Maurice Strong has been central to reformulating socialism’s grand narrative in radical environmental terms
There is nothing that aspiring global governors love so much as recognition of their vast good intentions. Today, octogenarian citizen of the
world Maurice Strong receives one of this year’s Four Freedoms Awards, established by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Roosevelt Stichting in the
Netherlands.
The Four Freedoms are those relating to speech and religion, and from want and fear, and are at the root of the United Nations charter. Mr. Strong’s award comes under the
“want” category. The citation notes his modest “role as the foremost guardian of the world’s environment.” Also his commitment to “social justice.”
Inconveniently, that latter commitment has recently come to the attention of Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who is not the first to notice that “social justice” actually means
forced redistribution, which means socialism, which has created more “want” than any system devised by man.
Washington’s runaway gusher of spending makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster look small and simple to stop.
Congress is debating another
irresponsible round of extra spending (although they refuse to call it “son of stimulus”) before they take a Memorial Day break. The measure would add an
estimated $84-billion (or perhaps $100-billion) to the deficit.
That’s actually good news, because earlier this week they planned to spend $50-billion more, until
some Democrats joined Republicans in balking. The bad news is that Congress
refuses to adopt a budget that would describe how much more they intend to spend over the next five years—or even to tell us how much more they will spend this year.
In addition, another spending bill is moving thru Congress–with $60-billion that is mostly to finance the war in Afghanistan—which is also deficit spending not included
in official budget numbers.
The National Debt clock just topped $13-trillion, surpassing $42,000 apiece for each American. The $1.5-trillion deficit in
2010 makes everything worse. Continue reading...
(The Foundry)
In passing Obamacare, Congress has put the states in quite a pickle.
To sharply expand health coverage, Obamacare flung wide the gates of Medicaid eligibility. It envisions a massive expansion of the federal-state health program that,
historically, delivers low-quality care to low-income Americans.
Not a smart move.
States were already struggling to meet their share of Medicaid program costs—even though Medicaid payments to providers often don’t even cover the cost of care. And, due
to the inadequate reimbursement rates, more and more doctors were already refusing to accept new Medicaid patients.
How fiscally shaky is Medicaid today? Well, last year Congress used the stimulus bill to give states $87 billion to help them cover rising Medicaid costs. And that doesn’t
seem to be enough.
A recent letter from House Democrats
encourages their colleagues to give states another $24 billion to help them cover Medicaid costs for another six months. “Without this funding,” the letter says, “our
states will be forced to make severe cuts to Medicaid providers and benefits, and the ensuing budget shortfall would have grave consequences for school funding and other
essential state programs.” Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
ONE of the many things ailing the present university - and the list is long - is the emergence of what we might term vampire disciplines. These new disciplines are parasitic
on existing bodies of knowledge and tend to justify themselves in terms of critique, deconstruction, contextualism, discourse analysis and other approaches that don't add very
much to the total sum of knowledge a society or civilisation possesses about itself.
Originally, vampire disciplines found their homes within the humanities and social sciences. But they are quickly spreading to areas as diverse as law and architecture,
terrorism studies and geography. Indeed, any discipline with some version of the "critical studies in . . ." genre has probably been infected by the vampire virus.
And, if your discipline is still a vampire-free zone, expect the vampire advanced guard to come knocking on your door to convince you that your students majoring in transport
logistics need to take a unit in "transport and society" or in "transport cultural identities".
The presence of the word "and" in a unit title should alert you the possibility that the unit being proposed is a vampire unit.
The lack of a sense of humour on the part of the proponent, or their inability to explain in words understandable to the man or woman on the street what the field is about,
also make it likely that you are dealing with an academic vampire.
So how did academic vampires become so powerful? (Eduardo De La Fuente, The Australian)
MSNBC’s Nightly News last night devoted a short segment to an “Extreme
Eating” list of high-calorie restaurant meals compiled by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). While the reporter acknowledges that each restaurant also
offers lower-calorie options, he concludes by saying that the more calorie-dense options are “a weighty issue for Americans, as this country’s obesity rates just keep
rising.”
“Obesity rates are not rising,” says ACSH’s Jeff Stier. “That’s not to say that obesity is not a serious problem or that we shouldn’t do something about it,
but for the media to continue to report falsely that obesity rates are rising when we know for a fact that those rates leveled out about five years ago is a
misrepresentation of the data. This is an example of the media agenda that supports things like a soda tax and government involvement with restaurant food options.
“Many years ago, I spoke with the head of nutrition at Burger King. He was basically speaking on behalf of all restaurants when he told me, ‘We are in the business of
selling customers the food that they want to eat.’ He said Burger King tried to sell tofu burgers for a while, but no one bought them. It’s up to the customers to make good
choices. And as far as the media is concerned, obesity is a big enough problem without their exaggerations.”
ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross adds, “Michael Jacobson of CSPI wants to eliminate all high-calorie food choices throughout America, for our own good, he says. Most restaurants offer
low-calorie selections, but banning delicious — albeit fattening — choices is, thankfully, not up to CSPI.” (ACSH)
At last justice has been seen to be done in the case of Andrew Wakefield, who provided our first Number
of the Month this year. For those who need it here is a comic book version
of the saga. We have covered the case on several occasions, beginning in February 2002.
A side issue is the fact that in covering such matters we exposed ourselves to potential bankruptcy in the UK courts, owing to Britain’s extraordinary libel laws, which
have been invented on the hoof by the likes of Mr JusticeEady ( Numby
Laureate in 2006). Still, given the state of the nation, the creation of a lucrative minor industry such as libel tourism is probably considered a positive contribution.
Meanwhile, all commentators, even those outside the UK if their remarks are published here, face the possibility of massive costs and time-wasting, innocent or not. Crooks
can use their ill-gotten gains to oppress anyone who dares to expose them.
NEW YORK - People who regularly feel stressed out by their jobs may have a higher risk of developing asthma than those with a more-relaxed work atmosphere, a new study
suggests.
High on-the-job stress has been linked to a number of health consequences, including heightened risks of heart disease, diabetes and depression.
The new findings, published in the journal Allergy, are the first to show an association between work stress and later asthma risk, according to the researchers.
The investigators found that among more than 5,100 adults they followed for nearly a decade, those who reported high job stress at the outset were twice as likely as those with
low levels of work stress to develop asthma. (Reuters Health)
CHICAGO - Indoor tanning beds sharply increase the risk of melanoma, the deadliest kind of skin cancer, and the risk increases over time, U.S. researchers said on Thursday,
and others experts called for tighter regulation.
They said people who use any type of tanning bed for any amount of time are 74 percent more likely to develop melanoma, and frequent users are 2.5 to 3 times more likely to
develop the skin cancer than people who never use them.
Nonetheless, the study confirms prior research linking indoor tanning beds with melanoma, and answers any lingering questions about whether the practice is safe, or if the risk
depends on the type of tanning bed used.
"We found that it didn't matter the type of tanning device used; there was no safe tanning device," said DeAnn Lazovich of the University of Minnesota, whose study
appeared in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. (Reuters)
Germany is already facing a demographic nightmare as birth rates fall despite a slew of family-friendly policies. Now, new statistics show that more people are leaving the
country than immigrating -- adding to concerns about the country's shrinking population. (Spiegel)
Preliminary research involving bone marrow transplants in mice suggests there may be an immune component to mental illness such as depression, OCD, autism and schizophrenia
(Ian Sample, The Guardian)
An estimated 60 million people in Bangladesh are exposed to unsafe levels of arsenic in their drinking water, dramatically raising their risk for cancer and other serious
diseases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Because most of the contaminated water is near the surface, many people in Bangladesh have installed deep wells to tap into groundwater that's relatively free of arsenic.
In recent years, farmers have begun using the deep, uncontaminated aquifers for irrigation – a practice that could compromise access to clean drinking water across the
country, according to a report in the May 27 issue of journal Science.
The report is co-authored by groundwater experts Scott Fendorf (Stanford University), Holly A. Michael (University of Delaware) and Alexander van Geen (Columbia University).
"Every effort should be made to prevent irrigation by pumping from deeper aquifers that are low in arsenic," the authors wrote. "This precious resource must be
preserved for drinking."
Every day, more than 100 million people are exposed to arsenic-contaminated drinking water in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam.
Over the last 10 years, Fendorf, Michael and van Geen have conducted long-term groundwater studies throughout southern Asia with the goal of finding low-cost solutions to what
the WHO calls the largest mass poisoning in history.
"Our Science report presents an overview of the scientific consensus and continuing uncertainty about the root causes of the arsenic calamity," said Fendorf, a
professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford. (Stanford University)
Badger culling has reduced incidence of TB in cattle, according to scientific evidence given to ministers.
Latest figures on disease outbreaks in the areas where badgers were trapped and shot during the Government’s scientific trials has found that incidence is down 37 per cent.
A joint study by researchers at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London, published in February, which reviewed the trials that took place between 1998 and
2005, suggested that the benefits of culling disappeared within four years. The experts have updated the findings and state that the results are “consistent with a constant
benefit of proactive culling”. The findings have hardened the attitude of many farmers, especially in the South West, one of the worst areas for TB, who are demanding that a
cull of badgers starts this autumn. (The Times)
WASHINGTON - Synthetic biology can be used to make nonpolluting fuel, instant vaccines against new diseases and inexpensive medicines, but it will take time, collaboration
and a nurturing regulatory environment, scientists said on Thursday.
The researchers, along with an ethicist and members of Congress, agreed the technology does not pose immediate environmental, security or ethical concerns but said everyone
needs to keep an eye on developments.
Most of the hearing before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee was spent outlining the potential of the technology. (Reuters)
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) argued his climate bill, the American Power Act, is a national security imperative, because climate change will inject “a new major source of
chaos, tension and human insecurity into an already volatile world.” (“Climate change: The new national security challenge” May 20) As evidence, he reeled off a doomsday
list of looming climate crises, including, “more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and staggering human displacement.” On
every count, the senator is wrong. (William Yeatman, The Hill)
The man battling NASA for access to potential "Climategate" e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough
to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.
Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit
Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.
Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the
science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.
"What we've got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of
aberrant warming," Mr. Horner said. "We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we've seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency
laws like FOIA."
He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be
released.
"They know time is our friend," said Mr. Horner, author of "Power Grab: How Obama's Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America."
Mark S. Hess, a spokesman for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which overseas the climate program, said the agency is working as fast as it can, and that Mr. Horner should
expect some answers any day. (Washington Times)
RICHMOND -- Virginia's flagship university went to court Thursday to fight an effort by Virginia Attorney Gen. Ken Cuccinelli II (R) to get documents from a former climate
scientist at the school, an unusual confrontation that will test the bounds of academic freedom and result in the college facing down its own lawyer in court.
