British class hate underlies many "environmental" causes
I wonder would British snobs be able to relate to the triumphant working-class culture here. They would be pathetic human beings to sneer at it but I suspect that they would sneer. Just the compere's hat would be deeply offensive to them. I suspect that a lot of American environmentalism is snobbish too. The Hollywood version does come to mind
This column is ... about the hate that dare not speak its name: class hatred. It is about hate-by-proxy: the distaste (I share it) for Dianamania, the dislike of supermarkets, the hatred (I'm not immune to it) of redtops [popular newspapers], the shudder (mine, sometimes) at low-cost airlines . . . all these allergens in the very air the top half of society must breathe have something in common. They remind us of the mob. I submit that, however weak or strong the justifications we may offer for our disapproval of a variety of features of what might be called mass culture, these various antipathies are inflamed by a single, secret anxiety, as old as the French Revolution, which in modern democracy we find it hard to acknowledge: fear of the common people.
Let's start with supermarkets: a touchy subject in modern Britain. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. "Supermarkets -- love 'em or loathe 'em" ran the intro to Jon Manel's series of discussions on the BBC Today programme, running all week. You'd have thought we were encountering one of the great questions of our time, the kind of debate that pits village against village and tears families apart: slavery, the Irish Question, Suez, Iraq, and Tesco.
Which is odd, because the series featured a specially commissioned poll whose most notable finding was that 79 per cent of respondents liked supermarkets. Among a curmudgeonly public it doesn't get much better than this: chocolate-covered cream puffs, Mother Teresa or a beach holiday in the Caribbean would be unlikely to outperform the British supermarket industry's 79 per cent approval-rating. So why, like a recurring theme through public debate in recent decades, does "down with supermarkets" keep elbowing its way into commentary and news? If I hadn't guessed already, a packed public meeting in Andover (where the radio programme took us) protesting against a proposed Tesco warehouse development, gave the game away to any listener with an ear for English accents.
People at the Andover meeting sounded posh. We heard none speaking with anything other than Received Pronunciation. Odd, for I know Andover; my nana lived there, and she had nothing against Tesco. But she was called Nana, not Gran, and that should alert you to something about the majority not present. Nana wasn't, and they aren't, posh. I have checked my hunch with locals and it was right: the driving force behind opposition to this development comes from the better-off: from the villages around the town; not from the estates and housing developments in the town itself.
Dislike of supermarkets is an overwhelmingly middle-to-upper-middle-class phenomenon. All classes use supermarkets, but it is the top half of society that voices (and genuinely feels) a distaste for them. Why? The same question may be asked about the wave of revulsion (I share it) that swept the middle-to-upper echelons of society after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when images of public grief and crowd sentimentality dominated the news. Little had changed yesterday, ten years on. The accents among the crowds were rough. Those voicing distaste for Dianamania were well spoken. This was a well-born woman but the common people loved her and mourned her loss, and the Establishment dislikes both their love and their grief. Why?
And do you remember the arrival in Britain of satellite television? At first its big selling point was sport - football and boxing - plus American cartoons like The Simpsons; and its initial market penetration was stronger on council estates than country estates. With it came satellite dishes: inoffensive objects, a good deal more tasteful and less prominent than the ugly metal TV aerials already on almost every roof. Yet there were endless complaints and letters to broadsheet newspapers, and in some places the dishes were for a while banned as aesthetically unacceptable. Why?
Today we have low-cost airlines like Ryanair and easyJet. With them has come cheap-flight-phobia. My observation as a frequent Ryanair flier is that the better-off use these flights more or less in proportion to our comparative numbers, and a flight to Perpignan or Girona is typically a fair cross-section of British society. It is also, typically, full, with minimum leg-room and restricted luggage, and therefore (in pints of fuel per pound of flesh) the second-most-environmentally friendly form of flight (after hang-gliding) known to man. This has not prevented an often scathing campaign against the whole idea of cheap flights. Among voices raised in this cause I have yet to hear a working-class accent.
Luton is a more efficient and less bothersome airport than Heathrow, yet people I know affect disdain at the idea of flying from there. Why? You have only to remind yourself of the horror expressed by the educated in the 19th century at the advent of railways (Wordsworth shudders at the idea that any fool in Bakewell could be in Buxton in half an hour, and vice versa) to understand their modern counterparts' excess of eco-sensitivity in the face of cheap flying.
You have only to read the 18th-century coffee shop derision at the mass hysteria of the grieving London mob at the hanging of the Rev Dr Dodd to understand modern Highgate's horror of Dianamania. To understand today's snootiness about Tesco, recall the early 20th century's snootiness about the very idea of cooperative stores. Popular newssheets have appalled the well-bred since popular newssheets began. The Hillsborough tragedy brought mountains of wreaths nearly a decade before Diana.
Diana's death did not change Britain. It reminded the modern Establishment of its deep insecurity in the face of the English mob: an object of fear, wonder and distaste since long before Spanish travellers returned to the imperial court in Madrid with horror stories of rough and volatile crowds who shouted in public and kissed and embraced each other in front of strangers. Ever since the French Revolution the top half of English society has glanced nervously at the crowd outside the window and muttered "could it happen here?".
We don't really trust democracy. We don't really like our countrymen. We no longer dare say so, not directly. So we sneer at their shops, shudder at their newspapers, disapprove of their means of mobility, find their joys tasteless and recoil even from their grief.
Mock tacky TV soap-opera all you like - and then tune in to The Archers; joke about shell suits [jogging gear] then fork out for silk; bemoan the greenhouse gas emissions of a cheap flight then emit four times as much flying business class. But don't pretend this is about quality or worth, the environment, taste or even beauty. It's partly about class. It always has been. It still is.
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Global Warming, the Great Lifesaver
Bjorn Lomborg says balmier weather could ward off millions of deaths. Yes, Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial Danish economist, believes that "global warming is real and man-made." But he is convinced that we are not thinking the problem through correctly and are, in fact, lost in a kind of green fog about how best to deal with global warming and other major environmental threats. In this excerpt from his new book, "Cool It", Lomborg illustrates how a major climate-related killer goes underreported, while human deaths from heat waves make front-page news.
The heat wave in Europe in early August 2003 was a catastrophe of heartbreaking proportions. With more than 3,500 dead in Paris alone, France suffered nearly 15,000 fatalities from the heat wave. Another 7,000 died in Germany, 8,000 in Spain and Italy, and 2,000 in the United Kingdom: The total death toll ran to more than 35,000. Understandably, this event has become a psychologically powerful metaphor for the frightening vision of a warmer future and our immediate need to prevent it.
The green group Earth Policy Institute, which first totaled the deaths, tells us that as "awareness of the scale of this tragedy spreads, it is likely to generate pressure to reduce carbon emissions. For many of the millions who suffered through these record heat waves and the relatives of the tens of thousands who died, cutting carbon emissions is becoming a pressing personal issue."
While 35,000 dead is a terrifyingly large number, all deaths should in principle be treated with equal concern. Yet this is not happening. When 2,000 people died from heat in the United Kingdom, it produced a public outcry that is still heard. However, the BBC recently ran a very quiet story telling us that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales for the past years have hovered around 25,000 each winter, casually adding that the winters of 1998-2000 saw about 47,000 cold deaths each year. The story then goes on to discuss how the government should make the cost of winter fuel economically bearable and how the majority of deaths are caused by strokes and heart attacks.
It is remarkable that a single heat-death episode of 35,000 from many countries can get everyone up in arms, whereas cold deaths of 25,000 to 50,000 a year in just a single country pass almost unnoticed. Of course, we want to help avoid another 2,000 dying from heat in the United Kingdom. But presumably we also want to avoid many more dying from cold.
For Europe as a whole, about 200,000 people die from excess heat each year. However, about 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold. That is more than seven times the total number of heat deaths. Just in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold, more than 400 times the iconic heat deaths from 2003. That we so easily neglect these deaths and so easily embrace those caused by global warming tells us of a breakdown in our sense of proportion.
How will heat and cold deaths change over the coming century with global warming? Let us for the moment assume-very unrealistically-that we will not adapt at all to the future heat. Still, the biggest cross-European cold/heat study concludes that for an increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the average European temperatures, "our data suggest that any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short-term declines in cold-related mortalities." For Britain, it is estimated a 3.6øF increase will mean 2,000 more heat deaths but 20,000 fewer cold deaths. Likewise, another paper incorporating all studies on this issue and applying them to a broad variety of settings in both developed and developing countries found that "global warming may cause a decrease in mortality rates, especially of cardiovascular diseases."
But of course, it seems very unrealistic and conservative to assume that we will not adapt to rising temperatures throughout the 21st century. Several recent studies have looked at adaptation in up to 28 of the biggest cities in the United States. Take Philadelphia. The optimal temperature seems to be about 80øF. In the 1960s, on days when it got significantly hotter than that (about 100øF), the death rate increased sharply. Likewise, when the temperature dropped below freezing, deaths increased sharply.
Yet something great happened in the decades following. Death rates in Philadelphia and around the country dropped in general because of better health care. But crucially, temperatures of 100øF today cause almost no excess deaths. However, people still die more because of cold weather. One of the main reasons for the lower heat susceptibility is most likely increased access to air-conditioning. Studies seem to indicate that over time and with sufficient resources, we actually learn to adapt to higher temperatures. Consequently we will experience fewer heat deaths even when temperatures rise.
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More pesky climate variability from natural causes: India's monsoons more variable than thought
India's monsoon is much more variable than previously thought, a new study by an Indian origin geologist has revealed. To study changes over long periods of time, Ashish Sinha of California State University in Carson, and his colleagues studied a section of stalagmite from a cave in eastern India.
First they dated its layers by looking at thorium and uranium isotopes, and then looked at levels of the oxygen-18 isotope in these layers. Higher oxygen-18 concentrations correlate with lower rainfall.
Findings revealed that in the past, rains have declined drastically for periods lasting up to 30 years, causing severe droughts. The monsoon supplies nearly 80 per cent of South-East Asia's rainfall, and is vital for agriculture. Instrumental records going back 150 years show that the monsoon has occasionally failed for several years at a time.
The findings appear in the Geophysical Research letters, reports New Scientist.
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Journal abstract follows:
A 900-year (600 to 1500 A.D.) record of the Indian summer monsoon precipitation from the core monsoon zone of India
By Ashish Sinha et al.
We present a near-annually resolved record of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) rainfall variations for the core monsoon region of India that spans from 600 to 1500 A.D. from a 230Th-dated stalagmite oxygen isotope record from Dandak Cave. Our rainfall reconstruction, which spans the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the earliest portion of the Little Ice Age (LIA), indicates that the short instrumental record of ISM underestimates the magnitude of monsoon rainfall variability. Periods of severe drought, lasting decades, occurred during the 14th and mid 15th centuries and coincided with several of India's most devastating famines.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L16707
The cost of cooling the climate
United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon is convening a high level meeting on global warming at the U.N. headquarters on September 24. The idea is to jump-start the climate change negotiations for the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP-13) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). COP-13 is scheduled for December 3-14 in Bali, Indonesia.
President George W. Bush is also inviting representatives from the major industrial countries and large developing countries to come to Washington, DC to discuss climate change on September 27-28. The goal of both meetings is figure out what to do about reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Under the Kyoto Protocol most industrialized nations-with exception of the United States and Australia-have agreed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below what their 1990 levels.
What is the optimal climate change policy-the one that sets future emissions reductions to maximize the economic welfare of humans? Yale University economist William Nordhaus,perhaps the world's leading expert on the economics of climate change, has just released a new study, The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy,which estimates the costs of various proposed trajectories for limiting carbon dioxide over the next couple of centuries.
Nordhaus and his colleagues have developed a small but comprehensive model that combines interactions between the economy and climate called DICE-2007, short for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy. Nordhaus first computes a baseline that assumes that humanity does essentially nothing to limit its output of carbon dioxide. By 2100 CO2 atmospheric concentrations would rise from the pre-industrial level 280 parts per million (ppm), to 380 ppm today, to 685 ppm in 2100. Global average temperature would rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. In this baseline scenario, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the present value of climatic damages is $22.6 trillion. DICE-2007 includes damage to major sectors such as agriculture, sea-level rise, health, and non-market damages.
Nordhaus then uses his model to assess the ambitious CO2 reduction proposals made by British economist Nicholas Stern and former Vice President Al Gore. Nordhaus calculates that the Stern and Gore proposals for steep immediate emissions reductions produce very similar cost/benefit results. Nordhaus also evaluates explicit temperature and concentration goals, e.g., limiting average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels or greenhouse gas concentrations to no more than 1.5-times pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric concentrations.
So what did Nordhaus find? First, the Stern proposal for rapid deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the future damage from global warming by $13 trillion, but at a cost of $27 trillion dollars. That's not a good deal. For an even worse deal, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the Gore proposal would reduce climate change damages by $12 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $34 trillion. As Nordhaus notes, both proposals imply carbon taxes rising to around $300 per ton carbon in the next two decades, and to the $600-$800 per ton range by 2050. A $700 carbon tax would increase the price of coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by about 150 percent, and would impose a tax bill of $1.2 trillion on the U.S. economy.
In addition, scenarios which attempt to keep the future average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius and concentrations below 1.5-times pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations are also not cost-effective. The DICE-2007 model calculates that both would cost more than $27 trillion in abatement costs and provide only about $13 trillion in reduced damages.
The optimal policy? Nordhaus reckons that the optimal policy would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010, with the tax increases gradually reaching $42 per ton in 2015, $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton of carbon in 2100. A $20 per metric ton carbon tax will raise coal prices by $10 per ton, which is about a 40 percent increase over the current price of $25 per ton. A $10 per ton carbon tax translates into a 4 cent per gallon increase in gasoline. A $300 per ton carbon tax would raise gasoline prices by $1.20 per gallon.
Following this optimal trajectory would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion over the next century. "The net present-value global benefit of the optimal policy is $3.4 trillion relative to no controls," writes Nordhaus. "While this is a large number absolutely, it is a small fraction, about 0.17 percent, of the discounted value of total future income." Keep in mind that in this optimal scenario climate change damages would still accumulate to $17 trillion (lower than $22.6 trillion in the baseline case), but they are not abated because to do so would cost more than the benefits obtained.
A more optimistic scenario envisions the invention of a low cost zero-carbon technology. Such a technology would have a net value of around $17 trillion in present value. As Nordhaus notes, "The net benefits of zero-carbon substitutes are so high as to warrant very intensive research." Setting a price on carbon through a rising tax will encourage the development of such technologies. Another good way to hurry the process along would be to offer a substantial prize to the inventor of a cheap low carbon energy technology, e.g., perhaps a better battery, or paint-on solar cells.
Nordhaus cogently argues that neither doing nothing nor trying to halt global warming immediately are sensible policy targets. Nordhaus's study is certainly not the final word on climate change policy, but it would be a excellent starting point for climate change negotiators when they gather in New York, Washington and Bali this fall.
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REALITY CHECK: GLOBAL WARMING NOT A HOT PRIORITY FOR THE PUBLIC
Americans think global warming is real and serious. Poll after poll shows that there are not many climate skeptics left. The issue has received an enormous amount of media attention over the past several years, but it still doesn't rank at or near the top of issues people want the president and Congress to address. In January, when the Pew Research Center updated its yearly poll on priorities for the president and Congress, global warming ranked twentieth of twenty-three issues. Pew described concern about the issue as "lukewarm."
