TOTAL DISHONESTY ABOUT POLLUTION LEVELS

Ozone smog levels have plummeted during the last three years. Between 2003 and 2005, the fraction of the nation's ozone monitors violating the federal 8-hour ozone standard plunged from 43 percent down to a record-low 18 percent. The last three years were the three lowest-ozone years on record.

Environmental fear factories aren't celebrating. Shortly after the 2005 ozone season ended, the environmental group Clean Air Watch proclaimed "Smog Problems Nearly Double in 2005." Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection warned "Number of Ozone Action Days Up from Last Year." And EPA's New England regional office noted that "New England Experienced More Smog Days during Recent Summer." Writing on 2005 ozone levels in Connecticut, a New York Times headline warned "A Hot Summer Meant More Smog.

Ozone levels were indeed higher in 2005 when compared with 2004. 2005 was only the second lowest ozone year since the 1970s, while 2004 was the lowest. Ozone levels were so improbably low in 2004 that it would have been astounding if ozone wasn't higher in 2005. The real news was the unprecedented plunge in areas violating the ozone standard, and the fact that 2005 was one of the hottest years on record -- conditions that favor high ozone -- yet ozone levels remained at historic lows. Both stories have gone unnoticed by the mainstream media.

Fine particulate matter has also been dropping. It declined steadily each year from 1999 to 2004, before rising a few percent in 2005. Like ozone, it can jog up and down from year to year based on weather, so the rise in 2005 isn't cause for alarm. Emissions and ambient levels of PM2.5-forming pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, continue to go down. Just as for ozone, the press has missed the drop in PM2.5 violations. Thirty percent of monitoring sites violated federal standards in 2001, but the nation cut that percentage in half by the end of 2005.

The medley of environmental scares continues as the American Lung Association (ALA) releases the latest installment of its annual State of the Air report. In some ways the report is an improvement over previous editions. Where ALA used to create the false impression that air pollution was increasing and would continue to increase, State of the Air now admits that both air pollution and emissions have been declining, and that upcoming regulations will continue to clean the air.

Nevertheless, State of the Air 2006 is still mainly nonsense on stilts. ALA continues to claim that nearly half of all Americans live in areas that violate the 8-hour ozone standard. ALA used data from 2002-2004 for its estimates -- a period for which 30 percent of ozone monitors violated the 8-hour standard. But ozone was much lower 2003-2005, with a national violation rate of only 18 percent. ALA's claim of high ozone levels today is thus based on a spike in ozone that occurred four years ago, back in the summer of 2002.

Even with the older data, ALA still counts clean areas as dirty. For example, ALA counts all 3 million people in San Diego County as living in areas that violate the 8-hour ozone standard. But only Alpine, a small rural town, actually violates the standard. The other 99 percent of San Diegans breathe clean air and have for many years. Nevertheless, under ALA's grading system, if even a tiny part of a county violates a pollution standard, ALA counts all people in the county as breathing air that violates the standard. ALA counted clean areas as dirty in dozens of other populous counties around the country, including Los Angeles, Cook (Chicago), and Maricopa (Phoenix), artificially inflating its "dirty air" tally by tens of millions of people.

Even in areas that have the worst air pollution in the nation, ALA wasn't satisfied with reporting actual pollution levels and instead resorted to pollution inflation. For example, ALA claims Riverside County in California averaged 90 days per year exceeding the 8-hour ozone standard during 2002-2004. But even Banning, the worst location in the county, averaged 50 exceedance days per year, while Indio, the best location, averaged 17.

State of the Air has received less and less press coverage with each successive edition. Doom-and-gloom is mother's milk in journalism. But ALA's report looks pretty much the same each year, and is probably starting to provoke yawns in the nation's newsrooms. If we could reduce press coverage of State of the Air as quickly as we're reducing actual air pollution, we'd be in pretty good shape. Or maybe not. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the environmental fear industry. If recent publicity is any guide, greenhouse gases have become the new air pollution.