In a motion filed in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia argued that Cuccinelli's subpoena for papers and e-mail from global warming researcher Michael Mann exceeds the
attorney general's authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure. (WaPo)
Hate Crime legislation is the last resort of those with no real case. It’s the last resort in the “shut-up” campaign that Team-Carbonari have been running against the
free world for two decades. The unverifiable, unknowable crime of intent. (Anyone have one of those Handy-Hate-Meters that reliably measures the dreaded Evil-Score to two
decimal places? No? It’s a matter of time…)
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post called Evidence What Evidence? where I dismantled the words
of a famous Australian science journalist for parroting bureaucrats and not investigating the evidence. What I wrote is not a recipe for building a better bomb with your Mazda,
but Ben E took issue with my pointed discussion in the comments:
“Sad, but scarcely surprising. Sites like this one will eventually be shut down in future updates to hate crime legislation, as they
are well on the way to inciting violence and hatred towards scientists and science communicators.”
Willis Eschenbach popped in with a devastating reply that deserved to be repeated.
“Well, let’s review the bidding regarding “violence and hatred” … More
» (Jo Nova)
Here’s another excellent post by Eduardo Zorita at the Klimazwiebel.
In this BBC podcast (takes a minute or so to load), the view of green elitists is
that we have casusbelli. Thus democracy has to be suspended and common sense authoritarianism has to take over – just
for a while, until things are put back in their proper order. The general population is just too stupid to understand it, and is only getting in the way. (Actually, and
thankfully, they’re too informed and many people understand precisely what this is about).
“The situation is urgent, the world is going to hell in a handbasket – let us rescue the planet. Trust us,” we are constantly told.
I’m trying to think of a veggie or fruit that’s green outside and brown inside. The closest thing I can think of is a rotten avocado. For me it’s even disturbing that
the BBC even gives equal time and weight to the green nutjobs who propose suspending democracy and taking us back to the German Democratic Republic – East Germany, behind the
Berlin Wall, for those of you who may have already forgotten. “Trust us” just isn’t good enough. History shows that populations have been burned by this all too
often.
The good news is that authoritarianism only works if there’s consent. But there can be no consent unless there is a genuine debate. That’s where the problem lies
for the kook warmists. They’ll never win this debate, and they know it. Indeed consent has been massively eroding lately. Their science has been exposed as a hoax.
They’ve lost the case and their desperation has caused them to lose any rationality they may have once had. (No Tricks Zone)
Middle class people living in the suburbs are bearing the brunt of an obsession with tackling climate change forced on them by a liberal elite, according to a new report.
Joel Kotkin, an American expert in social trends, said environmental policies were being used as an excuse to restrict the expansion of the suburbs on the edge of towns and
cities.
The result was "a direct assault on the quality of life for millions of working and middle class families".
Mr Kotkin argued in the report for the Legatum Institute that working and middle class people suffered the most from well intentioned yet-ill thought out policies of liberal
and urban elites.
Mr Kotkin said: “Long-term aesthetic arguments against suburbia have now evolved into a new emphasis on ‘sustainability’, largely in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Strict planning controls in the suburbs were ruining people's quality of life, forcing them to concrete over their gardens, or live in cramped homes.
Mr Kotkin said: “Progress made in the last century of returning the garden to British life has been largely sacrificed by … a policy of cramming, that is forcing ever
denser housing on both suburban and urban dwellers.” (TDT)
Scottish government told to draft tougher targets after MPs vote down mandatory annual targets
Alex Salmond's government has been told to draft tougher climate change targets after the Scottish parliament decided that his ministers were failing to cut CO2 emissions
quickly enough.
Opposition MPs narrowly threw out the Scottish government's plans to make modest immediate cuts in CO2 emissions, in an embarrassing rebuttal of Salmond's repeated claims that
Scotland has "world leading" climate change targets.
His Scottish National party government is now under intensifying pressure to honour its manifesto promise to immediately start cutting Scotland's emissions by at least 3% a
year, after offering today to only reduce levels by 0.5% for each of the next two years and 1% in 2012.
Today's vote at Holyrood – by 64 votes to 62 – now means that Scotland currently has no legally binding annual reduction targets. The annual targets were due to take effect
next Tuesday, but it may take until the autumn before ministers are able to draft revised proposals able to win majority support. (The Guardian)
Billions
of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being "wasted" in fighting climate change as other nations are hell-bent on development, a new book claims today – says The
Daily Express.
This is "Climate:
The Great Delusion", written by Frenchman Christian Gerondeau. He tells us that which we already know, but cannot be repeated often enough, that cutting carbon dioxide
emissions in the West will not reduce them globally because of the expansion of China, India and Africa. Thus, the money being spent by our governments to reduce our emissions
is being wasted.
Gerondeau concludes in his book that we have to stop wasting public and private money in the illusion that it will "save the planet". Huge savings are at hand, he
writes.
The tragedy of this is that it is all true, and easily verified. Yet, despite the economies of Europe falling apart as we speak, the likes of "Call me Dave" Cameron
are still locked into their mindless profligacy. And to this day, they cannot see the absurdity of calling for better control of public expenditure while, at the same time
condoning the stupidity of wasting billions on their global warming obsession.
Thus, we need a book to go with this one. To "Climate: the great delusion", should be added: "Politicians: the great deluded". Of the two problems, the
latter is probably the more formidable. (EU Referendum)
The Science Museum's new gallery aims to deepen the understanding of those who accept man-made global warming and inform those who are unsure
If there were ever a subject that required calm and considered discussion, it is climate change. The stakes are so high. Is it happening? Is it really being driven by humans?
Is it serious? If the threat is mild, we could needlessly waste huge effort and resources. If it is not, we could put at risk our food and water supplies, and world stability,
as well as bequeathing our grandchildren a legacy of rising sea levels, shifted climatic zones and an impoverished biosphere. Respond correctly, and we could ensure a future in
which both people and the planet can flourish.
Yet public comment is increasingly polarised and shrill. A tyranny is afoot, in which participating risks personal attack, whatever your viewpoint. The situation has become so
bad in the United States, that 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences recently published a letter in which they expressed deep concern about a growing wave of
political assaults on scientists in general – and climate scientists in particular.
Why should this subject generate so much emotion? Given this and the inevitable uncertainties, how can we find a sensible way forward? (Chris Rapley, The Guardian)
Rapley has certainly done his share of hyping the non issue but never mind that. The real question is whether the world is warmer than should be expected
and it is one that no one can answer. Until we can define precise albedo -- along with what it has been and should be through every possible combination of phases of major
natural cycles (ENSO, NAO, PDO, IOD, AO...) we have no hope of accurately determining Earth's expected mean temperature. Without knowing that we can not tell whether
Earth is responding to new forcings or merely returning to natural equilibrium following the unexplained cool period known as the Little Ice Age.
The UK's Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages.
They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.
The society's ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.
The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.
It is chaired by physicist John Pethica, vice-president of the Royal Society.
Its deliberations are reviewed by two critical sub-groups, each believed to comprise seven members.
Each of these groups contains a number of society Fellows who are doubtful in some way about the received view of the risks of rising CO2 levels.
One panel member told me: "The timetable is very tough - one draft has already been rejected as completely inadequate."
The review member said it might not be possible for the document to be agreed at all. "This is a very serious challenge to the way the society operates," I was told.
"In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a society without having to seek consensus of all the members. (BBC News)
Just been reading Climate: The Counter Consensus (Stacey International) the new book by Bob Carter – that’s New Zealand’s Professor Robert M Carter to you, mate:
he’s one of the world’s leading palaeoclimatologists – and it’s a cracker. By the end, you’re left feeling rather as I did after the Heartland Conference, that the
scientific case against AGW is so overwhelming that you wonder how anyone can still speak up for so discredited a theory without dying of embarrassment. (James Delingpole)
Climate change is about more than just polar bears. That is the message from Dr Kate Manzo whose research into climate change communication has been published in
Meteorological Applications. The research, which reviews the efforts of journalists, campaigners and politicians to engage the British public with climate change, explores how
new 'visual strategies' can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate scepticism.
"There have been various efforts to put a face on the climate change issue," said Dr Manzo, from Newcastle University. "Communicators need to move away from the
traditional images of polar bears or fear-laden imagery to find new, inspirational motifs to engage people with climate change. My research has uncovered a variety of
possibilities – such as windmills as icons of renewable energy – as well as alternatives to documentary photography as the dominant form of climate change communication.
Artists and cartoonists are among the producers of inspirational alternatives. (Wiley-Blackwell)
The Atlantic storm season may be the most intense since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina killed over a thousand people after crashing through Gulf of Mexico energy facilities,
the U.S. government's top climate agency predicted on Thursday.
In its first forecast for the storm season that begins next Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast 14 to 23 named storms, with 8 to 14 developing
into hurricanes, nearly matching 2005's record of 15.
Three to seven of those could be major Category 3 or above hurricanes, with winds of more than 110 miles per hour (177 km per hour), the agency said, echoing earlier
predictions from meteorologists for a particularly severe season that could disrupt U.S. oil, gas and refinery operations.
"If this outlook holds true, this season could be one of the more active on record," said Jane Lubchenco, NOAA's administrator. "The greater likelihood of storms
brings an increased risk of a landfall." (Reuters)
Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have started creeping up again after a dip caused by the global financial crisis, a trend that would see the nation overshoot its
Copenhagen Accord commitment by a large margin.
Emissions fell last year by 2.4 per cent on 2008 levels as steel and aluminium production was hit by the financial crisis, but began rising again in the last few months of the
year.
The country generated an estimated 537 tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2009, the largest amount per person of any developed country, three-quarters of which came from the
energy sector. (SMH)
537 metric tons? That's equivalent to the emissions of just 28 American citizens. On the other hand they might try a little simple arithmetic, 20 million
(give or take) Aussies with per capita emissions of 18.75 mt yields an expected emission total of 375 million mt (plausible) but their 537, if they meant million
metric tons, would mean Australians increased their per capita emissions by 50% -- in a recession.
The Sydney Morning Herald's numbers would appear ... questionable.
Australia is on track to meet its greenhouse gas emissions target under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol climate pact in part because of the global economic downturn, the
government said on Thursday.
Australia, among the developed world's top greenhouse gas polluters on a per-capita basis, generates about 80 percent of its electricity from coal.
Emissions from some sectors have soared over the past two decades, particularly power generation and transport. The government hoped an emissions trading scheme would push
industry and consumers to boost energy efficiency and switch to greener power.
But that plan has been shelved because of fierce political opposition, although the laws backing greater renewable energy investment have won wider support.
The government, in a regular greenhouse gas emissions report to the United Nations, said emissions fell by about 13 million tonnes between 2008 and 2009.
"The latest National Greenhouse Accounts show Australia's emissions declined for a brief period in the early part of 2009, due largely to the global economic
downturn," the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, said in a statement.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, which uses 1990 as a base year, Australia must limit its greenhouse gas emissions to 108 percent of 1990 levels during the pact's 2008-12 first
commitment period. The pact binds about 40 industrialized nations to emissions targets during the 2008-12 period.
