More fun! Gore camp suggests skeptical scientists bought off

A spokeswoman for former Vice President Al Gore has suggested that scientists cited in a new Senate minority report that calls global warming worries "entirely without merit" have been bought off. The U.S. Senate report documents hundreds of prominent scientists - experts in dozens of fields of study worldwide - who say global warming and cooling is a cycle of nature and cannot legitimately be connected to man's activities.

But Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told the Washington Times that after a quick review, about 25 or 30 of the scientists cited in the report may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp. However, Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the claim, telling the newspaper the company is concerned about climate change reports, and doesn't pay scientists to "bash global-warming theories." "Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he told the Times. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

A spokesman for Gore declined WND requests for additional comment on the issue.

"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number - entirely without merit," Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, said in the report . "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

"Of course I believe in global warming, and in global cooling - all part of the natural climate changes that the Earth has experienced for billions of years, caused primarily by the cyclical variations in solar output," said research physicist John W. Brosnahan, who develops remote-sensing instruments for atmospheric science for clients including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. However, he said, "I have not seen any sort of definitive, scientific link to man-made carbon dioxide as the root cause of the current global warming, only incomplete computer models that suggest that this might be the case.

"Even though these computer climate models do not properly handle a number of important factors, including the role of precipitation as a temperature regulator, they are being (mis-)used to force a political agenda upon the U.S.," he continued. "While there are any number of reasons to reduce carbon dioxide generation, to base any major fiscal policy on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change would be inappropriate and imprudent at best and potentially disastrous economic folly at the worst."

The report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP ranking member cited more than 400 prominent scientists in dozens of fields of study from more than two dozen nations around the world who voiced objections to the so-called "consensus" on "man-made global warming," the subject of Gore's award-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Gore, of course, has likened skeptics of the global-warming philosophy to "flat Earth society members." As recently as Nov. 5, he said: "But when you're reporting on a story like the one you're covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don't take - you don't search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time. And the reason the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the thousands of scientists who make up that group, have for almost 20 years now created a very strong scientific consensus that is as strong a consensus as you'll ever see in science, that the climate crisis is real, human beings are responsible for it."

The Senate report, however, noted the scientists who are expressing a dissatisfaction with such generalizations include experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, biology, glaciology, biogeography, meteorology, economics, chemistry, mathematics, environmental sciences, engineering, physics and paleoclimatology. "Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Price with Vice President Gore," the report said.

Besides the Nobel Gore shared over the issue of global warming, he also won an Oscar for his work on "An Inconvenient Truth," which proclaims the validity of man-made global warming and advocates urgent action.

And there probably would be many more scientists making such statements, were it not for the fear of retaliation from those aboard the global-warming-is-caused-by-SUVs bandwagon, the report said. "Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," noted Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He's authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, and said, "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!"

Members of the U.S. Senate earlier had noted an e-mail from a global warming theory supporter to a critic, threatening to "destroy your career . if you produce one more editorial against climate change."

Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. Patterson noted that the notion of a "consensus" of scientists aligned with United Nations climate change advocates or former is false. "I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority," he said.

The report was generated after UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri implied there were only "about half a dozen" skeptical scientists left in the world. ....

The new study includes opinions from scientists at Harvard, NASA, NOAA, NCAR, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Danish National Space Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Princeton, the EPA, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Helsinki, Notre Dame, Stockholm University and others.

"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double man would not perceive the temperature impact," said Russian scientist Oleg Sorochtin, of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He's authored more than 300 studies, nine books and a 2006 paper titled, "The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth."

WND earlier reported more than 500 scientists were cited by an analysis of peer-reviewed literature by the Hudson Institute as having published documentation questioning an least one facet of the global-warming agenda.

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The usual desperate recourse to "ad hominem" abuse and unreferenced assertions from the Left

Alarmist likens Senate report to 'something the German Parliament would issue during WW2 to tell the people that the Holocaust is not happening'

This report sounds like something the German Parliament would issue during WW2 to tell the people that the Holocaust is not happening, and if it is the Nazis are not responsible for it.

Personally, I have no political biases regarding my views on climate change. I don't support Al Gore's view because I am a "Democrat." I support his view on climate change and that of the PEER REVIEWED scientists across this globe who are actually posting the data and connecting the dots because I have armed myself with the knowledge I need to see with my own eyes...

Senate Report On Climate Skepticism...

the very thing this report aims to stop because of course, to those in Congress an enlightened and informed citizenry is indeed the biggest threat to them.

And unlike them my wallet does not hold sway over my beliefs like it does senators by the name of Inhofe and others who do nothing but issue reports at opportune moments to coincide with their own personal petty political grudges.

The rate of ice melt in the Arctic and Greenland alone is three times faster than ever predicted. It is unprecedented. Again, unprecedented. It has been proven by PEER REVIEWED scientists (not weathermen or Senators with no scientific background) that CO2 forcings on this planet along with other gases and sources together with anthropogenic climate change are changing our relationship with this planet.

Now, we can "debate" all day until we are blue in the face but it doesn't change the reality of what this planet is becoming regardless of what you may personally believe is responsible for it.

It is as if this report is then telling the American people not to care about this planet or their responsibility as stewards to her or to try to understand what is now occurring. I suppose they also believe that air and water pollution are not caused by humans either? Poisoning our water and air thus leading to diseases is not human induced? How about poverty? How about war? We aren't responsible for that either? Water scarcity, deforestation... Who is cutting down all the trees thus exacerbating the effects of this crisis? God?

To me, this report is nothing more than a timed trashing of a man they fear the most. The one man who came out with a movie and a book [But no PEER REVIEWED studies?] that explained what is happening to our planet in a way those whom they wished to keep in the dark for their own selfish reasons understand, and they are more afraid of it hurting their financial bottomlines than anything else.

And in my view, telling people that there is "nothing to worry about" regardless of your belief when we can see otherwise just to protect your wallet and political standing and assuage your political grudges is not only morally bankrupt, it is criminal.

But where is the outrage? Where are all the Gore supporters on other sites who claim to "support" him in refuting this garbage? Where are all those who signed his Capitol Hill letter last March, and his petition to Bali? This is exactly the time we need a palpable response to show the world that we do care and will not fall for the false choices.

We sat by and allowed them to take our Democracy from us...are we going to sit and allow them to take our planet too?

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Greenland prior eras as warm or warmer than today

I was forwarded a slide show presentation done by Thomas Lowell et al of the University of Cincinnati titled: Organic Remains from the Istorvet Ice Cap, Liverpool Land, East Greenland: A Record of Late Holocene Climate Change. It was presented last week at AGU's Greenland Climate Change Past and Present session. It has some very interesting data in it. In summary it has a report on occurrence of subfossil organic remains, with organics recovered in locations presently void of plant growth.

The preliminary conclusion from the data collected in the field work is that presently the small ice caps at high latitudes in Greenland are retracting to locations where they were at 1000 years ago. The presence of subfossil vegetation was found within 280 vertical meters of ice cap summit and where comparable modern assemblages do not exist. The implication seems to be that there were warmer periods in these areas prior to today, warm enough for plant growth. According to the study, the organic material in Liverpool Land radiocarbon dates from 400 to 1015 AD. It is interesting to note that the Vikings settled in Greenland around 974 AD and the study indicates that ice cap expansion began around 1015 AD.

While the UC team that did the field work still has more work to do to reconstruct temperatures from this data, the study lends support to the idea that Greenland's climate was warmer approximately 1000 years ago. One of the organic samples recovered at another location was dated to 910BC. This makes one wonder just how often shifts in Greenland's climate occurs. More study is needed, but this is certainly interesting.

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Environmental Policy: More Science and Less Religion Please

Environmental policy must be based on the good science and not emotion

In Brief:

Environmentalists can be divided into a number of categories ranging from "conservationists" who advocate a policy of "wise use" to the "deep ecologists" who tend to "humanize" nature.

The public at large demands clear and unambiguous statements from environmental scientists while the scientists themselves are dealing with uncertainty and ever-changing information flows.

Science has been described as the "self-correcting process of discovery" which means that what is the received wisdom of today may need to be discarded or modified based on new information.

Policy makers must be aware of the flux inherent in environmental science and ensure that environmental policies must reflect the best science.

Environmentalists can be divided into many categories. There is the wise use conservation type (like me). There is the scientific ecologist. There is the committed activist, and then there is the deep ecologist. This latter group, largely, believes there is a spiritual dimension to Mother Nature. This leads to a philosophy whereby environmental policy decisions are based as much on the "rights" of the natural world as on the needs of humanity. In addition, it is often a case of symbolic acts taking the place of real and scientifically verifiable environmental outcomes. For example, most urban recycling programs have failed utterly, especially when attempting to recycle low value and environmentally benign products such as glass. Of course, when those of us with a scientific bent are mildly critical of such wasteful programs, the charge of "Don't you care??!!" is flung back at us in an orgy of political correctness. Actually, I do care. So much so that I demand real environmental results for real environmental expenditures.

