from Australia but no action
Environment Minister Ian Campbell today stood firm on Australia's long standing refusal to sign onto the Kyoto protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions, declaring it a slogan not a solution. Senator Campbell, fresh back from the UN framework conference on climate change in Switzerland, backed urgent action on climate change but with better quality practical international action. He said there was a sense of frustration that the whole process was becoming too bureaucratic and that more practical action was needed.
But for Australia, that would not involving signing the Kyoto accord. "I don't think people who make alarmist predictions do us much of a favour because the public will switch off. There are going to be substantial serious consequences of not addressing climate change, urgently and with multiple billion dollar investments. "The problem is too serious to offer up slogans as solution. Signing Kyoto is a slogan. It's not a solution. Investing billions of dollars in the technologies we need to transform the way we produce and use energy is a substantial solution." Senator Campbell said Australia could end all carbon emissions overnight but growth in China alone would replace Australian emissions within 10 months. "We could be the best climate change country in the world - and we are one of the best - but without cooperative effective action internationally we will not save Perth's beaches," he said.
Labor has strongly backed Australia signing the Kyoto Protocol but Senator Campbell said the reality was that protocol was being rewritten. He said Kyoto signatories such as France were nine per cent over its Kyoto target, Norway 22 per cent, Portugal 26 per cent and Spain 36 per cent. "The whole world is moving beyond Kyoto and Labor is saying sign up to something that was really drafted six, seven, eight years ago, which we know is not working," he said. "There is no gain to ratifying. We are part of a process that is designing the post-Kyoto world."
Senator Campbell said the Switzerland meeting aimed to prepare a group of some 30 ministers for the next meeting in Nairobi in a few weeks. He said what he sought to achieve was a new focus on technology transfer so that innovative technology could be speedily disseminated through the world. Unlike many of his coalition colleagues, Senator Campbell backed the thrust of the movie An Inconvenient Truth by former US vice-president Al Gore. He said respected scientists agreed with him that the science in the movie was sound and the consequences of not addressing the problems were very substantial. "We have got to remember there are consequences of global warming. There will be sea level rises. There already have been," he said.
Source
Australia: Stupid water policies
Are the states imposing almost useless drought restrictions on water consumers while failing to build the infrastructure to bring water where it's needed?
As last summer ended, booming southeast Queensland was the only urban sprawl on the mainland without water restrictions. But suddenly, it seems, Queenslanders are also running short of water. On the first day of business after last weekend's Queensland state election, the re-elected Labor Government led by Premier Peter Beattie awarded 180,000 pool owners the toughest and most expensive water-saving requirement in the country: compulsory covers for their swimming pools to reduce evaporation loss. Many can expect to be out of pocket by as much as $2000 as a result. Are such restrictions value for money in terms of the cost of water saved? Not always.
Federal parliamentary secretary for water Malcolm Turnbull says the new Queensland "pool tax" is the latest example of short-term thinking and poor water planning in Australia, resulting from serial abuse of water utilities by state and local governments. "Water-saving measures are good, but you have to look at them with a hard head," Turnbull says. "Water is not the only scarce resource. So is money."
Water infrastructure - dams, desalination and recycling plants - is costly to build, but once in place the operating costs of the business are relatively low. State-owned water utilities are a valuable money pot for cash-strapped governments reluctant to give up some of the revenue stream to expand supply.
As part of new water restrictions beginning in Brisbane and other parts of southeast Queensland in November, gardens can only be watered legally by bucket or can. The taps have really been screwed down on backyard pools, effective as of summer 2007. As well as being required to fit a pool cover by the middle of next year, owners will need to complete two of three indoors retrofits: install a dual flush system in their toilet, fit a water-efficient shower head and buy a new, water-efficient washing machine.
Such is Brisbane's water supply that every drop counts, seemingly no matter what the cost. The Queensland Water Commission is quick to point out that 12 million litres of water is lost every day through evaporation from swimming pools. What it doesn't mention is that the cost of this imposed saving will be more than four times the cost of the water. At about $500 a pool cover, and assuming an ambitious but as yet unspecified regulatory regime to deliver savings of two-thirds of all evaporation, it will cost about $4 for each kilolitre of water saved. Presently Brisbane Water sells the same amount of water for 85c. Pool covers as a demand management strategy come in at five to 10 times more expensive than most of the more broadly accepted demand management options, including water-efficient showers and washing-machine rebates. This cost does not include optional extras including cover rollers and the extra cost to pool owners of replumbing their bathrooms. That it has come to this level of crisis management seems extraordinary in the fastest-growing corner of one of the most developed countries in the 21st century.
Dams take a long time to fill and a long time to empty. Queensland's Wivenhoe Dam is only a quarter full, enough water for two years, but who's taking chances? Being surprised by a water shortage is like having a tortoise sneak up on you. You need to be looking the other way for an awfully long time. And yet all state governments except the one in Tasmania have embraced the symbolism of water restrictions as a public response to shallower water levels, starting with Perth in the spring of 2001. Canberra followed suit a year later, then Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney in 2003.
For Brisbane, the warnings were writ large on the Wivenhoe Dam wall as early as 1991. The South East Queensland Water Resources Strategy of that year found that "existing storages ... have inadequate yields to meet the needs of the future predicted populations at current rates of water use. Even with stringent demand management, the provision of additional water supplies will be necessary in the future."
The Water Services Association of Australia represents the big water authorities providing water to three-quarters of Australians. It asserts population growth in Australia's cities - with the exception of Perth - has been catered for not by providing new water services, but by reducing per capita demand. In a paper on urban water last year, WSAA pointed out the easy measures had been targeted "and further measures are likely to be intrusive and may encounter community resistance".
In 2004-05, despite water restrictions in every mainland capital except Brisbane, city water authorities paid over $658 million in dividends to their respective state governments. That year, city water users saved 220 billion litres, with one exception: Brisbane.
The National Water Commission is reviewing and assessing the existing water restrictions. Chief executive of the Irrigation Association of Australia, Jolyon Burnett, says there is a bewildering array of water restrictions. "In southeast Queensland until this new state Water Commission took over, there were up to 14 different regulations. It is absolute madness, and the public have felt that this was a bit of a joke."
Burnett argues there are three problems with the present water restrictions. The first is the poor process, with a lack of consultation and lack of warning. "Secondly the lack of science, and thirdly the inequity. Outdoor water use is the only one that attracts mandatory attention," Burnett says.....
More here
***************************************
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
It is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century. The French army used frozen rivers as thoroughfares to invade the Netherlands. New Yorkers walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across the frozen harbour.
Sea ice surrounded Iceland for miles and the island's population halved. It wasn't the first time temperatures had plunged: a couple of hundred years earlier, between 1420 and 1570, a climatic downturn claimed the Viking colonies on Greenland, turning them from fertile farmlands into arctic wastelands.
Could the sun have been to blame? We now know that, curiously, both these mini ice ages coincided with prolonged lulls in the sun's activity - the sunspots and dramatic flares that are driven by its powerful magnetic field.
Now some astronomers are predicting that the sun is about to enter another quiet period. With climate scientists warning that global warming is approaching a tipping point, beyond which rapid and possibly irreversible damage to our environment will be unavoidable, a calm sun and a resultant cold snap might be exactly what we need to give us breathing space to agree and enact pollution controls. "It would certainly buy us some time," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London.
Global average temperatures have risen by about 0.6 °C in the past century, and until recently almost all of this has been put down to human activity. But that may not be the only factor at work. A growing number of scientists believe that there are clear links between the sun's activity and the temperature on Earth. While solar magnetic activity cannot explain away global warming completely, it does seem to have a significant impact. "A couple of years ago, I would not have said that there was any evidence for solar activity driving temperatures on Earth," says Paula Reimer, a palaeoclimate expert at Queen's University, Belfast, in the UK. "Now I think there is fairly convincing evidence."
What has won round Reimer and others is evidence linking climate to sunspots. These blemishes on the sun's surface appear and fade over days, weeks or months, depending on their size. More than a mere curiosity, they are windows on the sun's mood. They are created by contortions in the sun's magnetic field and their appearance foretells massive solar eruptions that fling billions of tonnes of gas into space. Fewer sunspots pop up when the sun is calm, and historically these periods have coincided with mini ice ages.
The number of sunspots and solar magnetic activity in general normally wax and wane in cycles lasting around 11 years, but every 200 years or so, the sunspots all but disappear as solar activity slumps (see "Field feedback"). For the past 50 years, on the other hand, the sun has been particularly restless. "If you look back into the sun's past, you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity," says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Fortunately, an indirect record of the sun's moods stretching back thousands of years has been preserved on Earth in the concentrations of rare isotopes locked into tree rings and ice cores. The story begins way out beyond the orbit of Pluto, at the boundary of the sun's magnetic field. While the sun is magnetically calm, its field extends around 12 billion kilometres into space, but the field puffs up to 15 billion kilometres when the sun is active. Cosmic rays - the high-energy particles from deep space that are constantly hurtling towards us - are deflected by the field, so at active times far fewer of them reach the Earth.
Cosmic correlation
The rays that do reach our planet leave traces in the form of carbon-14 and beryllium-10, isotopes that are only created when cosmic rays slam into the Earth's atmosphere. Plants and trees then absorb carbon-14, while beryllium-10 settles onto the polar ice sheets and becomes incorporated into that year's ice layer. So by measuring the levels of the isotopes in tree rings and polar ice cores, we can work out how many cosmic rays were reaching Earth when the rings or ice layers were formed, and so estimate how active the sun was at those times.
Sami Solanki and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, have looked at the concentrations of carbon-14 in wood and beryllium-10 in ice as far back as back 11,000 years ago. The similarity of the fluctuations in both isotopes convinced them that they were seeing effects due to the sun. The peaks and slumps showed a recognisable pattern: "Periods of high solar activity do not last long, perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," says Weiss. "It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon."
Although another crash is likely, predicting the sun's activity with any certainty is difficult because of the chaotic way in which the solar magnetic field is generated. If anyone can do it, though, it's solar physicist turned computer programmer Leif Svalgaard, from Stanford University in California, who has been forecasting solar activity for nearly three decades. In the 1970s, he pioneered the best forecasting method yet devised, which uses the strength of the magnetic field at the sun's poles to predict future levels of solar activity.
He too expects a crash. The sun's polar field is now at its weakest since measurements began in the early 1950s, and to Svalgaard, the latest figures indicate that the sun's activity will be weaker during the next decade than it has been for more than 100 years. "Sunspot numbers are well on the way down in the next decade," he predicts. He expects fewer than six new sunspots per month, less than half the average number seen over the past decade.
This is hardly the sunspot crash that observations from 1645 to 1715 suggest. Back then, the appearance of even a single sunspot was major astronomical news, sparking hurriedly penned communications from one observatory to another. Nevertheless, it's a sign of things to come. "Sunspot numbers will be extremely small, and when the sun crashes, it crashes hard," says Svaalgard. "The upcoming sunspot crash could cause the Earth to cool"
Hot link
So what does the sun's magnetic activity have to do with the climate on Earth? To pin down the connection, Solanki and his colleagues compared records of solar activity derived from tree rings with meteorological records from 1856 to the present day. They found that the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere changed in step with sunspot numbers until 1970. This is the evidence that has done more than anything else to convince climatologists to take the link seriously. What's more, the most recent calculations by Solanki's team suggest that the sunspot crash could lead to a cooling of the Earth's atmosphere by 0.2 °C. It might not sound much, but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol.
There is still a big puzzle, though. Astronomers and climate scientists have always struggled to understand exactly how solar activity could influence the temperature on Earth. Whatever the variations in the sun's magnetic activity, the total energy it emits changes by only 0.1 per cent - too small a change to have any direct effect. As a result, the sun's role in climate change is highly controversial. "People have been arguing over this for years," says Reimer.