Source







State control of resources raises oil costs



A principal reason fuel prices are high and likely to remain so is a trend worldwide toward state ownership and control of oil resources that is raising questions about how quickly large tracts of oil and gas will be developed and made available to consumers.

While some state-owned oil companies, such as Saudi Arabia's Aramco, readily develop their vast oil reserves to help hold down prices and satisfy the demands of consuming nations, other major tracts of oil have fallen into the hands of governments that are less attuned or outright hostile to pleas from drivers around the world who want them to continue the flow of cheap and readily available fuel.

Bolivia, with the second-largest reserves of natural gas and oil in South America, this week became the latest example of a nation to seize control of critical energy facilities that had been operated by private companies that were gearing up to produce the fuel needed by hungry markets. Bolivian President Evo Morales' move on Monday to send national guard troops to take over Exxon Mobil, Petrobras, Repsol and other oil companies' facilities helped send the price of oil to near-record levels. The president scoffed at protests from companies that said the radical move would prevent future development, saying "foreign petroleum companies that announced they will freeze their investments can leave."

Bolivia's action shook the markets not so much because the Latin nation is a significant producer of oil -- currently it is not -- but because of the "psychological" impact of bottling up yet another critical reserve of fuel at a time of tight supplies, said Societe Generale analyst Deborah White. "Nationalizations or increased state control tend to be followed by production lower than it otherwise would have been," she said.

The American Petroleum Institute estimates that nearly 80 percent of the world's oil reserves are owned by national oil companies and 6 percent are controlled by investor-owned corporations such as Exxon Mobil and Shell. That trend -- and the tendency of states to skimp on investment in future production so they can spend their oil riches on other projects and causes -- prompted the Energy Information Administration late last year to nearly double its forecast for world oil prices, saying they would stay at high levels because of lack of investment. The trend emerged in recent years as two of the top oil producers -- Russia and Venezuela -- asserted control over their oil industries, precipitating sharp drops in investment, development and production. Their actions laid the foundations for today's soaring prices.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a left-leaning nationalist and populist whose example inspired Mr. Morales, is the most outspoken advocate of high oil prices. Venezuela sits atop the Western Hemisphere's largest oil reserves and historically has been a top supplier of the United States. The U.S. energy agency has concluded that since his election in 1998, Mr. Chavez's goal has been to increase the oil revenues that sustain his government and the country's economy through price increases rather than increased output. As a key member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), he regularly lobbies for production cuts to keep markets tight and prices high. Output has fallen from a high of 3.3 million barrels a day to about 2.76 million, though analysts say Venezuela is one of only a handful of countries that could be increasing its output substantially to ease strains in world oil markets.

Mr. Chavez this year moved to take a bigger cut of profits earned by private oil companies under contract, and seized some assets of France's Total and Italy's Eni SpA, causing western oil companies to step back from further engagement though Venezuela needs their expertise to develop its oil fields. Rather than using the profits from oil operations to invest in new production, as a private company would in response to high oil prices, Mr. Chavez has used the countries' oil wealth for economic development, to aid the poor and lavish favors on friendly countries and causes. Cuba and other Caribbean and Central American countries receive oil from Venezuela on preferential terms.

Russia, whose privatization of the oil sector in the 1990s caused a rapid increase in production that catapulted it into the world's second-largest producer behind Saudi Arabia, in 2004 moved to take control of its largest oil company, Yukos, as well as increase the state's already sizable share of revenue and profits from oil operations. The result has been a precipitous fall in new investment and production in the oil giant. While Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a member of OPEC or a vocal advocate of high oil prices like Mr. Chavez, he has said he views Russia's vast oil resources as a national treasure that should be preserved and cultivated for the good of the Russian people rather than private firms. He has taken a go-slow approach to opening up unexplored and undeveloped, but potentially huge, oil reserves in eastern Siberia.

Most oil companies in OPEC members in the Middle East have been state-owned since the 1970s, when the world's oil-rich nations first flexed their power and formed the cartel to maximize their revenues through high prices. OPEC's control over prices was blunted during a period of rapid growth in non-OPEC oil output during the 1980s and 1990s, but it has emerged as the reigning power over the oil markets once again.