The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a paper titled "Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society" where he makes an eloquent case for a proper understanding of the uncertainties of science. He takes aim at the often uncritical public acceptance of any statement made by any scientist no matter that he or she may be making statements outside his or her field of expertise, or that the field is a hotbed of controversy. A Scientist said it, so it must be true. But, as Dyson so eloquently explains: "The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, `Sorry, but we don't know.' The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities."

One of the best definitions of science I have come across states, "Science is the self-correcting process of discovery." Science is a process that lurches toward truth, backtracking from time to time, going sideways, standing still but is rarely, if ever, static. While the outcome is often in doubt, the process of evidence-based conclusions must be immutable.

The field of environmental science is suffering from growing pains as an energized public, demanding that governments "do something, anything about the environment," collides with the growing realization that we do not yet have all the answers, and what appears as a truth today may be on tomorrow's ash heap of failed hypotheses.

We are all familiar with the notion of climate change, and we have been told repeatedly that the science is settled. Well, as Yogi Berra once said, "It ain't over till it's over." And to prove Berra right, along came Steve McIntyre, a Canadian scientist and co-author, with Ross McKitrick, of the climate book, Taken by Storm. McIntyre, in the best scientific tradition, decided to do the math regarding the assumptions and calculations that went into the famous these are the hottest years in history hypothesis. The earlier NASA calculations concluded that 1998 was the hottest year on record, but McIntyre's corrected calculations show that 1934 was the hottest. It must be noted that NASA accepted McIntyre's numbers and issued a correction, although with no fanfare.

While this may seem like a bit of scientific trivia, policymakers are basing many decisions on the incorrect assumption that we are living in the hottest time in history. Of course, measuring past temperature trends on Earth is relatively simple, but one needs only to imagine the uncertainty that must exist when we try to predict the Earth's climate trends over the next 100 years.

I am reminded of a 1967 must-read paper by environmental scientist Paul Ehrlich titled "Paying the Piper." The paper concludes quite definitively that "the battle to feed humanity is over" and that "sometime between 1970 and 1985 the world will undergo vast famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

It obviously did not happen and during that time, food production actually rose dramatically. Any people who are starving today are in that predicament due to bad governments and corruption and certainly not a lack of food. Ehrlich was dead wrong.

There is no sin in being wrong; the only sin is when mistakes are not corrected based on new evidence. Or as one wag [Lord Keynes] put it, "When I'm presented with new information I change my mind; what do you do?"

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GERMANY ACCUSES EU'S GREEN BUREAUCRATS OF WAGING "WAR OF DESTRUCTION"

The EU's controversial plans to force car makers to make greener cars from 2012 or face fines have caused strong division within the European Commission itself, with industry commissioner Guenter Verheugen said to have boycotted the press conference to announce the proposals on Wednesday (19 December). Under the plans, cars should emit an average of 130 grammes of carbon dioxide in four years time or be subject to fines rising to _95 per gramme over the limit in 2015.

Practically it is expected to mean that big gas-guzzling cars will become more expensive while smaller more efficient cars will be relatively cheaper. Subject to intense lobbying and causing unusually deep divisions in the commission, the proposals have been worked on jointly by officials in the environment and industry unit of the Brussels executive since early this year. But only environment commissioner Stavros Dimas presented them on Wednesday although his industry colleague was scheduled to take part as well.

According to Spiegel Online, Mr Verheugen, who comes from Germany where powerful car manufacturers such as BMW say they will be most adversely affected by the plans, deliberately chose not to take part in the announcement.

Meanwhile, transport commissioner Jacques Barrot (French) and Justice commissioner Franco Frattini (Italian) also rejected the blueprint. Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso is reportedly standing behind Mr Dimas who presented the outline on behalf of the whole commission yesterday.

Germany has already strongly criticised the plans with chancellor Angela Merkel saying "I believe this is industrial policy at the expense of German auto producers." "We are not satisfied," the chancellor said, with her economy minister Michael Glos even accusing the commission of staging a "war of destruction" against German car-makers.

FT Deutschland reports German centre-right MEPs are also threatening not to support Mr Barroso in his likely bid for a second term as head of the commission from 2009. "The question of whether Barroso is taking into account the legitimate interests of the German industry will help decide whether we back him for a second term in office," Christian Democrat MEP Werner Langen, told the paper. The German MEP threat is being presented as a counterpoint to French president Nicolas Sarkozy who has being lobbying the commission president for proposals that would favour small car makers such as Peugeot.

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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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It's an Al Gore Christmas: Congress hands out energy-loan guarantees

As is so often the case, close to Christmas, Congress this week skipped the formality of authorizing and appropriating separate spending bills and instead passed a monster omnibus spending bill. This year, however, there was one major difference: Congress approved a spending package that will effectively make the U.S. Treasury the bank of first resort for virtually any large commercial energy project that can claim to be "innovative" and "clean."

How? By granting nearly $38.5 billion in guaranteed federal loans for a variety of energy projects that no private bank would touch with a ten-foot pole (under the "Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program, described here, page 121) . Mind you, none of these efforts have anything to do with research and development. Instead, they are commercial ventures using technology that has already been proven but that are too uneconomic to secure private backing

What kind of projects are we talking about? Nuclear reactors, plants so expensive to build - Moody's estimates between at least $5 and $6 billion dollars each - that no private bank is willing to use their own money to finance them for fear that the operator will go bankrupt simply trying to pay the interest on the loan.. These plants are slated to get $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees. Clean coal plant construction and conversion, meanwhile got $6 billion. Converting coal into fuels for trucks and cars, which could go bust if oil prices decline, is slated to get $2 billion in guaranteed loans and renewables, improved energy-efficiency projects, and distributed energy programs got another $10 billion collectively. Finally, another $2 billion went to the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) to finance a Department of Energy designed uranium-enrichment centrifuge plant that is so risky USEC was unable to get any private bank to back it.

What's the problem with guaranteeing such large loans to these commercial projects? First, the last time our government did this, during the Carter years, it picked a series of turkeys. Ten of the 14 coal gasification and ethanol projects it backed went bust. And one - the synfuels project - produced nothing and left U.S. taxpayers with a $13 billion hole in their pockets. Count on history rhyming. As the inspector general of the Department of Energy pointed out in his evaluation of the loan-guarantee program "This [program] will result in significant risk to the Government and, therefore the American Taxpayer." The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the odds of default on the proposed federal loans to be 50 percent.

Second, this is precisely the kind of corporate give away that would make Ronald Reagan turn over in his grave. He had the good sense to kill the synfuels project as a matter of principle: Government, he insisted, should not be in the business of backing commercialization projects. Research and development might make sense for the federal government to pursue if only because state-run utility commissions will not allow most utilities to invest much in such activities. But getting the government into picking commercial winners or losers is almost always bad business. When government picks a loser (and with the Department of Energy, it's a frequent occurrence), nobody pays or goes bankrupt but the U.S. taxpayer and then only after the government has kept the project alive years beyond when it should have been terminated.

More here





Comments On The Weblog By Andrew C. Revkin Entitled "Climate Consensus `Busted'?"

There is a weblog on the New York Times weblog Dot Earth on December 20, 2007 by Andrew C. Revkin entitled "Climate Consensus `Busted'?". Mr Revkin is a talented reporter, however, he clearly suspends his capabilities when he writes

"In science, what is more important than any individual study or collection of papers (particularly if assembled by someone with an agenda), is the trajectory of understanding. This is particularly true with a problem like the human-amplified greenhouse effect. Not only is it multidisciplinary; it is also not testable through experiments (we're all in the test tube undergoing a one-time experiment).

On the basics, the trajectory of understanding is clear and has been building for more than 100 years: more carbon dioxide (and other heat-trapping gases) = warmer world = less ice = higher seas (and lots of shifting climate patterns). A solid review can be found in the online hypertext edition of "The Discovery of Global Warming," a book by Spencer Weart of the American Institute of Physics.

At the same time, there are at least two areas of persistent, and legitimate, scientific debate left - more than enough to produce lists as long as the one published today by Senator Inhofe.

First, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the extent and pace of warming from a particular rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases, and about how fast and far seas will rise as a result. (It's important to keep in mind that uncertainty could result in outcomes being much worse than the midrange outcome, or much less severe). "

In making the claim that

"On the basics, the trajectory of understanding is clear."

he ignores a large number of studies without the appropriate investigation of the merits of that research. As a very clear example, he ignored the findings of the book

National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp.