The government said annual emissions, excluding those from land use, land use change and forestry, for the four quarters to Dec 2009 fell 2.4 per cent, or from 550 million
tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent in 2008 to 537 million tonnes in 2009. (Reuters)
... which must mean there are significantly more Australians than previously supposed or that we emit roughly 50% more per capita than previously admitted
:-)
Not that it really matters at all because all greenhouse figures are rubbery and irrelevant.
Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.
The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into
a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.
Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern Ocean floor between Antarctica and South Africa, the international team led by Dr Luke Skinner of the University
of Cambridge radiocarbon dated shells left behind by tiny marine creatures called foraminifera (forams for short).
By measuring how much carbon-14 (14C) was in the bottom-dwelling forams' shells, and comparing this with the amount of 14C in the atmosphere at the time, they were able to work
out how long the CO2 had been locked in the ocean.
By linking their marine core to the Antarctic ice-cores using the temperature signal recorded in both archives, the team were also able compare their results directly with the
ice-core record of past atmospheric CO2 variability.
According to Dr Skinner: "Our results show that during the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, carbon dioxide dissolved in the deep water circulating around Antarctica
was locked away for much longer than today. If enough of the deep ocean behaved in the same way, this could help to explain how ocean mixing processes lock up more carbon
dioxide during glacial periods."
Throughout the past two million years (the Quaternary), the Earth has alternated between ice ages and warmer interglacials. These changes are mainly driven by alterations in
the Earth's orbit around the sun (the Milankovic theory).
But changes in Earth's orbit could only have acted as the 'pace-maker of the ice ages' with help from large, positive feedbacks that turned this solar 'nudge' into a
significant global energy imbalance. (University of Cambridge)
... these guys just won't let go. Yes, colder oceans store more dissolved carbon dioxide and yes, larger ice sheets reduce ocean atmosphere exchanges but
no, this is not "evidence" of enhanced greenhouse forcing at all. Oceans do not warm because they lose carbon dioxide but they do lose carbon dioxide because they
warm.
Just stop and consider, for a moment, the effect of ice ages and ice sheet expansion -- more precipitation is locked on land and polar caps in the expanding ice sheets, ocean
levels fall about 400 feet (120 meters) below current levels which by definition must reduce pressure over shallow methane clathrate deposits, which form from 300 meters or
so -- as ice ages advance the +300 meter depth zone migrates significantly so we should anticipate significant methane release. In fact the whole continental shelf zone has
an average drop off depth of 440 feet (135 meters) which means oceans shrink in area by almost 7%. Strange that no one seems to be talking about methane pulses as ice ages
develop. Stranger still that if enhanced greenhouse is such an important effect that ice ages can lower sea levels so far.
They pretend to worry about a little methane escaping from permafrost thaw -- think about how much must be liberated from sediment covering almost the entire continental
shelf zone. And that is additional to the 120 meter depth girdling the continental drop off where methane clathrate deposits would be destabilized.
Neither the methane panic nor enhanced greenhouse hypothesis make any sense at all.
The tropical forest conservation plan, known as REDD, has the potential to significantly reduce deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. But unless projects are
carefully designed and monitored, the program could be undercut by shady dealings at all levels, from the forests to global carbon markets. (Fred Pearce, e360)
Simply another scam with no worthwhile objective -- don't touch it.
Al Gore channels Monty Python, there’s a long list of hyphen-gate scandals for you to cut out and keep, Big Green is out of step with ordinary people and there is a planet
doomed by global warming, but it’s not Earth. (Daily Bayonet)
The world's floating ice is in "constant retreat," showing an instability which will increase global sea levels, according to a report published in Geophysical
Research Letters on Wednesday.
Floating ice had disappeared at a steady rate over the past 10 years, according to the first measurement of its kind.
"It's a large number," said Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds, lead author of the paper, estimating the net loss of floating sea ice and ice
shelves in the last decade at 7,420 cubic kilometers.
That is greater than the loss of ice over land from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the same time period, highlighting the impact of warming oceans on floating ice.
Ice melt ebbs and flows from winter to summer. The report's calculations referred to the net loss over the past decade.
"There's a constant rate of retreat (annually)," said Shepherd. "It's a rapid process and there's no reason why it won't increase over the next century."
(Reuters)
Actually not:
Antarctic sea ice gains pretty much cancel recent reductions in the Arctic and the world is not losing its sea ice:
Jeffrey Long’s lab will soon host a round-the-clock, robotically choreographed hunt for carbon-hungry materials.
The Berkeley Lab chemist leads a diverse team of scientists whose goal is to quickly discover materials that can efficiently strip carbon dioxide from a power plant’s
exhaust, before it leaves the smokestack and contributes to climate change.
They’re betting on a recently discovered class of materials called metal-organic frameworks that boast a record-shattering internal surface area. A sugar cube-sized piece, if
unfolded and flattened, would more than blanket a football field. The crystalline material can also be tweaked to absorb specific molecules.
The idea is to engineer this incredibly porous compound into a voracious sponge that gobbles up carbon dioxide. (LBNL)
That's lovely, now don't bother. Why? Because the last thing we want to do is reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Earth has been at critically low CO2
levels for far too long, levels barely able to support photosynthesis.
Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there.
As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have
succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore
Alaska sites is now dead.)
And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
So we go deep, ultradeep — to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.
There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend
for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people?
All spills seriously damage wildlife. That's a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing,
shipping, tourism and recreation?
Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they've escaped any mention at all. (Charles Krauthammer, IBD)
[Editor note: Some important facts are emphasized in this post: the Gulf oil spill occurred on property owned and managed by the federal government, and the
operator-at-fault (BP) has been the most politically active in its industry. Sheldon
Richman is editor of The Freeman magazine and www.thefreemanonline.org, where this article first
appeared.]
With some 7,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day from BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon well, offshore drilling and oil-industry regulation have
returned to the front pages.
The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or government regulation and safety? The implied premise is that the oil industry operates
in a free market. So, the argument goes, the only alternative is government regulation.
The company that owns the offshore well spewing crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico and other major oil companies spearheaded a campaign to thwart a government plan to impose
tighter regulations aimed at preventing similar disasters, according to government records.
Tighter regulations would have required that drillers perform independent audits and hazard assessments designed to reduce accidents caused by human errors, but the
federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) has so far not imposed the rules in the face of near unanimous opposition from oil companies.
Oil executives — including BP, which leased the rig that exploded April 20 — argued that the industry had a solid environmental record and most companies had
voluntarily adopted similar safeguards to protect against a major spill. They also said the new rules would have been too costly.
So: the MMS wanted to regulate, but the industry said it could regulate itself at lower cost, insisting it was a good steward of the environment. This is not to say that MMS
was right and the companies wrong. For reasons provided below, government regulation is fatally flawed. Further, this is not just a simple matter of regulation. More
fundamentally it’s a matter of ownership. The government has proclaimed itself the owner of the offshore positions where oil companies drill. In a free market those positions
would be homesteaded and managed privately with full liability. In the absence of a free market and private property, built-in incentives that protect the public are diminished
if not eliminated. Bureaucrats and “political capitalists” are not as reliable as companies facing bankruptcy in a fully freed market. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
“Local environmental regulators say they will press ahead in their battle against global warming whether or not Congress strips U.S. EPA of its authority to regulate
greenhouse gasses. State and local officials from New York and New Jersey also predicted that new greenhouse gas-curbing rules regulating industries would continue even
if Congress approves federal climate legislation.”
Affordable energy is under assault at all levels of government. But while much attention has focused on federal efforts that are certain to increase the cost of energy (e.g.
Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Graham-Lieberman) far less scrutiny been paid to the concerted efforts at the state level to achieve similar goals. The Institute for Energy Research’s
report Energy Regulations in the States: A Wake-up Callfills the void and highlights the
programs anti-energy activists are promoting in the states.
The report is available here and an interactive map showing electricity prices and other select
economic and energy data is here.
The report includes:
· A detailed look at greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations in the states. There have been total of 249 bills passed (see below) that regulate GHGs nationwide, leading to higher
energy prices in states.
· An examination of the three regional greenhouse gas initiatives and their effect on state energy policy. A majority of the nation’s states are either members or
observers in one or more of these initiatives, and they have varying effects of energy policy.
· A look at the de facto bans on coal power plants that are popping up in different parts of the nations, and the impact these have on the price of energy and doing
business in these states.
· An analysis of Renewable Portfolio Standards throughout the nation. These mandates require a certain percentages of the state’s overall electricity to come from
renewables. States that have binding renewable electricity mandates, have electricity prices that are an average of 40 percent higher than other states.
· A break down of the electricity generation profile in each state (this map provides an easy-to-use view of
this breakdown). The report also explains why promoting nuclear and wind will do nothing to reduce oil imports (petroleum provides only one percent of our electricity
generation).
· An examination of the reasons electricity prices are lower in some states than in others. For example, 13 of the 15 states with the least expensive residential
electricity prices produce at least 50 percent of their electricity from either coal or hydroelectric power.
· A detailed state specific appendix examining the energy sources, prices, and regulation (scroll
down here to view the link for each states) These profiles give the varying prices of energy per state, as well delve into the wide spectrum of energy sources utilized by
our nation. They describe both the benefits and impediments that different sources face in each state and the programs that make up policy. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
At the press conference accompanying the political hara-kiri by his director of the Minerals and Management Service, President Obama changed topics and said, “Now let me
make one broader point, though, about energy. The fact that oil companies now have to go a mile underwater and then drill another three miles below that in order to hit oil
tells us something about the direction of the oil industry. Extraction is more expensive, and it is going to be inherently more risky. … The easily accessible oil has already
been sucked up out of the ground.”
Not all of it. He also could have noted that billions of barrels of “easily accessible” oil have been turned into “impossible to access” oil by federal regulations
and moratoria that block any access. There is still a lot of non-deep sea oil available off the cost of California that can be accessed from onshore. And, don’t forget, there
are the 10 billion barrels in ANWR. All of this oil has been placed completely off limits by federal regulations. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
Can the Sahara Desert really meet Europe's voracious appetite for energy? The Desertec solar power project aims to do just that, but a host of obstacles remain. Overly
optimistic expectations are now being scaled down as the project starts to take shape. (Spiegel)
Nissan Motor Co and alliance partner Renault could market electric vehicles without government incentives within four years as global sales reach 500,000 to 1 million
vehicles per year, executives said on Wednesday.
Nissan, which is introducing a mass-market Leaf electric car later this year, needs government incentives to spark initial demand but understands those incentives will not be
permanent, Nissan-Renault Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said.
"You need to jump start electric cars at a certain level so that we can get scale and the scale will allow us to reduce costs," Ghosn told reporters after a
groundbreaking at a plant in Tennessee that will produce the Leaf and its battery.