While OPEC members frequently say they aim to keep oil prices in a moderate range, the failure of most to significantly increase output in response to growing demand in recent years is what led to today's record oil prices. Among the states with the largest oil resources under their control are Iraq, Iran and Nigeria, Africa's largest producer.

State-owned oil companies outside of OPEC also have aimed at raising prices rather than production so as to maximize the revenue coming into government coffers. Mexico's Pemex oil company was created in 1938 under provisions of the Mexican Constitution, which prohibits any foreign ownership of the country's oil riches. Mexico is the world's fifth-largest producer and a critical supplier to the United States. "There have been complaints from Pemex managers and Mexico's Energy Ministry that Pemex does not have sufficient funds available for exploration and investment, owing to high financial burdens placed upon the company by the Mexican government," according to the Energy Information Administration. Investment has picked up in Mexico since 2000 under President Vincente Fox's administration.

Even the few remaining producers like the United States that are advocates of private control have government policies that put critical oil resources out of reach for exploration and development. Environmental opposition against drilling on the outer continental shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has left sizable reserves unavailable there for decades.

With the vast majority of the world's reserves controlled by powerful states, Max Schulz, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said that charges in Congress that major oil companies are driving up oil prices seem bizarre.

"The real giants are the state-owned oil companies," he said. "Compared to them, Big Oil seems like small fry."

Source






GREAT LACK OF PERSPECTIVE AMONG GREENIES

By Michael Duffy

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Environmental groups continue to use this as part of their irrational campaign against nuclear energy. In truth, Chernobyl was caused by communist managerial incompetence, not nuclear technology. France went nuclear in 1974, has had no significant accidents and today has 78 per cent of its power coming from nuclear plants. Its energy is almost the cheapest and its air probably the cleanest in Europe.

Last month Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the USSR, wrote that Chernobyl "was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed the Chernobyl catastrophe was a historic turning point . the system as we knew it could no longer continue." This is an amazing admission. It suggests that Chernobyl should be seen in a new light, as an event that helped free a large part of the Earth's surface from a regime that had killed some 20 million human beings.

We don't know how many people will die as a result of Chernobyl, but it will be fewer than the number killed by the Russian Revolution. The Chernobyl Forum, which includes the World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Energy Agency, says 56 people died after the accident and up to 9300 more will die. Greenpeace claims 100,000 will die. It's a huge difference in prediction. Who do you believe: a United Nations body that depends on its reputation for accuracy, or the green fear factory?

Recently I interviewed Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, on radio and asked why he quit the organisation. He said: "I left in the mid-'80s when the policy started to drift away from science and logic into these kind of zero-tolerance positions that I believe are based more on sensation and fund-raising around scare tactics. Look at the campaign against genetically modified crops and the whole 'Frankenstein food'. These are scare words that are attached to what is actually one of the most important advances to genetic science in history. For example, taking a gene from corn and creating the 'golden rice' which could eliminate blindness in half a million kids every year in Asia and Africa, and could eliminate chronic vitamin A deficiency in over 200 million people in the rice-eating countries."

Moore, who has an honours degree in forest biology and a PhD in ecology, says he left Greenpeace when "I was an international director, one of five. My fellow international directors had no science education. Most of them were political activists or entrepreneur environmentalists, for want of a better word, and they decided we should start a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. I said, 'Chlorine is one of the elements in the periodic table. I don't think that's in our jurisdiction.' And they said, 'No, this is a good campaign. Chlorine is the devil's element, and it works really well for fund-raising and media and everything.'

"I said, 'Just a minute, 75 per cent of our medicines are based on chlorine chemistry, and adding chlorine to drinking water was the single biggest advance in the history of public health, and the best way to deliver that slightly chlorinated drinking water to the general public is in a PVC pipe. So give me a break. I cannot go along with this. You guys make a list of the chlorine compounds that you don't like and we'll look at them one by one like any regulatory agency would do, but you can't just condemn chlorine. We put it in swimming pools so that people don't get cholera and tetanus.'" The others weren't persuaded. Moore says: "That was the beginning of my having to leave the organisation that I helped found."