What other factor is at work? Important clues have emerged recently from solar observatories, including the SOHO spacecraft operated by NASA and the European Space Agency for the past 10 years. Although the change in overall solar energy is small, measurements made by SOHO and other solar observatories have revealed much greater variation in the levels of ultraviolet radiation, which can peak at up to 100 times its minimum level. "This means that there is scope for ultraviolet to have a much larger effect on our atmosphere," says Haigh, who for the past decade has been studying the impact of the sun's variability on climate.
According to computer models she has developed, ultraviolet radiation heats the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere by energising atoms and molecules there. This drives chemical reactions involving ozone and other molecules, which can release still more heat. This heating changes the temperature structure of the atmosphere at all altitudes, although the details are unclear because of the sheer complexity of Haigh's model. "By varying the amount of ultraviolet radiation, solar activity changes the circulation of the whole atmosphere," she says. Change the circulation, and you change the weather.
Haigh's work may help to explain one of the most puzzling aspects of the Little Ice Age: "Europe was badly hit, but other parts of the world may not really have noticed it," says Solanki. This might have been due to the different distribution of land masses in the northern and southern hemispheres. While Antarctica is surrounded by a wide belt of ocean, the distribution of land and oceans in the northern hemisphere is much less regular. This means that the interaction between the circulating atmosphere and the ground is more complex in the northern hemisphere. It gives rise to the North Atlantic Oscillation, an interplay of low and high pressure that dictates the movement of storms across the continents bordering the north Atlantic.
Haigh has found that at times of low solar activity the air pressure over the North Pole is higher than normal and forces storms south, funnelling colder weather to lower latitudes. What happens in the southern hemisphere is less well known, but Haigh says she wouldn't be surprised if the reaction here to changes in solar activity is different.
Solar activity might also influence climate through its effect on cosmic rays. In another study, Solanki has found an intriguing correlation between the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and the number of cosmic rays striking it, with lower temperatures in periods of high numbers of cosmic rays.
How could cosmic rays lead to cooler temperatures? Enter a theory proposed by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen almost a decade ago. They suggested that cosmic rays create an electric charge in particles in our atmosphere that then act as seeds for the formation of clouds at low altitudes. A spell of low solar activity would mean more cosmic rays and therefore more clouds and lower temperatures.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's idea is controversial, however (New Scientist, 11 July 1998, p 45). Most climatologists accept that more low clouds would reflect more radiation back into space, thus lowering temperatures.
But many dismiss Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's evidence of a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover as coincidence (see "Cloud cover"). Others want the theory investigated, if only to rule it out. To this end, an international group of more than 50 scientists have proposed an experiment at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to begin in 2008.
No room for complacency
The coming years could settle the sun's role on temperatures once and for all. If the expected sunspot crash does takes place, Solanki's work could receive dramatic confirmation. "Having a crash would certainly allow us to pin down the sun's true level of influence on the Earth's climate," says Weiss.
None of this means that we can stop worrying about global warming caused by emissions into the atmosphere. "The temperature of the Earth in the past few decades does not correlate with solar activity at all," Solanki says. He estimates that solar activity is responsible for only 30 per cent, at most, of the warming since 1970. The rest must be the result of man-made greenhouse gases, and a crash in solar activity won't do anything to get rid of them.
What might happen is that the sun gives the planet a welcome respite from the ravages of man-made climate change - though for how long, nobody knows. During the Little Ice Age, the fall in average global temperature is estimated to have been less than 1 °C and lasted 70 years. The one before that persisted for 150 years, but a minor crash at the beginning of the 19th century lasted barely 30. For now, we will have to keep watching for falling sunspot numbers. "The deeper the crash, the longer it will last," Weiss says.
There is a dangerous flip side to this coin. If global warming does slow down or partially reverse with a sunspot crash, industrial polluters and reluctant nations could use it as a justification for turning their backs on pollution controls altogether, makingmatters worse in the long run. There is no room for complacency, Svalgaard warns: "If the Earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing, when the sun's magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance."
Field feedback
Sunspots and solar activity are driven by the strength of the sun's complex magnetic field. Although solar scientists are still debating the detail, most believe that the magnetic field is generated in a shell of hot gas 35,000 kilometres thick and buried some 200,000 kilometres deep inside the sun. Known as the tachocline, this layer is made of plasma - a gas so hot that the atoms break up into charged electrons and ions.
Material at different latitudes and depths of the tachocline rotates at different rates. This variability moves electric charges and generates the sun's magnetic field. Once created, the magnetic field is strong enough to influence the movement of the electrically charged gas that creates it, a feedback mechanism that can either strongly amplify or diminish the overall strength of the field. For the past 50 years the field has been building, and the sun has been experiencing a period of unusually high magnetic activity.
Predicting future solar activity is tricky because of this complexity. The best method in use today was formulated in the 1970s by Leif Svalgaard, then at Stanford University. He showed that the magnetic field at the sun's poles is the best predictor. "The polar field is the magnetic seed for solar activity," Svalgaard says.
The polar fields are the accumulation of dead sunspots, transient dark patches on the sun's surface that have immense magnetic fields. When a spot fades from view, its residual magnetic field is gradually swept polewards by a surface current of solar gas known as the meridional flow. At the poles, this flow turns down into the sun, where astronomers believe it sinks to the tachocline and begins a return journey towards the sun's equator. En route, the magnetic field is rejuvenated by the tachocline to produce new sunspots.
Cloud cover
In 1997, meteorologists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen analysed weather satellite records from 1979 to 1992. This was long enough for the sun's activity to complete one of its regular 11-year cycles.
The researchers found that the Earth was 3 per cent cloudier when the sun's activity was at a minimum than when it was at its peak. They also noted the influx of cosmic rays at five experiments across the globe and found that it was as much as 25 per cent higher at the solar minimum. They called their discovery a "missing link in solar-climate relationships" and argued that cosmic rays were responsible for increasing cloud formation by electrically charging the lower atmosphere.
Intriguing as this link is, it is far from proof that solar activity and cloud cover are connected. "You have to demonstrate such an effect with an experiment, otherwise it is not physics," says Robert Bingham, a physicist at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Bingham is part of an international collaboration building an experiment called CLOUD to test the idea that cosmic rays seed clouds. CLOUD will start up in 2008 using a particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva as a source of simulated cosmic rays. The researchers will fire charged particles through a chamber holding a mixture of gases similar to the Earth's atmosphere to determine how often the particles trigger cloud formation. "CLOUD will go a long way towards understanding the microphysics of droplet formation," says Bingham.
New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006
RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE REPORT WARNS OF GLOBAL COOLING in 6-9 YEARS
Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences' astronomical observatory's report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.
Environmentalists and scientists warn not about the dangers of global warming provoked by man's detrimental effect on the planet's climate, but global cooling. Though never widely supported, it is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation. "On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth's climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate's global warming at the start of the 22nd century," said the head of the space research sector.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century - when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland - could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060.
He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today because "climate cooling is connected with changing temperatures, especially for northern countries."
"The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times," he said, referring to an international treaty on climate change targeting greenhouse gas emissions. "The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth's global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol," Abdusamatov said.
MosNews, 25 August 2006
Kyoto 'a slogan, not a solution'
Some lip service to global warming from Australia but no action
Environment Minister Ian Campbell today stood firm on Australia's long standing refusal to sign onto the Kyoto protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions, declaring it a slogan not a solution. Senator Campbell, fresh back from the UN framework conference on climate change in Switzerland, backed urgent action on climate change but with better quality practical international action. He said there was a sense of frustration that the whole process was becoming too bureaucratic and that more practical action was needed.
But for Australia, that would not involving signing the Kyoto accord. "I don't think people who make alarmist predictions do us much of a favour because the public will switch off. There are going to be substantial serious consequences of not addressing climate change, urgently and with multiple billion dollar investments. "The problem is too serious to offer up slogans as solution. Signing Kyoto is a slogan. It's not a solution. Investing billions of dollars in the technologies we need to transform the way we produce and use energy is a substantial solution." Senator Campbell said Australia could end all carbon emissions overnight but growth in China alone would replace Australian emissions within 10 months. "We could be the best climate change country in the world - and we are one of the best - but without cooperative effective action internationally we will not save Perth's beaches," he said.
Labor has strongly backed Australia signing the Kyoto Protocol but Senator Campbell said the reality was that protocol was being rewritten. He said Kyoto signatories such as France were nine per cent over its Kyoto target, Norway 22 per cent, Portugal 26 per cent and Spain 36 per cent. "The whole world is moving beyond Kyoto and Labor is saying sign up to something that was really drafted six, seven, eight years ago, which we know is not working," he said. "There is no gain to ratifying. We are part of a process that is designing the post-Kyoto world."
Senator Campbell said the Switzerland meeting aimed to prepare a group of some 30 ministers for the next meeting in Nairobi in a few weeks. He said what he sought to achieve was a new focus on technology transfer so that innovative technology could be speedily disseminated through the world. Unlike many of his coalition colleagues, Senator Campbell backed the thrust of the movie An Inconvenient Truth by former US vice-president Al Gore. He said respected scientists agreed with him that the science in the movie was sound and the consequences of not addressing the problems were very substantial. "We have got to remember there are consequences of global warming. There will be sea level rises. There already have been," he said.
Source
Australia: Stupid water policies
Are the states imposing almost useless drought restrictions on water consumers while failing to build the infrastructure to bring water where it's needed?
As last summer ended, booming southeast Queensland was the only urban sprawl on the mainland without water restrictions. But suddenly, it seems, Queenslanders are also running short of water. On the first day of business after last weekend's Queensland state election, the re-elected Labor Government led by Premier Peter Beattie awarded 180,000 pool owners the toughest and most expensive water-saving requirement in the country: compulsory covers for their swimming pools to reduce evaporation loss. Many can expect to be out of pocket by as much as $2000 as a result. Are such restrictions value for money in terms of the cost of water saved? Not always.
Federal parliamentary secretary for water Malcolm Turnbull says the new Queensland "pool tax" is the latest example of short-term thinking and poor water planning in Australia, resulting from serial abuse of water utilities by state and local governments. "Water-saving measures are good, but you have to look at them with a hard head," Turnbull says. "Water is not the only scarce resource. So is money."
Water infrastructure - dams, desalination and recycling plants - is costly to build, but once in place the operating costs of the business are relatively low. State-owned water utilities are a valuable money pot for cash-strapped governments reluctant to give up some of the revenue stream to expand supply.
As part of new water restrictions beginning in Brisbane and other parts of southeast Queensland in November, gardens can only be watered legally by bucket or can. The taps have really been screwed down on backyard pools, effective as of summer 2007. As well as being required to fit a pool cover by the middle of next year, owners will need to complete two of three indoors retrofits: install a dual flush system in their toilet, fit a water-efficient shower head and buy a new, water-efficient washing machine.
Such is Brisbane's water supply that every drop counts, seemingly no matter what the cost. The Queensland Water Commission is quick to point out that 12 million litres of water is lost every day through evaporation from swimming pools. What it doesn't mention is that the cost of this imposed saving will be more than four times the cost of the water. At about $500 a pool cover, and assuming an ambitious but as yet unspecified regulatory regime to deliver savings of two-thirds of all evaporation, it will cost about $4 for each kilolitre of water saved. Presently Brisbane Water sells the same amount of water for 85c. Pool covers as a demand management strategy come in at five to 10 times more expensive than most of the more broadly accepted demand management options, including water-efficient showers and washing-machine rebates. This cost does not include optional extras including cover rollers and the extra cost to pool owners of replumbing their bathrooms. That it has come to this level of crisis management seems extraordinary in the fastest-growing corner of one of the most developed countries in the 21st century.
Dams take a long time to fill and a long time to empty. Queensland's Wivenhoe Dam is only a quarter full, enough water for two years, but who's taking chances? Being surprised by a water shortage is like having a tortoise sneak up on you. You need to be looking the other way for an awfully long time. And yet all state governments except the one in Tasmania have embraced the symbolism of water restrictions as a public response to shallower water levels, starting with Perth in the spring of 2001. Canberra followed suit a year later, then Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney in 2003.