The poll was taken before the latest wave of media attention to global warming, but other more recent polls show the same pattern. In a survey taken in late May and early June by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, the issue ranked eighth of ten issues examined. And it isn't just sentiment in the polls. According to the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, the media ratings for the July "Live Earth" concerts orchestrated to draw attention to the issue were "disappointing," with smaller than normal Saturday summer viewership.
Why doesn't the issue have a bigger public opinion footprint? First, many people see global warming as a problem for the future. Other issues such as the war in Iraq and health care seem more immediate to larger numbers of people. For most people, there have been few tangible manifestations of global warming. Polling on environmental issues over the past several decades shows that people are usually most concerned about problems they can see in their communities. Weather patterns seem unusually severe in many parts of the country, but the vagaries of the weather are a familiar story.
Another possible explanation relates to changing views of the media. When the environment emerged as a powerful political issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the media had more credibility than it has today. The media has joined government, labor and big business as powerful institutions about which the public is skeptical. In Gallup polls taken yearly since 2001, around three in ten have said the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, while around 35 percent say it is generally underestimated. In Pew's most recent media usage survey from 2006, just 20 percent said that they believed all or most of what they read in Time magazine, for example. Time's overheated tag line for its April cover story on global warming, "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid," probably only confirms the skeptics' suspicions about exaggeration.
It is also possible that Americans think they have been heard on the issue and will let politicians, interest groups and others take over. Again, the manner in which the environment emerged as an issue is instructive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans decided that a clean and healthful environment was important to them. Once they agreed on the ends policy should serve, most people pulled away from the debate about the means -- that is, exactly what kinds of legislation should be enacted to ensure environmental progress. They had neither the time nor the knowledge to get involved in complex debates about ambient air quality or energy options. Americans aren't indifferent, but they are inattentive. Their benign neglect is a backhanded compliment to representative democracy, an indication of confidence in the process.
Lobbyists and activists can't pack their bags and go home. The debates in Washington on global warming will be as intense as ever, but most Americans will be on the sidelines. Interest groups will claim they have public opinion on their side in terms of how to respond to global warming, but how you word questions on complex hypothetical policy choices often determines the answers.
Finally, there may be another reason Americans have not elevated the issue. Most politicians younger than 81-year old House Environment and Public Works chairman John Dingell grew up with the environmental movement. We're all environmentalists now, and it is hard to make a political issue out of a commitment shared by most of the population.
George Bush's marks on virtually every aspect of his presidency are negative, including his handling of global warming, and Democrats lead the Republicans in every poll as the party better able to handle the issue. In a new Newsweek poll, 68 percent say Bush hasn't done enough, but in another question only 4 percent say they will vote on the basis of global warming. Nearly six in ten say the issue will be one of a number of issues that will be important to their vote. There is little evidence from the polls that taking on George Bush or the Republicans on the issue will make it a top-tier issue or increase its political weight.
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Monday, September 03, 2007
UN CLIMATE TALKS GO NOWHERE
Parties to the UN's Kyoto Protocol wound up troubled talks here Friday with broad pledges, but no specific commitments, to deepen cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. In a final document issued after hours of wrangling, they ditched a proposed text whereby industrialized countries would consider cutting their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 compared to their 1990 levels, diplomats said.
The goal had been spelt out in a draft statement backed by countries of the European Union but opposed by other delegations, notably Canada, Japan, Switzerland, New Zealand and Russia, they said. The figures had been spelt out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the world's top climate-change experts -- as an option for policymakers seeking to keep global warming to less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.
Instead, the Vienna paper said Kyoto parties "recognized" the IPCC range and described it as providing "useful initial parameters for the overall level of ambition of further emissions reductions."
The talks took place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A total of 175 of the 191 UNFCCC's members are parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out at the end of 2012. Negotiations on a successor treaty to Kyoto take place in Bali, Indonesia in December, gathering all UNFCCC members.
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Eco-Narcissism
When you hear the phrase `eco-car', probably the first thing you think of is the Toyota Prius. Toyota's hybrid car, which combines electric and petrol engines to reduce fuel usage, and thus helps to `save the planet' from too much oil-use and grey exhaust fumes, has been a huge hit and has won widespread celebrity endorsement (1). Indeed, the word `Prius' has become synonymous with `hybrid car'. Just getting hold of a Prius can be hard work, as there are long lists of eco-aware drivers who want one.
Now, Japanese rivals Honda are getting a bit jealous of the success of Toyota's car. After all, Honda launched a planet-friendly hybrid driving machine of their own well before the Prius hit our roads. But Honda's models haven't proved nearly as popular as the Prius. Why not?
The success of the Prius isn't exactly based on how much money one will save. Yes, it will save you some money at the petrol pumps, as a Prius doesn't require as much petrol as other cars do, but the difference in the cost of upkeep between a Prius and a normal car isn't that great. In fact, there is some doubt as to whether the Prius is any better than many comparable diesel-powered models (2), which is a bit of a choker when you consider that the similarly sized Toyota Auris costs about 5,000 less than a Prius.
The saving grace for Prius owners is that the car has been given a privileged status by many city and regional authorities around the world. In London, the Prius is exempt from the Congestion Charge, saving drivers œ8 per day. Consequently, London's private-hire fleets of cars are buying more and more Prius vehicles. This privileging of one kind of car over another on London's streets shows, as we have argued on spiked, that the Congestion Charge actually has little to do with congestion, and is more about making moral judgements about good and bad kinds of driving (see London: still stuck in a jam, by Nico Macdonald). In California, Prius drivers won access to the car pool lane, in theory making their commute to work quicker; however, after the Californian authorities revised their fuel economy figures, they withdrew this privilege from the Prius.
Honda makes perfectly serviceable hybrid cars, too; in fact, it was the pioneer in the field. So why do so few people buy Honda hybrids? Why have `Civic' or `Insight' not entered the eco-lexicon in the way that `Prius' has? The answer is, partly at least, because they look the same as regular Honda cars. Honda made a conscious decision to keep the look of their regular models so that buyers would not be put off by hybrid cars that looked too new or exotic. But as MSNBC reported this week, that is no good for many eco-motorists who buy distinct-looking hybrid cars precisely to show off their green credentials.
`That's a big part of why I bought the Prius', said one New York retiree who traded in his Honda Civic for the better-known, and more easily identified, Toyota Prius. `It opens up conversations, and I push my theory that we've got to do our best to conserve. If I'm driving a hybrid, I want people to know it.' (3) He's in good company, with right-on celebs like Leonardo Di Caprio happy to parade their planet-saving hearts on their sleeves (or in their driveways at least). Honda is so cheesed off with all of this that it is withdrawing its current hybrid models and replacing them with more distinctive designs.
Some of this desire to drive instantly recognisable `good cars' is vanity, wanting to be seen to be part of a new in-crowd. As such, green living has become a currency by which you can prove you're an intelligent, caring kind of person. Eco-living may prove to be as superficial as any other passing fad (remember the catwalk models who campaigned against fur only to be seen wearing it a couple of years later?) And there's more than a whiff of hypocrisy about rich celebs who make a song-and-dance about their Prius-driving ways but who keep a private jet parked in their personal hangars for long trips.
But the Prius fad is also a symptom of the deeply conformist nature of green living, where it seems the chosen ones are desperate to show their piety, just as the religious bores of the past did. From their pulpit in the front seat of their energy-saving eco-car, the enlightened can lecture the rest of us about our sinful ways. Their message? `Driving is bad - but if you must drive, make it a Prius.'
This desperate desire to be seen to be green is not just about the car you drive. From organic food to recycling, out-and-proud ethical living is all the rage. Ethical living is not entirely about impressing other people; for many, it also seems to serve a therapeutic function, a way of assuaging their guilt about their excessive consumption and comfortable lifestyles. But it seems that an important strain of the eco-lifestyle is to let everyone know you are being ethical, to proclaim your inherent goodness from the rooftops (in the form of ostentatious but largely useless windmills) or from the front of your recognisable hybrid cars (in the form of a smug look of concern at other, lesser drivers). Welcome to the era of eco-narcissism.
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Storm Surge
By BJORN LOMBORG
Even as the clean-up continues in the Atlantic Basin, a lot has been written about Hurricane Dean. Some commentators believe nature is sending us a message. They say that the effects of climate change are getting out of hand, and it is time to take action. We have heard this point many times before. With every "extreme weather event," passionate climate change activists ride a public wave of concern. Former Vice President Al Gore believes we must make drastic reductions in carbon emissions because weather-related disasters are on track to cost as much as $1 trillion by 2040.
Mr. Gore is right that there is a growing problem, but he has identified the wrong solution. The global cost of climate-related disasters has increased relentlessly over the past half century. Hurricane Dean has left behind many billions of dollars of damage. But when Mr. Gore links global warming to the spiraling increase in weather-related insurance costs, he misses the fundamental points.
It has become more popular than ever to reside in low-lying, coastal areas that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. In Florida, more people live in Dade and Broward counties today than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas through Virginia in 1930. It's obvious that more damage will occur when many more people with much more wealth live in harm's way.
No matter how you look at it, however, the prospect of $1 trillion of weather-related damage by 2040 is frightening. But it is just as frightening that we have developed a blinkered focus on reducing carbon emissions as a way to somehow stop the devastation of events like Hurricane Dean. Presumably, our goal is to help humans and the planet. Cutting carbon is a very poor way of doing that. If coastal populations kept increasing but we managed to halt climate warming, then research shows that there would still be a 500% increase in hurricane damage in 50 years' time.
On the other hand, if we let climate warming continue but stopped more people from moving into harm's way, the increase in hurricane damage would be less than 10%. So, which policy knob should we turn first: The climate knob that does so very little, or the societal knob that would do 50 times more?
It is obviously unrealistic to believe that we could turn either knob all the way. We cannot halt climate change entirely, just as we cannot hold back the wave of people moving into beach houses. If the United States and Australia were to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol and its binding restrictions were to last all the way until 2050, very little would be achieved: Hurricane damage would increase by half a percent less than it would without Kyoto. There are many more effective things we could do. Communities at risk should have better education, evacuation plans and relief distribution.
These are "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff" measures, but there are also plenty of proactive options, like regulating vulnerable land and avoiding state-subsidized, low-cost insurance that encourages people to build irresponsibly in high-risk areas. Policy makers can improve and better enforce building codes to ensure structures can withstand higher winds, and maintain and upgrade the protective infrastructure of dikes and levies. More investment could be made in improved forecasts and better warning systems. Reducing environmental degradation and protecting wetlands would mean fewer landslides and stronger natural barriers against hurricanes.
Conservative estimates suggest we could halve the increase in damage through these incredibly cheap and simple social policy measures. This was shown powerfully in a previous weather disaster, Hurricane Katrina, when one insurance company found that 500 storm-hit locations that had implemented all the hurricane-loss prevention methods experienced one-eighth the losses of those that had not done so. By spending $2.5 million, these communities had avoided $500 million in damage. Often, big benefits can come from cheap and simple structural measures like bracing and securing roof trusses and walls using straps, clips or adhesives.
We shouldn't ignore climate change. We should tackle it smartly. We should make a 10-fold increase in research to make zero-carbon energy cheaper in the future. This would be much more efficient than Kyoto, yet cost almost 10 times less.
In any event, hurricane damage is increasing, whether we like it or not. Kyoto would cost trillions and reduce increased damage by about 0.5%. Simple preventive measures would cost a small fraction of that cost, but do a hundred times better. Hurricane Dean is a reminder of nature's force. Over the past few years, we have focused on only one "solution" to extreme weather events. Imagine if we had spent our time and energy on approaches that would actually make things better in the future. We still have an opportunity.
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Another stabilizing feedback mechanism
Played down, of course
Permafrost - the perpetually frozen foundation of North America - isn't so permanent anymore, and scientists are scrambling to understand the pros and cons when terra firma goes soft. Permafrost serves like a platform underneath vast expanses of northern forests and wetlands that are rooted, literally, in melting permafrost in many northern ecosystems. But rising atmospheric temperatures are accelerating rates of permafrost thaw in northern regions, says MSU researcher Merritt Turetsky. In the report, "The Disappearance of Relict Permafrost in Boreal North America: Effects on Peatland Carbon Storage and Fluxes," in this week's online edition of Global Change Biology, Turetsky and others explore whether melting permafrost can lead to a vicious feedback of carbon exchange that actually fuels future climate change.
"The loss of permafrost usually means the loss of terra firma in an otherwise often boggy landscape," Turetsky said. "Roads, buildings and whole communities will have to cope with this aspect of climate change. What this means for ecosystems and humans residing in the North remains of the most pressing issues in the climate change arena."
Working closely with researchers from Southern Illinois University, Villanova University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Turetsky, assistant professor of crop and soil sciences and fisheries and wildlife, found that permafrost degradation has complex impacts on greenhouse gas fluxes from northern wetlands. Their study focused on peatlands, a common type of wetland in boreal regions that slowly accumulates peat, which is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation. Today, peatlands represent a massive reservoir of stockpiled carbon that accumulated from the atmosphere over many thousands of years. Peat blankets the permafrost and protects it like a thick layer of insulation.
"We find permafrost in peatlands further south than in other boreal ecosystems due to the insulating qualities of peat.So we have argued that these ecosystems serve as a very sensitive indicator of climate change," Turetsky said. "What will happen to peatlands when climate change disrupts these frozen layers, or perhaps more importantly what will happen to all of that stored carbon in peat, have remained big questions for us."
Their results were surprising.Turetsky and her colleagues studied areas affected by permafrost degradation across a large region of Canada. They initially expected to find that the melting ice would trigger a release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, as previously frozen plant and animal remains became susceptible to decay. "This could serve as a positive feedback to climate change, where typically warming causes changes that release more greenhouse gases, which in turn causes more warming, and more emissions, and so on," she said.
But what the researchers actually found is not such a clear-cut climate story. Permafrost collapse in peatlands tends to result in the slumping of the soil surface and flooding, followed by a complete change in vegetation, soil structure, and many other important aspects of these ecosystems, Turetsky said.The study showed that vegetation responds to the flooding with a boost in productivity. More vegetation sequesters more carbon away from the atmosphere in plant biomass. "This is actually good news from a greenhouse gas perspective," Turetsky said.
However, the report also cautions that this flooding associated with collapsing permafrost also increases methane emissions.Methane is an important greenhouse gas, which is more powerful than carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. Turetsky said it seems the permafrost degradation initially causes increased soil carbon sequestration, rather than the large releases of carbon to the atmosphere originally predicted.But over time high methane emissions will balance - or outweigh - the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. "Not all ecosystems underlain by permafrost will respond the same way," Turetsky cautioned. "It will depend on the history of the permafrost and the nature of both vegetation and soils." What is clear, she said, is that not even northern ecosystems can escape the wide reach of climate change.
Source
Greenie fiction about the planned Tasmanian pulp mill
HAS anyone bothered to ask Tasmanians if they really want to be "saved" by mainland "celebrities"? But what would Tasmanians know about their own island, right? That's why more than 100 kinda-famous people from nowhere near Tasmania have signed a petition to stop the island from building itself a $2 billion pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. Led by millionaire Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins, they are campaigning against another mainlander, Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, warning that if he doesn't stop this satanic mill he could lose his Sydney seat.
Stop Tasmania's mill, demand playwright David Williamson from the Sunshine Coast; tennis star John Newcombe from Sydney; actor Rachel Ward from near Coffs Harbor; radio host Wendy Harmer from Sydney; Fairfax executive Mark Burrows from Sydney; TV chef Kylie Kwong from Sydney; film director Phillip Noyce from Hollywood; A-list ex-headmistress Rowena Danziger from Sydney and arts critic Leo Schofield from Sydney. Hear them cry from their concrete haunts: Stop those Tasmanians from building their forest-murdering, planet-choking, water-fouling, wine-tainting pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, that Garden of Eden, or face ruin by people who live nowhere near the place.