"We think that scale for us is between 500,000 and 1 million cars a year," he said. "When you get between 500,000 and 1 million cars per year, we don't need
government support." (Reuters)
Why should they get any government support at all? If there's really a market for them then people will pay for them. After all, VW's Bugatti built the 3
mile per gallon, 250 mph, thousand horsepower Veyron and retailed it for $1.7 million a piece (base price). Never sell? At least 200 people thought otherwise and forked over
the cash.
Banning medic training with live animals could kill our troops
A choice between animal lives and human lives is pretty simple for most people, but there are some groups that would equate the two. Right now, there is an amendment to the
Defense Appropriations Act that would cost the lives of some of our troops in order to save the lives of some animals. One of the groups pushing this agenda is the Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine, which posts this on its website:
"On Dec. 10, 2009, Rep. Bob Filner, California Democrat, chair of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, introduced H.R. 4269, the BEST Practices Act, which would phase
in human-based training methods and replace the current use of live animals in military medical training courses."
The euphemistically named BEST Practices Act is anything but that. The best practice for a new combat medic is treating a living being. That is a harsh reality, but it is the
truth. Currently, the military conducts what is called live-tissue training with goats and pigs. The animals are anesthetized and then given wounds the medics and doctors are
likely to see in combat, and the medics perform the appropriate procedures to treat them. The animals are not a perfect analogue to a human casualty, but they provide one thing
no simulation or dummy can: the visceral reaction each medic must face when a life is in danger. (Jim Hansen, Washington Times)
Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it will continue to do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers in the Obama administration and the
rest of the world.
The most recent example of this failure: Euro-socialism is presently bankrupting the countries that embraced it in Europe. This will result not only in more social and economic
upheaval, but also the ultimate demise of the ill-conceived European Union. (Steve McCann, IBD)
The only way to challenge the pseudoscience of Andrew Wakefield and others is to have more debate, not less.
‘Serious thought should be given by the public as to whether the press can self-police their own conflict of selling their product and sensationalising poor science – and
if not, recognised as such, and remedies put in place.’ (Gregory Poland, Ray Spier.)
‘Fear, misinformation, and innumerates: how the Wakefield paper, the press, and public advocacy groups damaged the public health.’ (Vaccine 28 (2010) 2361-2362.)
‘How could this have happened?’ asks a splenetic editorial reflection on the MMR-autism controversy in the current issue of Vaccine, the leading scientific journal in the
field of immunisation. The authors - Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic and Ray Spier from the University of Surrey – proceed to blame everybody but the scientific authorities
for the scare that was launched in a notorious (and now withdrawn) Lancet paper by the former Royal Free gastroenterology researcher Andrew Wakefield who was finally struck off
the medical register this week on charges of serious professional misconduct.
They blame Wakefield (citing the General Medical Council verdict that he was ‘dishonest, misleading and irresponsible’), public health authorities (who ‘stumbled in
responding poorly and immediately to the issue’), and the public (for being ‘innumerate’ and ‘uncritical’). In the tone of exasperated schoolteachers scolding
truculent adolescents, the authors also attribute ‘significant and disproportionate blame’ to autism advocacy organisations and recommend a period of penitence: ‘deep
self-reflection would be appropriate’.
The main target of editorial wrath is the media, which is judged to be unable to ‘balance reporting, risk communication and ethics’ and found guilty of ‘celebrity-based
medicine’ and ‘sensational reporting’. A disingenuous assertion of support for the principle of freedom of speech is followed by the demand for apologies from the press
for their failures over MMR and a commitment to more responsible reporting in the future, with the implicit threat of measures of censorship – ‘remedies put in place’ –
should such responses not be forthcoming.
Professors Poland and Spier have nothing to say about the failures of scientific quality control that allowed the Wakefield research to proceed at a reputable British medical
school and teaching hospital and to be accepted for publication in a prestigious medical journal. This is surprising as they are both eminent vaccine scientists and are,
respectively, the current and former ‘editors in chief’ of Vaccine. (Michael Fitzpatrick, spiked)
WASHINGTON - A "headless" version of the influenza virus protected mice from several different strains of flu and may offer a step toward a so-called universal flu
vaccine, researchers report.
They identified a piece of the virus that appears to be the same even among mutated strains, and found a way to make it into a vaccine.
Years of work lie ahead but if it works in people the way it worked in mice, the new vaccine might transform the way people are now immunized against influenza, the team at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reported.
"We now report progress toward the goal of an influenza virus vaccine which would protect against multiple strains," Dr. Peter Palese, Dr. Adolfo Garcia-Sastre and
colleagues report in a new journal mBio.
"Current influenza vaccines are effective against only a narrow range of influenza virus strains. It is for this reason that new vaccines must be generated and
administered each year."
Flu viruses mutate constantly and each year a cocktail of three flu vaccines is tweaked to try and hit the most common new mutations. Every few decades a new pandemic strain
emerges - a year ago the new H1N1 swine flu strain started a pandemic and it has been added to the seasonal flu vaccine mix.
It takes months to make a new flu vaccine and governments and commercial drug companies struggled to get the new H1N1 vaccine out by last September. Having a universal flu
vaccine could, in theory, prevent future pandemics and keep seasonal flu under better control. (Reuters)
Litigators clean up while taxpayers are taken to the cleaners
The EPA has a history of impeding environmental protection, most notably with toxic-waste-site cleanup and nuclear waste storage.
In the wake of the 1978 Love Canal controversy, a lame-duck Congress and president enacted the Superfund law in December 1980 to provide for the cleanup of so-called
toxic-waste sites. But the Superfund law was poorly designed. By the early 1990s, few sites had been cleaned up. Moreover, while it would take only about two years to actually
clean up a site, it would take 10 years to progress to the point of implementation. An average cleanup cost $25 million. The Department of Energy was looking down the barrel of
$300 billion worth of cleanups. More money was spent litigating cleanups than actually cleaning up. (Steve Milloy, Washington Times)
As more facts come to light, we can finally see how crazy it was to shut UK airspace in response to the Icelandic volcano.
So, with the Eyjafjallajökull volcano now appearing to be dormant once more, it seems that Iceland’s most famous export besides fish, the ash cloud, was not quite the mortal
threat to European aviation it was said to be. No engines failed, no windows were sandblasted, and no planes crashed. Even at the height of the panic, over the UK and Europe
the ash was not of a density sufficient to cause any damage. This does rather raise the question as to why on 15 April, National Air Traffic Services (NATS) closed down all UK
airspace for five days, a decision that prompted most of the rest of Europe to do likewise.
The principal reason is that on the morning of 15 April, as the plume of ash from Iceland drifted over the UK, NATS simply did not know whether planes could fly through it
without causing damage to their engines. This initial ignorance, backed up by the equally ignorant but zero-tolerance UK Civil Aviation Authority guidelines on volcanic ash
clouds, led NATS to shut everything down. ‘It is our priority to ensure safety’, a spokesperson for NATS said at the time. In other words, no risks would, could or should
be taken.
The strange thing about this safety-conscious approach is that over a prolonged period of time very little was done to establish whether the ash cloud really did pose a threat
to aircraft engines. What was needed was a rational risk-assessment and on that basis an attempt to work out the probable outcomes. That this was absent becomes clear when one
considers what the decision to completely shut down UK airspace was based on: a UK Meteorological Office computer modelling system. Such models project the distribution of the
ash cloud over a certain period of time. Unfortunately, not only does the margin of error significantly increase over time – which is what you’d expect of any modelling
system – but the model also proved incapable of providing the one key datum necessary to gauge potential aircraft damage: the particle density of the ash cloud. (Tim Black,
spiked)
WASHINGTON - Sellers of ginseng, echinacea and other herbal and dietary supplements often cross the line in marketing their products, going as far as telling consumers the
pills can cure cancer or replace prescription medications, a U.S. government probe found.
In an undercover probe, investigators at the Government Accountability Office also found that labels for some supplements claim to prevent or cure ailments like diabetes or
heart disease - a clear violation of U.S. law.
GAO staff targeted supplements most popular with older consumers and posed as elderly buyers in stores or over the telephone.
"The most egregious practices included suspect marketing claims that a dietary supplement prevented or cured extremely serious diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular
disease," the GAO said in a report released on Wednesday at a Senate hearing.
For example, one shopper at a supplement specialty store was told that a garlic supplement could be taken instead of prescribed blood pressure drugs. Another staffer posing as
a forgetful, elderly consumer was told by a salesperson that he could take aspirin and ginkgo biloba together with no harm. The Food and Drug Administration has said that
combination can cause internal bleeding.
The GAO, which conducts investigations for Congress, also said it found trace amounts of potentially harmful contaminants such as lead and arsenic, but at levels that do not
exceed federal guidelines.
Findings of pesticides, however, did exceed the FDA's advisory levels, the GAO said, and 16 of 40 supplements tested would violate the FDA's tolerance. (Reuters)
As if the euro crisis were not enough, the Continent is being gnawed by a new problem: ungrateful beavers.
The rodents, Castor fiber, have been munching through dykes and aggravating the floods currently sweeping along the River Oder in Central Europe. They are also holding up the
construction of a controversial bridge across the Elbe in Dresden. In Bavaria beavers have tunnelled into a sewerage works, releasing hundreds of tonnes of untreated faeces
into a river.
Conservationists have spent millions of euros protecting the endangered species. That now seems to have been a very expensive decision. (The Times)
Agency more adept at blowing hot air By Steve Milloy 6:49 p.m., Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a perplexing beast. While the agency remains hellbent on regulating colorless, odorless and likely harmless greenhouse gas
emissions, it has been utterly incapable of living up to its name with respect to the Gulf oil spill.
Not only was the EPA caught entirely unprepared for the oil spill, but also last week it actually tried to interfere with BP's efforts to use a chemical called Corexit to speed
up dispersal of the oil. When the EPA told BP that it should use a less toxic chemical, BP rightly ignored the order because it's the oil, not the dispersant (stupid) that is
the real threat to the environment, and there is no better option than the detergentlike Corexit.
Though laboratory toxicity tests show that Corexit will kill 50 percent of the fish exposed to a concentration of 15 parts per million over a period of four days, what the EPA
seems to have overlooked is that there are no fish still living in an oil slick in the first place. By the time the oil has dispersed, so too will have the Corexit, down to
nontoxic levels. But in the EPA mindset, all chemicals are bad and to be avoided - even ones that help and are, practically speaking, harmless.
But that is not the extent of the EPA's failure. (Washington Times)
But that doesn't stop the New York Times from running interference for the two New England liberals' climate change bill, of course. May 26, 2010
- by Tristan Yates
Eighteen months after the stimulus package that was supposed to prevent a deep recession, here we are. Unemployment is still close to 10%, government budgets are at their worst
state in decades, and the stock market one bad day away from another meltdown.
Naturally, that means its time for the Senate to introduce a bill that will kill even more American jobs, and for the liberals in the media to do everything they can to hide
its impact.