For Brisbane, the warnings were writ large on the Wivenhoe Dam wall as early as 1991. The South East Queensland Water Resources Strategy of that year found that "existing storages ... have inadequate yields to meet the needs of the future predicted populations at current rates of water use. Even with stringent demand management, the provision of additional water supplies will be necessary in the future."
The Water Services Association of Australia represents the big water authorities providing water to three-quarters of Australians. It asserts population growth in Australia's cities - with the exception of Perth - has been catered for not by providing new water services, but by reducing per capita demand. In a paper on urban water last year, WSAA pointed out the easy measures had been targeted "and further measures are likely to be intrusive and may encounter community resistance".
In 2004-05, despite water restrictions in every mainland capital except Brisbane, city water authorities paid over $658 million in dividends to their respective state governments. That year, city water users saved 220 billion litres, with one exception: Brisbane.
The National Water Commission is reviewing and assessing the existing water restrictions. Chief executive of the Irrigation Association of Australia, Jolyon Burnett, says there is a bewildering array of water restrictions. "In southeast Queensland until this new state Water Commission took over, there were up to 14 different regulations. It is absolute madness, and the public have felt that this was a bit of a joke."
Burnett argues there are three problems with the present water restrictions. The first is the poor process, with a lack of consultation and lack of warning. "Secondly the lack of science, and thirdly the inequity. Outdoor water use is the only one that attracts mandatory attention," Burnett says.....
More here
***************************************
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Sunday, September 17, 2006
NUTTY ABOUT COCONUTS
Self-righteous vandals at work
Striding purposefully down a pristine white sand beach in northeastern Australia, Hugh Spencer ignores the bikini-clad sunbathers and instead heads straight for a thick grove of coconut palms. "Look at this - there are no native plants left. They've all been pushed out by the coconuts," says Dr. Spencer, who heads the Australian Tropical Research Foundation. "The national parks service won't lift a finger - they're seriously underfunded, and they don't want to deal with the issue because it's so contentious."
Swaying coconut trees may symbolize the laid-back lifestyle of the tropics, but in northern Queensland, they are the focus of an acrimonious public debate which has left locals anything but relaxed. Tourism operators say Cocos nucifera palms are essential to the state's tropical ambience, offering the promise of long lazy days spent swinging in hammocks, sipping cool drinks, and gazing out at the azure waters of the Coral Sea. But local governments (known as councils) take a dimmer view, fearing hefty lawsuits if the trees drop their hairy harvest on the heads of unsuspecting, and increasingly litigious, tourists. Conservation groups loathe the coconut palm, saying it is an alien, invasive species that is encroaching on native vegetation and crowding out a narrow band of littoral rain forest - one of the rarest types of forest in the world.
"Coconut palms are a particularly aggressive nonnative," says Spencer. "Of the nuts that fall to the ground, a large majority germinate. Coconuts, urban development, fires, all mean that the littoral rain forest in Australia is vanishing." To some ecologists, the trees are public enemy No. 1, on a par with the hated cane toad, which was introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in the 1930s to control a type of beetle but has since bred in millions and spread across the continent.
So passionate is the debate that Spencer and a band of volunteers are poisoning the trees in a covert campaign of sabotage. Digging through the leaf litter in a particularly dense stand of palms, he points out a tiny hole at the base of a particularly tall specimen. "We put poison in there. We have to do it on days when the weather is bad and there's no one on the beach."
Poisoning the palms is not strictly illegal because they are not a protected species. But at the very least it is "illicit and unauthorized," according to the environmental biologist, who says he would welcome some form of prosecution by the Queensland national parks service because it would raise the profile of the issue. The group's guerrilla tactics have made them enemies. Spencer says he's received hate mail for leading the counter-coconut charge. "Some members of the local council would like to hang me from the nearest coconut tree. But others would like to give me a knighthood," he says.
Coconut palms are one of hundreds of thriving plant species introduced to Australia since British settlement in 1788. Coconuts were first planted here by 19th-century pioneers and later spread along the remote coastline of northern Queensland by postwar settlers and, in the 1970s, bands of hippies.
The problem of nonnative trees is not unique to Australia. For example, Greece and South Africa are infested with Australian eucalyptus trees. Fast-growing, rot-resistant eucalyptus were planted as windbreaks and for their timber. British woodlands are choked with rhododendrons, an ornamental species originally from the Himalayas. In the US, Chinese tallow trees have invaded forests of Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina; while Florida struggles to control the Brazilian pepper tree, mimosas, and two fast-growing Australian imports: melaleucas and casuarina pines.
In Queensland, many people now consider coconut palms an irreplaceable part of the state's tropical appeal. Towns like Cairns and Port Douglas, gateways to the Great Barrier Reef, have boomed in the past decade thanks to resorts with enticing names like Palm Cove and Paradise Palms. "This is a tropical destination, and people expect to see coconut palms, especially on the beaches," says Barry O'Brien, of Preserve Our Palms, a community group set up to challenge any threat to the spindly trees. "We have other dangerous things up here like crocodiles and snakes and stinging jellyfish, but no one is suggesting we kill them. I've lived here 13 years and to my knowledge there's been no one killed or seriously injured by a coconut."
Local authorities say the lack of injuries is testimony to their readiness to remove dangerous trees. Their vigilance is prompted by a growing culture of US-style litigiousness in Australia. Douglas Shire Council, which administers a swath of idyllic coastline north of Cairns, is one of the local authorities to have taken such precautionary measures, chopping down dozens of trees overhanging footpaths or playgrounds over the past three years.
The effort did not please the local tourism industry. "When the council chopped down 100 palm trees at a local beach, everyone was outraged," Mr. O'Brien says. Less offensive to local businesses is the twice yearly "de-nutting," when contract workers climb the palms in spiked boots or use cherry pickers and long saws to remove the dangling fruit. (A coconut palm can produce up to 75 fruit a year.) But for cash-strapped local councils, it is an expensive business - coconut maintenance costs about A$80,000 a year (US$61,500) in Douglas Shire alone, one of a dozen or more local authorities in Queensland that have to manage the problem. Other councils are experimenting with "coco-nets," specially designed nets that catch the coconuts before they crash to the ground. But that, too, is pricey, because the nets have to be emptied on a regular basis.
Eradicating the palms altogether is not an option, however. "Having coconut palms scattered along the coastline adds to the tropical appeal of our beaches," says Bob Jago, the Douglas Shire Council's environmental officer, striking a conciliatory note in the debate. "I would only support removing them where they are growing in national parks."
Meanwhile Spencer and his volunteers feel they have right on their side. In a survey of visitors to the Cape Tribulation wilderness area carried out by the group in 2004, 650 tourists were asked whether they preferred seeing native tropical vegetation or a South Pacific-style coconut palm landscape. Ninety percent said they favored native vegetation. The next stage in the great coconut confrontation will be a fresh assault on the palms by the conservationists. As with earlier campaigns, they will rip out germinating nuts, cut down smaller trees, and poison the big ones. "We've done a huge amount of coconut removal already," Spencer says. "If they're left to their own devices, you end up with a monoculture. But if you tell people [coconut palms are] a weed, they go berserk."
Source
ENCROACHING SANITY ABOUT DDT?
The World Health Organization on Friday called on more developing countries, particularly in Africa, to begin spraying the controversial pesticide DDT to fight malaria. The difference: DDT, longed banned in the United States because of environmental damage, is no longer sprayed outdoors. Instead it's used to coat the inside walls of mud huts or other dwellings and kill mosquitoes waiting to bite families as they sleep.
A small number of malaria-plagued countries already use DDT, backed by a 2001 United Nations treaty that set out strict rules to prevent environmental contamination. But the influential WHO's long-awaited announcement makes clear that it will push indoor spraying with a number of insecticides -- and that DDT will be a top choice because when used properly it's safe, effective and cheap. "We must take a position based on the science and the data," said Dr. Arata Kochi, the WHO's malaria chief. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." "It's a big change," said biologist Amir Attaran of Canada's University of Ottawa, who has long pushed for the guidelines and described a recent draft. "There has been a lot of resistance to using insecticides to control malaria, and one insecticide especially. ... That will have to be re-evaluated by a lot of people."
The U.S. government already has decided to pay for DDT and other indoor insecticide use as part of President Bush's $1.2 billion, five-year initiative to control malaria in Africa.
Kochi has positioned indoor spraying as an important but neglected third weapon -- along with insecticide-treated bed nets and new medications -- in the war on malaria, which infects half a billion people each year and kills more than 1 million, most of them children. While some well-known environmental groups have signed on to WHO's decision, it has generated some concern from groups like the Pesticide Action Network, which says there are questions about its effects on developing children. But proponents argue that until better strategies are developed, carefully controlled DDT use is warranted because in recent years, nothing else has succeeded in lowering deaths from malaria. "Indoor spraying is like providing a huge mosquito net over an entire household for around-the-clock protection," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a physician who has urged stronger international anti-malaria programs.
DDT is easily history's most notorious insecticide. While it isn't classified a human health hazard, it was banned in the U.S. in 1972 after decades of widespread agricultural spraying led to environmental damage around the globe. [Baseless assertion!]
DDT never disappeared in developing countries, although political pressure and lack of funding meant few continued to use it. Then a 2001 United Nations treaty that aims to wipe out a dozen of the world's most dangerous chemicals carved out one exception for DDT: indoor anti-malaria spraying, under strict conditions to prevent environmental contamination. Why? When small amounts are sprayed on interior walls, DDT forms a residue that both repels mosquitoes -- discouraging them from flying into the house -- and kills those that rest on the walls, explained Clive Shiff, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Malaria Research Institute. It has to be applied only about once a year.
Bednets soaked in different insecticides already are used to protect sleeping families. But if the nets are torn or aren't used every night, a mosquito can infect someone. Plus, mosquitoes can develop resistance to those nets' chemicals, Shiff added, pointing to a 2002 malaria outbreak in part of South Africa using bednets. DDT in those houses quelled the outbreak. "It would be naive to say DDT is a magic bullet for malaria. It isn't," stressed Attaran. It won't work in some places where mosquitoes already are resistant to a range of insecticides, he noted. He suspects DDT will be of most use in eastern Africa, where that problem hasn't yet emerged. Attaran called for research "to make sure we're using insecticides and DDT not in a willy-nilly way but in an optimal way in the right places."
Nor, scientists cautioned, is indoor spraying alone a solution, as mosquitoes bite everywhere. Countries are being encouraged to adopt comprehensive malaria programs that also include newer, more effective medications, as Bush's malaria chief, Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, was to outline Friday. "President Bush has directed Admiral Ziemer to use the most safe and effective tools available to control and combat malaria in Africa," said White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. Indoor spraying "programs are an important part of his Presidential Malaria Initiative to save thousands of people from a highly treatable and preventable disease."
Source
The Snap, Crackle and Pop of doom?
In August, Bayer Cropscience reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that some of the American long grain rice crop had been commingled with its genetically modified (GM) LL-601 rice. LL-601 is the abbreviation for the gene that confers resistance to the Liberty Link herbicide. LL-601 rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, was field tested between 1998 and 2001 and was dropped by Bayer when other varieties proved more productive and it judged that the time was not ripe for introducing GM rice. No one currently knows how the LL-601 rice got commingled at a rate of six grains of LL-601 to about 10,000 grains of conventional rice.
The announcement by the USDA and Bayer produced a predictable furor. Japan immediately banned imports of American long grain rice (but not short grain rice). The European Union restricted U.S. rice imports to only those that have been tested for the offending gene. Ireland banned U.S. rice exports outright. Gleeful anti-biotech activists called for imposing a worldwide ban on imports of U.S. rice.
Before the flap over "contaminated" U.S. rice could die down, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth declared that they had tested Chinese rice products in Britain, France and Germany and had detected the presence of rice genetically modified to resist insects. The Chinese government responded that no genetically modified rice varieties had yet been approved for commercialization. Which is true, but recent research shows that genetically modified rice offers a potentially great benefits to China's farmers and commercialization appears to be only a matter of time.