That's quite some bullying, and by people who have little on their side but more cash and cachet than the average voter. Certainly more cash and cachet than the workers who'll get a job at this planned mill, or a cut of the taxes on its earnings. It's odd that these far-away celebrities can so easily assume the right to block a project in Tasmania that's been backed by that state's Government, checked by its environment experts and approved by its parliament with the support of Labor, the Liberals and independents. What kind of patronising is this?
But out of this celebrity intervention comes both a lesson and laugh. The lesson is in the hazard of green dreamers making a cause of some project far away, of which you and they know little and thus imagine much. For instance, from all the hype and the soft-focus pictures, you will by now think - as these celebrities seem to think - that the Gunns pulp mill will be built in a valley as pristine and beautiful as the day Gaia made it.... see the lingering footage on the ABC's 7.30 Report this week of misty fields, babbling brooks and serene hills, all with a soundtrack of dreamy music - a vision of paradise soon to be torn to shreds and blackened by A STINKING LOUSY PULP MILL.
Ah, the advantages of a little local knowledge, rather than some long-distance Dreaming. Attention: the mill is not going to be built in Eden, or in any of the 40 per cent of Tasmania that's now national parks and reserves, but in the Bell Bay industrial precinct. Its neighbours there will not be fauns and woodsprites, but heavy industries of the kind that have been in this zone for many, many years - a steel smelter, an aluminium smelter, a wood chip mill, a fibreboard plant, a power station, a fuel depot, and a few other factories of a kind to give a green believer the vapors. Shocking, I know, that such grunting, clanking, sweating businesses are allowed to exist, even with their emissions cut to negligible - as the emissions of the pulp mill most certainly will be.
But I have a newsflash for the denizens of Sydney's smartest cafes: man cannot live on green fundraising calendars alone. It's in fact industries such as these that give Tasmanians the cash that allows them, too, to enjoy the shows a Schofield recommends, the films a Noyce directs, the dinners a Kwong cooks, the private schools a Danziger runs, the plays a Williamson writes, and the health cookies of the nearby bakery which Cousins part-owns. Who knows, they might even choose to spend their dirty dollars on the high-minded paper that Burrows publishes.
Oh, did I mention paper? That reminds me of the laugh in this campaign to stop a mill that pulps wood for paper. How are the celebrities fighting this plant? Not just by running ads in a newspaper published in Turnbull's electorate. Cousins is also stuffing 50,000 letterboxes in Sydney with copies of the endless and emotive essay of author Richard Flanagan, which he says inspired him to go on his crusade. Wow - 50,000 copies of this booklet? That's quite some paper these anti-mill campaigners are using. Tasmania will need a new pulp mill to cope.
Source
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Parties to the UN's Kyoto Protocol wound up troubled talks here Friday with broad pledges, but no specific commitments, to deepen cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming. In a final document issued after hours of wrangling, they ditched a proposed text whereby industrialized countries would consider cutting their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 compared to their 1990 levels, diplomats said.
The goal had been spelt out in a draft statement backed by countries of the European Union but opposed by other delegations, notably Canada, Japan, Switzerland, New Zealand and Russia, they said. The figures had been spelt out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the world's top climate-change experts -- as an option for policymakers seeking to keep global warming to less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.
Instead, the Vienna paper said Kyoto parties "recognized" the IPCC range and described it as providing "useful initial parameters for the overall level of ambition of further emissions reductions."
The talks took place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A total of 175 of the 191 UNFCCC's members are parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out at the end of 2012. Negotiations on a successor treaty to Kyoto take place in Bali, Indonesia in December, gathering all UNFCCC members.
Source
Eco-Narcissism
When you hear the phrase `eco-car', probably the first thing you think of is the Toyota Prius. Toyota's hybrid car, which combines electric and petrol engines to reduce fuel usage, and thus helps to `save the planet' from too much oil-use and grey exhaust fumes, has been a huge hit and has won widespread celebrity endorsement (1). Indeed, the word `Prius' has become synonymous with `hybrid car'. Just getting hold of a Prius can be hard work, as there are long lists of eco-aware drivers who want one.
Now, Japanese rivals Honda are getting a bit jealous of the success of Toyota's car. After all, Honda launched a planet-friendly hybrid driving machine of their own well before the Prius hit our roads. But Honda's models haven't proved nearly as popular as the Prius. Why not?
The success of the Prius isn't exactly based on how much money one will save. Yes, it will save you some money at the petrol pumps, as a Prius doesn't require as much petrol as other cars do, but the difference in the cost of upkeep between a Prius and a normal car isn't that great. In fact, there is some doubt as to whether the Prius is any better than many comparable diesel-powered models (2), which is a bit of a choker when you consider that the similarly sized Toyota Auris costs about 5,000 less than a Prius.
The saving grace for Prius owners is that the car has been given a privileged status by many city and regional authorities around the world. In London, the Prius is exempt from the Congestion Charge, saving drivers œ8 per day. Consequently, London's private-hire fleets of cars are buying more and more Prius vehicles. This privileging of one kind of car over another on London's streets shows, as we have argued on spiked, that the Congestion Charge actually has little to do with congestion, and is more about making moral judgements about good and bad kinds of driving (see London: still stuck in a jam, by Nico Macdonald). In California, Prius drivers won access to the car pool lane, in theory making their commute to work quicker; however, after the Californian authorities revised their fuel economy figures, they withdrew this privilege from the Prius.
Honda makes perfectly serviceable hybrid cars, too; in fact, it was the pioneer in the field. So why do so few people buy Honda hybrids? Why have `Civic' or `Insight' not entered the eco-lexicon in the way that `Prius' has? The answer is, partly at least, because they look the same as regular Honda cars. Honda made a conscious decision to keep the look of their regular models so that buyers would not be put off by hybrid cars that looked too new or exotic. But as MSNBC reported this week, that is no good for many eco-motorists who buy distinct-looking hybrid cars precisely to show off their green credentials.
`That's a big part of why I bought the Prius', said one New York retiree who traded in his Honda Civic for the better-known, and more easily identified, Toyota Prius. `It opens up conversations, and I push my theory that we've got to do our best to conserve. If I'm driving a hybrid, I want people to know it.' (3) He's in good company, with right-on celebs like Leonardo Di Caprio happy to parade their planet-saving hearts on their sleeves (or in their driveways at least). Honda is so cheesed off with all of this that it is withdrawing its current hybrid models and replacing them with more distinctive designs.
Some of this desire to drive instantly recognisable `good cars' is vanity, wanting to be seen to be part of a new in-crowd. As such, green living has become a currency by which you can prove you're an intelligent, caring kind of person. Eco-living may prove to be as superficial as any other passing fad (remember the catwalk models who campaigned against fur only to be seen wearing it a couple of years later?) And there's more than a whiff of hypocrisy about rich celebs who make a song-and-dance about their Prius-driving ways but who keep a private jet parked in their personal hangars for long trips.
But the Prius fad is also a symptom of the deeply conformist nature of green living, where it seems the chosen ones are desperate to show their piety, just as the religious bores of the past did. From their pulpit in the front seat of their energy-saving eco-car, the enlightened can lecture the rest of us about our sinful ways. Their message? `Driving is bad - but if you must drive, make it a Prius.'
This desperate desire to be seen to be green is not just about the car you drive. From organic food to recycling, out-and-proud ethical living is all the rage. Ethical living is not entirely about impressing other people; for many, it also seems to serve a therapeutic function, a way of assuaging their guilt about their excessive consumption and comfortable lifestyles. But it seems that an important strain of the eco-lifestyle is to let everyone know you are being ethical, to proclaim your inherent goodness from the rooftops (in the form of ostentatious but largely useless windmills) or from the front of your recognisable hybrid cars (in the form of a smug look of concern at other, lesser drivers). Welcome to the era of eco-narcissism.
Source
Storm Surge
By BJORN LOMBORG
Even as the clean-up continues in the Atlantic Basin, a lot has been written about Hurricane Dean. Some commentators believe nature is sending us a message. They say that the effects of climate change are getting out of hand, and it is time to take action. We have heard this point many times before. With every "extreme weather event," passionate climate change activists ride a public wave of concern. Former Vice President Al Gore believes we must make drastic reductions in carbon emissions because weather-related disasters are on track to cost as much as $1 trillion by 2040.
Mr. Gore is right that there is a growing problem, but he has identified the wrong solution. The global cost of climate-related disasters has increased relentlessly over the past half century. Hurricane Dean has left behind many billions of dollars of damage. But when Mr. Gore links global warming to the spiraling increase in weather-related insurance costs, he misses the fundamental points.
It has become more popular than ever to reside in low-lying, coastal areas that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. In Florida, more people live in Dade and Broward counties today than lived in all 109 coastal counties from Texas through Virginia in 1930. It's obvious that more damage will occur when many more people with much more wealth live in harm's way.
No matter how you look at it, however, the prospect of $1 trillion of weather-related damage by 2040 is frightening. But it is just as frightening that we have developed a blinkered focus on reducing carbon emissions as a way to somehow stop the devastation of events like Hurricane Dean. Presumably, our goal is to help humans and the planet. Cutting carbon is a very poor way of doing that. If coastal populations kept increasing but we managed to halt climate warming, then research shows that there would still be a 500% increase in hurricane damage in 50 years' time.
On the other hand, if we let climate warming continue but stopped more people from moving into harm's way, the increase in hurricane damage would be less than 10%. So, which policy knob should we turn first: The climate knob that does so very little, or the societal knob that would do 50 times more?
It is obviously unrealistic to believe that we could turn either knob all the way. We cannot halt climate change entirely, just as we cannot hold back the wave of people moving into beach houses. If the United States and Australia were to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol and its binding restrictions were to last all the way until 2050, very little would be achieved: Hurricane damage would increase by half a percent less than it would without Kyoto. There are many more effective things we could do. Communities at risk should have better education, evacuation plans and relief distribution.
These are "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff" measures, but there are also plenty of proactive options, like regulating vulnerable land and avoiding state-subsidized, low-cost insurance that encourages people to build irresponsibly in high-risk areas. Policy makers can improve and better enforce building codes to ensure structures can withstand higher winds, and maintain and upgrade the protective infrastructure of dikes and levies. More investment could be made in improved forecasts and better warning systems. Reducing environmental degradation and protecting wetlands would mean fewer landslides and stronger natural barriers against hurricanes.
Conservative estimates suggest we could halve the increase in damage through these incredibly cheap and simple social policy measures. This was shown powerfully in a previous weather disaster, Hurricane Katrina, when one insurance company found that 500 storm-hit locations that had implemented all the hurricane-loss prevention methods experienced one-eighth the losses of those that had not done so. By spending $2.5 million, these communities had avoided $500 million in damage. Often, big benefits can come from cheap and simple structural measures like bracing and securing roof trusses and walls using straps, clips or adhesives.
We shouldn't ignore climate change. We should tackle it smartly. We should make a 10-fold increase in research to make zero-carbon energy cheaper in the future. This would be much more efficient than Kyoto, yet cost almost 10 times less.
In any event, hurricane damage is increasing, whether we like it or not. Kyoto would cost trillions and reduce increased damage by about 0.5%. Simple preventive measures would cost a small fraction of that cost, but do a hundred times better. Hurricane Dean is a reminder of nature's force. Over the past few years, we have focused on only one "solution" to extreme weather events. Imagine if we had spent our time and energy on approaches that would actually make things better in the future. We still have an opportunity.
Source
Another stabilizing feedback mechanism
Played down, of course
Permafrost - the perpetually frozen foundation of North America - isn't so permanent anymore, and scientists are scrambling to understand the pros and cons when terra firma goes soft. Permafrost serves like a platform underneath vast expanses of northern forests and wetlands that are rooted, literally, in melting permafrost in many northern ecosystems. But rising atmospheric temperatures are accelerating rates of permafrost thaw in northern regions, says MSU researcher Merritt Turetsky. In the report, "The Disappearance of Relict Permafrost in Boreal North America: Effects on Peatland Carbon Storage and Fluxes," in this week's online edition of Global Change Biology, Turetsky and others explore whether melting permafrost can lead to a vicious feedback of carbon exchange that actually fuels future climate change.
"The loss of permafrost usually means the loss of terra firma in an otherwise often boggy landscape," Turetsky said. "Roads, buildings and whole communities will have to cope with this aspect of climate change. What this means for ecosystems and humans residing in the North remains of the most pressing issues in the climate change arena."
Working closely with researchers from Southern Illinois University, Villanova University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Turetsky, assistant professor of crop and soil sciences and fisheries and wildlife, found that permafrost degradation has complex impacts on greenhouse gas fluxes from northern wetlands. Their study focused on peatlands, a common type of wetland in boreal regions that slowly accumulates peat, which is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation. Today, peatlands represent a massive reservoir of stockpiled carbon that accumulated from the atmosphere over many thousands of years. Peat blankets the permafrost and protects it like a thick layer of insulation.
"We find permafrost in peatlands further south than in other boreal ecosystems due to the insulating qualities of peat.So we have argued that these ecosystems serve as a very sensitive indicator of climate change," Turetsky said. "What will happen to peatlands when climate change disrupts these frozen layers, or perhaps more importantly what will happen to all of that stored carbon in peat, have remained big questions for us."
Their results were surprising.Turetsky and her colleagues studied areas affected by permafrost degradation across a large region of Canada. They initially expected to find that the melting ice would trigger a release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, as previously frozen plant and animal remains became susceptible to decay. "This could serve as a positive feedback to climate change, where typically warming causes changes that release more greenhouse gases, which in turn causes more warming, and more emissions, and so on," she said.
But what the researchers actually found is not such a clear-cut climate story. Permafrost collapse in peatlands tends to result in the slumping of the soil surface and flooding, followed by a complete change in vegetation, soil structure, and many other important aspects of these ecosystems, Turetsky said.The study showed that vegetation responds to the flooding with a boost in productivity. More vegetation sequesters more carbon away from the atmosphere in plant biomass. "This is actually good news from a greenhouse gas perspective," Turetsky said.
However, the report also cautions that this flooding associated with collapsing permafrost also increases methane emissions.Methane is an important greenhouse gas, which is more powerful than carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. Turetsky said it seems the permafrost degradation initially causes increased soil carbon sequestration, rather than the large releases of carbon to the atmosphere originally predicted.But over time high methane emissions will balance - or outweigh - the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. "Not all ecosystems underlain by permafrost will respond the same way," Turetsky cautioned. "It will depend on the history of the permafrost and the nature of both vegetation and soils." What is clear, she said, is that not even northern ecosystems can escape the wide reach of climate change.
Source
Greenie fiction about the planned Tasmanian pulp mill
HAS anyone bothered to ask Tasmanians if they really want to be "saved" by mainland "celebrities"? But what would Tasmanians know about their own island, right? That's why more than 100 kinda-famous people from nowhere near Tasmania have signed a petition to stop the island from building itself a $2 billion pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. Led by millionaire Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins, they are campaigning against another mainlander, Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, warning that if he doesn't stop this satanic mill he could lose his Sydney seat.
Stop Tasmania's mill, demand playwright David Williamson from the Sunshine Coast; tennis star John Newcombe from Sydney; actor Rachel Ward from near Coffs Harbor; radio host Wendy Harmer from Sydney; Fairfax executive Mark Burrows from Sydney; TV chef Kylie Kwong from Sydney; film director Phillip Noyce from Hollywood; A-list ex-headmistress Rowena Danziger from Sydney and arts critic Leo Schofield from Sydney. Hear them cry from their concrete haunts: Stop those Tasmanians from building their forest-murdering, planet-choking, water-fouling, wine-tainting pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, that Garden of Eden, or face ruin by people who live nowhere near the place.