Cue the New York Times. According to them, the Kerry-Lieberman climate change bill will “prompt a decade of job growth.” That story comes from their affiliate, Greenwire,
and references a supposedly nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics study.
If you’re wondering how a tax creates jobs, here’s how it works. The cost to emit a ton of CO2 will be set through auction, but they forecast $16.47 in 2013 with lots of
exceptions for favored industries.
Then the legislation is a runaway train. By 2020, few permits are given away — most are auctioned off for higher and higher prices. One CNBC report puts the annual global
market for carbon credits at $2 trillion a year. American companies would be paying tens or more likely hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the federal government for the
right to emit carbon.
If companies don’t want to pay those fees, they can instead spend money on energy efficient technologies, which creates jobs in those sectors. These are real jobs — but
like those in Spain, they’re not economically productive ones. In the absence of taxes and regulation, they wouldn’t exist.
But will companies pay the fees or create the jobs? The study makes assumptions, but as is the case with most economic policies that try to profit by punishing certain
behavior, nobody really knows. Maybe everyone just pays the tax and no new alternative energy jobs are created. That’s good for tax revenue but bad for those expecting to get
back to work. (PJM)
With public faith in the global-warming myth on the wane, leftist zealots are desperate to spin a new tale - and they're spending your tax money to do it. Three years ago,
Congress appropriated $5,856,600 for the National Academy of Sciences to complete a climate-change study. This bureaucratic attempt to cook the books, which was completed last
week, may be too late to save this dying religion. (Washington Times)
Campaign group Sandbag says the European emissions trading scheme is failing to reduce enough CO2 emissions
Sandbag yesterday released analysis (pdf) showing how Europe's carbon caps have turned into a carbon trap.
This analysis is launched ahead of the European Commission's communiqué expected this week, which will analyse the options for moving beyond a 20% emissions reduction target.
Leaked versions of the communiqué have been widely circulated and indicate that the EU acknowledges there are problems with the systems and the oversupply of permits,
recommending removing 1.4bn tonnes from the scheme from 2013-20. Sandbag analysis shows that that this number is too low, for caps to become effective 2.3bn tonnes need to be
removed.
The EU ETS is facing a number of problems which may leave it redundant. To prevent this from happening and rescue the EU ETS Sandbag have highlighted four fundamental problems
with the current system that must be addressed to salvage the scheme. (The Guardian)
Uh... why would anyone want to rescue such an idiotic scheme?
Climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard claims that economic crisis has made it cheaper to move to higher target
The European commission today reopened the debate on whether Europe should volunteer to cut its carbon emissions further, but stopped short of recommending such a move.
Connie Hedegaard, climate commissioner, said the recession would make it cheaper than expected for the continent to hit its target to reduce carbon pollution 20% by 2020.
Raising the target to 30% by 2020 would also cost less than first calculated.
Hedegaard said: "Whether to increase our reduction target for 2020 from 20% to 30% is a political decision for the EU leaders to take when the timing and the conditions
are right. Obviously, the immediate political priority is to handle the [financial] crisis. But as we exit the crisis, the commission has now provided input for a fact-based
discussion. The decision is not for now, but I hope that our analysis will inspire debate in the member states on the way forward." (The Guardian)
We're broke anyway so we have less to lose with ever more suicidal "targets"? What a dangerous loon.
Climategate starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians.
The news that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who popularized the idea of a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism, has been struck off the register of
general practitioners in the United Kingdom testifies to the fact that, in many scientific fields, objectivity still reigns. Britain’s General Medical Council found that
Wakefield had used unethical and dishonest research methods and that when his conclusions became common knowledge, the result was that far more children were exposed to the
risk of those diseases than would have been the case otherwise. Unfortunately, in other areas, some scientists have been getting away with blatant disregard for the scientific
method.
The most prominent example, “Climategate,” highlights how dangerous the politicization of science can be. The public reaction to Climategate should motivate politicians to
curb such abuses in the future. Yet it was politicians who facilitated this politicization of science in the first place. (Iain Murray, NRO)
Many circumstances require immediate action: consider a full bladder or a red traffic light. We usually address such circumstances without delay, because the consequences of
inaction--physical discomfort or legal troubles--are clear.
When it comes to climate change, the urgency of the problem may not seem so obvious, since it doesn't sound an alarm or poke us in the eye. The consequences appear to be far
away. And we find it hard to comprehend the significant risks posed by global warming, such as the rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere or the impending rise
in sea levels, because we can't, at the moment, see them with the naked eye. Yet if we fail to reduce heat-trapping emissions, we will cross a threshold, and the changes in our
world will be irreversible. (Brenda Ekwurzel, Union of Concerned Scientists)
By golly they do spew a lot of rubbish! Would changes in climatic state be "irreversible"? Never have been in the past because Earth has been
through multiple phases of ice age and ice free so definitely "reversible". Is carbon dioxide the key driver of climatic state? Of course not, Earth has plunged
into glaciated states when atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels have been an order of magnitude higher and similarly emerged from glaciated states when these trace
gases have been much lower -- changes in greenhouse gases follow changes in climate but they show no evidence of causing such changes. Are we making changes anything
akin to inflating a balloon with water from a gushing faucet? How utterly absurd! What we are managing is barely a daily drip, having taken 250 years to assist atmospheric CO2
levels to increase from ~0.03% to ~0.04%. Only 100 times greater increase to go before the atmosphere resembles what we exhale naturally (halitosis not withstanding human
breath is neither poisonous gas nor "pollution").
The first new projections of future aircraft emissions in 10 years predicts that carbon dioxide and other gases from air traffic will become a significant source of global
warming as they double or triple by 2050. The study is in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal. (ACS)
CHAMPAIGN, lll. — Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new, more accurate method of calculating the change in greenhouse gas emissions that results
from changes in land use.
The new approach, described in the journal Global Change Biology, takes into account many factors not included in previous methods, the researchers report.
Different ecosystem types vary in their absorption or emission of greenhouse gases. | Graphic by Kristina Anderson-Teixera and Diana Yates
There is an urgent need to accurately assess whether particular land-use projects will increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions, said Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, a
postdoctoral researcher in the Energy Biosciences Institute at Illinois and lead author of the new study. The greenhouse gas value (GHGV) of a particular site depends on
qualities such as the number and size of plants; the ecosystem’s ability to take up or release greenhouse gases over time; and its vulnerability to natural disturbances, such
as fire or hurricane damage, she said. (U Illinois)
It could take decades to undo the damage wrought by this runaway hypothesis -- we have no empirical support whatsoever for catastrophic enhanced greenhouse
effect and yet the hysteria has contaminated everything, including fields that should recognize the value atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Victoria’s Department of Sustainability and the Environment admits that the more you question a global warming scientist, the less likely you are to believe him:
Popular opinion on climate change often waivers, particularly when the media focus on denialist views and encourage “debates” with climate change scientists.
And so the department is offering all Victorian public servants this workshop - which of course presumes there’s not a sceptic in the joint:
DSE invites members of the Victorian Public Service to a presentation on:
Dealing with climate change denialism
with Paul Holper, CSIRO…
Friday 18 June 2010
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
(includes question time)
Treasury Theatre, Lower Plaza
1 Macarthur Street, East Melbourne
Ah, that slur-word “denialism”. But why a “question time” when debate is so dangerous to the cause?
(No link to the DSE email. Thanks to readers Michael, Peter, Pat and Andy.) (Andrew Bolt)
Britain is heading for water shortages and crop failures as extreme droughts like that of 1976 become more frequent, experts have warned.
A Met Office study on how climate change could affect the frequency of extreme droughts in the UK has found they will become more common by 2100, and to put the droughts in
context, conditions seen in 1976 were used as a benchmark – one of the worst droughts on record.
The Met Office climate model was used to run a number of simulations and in the worst case scenarios, extreme droughts could happen once every decade – making them about 10
times more frequent than today.
Eleanor Burke, climate extremes scientist with the Met Office, said understanding how droughts will affect the UK in the future is vital for plans to adapt to climate change.
(The Independent)
For the record, 1976 was at the end of three decades of cooling global temperatures and worries about the onset of a new ice age. Oops...
In fairness it was a relatively warm year in the Central England Temperature record, ranking 32nd in the warm list. The case for annual deficits is difficult to
make when reviewing seasonal England & Wales precipitation though:
Even tougher when you look at the long-term annual series:
“What is missing from the otherwise excellent website (refering to website http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anomaly.html),
of course, are time plots of the global average sea surface temperatures, as well as averages for different subregions of the oceans. With that information, we
could more readily track the ocean contribution to the global average surface temperature trend, as well as anomalies within the subregions.”
Bob Tisdale on his weblog http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/ has alerted us to his excellent weblog presentation with monthly
updates of SST anomalies globally, and for hemispheric and ocean basin basins. His information is accessible at
The global average anomaly is currently well above average, but unless this positive anomaly continues for the coming months, the absence of a clear long term
trend since 1998 remains (although the interannual variations are remarkably large).
As Bob writes
“NINO3.4 SST anomalies are dropping but El Niño conditions remained during April in the central tropical Pacific (Monthly NINO3.4 SST Anomaly = +0.68 deg C). Weekly
data has fallen into ENSO-neutral ranges (+0.30 deg C). Global SST anomalies increased slightly again during April (0.017 deg C). On a hemispheric basis, the rise was limited
basically to the Northern Hemisphere, since the increase in the Southern Hemisphere was negligible (0.002 deg C). And looking at the major ocean basins, the North Pacific,
South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the East Indian-West Pacific Ocean datasets all show drops this month, but they were not strong enough to outweigh the rises in the North
Atlantic and South Pacific.”
“NINO3.4 SST anomalies for the week centered on May 19, 2010 show that central equatorial Pacific SST anomalies are below zero and continuing their decline. Presently
they’re at -0.21 deg C, which is in ENSO-neutral levels.”
and
”Weekly Global SST anomalies are still elevated, but they may have peaked for this El Nino. They are starting to show signs of a drop in response to the decline in
central equatorial Pacific temperatures, but the global weekly data is much too variable to tell for sure.”
I recommend bookmarking this excellent, much needed weblog! (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
He believes - or he pretends to believe - that the average RC readers are more confused about this topic than himself. However, his text - which is a mixture of correct
observations, tautologies, obfuscations, hidden facts, missing basic principles, double standards, and manifestly untrue propositions - shows otherwise.
His "executive summary" makes four basic claims:
You can’t do attribution based only on statistics
Attribution has nothing to do with something being “unprecedented”
You always need a model of some sort
The more distinct the fingerprint of a particular cause is, the easier it is to detect
Now, the points 1,3,4 are correct as stated while 2 is incorrect. However, Schmidt later strengthens 1 to something that is no longer correct. And he masks the results of 4,
the fingerprint (or he only wants to use the point 4 when it's convenient but not otherwise). So when these four items are taken to include the whole context, I only agree with
3 - although the word "model" in 3 is inappropriate and immediately leads Schmidt to additional missteps.