So should you dump the boxes of Rice Krispies and Uncle Ben's in your pantry into a biohazard receptacle? Nope. First, keep in mind that you've probably already have been eating foods made with ingredients from Liberty Link crops. The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have found that LL-601 gene and the protein it produces are safe for consumers and the environment in such crops as corn, soybeans and canola. As USDA Secretary Mike Johanns declared, "It is important to note that the protein found in this regulated rice line, LL Rice-601, is approved for use in other products. It has been repeatedly and thoroughly scientifically reviewed, and used safely in food and feed, cultivation, import and breeding in the United States. It is also approved for use in nearly a dozen other countries around the world." Of course, inevitably some American rice farmers are suing Bayer over their lost sales to the regulation-happy Europeans and Japanese. It's a pity they can't sue foreign regulators for lost sales due to stupid directives.
What about that Chinese rice? My guess is that if Europeans are finding traces of GM rice in food products imported from China, it's likely that enterprising anti-biotech activists will soon announce the same allegedly dire findings here. The Chinese rice has apparently been modified using the long familiar technology of incorporating a gene from bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which acts as anti-caterpillar insecticide. Bt is non-toxic to humans and animals and does not kill insects that leave crop plants protected by it alone. So it unlikely that whatever traces of GM rice that make it into foods imported from China will harm Americans who have been eating foods made from ingredients derived from crops protected by Bt for more than a decade now. It is estimated that at least 70 percent of all processed foods on American grocery shelves are made using ingredients from biotech crops.
However, both the Bayer and Chinese cases point up how activists misuse the current case-by-case regulatory approval system.There has to be a better way to protect public health while permitting the swift introduction of safe and beneficial agricultural technologies. In fact, Drew Kershen, a professor of law at University of Oklahoma, offers a three point plan for wending our way out of the current international biotech regulatory morass.
First, GM crops and non-GM crops should be regulated in the same manner for similar or identical risks. If a regulatory system would cover a specific trait were it in a conventionally bred crop, then it should also regulate that same trait in a GM crop. If not, then it should not be regulated in a GM crop either.
Second, once a trait has been approved, it should be approved for all varieties and all crops. There is no need to make a trait go through the regulatory system again and again and again. This would clearly apply to the Liberty Link case.
And third, comparable science-based regulatory systems should mutually recognize one another's approvals of the same traits by either direct recognition or by means of a short, fast-track recognition process. Obviously, just how much confidence to repose in European, Chinese or Indian regulatory systems is subject to debate, but the principle is sound.
In any case, the rest of the world outside European Union will soon be awash in safe biotech crop varieties. The EU will eventually have to choose between stopping all imports and growing all its own food or adopting a more reasonable science-based regulatory system. However, until something like Kershen's sensible suggestions are implemented, the world's consumers will continue to enjoy periodic bogus food scares conjured up by anti-biotech activists.
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Self-righteous vandals at work
Striding purposefully down a pristine white sand beach in northeastern Australia, Hugh Spencer ignores the bikini-clad sunbathers and instead heads straight for a thick grove of coconut palms. "Look at this - there are no native plants left. They've all been pushed out by the coconuts," says Dr. Spencer, who heads the Australian Tropical Research Foundation. "The national parks service won't lift a finger - they're seriously underfunded, and they don't want to deal with the issue because it's so contentious."
Swaying coconut trees may symbolize the laid-back lifestyle of the tropics, but in northern Queensland, they are the focus of an acrimonious public debate which has left locals anything but relaxed. Tourism operators say Cocos nucifera palms are essential to the state's tropical ambience, offering the promise of long lazy days spent swinging in hammocks, sipping cool drinks, and gazing out at the azure waters of the Coral Sea. But local governments (known as councils) take a dimmer view, fearing hefty lawsuits if the trees drop their hairy harvest on the heads of unsuspecting, and increasingly litigious, tourists. Conservation groups loathe the coconut palm, saying it is an alien, invasive species that is encroaching on native vegetation and crowding out a narrow band of littoral rain forest - one of the rarest types of forest in the world.
"Coconut palms are a particularly aggressive nonnative," says Spencer. "Of the nuts that fall to the ground, a large majority germinate. Coconuts, urban development, fires, all mean that the littoral rain forest in Australia is vanishing." To some ecologists, the trees are public enemy No. 1, on a par with the hated cane toad, which was introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in the 1930s to control a type of beetle but has since bred in millions and spread across the continent.
So passionate is the debate that Spencer and a band of volunteers are poisoning the trees in a covert campaign of sabotage. Digging through the leaf litter in a particularly dense stand of palms, he points out a tiny hole at the base of a particularly tall specimen. "We put poison in there. We have to do it on days when the weather is bad and there's no one on the beach."
Poisoning the palms is not strictly illegal because they are not a protected species. But at the very least it is "illicit and unauthorized," according to the environmental biologist, who says he would welcome some form of prosecution by the Queensland national parks service because it would raise the profile of the issue. The group's guerrilla tactics have made them enemies. Spencer says he's received hate mail for leading the counter-coconut charge. "Some members of the local council would like to hang me from the nearest coconut tree. But others would like to give me a knighthood," he says.
Coconut palms are one of hundreds of thriving plant species introduced to Australia since British settlement in 1788. Coconuts were first planted here by 19th-century pioneers and later spread along the remote coastline of northern Queensland by postwar settlers and, in the 1970s, bands of hippies.
The problem of nonnative trees is not unique to Australia. For example, Greece and South Africa are infested with Australian eucalyptus trees. Fast-growing, rot-resistant eucalyptus were planted as windbreaks and for their timber. British woodlands are choked with rhododendrons, an ornamental species originally from the Himalayas. In the US, Chinese tallow trees have invaded forests of Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina; while Florida struggles to control the Brazilian pepper tree, mimosas, and two fast-growing Australian imports: melaleucas and casuarina pines.
In Queensland, many people now consider coconut palms an irreplaceable part of the state's tropical appeal. Towns like Cairns and Port Douglas, gateways to the Great Barrier Reef, have boomed in the past decade thanks to resorts with enticing names like Palm Cove and Paradise Palms. "This is a tropical destination, and people expect to see coconut palms, especially on the beaches," says Barry O'Brien, of Preserve Our Palms, a community group set up to challenge any threat to the spindly trees. "We have other dangerous things up here like crocodiles and snakes and stinging jellyfish, but no one is suggesting we kill them. I've lived here 13 years and to my knowledge there's been no one killed or seriously injured by a coconut."
Local authorities say the lack of injuries is testimony to their readiness to remove dangerous trees. Their vigilance is prompted by a growing culture of US-style litigiousness in Australia. Douglas Shire Council, which administers a swath of idyllic coastline north of Cairns, is one of the local authorities to have taken such precautionary measures, chopping down dozens of trees overhanging footpaths or playgrounds over the past three years.
The effort did not please the local tourism industry. "When the council chopped down 100 palm trees at a local beach, everyone was outraged," Mr. O'Brien says. Less offensive to local businesses is the twice yearly "de-nutting," when contract workers climb the palms in spiked boots or use cherry pickers and long saws to remove the dangling fruit. (A coconut palm can produce up to 75 fruit a year.) But for cash-strapped local councils, it is an expensive business - coconut maintenance costs about A$80,000 a year (US$61,500) in Douglas Shire alone, one of a dozen or more local authorities in Queensland that have to manage the problem. Other councils are experimenting with "coco-nets," specially designed nets that catch the coconuts before they crash to the ground. But that, too, is pricey, because the nets have to be emptied on a regular basis.
Eradicating the palms altogether is not an option, however. "Having coconut palms scattered along the coastline adds to the tropical appeal of our beaches," says Bob Jago, the Douglas Shire Council's environmental officer, striking a conciliatory note in the debate. "I would only support removing them where they are growing in national parks."
Meanwhile Spencer and his volunteers feel they have right on their side. In a survey of visitors to the Cape Tribulation wilderness area carried out by the group in 2004, 650 tourists were asked whether they preferred seeing native tropical vegetation or a South Pacific-style coconut palm landscape. Ninety percent said they favored native vegetation. The next stage in the great coconut confrontation will be a fresh assault on the palms by the conservationists. As with earlier campaigns, they will rip out germinating nuts, cut down smaller trees, and poison the big ones. "We've done a huge amount of coconut removal already," Spencer says. "If they're left to their own devices, you end up with a monoculture. But if you tell people [coconut palms are] a weed, they go berserk."
Source
ENCROACHING SANITY ABOUT DDT?
The World Health Organization on Friday called on more developing countries, particularly in Africa, to begin spraying the controversial pesticide DDT to fight malaria. The difference: DDT, longed banned in the United States because of environmental damage, is no longer sprayed outdoors. Instead it's used to coat the inside walls of mud huts or other dwellings and kill mosquitoes waiting to bite families as they sleep.
A small number of malaria-plagued countries already use DDT, backed by a 2001 United Nations treaty that set out strict rules to prevent environmental contamination. But the influential WHO's long-awaited announcement makes clear that it will push indoor spraying with a number of insecticides -- and that DDT will be a top choice because when used properly it's safe, effective and cheap. "We must take a position based on the science and the data," said Dr. Arata Kochi, the WHO's malaria chief. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." "It's a big change," said biologist Amir Attaran of Canada's University of Ottawa, who has long pushed for the guidelines and described a recent draft. "There has been a lot of resistance to using insecticides to control malaria, and one insecticide especially. ... That will have to be re-evaluated by a lot of people."
The U.S. government already has decided to pay for DDT and other indoor insecticide use as part of President Bush's $1.2 billion, five-year initiative to control malaria in Africa.
Kochi has positioned indoor spraying as an important but neglected third weapon -- along with insecticide-treated bed nets and new medications -- in the war on malaria, which infects half a billion people each year and kills more than 1 million, most of them children. While some well-known environmental groups have signed on to WHO's decision, it has generated some concern from groups like the Pesticide Action Network, which says there are questions about its effects on developing children. But proponents argue that until better strategies are developed, carefully controlled DDT use is warranted because in recent years, nothing else has succeeded in lowering deaths from malaria. "Indoor spraying is like providing a huge mosquito net over an entire household for around-the-clock protection," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a physician who has urged stronger international anti-malaria programs.
DDT is easily history's most notorious insecticide. While it isn't classified a human health hazard, it was banned in the U.S. in 1972 after decades of widespread agricultural spraying led to environmental damage around the globe. [Baseless assertion!]
DDT never disappeared in developing countries, although political pressure and lack of funding meant few continued to use it. Then a 2001 United Nations treaty that aims to wipe out a dozen of the world's most dangerous chemicals carved out one exception for DDT: indoor anti-malaria spraying, under strict conditions to prevent environmental contamination. Why? When small amounts are sprayed on interior walls, DDT forms a residue that both repels mosquitoes -- discouraging them from flying into the house -- and kills those that rest on the walls, explained Clive Shiff, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Malaria Research Institute. It has to be applied only about once a year.
Bednets soaked in different insecticides already are used to protect sleeping families. But if the nets are torn or aren't used every night, a mosquito can infect someone. Plus, mosquitoes can develop resistance to those nets' chemicals, Shiff added, pointing to a 2002 malaria outbreak in part of South Africa using bednets. DDT in those houses quelled the outbreak. "It would be naive to say DDT is a magic bullet for malaria. It isn't," stressed Attaran. It won't work in some places where mosquitoes already are resistant to a range of insecticides, he noted. He suspects DDT will be of most use in eastern Africa, where that problem hasn't yet emerged. Attaran called for research "to make sure we're using insecticides and DDT not in a willy-nilly way but in an optimal way in the right places."
Nor, scientists cautioned, is indoor spraying alone a solution, as mosquitoes bite everywhere. Countries are being encouraged to adopt comprehensive malaria programs that also include newer, more effective medications, as Bush's malaria chief, Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, was to outline Friday. "President Bush has directed Admiral Ziemer to use the most safe and effective tools available to control and combat malaria in Africa," said White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. Indoor spraying "programs are an important part of his Presidential Malaria Initiative to save thousands of people from a highly treatable and preventable disease."
Source
The Snap, Crackle and Pop of doom?