That's quite some bullying, and by people who have little on their side but more cash and cachet than the average voter. Certainly more cash and cachet than the workers who'll get a job at this planned mill, or a cut of the taxes on its earnings. It's odd that these far-away celebrities can so easily assume the right to block a project in Tasmania that's been backed by that state's Government, checked by its environment experts and approved by its parliament with the support of Labor, the Liberals and independents. What kind of patronising is this?
But out of this celebrity intervention comes both a lesson and laugh. The lesson is in the hazard of green dreamers making a cause of some project far away, of which you and they know little and thus imagine much. For instance, from all the hype and the soft-focus pictures, you will by now think - as these celebrities seem to think - that the Gunns pulp mill will be built in a valley as pristine and beautiful as the day Gaia made it.... see the lingering footage on the ABC's 7.30 Report this week of misty fields, babbling brooks and serene hills, all with a soundtrack of dreamy music - a vision of paradise soon to be torn to shreds and blackened by A STINKING LOUSY PULP MILL.
Ah, the advantages of a little local knowledge, rather than some long-distance Dreaming. Attention: the mill is not going to be built in Eden, or in any of the 40 per cent of Tasmania that's now national parks and reserves, but in the Bell Bay industrial precinct. Its neighbours there will not be fauns and woodsprites, but heavy industries of the kind that have been in this zone for many, many years - a steel smelter, an aluminium smelter, a wood chip mill, a fibreboard plant, a power station, a fuel depot, and a few other factories of a kind to give a green believer the vapors. Shocking, I know, that such grunting, clanking, sweating businesses are allowed to exist, even with their emissions cut to negligible - as the emissions of the pulp mill most certainly will be.
But I have a newsflash for the denizens of Sydney's smartest cafes: man cannot live on green fundraising calendars alone. It's in fact industries such as these that give Tasmanians the cash that allows them, too, to enjoy the shows a Schofield recommends, the films a Noyce directs, the dinners a Kwong cooks, the private schools a Danziger runs, the plays a Williamson writes, and the health cookies of the nearby bakery which Cousins part-owns. Who knows, they might even choose to spend their dirty dollars on the high-minded paper that Burrows publishes.
Oh, did I mention paper? That reminds me of the laugh in this campaign to stop a mill that pulps wood for paper. How are the celebrities fighting this plant? Not just by running ads in a newspaper published in Turnbull's electorate. Cousins is also stuffing 50,000 letterboxes in Sydney with copies of the endless and emotive essay of author Richard Flanagan, which he says inspired him to go on his crusade. Wow - 50,000 copies of this booklet? That's quite some paper these anti-mill campaigners are using. Tasmania will need a new pulp mill to cope.
Source
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Sunday, September 02, 2007
Bedbugs are back
DDT sent them close to extinction but they have now bounced back and only that wicked DDT will eradicate them again
Five decades after being declared officially dead, the most toe-curling of all America's critters has returned, with a spate of bloodsucking attacks on unsuspecting victims as they sleep. The culprit is Cimex lectularius - otherwise known as the common bedbug. Until recently it was known happily to Americans only from nursery rhymes.
Not any more. Up to 5mm in length, wingless, nocturnal and covered in microscopic hairs, the bedbug was supposed to have been eliminated from the US by the pesticide DDT, which was later banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 because of the damage it caused to fish, birds and other wildlife. But now the insect is back, and its sudden return has been proclaimed "one of the great mysteries of entomology". Over recent months bedbugs have been turning up in hospitals, nursing homes, cinemas, dry cleaners, schools, public housing and even some well-to-do residential homes.
They are attracted to the very thing that has caused the US, and the rest of the world, so much grief lately: carbon dioxide. While historically it is the carbon dioxide in human breath that has brought them out to feed, experts speculate that rising levels in the air could be behind their renaissance. Every day seems to bring a new tale of infestation - and, in the land that spawned the compensation culture, a new lawsuit.
Maya Rudelph, star of Saturday Night Live, is suing her New York landlord for $450,000 over a claim that her $13,500-a-month SoHo loft apartment is infested with the insects. In Ohio a woman is suing the Hilton hotel chain after she allegedly suffered more than 150 bites in a room, leaving her "physically scarred and emotionally damaged".
The bugs have been gone for so long now that few know how to deal with them. "We have a whole new generation of people in our profession who had never seen a bedbug," said Leonard Douglen, executive director of the New Jersey Pest Management Association, which organised a trade show at Rutgers University last week devoted to the pest's resurgence.
Another problem: with DDT banned, the bedbugs laugh in the face of the pyrethroid-based compounds now used against them. "We've had cases where we're spraying 200 to 300 times the label dose of toxins and we can't kill 'em," Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, complained during a seminar in New York last week.
Anyone unsure of what a bedbug calls mealtime is invited by Dr Potter to look at a video posted on YouTube by his university. It shows a bug, in close-up, on the flesh of a victim. The bug appears translucent at first, but after injecting the human with saliva - which contains anticoagulants and anaesthetics - the bug turns crimson as it gorges on blood.
Bedbugs are hard to see, as are their eggs, of which they can lay six a day. Although they like to feed every five to ten days, they can survive without a bloodsucking session for as long as 18 months. The good news is that while they have been known to contain pathogens such as plague and hepatitis B, bedbugs have not been linked with the transmission of any diseases.
Source
Leo DiCaprio, Expert Climatologist
Movie "The 11th Hour" Serves as Latest Round of Silly, Self-Righteous Hollywood Environmentalism
No longer satisfied playing the role of vacuous teen dreamboat, actor Leo DiCaprio now presumes to play the role of meteorological expert on all things climate-related. Joining that vast herd of self-righteous Hollywood global-warming hysterics, DiCaprio last week opened his new "documentary" entitled The 11th Hour, which he both narrates and produced. No word yet on whether DiCaprio dons a white lab coat or horn-rimmed bifocals to fabricate that extra little sense of legitimacy and expertise.
According to a fawning summary in the reliably-partisan Los Angeles Times, DiCaprio peppers the film with "traumatic images of destruction" to advance his theme that "everyone and everything on Earth is linked and it will take a collective shift of individual determination to save the planet." Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, sabretooth tigers and Neanderthals, there was no prehistoric Leo DiCaprio to save them from similar destruction.
But this silliness is merely the tip of Leo's iceberg, assuming that icebergs still exist in our supposedly-sweltering sauna of a planet. And speaking of icebergs, isn't it also tragic that DiCaprio wasn't around in 1912 to stop that deadly wave of global cooling that doomed the Titanic? After all, his starring role in the movie of the same name should have been sufficient to raise his consciousness to that little climate cataclysm. Global warming, global cooling - what matters is not climatic reality, but the ability of well-meaning celebrities to morally preen before an adoring audience of clueless young minds.
Regardless, DiCaprio, who apparently also moonlights as a socio-political expert, aims to do much more than merely whip up a meringue of typical environmentalist hysteria. Rather, his ultimate goal is apparently nothing less than complete worldwide socio-economic reconstruction. According to DiCaprio, "the collapse of the environment is not the problem - it's a symptom. The real problem is industrial civilization and how we organize society." Can you say "Karl Marx?"
The mind boggles at the possible degree of social upheaval that he seeks. Does he actually intend to abolish all worldwide industry? Is it "goodbye manufacturing industry, and hello homemade sandals and garden sustenance?" Will pretentious Hollywood actors still be able to fly private jets and drive convoys of giant SUVs with blackened window tinting?
Levity aside, DiCaprio's bald partisan vitriol is nothing short of pathetic. On the movie's official website, DiCaprio narrates the usual tripe about "irreparable damage" to a supposedly-fragile Earth while sinister images of the White House, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice roll.
The official movie trailer subsequently trumpets the standard doomsday hyperbole, such as the claim that "the U.N. estimates that by the middle of the century, there may be 150 million environmental refugees." But don't hold your breath on that. DiCaprio and his silly army of associates in this nonsense would be well-advised to recall 1970s climate-change alarmist Paul Ehrlich, who boldly predicted worldwide starvation due to oncoming global cooling - yes, cooling.
Undeterred, the trailer then boldly pronounces that, "the tragedy is the potential extinction of humankind." A straight-faced DiCaprio then appears to appoint "our pivotal generation" (more pivotal than the World War II generation, Leo?) as responsible for "creating a sustainable world in time." Obligatory images of cute penguins and ridiculous contraptions such as ugly windmills and grass-covered buildings follow, creating a cavalcade of self-parody.
But never mind the facts. Years from now, when the utter absurdity of these enviro-economic fascists comes to light, such claims will be conveniently swept under the rug. By then, a new bogeyman will be fabricated by the Left to advance their collectivist, anti-freedom agenda.
In the meantime, however, this isn't all fun and games. It's easy to mock DiCaprio as the foolish airhead that he is, but the damage that he and people like him create is very real, and it's no laughing matter. Schoolchildren who will naturally be subjected to this nonsense are likely to swallow it wholesale, as will adult dupes who are unaware of the facts regarding natural climate fluctuation and the consequences of environmentalist orthodoxy.
Accordingly, everyone should do themselves a favor and read Christopher C. Horner's fantastic book entitled The Politically-Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. It's the perfect antidote to the lunacy of Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio.
Source
THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL WARMING: ECONOMIC MODELS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
This is an excerpt from the most recent contribution by econometrician Nordhaus. Nordhaus shows that the Kyoto approach is very inefficient in achieving its goals and that there is no urgency in dealing with any global warming
A. Preface
The issues involved in understanding global warming and taking policies to slow its harmful impacts are the major environmental challenge of the modern age. Global warming poses a unique mix of problems that arise from the fact that global warming is a global public good, is likely to be costly to slow or prevent, has daunting scientific and economic uncertainties, and casts a shadow over the globe for decades, perhaps even centuries to come.
The challenge of coping with global warming is particularly difficult because it spans many disciplines and parts of society. Ecologists may see it as a threat to ecosystems, marine biologists as a problem arising from ocean acidification, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and coal miners as an existential threat to their livelihood. Businesses may view global warming as either an opportunity or a hazard, politicians as a great issue as long as they don't need to mention taxes, ski resorts as a mortal danger to their already short seasons, golfers as a boon to year-round recreation, and poor countries as a threat to their farmers as well as a source of financial and technological aid.
This many-faceted nature also raises challenges to natural and social scientists, who must incorporate a wide variety of geophysical, economic, and political disciplines in their diagnoses and prescriptions. This is the age of global warming ... and of global-warming studies.
The present study uses the tools of economics and mathematical modeling to analyze efficient and inefficient approaches to slowing global warming. It describes a small but comprehensive model of the economy and climate called the DICE-2007 model, for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy. The current study is a completely revised version of earlier models developed by the author and collaborators to understand the economic and environmental dynamics of alternative approaches to slowing global warming. It represents the fifth major version of modeling efforts, with earlier versions developed in the periods 1974-1979, 1980-82, 1990-1994, and 1997-2000. Many of the equations and details have changed over the different generations, but the basic modeling philosophy remains unchanged: to incorporate the latest economic and scientific knowledge and to capture the major elements of the economics of climate change in as simple and transparent a fashion as is possible. The guiding philosophy is, in Leonardo's words, that "simplicity is the highest form of sophistication."
B. Reader's Guide to the Book
The current volume combines a description of the new version of the DICE model along with several analyses of major issues and policy proposals. We begin with a brief outline of the major chapters for those who would like a map of the terrain. We begin this book with a Summary for the Citizen, which describes the underlying approach and major results. This chapter stands alone and can be usefully read by non-economists who want the broad overview as well as specialists who would like an intuitive summary.
Chapter II provides a verbal description of the DICE model. Chapter III then provides a detailed description of the model's equations. The actual equations of the model are provided in Appendix A, while the GAMS computer code is provided in Appendix B. More details on the computer code and derivation of the program are available online. Chapter IV then describes the alternative policies that are analyzed in the computer runs. These include everything from the current Kyoto Protocol to an idealized perfectly efficient or "optimal" economic approach. Chapter V presents the major analytical results on the different policies, including the economic impacts, the carbon prices and control rates, and the effects on concentrations and temperature. Chapters VI through IX provide further analyses using the DICE model. Chapter VI begins with an analysis of the impacts of incomplete participation. This new modeling approach is able to capture analytically the economic and geophysical impacts of policies which include only a fraction of countries or sectors; it shows the importance of full participation. Chapter VII presents preliminary results on the impacts of uncertainty on policies and outcomes. Chapter VIII is a policy-oriented chapter that examines the two major approaches to controlling emissions - prices and quantities - and describes the surprising advantages of price-type approaches. Chapter IX provides an analysis, using the DICE model framework, of the recent Stern Review of the economics of climate change.
The final chapter contains some reservations about the results and then provides the major conclusions of the study. For those who are interested in the derivation of the model and technical details, these are available in a full set of documentation in Accompanying Notes [2007].
FULL PAPER here
"Doomsday Clock" hijacked by climate change alarmists
Radical Environmentalists Continue Politicization of Doomsday Clock, Literally Equating Climate Change to Nuclear Weapons
What does the famed nuclear war "Doomsday Clock" have to do with climate change hysteria? According to Al Gore's minions, everything. For the first time since the Clock's inception, its hands have been advanced for a reason other than the prospect of nuclear war. Not because of mass terrorism, not an outbreak of catastrophic conventional war, not political instability in a nuclear-armed nation or other concrete event, but rather due to that trendy, all-purpose bogeyman of the left - climate change.
First introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago in 1947, the iconic clock face shows the remaining "minutes to midnight," with midnight symbolizing humanity's nuclear destruction. The initial 1947 Clock showed seven minutes until midnight as the Cold War descended upon the world, and the minute hand has been advanced or turned back 19 times since that date in response to various geopolitical crises and the threat of global nuclear war. The Clock was advanced to just three minutes to midnight in 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, and again to just two minutes in 1953, when the United States and Soviet Union tested advanced hydrogen bombs within nine months of one another.
During subsequent years, the Clock became increasingly politicized to reflect the leftist sympathies of its Board of Directors. For instance, the Board illogically turned the Clock back to 12 minutes in 1972 with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, even though this treaty actually eliminated missile defense protections.
The politicized nature of the Clock became even more obvious with Ronald Reagan's ascent to the White House. During the 1980s, the Board predictably expressed its antipathy toward President Reagan, who ultimately ended the Cold War without firing a shot, by advancing the minute hand all the way to just three minutes before midnight. The Board's naked political basis for this decision is best illustrated by quoting its own website:
"The United States seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic-missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin... Reagan scraps any talk of arms control and proposes that the best way to end the Cold War is for the United States to win it."
Yes, how silly of that foolish warmonger Ronald Reagan to think that America could actually "win" the Cold War. The Kremlin itself couldn't have stated it in a more one-sided manner. In this light, the recent addition of climate change hysteria to the Clock's calculation is merely a pathetic continuation of its gradual politicization.
Nevertheless, the blatant incorporation of global warming silliness is astounding and noteworthy. On January 17, 2007, giddy with anticipation of the release of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the Board announced that it was advancing the Clock two minutes. Consequently, it now reads five minutes to midnight. According to the Clock's official website:
"We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause dramatic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival".