He has never reported on a key finding in the National Research Council report (on page 4) where it was concluded that

"..the traditional global mean TOA radiative forcing concept has some important limitations, which have come increasingly to light over the past decade. The concept is inadequate for some forcing agents, such as absorbing aerosols and land-use changes, that may have regional climate impacts much greater than would be predicted from TOA radiative forcing. Also, it diagnoses only one measure of climate change-global mean surface temperature response-while offering little information on regional climate change or precipitation. These limitations can be addressed by expanding the radiative forcing concept and through the introduction of additional forcing metrics. In particular, the concept needs to be extended to account for (1) the vertical structure of radiative forcing, (2) regional variability in radiative forcing, and (3) nonradiative forcing."

Moreover, Mr. Revkin's statement that

".. with a problem like the human-amplified greenhouse effect. Not only is it multidisciplinary; it is also not testable through experiments (we're all in the test tube undergoing a one-time experiment)"

shows a lack of understanding of the scientific method! If a hypothesis is not testable, it is not science! [actually, despite his claim, the multi-decadal global model projections, which are hypotheses, are testable, as discussed on Climate Science (e.g. see). There are numerous other examples on Climate Science which refutes the claim of Mr. Revkin that the science is settled (e.g. see our summary of papers in the book Human Impacts on Weather and Climate).

Unless he broadens his reporting on the role of humans in the climate system, readers should interpret his contributions in the New York Times as the biased presentation of climate science by an advocate who, by his incorrect reporting on the understanding of climate science, is limiting the consideration of policy actions which would most effectively deal with climate variability and change, energy, and other environmental and social issues. With his abilities as a writer and his wide influence, it is unfortunate that he has chosen to erroneously limit the information to the public and policymakers.

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2007 MAY BE THE COLDEST YEAR OF THE MILLENNIUM

RSS MSU satellite data for the lower troposphere show that November 2007 was the coldest month since January 2000. Other major teams that measure the global mean temperature have not yet published their November data.

The temperature anomaly was -0.014 oC. It means that the whole month was actually cooler than the the average recorded November. It was the first month in this century that was cooler than average.

The previous record low temperature anomaly in this century occurred in July 2004 when the anomaly was +0.053 oC. In other words, the record low for this century was improved by 0.07 oC. The continuing La Nina is the main reason behind the recent cold months; La Nina is expected to disappear in Spring 2008. January 2000, a month that was even cooler than November 2007, witnessed a La Nina, too. November 2007 was also a whopping 0.915 oC colder than April 1998.

Another reason could be an inactive Sun. We are expecting the solar cycle 24 to begin soon but it takes a longer time than expected and there are still almost no sun spots. Via a crucial mechanism, it means that we should be getting more galactic cosmic rays that should create more clouds.

The year 2007 is now very likely to become RSS MSU's 9th warmest year on record which really means one of the coldest years of our times. It will end up colder than all other years in the 21st century so far as well as 1998 (by 0.4 oC) and 1995. We explained that 2006 was very cold but 2007 will be shown as 0.1 oC colder.

This extraordinarily cold conclusion of RSS MSU occurs partly (but certainly not completely) because RSS MSU omits the polar regions north of 82.5oN and south of 70.0oS latitude. The former region that occupies less than 0.5% of the surface of Earth was recently getting substantially warmer.

Other teams (HadCRUT3, UAH MSU) except for GISS will also report 2007 to be between the 6th and 9th warmest year. Dr James Hansen's GISS deviates substantially - it may even announce that 2007 was the warmest year - and their method to measure temperature based on stations is probably dominated by urban heat islands and the results are most likely complete rubbish.

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God, I miss the Soviets

Post below lifted from Protein Wisdom. See the original for links

One thing about growing up during the Cold War, other than duck-and-cover drills, was having few illusions about the enemy, due in no small part their own honesty in declaring themselves as such. When Hollywood gave the villain a Russian accent, no Council on American-Soviet Relations was threatening lawsuits or boycotts.

The collapse of the USSR and the humiliation of communism in the face of liberty and capitalism didn't mean all those Marxist True Believers and camp followers gave up. It just meant they decided to pursue their interests in a different venue. Though, they seem to find being circumspect no longer necessary

The media obsession has been on the efforts of delegates at the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference to craft an agreement for a climate treaty that would take effect after the Kyoto Treaty expires in 2011. [.]

A day earlier, however, a panel at the IPCC conference titled "A Global CO2 Tax" took a step that will have a more lasting impact than an empty agreement. It urged the U.N. to adopt taxes on carbon dioxide emissions that would be "legally binding to all nations."

And guess who would be hit the hardest? That's right, the tax, if levied, would put an especially high burden on the U.S.
"Finally, someone will pay for these costs" related to global warming, Othmar Schwank, a global warming busybody from Switzerland, told Sen. James Inhofe's office. [.]

The driving force of the environmental movement is not a cleaner planet - or a world that doesn't get too hot, in the case of the global warming issue - but a leftist, egalitarian urge to redistribute wealth. A CO2 tax does this and more, choking economic growth in the U.S. and punishing Americans for being the voracious consumers that we are.

Eco-activists have been so successful in distracting the public from their real intentions that they're becoming less guarded in discussing their ultimate goal. "A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources," Emma Brindal, a "climate justice campaign coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia, wrote Wednesday on the Climate Action Network's blog.

We could easily dismiss li'l Miss Emma as a retread of the Castro/Che groupies of years gone by - emotionally invested in showing their solidarity with the exotic Other. Then there's Mayer Hillman, a senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, who makes no bones about controlling people's lives

Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people.

"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."

Scrape away some of the high-flown rhetoric of the acolytes of the Church of Anthropogenic Global warming and it is easy to see a coterie of fashionistas, retooled Marxists, doe-eyed relativists, unrepetant misanthropes and pragmatic authoritarians. Some wax poetically of "food sovereignty" and others are quite blatant in their hatred of modernity

Ultimately, the world's population must be reduced - by 5.9 billion. But the 100million left, devoid of cars, planes, heaters and fertilisers will be a much smaller burden on the planet. What a happy place it will be!

The "Greens" are no more interested in clean air and water today than the Soviets were in liberty when they rolled tanks into Prague in 1968. We dismiss them as "silly" at our own peril.




Leave Those Car Buyers Alone

Last week, environmentalists and the auto industry struck a deal to require new cars sold 13 years hence to average 35 miles per gallon; a 40-percent increase over the existing 27.5 mpg mandate. Hands were held, tears were shed, and "Kum-ba-ya" broke out all over Washington. As the president prepares to sign the energy bill passed yesterday by the House, Congress's 32-year-old fight over automotive fuel-economy standards is probably over ... for now. That's too bad, because while there are a number of parties claiming victory from this political peace treaty, consumers will almost certainly be the biggest losers.

Of the 1,153 passenger vehicle models on the road today, only two presently meet the proposed 35 mpg standard. According to a quick review of EPA data undertaken by Marlo Lewis at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, those cars are the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic hybrid. Nine other vehicles, Lewis reports, get 35 mpg in city or highway driving conditions, but not both - and all of those vehicles are either subcompacts or compacts. Hence, the auto fleet is going to have to change - and change a lot - for new cars to average 35 mpg by 2020.

The industry has three routes it can go. First, it can lighten cars and thus improve mileage. Second, it can reengineer cars by reducing engine power and incorporating advanced technology to improve fuel efficiency. Third, it can simply stop making low-mileage cars and trucks or, alternatively, increase their prices so much that a substantial number of consumers opt for the fuel-efficient alternatives. Of course, mixing and matching is not only possible, but probable.

None of those options, however, represent a Christmas gift to car buyers. Reducing vehicle weight is the cheapest way to improve fuel efficiency, but that would increase highway deaths, just as it has done in the past according to a 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences. Reengineering cars will reduce automotive performance in ways that car-buyers probably won't like while increasing automotive prices by as much as $3,500 a car according to the same NAS study. Cross-subsidies might be the most direct way to meet the standard, but that represents a rather steep tax on people with large families, big dogs, and those who for whatever reason need to haul around a lot of stuff - not to mention those who simply have a preference for zippy sports cars or riding high off the road.

So how does that square with claim that consumers win with more fuel-efficient cars? Well, if all other things were equal, they would. But all other things are not equal, and fuel-efficiency improvements involve trade-offs that consumers are demonstrably not wild about making. If they were, we wouldn't need a CAF_ law in the first place. The fleet would average 35 mpg now.

So why are we so determined to overrule consumer preferences? Three rationales are commonly offered.

First, we're sometimes told that consumers want super fuel-efficient cars but automakers stubbornly refuse to make them. But automakers and venture capitalists who might otherwise enter the auto industry would hardly be more ignorant than the casual observers at the Sierra Club and Rep. Nancy Pelosi's office about how much money they're leaving on the table. Suffice it to say that this argument seems unlikely, which suggests that consumers are indeed getting exactly the kind of cars that they want.