But even if you ignore the wrong word "model" and consider the point 3 correct, 3 is just the very beginning of science - and everything else that Schmidt would like
to be done with 3 is just wrong.
We have written about the solar control on climate many times in the past, and to say the least, the debate continues to rage regarding the solar influence of Earth’s
climate. IPCC has been luke warm on the subject, stating in the Technical Summary that “Solar irradiance contributions to global average radiative forcing are considerably
smaller than the contribution of increases in greenhouse gases over the industrial period.” Two articles have appeared recently that provide even more evidence that
variations in solar output have a profound impact on regional, hemispheric, and global climatic variations. (WCR)
Norway has announced $1bn in aid to protect forests in Indonesia and hopes to forge a partnership to fight climate change (Reuters)
The trouble is wealthy developed worlders pay money to third world kleptocrats to lock impoverished people out of essential resources and any chance of
development. It might give warm fuzzy feelings to ecochondriacs with everything they need (save perhaps common sense) but it wreaks havoc on the world's poorest people. Don't
do it.
New Scientistplumbs
new lows. The magazine has become its own self-parody. Do they see the irony of inviting a PR expert to accuse industries nearly 20 years ago of committing the crime of,
wait for it, … using a PR expert?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hold any elitist ideas that only people with science degrees can write for New Scientist (the magazine has pretty much proven how
useless a science degree can be). My issue with them is that Richard
Littlemore (a PR expert) has essentially written a smear-by-association piece, which should have no place in a real scientific magazine. It’s not like Littlemore is just
an unhealthy part of a big healthy debate — instead he’s the advertiser being offered free editorial space within the one-sided propaganda that masquerades as journalism.
New Scientist may think climate science is a moral imperative, but they don’t have room for the climate scientists who have published peer reviewed criticisms of
their favorite theory. Nor do they have space to tell the extraordinary story of the grassroots independent retiree scientists who’ve busted the biggest scientific scam since
the Piltdown Man. More » (Jo Nova)
Many
climate change alarmists have predicted a wide range of calamitous side-effects to be caused by global warming. One such link that frequently surfaces is that global warming
will cause the spread of malaria, leading to a world wide pandemic. A new study, just published in the journal Nature, has shown that malaria is actually declining
worldwide. Furthermore, proposed future climate induced effects are insignificant compared with the observed natural trend and easily overcome by current disease control
mechanisms. In short, claiming that malaria will spread around the globe due to climate change is an outright lie.
An increased malarial threat has been popular with the media and global warming alarmists for decades. Conscientious scientists like Paul Reiter, a medical
entomology researcher at the Institut Pasteur, have denounced such exaggerated claims for more than a decade. “Environmental activists use the ‘big talk’ of science to
create a simple but false paradigm,” Reiter said in testimony before the US Senate in
2006. “Malaria specialists who protest this are generally ignored, or labelled as ‘sceptics’.” Now he and others have who have fought against such non-science have been
vindicated. A new article, entitled “Climate change and the global
malaria recession,” by Peter W. Gething et al. has driven a stake into the heart of this blatant nonsense. Writing in the May 20, 2010, issue of the respected
scientific journal Nature the international team of researchers explain their study:
The current and potential future impact of climate change on malaria is of major public health interest. The proposed effects of rising global temperatures
on the future spread and intensification of the disease, and on existing malaria morbidity and mortality rates, substantively influence global health policy. The contemporary
spatial limits of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and its endemicity within this range, when compared with comparable historical maps, offer unique insights into the changing
global epidemiology of malaria over the last century. It has long been known that the range of malaria has contracted through a century of economic development and disease
control. Here, for the first time, we quantify this contraction and the global decreases in malaria endemicity since approximately 1900.
Simply put, instead of just conjecture they went back over the past century's worth of records concerning malaria to find out what has actually been
happening. After all, we all know that Earth's climate has warmed somewhat over the past 100+ years or so, which should imply an increase in malaria if the proposed global
warming-malaria link is true. Not that it is unreasonable to think that climate change could have an impact on malaria.
A malaria mosquito. Photo UC Davis.
Malaria remains a major scourge of mankind, killing around 1.5 million people each year, more than 3,000 of them children under the age of five. According to
the World Health Organization (WHO), it has an infection rate of approximately 400 to 500 million victims each year and accounts for one in every ten deaths of children in
developing countries. Malaria is both treatable and preventable with the technology we have today. Tragically, the majority of these cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa where
poverty is the biggest obstacle in dealing with this epidemic.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease caused by a eukaryotic protist of the genus Plasmodium. It is widespread in tropical and subtropical
regions, including parts of North and South America, Asia, and Africa. Malaria is naturally transmitted by the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito (the disease's vector).
The life cycle of malaria parasites is quite complicated, consisting of three major cycles with multiple stages at each step along the way.
The malaria life cycle. Source CDC.
When an infected mosquito bites a person, malaria parasites are transferred to the new human host in the mosquito's saliva. The first human cycle (A) is
spent in the infected person's liver. After a period of between two weeks and several years, the malaria parasites infect and begin to multiply within red blood cells, starting
the second human cycle (B). The parasites are protected from attack by the body's immune system because, for most of their human life cycle, they hide in the liver and red
blood cells, where they are relatively invisible to the immune system.
In the human blood cycle, infected cells stick to the walls of blood vessels, obstructing blood flow. The pathogen also digests the blood cells' hemoglobin,
diminishing oxygen flow throughout the body. The classic symptom of malaria is cyclical occurrence of sudden coldness followed by rigor and then fever and sweating lasting four
to six hours. It also causes widespread anemia and major problems occur when blockage affects major organs such as the brain and heart. Children with malaria can suffer
cognitive impairments and even severe brain damage. During this stage of the parasites' life red blood cells burst open spilling the pathogen into its host so other cells can
be infected. From the victim's blood, mature parasites await transfer to a new mosquito host.
Red blood cells burst by malaria parasites.
When a mosquito bites an infected person, a small amount of blood is taken that contains malaria parasites and the mosquito cycle (C) starts. After dining on
an infected person, parasites develop within the mosquito and about one week later, when the mosquito takes its next blood meal the whole complicated process over again.
Both the malaria parasite and the mosquitoes which spread it respond to temperature and moisture, and global warming is expected to increase both. As is
typical these days, scientists constructed models to help predict the impact of a changing climate on diseases including malaria. These models have predicted that in a warmer
world the area subject to endemic malaria would increase significantly, though some places could see a reduction due to increased aridity. “We compare the magnitude of these
changes to the size of effects on malaria endemicity proposed under future climate scenarios and associated with widely used public health interventions,” state Gething et
al..
The researchers found two key implications with respect to climate change and malaria that the alarmists often conveniently ignore: “First, widespread
claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in
both its endemicity and geographic extent. Second, the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes
observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures.”
Figure S2. Maps estimating the P. falciparum basic reproductive rate.
In other words, over the past century malaria has receded, despite an ever warming climate—the exact opposite of the effect predicted by the climate change
Cassandras. Gething et al. concluded that claims that a warming climate has led to more widespread disease and death due to malaria are not supported by the evidence.
Actual real-world data show the areas affected shrinking in size and the impact of the change shrinking as well. Furthermore, the changes projected for the future are only a
tenth of those already experienced and can be easily controlled. The study's authors summed up the case for an increasing malarial threat due to global warming this way:
Predictions of an intensification of malaria in a warmer world, based on extrapolated empirical relationships or biological mechanisms, must be set against
a context of a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease and a substantial weakening of the global correlation between malaria endemicity and
climate.
Science speak for “it doesn't work that way.” There is no denying that all life on Earth is affected by climate, and that the climate is always changing.
It is the amount of the climate effect that has been blown all out of proportion. Just like the claims of imminent polar bear extinction, increased hurricane activity and
rapidly rising sea-levels, the global warming induced malaria epidemic is a fiction.
These revelations have prompted a wide number of responses in the media, including one from the green.view
column of The Economist, which generally supports climate change claims. “Scientists tend to model what can be modelled, and natural scientists, in particular, tend to
prefer models that incorporate at least some aspects of the underlying processes which they are interested in, rather than working purely on empirical correlations,” the
online article states. Models should always come with a list of warning, caveats regarding possible inaccuracies, but that this doesn't always get communicated along with a
model's results. The article calls not including appropriate caveats reckless, but many have no time for such details and others have agendas to follow:
The recklessness may, at times, be deliberate. In the reporting of climate change, as in the reporting of pretty much everything else, bad news gets a
better airing than good. There is no doubt that some environmental advocates are willing to exploit that dynamic to the full.
Unsurprisingly, warmist propagandists like Joe Romm
and Andy Revkin persist in trying to spread
this untruth. They continue to claim that balanced coverage of global warming is really bias and that people need to be scared into supporting draconian anti-climate change
measures. Lies on top of lies. Eventually these self-serving, pompous ignoramuses will have to drink from the bitter cup of truth. It is worth recalling the words of Dr. Reiter
to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation:
A galling aspect of the debate is that this spurious 'science' is endorsed in the public forum by influential panels of 'experts.' I refer particularly to
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every five years, this UN-based organization publishes a 'consensus of the world's top scientists' on all aspects of
climate change. Quite apart from the dubious process by which these scientists are selected, such consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science proceeds by
observation, hypothesis and experiment. The complexity of this process, and the uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to a meaningful understanding of scientific
issues by non-scientists. In reality, a genuine concern for mankind and the environment demands the inquiry, accuracy and scepticism that are intrinsic to authentic science.
A public that is unaware of this is vulnerable to abuse.
The Economist opined, “one of the obvious problems with predicting the future effects of climate change is that they haven’t happened.” Indeed.
Here again we see a scare tactic widely used by climate change alarmists shown to be pure bunk. Real science takes time, but politicians, the media and eco-activists are always
impatient and rushing to judgment. In doing so they may generate a few scary headlines and temporarily shift public opinion in their direction, but the truth comes out in the
fullness of time. As we said in The Resilient Earth,
nature is what it is.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
FORT COLLINS - The large number of tiny organic aerosols floating in the atmosphere – emitted from tailpipes and trees alike – share enough common characteristics as a
group that scientists can generalize their makeup and how they change in the atmosphere.
The groundbreaking research by Colette Heald, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, was highlighted this month on the cover
of the American Geophysical Union’s prestigious Geophysical Research Letters.
“The hope is that we can start to accurately represent organic aerosols in climate models so we can address how they impact climate and air quality, and particularly the
issue of how much is natural and how much comes from human activities,” Heald said. “What we’re really trying to get at is the composition – what’s in the atmosphere,
how is it changing and where does it have an environmental impact? Many of the compounds in the atmosphere are really short lived, so the picture changes quickly.”