Of course, the Board neglects to mention that climate change hysterics in the 1970s asserted that global cooling, not global warming, was threatening massive crop failure and billions of human deaths through starvation. But that would be an "inconvenient truth," as Mr. Gore would say.
In what can only be charitably described as breathtaking absurdity, the Board proceeds to assert that climate change is second only to nuclear war in terms of its threat to human existence:
"Global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons".
Did the Board sleep through 9/11? Have they ever heard of Darfur? What about diseases such as malaria that still kill millions because environmentalists in wealthier countries oppose the use of simple preventative vaccines like DDT? One can only wonder what pet political issue the Clock's Board will attempt to dramatize by adding to its minute calculus. Socialized medicine? Secondhand smoke? Labor union protections? Trans-fats? Sadly, none of these would be a shock in light of the clock's politicized history.
Source
PRIEST OFFERS GREEN CONFESSION
Forgotten to recycle any newspapers or tin cans recently? Feeling guilty because you neglected to carbon offset your flight to somewhere, anywhere, outside England this summer? The Roman Catholic Church is at hand with a new line in "green confessions" to help eco-sinners to find forgiveness. Dom Anthony Sutch, the Benedictine monk who resigned as head of Downside School to become a parish priest in Suffolk, will be at the county's Waveney Greenpeace festival this weekend to hear eco-confessions in what is thought to be the first dedicated confessional booth of its kind.
Vested in a green chasuble-style garment made from recycled curtains, and in a booth constructed of recycled doors, he will hear the sins of of those who have not recycled the things they ought to have done and who have consumed the things they ought not to have done. Father Sutch tries to practise what he preaches but has turned the heating down so low at his church of St Benet's that at least one parishioner has fled to the warmer care of a neighbouring priest for winter services.
He told The Times: "It is not, I hope, blasphemous to do this. I do not think it is. It is just an attempt to make people conscious of the way they live. The Church is aware of green issues and of how aware we have to be of how we treat the environment. "I know the Pope has now set up his own airline, but I am told the Vatican will be planting trees every time it flies. I do think the way we treat our environment is important. "There is a huge amount of greed in the West. We have to be aware of the consequences of how we live."
FULL STORY here.
***************************************
The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
DDT sent them close to extinction but they have now bounced back and only that wicked DDT will eradicate them again
Five decades after being declared officially dead, the most toe-curling of all America's critters has returned, with a spate of bloodsucking attacks on unsuspecting victims as they sleep. The culprit is Cimex lectularius - otherwise known as the common bedbug. Until recently it was known happily to Americans only from nursery rhymes.
Not any more. Up to 5mm in length, wingless, nocturnal and covered in microscopic hairs, the bedbug was supposed to have been eliminated from the US by the pesticide DDT, which was later banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 because of the damage it caused to fish, birds and other wildlife. But now the insect is back, and its sudden return has been proclaimed "one of the great mysteries of entomology". Over recent months bedbugs have been turning up in hospitals, nursing homes, cinemas, dry cleaners, schools, public housing and even some well-to-do residential homes.
They are attracted to the very thing that has caused the US, and the rest of the world, so much grief lately: carbon dioxide. While historically it is the carbon dioxide in human breath that has brought them out to feed, experts speculate that rising levels in the air could be behind their renaissance. Every day seems to bring a new tale of infestation - and, in the land that spawned the compensation culture, a new lawsuit.
Maya Rudelph, star of Saturday Night Live, is suing her New York landlord for $450,000 over a claim that her $13,500-a-month SoHo loft apartment is infested with the insects. In Ohio a woman is suing the Hilton hotel chain after she allegedly suffered more than 150 bites in a room, leaving her "physically scarred and emotionally damaged".
The bugs have been gone for so long now that few know how to deal with them. "We have a whole new generation of people in our profession who had never seen a bedbug," said Leonard Douglen, executive director of the New Jersey Pest Management Association, which organised a trade show at Rutgers University last week devoted to the pest's resurgence.
Another problem: with DDT banned, the bedbugs laugh in the face of the pyrethroid-based compounds now used against them. "We've had cases where we're spraying 200 to 300 times the label dose of toxins and we can't kill 'em," Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, complained during a seminar in New York last week.
Anyone unsure of what a bedbug calls mealtime is invited by Dr Potter to look at a video posted on YouTube by his university. It shows a bug, in close-up, on the flesh of a victim. The bug appears translucent at first, but after injecting the human with saliva - which contains anticoagulants and anaesthetics - the bug turns crimson as it gorges on blood.
Bedbugs are hard to see, as are their eggs, of which they can lay six a day. Although they like to feed every five to ten days, they can survive without a bloodsucking session for as long as 18 months. The good news is that while they have been known to contain pathogens such as plague and hepatitis B, bedbugs have not been linked with the transmission of any diseases.
Source
Leo DiCaprio, Expert Climatologist
Movie "The 11th Hour" Serves as Latest Round of Silly, Self-Righteous Hollywood Environmentalism
No longer satisfied playing the role of vacuous teen dreamboat, actor Leo DiCaprio now presumes to play the role of meteorological expert on all things climate-related. Joining that vast herd of self-righteous Hollywood global-warming hysterics, DiCaprio last week opened his new "documentary" entitled The 11th Hour, which he both narrates and produced. No word yet on whether DiCaprio dons a white lab coat or horn-rimmed bifocals to fabricate that extra little sense of legitimacy and expertise.
According to a fawning summary in the reliably-partisan Los Angeles Times, DiCaprio peppers the film with "traumatic images of destruction" to advance his theme that "everyone and everything on Earth is linked and it will take a collective shift of individual determination to save the planet." Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, sabretooth tigers and Neanderthals, there was no prehistoric Leo DiCaprio to save them from similar destruction.
But this silliness is merely the tip of Leo's iceberg, assuming that icebergs still exist in our supposedly-sweltering sauna of a planet. And speaking of icebergs, isn't it also tragic that DiCaprio wasn't around in 1912 to stop that deadly wave of global cooling that doomed the Titanic? After all, his starring role in the movie of the same name should have been sufficient to raise his consciousness to that little climate cataclysm. Global warming, global cooling - what matters is not climatic reality, but the ability of well-meaning celebrities to morally preen before an adoring audience of clueless young minds.
Regardless, DiCaprio, who apparently also moonlights as a socio-political expert, aims to do much more than merely whip up a meringue of typical environmentalist hysteria. Rather, his ultimate goal is apparently nothing less than complete worldwide socio-economic reconstruction. According to DiCaprio, "the collapse of the environment is not the problem - it's a symptom. The real problem is industrial civilization and how we organize society." Can you say "Karl Marx?"
The mind boggles at the possible degree of social upheaval that he seeks. Does he actually intend to abolish all worldwide industry? Is it "goodbye manufacturing industry, and hello homemade sandals and garden sustenance?" Will pretentious Hollywood actors still be able to fly private jets and drive convoys of giant SUVs with blackened window tinting?
Levity aside, DiCaprio's bald partisan vitriol is nothing short of pathetic. On the movie's official website, DiCaprio narrates the usual tripe about "irreparable damage" to a supposedly-fragile Earth while sinister images of the White House, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice roll.
The official movie trailer subsequently trumpets the standard doomsday hyperbole, such as the claim that "the U.N. estimates that by the middle of the century, there may be 150 million environmental refugees." But don't hold your breath on that. DiCaprio and his silly army of associates in this nonsense would be well-advised to recall 1970s climate-change alarmist Paul Ehrlich, who boldly predicted worldwide starvation due to oncoming global cooling - yes, cooling.
Undeterred, the trailer then boldly pronounces that, "the tragedy is the potential extinction of humankind." A straight-faced DiCaprio then appears to appoint "our pivotal generation" (more pivotal than the World War II generation, Leo?) as responsible for "creating a sustainable world in time." Obligatory images of cute penguins and ridiculous contraptions such as ugly windmills and grass-covered buildings follow, creating a cavalcade of self-parody.
But never mind the facts. Years from now, when the utter absurdity of these enviro-economic fascists comes to light, such claims will be conveniently swept under the rug. By then, a new bogeyman will be fabricated by the Left to advance their collectivist, anti-freedom agenda.
In the meantime, however, this isn't all fun and games. It's easy to mock DiCaprio as the foolish airhead that he is, but the damage that he and people like him create is very real, and it's no laughing matter. Schoolchildren who will naturally be subjected to this nonsense are likely to swallow it wholesale, as will adult dupes who are unaware of the facts regarding natural climate fluctuation and the consequences of environmentalist orthodoxy.
Accordingly, everyone should do themselves a favor and read Christopher C. Horner's fantastic book entitled The Politically-Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. It's the perfect antidote to the lunacy of Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio.
Source
THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL WARMING: ECONOMIC MODELS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
This is an excerpt from the most recent contribution by econometrician Nordhaus. Nordhaus shows that the Kyoto approach is very inefficient in achieving its goals and that there is no urgency in dealing with any global warming
A. Preface
The issues involved in understanding global warming and taking policies to slow its harmful impacts are the major environmental challenge of the modern age. Global warming poses a unique mix of problems that arise from the fact that global warming is a global public good, is likely to be costly to slow or prevent, has daunting scientific and economic uncertainties, and casts a shadow over the globe for decades, perhaps even centuries to come.
The challenge of coping with global warming is particularly difficult because it spans many disciplines and parts of society. Ecologists may see it as a threat to ecosystems, marine biologists as a problem arising from ocean acidification, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and coal miners as an existential threat to their livelihood. Businesses may view global warming as either an opportunity or a hazard, politicians as a great issue as long as they don't need to mention taxes, ski resorts as a mortal danger to their already short seasons, golfers as a boon to year-round recreation, and poor countries as a threat to their farmers as well as a source of financial and technological aid.
This many-faceted nature also raises challenges to natural and social scientists, who must incorporate a wide variety of geophysical, economic, and political disciplines in their diagnoses and prescriptions. This is the age of global warming ... and of global-warming studies.
The present study uses the tools of economics and mathematical modeling to analyze efficient and inefficient approaches to slowing global warming. It describes a small but comprehensive model of the economy and climate called the DICE-2007 model, for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy. The current study is a completely revised version of earlier models developed by the author and collaborators to understand the economic and environmental dynamics of alternative approaches to slowing global warming. It represents the fifth major version of modeling efforts, with earlier versions developed in the periods 1974-1979, 1980-82, 1990-1994, and 1997-2000. Many of the equations and details have changed over the different generations, but the basic modeling philosophy remains unchanged: to incorporate the latest economic and scientific knowledge and to capture the major elements of the economics of climate change in as simple and transparent a fashion as is possible. The guiding philosophy is, in Leonardo's words, that "simplicity is the highest form of sophistication."
B. Reader's Guide to the Book
The current volume combines a description of the new version of the DICE model along with several analyses of major issues and policy proposals. We begin with a brief outline of the major chapters for those who would like a map of the terrain. We begin this book with a Summary for the Citizen, which describes the underlying approach and major results. This chapter stands alone and can be usefully read by non-economists who want the broad overview as well as specialists who would like an intuitive summary.
Chapter II provides a verbal description of the DICE model. Chapter III then provides a detailed description of the model's equations. The actual equations of the model are provided in Appendix A, while the GAMS computer code is provided in Appendix B. More details on the computer code and derivation of the program are available online. Chapter IV then describes the alternative policies that are analyzed in the computer runs. These include everything from the current Kyoto Protocol to an idealized perfectly efficient or "optimal" economic approach. Chapter V presents the major analytical results on the different policies, including the economic impacts, the carbon prices and control rates, and the effects on concentrations and temperature. Chapters VI through IX provide further analyses using the DICE model. Chapter VI begins with an analysis of the impacts of incomplete participation. This new modeling approach is able to capture analytically the economic and geophysical impacts of policies which include only a fraction of countries or sectors; it shows the importance of full participation. Chapter VII presents preliminary results on the impacts of uncertainty on policies and outcomes. Chapter VIII is a policy-oriented chapter that examines the two major approaches to controlling emissions - prices and quantities - and describes the surprising advantages of price-type approaches. Chapter IX provides an analysis, using the DICE model framework, of the recent Stern Review of the economics of climate change.
The final chapter contains some reservations about the results and then provides the major conclusions of the study. For those who are interested in the derivation of the model and technical details, these are available in a full set of documentation in Accompanying Notes [2007].
FULL PAPER here
"Doomsday Clock" hijacked by climate change alarmists
Radical Environmentalists Continue Politicization of Doomsday Clock, Literally Equating Climate Change to Nuclear Weapons
What does the famed nuclear war "Doomsday Clock" have to do with climate change hysteria? According to Al Gore's minions, everything. For the first time since the Clock's inception, its hands have been advanced for a reason other than the prospect of nuclear war. Not because of mass terrorism, not an outbreak of catastrophic conventional war, not political instability in a nuclear-armed nation or other concrete event, but rather due to that trendy, all-purpose bogeyman of the left - climate change.
First introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago in 1947, the iconic clock face shows the remaining "minutes to midnight," with midnight symbolizing humanity's nuclear destruction. The initial 1947 Clock showed seven minutes until midnight as the Cold War descended upon the world, and the minute hand has been advanced or turned back 19 times since that date in response to various geopolitical crises and the threat of global nuclear war. The Clock was advanced to just three minutes to midnight in 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, and again to just two minutes in 1953, when the United States and Soviet Union tested advanced hydrogen bombs within nine months of one another.
During subsequent years, the Clock became increasingly politicized to reflect the leftist sympathies of its Board of Directors. For instance, the Board illogically turned the Clock back to 12 minutes in 1972 with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, even though this treaty actually eliminated missile defense protections.
The politicized nature of the Clock became even more obvious with Ronald Reagan's ascent to the White House. During the 1980s, the Board predictably expressed its antipathy toward President Reagan, who ultimately ended the Cold War without firing a shot, by advancing the minute hand all the way to just three minutes before midnight. The Board's naked political basis for this decision is best illustrated by quoting its own website:
"The United States seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic-missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin... Reagan scraps any talk of arms control and proposes that the best way to end the Cold War is for the United States to win it."
Yes, how silly of that foolish warmonger Ronald Reagan to think that America could actually "win" the Cold War. The Kremlin itself couldn't have stated it in a more one-sided manner. In this light, the recent addition of climate change hysteria to the Clock's calculation is merely a pathetic continuation of its gradual politicization.
Nevertheless, the blatant incorporation of global warming silliness is astounding and noteworthy. On January 17, 2007, giddy with anticipation of the release of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the Board announced that it was advancing the Clock two minutes. Consequently, it now reads five minutes to midnight. According to the Clock's official website:
"We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause dramatic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival".
Of course, the Board neglects to mention that climate change hysterics in the 1970s asserted that global cooling, not global warming, was threatening massive crop failure and billions of human deaths through starvation. But that would be an "inconvenient truth," as Mr. Gore would say.
In what can only be charitably described as breathtaking absurdity, the Board proceeds to assert that climate change is second only to nuclear war in terms of its threat to human existence:
"Global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons".
Did the Board sleep through 9/11? Have they ever heard of Darfur? What about diseases such as malaria that still kill millions because environmentalists in wealthier countries oppose the use of simple preventative vaccines like DDT? One can only wonder what pet political issue the Clock's Board will attempt to dramatize by adding to its minute calculus. Socialized medicine? Secondhand smoke? Labor union protections? Trans-fats? Sadly, none of these would be a shock in light of the clock's politicized history.