Second, it's often alleged that consumers are irrationally attracted to gas guzzlers and are acting against their own self interests when they buy SUVs and minivans. But there is little evidence for that proposition. A recent survey of consumer behavior by Clemson economist Molly Espey found that consumers valued energy efficiency appropriately from an economic perspective. That is, they spent more money on engines that saved fuel when the initial cost of the engine was more than offset by the fuel savings over the lifetime of the vehicle, controlling for other attributes of the vehicle.

But that's not good enough for many critics. They don't like the fact that many consumers seem to like other attributes - such as vehicle size and acceleration - that mitigate against fuel economy.

Third, we sometimes hear that a host of market failures is responsible for fuel prices being too low, which in turn produces suboptimal interest in energy conservation. In our own study earlier this year, however, we find very little support for this proposition. But if there were good evidence for the existence of market failures, the proper remedy would be a higher fuels tax that would let consumers make their own decisions about the tradeoffs between those higher prices and consumption. Higher fuel-efficiency standards, on the other hand, will reduce the marginal cost of driving and thus exacerbate problems like traffic.

For many, however, there is no such thing as too much energy conservation, and society always gains the less we consume. But if that were true, why not just ban cars from the road altogether? Few seriously entertain that idea, because we know intuitively that some amount of fuel consumption is worthwhile no matter how we feel about oil scarcity, energy independence, or the environment. How much is the "right" amount for society to consume? The aggregated preferences of consumers facing accurate fuel prices will deliver the right answer. Interfering with those aggregated preferences is guaranteed, however, to deliver the wrong one.

Source

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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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It's not News Unless it's Reported by a Mainstream Journalist

The Leftist "Media Matters" is scandalized because Fox News reported an anti-Greenie story that was originally put on the net via a blog rather than by one of the mainstream news organizations. Fox was reporting -- HORROR -- that a group of 400 scientists have rejected the "consensus" view that the world is warming up. The scientific "consensus" on global warming has unravelled and we can't have that!

How pathetic they are. They couldn't question the truth of the story -- because it is true. The only thing to criticize that they could find was who reported the event. We must bow down to the Leftist media and let them tell us what to think, apparently. We are naughty children from whom some information must be kept hidden. They are in for a lot of disappointment from now on, I would say.

The blog concerned was run by the GOP side of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- which makes the squawk from Media Matters all the more absurd. How did putting the info on a blog differ from putting out a press release? I suppose the difference is that the media have the chance to ignore a press release. An important difference to be sure.

-------

The Greenie site called "Grist" is also in mourning. Excerpt:

"One final (depressing) note: How effective is Inhofe's media outreach compared to that of the entire community of climate scientists? Well, according to technorati (PDF), as of today, Dec. 21, the IPCC Synthesis report has had 278 blog reactions since its release November 17, whereas Inhofe's "report," issued just yesterday (Thursday), has already had over 300 blog reactions."

Grist was also sad that the NYT ran the "consensus-shattering" news -- a sort of "betrayed by our own" feeling, apparently.

The only substantial point in the Grist article was what we have come to expect of the Green/Left -- attempts to discredit the personalities concerned. They said that some of the scientists were not "prominent" enough -- even though some of them were very prominent indeed.

That the Grist post was a "watermelon" (Green on the outside, red on the inside) effort was shown by its footnote: This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Another typically abusive Leftist response here





The "Consensus" On Global Warming Inside the IPCC Report

Post below lifted from Flopping Aces. See the original for links

With MSM reports coming out daily like "Walruses Die; Global Warming Blamed", "Global Warming "Tipping Points" Reached, Scientist Says" or my favorite "Small group of US experts insist global warming not man-made" it's little wonder many believe in the hoax known as man-made global warming. Especially in light of the new IPCC research.

Of course if you look hard enough at the IPCC you will find a particular fact thats been overlooked. There is no consensus on the man-made baloney:

An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that `hundreds of IPCC scientists' are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years."

In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.

Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article - Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the "Greenhouse gas forcing ." statement above, Professor McKitrick explained "A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed."

Dr. Gray labeled the WG I statement as "Typical IPCC doubletalk" asserting "The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model."

Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers' comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.

So it appears that this "consensus" is really seven impartial scientists, and even one of those called the assertion by the IPCC that greenhouse gases have caused most of the global warming "doubletalk".

Now that is something the environazi's should hang their hat on. Sigh.... And then no one noticed the letter sent to Ban Ki-Moon signed by 100 scientists which said the following:

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.

No, the MSM missed that one in their zeal to help their compatriots on the left push through agendas that ultimately lead to Socialism::

"The media obsession has been on the efforts of delegates at the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference to craft an agreement for a climate treaty that would take effect after the Kyoto Treaty expires in 2011. Though it appeared the meeting would end with no deal, the delegates looked to be near a compromise late Friday. That treaty is likely to be as effective as the useless, symbolic Kyoto protocol with which no nation has yet complied.
A day earlier, however, a panel at the IPCC conference titled "A Global CO2 Tax" took a step that will have a more lasting impact than an empty agreement. It urged the U.N. to adopt taxes on carbon dioxide emissions that would be "legally binding to all nations." And guess who would be hit the hardest? That's right, the tax, if levied, would put an especially high burden on the U.S.
"Finally, someone will pay for these costs" related to global warming, Othmar Schwank, a global warming busybody from Switzerland, told Sen. James Inhofe's office. We imagine Schwank, a panel participant, took great glee in saying the U.S. and other developed nations should "contribute significantly more to this global fund."

And now you see the real agenda by our environazi's......Socialism:

The driving force of the environmental movement is not a cleaner planet - or a world that doesn't get too hot, in the case of the global warming issue - but a leftist, egalitarian urge to redistribute wealth. A CO2 tax does this and more, choking economic growth in the U.S. and punishing Americans for being the voracious consumers that we are.
Eco-activists have been so successful in distracting the public from their real intentions that they're becoming less guarded in discussing their ultimate goal.

"A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources," Emma Brindal, a "climate justice campaign coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia, wrote Wednesday on the Climate Action Network's blog."

My favorite:

"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."

Long live freedom! As long as you're doing and paying what we tell you.






Al Gore: enviro-tyrant

In aspiring to `control the destiny of all generations to come', Gore has unwittingly unveiled his anti-democratic streak

As he flies around the world to tell people that they should fly less, or organises rock-star extravaganzas to tell the masses they should live more meekly, some sceptics have asked: `Who the hell does Al Gore think he is?'

Well, now we know. He seems to think he is the spokesman for the human species, the legitimate representative of every human being who has ever lived or who will ever live in the future. He thinks he and his supporters `control the destiny of all generations to come', a boast that even the worst dictators in history never dared to make. Al Gore is an enviro-tyrant with delusions of global domination.

In his speech at the climate change conference in Bali last week, Gore expressed some deeply anti-democratic views. He told an audience of 1,000, including NGOs, green campaigners and journalists, as well as UN representatives and government officials, that they should `feel a sense of exhilaration that we are the people alive at a moment in history when we can make all the difference'. He suggested the audience should not be worried about being seen as a minority, a tiny brave group that recognises the `planetary emergency' facing Earth and its inhabitants, but rather should consider it a `privilege to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come' (1). [Reminscent of the French revolution]

Throughout history, from the feudalistic era through the Stalinist dictatorships of the twentieth century to places like Burma and Nepal today, vast swathes of mankind have considered it a drag to be `alive at a moment' when `small groups of people' controlled theirs and others' destinies. Now we're supposed to see it as a privilege that an apparently right-minded clique, which claims to represent `the human species', would like to shape the human destiny as it sees fit.

Gore openly expressed hostility towards the democratic process. He described certain elected governments as `obstacles' to the environmentalist agenda being drawn up in Bali, and called on the `relatively small group' of eco-enlightened ones to ignore or leap over these obstacles. `My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.' he said. `But if we look realistically at the situation that confronts us, then wisdom would call for moving forward in spite of that obstacle.' (2) Who needs to take into consideration the views of a government elected by tens of millions of Americans when you have `realism' and `wisdom' on your side?

Gore seems to believe that it is precisely the fact that he is unelected, and thus above the grubby process of winning public support and representing public interest, that makes him an honourable and fearless representative of humankind. `I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by diplomatic niceties', he boasted. `So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth [about the planetary emergency facing humanity].' (3) Here, planetary interests, as represented by a self-styled, unelected spokesman for Mother Earth, trump the public interest, as represented by politicians who worked to win the support of millions of Americans. President George W Bush might represent the desires - yuk! - of a majority of the American people, but Gore represents something far more important: planet Earth itself, and all of the billions of human beings yet to be born. As the numerous newspaper headlines said in celebration of Gore's speech: `The world cannot wait for George Bush.' Or for his 50million supporters, presumably (4).