These days the green movement often seems driven by left-wing rather than environmental causes. The biggest example is population growth, which is the greatest single danger to Australia's environment. When is the last time you heard a green activist even mention immigration, a major source of that growth? When the Herald-Sun newspaper in Melbourne claimed before the 2004 election that the Greens political party wanted to reduce the population by 2 million, Senator Bob Brown took it to the Press Council on the ground that this was not the party's policy - and won.

The activists focus on other issues, such as globalisation. They claim free trade moves dirty factories offshore, thereby exporting Western environmental problems to the Third World. But in his new book, The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford of the Financial Times points out that "foreign investment in polluting industries is the fastest growing segment of foreign investment coming into the United States. In contrast, foreign investment in clean industries is the fastest growing segment of American investments abroad." The reason, Harford says, is that "seriously polluting industries like bulk chemical production require high levels of skill, reliable infrastructure and - since a lot of capital investment is involved - political stability. Why jeopardise that by moving the plant to Ethiopia to save a few dollars on environmental costs?" He notes that air pollution in China has dropped substantially as globalisation has boosted its economy, a correlation also seen in the other major developing nations of Brazil and Mexico.

It's strange that so many of the positions now advocated by green activists actually pose serious threats to the environment.

Source






THE PESKY HISTORY OF GLOBAL PRECIPITATION FROM 1979 TO 2004

Discussing: Smith, T.M., Yin, X. and Gruber, A. 2006. Variations in annual global precipitation (1979-2004), based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Project 2.5o analysis. Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2005.

What was done

Noting that "the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) has produced merged satellite and in situ global precipitation estimates, with a record length now over 26 years beginning 1979 (Huffman et al., 1997; Adler et al., 2003)," the authors used empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis to study annual GPCP-derived precipitation variations over the period of record.

What was learned

The first three EOFs accounted for 52% of the observed variance in the precipitation data. Mode 1 was associated with mature ENSO conditions and correlated strongly with the Southern Oscillation Index, while Mode 2 was associated with the strong warm ENSO episodes of 1982/83 and 1997/98. Mode 3, on the other hand, was uncorrelated with ENSO but was associated with tropical trend-like changes that were correlated with interdecadal warming of tropical sea surface temperatures. Globally, however, Smith et al. report that "the mode 3 variations average to near zero, so this mode does not represent any net change in the amount of precipitation over the analysis period."

What it means

Citing several climate modeling studies, Huntington (2006) states there is a "theoretical expectation" that global warming will result in significant increases in global precipitation. However, as a result of their analysis of global precipitation data over the period 1979-2004 (when climate alarmists claim the world warmed at a rate and to a degree that was unprecedented over the past two millennia), Smith et al. report that most of the precipitation variations in their global data set "are associated with ENSO and have no trend." As for the variations that are not associated with ENSO and that do exhibit trends, they say that the trends are associated "with increased tropical precipitation over the Pacific and Indian Oceans associated with local warming of the sea." However, they note that this increased precipitation "is balanced by decreased precipitation in other regions," so that "the global average change is near zero." Over the earth as a whole, therefore, one of the major "theoretical expectations" of the climate modeling community remains unfulfilled, even under the supposedly highly favorable thermal conditions of the last quarter century, which observation suggests that their other major "theoretical expectation," i.e., catastrophic CO2-induced global warming, may well remain unfulfilled too.

CO2 Science Magazine, 26 April 2006

The abstract from the study mentioned above follows:

The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) has produced a combined satellite and in situ global precipitation estimate, beginning 1979. The annual average GPCP estimates are here analyzed over 1979-2004 to evaluate the large-scale variability over the period. Data inhomogeneities are evaluated and found to not be responsible for the major variations, including systematic changes over the period. Most variations are associated with El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes. There are also tropical trend-like changes over the period, correlated with interdecadal warming of the tropical SSTs and uncorrelated with ENSO. Trends have spatial variations with both positive and negative values, with a global-average near zero.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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