Source
PRIEST OFFERS GREEN CONFESSION
Forgotten to recycle any newspapers or tin cans recently? Feeling guilty because you neglected to carbon offset your flight to somewhere, anywhere, outside England this summer? The Roman Catholic Church is at hand with a new line in "green confessions" to help eco-sinners to find forgiveness. Dom Anthony Sutch, the Benedictine monk who resigned as head of Downside School to become a parish priest in Suffolk, will be at the county's Waveney Greenpeace festival this weekend to hear eco-confessions in what is thought to be the first dedicated confessional booth of its kind.
Vested in a green chasuble-style garment made from recycled curtains, and in a booth constructed of recycled doors, he will hear the sins of of those who have not recycled the things they ought to have done and who have consumed the things they ought not to have done. Father Sutch tries to practise what he preaches but has turned the heating down so low at his church of St Benet's that at least one parishioner has fled to the warmer care of a neighbouring priest for winter services.
He told The Times: "It is not, I hope, blasphemous to do this. I do not think it is. It is just an attempt to make people conscious of the way they live. The Church is aware of green issues and of how aware we have to be of how we treat the environment. "I know the Pope has now set up his own airline, but I am told the Vatican will be planting trees every time it flies. I do think the way we treat our environment is important. "There is a huge amount of greed in the West. We have to be aware of the consequences of how we live."
FULL STORY here.
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Saturday, September 01, 2007
THE "CONSENSUS" EVAPORATES
Comprehensive survey of published climate research reveals varied viewpoints
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy.
The figures are surprising. Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.
Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations.
By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself. By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.
Source
European protectionists trump the Greenies
The European Commission has given in to industry pressure and extended the bloc's import duties on environment-friendly light bulbs made in China for another year. Critics argue the move is against Brussels' proclaimed support for energy efficiency and Europe's climate change ambitions.
Despite his previous intention, trade commissioner Peter Mandelson on Wednesday (29 August) suggested the EU's anti-dumping measure should go in a year, rather than straight away. "This case has once again shown the complexities of managing anti-dumping rules in a global economy and against the broad range of EU interests," Mr Mandelson stated.
The EU executive argues that a further delay on ceasing the tariffs - which add up to 66 percent on the value of bulbs - is justified by "overall community interest" to provide a sufficient transition period for European producers to prepare for it.
Source
An inconvenient fact
Dr. Patrick Moore -- a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver comments the latest stupid climate movie
It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts.
Here's a key piece of information DiCaprio, collaborator and long-time activist Tzeporah Berman and the leadership of my old organization Greenpeace are ignoring when it comes to forests and carbon: For British Columbians, living among the largest area of temperate rainforest in the world, managing our forests will be a key to reducing greenhouse gases
As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world's sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood. Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre..... The relationship between trees and greenhouse gases is simple enough on the surface. Trees grow by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, through photosynthesis, converting it into sugars. The sugars are then used as energy and materials to build cellulose and lignin, the main constituents of wood.
There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago. Berman, a veteran of the forestry protest movement, should by now have learned that young forests outperform old growth in carbon sequestration. Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.
When a tree rots or burns, the carbon contained in the wood is released back to the atmosphere. Since combustion releases carbon, active forest management -- such as removing dead trees and clearing debris from the forest floor -- will be imperative in reducing the number and intensity of fires....
In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.
The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.
To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.
DiCaprio's movie, The 11th Hour, is another example of anti-forestry scare tactics, this time said to be "brilliant and terrifying" by James Christopher of the London Times. Maybe so, but instead of surrendering to the terror, keep in mind that there are solutions to the challenges of climate, and our forests are among them. This film should be a good, clear reminder for us to put the science before the Hollywood hype.
More here
The Gospel according to Gore
You may have missed it, but April 22nd was National Day of Hope, Prayer and Reflection about Global Warming - presumably not by the edict of the current administration. In the political world Bush is becoming more and more isolated in his stance on this subject. Other public figures are acquiescing one by one. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once seemed likely to be an unmovable bastion of big-business conservatism, has been converted and is on the cover of Newsweek, twirling a fragile and endangered world on his finger and announcing draconian measures to limit carbon emissions in California. He's a believer.
Global warming has galvanized the developed world. Liberals sound the warning, Conservatives respond with gradually mounting enthusiasm. Clergy fall to their knees in prayer and repentance. Atheists find new purpose and a moral lodestone. Americans slap concerned bumper stickers on their SUVs and flock to "An Inconvenient Truth". Hollywood swoons and bestows on Gore's slideshow two Academy Awards. The scientific community churns out technical paper after paper in the journals reporting the mounting evidence.
Or do they? Gore assures us of it, stating that there is no controversy. He refers to the multitudes of the world's top scientists voicing unmitigated concern through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. He cites a study of a random sample of 928 articles on global warming, none of which were found to express doubt. There is a consensus.
However, Michael Crichton (best known for his novels but also a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies) warned his audience of the dangers of "consensus science" in a 2003 speech:
Think of Semmelweiss and puerperal fever. Think of Goldberger and pellagra. Even Gore's favorite example of continental drift highlights the folly of the scientific consensus that mocked Alfred Wegener's theory of Pangaea for half a century.
Al Gore Goes to Hollywood (but not to Caltech)
In his film Gore urges an auditorium full of students to "separate the truth from the fiction and the accurate connections from the misunderstandings". In keeping with that exhortation I watched the An Inconvenient Truth with careful attention to the research on which its arguments were founded. At the time of my second viewing, I began to take notes and read the scientific literature.
Within the first half hour of the film it is clear that Gore does not see global warming merely as a future threat. He states, "Now we're beginning to see the impact in the real world." The example of this impact that made the biggest impression on me was that of Lake Chad in Northern Africa. Gore showed dramatic satellite images demonstrating the rapid shrinking of the once-giant lake to near dryness since the turn of the previous century. He suggested that this water shortage has brought on the conditions that have lead to the tragedy and mass violence in the bordering areas of Niger and Darfur. This made me listen. What would it take for a lake of such magnitude to dry up? The warming must be dramatic indeed. I decided to Google it.
The Lake Chad deception
The first site that came up was Wikipedia, where I learned that, indeed, Lake Chad is a critical water source for over 20 million people and its rapid shrinkage is extensively documented. At this point the surface area is about 1,350 square km , down from its all time high of about 400,000 square km in about 4,000 BC. However, there were also some details that Gore failed to mention. The lake itself is only seven meters deep at its deepest. Its average depth currently is 1.5 - 4.5 meters depending on your source). Essentially, it is a large and geo-politically important swamp. For comparison, Lake Champlain covers approximately the same amount of land and has an average depth of 19.5 m and a max depth of 112. Lake George, with one-tenth the surface area, is almost nine times as deep.
It turns out Lake Chad has actually been dry multiple times in the past: in 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC and 100 BC. Though Wikipedia and a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research on the topic agree that global climate change may have played a role, they also report that the major factors were significant local changes - a rapidly expanding population drawing water from the lake, the introduction of irrigation technologies and local overgrazing. Yes, these are anthropogenic causes, but they are neither global nor warming, and are utterly independent of CO2 . In addition, Africa as a continent experienced a dramatic shift towards dryer weather in the end of the 19th century that is not generally attributed to CO2 . (Coe, M.T. and J.A. Foley, Human and natural impacts on the water resources of the Lake Chad basin. Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 106, D4, 3349-3356. 2001) Gore might as well have photographed a glass of water on a picnic table, called it a lake, drunk its contents and then attributed the change to global warming. Was he purposefully misrepresenting the evidence or had he really not done his homework even on the most basic level?
The Kilimanjaro deception
The shrinking of the snows of Kilimanjaro is another dramatic example. Scientists have noted this phenomenon for over a hundred years. A search of the scholarly literature immediately produced Georg Kaser's 2004 article in The International Journal of Climatology on the subject. He states that all three of the major East African glaciers have seen significant retreat since the late 1800s. Kaser writes, "The dominant reasons for this strong recession in modern times are reduced precipitation and increased availability of shortwave radiation due to decreases in cloudiness". This dryness began relatively abruptly around 1880. "In contrast to this 'switch' in moisture conditions, there is no evidence of an abrupt change in air temperature.... Temperature increases in the tropics on the surface and in the troposphere have been little in recent decades compared with the global trend." The very shape of the glacier speaks out against Gore's theory: melting from temperature rise "would round-off and destroy the observed features within a very short time, ranging from hours to days". Indeed, a year and a half record from 2000-2002 showed that air temperatures never exceeded -1.6 degrees C (in fact, Gore's friend Lonnie Thompson reports that the temperatures never rose above -2 degrees C during his research there), and permafrost extends far below the edge of the glacier. (Kaser et al, Int. J. Climatol. 24: 329-339 (2004)) In other words, not only is the recession of Mt. Kilimanjaro's snowy peak probably not due to CO2 -induced temperature rise, it isn't even driven by temperature rise at all.
At this point I would like to make a note about methodology. To find the papers cited throughout this article I searched Google Scholar and occasionally individual publications, such as Science. (For example, when I wanted to find articles about Lake Chad, I typed in "Lake Chad", and for the ice core record, I entered "ice core record" and "ice core record timing".) I did not dig though dozens of studies to pick out these ones. Some of these papers, in fact, include statements affirming the authors' belief in global warming despite the lack of evidence for it in their study.
Perhaps you are wondering where Gore got his article proving the undisputed "consensus" on global warming. The original review of the scientific literature was published in a non-peer reviewed essay section of Science, written by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at UCSD. Her search included articles with "climate change" as a keyword. The study was cited and expanded in a paper in the political journal, Globalizations, which added the analysis of popular media. A statement by Dr. Oreskes that was not included in the Globalizations article read, "The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility.." In light of that, I encourage you to look at the evidence for yourself, but I recommend you start with peer-reviewed articles before resorting to the essay section of Science, let alone the science section of Globalizatons or Newsweek.
There is one piece of evidence that is particularly accessible to medical students for critical analysis: Gore pointed out the potential for increases in infectious diseases due to expansion of areas suitable for insect vectors. To illustrate this he listed fifteen new or recently resurgent diseases: Ebola, Arena virus, Hanta virus, SARS, multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB), E. coli 0157:H7, Lyme disease, legionnaire's disease, Vibrio Cholerae 0139, Nipah virus, malaria, dengue fever, leptospirosis, West Nile virus, and Avian flu.
This litany of killers is impressive until you realize that out of the fifteen, only Lyme, malaria, dengue and West Nile virus are spread by insect vectors. A closer look at those four even further confounds the point. Lyme disease - far from being a tropical disease spreading northwards - originated in the temperate climate of Lyme, CT and spread South and West. Malaria is a disease confined to the tropics more for socioeconomic reasons than climatologic ones, and it was once prevalent in Siberia and Northern Europe. Its decline in these areas happened largely during warming periods of history. There has been a recent resurgence of malaria in some Eastern European countries that the WHO attributes to socioeconomic instability.
Paul Reiter from the Pasteur Institute in Paris published a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, refuting the section of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report on infectious diseases. (Reiter was actually drafted to be one of the authors of the IPCC report, but withdrew and actually threatened to sue the organization to have his name removed from the author list because he was so disgusted with the inaccuracy of the final product.) He focused on the misrepresentation of malaria and the lack of any evidence for climate-associated spread of dengue fever. Of these diseases, the one most commonly attributed to Global warming is West Nile Virus (WNV). Once again, the science doesn't hold up. The disease vector, Culex pipiens (also responsible for transmitting St. Louis encephalitis), is the most widely distributed mosquito in the world, common on every continent but Antarctica. Prevalent in temperate, not tropical, zones, it is readily found as far north as Nova Scotia. WNV's arrival in the US had nothing to do with changes in vector habitat conditions. (Emerg Infect Dis 6(4), 2000; and also Environmental Health Perspectives /Supplements Volume 109, Number S1, March 2001)
On the other hand, two of the diseases - SARS and MDR TB - are transmitted person-to-person by aerosolized droplets and are therefore more likely to be spread during cold weather when people are in closer quarters. This is evidenced not only by the pattern of their epidemiology (apartment buildings for SARS, prisons for TB) but also by the seasonal (winter) pattern that we see in the US of other infections transmitted through the respiratory tract. Conversely, it could be argued that increased use of air conditioners - one route of dissemination for Legionella pneumophilia - in a warmer world might lead to a higher incidence of legionnaire's disease. I guess. It's a stretch.
Arena virus, Hanta virus and leptospirosis are spread by aerosolized rodent feces or direct contact with rats. Human contact with rodent population is complex and poorly studied, but epidemiologic data show that it is largely related to precipitation and flooding, with no correlation to warming. (Climate Variability and Change in the United States: Potential Impacts on Vector and Rodent-Borne Diseases, Environ Health Perspect. 2001 May; 109 (Suppl 2): 223-233) The effect of climate change on pigs (the Nipah virus vector), chickens (Avian flu) and non-human primates (the presumed vector for Ebola) is not immediately obvious. (Though the effect of socioeconomic development on the incidence of people living in close contact with these animals is clear.) New strains of V. cholera and E. coli are spread the same way as the old strains: contaminated food or water - again, the role of climate, if there is any, is insignificant compared to socioeconomic and hygienic factors. (Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine, 2nd Ed. Eddleston, M et al. 2005)
To return to Gore's original point, however, there is no evidence that any of these diseases emerged or resurged due to global climate change. Talking about these diseases in an article about Global warming is like listing Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin as examples of the depravity of American politicians. Like the tragedies in Darfur and the loss of Mt Kilimanjaro's glaciers their mention in An Inconvenient Truth is totally irrelevant and manipulative - just smoke and mirrors, a distraction from the dearth of good evidence.
But these kinds of "examples" go on and on: another is the storm argument. Are we having more storms, as the film states? Not according to an article last year in the journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. "Any changes associated with warming of the surface compared to a smaller temperature rise in the lower-troposphere (and resultant changes in atmospheric stability) have not produced detectable impacts on intensification rates of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin." (Balling, R. C. ; Cerveny, R. S. Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, Volume 93, Issue 1-2, pp. 45-51, 2006)
Shall we address them all: the drowning computer-animated polar bear, the simulated submersion of Calcutta...?
Even if every example of the current impact of CO2 driven temperature rise could be disproved, one stunning visual from the movie remains to haunt the viewer with doubts. Gore shows us two lines - one plotting temperature over the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, the other plotting atmospheric carbon dioxide. They appear to rise and fall with a synchronicity that would be the envy of many an aquatic acrobat. If temperature and carbon dioxide really have shown such a strong correlation over the centuries, isn't it still probable that CO2 drives temperature? This is possible, of course, provided that the CO2 rises coincide with or slightly predate the rises in temperature. Correlation is sensitive, but not specific - it can pick up a whole range of possible causes, but cannot prove causation. On the other hand, as we have all learned by now, if a sensitive test is negative, it can rule out a potential cause. Lack of correlation rules out proximate causation. Is CO2 inducing this global fever? Probably not.
The direction of causation fraud
That is, not if you trust the ice core records that Gore speaks so highly of in his Oscar-winning Powerpoint presentation. The Antarctic melting during the third glacial termination (210-225 thousand years ago) show that the CO2 rise lagged behind the temperature increase by about 800 years. An article by Fischer in Science reported a lag of 400-1000 years during all three glacial interglacial transitions on record. A later analysis using argon - which has been shown to correlate with temperature as well as the standard oxygen isotopes and would be less prone to inaccuracies in timing - confirmed the previously reported findings. That kind of a lag is easy to miss in charts covering hundreds of millennia, but it is hard to dismiss as insignificant on a practical level. The Fischer article states that the generally observed correlation between CO2 and temperature rise and fall is "connected to a climate-driven net transfer of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere". In other words, the ocean acts as an enormous organism that exhales carbon dioxide during warming periods of earth's history, and absorbs it during periods of cooling. Caillon et al report that "this confirms that CO2 is not the forcing [that is, the causative factor] that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation". (Caillon, N. et al, Science 14 March 2003: Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 - 1731; Fischer, H et al, Science 12 March 1999: Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 - 1714).