Gore opened his speech in Bali with the words: `We, the human species.' Nothing better sums up his megalomaniacal delusions than those four words. American governments have claimed to speak for `We, the people' (some with more right and legitimacy than others). Outside of the democratic process, tyrannical leaders have often claimed to represent `the nation' or `the masses': apparently they have some special emotional insight into what the people need and desire. But no one has ever claimed to represent the human species before.

Unlike those who merely represent a people or a nation, the self-described representatives of the human species, that `relatively small group' of privileged warriors for planetkind, have a blank cheque to do and say as they please. Legitimate representatives of the people are dependent on the people's support: they are confined and directed by the electoral process. Representatives of the nation are restricted by borders: their writ extends only to the ends of their sovereign territory. But a wannabe representative of the human species like Al Gore recognises no democratic mandate or territorial border, because he thinks he represents every human being who has ever existed, who exists now, and who will exist in the future: the species itself. Gore's mandate is timeless and borderless, and it most certainly does not require the rubber-stamping of the mass of the population, that relatively large group of people who apparently do not appreciate the urgency of today's `planetary emergency'.

For the past seven years, Gore and his supporters have claimed that he was robbed of presidential victory by the conniving Bush regime. Gore has posed as a sincere democrat whose place in the White House was stolen from him by Dubya. Yet today, Gore claims to speak for future generations (who cannot vote, on account of the fact that they aren't born yet), the planet (which has no vote, on account of the fact that it is not a sentient or rational organism), and the human species itself (a natural/biological category that falls outside of the political process). And he is cheered by the very same people who wept when Bush allegedly stole his election. It seems that when it comes to `saving the planet', you can be as undemocratic and dictatorial as you like.

Gore's off-planet fantasies about being some kind of new Timelord who speaks for the human species expose the anti-democratic strain in the politics of environmentalism. Many green-leaning leaders and spokesmen claim that the threat facing the planet is so dire that normal democratic debate and processes must be suspended in order to deal with it. Dictators of old used to impose states of emergency in order to freeze democracy; today's eco-megalomaniacs use the more PC phrase `planetary emergency' in an attempt to justify allowing small groups of people to override the `obstacle' of individual nations' democratic processes.

Where the modern democratic system has been defined by ideas of sovereign independence and territorial integrity - where a people are, at least on paper, the masters of their nation's fate - today we are told that the threat of climate change makes the institutions of sovereignty obsolete. Because pollution and CO2 emissions are, in Gore's words, `invisible' and `global', climate change activism must override borders and do away with `diplomatic niceties' (5). In the real world, the new green disregard for sovereignty has allowed powerful nations in the West to demonise India and China for daring to develop, on the extremely dodgy basis that India and China's development is poisoning us over here (6).

Modern democratic politics was also traditionally defined by time constraints. In America, presidents can only serve for four years at a time, and never for longer than eight years; in Britain the PM must submit to the electorate's interrogation and judgement every four or five years. But in the name of saving the planet, both elected officials and unelected campaigners now push through far-reaching policies to `protect future generations'. They draw up 50-year plans for tackling climate change, and demand that nations cut their emissions by 60 or 80 per cent by 2020 or 2050, without thinking about what voters in four years' time might consider to be an acceptable level of carbon output or a desirable level of industrial development (7). Democratic politics was also once driven by debate: it involved putting forward proposals, arguing the toss over them, and then deciding whether and how to act on them. Today, green-fingered officials and activists frequently argue that the threat to Gaia and her organisms (that includes us) is so great that we must ditch debate. Instead we should have `action, action, action'. As Gore says, `The debate about global warming is over' (8).

Once an individual or a campaign group can pose as the mouthpiece for the needs of the planet, there is no limit to their authority. Freed from the shackles of responsibility to an electorate, and from the time and territorial restraints of democratic politics, campaigners can make sweeping declarations about the needs of the human species and about what is good for people now and in time immemorial. `We are one people on one planet with one destiny', said Gore in Bali (9).

That sounds nice and hippyish. But it is actually an attempt to deny and undermine the stuff of politics itself: debate; disagreement; the clash of interests; heated scraps over the destiny of mankind. We don't only have `one destiny'. My desired destiny for mankind is a whole world away from Al Gore's, just as the needs and desires of people in poorer parts of Africa are different to the needs and desires of those 1,000 well-heeled people who packed the conference hall in Bali.

Airing these differences, and arguing over them, is politics itself - or it will be, once we do something about the anti-democratic, debate-phobic Al Gore and his acolytes in the environmentalist lobby.

Source





Return of the Skeptical Environmentalist

In his new book Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg shows how `the science' on global warming - covering everything from polar bear extinction to the disappearance of Greenland - has been distorted and politicised

Climate change has dominated the political agenda throughout 2007, making previous debates about global warming look like mere water-cooler gossip....

In the midst of all this hyped-up consensus and overheated alarmism, the return of the `Skeptical Environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg, with his new book Cool It, provides some very welcome perspective. Lomborg has little doubt that global warming is occurring, that human activities are a factor, and that all of this presents us with problems and challenges. However, he is adamant that there is no need to panic, that attempts to cut greenhouse emissions now are a costly waste of time, and that adaptation for the medium-term future, coupled with investment in research and development (R&D) for the longer term, would make for a more sensible way forward.

Beginning with the much-proclaimed demise of the polar bear and working his way through other hot topics such as heat-related deaths, sea-level rise, hurricanes and disease, Lomborg examines the specialist literature to show that many of the stories that arise in the media or that are promoted by campaigners and politicians are simply not supported by the facts.

He starts by examining the plight of the polar bear because it `encapsulates the problems with many of the other scares - once you take a look at the supporting data the narrative falls apart'. In contrast to the argument put forward by Al Gore, the World Wildlife Fund, and others - that polar bears may well become extinct due to a loss of habitat - Lomborg examines the key research that such stories rest on, conducted by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union in 2001, to uncover a very different story. According to Lomborg, what this group actually found was that of 20 distinct populations of polar bears, `one or possibly two were declining', while `more than half were known to be stable, and two subpopulations were actually increasing'. Apparently, the report also found that, thanks to the regulation of hunting, the global polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 nowadays.

Since Lomborg made this point, he has been criticised for failing to refer to a more recent 2006 report by the same group, `which showed that of 19 populations five were declining, five were stable and two were increasing; and for the remaining six there was not enough data to judge'. Lomborg apparently retorted that the latest research did not detract from his key argument that the `best way to protect polar bears was not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but to reduce hunting' (6).

Lomborg's second case study in climate change alarmism is our understanding of the 35,000 human lives lost during the European heatwave of 2003, a story that has featured prominently in the arguments of those advocating the need to curb carbon emissions right now. Lomborg agrees that a warmer world will result in an increased frequency of exceptional heat events such as the 2003 heatwave, and that therefore we are likely to see an increase in the number of `heat deaths'. But again his concern is to put this issue into perspective. As he points out, `cold spells will decrease just as much as heatwaves increase', and this is important because `cold deaths' are a bigger killer than `heat deaths'. According to Lomborg, `every year more than 200,000 people die from excess heat in Europe' compared to about 1.5million people who die from excess cold. The data suggests that any increased mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger declines in cold-related mortalities.....

Lomborg devotes several pages to a discussion of the role played by potential ice sheet collapse in order to demonstrate why the 20 feet of sea level rise posited by Al Gore in his influential film/book/roadshow combo An Inconvenient Truth is so out of kilter with most other people's thinking. Lomborg points out that `IPCC estimates that the very worst additional increase to be expected from Greenland could be 20cm over the century', and that to achieve the scale or sea level rise discussed by Gore would require figures `40 times higher than the absolutely highest model estimate and an astounding 174 times higher that [sic] the average'.

Lomborg also notes that the IPCC expects that with sufficient warming, `a rather, but not unrealistically, high temperature increase globally of 3.1 degrees Celsius', Greenland's ice will disappear. However, given that this temperature increase would not be reached until around 2100, and that it would need to be sustained for `many, many centuries' for Greenland's ice to start disappearing, Lomborg argues that this seems unrealistic because we will by then already be in the twenty-second century and will therefore have developed CO2 alternatives.

Given the heaps of headlines that we have been treated to about major cities being submerged in floods of biblical proportions, with scant if any mention of the huge timescales in question even for this theoretical possibility to occur, I know who I think provides a fairer overview of `the science'.