In August, Bayer Cropscience reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that some of the American long grain rice crop had been commingled with its genetically modified (GM) LL-601 rice. LL-601 is the abbreviation for the gene that confers resistance to the Liberty Link herbicide. LL-601 rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, was field tested between 1998 and 2001 and was dropped by Bayer when other varieties proved more productive and it judged that the time was not ripe for introducing GM rice. No one currently knows how the LL-601 rice got commingled at a rate of six grains of LL-601 to about 10,000 grains of conventional rice.
The announcement by the USDA and Bayer produced a predictable furor. Japan immediately banned imports of American long grain rice (but not short grain rice). The European Union restricted U.S. rice imports to only those that have been tested for the offending gene. Ireland banned U.S. rice exports outright. Gleeful anti-biotech activists called for imposing a worldwide ban on imports of U.S. rice.
Before the flap over "contaminated" U.S. rice could die down, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth declared that they had tested Chinese rice products in Britain, France and Germany and had detected the presence of rice genetically modified to resist insects. The Chinese government responded that no genetically modified rice varieties had yet been approved for commercialization. Which is true, but recent research shows that genetically modified rice offers a potentially great benefits to China's farmers and commercialization appears to be only a matter of time.
So should you dump the boxes of Rice Krispies and Uncle Ben's in your pantry into a biohazard receptacle? Nope. First, keep in mind that you've probably already have been eating foods made with ingredients from Liberty Link crops. The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have found that LL-601 gene and the protein it produces are safe for consumers and the environment in such crops as corn, soybeans and canola. As USDA Secretary Mike Johanns declared, "It is important to note that the protein found in this regulated rice line, LL Rice-601, is approved for use in other products. It has been repeatedly and thoroughly scientifically reviewed, and used safely in food and feed, cultivation, import and breeding in the United States. It is also approved for use in nearly a dozen other countries around the world." Of course, inevitably some American rice farmers are suing Bayer over their lost sales to the regulation-happy Europeans and Japanese. It's a pity they can't sue foreign regulators for lost sales due to stupid directives.
What about that Chinese rice? My guess is that if Europeans are finding traces of GM rice in food products imported from China, it's likely that enterprising anti-biotech activists will soon announce the same allegedly dire findings here. The Chinese rice has apparently been modified using the long familiar technology of incorporating a gene from bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which acts as anti-caterpillar insecticide. Bt is non-toxic to humans and animals and does not kill insects that leave crop plants protected by it alone. So it unlikely that whatever traces of GM rice that make it into foods imported from China will harm Americans who have been eating foods made from ingredients derived from crops protected by Bt for more than a decade now. It is estimated that at least 70 percent of all processed foods on American grocery shelves are made using ingredients from biotech crops.
However, both the Bayer and Chinese cases point up how activists misuse the current case-by-case regulatory approval system.There has to be a better way to protect public health while permitting the swift introduction of safe and beneficial agricultural technologies. In fact, Drew Kershen, a professor of law at University of Oklahoma, offers a three point plan for wending our way out of the current international biotech regulatory morass.
First, GM crops and non-GM crops should be regulated in the same manner for similar or identical risks. If a regulatory system would cover a specific trait were it in a conventionally bred crop, then it should also regulate that same trait in a GM crop. If not, then it should not be regulated in a GM crop either.
Second, once a trait has been approved, it should be approved for all varieties and all crops. There is no need to make a trait go through the regulatory system again and again and again. This would clearly apply to the Liberty Link case.
And third, comparable science-based regulatory systems should mutually recognize one another's approvals of the same traits by either direct recognition or by means of a short, fast-track recognition process. Obviously, just how much confidence to repose in European, Chinese or Indian regulatory systems is subject to debate, but the principle is sound.
In any case, the rest of the world outside European Union will soon be awash in safe biotech crop varieties. The EU will eventually have to choose between stopping all imports and growing all its own food or adopting a more reasonable science-based regulatory system. However, until something like Kershen's sensible suggestions are implemented, the world's consumers will continue to enjoy periodic bogus food scares conjured up by anti-biotech activists.
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Saturday, September 16, 2006
GOOGLE GOES GREEN
No pictures of GROWING glaciers or GROWING North American forests and suchlike? How odd?
Satellite photographs revealing how the landscape has been altered by human activity have been made available online by Google Earth. The pictures show the changes that have been wrought at 100 locations around the globe. All but one have been selected to show the damage caused to the landscape. One of the most striking series of images depicts how Santa Cruz in Bolivia has had its dense forests cut down to make way for urbanisation and agriculture.
Google has teamed up with the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) to allow the public access to the photographs. A spokesman said: “The intention is to show the damage being done to the environment and to increase public awareness. It’s usually difficult for the ordinary person in the street to get access to these images. We hope to bring them to a wider audience.”
Source
YOUNGIES REJECTING THE GREENIES
"An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie on global warming, is now the fourth-largest-grossing documentary of all time. But apparently it isn't young adults who are paying the price of the ticket -- or, more important, taking the truth about the environment to heart. In fact, the inconvenient truth today is that youths' willingness to conserve gas, heat and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.
According to data from Monitoring the Future, a federally funded national survey on trends in the attitudes, values and behavior of high school seniors since 1976, there has been a clear decline in conservation behavior among 18-year-olds over the past 27 years -- although we are not yet sure whether these attitudes follow youths into adulthood. This decline, interestingly, is coupled with a rise in materialistic values.
In fact, trends in materialism and conservation are highly related: At times when youths place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to say they would conserve resources. And when youths are more materially driven, they are also less likely to believe that natural resources will become scarce in the future. Since the 1990s, the trends in materialism seem to have topped out at a steady high level, while willingness to conserve keeps declining. These opposing values should raise a red flag about the consumer culture and its influence on youth.
Youths also consistently believe that government is more responsible for the environment than they are personally. Importantly, when they perceive that the government's role in solving environmental problems is declining, so does their belief that they, personally, must do their part to save the environment.
Conservation is a collective responsibility. Likewise, in the minds of youth, their own actions to preserve the environment are inextricably linked to their perception of the government's role in environmental conservation. Indeed, environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time. The highest levels of conservation occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, at the same time President Jimmy Carter was publicly petitioning citizens to take individual responsibility for conserving resources. The steepest decline in conservation occurred during the Reagan administration, which has been widely criticized for its environmental policies. Willingness to conserve enjoyed a slight surge around 1992-93, when Bill Clinton first took office, but this increase was short-lived. (Al Gore must not have been speaking up too loudly about the environment back then.)
The good news in these trends is that when government responds, so do youth. If our country's leaders follow the example of Al Gore and start to genuinely explore sustainable solutions, it's likely that young people will follow suit. Policymakers and elected officials might also want to note that when youths embrace conservation and pro-environmental attitudes, they are more likely to engage in conventional politics, from writing to officials to giving money to a political campaign, or working on a campaign. Gore argues that in America, "political will is a renewable resource." Perhaps one way to renew this resource is to start focusing more on young people and their understanding of, as well as contribution to, environmental problems.
Source
STILL NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY GREENIE
Nature cures itself -- but it might go "too far" -- the answer? Government control, of course!
Scientists used to worry that San Francisco Bay didn't have enough phytoplankton, the tiny plants at the base of the food web that support aquatic life like clams and fish and on up to the diving ducks and harbor seals. But new studies from the U.S. Geological Survey show that phytoplankton has increased 75 percent since the early 1990s. From San Pablo Bay to the southern tip of the estuary, levels of the microscopic plants are at their highest since monitoring began 30 years ago, transforming the bay into a richer estuary for wildlife.
The reasons behind the increase remain a mystery. Some experts suspect a decline in the phytoplankton-grazing nonnative clams, a reduction in toxic chemicals and sediment, and a shift in ocean currents.
Yet there is a possibility of too much of a good thing. Some scientists worry that if the trend continues for another 10 years, San Francisco Bay could face the kind of problems from decaying phytoplankton that killed fish in the Chesapeake Bay, the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. Dying plants suck oxygen out of the water as they decompose, robbing fish and other aquatic wildlife of oxygen.
"San Francisco Bay is a different place than it was 20 years ago,'' said Jim Cloern, a USGS aquatic ecologist in Menlo Park. "When we started studying the bay in the 1970s and 1980s, it had a low productivity of phytoplankton. In the last five years, the level has increased to what is comparable to the estuaries of North America and Europe,'' Cloern said. Cloern plans to present his findings today at the annual meeting of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Meanwhile, ongoing studies are attempting to find out why the phytoplankton is doing well in the marine parts of the estuary, but isn't growing as fast in the fresher Suisun Bay and the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Michael Connor, executive director of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, which runs a regional monitoring program for the bay, called phytoplankton growth one of the most important environmental issues for the bay in the next two decades. "That's why looking at trends and understanding the bay is so important," he said.
In 1980, USGS experts and other scientists estimated that the phytoplankton production in the bay was about 200,000 tons of organic carbon a year, equivalent to the biomass of 5,500 humpback whales or the calories to feed 1.8 million people. Since the 75 percent increase of phytoplankton between 1993 and 2004, the tonnage has grown to between 300,000 and 400,000 tons a year, scientists say.
Source
CALIFORNIA'S URINAL OBSESSIONS
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger soon will decide if he wants to save millions of gallons of water annually by using even lower-flush home and public toilets, and a new military favorite that's reminiscent of portable potties -- waterless, no-flush urinals in public buildings. Legislation, which involved an 11th-hour deal between labor and manufacturers to clear the way for non-water urinals, slipped around the public spotlight during lawmakers' end-of-session rush.
Even so, the measure praised as "making California a national leader" in yet another area, drew a few chuckles from lawmakers and bystanders who are already coping with low-flush toilets and were trying to imagine waterless urinals. A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said Wednesday: "The governor has not taken a position on the bill." He has until the end of the month to do so. AB2496 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, is aimed at further conserving water in California by reducing average toilet flushes in homes, schools, office buildings and other structures from 1.6 gallons to 1.3 gallons.
Under the bill, co-authored by Democratic Assembly members Loni Hancock of Berkeley and Gene Mullin of San Mateo, urinal flushes would have to be cut back from a gallon to a half-gallon. Various state regulatory agencies would phase-in the new rules for bathroom and restroom equipment installed beginning Jan. 1, 2009. California is now operating under flush standards adopted in 1992. "Upgrading flush-volume standards will save billions of gallons of water and make California a national leader in water conservation," Laird said.
Since toilets account for a third of indoor water use daily by Californians, the bill would save about 200 million gallons the first year alone -- enough to fill 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools. By the 10th year, savings would amount to more than 8 billion gallons annually. That's more than the total amount of bottled water Americans consumed last year.
Through 11th-hour amendments, the bill also "resolved a long-standing dispute between the California Pipe Trades Council and Falcon WaterFree Technologies, a manufacturer of waterless urinals," said Laird. The measure requires the state Building Standards Commission to ponder how to include the non-water urinals in the state's plumbing codes.
Falcon representatives say waterless urinals are better than the old flush models, where the combination of urine and water causes the smell of ammonia oxide. The Falcon fixture is nonporous so it "funnels virtually every drop of urine" down through a biodegradable liquid sealant layer in a cartridge and down the drain, the company says. The cartridge liquid is lighter than urine so it blocks smell. The military, in particular, has embraced the new technology. The Army Times reported last month that "waterless urinals are the wave of the future, and in the Defense Department, the Army is leading the way." The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, noting the Army's use of the urinals, has ordered the Defense Department to submit a report on how the military can more widely follow suit.
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
No pictures of GROWING glaciers or GROWING North American forests and suchlike? How odd?
Satellite photographs revealing how the landscape has been altered by human activity have been made available online by Google Earth. The pictures show the changes that have been wrought at 100 locations around the globe. All but one have been selected to show the damage caused to the landscape. One of the most striking series of images depicts how Santa Cruz in Bolivia has had its dense forests cut down to make way for urbanisation and agriculture.