The temperature records have more to tell: even with a cursory investigation of Gore's charts you will notice that the temperature rises during the early part of the 20th century. This rise begins decades before cars or planes were in use, at a time when the global economy was struggling under war and economic depression. Industry, and with it, CO2 emissions, didn't really take off until the post-war period, at which point temperatures went down. I'm not making this up.
"But these details are missing the point," I hear you cry. "The critical issue is that we're seeing extreme, rapid climate changes." Not really. If you look back at Gore's chart of the past couple hundred thousand years (though not his chart of the past 2000 years which does not resemble any other temperature record I've come across), even he shows our current temperature as still within the high end of the normal limits. His graph also reveals something else, noted by a team of Chinese scientists in The Geophysical Research Letters in 2003. In their paper Ming Tan and his colleagues record data taken from temperature proxies found in a 2560-year-old stalagmite. They report that, over this period warming and cooling trends have followed a distinct pattern: They report that, over this period warming and cooling trends have followed a distinct pattern: the warming occurring rapidly over approximately a century followed by gradual, multi-centennial cooling, creating what they described as a "saw-toothed pattern". (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003. This article also contains a markedly different two millennia temperature record than that shown in An Inconvenient Truth.) Based on available records, the current warming curve is consistent with the known historical pattern.
Unlikely CO2, possible meteorites, probable sunshine
Carbon dioxide has never driven temperature. In fact, the evidence shows that historically, temperature has driven CO2 . We cannot rule out the possibility that CO2 could drive climate, just as it would be hard to rule out the possibility of a devastating meteor striking earth. But we are not enacting expensive legislation to erect retractable meteorite shields around major US cities, or pouring money into the development of meoteorite-proof material. No one is pressuring poor nations to sign treaties swearing they will dedicate a portion of their meager GDP to combat this potential threat. It would be absurd. And in that case we're talking about an event that has actually happened in the past.
So, if it isn't CO2 , what does drive climate change? I don't know. One convincing theory is that of solar magnetic activity and irradiance - two separate but generally coinciding phenomena. An article in the Astrophysical Journal in 1996 argues for a combined effect of greenhouse gasses and solar factors, with solar factors contributing a more significant amount. (The Astrophysical J., 472: 891-902, 1996 Dec 1) The authors of the article on the saw-toothed climate pattern favor the solar explanation, saying, "All centennial to sub-millennial scale cycles exhibited by the WTR [warm season temperature record] could be connected to solar variation cycles of about 208, 350, 700 and 950 years." (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003) Other articles expressly denounce these solar theories or claim they are insufficient to account for the full extent of the warming. (The Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 25, No. 23, pp 4377-4380, Dec. 1, 1998; GSA Today, v. 14, no. 3, 1052-5173, 2004) There is the potential for localized anthropogenic warming effects secondary to changes in land use, which have been widely documented and are known as the "urban heat island effect". (e.g. The Urban Heat Island Effect at Fairbanks, Alaska, Theoretical and Applied Climatology; Volume 64, Numbers 1-2 / October, 1999, pp. 39-47) There are the ocean currents and oscillations, such as the Gulf Stream and El Nino, that have changed throughout the Earth's history and to which many significant warming and cooling effects are attributed. The fact is, weather is a complex, perhaps even chaotic, system. It is determined by multi-factorial processes. Some variables are independent and others are interdependent in complex and unpredictable ways. Some are subject to human manipulation, but we are utterly at the mercy of others.
Crichton states, "Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?" He goes on to point out:
Counting the cost of the precautionary principle
People will appeal to the Precautionary Principle - that it's better to be safe than sorry. Why not sign global treaties to limit carbon emissions? The April 16th Newsweek had a telling map entitled "Leaders and Laggers". Based on the Environmental Performance Index from Yale, it rated countries based on how environmentally friendly their policies were - the "leaders" dark green and the "laggers" in coal black. One immediately notes a rough correlation between wealth and environmental policy on this map. Why not encourage developing nations to get with the program and use more "clean energy"?
Well, why don't you have a solar paneled house? Probably because it's too expensive. No matter what we say about saving costs down the road, as a practical matter these solar technologies involve too much of an initial capital investment to be feasible for most Americans. Installation costs for one entirely solar house in Boston was $35,456. Presumably the technology will get cheaper and more efficient in the future, but this is where it stands today. A recent article came out about a group of Virginia Tech engineering students who designed a solar energy system to power a clinic in Getongoroma village in Southwestern Kenya. The high tech system will provide the clinic with an ample 24 kilowatt hours per day (25% more than was requested, but still 20% less than the average US household uses). The projected cost: $120,000. Surrounded by the relative riches of America, the project is still in the fund raising stage. How can we possibly be serious in prescribing this to countries where the average person earns a couple of dollars a day? James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist and author, has said, "The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy. But for us, we are still at the stage of survival."
Of course, there are places where solar energy is the best option for electricity in developing countries. These are generally places that have no hope of getting connected with a power grid, such as remote clinics in agricultural communities in Kenya or guerilla-controlled areas of Burma. The technology generally used in clinics along the Thai-Burmese border, for example, utilizes solar panels which each cost $525. Sounds a little more reasonable, right? Each of these panels supplies 130 watts of power. If you have two incandescent light bulbs on in your house right now, you are probably exceeding this wattage. If you made coffee this morning, you used almost seven times this amount of power. The medics along the Thai-Burma border don't really focus much on immunizations because a refrigerator requires at least 200-700 watts of power. Of course, this also precludes the possibility of blood banks, in a part of the world where medics are frequently faced with treating postpartum hemorrhage, malarial hemolysis and trauma. At a household level, lack of refrigeration has profound repercussions in the form of prevalent and deadly diarrheal diseases that account for 50% of childhood mortality in this population. What else might you want in a clinic? An ultrasound? Cautery? A microscope that can be used at night? A pulse-oximeter? A UV lamp?
These affordable solar panels are a valuable stopgap, but they are by no means a permanent panacea for the word's energy needs. Economist James Shikwati says, "I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway train network. It might work to power a small transistor radio.. One clear thing that emerges from [this] debate is the point that there's somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop." By telling developing countries to use "clean energy sources" what we are saying is, "You will not have electricity at all." We are saying, "You will live a life of backbreaking work. You will see at least one of your children die in early childhood, probably more than that. You will experience incomparably more painful and dangerous pregnancy and labor than women in developed countries, and you will face it more frequently because you will fear losing your children to disease, starvation or violence. You will be too busy struggling for survival to protest the rampant official corruption or the government troops who rape you, destroy your villages and disregard your votes. Ultimately, you will die 20-30 years younger than I will. "But it will be worth it, because I've been told there is a scientific consensus that all this is necessary to avert global warming."
Source
"Green" building goes brown
A YEAR after it was launched amid much green fanfare, the building touted as Australia's best environmental performer has come under fire because several of its environmental features do not yet work. Teething problems at CH2 - Melbourne City Council's new state-of-the-art offices - include a sewage recycling system not yet operating, extra lighting having been installed after staff complained it was too dark, rooftop turbines not performing to expectations, and problems with plumbing leaving unpleasant odours. There were concerns about "shower towers" mounted on the building's side, designed to provide an air-conditioning alternative. They are functioning now, but were shut in February after legionella was found in the building's cooling system.
When asked about the building's environmental performance, Lord Mayor John So said yesterday CH2 was producing 80 per cent fewer emissions than comparable office buildings. But his response is at odds with his own council's report two months ago, which conceded there was no data on the building's environmental performance because it had not yet been assessed.
Green building expert Peter Szental, the man responsible for Australia's first refurbished office building to get a six-star Green Star rating, commended the council on its vision, but said many of CH2's environmental initiatives did not yet work. "There's no chance they would get a six-star rating if they were audited," Mr Szental said. "If you're going to the cutting edge, obviously some things are not going to work. But we really need to know what works and what doesn't." Mr Szental also questioned council claims that productivity would increase by 4.9 per cent.
Staff in the building have complained about noise levels in the open-plan offices. And an overwhelming stench from waterless urinals has been another source of consternation.
Source
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Comprehensive survey of published climate research reveals varied viewpoints
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy.
The figures are surprising. Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.
Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations.
By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself. By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.
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European protectionists trump the Greenies
The European Commission has given in to industry pressure and extended the bloc's import duties on environment-friendly light bulbs made in China for another year. Critics argue the move is against Brussels' proclaimed support for energy efficiency and Europe's climate change ambitions.
Despite his previous intention, trade commissioner Peter Mandelson on Wednesday (29 August) suggested the EU's anti-dumping measure should go in a year, rather than straight away. "This case has once again shown the complexities of managing anti-dumping rules in a global economy and against the broad range of EU interests," Mr Mandelson stated.
The EU executive argues that a further delay on ceasing the tariffs - which add up to 66 percent on the value of bulbs - is justified by "overall community interest" to provide a sufficient transition period for European producers to prepare for it.
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An inconvenient fact
Dr. Patrick Moore -- a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver comments the latest stupid climate movie
It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts.
Here's a key piece of information DiCaprio, collaborator and long-time activist Tzeporah Berman and the leadership of my old organization Greenpeace are ignoring when it comes to forests and carbon: For British Columbians, living among the largest area of temperate rainforest in the world, managing our forests will be a key to reducing greenhouse gases
As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world's sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood. Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre..... The relationship between trees and greenhouse gases is simple enough on the surface. Trees grow by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, through photosynthesis, converting it into sugars. The sugars are then used as energy and materials to build cellulose and lignin, the main constituents of wood.
There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago. Berman, a veteran of the forestry protest movement, should by now have learned that young forests outperform old growth in carbon sequestration. Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.
When a tree rots or burns, the carbon contained in the wood is released back to the atmosphere. Since combustion releases carbon, active forest management -- such as removing dead trees and clearing debris from the forest floor -- will be imperative in reducing the number and intensity of fires....
In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.
The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.
To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.
DiCaprio's movie, The 11th Hour, is another example of anti-forestry scare tactics, this time said to be "brilliant and terrifying" by James Christopher of the London Times. Maybe so, but instead of surrendering to the terror, keep in mind that there are solutions to the challenges of climate, and our forests are among them. This film should be a good, clear reminder for us to put the science before the Hollywood hype.
More here
The Gospel according to Gore
You may have missed it, but April 22nd was National Day of Hope, Prayer and Reflection about Global Warming - presumably not by the edict of the current administration. In the political world Bush is becoming more and more isolated in his stance on this subject. Other public figures are acquiescing one by one. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once seemed likely to be an unmovable bastion of big-business conservatism, has been converted and is on the cover of Newsweek, twirling a fragile and endangered world on his finger and announcing draconian measures to limit carbon emissions in California. He's a believer.
Global warming has galvanized the developed world. Liberals sound the warning, Conservatives respond with gradually mounting enthusiasm. Clergy fall to their knees in prayer and repentance. Atheists find new purpose and a moral lodestone. Americans slap concerned bumper stickers on their SUVs and flock to "An Inconvenient Truth". Hollywood swoons and bestows on Gore's slideshow two Academy Awards. The scientific community churns out technical paper after paper in the journals reporting the mounting evidence.
Or do they? Gore assures us of it, stating that there is no controversy. He refers to the multitudes of the world's top scientists voicing unmitigated concern through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. He cites a study of a random sample of 928 articles on global warming, none of which were found to express doubt. There is a consensus.
However, Michael Crichton (best known for his novels but also a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies) warned his audience of the dangers of "consensus science" in a 2003 speech:
"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. "Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
Think of Semmelweiss and puerperal fever. Think of Goldberger and pellagra. Even Gore's favorite example of continental drift highlights the folly of the scientific consensus that mocked Alfred Wegener's theory of Pangaea for half a century.
Al Gore Goes to Hollywood (but not to Caltech)
In his film Gore urges an auditorium full of students to "separate the truth from the fiction and the accurate connections from the misunderstandings". In keeping with that exhortation I watched the An Inconvenient Truth with careful attention to the research on which its arguments were founded. At the time of my second viewing, I began to take notes and read the scientific literature.
Within the first half hour of the film it is clear that Gore does not see global warming merely as a future threat. He states, "Now we're beginning to see the impact in the real world." The example of this impact that made the biggest impression on me was that of Lake Chad in Northern Africa. Gore showed dramatic satellite images demonstrating the rapid shrinking of the once-giant lake to near dryness since the turn of the previous century. He suggested that this water shortage has brought on the conditions that have lead to the tragedy and mass violence in the bordering areas of Niger and Darfur. This made me listen. What would it take for a lake of such magnitude to dry up? The warming must be dramatic indeed. I decided to Google it.
The Lake Chad deception
The first site that came up was Wikipedia, where I learned that, indeed, Lake Chad is a critical water source for over 20 million people and its rapid shrinkage is extensively documented. At this point the surface area is about 1,350 square km , down from its all time high of about 400,000 square km in about 4,000 BC. However, there were also some details that Gore failed to mention. The lake itself is only seven meters deep at its deepest. Its average depth currently is 1.5 - 4.5 meters depending on your source). Essentially, it is a large and geo-politically important swamp. For comparison, Lake Champlain covers approximately the same amount of land and has an average depth of 19.5 m and a max depth of 112. Lake George, with one-tenth the surface area, is almost nine times as deep.
It turns out Lake Chad has actually been dry multiple times in the past: in 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 2000 BC and 100 BC. Though Wikipedia and a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research on the topic agree that global climate change may have played a role, they also report that the major factors were significant local changes - a rapidly expanding population drawing water from the lake, the introduction of irrigation technologies and local overgrazing. Yes, these are anthropogenic causes, but they are neither global nor warming, and are utterly independent of CO2 . In addition, Africa as a continent experienced a dramatic shift towards dryer weather in the end of the 19th century that is not generally attributed to CO2 . (Coe, M.T. and J.A. Foley, Human and natural impacts on the water resources of the Lake Chad basin. Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 106, D4, 3349-3356. 2001) Gore might as well have photographed a glass of water on a picnic table, called it a lake, drunk its contents and then attributed the change to global warming. Was he purposefully misrepresenting the evidence or had he really not done his homework even on the most basic level?
The Kilimanjaro deception
The shrinking of the snows of Kilimanjaro is another dramatic example. Scientists have noted this phenomenon for over a hundred years. A search of the scholarly literature immediately produced Georg Kaser's 2004 article in The International Journal of Climatology on the subject. He states that all three of the major East African glaciers have seen significant retreat since the late 1800s. Kaser writes, "The dominant reasons for this strong recession in modern times are reduced precipitation and increased availability of shortwave radiation due to decreases in cloudiness". This dryness began relatively abruptly around 1880. "In contrast to this 'switch' in moisture conditions, there is no evidence of an abrupt change in air temperature.... Temperature increases in the tropics on the surface and in the troposphere have been little in recent decades compared with the global trend." The very shape of the glacier speaks out against Gore's theory: melting from temperature rise "would round-off and destroy the observed features within a very short time, ranging from hours to days". Indeed, a year and a half record from 2000-2002 showed that air temperatures never exceeded -1.6 degrees C (in fact, Gore's friend Lonnie Thompson reports that the temperatures never rose above -2 degrees C during his research there), and permafrost extends far below the edge of the glacier. (Kaser et al, Int. J. Climatol. 24: 329-339 (2004)) In other words, not only is the recession of Mt. Kilimanjaro's snowy peak probably not due to CO2 -induced temperature rise, it isn't even driven by temperature rise at all.