Essentially, Lomborg's argument is that, on the basis of our current understanding of climate systems and the role played by CO2, we will eventually have to cut CO2 emissions significantly. Right now, however, is a bad time to be worrying about it because the harmful effects of climate change in the medium-term future are manageable, and can be managed far more cheaply than can the massive cuts in CO2 that would be required to avoid those effects.

So according to Lomborg, we could get all the world's current energy from solar cells taking up space equivalent to 2.6 per cent of the area of the Sahara - the reason we don't is because `it would be horrendously costly'. Based on the fact that solar energy has come down in price by about 50 per cent per decade over the past 30 years, Lomborg estimates: `Even at a much slower pace, it will probably become competitive before mid-century for many uses, and before the end of the century for most uses.' He points out that this is only one such opportunity, and proposes that all nations should commit themselves to spending 0.05 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in R&D on non-carbon emitting energy technologies as a long-term approach to tackling global warming.

In Cool It's penultimate chapter, `The Politics of Global Warming', Lomborg discusses how the science of climate change is becoming politicised. He argues that when the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, argues for dramatic CO2 cuts, the IPCC scientists `effectively become agenda-driven advocates', who misuse `their standing as scientists to pursue a political agenda' which will eventually undermine the credibility of the scientific discipline....

Lomborg notes that some climate scientists have become concerned about this process. Most notably he cites Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, who spoke out against the use of the language of catastrophe, tipping points and points of no return. Writing for the BBC in November 2006, Hulme asked: `Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions?'

Hulme also argued that `the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012'. He remarked that the UK government-sponsored conference of February 2005, titled `Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change', `served the government's purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of "climate change is worse than we thought" news reporting and group-think.' (9)

In 2007 alone, we have witnessed a concerted effort to employ a mix of one-sided presentations of the science of global warming, combined with heavy rhetoric and emotionalism, designed to force a consensus view on climate policy on to the world's nations. This has had a chilling effect not only on the debate about global warming in the policy and media world, but also on scientists themselves, working to discover the true facts about what is going on.

As Chris Rapley, the former director of the British Antarctic Survey, commented at the Battle of Ideas conference in London in October 2007: `There are an awful lot of scientists who feel extremely uncomfortable in this debate. the heat and light that are in the subject now I believe is causing many scientists, many working scientists, to say I don't want to be part of this, it is all too dangerous, all too difficult; I am going to retreat into my shell. And so areas of science which are as yet unresolved are not being debated in public in the way that I believe they should be.' (10)

It is fortunate that critics such as Bjorn Lomborg and Mike Hulme are brave enough to venture into this terrain, attempting to transform the `heat and light' of climate change politics into a more cool-headed debate about what the science actually is, and how we can best use its findings now and in the future. Whether or not one agrees with Lomborg's cost-benefit approach to managing global warming, one thing is certain: the price of crushing skeptical voices about Al Gore's `inconvenient truths' is far too high for any civilised society to consider paying.

More here





Eco-imperialism at the Bali summit?

Are Western powers offsetting their industrial growth by blackmailing poorer countries to foreswear development?

More than most scientific questions, the state of the environment has been deeply mixed up with international rivalries. In fact, some nations seem to have politicised environmental claims as a weapon in their economic competition. CO2 emissions mirror industrial output. The agreement in Bali to limit CO2 emissions looks to me like an attempt by the Great Powers to regulate industrial competition.

British diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell was one of the first people to identify the realpolitik possibilities of ecological concern. His book Climate Change in World Affairs attempted to justify Western intervention into the internal domestic policies of newly-independent Third World states. Those governments, said Tickell, ‘can often make things as bad for their neighbours as for themselves… but they lack the knowledge and still more the means to cope’. Climate Change in World Affairs was published in 1977, long before scientists identified global warming as a problem.

In 1988 Sir Crispin persuaded then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher to make a major speech on global warming as the ‘new danger’ that would replace the Soviet threat as a motivation for Western policy (1). Finding a new principle around which to organise international diplomacy was pressing in the late Eighties and early Nineties. For 40 years, the leading Western powers had organised themselves, and the rest of the world, around a campaign against communism. But when Russia abandoned Communism, a new motivation had to be found for Western leadership on the world stage.

While most of today’s anti-capitalist protesters were still at school, the global elite put climate change on the agenda of the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, and agreed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at Kyoto in December 1997. Greenhouse gas emissions, which the convention limits, roughly correspond to heavy industrial output, especially at a lower technological level. For that reason, different nations adopted differing stances on Kyoto, according to its differential impact. As a mature region, with declining growth rates, but a high technical level, Europe was pointedly in favour of the measure that set limits on its more dynamic competitors. Developing countries like Russia, India and China were pointedly more sceptical, as was the heavily producing United States.

Indeed, China and India could only be persuaded to sign on the basis that they would not be subject to greenhouse gas limits under the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. Russia only agreed to sign up in exchange for membership of the World Trade Organisation. But despite negotiating opt-outs, the Kyoto framework makes their growth open to constant attack (2). ‘Developing nations whose emissions are surging are under no pressure to cut back’, worries The Sunday Times, reporting that ‘bringing India and China into a new emissions regime is a major part of what the EU and America want to achieve [at the December 2007 climate change talks] at Bali’ (3).

The new climate deal struck at Bali seems to be about letting First World countries offset their industrial growth by persuading less developed countries to forego growth, and enlarge their forest reserves instead. In effect the West will use its financial leverage to keep the natives sitting in darkness and its own monopoly on technology intact. Even Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth was moved to denounce this deal as ‘ecological imperialism foisted on the developing world’ (4).

The debate over Kyoto made it clear that what was at issue was economic rivalry, masked as climate control. During the initial negotiations, then US president Bill Clinton was preoccupied with China and India, because ‘within 30 years they would surpass the United States as emitters of greenhouse gases’ (5). Openly expressed, hostility to Chinese and Indian industrial expansion would sound like self-serving hypocrisy. Dressed up as environmental concern it looked like altruism. When the US Congress balked at reining in US industry and refused to sign Kyoto, it was America’s turn to be attacked. Incoming president George W Bush was widely denounced by European protesters as the ‘Toxic Texan’. At Bali this month, the US negotiators were booed. Climate control seems to make national chauvinism acceptable.

For some radicals it seemed straightforward that the opponents of the Kyoto accord were industry spokesmen, and its defenders critics of big business. But that was to forget that capitalism is a competitive system. Setting limits to output was indeed a successful capitalist strategy, especially for those businesses with a lower carbon footprint, like banks and other financial speculators. Translated to competition at the international level, nations’ interests differ according to the proportion of CO2-emitting industries in their domestic economies. For those nations that are experiencing slower growth, penalising more dynamic competitors made sense. What is more, even for companies with higher emissions, raising the bar of entry could prove to be a successful business strategy. Of course, big greenhouse gas emitters were among the business lobby that opposed Kyoto, and the United States, being home to many of those, was among the most reluctant to sign up to the treaty. Was the Kyoto Convention, then, a blow against business? Hardly. Not unless Enron or the European Union or Al Gore are to be counted among the enemies of big business.

Source

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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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The Hebrew University debate on Global Warming

By Nir J. Shaviv (D.Sc.)

On Sunday last week, a global warming debate was held at the Hebrew University, in front of a large public audience. The speakers included myself, and Prof. Nathan Paldor from the HU, on the so called sceptic side, and Prof. Dan Yakir (Weizmann) and Prof. Colin Price (Tel-Aviv Univ.) on the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (AGHG) side...

Although it was called a debate, it wasn't really one. It included 4 short presentations (about 12 mins each + 3 min for clarifying questions) and then another 45 mins of questions from the audience.

In my short presentations, I stressed a few major issues. First, there are no fingerprints proving that 20th century warming is necessarily human. Second, once you check the details, you find that there are notable inconsistencies. In particular, the AGHG theory predicts warming over the whole troposphere, while in reality, only the ground appears to have warmed over the past few decades, and that Earth's climate response to volcanic eruptions is significantly smaller than predicted by computer models. This is because these models tend to have an exaggerated climate sensitivity. Third, the only reason we can attribute the warming to humans, is because allegedly there is nothing else to blame, but there is, the increasing activity of the sun. And then I quickly showed some of the evidence showing that the sun affects climate through the cosmic ray climate link.

The second speaker was Prof. Dan Yakir. He started by saying that there is really no place or need to hold such debates anymore since the vast majority of scientists believe that the warming is anthropogenic. He mentioned Gore's nobel prize (yes, committees are to decide about scientific truths), Oreskes findings that from a 1000 papers, none contradict anthropogenic global warming, etc. He then attempted to debunk the cosmic ray - climate theory, some of his claims were supposed inconsistencies in the theory, and some were simply non-scientific arguments. Since I was not given a chance to address these claims, the response to each and every point raised can be found below.