The atmosphere contains many different kinds of aerosols such as dust and sulfate as well as organic aerosols. These organic aerosols come from many different sources,
including fossil fuel emission and wildfires. Fungi, bacteria and pollen are among the major biologically produced organic aerosol particles. Further complicating the picture
are atmospheric gases that change over time and can become aerosols in the atmosphere. (CSU)
Two weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Roy Spencer from the
University of Alabama, Huntsville. Spencer is a trained atmospheric scientist and actively publishes in peer-reviewed journals – he is also a global warming skeptic.
Given his background and contrarian views, I asked Spencer what evidence there is to suggest that a majority of the climate science community is wrong about global warming.
He explained that the IPCC climate models used to forecast drastic temperature increases assume that low level clouds, which tend to cool the climate, dissipate in response to
warming from CO2 emissions. The assumption is based on the observation that warmer years tend to have less cloud cover than cooler years.
Spencer argues that the IPCC is mixing up cause and effect; the warming could actually be caused by decreases in cloud cover. If he is correct, there are good reasons to
believe that increases in cloud cover will mitigate the warming caused by CO2 emissions, and, as a result, global warming may not be the disaster many scientists anticipate.
Some readers took issue with that hypothesis. Patrick Lockerby was so moved by the interview that he wrote a fairly lengthy rebuttal to it. Given the detailed criticism, I
asked Spencer to briefly respond. (Cameron J English, Scientific Blogging)
The explanation from P. Fraser, a senior CSIRO scientist, reveals how a major document
branded by the organisation was published and promoted. Apparently, the final draft “State of the Climate” report was not reviewed by CSIRO or BOM scientists themselves,
and when it is questioned others are blamed for the errors it contains and the confused dating of information.
It’s not as though nothing is at stake. Were the now delayed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to be introduced, an estimated $14 billion over 10 years would be
confiscated from the coal mining sector alone, simply on the basis that its allegedly rising fugitive methane emissions posed an unacceptable climatic threat.
Australia’s was the only scheme in the world that was going to penalise coal mining in this way – and the proposal appeared to have CSIRO professional authority behind
it. But rather than represent the data objectively – which is the CSIRO’s charter – we’ve been served up a significant distortion. If it’s not the scientist’s fault
one wonders where the real accountability lies?
To Fraser’s points: while the data may now be correct the choice of scale renders the presented result unintelligible. What remains unexplained is the omission of the
methane measurements from Cape Grim showing the plateau in methane concentrations.
Fraser makes the point that the CSIRO team were the first to report a rise in methane again towards the end of 2006 at the end of the omitted plateau. The work of the group
in atmospheric measurements is first class and arguably occasionally better than some of their US colleagues but their over eager interpretation may lead them astray. The claim
of rising methane is an example (Figure 1) as the latest published measurements[i] suggest otherwise with a
decreasing trend.
Figure 1:Recent measurements of atmospheric methane. Instantaneous growth rate for globally averaged atmospheric methane (solid line; dashed lines are ±1
standard deviation).
The IPCC does not understand or cannot explain the behaviour of atmospheric methane. The CSIRO has done no better. Only time for more measurements and a better understanding
of the sources and sinks of methane will resolve this issue. The science is uncertain and not a basis for any policy making that has the potential to cripple a large part of
the coal mining industry.
More transparency and less selective presentation would help.
[i] E. J. Dlugokencky, L. Bruhwiler, J. W. C. White, L. K. Emmons, P. C. Novelli, S. A. Montzka, K. A. Masarie, P.
M. Lang, A. M. Crotwell, J. B. Miller and L. V. Gatti, Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. Geophysical Research Letters, 36,
L18803, 2009
Post-Ike study by Rice's SSPEED Center details vulnerabilities
With the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season less than a week away, a new analysis from experts at several Texas universities is warning that a major hurricane could devastate the
Houston/Galveston region. A report issued today by the Rice University-based Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center (SSPEED) indicates that
even a moderately powerful hurricane could endanger tens of thousands of lives and cripple the Houston Ship Channel, which is home to about one-quarter of U.S. refineries.
(Rice University)
WASHINGTON—Hurricanes could snap offshore oil pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico and other hurricane-prone areas, since the storms whip up strong underwater currents, a new
study suggests.
These pipelines could crack or rupture unless they are buried or their supporting foundations are built to withstand these hurricane-induced currents. "Major oil leaks
from damaged pipelines could have irreversible impacts on the ocean environment," the researchers warn in their study, to be published on 10 June in Geophysical Research
Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
With the official start of hurricane season approaching on June 1, news reports about the Deep Horizon oil spill that began fouling the Gulf last month have raised questions
about how a hurricane might complicate the unfolding disaster.
A hurricane might also create its own spills, the new research indicates. The storms' powerful winds can raise waves 20 meters (66 feet) or more above the ocean surface. But
their effects underwater are little known, although signs of seafloor damage have showed up after some hurricanes.
Based on unique measurements taken directly under a powerful hurricane, the new study's calculations are the first to show that hurricanes propel underwater currents with
enough oomph to dig up the seabed, potentially creating underwater mudslides and damaging pipes or other equipment resting on the bottom.
At least 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) of pipelines reportedly snake across the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico. Damage to these pipelines can be difficult to detect if it
causes only smaller leaks, rather than a catastrophic break, the researchers say. Repairing underwater pipes can cost more than fixing the offshore oil drilling platforms
themselves, making it all the more important to prevent damage to pipelines in the first place. (AGU)
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is providing barrels of new ammunition to pundits on both the Right and the Left who contend we have to end our
“addiction” to oil. [Read More] (Robert Bryce,
Energy Tribune)
We're constantly urged to "go green" -- use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth. How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic and buy
things with the government's Energy Star label.
But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al Gore's group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can
do it within 10 years.
"It's simply not possible," says Robert Bryce, author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy." "Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume
are produced by hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process. ... The
world consumes 200 million barrels of oil equivalent in hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias."
Bryce used to be a left-liberal, but then: "I educated myself about math and physics. I'm a liberal who was mugged by the laws of thermodynamics." (John Stossel,
Townhall)
Switching all cars in the country to electric would drain the National Grid of nearly a fifth of its capacity unless the equivalent of another six new nuclear power stations
are built, claims a report. (TDT)
[Editor's note: This is the final post in the series reviewing studies for the Netherlands, Colorado and Texas on (elevated) fossil-fuel
emissions associated with firming otherwise intermittent wind power. Part I introduced
the issues. Part II showed negated emission savings for the Netherlands
at current wind penetration (about 3 percent). Part
III extended the Netherland's experience to the higher wind penetration in Colorado (6%) which demonstrates higher emissions. Part IV concludes with the Bentek
results for Texas,which confirms those for Colorado.]
There are a number of relevant, notable characteristics of the 2008 Texas electricity production
profile, 85% of which is managed by ERCOT:
The utility portion of the total electricity production is only about 24% of the total, with independent suppliers providing 57% and CHP installations, 19%. This
distribution suggests that ERCOT’s ability to balance wind production is more limited than what might first appear.
Wind production is 5% of the total (less CHP), but a very large 17% of the utilities portion.
A large proportion of gas production is provided by independent suppliers and CHP, 45% and 39% respectively, again likely limiting ERCOT’s ability to balance wind with
gas.
The ratio of utility gas to wind production is 192%, which suggests that this is tight if dedicated to wind balancing. This, plus high production from wind at night,
explains the high degree of cycling of coal plants required.
Because of recycling events, arguably attributable to the presence of wind plants, the results are the same as for PSCO, that is, there is an increase in CO2
emissions with the presence of wind. In ERCOT, the coal plants produced an additional CO2 emissions in 2008 of about 0-566,000 tons over running stably without these
events, and in 2009, an additional 772,000-1,102,000 tons. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
The planned ITER fusion reactor in France is supposed to replicate conditions inside the Sun to produce limitless clean energy. But skyrocketing costs are putting the
international project at risk. Now Germany's research minister has said Berlin will not write a blank check for the technology.
From the air, the construction site looks like a sandbox for giants. The meticulously leveled area, which is located in the middle of lush pine forests near the southern French
town of Saint-Paul-les-Durance, is waiting for the ground-breaking ceremony in July. Here, on yellowish-red Provencal soil, the international nuclear fusion reactor ITER is
supposed to be built in what will be one of the largest research projects in the world.
In recent months, construction workers are said to have moved soil with the total volume of the Great Pyramid at Giza. And that is just the beginning. The first buildings will
soon be erected here, forming the site's own small town. The largest building will house the reactor, where as of 2026 the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium will be fused
in a controlled reaction to form helium, delivering energy on the scale of a power plant. It's the same process that operates within the sun, and temperatures in the interior
of the reactor could reach 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).
Proponents of the project argue that what is at stake is nothing less than the energy of the future -- a process of energy production that uses a fuel that is available in
almost infinite quantities, and that produces nearly no waste. For the first time, a fusion reactor would produce more energy than is necessary for its operation.
Opponents, however, see the multi-billion euro project as a modern white elephant. Now it has been revealed that ITER's construction costs are exploding. In a worst case
scenario, the whole project could be at risk. (Spiegel)
NEW YORK - Scientists are no strangers to spinning their research, a new study -- presumably not spun -- shows.
More than half of 72 reports examined by French and British researchers had dressed up their conclusions to make it seem as if new treatments were beneficial, even though they
weren't according to the statistics in the report.
For instance, one study concluded a cancer detection system worked, but couldn't back it up with actual results, Dr. Isabelle Boutron, who worked on the study, told Reuters
Health.
"Some of it was quite shocking," said Boutron, of the Universite Paris Descartes in France, adding that not all the examples were as glaring.
Earlier research has shown that findings are often spun when money is involved -- for instance when a drug maker funds a study of its own product. In such cases, favorable
conclusions may directly contradict the actual results. (Reuters Health)
CHICAGO - About half of the 65 million people in the United States who have high blood pressure now have it under control, up from 27 percent two decades ago, U.S.
researchers said on Tuesday.
But the overall rate of Americans who have high blood pressure has not changed in recent years, reflecting the need for better prevention efforts, they wrote in the Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The Institute of Medicine earlier this year declared high blood pressure, or hypertension, a "neglected disease" that costs the U.S. health system $73 billion a year.
High blood pressure, or too much force exerted by blood as it moves against vessel walls, is easily preventable through diet, exercise and drugs, yet it is the second-leading
cause of death in the United States. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON - Laws requiring U.S. restaurant chains to list calorie counts have not stopped them from offering unhealthy meals that pack in calories, fat and salt, a group
that encourages healthy food said on Tuesday.
A pancake breakfast providing 1,380 calories, a single-serve pizza that packs two days' worth of sodium and a pasta dish swimming in four day's worth of fat top a list
published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
The group, which "outs" the calorie, fat and sodium counts of America's favorite foods every year, said it looked for evidence that restaurants are trimming back
their offerings in the face of new laws and political pressure.