Google has teamed up with the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) to allow the public access to the photographs. A spokesman said: “The intention is to show the damage being done to the environment and to increase public awareness. It’s usually difficult for the ordinary person in the street to get access to these images. We hope to bring them to a wider audience.”
Source
YOUNGIES REJECTING THE GREENIES
"An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie on global warming, is now the fourth-largest-grossing documentary of all time. But apparently it isn't young adults who are paying the price of the ticket -- or, more important, taking the truth about the environment to heart. In fact, the inconvenient truth today is that youths' willingness to conserve gas, heat and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.
According to data from Monitoring the Future, a federally funded national survey on trends in the attitudes, values and behavior of high school seniors since 1976, there has been a clear decline in conservation behavior among 18-year-olds over the past 27 years -- although we are not yet sure whether these attitudes follow youths into adulthood. This decline, interestingly, is coupled with a rise in materialistic values.
In fact, trends in materialism and conservation are highly related: At times when youths place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to say they would conserve resources. And when youths are more materially driven, they are also less likely to believe that natural resources will become scarce in the future. Since the 1990s, the trends in materialism seem to have topped out at a steady high level, while willingness to conserve keeps declining. These opposing values should raise a red flag about the consumer culture and its influence on youth.
Youths also consistently believe that government is more responsible for the environment than they are personally. Importantly, when they perceive that the government's role in solving environmental problems is declining, so does their belief that they, personally, must do their part to save the environment.
Conservation is a collective responsibility. Likewise, in the minds of youth, their own actions to preserve the environment are inextricably linked to their perception of the government's role in environmental conservation. Indeed, environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time. The highest levels of conservation occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, at the same time President Jimmy Carter was publicly petitioning citizens to take individual responsibility for conserving resources. The steepest decline in conservation occurred during the Reagan administration, which has been widely criticized for its environmental policies. Willingness to conserve enjoyed a slight surge around 1992-93, when Bill Clinton first took office, but this increase was short-lived. (Al Gore must not have been speaking up too loudly about the environment back then.)
The good news in these trends is that when government responds, so do youth. If our country's leaders follow the example of Al Gore and start to genuinely explore sustainable solutions, it's likely that young people will follow suit. Policymakers and elected officials might also want to note that when youths embrace conservation and pro-environmental attitudes, they are more likely to engage in conventional politics, from writing to officials to giving money to a political campaign, or working on a campaign. Gore argues that in America, "political will is a renewable resource." Perhaps one way to renew this resource is to start focusing more on young people and their understanding of, as well as contribution to, environmental problems.
Source
STILL NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY GREENIE
Nature cures itself -- but it might go "too far" -- the answer? Government control, of course!
Scientists used to worry that San Francisco Bay didn't have enough phytoplankton, the tiny plants at the base of the food web that support aquatic life like clams and fish and on up to the diving ducks and harbor seals. But new studies from the U.S. Geological Survey show that phytoplankton has increased 75 percent since the early 1990s. From San Pablo Bay to the southern tip of the estuary, levels of the microscopic plants are at their highest since monitoring began 30 years ago, transforming the bay into a richer estuary for wildlife.
The reasons behind the increase remain a mystery. Some experts suspect a decline in the phytoplankton-grazing nonnative clams, a reduction in toxic chemicals and sediment, and a shift in ocean currents.
Yet there is a possibility of too much of a good thing. Some scientists worry that if the trend continues for another 10 years, San Francisco Bay could face the kind of problems from decaying phytoplankton that killed fish in the Chesapeake Bay, the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. Dying plants suck oxygen out of the water as they decompose, robbing fish and other aquatic wildlife of oxygen.
"San Francisco Bay is a different place than it was 20 years ago,'' said Jim Cloern, a USGS aquatic ecologist in Menlo Park. "When we started studying the bay in the 1970s and 1980s, it had a low productivity of phytoplankton. In the last five years, the level has increased to what is comparable to the estuaries of North America and Europe,'' Cloern said. Cloern plans to present his findings today at the annual meeting of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Meanwhile, ongoing studies are attempting to find out why the phytoplankton is doing well in the marine parts of the estuary, but isn't growing as fast in the fresher Suisun Bay and the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Michael Connor, executive director of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, which runs a regional monitoring program for the bay, called phytoplankton growth one of the most important environmental issues for the bay in the next two decades. "That's why looking at trends and understanding the bay is so important," he said.
In 1980, USGS experts and other scientists estimated that the phytoplankton production in the bay was about 200,000 tons of organic carbon a year, equivalent to the biomass of 5,500 humpback whales or the calories to feed 1.8 million people. Since the 75 percent increase of phytoplankton between 1993 and 2004, the tonnage has grown to between 300,000 and 400,000 tons a year, scientists say.
Source
CALIFORNIA'S URINAL OBSESSIONS
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger soon will decide if he wants to save millions of gallons of water annually by using even lower-flush home and public toilets, and a new military favorite that's reminiscent of portable potties -- waterless, no-flush urinals in public buildings. Legislation, which involved an 11th-hour deal between labor and manufacturers to clear the way for non-water urinals, slipped around the public spotlight during lawmakers' end-of-session rush.
Even so, the measure praised as "making California a national leader" in yet another area, drew a few chuckles from lawmakers and bystanders who are already coping with low-flush toilets and were trying to imagine waterless urinals. A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said Wednesday: "The governor has not taken a position on the bill." He has until the end of the month to do so. AB2496 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, is aimed at further conserving water in California by reducing average toilet flushes in homes, schools, office buildings and other structures from 1.6 gallons to 1.3 gallons.
Under the bill, co-authored by Democratic Assembly members Loni Hancock of Berkeley and Gene Mullin of San Mateo, urinal flushes would have to be cut back from a gallon to a half-gallon. Various state regulatory agencies would phase-in the new rules for bathroom and restroom equipment installed beginning Jan. 1, 2009. California is now operating under flush standards adopted in 1992. "Upgrading flush-volume standards will save billions of gallons of water and make California a national leader in water conservation," Laird said.
Since toilets account for a third of indoor water use daily by Californians, the bill would save about 200 million gallons the first year alone -- enough to fill 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools. By the 10th year, savings would amount to more than 8 billion gallons annually. That's more than the total amount of bottled water Americans consumed last year.
Through 11th-hour amendments, the bill also "resolved a long-standing dispute between the California Pipe Trades Council and Falcon WaterFree Technologies, a manufacturer of waterless urinals," said Laird. The measure requires the state Building Standards Commission to ponder how to include the non-water urinals in the state's plumbing codes.
Falcon representatives say waterless urinals are better than the old flush models, where the combination of urine and water causes the smell of ammonia oxide. The Falcon fixture is nonporous so it "funnels virtually every drop of urine" down through a biodegradable liquid sealant layer in a cartridge and down the drain, the company says. The cartridge liquid is lighter than urine so it blocks smell. The military, in particular, has embraced the new technology. The Army Times reported last month that "waterless urinals are the wave of the future, and in the Defense Department, the Army is leading the way." The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, noting the Army's use of the urinals, has ordered the Defense Department to submit a report on how the military can more widely follow suit.
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Friday, September 15, 2006
THE CLIMATE CHANGE LEARNING CURVE
BY: Andrew J. Leach, HEC Montreal, Canada
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to confront economic models of climate change with the reality that limited information exists with which to form expectations about the evolution of the climate. A key element in the tension between those who believe we should impose aggressive climate change mitigation policies and those who do not is the question of if we are merely in a long period of shock-induced, above average temperatures or if observed increases in temperature are a result of carbon emissions. This paper characterizes learning dynamics resulting from the use of observations of temperature to update beliefs about two key characteristics of global climate: the persistence of natural trends and the sensitivity of temperature to atmospheric carbon levels. This paper shows that, contrary to predictions in the literature that uncertainty may be resolved very quickly, the time to learn the true processes may be in the order of thousands of years. Further, this paper shows the effects of uncertainty on the likelihood that observations from the statistical record lead to important estimate and policy errors.
1. Introduction
A large and growing literature in economics addresses the challenge of developing optimal climate change policy in the face of uncertainty and expected future learning. Both the persistence of temperature changes (whether natural or anthropogenic) and the degree to which greenhouse gas (GHG) accumulation causes temperature change will be important for policy formation. In this paper, a model is developed which captures the need to use a limited amount of information to form expectations about a complex system in order to set climate policy. While there exist reasonable data describing the recent evolution of both temperature and atmospheric GHG accumulation, separately identifying the sources of temperature change as natural or anthropogenic solely based on the statistical record leads to significant uncertainty surrounding the relative magnitudes of these effects. If we assume knowledge of the natural process which governs temperature evolutions, then the process of identifying the effect of carbon is made to appear much less complex. This paper describes the nature of the uncertainty that exists over the mechanism of climate change through an empirical exercise, and then characterizes the dynamics which are likely to arise as this uncertainty is resolved using a reduced form, learning experiment. Finally, learning and uncertainty are imposed in an optimal policy model to characterize how uncertainty is likely to affect policy choices and vice versa.
The benchmark contributions to climate change economics are Manne and Richels (1992), Manne et al. (1995), Nordhaus (1994), and Nordhaus and Boyer (2000). Each of these contain extensive reference to uncertainty, but generally treat uncertainty only through sensitivity analysis, reporting results for various parameter vectors. Pizer (1999) introduces a model where the regulator specifically accounts for parameter uncertainty in the social planning decision. Related papers on active learning to resolve uncertainty about the value of parameters governing climate change and the damages it may cause include Kolstad, 1994, Kolstad, 1996 and Kolstad, 1997, Ulph and Ulph (1997), Kelly et al. (2005), Kelly and Kolstad (1999), and Karp and Zhang (2006).
Kelly and Kolstad (1999) is closely related to the exercise undertaken here. This paper proposes a model in which a social planner uses information from temperature realizations to update prior beliefs about the temperature response to atmospheric GHG levels. The planner chooses the optimal level of savings and emissions control conditional on current knowledge of the mechanism of climate change at each point in time, updates these beliefs, and thus adjusts their actions, conditional on observations of climate data. Learning is Bayesian, and so the planner is using information in an optimal manner. A key result shown with the model is that the expected learning time (the time after which parametric uncertainty is essentially removed from the planner's problem) is 90-160 years. The results also show that there is a tradeoff between the benefits of controlling emissions and information....
[...]
7. Conclusion
This paper uses both a reduced-form, numerical experiment and a dynamic, optimal policy model to explore the effects of learning and uncertainty on the ability to set effective climate change mitigation policies. In particular, the analysis highlights the fact that it is difficult to determine the benefits of emissions control when the relative importance of natural trends and anthropogenic influences on temperature changes are unknown.
This paper extends earlier results from Kelly and Kolstad (1999) to show that when uncertainty exists over two potential causes of observed climate changes, the time to learn the true parameter values of the climate model may be on the order of hundreds if not thousands of years. Perhaps more importantly, it is shown that the probability that a particular learning path yields very poor estimates of the severity of climate change is greatly affected by the nature of initial uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be expected to be much more persistent where more parameter values are unknown. In part, the results suggest that some trade-off must be made between investments in regulation under uncertainty and investments in accelerating the arrival of new information. Further, the results emphasize the fact that temperature data represent only a single draw from a complicated system about which we have limited knowledge. In such an environment, allowing this single set of observations to over-influence our policy choices may lead to significant errors.
The results presented here are limited by computational complexity. Uncertainty clearly exists over values which are as important for the determination of effective climate policies as those explored in this paper: the extent of damages, the cost of reducing emissions, and future technological progress are but three important examples. Furthermore, even greater uncertainty may exist over the regional distribution of the effects of climate change and potential thresholds and irreversibility in the climate system, which are also not treated in this paper.
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Article in Press
THE MISSING ELEMENTS IN THE "SCIENCE" OF GLOBAL WARMING
Ignoring global warming isn't a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity
The typical mainstream attitude toward global warming is preoccupied with only two overriding questions: Is the earth's surface temperature rising? If so, is human activity the principal cause? Once these questions are answered scientifically - and they are indeed questions for science - elite opinion considers the debate closed. The fundamental issue is settled. Science, answering "yes" to both questions, has spoken. Global warming is a problem that we must address.