The third speaker was Prof. Nathan Paldor. He emphasized the large uncertainties in our current understanding of climate systems. One such example was that of global dimming. Because of these large uncertainties, computer based modeling of 20th century warming or predictions of future climate change is mostly pointless at this time. He mentioned the 70's during which scientists urged Nixon to prepare the US for the upcoming ice-age, especially considering that the Soviets are better prepared for it!

The fourth speaker was Prof. Price, who emphasized the agreements between computer model predictions of AGHG theory and the observations. He showed, for example, that computer models trying to model 20th warming with only natural radiative forcings cannot explain the observed temperature trend, and models with anthropogenic contributions added, can explain. He then continued by trying to debunk the cosmic-ray climate theory. He mentioned several inconsistencies in the cosmic ray climate link (at least so he supposed). He also showed that for the cosmic ray climate mechanism to work, it rests on many links, some of which he doubted.

Before addressing the critiques, let me add that neither Yakir nor Price brought any evidence proving the standard anthropogenic scenario. Yakir did not attempt to prove anything (there is no need since the majority of scientists anyway support it), and Price did bring supporting evidence, but evidence that in reality does not prove anything about the validity of the AGHG theory.

The main claim raised by Price was that when computer models are used to fit 20th century warming, they do a very lousy job if you include all the natural forcing only, but they do a wonderful job if you include the anthropogenic forcing as well. This supposedly implies that one needs the large anthropogenic contribution to explain the warming. The key point here is that the natural forcings included all the known forcings, and not the unknown forcings, or specifically, the large indirect solar/climate link which these models fail to include, because the modelers bluntly neglect this mechanism. More about it here.

Although Yakir and Price did have a chance to address the critiques I raised about the AGHG (unlike the opposite), they chose not to.

Much more here -- including lots of lovely graphs.






Strange Greenie "science"

When I was a member of Greenpeace in the 1980s I received a request for money supported by the claim that about 30,000 species each year were becoming extinct. Until then I'd been an unsceptical environmentalist, but this sounded like an awful lot, so I called Greenpeace to ask how they knew. I made several queries but they didn't seem very interested. Finally they told me they didn't know where the figure came from, and I resigned from the organisation.

I later found the figure almost certainly came from the work of the biologist Edward Wilson, originally an expert on ants. Wilson made his name in the area of conservation biology in the 1960s when he proposed a mathematical model that could be used to calculate species loss due to habitat destruction. Based on this and his invention of the concept of "biodiversity", he later announced the world was experiencing "one of the great extinction spasms of geological history" and losing up to 100,000 species a year. Wilson's claims are one of the mainstays of the modern environmental movement, and a foundation of government environmental policies around the globe.

This experience with Greenpeace gave me a long-running interest in the way much environmental science involves mathematical formulas or computer models. The most famous recent examples of these are the "general circulation models" used to produce predictions of future climatic conditions. An important book has just been published by an Australian academic that raises the question of whether this should be regarded as science at all.

The book is Science And Public Policy (Edward Elgar Publishing), and the author is Professor Aynsley Kellow, the head of the school of government at the University of Tasmania. Kellow believes that environmental science has often been corrupted by the good intentions of its practitioners, so that it consists of wishful thinking rather than facts and provable theories. Perhaps the first big case of this was the notorious Limits To Growth study published by the Club of Rome in 1972, based on computer modelling and subsequently disproved. One might expect the quality of models to improve, but since then they have been used for all sorts of predictions, and there is little evidence they have got much better.

Despite this, the predictions made by such models are now contained in scientific papers published in leading journals, which gives the status of science to what is often little more than wishful thinking. Kellow describes one paper published in the journal Nature in January 2004 that "warned of the loss of thousands of species with a relatively small warming over the next century. But just how virtual was this science is apparent when we consider that the estimates of species loss depended upon a mathematical model linking species and area; modelled changes in the . distributions of areas of habitat depended in turn upon the results of climate models tuned to reflect climate changes as a result of increasing greenhouse gases . these in turn were driven by scenarios of what [such] emissions might look like over the next century, driven in turn by economic models." Kellow notes that a similar warming over the previous century had not left anything like the trail of species devastation being proposed in the paper, yet this observational data was considered irrelevant compared with the virtual world of the models.

The widespread concern over climate change is based substantially on calculations similar to the one just described. Is this a problem? Kellow thinks it is, because virtual science is ripe for manipulation, usually unconsciously, by virtuous scientists. Few people are aware of the large element of subjectivity, not only in the design of immensely complicated general circulation models, but in the data that goes into them. Even basic information such as contemporary temperatures is often incomplete or uncertain and tweaked by those who operate the models.

An interesting article on this appeared on the BBC website last month. The author is Dr John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama and a climate expert. He runs one of the two dozen or so general circulation models in the world. He says the only way to test models is to compare their predictions with outcomes "not known ahead of time", and when he has done that he has found "gross inconsistencies - hence I am sceptical of our ability to claim cause and effect about both past and future climate states".

It is not just in the field of climate change that modelling produces wildly over-pessimistic projections. Writing in the latest IPA Review, the biologist Dr Jennifer Marohasy, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, notes that "in the lead-up to the 2001 federal election, the National Farmers' Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation joined forces to lobby the government for $65 billion on the premise that vast areas of farmland were in ruin and salinity was spreading". But in 2005 Dr Wendy Craik, the head of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, admitted publicly that flawed models had been used to talk up the salinity threat.

We often hear that the predictions accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on "the science". It's important to realise that this is often a very different type of science to other science, the sort that explains why a jumbo jet won't fall out of the sky or why a certain treatment will cure a certain disease.

Source





Sunshine duration accounts for 93% of all warming since 1951

Post below lifted from Gust of Hot air. See the original for links

Abstract: Using twenty two weather stations across Australia, the variable sunshine duration is shown to have significantly increased since 1951. Its correlation with maximum temperature anomalies is highly statistically significant. By eliminating the influence of sunshine duration from the maximum temperature dataset, maximum temperature trends were shown to drop from an average of 1.4 to 0.1 degrees increase per 100 years. Hence the variable sunshine duration accounts for 93% of all positive trends in maximum temperature since 1951 in Australia. Implications of these findings and the relationship of the variable sunshine duration with respect to cloud cover trends and how they is measured will be discussed.

Our introduction on Tuesday laid out that we intend on looking at the variable sunshine duration to see if it has any effect on temperature change over the years.

Using our dataset we found a highly significant increase in maximum temperatures (t = 5.95, p < 0.001). Maybe because we have used urban stations or maybe because the bulk of the weather stations occur on the east coast of Australia (an area which has seen the majority of increase), that the rate of increase of temperature as shown on that graph (linked) is at 1.42 degrees per 100 years, which is more than greater Australia and the rest of the world.

Either way, this doesn't matter, as we are merely looking at the relationship between sunshine duration and temperature. Because some stations have data for maximum temperature that goes back further than sunshine duration (and vice versa), all years that did not have recordings for sunshine duration as well maximum temperatures were eliminated from the dataset for each individual station.

Interestingly, sunshine duration also significantly increased since 1951 (t = 2.58, p = 0.013). The strength of the trend is not as strong as temperature, but is still statistically significant.



The two variables shown on the same graph is shown above. Note that in general when temperatures are high, so too is sunshine duration and vice versa. The last six years of data highlights this. anomalies

The relationship between the maximum temperature per year per station as well as sunshine duration per year per station is shown below. The correlation between them is highly significant (t = 14.71, p < 0.001), and the r squared indicates that 17.5% of the variance of temperature can be explained by sunshine duration.

That might not sound like much, but when we account for the variable sunshine duration (i.e. minus its relationship with temperature off the original dataset), then we can analyse temperature without any influence of sunshine duration. In other words, we can look at temperature trends over the past 50 years by assuming that there has been no trends and no anomalies in sunshine duration at all.

The results are amazing. The following graph shows the temperature trend since 1951 should there be no variance in sunshine duration. The increase in temperature since 1951 still occurs, as is statistically significant (t = 5.8, p < 0.001), but take a look the rate of change of temperature, in particular the formula for the line of best fit as well as the left hand axis.



When taking into account sunshine duration, temperature rise in Australia is at the rate of 0.00099 per year or 0.099 degrees per 100 years. Now a 0.1 degree increase every 100 years is hardly anything to get worries about. It's not going to cause any great catastrophe. So we've gone from 1.4 degrees of warming per 100 years to 0.1 degrees of warming per 100 years. The variable sunshine duration has accounted for 93% (1.3/1.4) of all warming trend that we have seen since 1951.