At this point I would like to make a note about methodology. To find the papers cited throughout this article I searched Google Scholar and occasionally individual publications, such as Science. (For example, when I wanted to find articles about Lake Chad, I typed in "Lake Chad", and for the ice core record, I entered "ice core record" and "ice core record timing".) I did not dig though dozens of studies to pick out these ones. Some of these papers, in fact, include statements affirming the authors' belief in global warming despite the lack of evidence for it in their study.
Perhaps you are wondering where Gore got his article proving the undisputed "consensus" on global warming. The original review of the scientific literature was published in a non-peer reviewed essay section of Science, written by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at UCSD. Her search included articles with "climate change" as a keyword. The study was cited and expanded in a paper in the political journal, Globalizations, which added the analysis of popular media. A statement by Dr. Oreskes that was not included in the Globalizations article read, "The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility.." In light of that, I encourage you to look at the evidence for yourself, but I recommend you start with peer-reviewed articles before resorting to the essay section of Science, let alone the science section of Globalizatons or Newsweek.
There is one piece of evidence that is particularly accessible to medical students for critical analysis: Gore pointed out the potential for increases in infectious diseases due to expansion of areas suitable for insect vectors. To illustrate this he listed fifteen new or recently resurgent diseases: Ebola, Arena virus, Hanta virus, SARS, multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR TB), E. coli 0157:H7, Lyme disease, legionnaire's disease, Vibrio Cholerae 0139, Nipah virus, malaria, dengue fever, leptospirosis, West Nile virus, and Avian flu.
This litany of killers is impressive until you realize that out of the fifteen, only Lyme, malaria, dengue and West Nile virus are spread by insect vectors. A closer look at those four even further confounds the point. Lyme disease - far from being a tropical disease spreading northwards - originated in the temperate climate of Lyme, CT and spread South and West. Malaria is a disease confined to the tropics more for socioeconomic reasons than climatologic ones, and it was once prevalent in Siberia and Northern Europe. Its decline in these areas happened largely during warming periods of history. There has been a recent resurgence of malaria in some Eastern European countries that the WHO attributes to socioeconomic instability.
Paul Reiter from the Pasteur Institute in Paris published a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, refuting the section of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report on infectious diseases. (Reiter was actually drafted to be one of the authors of the IPCC report, but withdrew and actually threatened to sue the organization to have his name removed from the author list because he was so disgusted with the inaccuracy of the final product.) He focused on the misrepresentation of malaria and the lack of any evidence for climate-associated spread of dengue fever. Of these diseases, the one most commonly attributed to Global warming is West Nile Virus (WNV). Once again, the science doesn't hold up. The disease vector, Culex pipiens (also responsible for transmitting St. Louis encephalitis), is the most widely distributed mosquito in the world, common on every continent but Antarctica. Prevalent in temperate, not tropical, zones, it is readily found as far north as Nova Scotia. WNV's arrival in the US had nothing to do with changes in vector habitat conditions. (Emerg Infect Dis 6(4), 2000; and also Environmental Health Perspectives /Supplements Volume 109, Number S1, March 2001)
On the other hand, two of the diseases - SARS and MDR TB - are transmitted person-to-person by aerosolized droplets and are therefore more likely to be spread during cold weather when people are in closer quarters. This is evidenced not only by the pattern of their epidemiology (apartment buildings for SARS, prisons for TB) but also by the seasonal (winter) pattern that we see in the US of other infections transmitted through the respiratory tract. Conversely, it could be argued that increased use of air conditioners - one route of dissemination for Legionella pneumophilia - in a warmer world might lead to a higher incidence of legionnaire's disease. I guess. It's a stretch.
Arena virus, Hanta virus and leptospirosis are spread by aerosolized rodent feces or direct contact with rats. Human contact with rodent population is complex and poorly studied, but epidemiologic data show that it is largely related to precipitation and flooding, with no correlation to warming. (Climate Variability and Change in the United States: Potential Impacts on Vector and Rodent-Borne Diseases, Environ Health Perspect. 2001 May; 109 (Suppl 2): 223-233) The effect of climate change on pigs (the Nipah virus vector), chickens (Avian flu) and non-human primates (the presumed vector for Ebola) is not immediately obvious. (Though the effect of socioeconomic development on the incidence of people living in close contact with these animals is clear.) New strains of V. cholera and E. coli are spread the same way as the old strains: contaminated food or water - again, the role of climate, if there is any, is insignificant compared to socioeconomic and hygienic factors. (Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine, 2nd Ed. Eddleston, M et al. 2005)
To return to Gore's original point, however, there is no evidence that any of these diseases emerged or resurged due to global climate change. Talking about these diseases in an article about Global warming is like listing Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin as examples of the depravity of American politicians. Like the tragedies in Darfur and the loss of Mt Kilimanjaro's glaciers their mention in An Inconvenient Truth is totally irrelevant and manipulative - just smoke and mirrors, a distraction from the dearth of good evidence.
But these kinds of "examples" go on and on: another is the storm argument. Are we having more storms, as the film states? Not according to an article last year in the journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. "Any changes associated with warming of the surface compared to a smaller temperature rise in the lower-troposphere (and resultant changes in atmospheric stability) have not produced detectable impacts on intensification rates of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin." (Balling, R. C. ; Cerveny, R. S. Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, Volume 93, Issue 1-2, pp. 45-51, 2006)
Shall we address them all: the drowning computer-animated polar bear, the simulated submersion of Calcutta...?
Even if every example of the current impact of CO2 driven temperature rise could be disproved, one stunning visual from the movie remains to haunt the viewer with doubts. Gore shows us two lines - one plotting temperature over the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, the other plotting atmospheric carbon dioxide. They appear to rise and fall with a synchronicity that would be the envy of many an aquatic acrobat. If temperature and carbon dioxide really have shown such a strong correlation over the centuries, isn't it still probable that CO2 drives temperature? This is possible, of course, provided that the CO2 rises coincide with or slightly predate the rises in temperature. Correlation is sensitive, but not specific - it can pick up a whole range of possible causes, but cannot prove causation. On the other hand, as we have all learned by now, if a sensitive test is negative, it can rule out a potential cause. Lack of correlation rules out proximate causation. Is CO2 inducing this global fever? Probably not.
The direction of causation fraud
That is, not if you trust the ice core records that Gore speaks so highly of in his Oscar-winning Powerpoint presentation. The Antarctic melting during the third glacial termination (210-225 thousand years ago) show that the CO2 rise lagged behind the temperature increase by about 800 years. An article by Fischer in Science reported a lag of 400-1000 years during all three glacial interglacial transitions on record. A later analysis using argon - which has been shown to correlate with temperature as well as the standard oxygen isotopes and would be less prone to inaccuracies in timing - confirmed the previously reported findings. That kind of a lag is easy to miss in charts covering hundreds of millennia, but it is hard to dismiss as insignificant on a practical level. The Fischer article states that the generally observed correlation between CO2 and temperature rise and fall is "connected to a climate-driven net transfer of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere". In other words, the ocean acts as an enormous organism that exhales carbon dioxide during warming periods of earth's history, and absorbs it during periods of cooling. Caillon et al report that "this confirms that CO2 is not the forcing [that is, the causative factor] that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation". (Caillon, N. et al, Science 14 March 2003: Vol. 299. no. 5613, pp. 1728 - 1731; Fischer, H et al, Science 12 March 1999: Vol. 283. no. 5408, pp. 1712 - 1714).
The temperature records have more to tell: even with a cursory investigation of Gore's charts you will notice that the temperature rises during the early part of the 20th century. This rise begins decades before cars or planes were in use, at a time when the global economy was struggling under war and economic depression. Industry, and with it, CO2 emissions, didn't really take off until the post-war period, at which point temperatures went down. I'm not making this up.
"But these details are missing the point," I hear you cry. "The critical issue is that we're seeing extreme, rapid climate changes." Not really. If you look back at Gore's chart of the past couple hundred thousand years (though not his chart of the past 2000 years which does not resemble any other temperature record I've come across), even he shows our current temperature as still within the high end of the normal limits. His graph also reveals something else, noted by a team of Chinese scientists in The Geophysical Research Letters in 2003. In their paper Ming Tan and his colleagues record data taken from temperature proxies found in a 2560-year-old stalagmite. They report that, over this period warming and cooling trends have followed a distinct pattern: They report that, over this period warming and cooling trends have followed a distinct pattern: the warming occurring rapidly over approximately a century followed by gradual, multi-centennial cooling, creating what they described as a "saw-toothed pattern". (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003. This article also contains a markedly different two millennia temperature record than that shown in An Inconvenient Truth.) Based on available records, the current warming curve is consistent with the known historical pattern.
Unlikely CO2, possible meteorites, probable sunshine
Carbon dioxide has never driven temperature. In fact, the evidence shows that historically, temperature has driven CO2 . We cannot rule out the possibility that CO2 could drive climate, just as it would be hard to rule out the possibility of a devastating meteor striking earth. But we are not enacting expensive legislation to erect retractable meteorite shields around major US cities, or pouring money into the development of meoteorite-proof material. No one is pressuring poor nations to sign treaties swearing they will dedicate a portion of their meager GDP to combat this potential threat. It would be absurd. And in that case we're talking about an event that has actually happened in the past.
So, if it isn't CO2 , what does drive climate change? I don't know. One convincing theory is that of solar magnetic activity and irradiance - two separate but generally coinciding phenomena. An article in the Astrophysical Journal in 1996 argues for a combined effect of greenhouse gasses and solar factors, with solar factors contributing a more significant amount. (The Astrophysical J., 472: 891-902, 1996 Dec 1) The authors of the article on the saw-toothed climate pattern favor the solar explanation, saying, "All centennial to sub-millennial scale cycles exhibited by the WTR [warm season temperature record] could be connected to solar variation cycles of about 208, 350, 700 and 950 years." (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 12, 1617, 2003) Other articles expressly denounce these solar theories or claim they are insufficient to account for the full extent of the warming. (The Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 25, No. 23, pp 4377-4380, Dec. 1, 1998; GSA Today, v. 14, no. 3, 1052-5173, 2004) There is the potential for localized anthropogenic warming effects secondary to changes in land use, which have been widely documented and are known as the "urban heat island effect". (e.g. The Urban Heat Island Effect at Fairbanks, Alaska, Theoretical and Applied Climatology; Volume 64, Numbers 1-2 / October, 1999, pp. 39-47) There are the ocean currents and oscillations, such as the Gulf Stream and El Nino, that have changed throughout the Earth's history and to which many significant warming and cooling effects are attributed. The fact is, weather is a complex, perhaps even chaotic, system. It is determined by multi-factorial processes. Some variables are independent and others are interdependent in complex and unpredictable ways. Some are subject to human manipulation, but we are utterly at the mercy of others.
Crichton states, "Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?" He goes on to point out:
"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?
"But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon..
"Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it."
Counting the cost of the precautionary principle
People will appeal to the Precautionary Principle - that it's better to be safe than sorry. Why not sign global treaties to limit carbon emissions? The April 16th Newsweek had a telling map entitled "Leaders and Laggers". Based on the Environmental Performance Index from Yale, it rated countries based on how environmentally friendly their policies were - the "leaders" dark green and the "laggers" in coal black. One immediately notes a rough correlation between wealth and environmental policy on this map. Why not encourage developing nations to get with the program and use more "clean energy"?
Well, why don't you have a solar paneled house? Probably because it's too expensive. No matter what we say about saving costs down the road, as a practical matter these solar technologies involve too much of an initial capital investment to be feasible for most Americans. Installation costs for one entirely solar house in Boston was $35,456. Presumably the technology will get cheaper and more efficient in the future, but this is where it stands today. A recent article came out about a group of Virginia Tech engineering students who designed a solar energy system to power a clinic in Getongoroma village in Southwestern Kenya. The high tech system will provide the clinic with an ample 24 kilowatt hours per day (25% more than was requested, but still 20% less than the average US household uses). The projected cost: $120,000. Surrounded by the relative riches of America, the project is still in the fund raising stage. How can we possibly be serious in prescribing this to countries where the average person earns a couple of dollars a day? James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist and author, has said, "The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy. But for us, we are still at the stage of survival."
Of course, there are places where solar energy is the best option for electricity in developing countries. These are generally places that have no hope of getting connected with a power grid, such as remote clinics in agricultural communities in Kenya or guerilla-controlled areas of Burma. The technology generally used in clinics along the Thai-Burmese border, for example, utilizes solar panels which each cost $525. Sounds a little more reasonable, right? Each of these panels supplies 130 watts of power. If you have two incandescent light bulbs on in your house right now, you are probably exceeding this wattage. If you made coffee this morning, you used almost seven times this amount of power. The medics along the Thai-Burma border don't really focus much on immunizations because a refrigerator requires at least 200-700 watts of power. Of course, this also precludes the possibility of blood banks, in a part of the world where medics are frequently faced with treating postpartum hemorrhage, malarial hemolysis and trauma. At a household level, lack of refrigeration has profound repercussions in the form of prevalent and deadly diarrheal diseases that account for 50% of childhood mortality in this population. What else might you want in a clinic? An ultrasound? Cautery? A microscope that can be used at night? A pulse-oximeter? A UV lamp?
These affordable solar panels are a valuable stopgap, but they are by no means a permanent panacea for the word's energy needs. Economist James Shikwati says, "I don't see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway train network. It might work to power a small transistor radio.. One clear thing that emerges from [this] debate is the point that there's somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop." By telling developing countries to use "clean energy sources" what we are saying is, "You will not have electricity at all." We are saying, "You will live a life of backbreaking work. You will see at least one of your children die in early childhood, probably more than that. You will experience incomparably more painful and dangerous pregnancy and labor than women in developed countries, and you will face it more frequently because you will fear losing your children to disease, starvation or violence. You will be too busy struggling for survival to protest the rampant official corruption or the government troops who rape you, destroy your villages and disregard your votes. Ultimately, you will die 20-30 years younger than I will. "But it will be worth it, because I've been told there is a scientific consensus that all this is necessary to avert global warming."
Source
"Green" building goes brown
A YEAR after it was launched amid much green fanfare, the building touted as Australia's best environmental performer has come under fire because several of its environmental features do not yet work. Teething problems at CH2 - Melbourne City Council's new state-of-the-art offices - include a sewage recycling system not yet operating, extra lighting having been installed after staff complained it was too dark, rooftop turbines not performing to expectations, and problems with plumbing leaving unpleasant odours. There were concerns about "shower towers" mounted on the building's side, designed to provide an air-conditioning alternative. They are functioning now, but were shut in February after legionella was found in the building's cooling system.
When asked about the building's environmental performance, Lord Mayor John So said yesterday CH2 was producing 80 per cent fewer emissions than comparable office buildings. But his response is at odds with his own council's report two months ago, which conceded there was no data on the building's environmental performance because it had not yet been assessed.
Green building expert Peter Szental, the man responsible for Australia's first refurbished office building to get a six-star Green Star rating, commended the council on its vision, but said many of CH2's environmental initiatives did not yet work. "There's no chance they would get a six-star rating if they were audited," Mr Szental said. "If you're going to the cutting edge, obviously some things are not going to work. But we really need to know what works and what doesn't." Mr Szental also questioned council claims that productivity would increase by 4.9 per cent.
Staff in the building have complained about noise levels in the open-plan offices. And an overwhelming stench from waterless urinals has been another source of consternation.
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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) 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