Still open to debate are subsidiary issues such as the role of command-and-control regulations versus market-based approaches like tradable emissions permits. But the Big Issue - humans' harmful effect on the climate and our consequent need to correct the problem - is settled.
Being neither an atmospheric scientist nor a former U.S. vice-president, I haven't the expertise to judge whether or not global warming is a reality or the extent to which humans cause it. Experts who I trust, however, persuade me that science does indeed show that global temperatures are rising and that industrial activity is at least part of the reason. I'm prepared to believe even the possibility that global warming will eventually kill millions of people.
But I nevertheless insist that science does not unambiguously endorse action against global warming. Put differently - and contrary to today's elite opinion - ignoring global warming is not necessarily a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity.
First, human preferences might counsel against tackling global warming. If global warming's ill-effects won't occur for, say, another 150 years, nothing objective says that people today should sacrifice for that distant tomorrow. Such sacrifice might be demanded by ethics - or by human preferences themselves - but not by science.
Second, and more interestingly, sound skepticism of government action to prevent global warming is itself based on science. Public Choice economics offers objective theory and evidence that political institutions are so prone to malfunctioning that entrusting them with great powers courts great trouble.
Posing the greatest danger is command-and-control regulation, for not only does it aim to achieve goals defined by politicians, it dictates in detail the means to be used by private firms and persons in pursuit of these goals. Such centralized, politicized, and bureaucratized intervention has only weak feedback loops. (For example, how to tell if the mandated method of emissions reduction is better than alternative and now-prohibited methods?) And unsurprisingly, such heavy-handed regulation is especially prone to be hijacked by special-interest groups. When eastern coal producers successfully lobbied for the 1977 Clean Air Act amendment that mandated scrubbers for all coal-burning factory furnaces, the intent (and effect!) had nothing to do with cleaning the air and everything to do with undermining the market for naturally cleaner low-sulfur coal from the west and with creating a market for scrubbers produced by corporations such as Westinghouse.
Even market-based environmental regulation, however, is risky. Tradable emissions permits do give firms flexibility when deciding how much factory output to produce and by what methods, but the overall level of desired emissions is still set politically. This is not because politicians are not scientists, but because the question of what ultimately constitutes an optimal emission level is not a scientific one alone. Neither scientists nor any one else really knows what trade-off individuals are willing to accept in constraining their preferred actions and choices now for the sake of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the future. Furthermore, this trade-off will vary from society to society, country to country, company to company, individual to individual. For instance, a poor mother in a Third World country trying to feed her family will have fewer qualms about using cheap, polluting fuels to cook for her children now than the wealthy and environmentally conscious individuals in her own country - not to mention prosperous First World countries -- who can forego some immediate material needs for the sake of the psychic benefit of leaving a stable climate to their great-great-grandchildren. Even elected officials with unalloyed devotion to the public good don't have enough information about the particular circumstances and needs of individuals to know where to set emission levels so as to optimize their costs and benefits. Indeed, the 1990 baseline in the Kyoto Treaty was picked not for scientific reasons but political ones.
Nor will it do to argue that democratic voting offers reliable (or even reliable-enough) feedback to elected officials to set optimal limits, as is generally claimed. Geoff Brennan's, Loren Lomasky's, and Bryan Caplan's recent contributions to the theory of "expressive voting," along with Kenneth Arrow's earlier research on the arbitrariness of majoritarian outcomes, provide solid scientific reasons to doubt both the meaningfulness of preferences expressed in voting booths and the legitimacy of electoral outcomes as reflections of these expressed preferences. Not only, as Arrow proved, are the results of majoritarian voting unavoidably sensitive to the specific rules governing elections, but - as Brennan, Lomasky, and Caplan argue - the fact that each voter bears little personal consequence of casting a ballot one way or another means that each voter, effectively, gets to vote for free. A voter gets to express in the voting booth his or her policy preferences without being constrained to reckon seriously the consequences of how he or she votes.
But if democratic decision-making doesn't offer a cure for the real possibility of negative externalities - that the gain pursued by rational individuals might generate an overall outcome in which everyone is worse off than if each person been constrained to follow an available different course of action - what should be done about the kinds of activities that contribute to global warming?
It is hard to admit, but unless solutions are realistically available that do not themselves pose serious risks of unleashing other problems worse than the one sought to be solved, the externality is best left alone. Public Choice reveals the risks of seeking such solutions from government. More general economics reveals yet other risks: stifling, if not killing, the goose laying our golden eggs, namely industrial capitalism.
Political manipulation to encourage investments in the most environmentally correct - as opposed to profitable - energy technologies, for instance, would simply mean less overall investment in the energy sector. Worker productivity in this sector would fall over the long run, as would overall output. Living standards would decline. Indeed, if investors ever come to believe that Al Gore's demand to "drastically change our civilization and our way of thinking" would become a reality, they would surely liquidate much of their stakes in the economy. The resulting destruction of capitalism's capital will throw us all into the dark ages.
We mustn't forget that industrial capitalism is history's greatest life-saver. Over the past two centuries it has more than doubled life-expectancies and made our bodies cleaner, taller, stronger, better clothed, and more disease-resistant. Capitalism has also made available to us rich experiences and knowledge - including most of science itself - that were simply out of reach before the industrial age. Any heavy-handed assault on capitalism might well impair this magnificent institution and lead to human suffering worse than will be wreaked under worst-case global-warming scenarios. As economists J.R. Clark and Dwight Lee argue, "government regulations that undermine both information flows and adjustments of the market process in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases, even if successful, run the serious risk of increasing the long-run damage of any global warming that does occur."
Indeed, until the science of economics, especially that of Public Choice, is brought more fully into the discussion, the science of global warming will remain perilously incomplete.
Source
ASIA SPURNS EUROPEAN PLEA FOR TIGHTER CURBS ON GREENHOSE GASES
Asian leaders rebuffed European pleas for tighter curbs on greenhouse gases, refusing to shackle their fast-growing economies to future limits on energy use. At a summit in Helsinki today, the heads of Asia's main developing economies balked at the European push for new binding targets for air pollution cuts once the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012. South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun instead called for new technologies to fight global warming, telling a news conference that ``we hope we will be able to contribute to reduced greenhouse gases.''
Developing countries in Asia are counting on rapid economic growth to lift millions of people out of poverty, making it politically difficult to impose a clampdown on energy use. Asia's emerging economies didn't sign up to the original Kyoto targets, which obliged industrial countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. China's economy, now the world's fourth largest, is likely to grow 10.4 percent this year, dwarfing Europe's 2.3 percent, the Asian Development Bank said last week.
French President Jacques Chirac pressed for Asia to accept emissions targets as part of ``our collective efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.'' He said it was unfortunate that EU and Asian environment ministers haven't met since 2003. Two Europeans who spoke in the opening session -- European Commission President Jose Barroso and Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen -- put climate change at the heart of their concerns. ``Climate change is happening and our future is in the balance,'' Barroso said. ``Borders are meaningless and we must develop a concerted response.''
The two Asian speakers -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung -- left global warming off their list of priorities, focusing on industrial development, trade, fighting terrorism and disease. ``One dividing issue is the role of developing countries and developing markets and how big of a burden they should take on scaling down unhealthy output,'' said Markus Lyra, a Finnish Foreign Ministry deputy.
The meeting ended with a broadly sketched pledge to fight climate change ``based on common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,'' with no mention of numerical goals.
Source
Desalination advance
It's long been an Australian dream: turning the country's unforgiving deserts into lush tracts of green, capable of sustaining communities and crops. However, proposals ranging from diverting rivers into the dry interior, to building canals, to blasting a giant lake in central Australia have never proved feasible. But advances in nanotechnology - engineering materials on a microscopic scale - could finally make creating an enormous oasis in the desert a reality.
South Australian researchers believe a filter they are developing will be able to produce fresh drinking water from salt water with minimal power input and cost. A team working out of Flinders University say the individual components of the system are already in existence and hope to produce a workable filtering device within three years.
The cheap fresh water could be used to irrigate arid areas close to the sea or, if economically feasible, piped inland. ``It could be used in areas like the Great Australian Bight or the mid-west coast of Western Australia where the desert impinges right up to the coast,'' said researcher Professor Jani Matisons.
Nanotechnology involves working with matter on an ultra-small scale. A nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre. A human hair is around 80,000 nanometres in width. Traditionally desalination has involved a process called reverse osmosis. Salty water is pumped up against a membrane through which water molecules can pass but the constituents of salt cannot. Under high pressure some of the water passes through the membrane, leaving the salt on the other side. The water that does not pass through the membrane becomes briney due to the increased salt content and is discarded. Because of the amount of power involved in pushing the water through the membrane, the process is often regarded as too costly for large scale desalination. The Flinder team will test two types of nanotechnology to see if they can reduce the amount of pressure needed for reverse osmosis and therefore reduce the cost. One involves shaping a matrix of minute carbon nano-tubes into a membrane while the other would see chemical nanotube molecules used as a filtering mechanism. While the team declined to reveal the exact process, their system is expected to create a more porous membrane that would allow water to pass through under far less pressure. Nano engineering will be used to create structures which traps salt molecules and prevent them passing through.
Matisons said it was expected the proposed process would cut the power required for desalination by more than half, greatly reducing costs. Fresh water removed from seawater could be used to irrigate arid areas adjacent to the coast. If transportation costs were low enough, the water could theoretically be piped further inland, helping to green Australia's dry interior.
Source
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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
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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BY: Andrew J. Leach, HEC Montreal, Canada
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to confront economic models of climate change with the reality that limited information exists with which to form expectations about the evolution of the climate. A key element in the tension between those who believe we should impose aggressive climate change mitigation policies and those who do not is the question of if we are merely in a long period of shock-induced, above average temperatures or if observed increases in temperature are a result of carbon emissions. This paper characterizes learning dynamics resulting from the use of observations of temperature to update beliefs about two key characteristics of global climate: the persistence of natural trends and the sensitivity of temperature to atmospheric carbon levels. This paper shows that, contrary to predictions in the literature that uncertainty may be resolved very quickly, the time to learn the true processes may be in the order of thousands of years. Further, this paper shows the effects of uncertainty on the likelihood that observations from the statistical record lead to important estimate and policy errors.
1. Introduction
A large and growing literature in economics addresses the challenge of developing optimal climate change policy in the face of uncertainty and expected future learning. Both the persistence of temperature changes (whether natural or anthropogenic) and the degree to which greenhouse gas (GHG) accumulation causes temperature change will be important for policy formation. In this paper, a model is developed which captures the need to use a limited amount of information to form expectations about a complex system in order to set climate policy. While there exist reasonable data describing the recent evolution of both temperature and atmospheric GHG accumulation, separately identifying the sources of temperature change as natural or anthropogenic solely based on the statistical record leads to significant uncertainty surrounding the relative magnitudes of these effects. If we assume knowledge of the natural process which governs temperature evolutions, then the process of identifying the effect of carbon is made to appear much less complex. This paper describes the nature of the uncertainty that exists over the mechanism of climate change through an empirical exercise, and then characterizes the dynamics which are likely to arise as this uncertainty is resolved using a reduced form, learning experiment. Finally, learning and uncertainty are imposed in an optimal policy model to characterize how uncertainty is likely to affect policy choices and vice versa.
The benchmark contributions to climate change economics are Manne and Richels (1992), Manne et al. (1995), Nordhaus (1994), and Nordhaus and Boyer (2000). Each of these contain extensive reference to uncertainty, but generally treat uncertainty only through sensitivity analysis, reporting results for various parameter vectors. Pizer (1999) introduces a model where the regulator specifically accounts for parameter uncertainty in the social planning decision. Related papers on active learning to resolve uncertainty about the value of parameters governing climate change and the damages it may cause include Kolstad, 1994, Kolstad, 1996 and Kolstad, 1997, Ulph and Ulph (1997), Kelly et al. (2005), Kelly and Kolstad (1999), and Karp and Zhang (2006).