So therefore the warming that we are seeing, is by and large highly correlated with sunshine duration. So does this mean that clouds are the major cause of global warming? Well, probably not. In order to discuss why the variable "sunshine duration" has a major effect on temperature change, we have to look into how it is measured, and the trends of clouds in Australia. And that will be in the next post







Beyond Bali: Fight Global Warming by Dumping Kyoto

Even assuming that man-caused warming is real, Kyoto is not a sane response to it

Last week at the UN's global warming meeting in Indonesia, polar bear costumed activists passed out huge pieces of cake. They were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions. I wonder if they understand how their obsessive focus on Kyoto as the "only solution" hinders progress?

Kyoto is both a technical and a political failure. (If fully implemented, Kyoto will reduce global temperature by only 0.03 degrees Celsius.) Activists demanded that the U.S. sign Kyoto, but it won't. Why? Because it is a terrible deal. The U.S. would have had to bear up to two-thirds, or more, of the cost of Kyoto, likely more than all other nations combined.

A new approach is required. Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner outline one in a new paper, The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy. The authors believe the threats of climate change are real and that action is warranted.

But they make explicit what every serious observer has known for quite some time: "The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of...concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth."

"The politically charged rhetoric within which the climate change question is discussed means that anyone who questions...reduction goals...is regarded with suspicion. Unquestioning support for...Kyoto...has become a litmus test for determining who takes the threat of climate change seriously."

"...[Kyoto's] narrow focus on mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases (in which it has failed) has created a taboo on discussing other approaches, in particular, adaptation to climate change. ...For the past fifteen years, it has given the...public an illusion of effective action, tranquillizing political concern. This has been, perhaps, its most damaging legacy." (Read the whole thing on FREE's website.)

The most vulnerable countries are those that depend on agriculture and are at low latitudes. They need to be more resilient to climate change today.

But reducing carbon emissions will not fix poor land-use practices, restore degraded local environments, improve emergency preparedness, or eliminate floods, droughts, or disease outbreaks.

Again Prins and Rayner: "Many...activists assume that slowing greenhouse-gas emissions has logical and ethical priority over adapting to climate impacts.... It is not clear to us that the interests of millions of people in poorer countries who depend on marginal ecosystems are best served by an exclusive preoccupation with mitigation. Indeed, such a narrow focus is likely to be a fatal error."

Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions fast enough and far enough to avoid "dangerous human interference in the climate system" (defined as an increase in temperature of about 2 degrees Celsius) requires an unprecedented transformation of our energy systems. For example, to cut global carbon emissions in half by 2050 requires that, on average, the world economy in the middle of the century will have the same carbon intensity as Switzerland had in 2004.

China and India are making huge investments in energy infrastructure that has a lifetime of 50 years or more. Their fuel of choice is coal. We will not achieve meaningful carbon reductions unless we can develop the technology to capture and safely store emissions from coal-fired power plants. This requires huge R&D investments in this emerging technology.

Another area for investment is to develop storage for wind and solar energy. Wind and solar are growing energy sources, but their usefulness will be limited to a niche role unless economical, large-scale storage can be developed. This is a basic science question that has proven difficult to crack.

Addressing climate change requires international cooperation for a simple reason: it is a global problem. No nation is going to sign an agreement whose costs greatly outweigh the benefits. Permanent solutions require the discovery and adoption of new technologies. The next U.S. President should make this explicit. Constructive proposals include transferring efficient energy technologies to developing countries. This will be both cheaper and more effective than continuing to push the Kyoto Protocol.

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USA Today Won't Take Back Claim that Fish Poison Babies

Newspaper makes outrageous claim: 600,000 born annually with brain damage due to fish-eating mothers. More mercury madness. Prolonged exposure to high doses of mercury does indeed cause a form of madness but just the mention of mercury is enough to cause madness among Greenies and their acolytes

It's no wonder businesspeople tend to distrust the media - especially when unsubstantiated alarmist statements are made and no recourse is offered. "As many as 600,000 babies may be born in the USA each year with irreversible brain damage because pregnant mothers ate mercury-contaminated fish, the Environmental Protection Agency says," USA Today's Larry Wheeler wrote. Sounds troublesome, right?

This article in the October 29 issue of USA Today ignored the tenets of ethical journalism by advocating a position that mercury-contaminated fish were responsible for a half a million babies annually being born with brain damage. But the story didn't end there. That claim and others in the article prompted the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) to react with an exchange of various responses, but the results were unsatisfactory, according to Jim McCarthy, a spokesman for NFI.

When eating fish is linked to hurting babies, it is certain to get attention. But according to the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), the statement that 600,000 babies are born in the USA each year with irreversible brain damage is incorrect. "That is false - and in several respects," John Connelly, president of NFI wrote in a November 1 letter to Gannett News Service Editor Val Ellicott. "First, the EPA has never made any such assertion. One official from EPA, Kathryn Mahaffey, extrapolated that figure at EPA's Fish Forum conference in 2004. The agency itself subsequently disavowed connection with the assertion - and placed a disqualifying reference to it on their public website. What's more, there is not a single documented case of any child in this country with mercury levels above RfD [Reference Dose] - let alone with resulting brain damage."

Despite the NFI's efforts, USA Today was uncooperative and even issued an incorrect correction in its November 5 edition: "In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 410,000 newborns in the USA were born to mothers whose methyl mercury levels were higher than the maximum level the EPA considers safe. An Oct. 30 story cited a 2004 study that estimated the number at 600,000 newborns."

But USA Today was also wrong with that statement, according to Connelly: "The figure you cite, that 410,000 infants are exposed to mercury above the EPA reference dose, is taken from a presentation delivered by one (1) EPA scientist, not the agency itself. In fact, here is what EPA had contributed as a slide in the beginning of that presentation: `The Findings and Conclusions in This Presentation Have Not Been Formally Disseminated by U.S. EPA and Should Not Be Construed to Represent Any Agency Determination or Policy.' We are unaware of any change in EPA's position. Therefore, obviously, this is not an EPA estimate as you assert."

Click here to see the EPA slides. See slide #25 for the 410,000 figure - an assertion solely of Ms. Mahaffey. On slide #2, EPA itself officially disavows that assertion.

According to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, journalists are supposed to:

* Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.

* Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.

* Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.

But Wheeler disregarded those tenets when he included background in his October 29 article. The article, which has recently popped up in other newspapers including the December 3 Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal, has many similarities to the left-wing Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Web site on mercury-contaminated fish. "Physicians and public health officials acknowledge it is extremely difficult to `prove' a direct link between eating a tuna steak and high blood mercury levels," Wheeler wrote.

However, both Wheeler's article and the NRDC Web site cite the same expert, Jane Hightower, a San Francisco doctor. Hightower claimed a link exists between fish consumption and what she diagnosed as a disorder she calls "fish fog." But as a November 3 letter from Connelly to Val Ellicott, editor of Gannett News Service, indicates - there is no published evidence of such a condition. "Medical and scientific researchers have, in fact, been studying the effects of mercury for decades," Connelly wrote. "It should also be noted that there is no medical condition known as `fish fog.' It is not a term used in the medical community and there is no documented evidence that anyone has such a condition."

Although the story didn't run until October 29, Wheeler originally contacted NFI on September 17 and insisted on a response by 3 p.m. the next afternoon. "Our PR firm took contemporaneous notes when Wheeler first called on Monday, September 17th," Mary Anne Hansan wrote in a letter to Gannett News Service Managing Editor Laura Rehrmann. "He said he was `handing my editor a copy of the piece at 5pm today.' He went on to say he would fill the `hole' in his story if we responded no later than 3pm on Tuesday, the 18th." USA Today's rush to have NFI to respond was peculiar - because they sat on the story for 40 days before finally publishing it October 29.

Published in every issue of USA Today is a message on its editorial page pledging a "Commitment to Accuracy": "To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones ." However, Jones, who was unwilling to comment on this particular story to the Business & Media Institute, told BMI he isn't an ombudsman. "USA TODAY doesn't have an actual ombudsman," Jones wrote in an e-mail to BMI. "But as reader editor, I am the primary link between the news organization and its print and online audiences. The job includes reviewing and sharing input from readers, selecting and publishing letters to the editor and serving on the newspaper's editorial board."

Since the fallout from a USA Today scandal involving Jack Kelley, a longtime reporter at the newspaper who in March 2004 was discovered to have been fabricating stories, the prominence of the Reader Editor was raised by Ken Paulson, editor of USA Today, according to a Dec. 10, 2004, PBS "NewsHour" case study on the Kelley-USA Today scandal. "In every edition of the paper, a photo of Reader Editor Brent Jones appears on the editorial page, soliciting feedback and concerns about USA Today's coverage," the study said. "Jones then takes that feedback into a daily meeting with editors at the paper. He told the Online NewsHour that `readers appreciate having a direct line of communication' with the editors of the paper and that the overall reaction has been `positive.'"

Source

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