Kelly and Kolstad (1999) is closely related to the exercise undertaken here. This paper proposes a model in which a social planner uses information from temperature realizations to update prior beliefs about the temperature response to atmospheric GHG levels. The planner chooses the optimal level of savings and emissions control conditional on current knowledge of the mechanism of climate change at each point in time, updates these beliefs, and thus adjusts their actions, conditional on observations of climate data. Learning is Bayesian, and so the planner is using information in an optimal manner. A key result shown with the model is that the expected learning time (the time after which parametric uncertainty is essentially removed from the planner's problem) is 90-160 years. The results also show that there is a tradeoff between the benefits of controlling emissions and information....
[...]
7. Conclusion
This paper uses both a reduced-form, numerical experiment and a dynamic, optimal policy model to explore the effects of learning and uncertainty on the ability to set effective climate change mitigation policies. In particular, the analysis highlights the fact that it is difficult to determine the benefits of emissions control when the relative importance of natural trends and anthropogenic influences on temperature changes are unknown.
This paper extends earlier results from Kelly and Kolstad (1999) to show that when uncertainty exists over two potential causes of observed climate changes, the time to learn the true parameter values of the climate model may be on the order of hundreds if not thousands of years. Perhaps more importantly, it is shown that the probability that a particular learning path yields very poor estimates of the severity of climate change is greatly affected by the nature of initial uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be expected to be much more persistent where more parameter values are unknown. In part, the results suggest that some trade-off must be made between investments in regulation under uncertainty and investments in accelerating the arrival of new information. Further, the results emphasize the fact that temperature data represent only a single draw from a complicated system about which we have limited knowledge. In such an environment, allowing this single set of observations to over-influence our policy choices may lead to significant errors.
The results presented here are limited by computational complexity. Uncertainty clearly exists over values which are as important for the determination of effective climate policies as those explored in this paper: the extent of damages, the cost of reducing emissions, and future technological progress are but three important examples. Furthermore, even greater uncertainty may exist over the regional distribution of the effects of climate change and potential thresholds and irreversibility in the climate system, which are also not treated in this paper.
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Article in Press
THE MISSING ELEMENTS IN THE "SCIENCE" OF GLOBAL WARMING
Ignoring global warming isn't a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity
The typical mainstream attitude toward global warming is preoccupied with only two overriding questions: Is the earth's surface temperature rising? If so, is human activity the principal cause? Once these questions are answered scientifically - and they are indeed questions for science - elite opinion considers the debate closed. The fundamental issue is settled. Science, answering "yes" to both questions, has spoken. Global warming is a problem that we must address.
Still open to debate are subsidiary issues such as the role of command-and-control regulations versus market-based approaches like tradable emissions permits. But the Big Issue - humans' harmful effect on the climate and our consequent need to correct the problem - is settled.
Being neither an atmospheric scientist nor a former U.S. vice-president, I haven't the expertise to judge whether or not global warming is a reality or the extent to which humans cause it. Experts who I trust, however, persuade me that science does indeed show that global temperatures are rising and that industrial activity is at least part of the reason. I'm prepared to believe even the possibility that global warming will eventually kill millions of people.
But I nevertheless insist that science does not unambiguously endorse action against global warming. Put differently - and contrary to today's elite opinion - ignoring global warming is not necessarily a sign of scientific illiteracy or of ideologically induced stupidity.
First, human preferences might counsel against tackling global warming. If global warming's ill-effects won't occur for, say, another 150 years, nothing objective says that people today should sacrifice for that distant tomorrow. Such sacrifice might be demanded by ethics - or by human preferences themselves - but not by science.
Second, and more interestingly, sound skepticism of government action to prevent global warming is itself based on science. Public Choice economics offers objective theory and evidence that political institutions are so prone to malfunctioning that entrusting them with great powers courts great trouble.
Posing the greatest danger is command-and-control regulation, for not only does it aim to achieve goals defined by politicians, it dictates in detail the means to be used by private firms and persons in pursuit of these goals. Such centralized, politicized, and bureaucratized intervention has only weak feedback loops. (For example, how to tell if the mandated method of emissions reduction is better than alternative and now-prohibited methods?) And unsurprisingly, such heavy-handed regulation is especially prone to be hijacked by special-interest groups. When eastern coal producers successfully lobbied for the 1977 Clean Air Act amendment that mandated scrubbers for all coal-burning factory furnaces, the intent (and effect!) had nothing to do with cleaning the air and everything to do with undermining the market for naturally cleaner low-sulfur coal from the west and with creating a market for scrubbers produced by corporations such as Westinghouse.
Even market-based environmental regulation, however, is risky. Tradable emissions permits do give firms flexibility when deciding how much factory output to produce and by what methods, but the overall level of desired emissions is still set politically. This is not because politicians are not scientists, but because the question of what ultimately constitutes an optimal emission level is not a scientific one alone. Neither scientists nor any one else really knows what trade-off individuals are willing to accept in constraining their preferred actions and choices now for the sake of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the future. Furthermore, this trade-off will vary from society to society, country to country, company to company, individual to individual. For instance, a poor mother in a Third World country trying to feed her family will have fewer qualms about using cheap, polluting fuels to cook for her children now than the wealthy and environmentally conscious individuals in her own country - not to mention prosperous First World countries -- who can forego some immediate material needs for the sake of the psychic benefit of leaving a stable climate to their great-great-grandchildren. Even elected officials with unalloyed devotion to the public good don't have enough information about the particular circumstances and needs of individuals to know where to set emission levels so as to optimize their costs and benefits. Indeed, the 1990 baseline in the Kyoto Treaty was picked not for scientific reasons but political ones.
Nor will it do to argue that democratic voting offers reliable (or even reliable-enough) feedback to elected officials to set optimal limits, as is generally claimed. Geoff Brennan's, Loren Lomasky's, and Bryan Caplan's recent contributions to the theory of "expressive voting," along with Kenneth Arrow's earlier research on the arbitrariness of majoritarian outcomes, provide solid scientific reasons to doubt both the meaningfulness of preferences expressed in voting booths and the legitimacy of electoral outcomes as reflections of these expressed preferences. Not only, as Arrow proved, are the results of majoritarian voting unavoidably sensitive to the specific rules governing elections, but - as Brennan, Lomasky, and Caplan argue - the fact that each voter bears little personal consequence of casting a ballot one way or another means that each voter, effectively, gets to vote for free. A voter gets to express in the voting booth his or her policy preferences without being constrained to reckon seriously the consequences of how he or she votes.
But if democratic decision-making doesn't offer a cure for the real possibility of negative externalities - that the gain pursued by rational individuals might generate an overall outcome in which everyone is worse off than if each person been constrained to follow an available different course of action - what should be done about the kinds of activities that contribute to global warming?
It is hard to admit, but unless solutions are realistically available that do not themselves pose serious risks of unleashing other problems worse than the one sought to be solved, the externality is best left alone. Public Choice reveals the risks of seeking such solutions from government. More general economics reveals yet other risks: stifling, if not killing, the goose laying our golden eggs, namely industrial capitalism.
Political manipulation to encourage investments in the most environmentally correct - as opposed to profitable - energy technologies, for instance, would simply mean less overall investment in the energy sector. Worker productivity in this sector would fall over the long run, as would overall output. Living standards would decline. Indeed, if investors ever come to believe that Al Gore's demand to "drastically change our civilization and our way of thinking" would become a reality, they would surely liquidate much of their stakes in the economy. The resulting destruction of capitalism's capital will throw us all into the dark ages.
We mustn't forget that industrial capitalism is history's greatest life-saver. Over the past two centuries it has more than doubled life-expectancies and made our bodies cleaner, taller, stronger, better clothed, and more disease-resistant. Capitalism has also made available to us rich experiences and knowledge - including most of science itself - that were simply out of reach before the industrial age. Any heavy-handed assault on capitalism might well impair this magnificent institution and lead to human suffering worse than will be wreaked under worst-case global-warming scenarios. As economists J.R. Clark and Dwight Lee argue, "government regulations that undermine both information flows and adjustments of the market process in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases, even if successful, run the serious risk of increasing the long-run damage of any global warming that does occur."
Indeed, until the science of economics, especially that of Public Choice, is brought more fully into the discussion, the science of global warming will remain perilously incomplete.
Source
ASIA SPURNS EUROPEAN PLEA FOR TIGHTER CURBS ON GREENHOSE GASES
Asian leaders rebuffed European pleas for tighter curbs on greenhouse gases, refusing to shackle their fast-growing economies to future limits on energy use. At a summit in Helsinki today, the heads of Asia's main developing economies balked at the European push for new binding targets for air pollution cuts once the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012. South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun instead called for new technologies to fight global warming, telling a news conference that ``we hope we will be able to contribute to reduced greenhouse gases.''
Developing countries in Asia are counting on rapid economic growth to lift millions of people out of poverty, making it politically difficult to impose a clampdown on energy use. Asia's emerging economies didn't sign up to the original Kyoto targets, which obliged industrial countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. China's economy, now the world's fourth largest, is likely to grow 10.4 percent this year, dwarfing Europe's 2.3 percent, the Asian Development Bank said last week.
French President Jacques Chirac pressed for Asia to accept emissions targets as part of ``our collective efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.'' He said it was unfortunate that EU and Asian environment ministers haven't met since 2003. Two Europeans who spoke in the opening session -- European Commission President Jose Barroso and Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen -- put climate change at the heart of their concerns. ``Climate change is happening and our future is in the balance,'' Barroso said. ``Borders are meaningless and we must develop a concerted response.''
The two Asian speakers -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung -- left global warming off their list of priorities, focusing on industrial development, trade, fighting terrorism and disease. ``One dividing issue is the role of developing countries and developing markets and how big of a burden they should take on scaling down unhealthy output,'' said Markus Lyra, a Finnish Foreign Ministry deputy.
The meeting ended with a broadly sketched pledge to fight climate change ``based on common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,'' with no mention of numerical goals.
Source
Desalination advance
It's long been an Australian dream: turning the country's unforgiving deserts into lush tracts of green, capable of sustaining communities and crops. However, proposals ranging from diverting rivers into the dry interior, to building canals, to blasting a giant lake in central Australia have never proved feasible. But advances in nanotechnology - engineering materials on a microscopic scale - could finally make creating an enormous oasis in the desert a reality.
South Australian researchers believe a filter they are developing will be able to produce fresh drinking water from salt water with minimal power input and cost. A team working out of Flinders University say the individual components of the system are already in existence and hope to produce a workable filtering device within three years.
The cheap fresh water could be used to irrigate arid areas close to the sea or, if economically feasible, piped inland. ``It could be used in areas like the Great Australian Bight or the mid-west coast of Western Australia where the desert impinges right up to the coast,'' said researcher Professor Jani Matisons.
Nanotechnology involves working with matter on an ultra-small scale. A nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre. A human hair is around 80,000 nanometres in width. Traditionally desalination has involved a process called reverse osmosis. Salty water is pumped up against a membrane through which water molecules can pass but the constituents of salt cannot. Under high pressure some of the water passes through the membrane, leaving the salt on the other side. The water that does not pass through the membrane becomes briney due to the increased salt content and is discarded. Because of the amount of power involved in pushing the water through the membrane, the process is often regarded as too costly for large scale desalination. The Flinder team will test two types of nanotechnology to see if they can reduce the amount of pressure needed for reverse osmosis and therefore reduce the cost. One involves shaping a matrix of minute carbon nano-tubes into a membrane while the other would see chemical nanotube molecules used as a filtering mechanism. While the team declined to reveal the exact process, their system is expected to create a more porous membrane that would allow water to pass through under far less pressure. Nano engineering will be used to create structures which traps salt molecules and prevent them passing through.
Matisons said it was expected the proposed process would cut the power required for desalination by more than half, greatly reducing costs. Fresh water removed from seawater could be used to irrigate arid areas adjacent to the coast. If transportation costs were low enough, the water could theoretically be piped further inland, helping to green Australia's dry interior.
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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
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Jim Hansen and his twin