They found little. (Reuters)
If people didn't provide a demand for the product of restaurant chains then said restaurant chains would either provide something different or go out of
business.
Personally I love fast food joints and drive-throughs for enabling the kids' "refueling in flight" as my wife and I shuttled three offspring to and from
before-school training sessions, after-school sports, debating club, cadets, swimming, drama, science club, chess club, shooting range and their various other activities and
social engagements. For years getting the whole family together for meals was done at weekends and by appointment and for years each of them had probably at least ten fast
food serves per week in addition to their home fare, often not having their kept main meal until perhaps ten pm as they began the day's homework. Never managed to get any fat
on any of them though, despite their having unrestricted access to whatever food they fancied at whatever interval suited them.
CSPI would have prevented my children having access to the high-octane fast refueling that allowed them to sample and savor so much of life in their first couple of decades
because it might "make them fat" -- well, we're still waiting for our now twenty- and thirty-somethings to slow down enough for much in the way of adiposity but it
doesn't seem imminent. CSPI should take a hike... if they can muster the energy for it, that is.
WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration needs greater authority, more cooperation from other agencies and must do more scientific research to help make the U.S. food
supply safer, the General Accountability Office said on Monday.
The FDA also needs to do more to help consumers navigate the maze of food supplements on the market and requires more power to regulate them, the GAO said.
A series of food safety scares has shaken consumer confidence in the food supply, the GAO said. Just last week California-based Caldwell Fresh Foods recalled alfalfa sprouts
after salmonella sickened 20 people.
"We found that FDA was hampered in its ability to carry out some food safety responsibilities - oversight of food labels, fresh produce, and dietary supplements - because
it lacked certain scientific information," Lisa Shames, director of Natural Resources and Environment for GAO, wrote in a letter accompanying the report. (Reuters)
Chris French mourns the passing of Martin Gardner, a prolific writer and populariser of mathematics, and one of the most influential figures in scepticism
I woke up on Sunday morning to some very sad news. Martin Gardner had died the previous day at the age of 95.
Gardner's life was not only long but extraordinarily productive. He was a polymath and a gifted writer, publishing more than 70 books in his long
career as well as innumerable magazine and newspaper articles. His wide range of interests included recreational mathematics,
pseudoscience, scepticism, magic, religion, philosophy and literature. He will be mourned by many hundreds of thousands around the world.
His sceptical credentials were already well established by that time. Back in 1952 he had published his seminal analysis of the nature of
pseudoscience, Fads and Fallacies in the Name
of Science. In this classic work, which is still well worth reading, he demolished a wide range of pseudoscientific claims to the total satisfaction of any reader with an
iota of critical intelligence. His targets covered a very wide range including UFOs, creationism, Atlantis, scientology, Rudolf
Steiner, dowsing, reincarnation, and Wilhelm Reich – to name but a few. It is,
of course, slightly depressing to realise just how contemporary this book still sounds.
Gardner's uncompromising attacks on fringe science and New Age ideas delighted his admirers and enraged his detractors for many decades. From 1983
to 2002, he contributed a regular column to the Skeptical Inquirer magazine under the title "Notes of a
fringe watcher" and published several more sceptical books including Science:
Good, Bad and Bogus and Order and Surprise. (The
Guardian)
Beavers are partly to blame for the devastating floods that have swept Poland killing 15 people because the animals tunnel through vital defences protecting the cities, the
interior minister has said.
"The greatest enemy of the flood defences is an animal called the beaver. They live everywhere along the levees on the Vistula (river) and cause a lot of damage to
them," Jerzy Miller said.
An estimated 50,000 of the large, mostly nocturnal, semi-aquatic rodents live in Poland where they enjoy a degree of protection, animal welfare services say.
However, local authorities have upped hunting quotas for the animals in the wake of the floods.
"Beavers dig tunnels in the flood defences, weakening them from inside. But they are not alone, there are also water voles," Pawel Fratczak, Poland's national fire
brigade spokesman said. (TDT)
Species are vanishing quicker than at any point in the last 65 million years
One more step in what scientists are increasingly referring to as the Sixth Great Extinction is announced today: the disappearance of yet another bird species. The vanishing
of the Alaotra grebe of Madagascar is formally notified this morning by the global conservation partnership BirdLife International – and it marks a small but ominous step in
the biological process which seems likely to dominate the 21st century.
Researchers now recognise five earlier cataclysmic events in the earth's prehistory when most species on the planet died out, the last being the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction
event of 65 million years ago, which may have been caused by a giant meteorite striking the earth, and which saw the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
But the rate at which species are now disappearing makes many biologists consider we are living in a sixth major extinction comparable in scale to the others – except that
this one has been caused by humans. In essence, we are driving plants and animals over the abyss faster than new species can evolve. (The Independent)
Actually the rate of species extinctions has declined rapidly over the last century or so, mostly because the bulk of human-related extinctions occurred in
the age of sail and exploration due to feral rats (mostly), cats and mice inadvertently spread through shipwrecks and trade and the deliberate release of breeding groups of
goats and pigs on islands to provide emergency sustenance for shipwrecked sailors. The result of all these sudden introductions of basically European animals to islands was
the alteration of habitat and previously unknown predators decimating nesting bird populations and obscure island-bound subspecies of reptiles.
The immediately preceding significant wave of extinctions was caused by the Polynesian migrations across the Pacific culminating in the settling of New Zealand between the 11th
and 16th Centuries. These migrations spread pigs and rats across the Pacific Islands too and the Maori hunted the New Zealand Moa and other flightless birds to
extinction. Most of the extinctions are niche subspecies of island dwellers, differing perhaps by markings from island to island. Very few species with continental ranges
have been lost in the modern era and current extinction rates are not noteworthy.
Donating money to tiger conservation charities is a waste of time because their success rate is "disastrous", according to Chris Packham, the BBC wildlife
presenter.
Packham, who caused an outcry last year when he suggested that pandas should be left to die out, said efforts to save the animals through conservation were worthless.
"Tiger conservation is a multi-million pound business that isn't working. If it were in the FTSE 100, it would have gone bankrupt. Who'd buy shares in a business that's
failing in its objective?" he asked.
"I'm not saying the conservation agencies don't have their hearts in the right place, but the results are disastrous."
He told the Radio Times: "I do rather dislike the fact that if you do as I do and openly criticise conservation, it's almost as if you're attacking something holy.
"But if we're all giving a pound for the tiger, or whatever, I think we all have a right to think that money is being best spent, that's all. Why shouldn't I criticise if
there is a criticism to be levelled? One would hope the vast majority of wildlife charities are doing good - but why shouldn't I ask? What's so sacred?"
There are only 3,000 tigers left in the world, down from an estimated 100,000 a century ago, according to figures from the World Wildlife Fund.
Packham evoked an angry response with his remarks last September about pandas. “Here’s a species that of its own accord has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac. It’s not
a strong species. Unfortunately, it’s big and cute and it’s a symbol of the World Wildlife Fund – and we pour millions of pounds into panda conservation. I reckon we
should pull the plug. Let them go with a degree of dignity," he said. (TDT)
He's quite right -- once a critter is "critically endangered" its absolutely pointless to throw money at it. Extinction is the natural result for
every species, let 'em go.
University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist Michael Whalen is part of a team of distinguished scientists who recently compiled a wide swath of evidence striking a definitive
blow in the ongoing battle over what killed the dinosaurs.
In a review published in the March 5 issue of the journal Science, the research group reaffirmed the recently challenged theory that an asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs.
Scientists first proposed the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur mass extinction 30 years ago. The discovery of a massive crater at Chicxulub [CHICK-shuh-loob], in Mexico’s
Yucatán Peninsula in 1991, strengthened that hypothesis. The Chicxulub crater is more than 120 miles wide--about the distance from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle--and
scientists believe it was created when an asteroid more than six miles wide crashed into Earth 65 million years ago. The cataclysmic impact--a million times more powerful than
the largest nuclear bomb ever tested--triggered massive earthquakes, atmospheric discharge and oceanic upheaval. The ensuing mass extinction ended both the reign of the
dinosaurs and the Cretaceous period, which gave way to the Paleogene period. This theory, having steadily accumulated evidence, was thought to be a near-consensus view.
Recently, however, in a series of articles, researchers posed an alternate hypothesis for the mass extinction. Some scientists claim that long-term volcanic activity at the
Deccan Traps, in what is now India, caused acid rain and global cooling, gradually making life untenable for the dinosaurs and other large animals. They also suggest that the
Chicxulub impact occurred some 300,000 years before the mass extinctions.
The alternate hypothesis spurred Whalen and other Chicxulub impact proponents to respond. The current Science article dispels the Deccan Traps hypothesis, arguing that the
geological record favors the Chicxulub impact event theory. (Brian Keenan, UAF)
Gun Rights: Not happy with interfering in our internal affairs by savaging Arizona's new immigration law, the president of Mexico wants to shred our Second Amendment too.
And the mayor of Chicago wants to help.
There stood Mexican President Felipe Calderon before Congress, blaming America for the violence on his side of the border and, among other things, the guns that fuel the
Mexican drug war that has claimed more than 23,000 Mexican lives since he took office in 2006. Rather than taking responsibility himself, he shoved the blame on America.
It would all stop, he implied, if America would reinstate a ban on semiautomatic weapons. The violence in Mexico, he said, "coincides, at least, with the lifting of the
assault weapons ban in 2004."
He repeated the canard that in the past three years Mexican authorities have seized some 75,000 weapons, more than 80% of them traceable to the United States. Rubbish on both
counts.
First, Mexico sends only about one-third of its confiscated weapons to the U.S. for tracing. Of that third, many can't be traced at all due to efforts to remove registration
markings.
Fox News reported last year that according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico sent about 11,000 guns in 2007-08 to the U.S. for tracing. Of that number, 6,000 were
successfully traced. And of that 6,000, only 5,114, or the famous 80%, were found to have originated in the U.S.
Do the math and you find that only 17% of the guns confiscated were actually traced to the U.S. So why are so few guns sent here for tracing? Because, as Matt Allen, a special
agent with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, points out, weapons known not to be of American origin are not sent to the U.S. for tracing. (IBD)
President Obama's announcement last Friday that his Administration is contemplating fuel economy standards beyond 2016 resurrected a familiar canard in the debate on the
Murkowski disapproval resolution. To wit: the resolution would overturn the "historic" auto emissions deal struck last May between the Obama Administration (EPA,
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, and Carol Browner), auto executives, and the state of California. By overturning EPA's endangerment finding,
Murkowski's detractors say, the administration's new fuel economy standards will vanish into thin air.
The one problem with this view is that it's wrong. Just ask the Obama Administration. "As a strictly legal matter," according to a February 19 letter by Kevin
Vincent, NHTSA's general counsel, "the Murkowski resolution does not directly impact NHTSA's statutory authority to set fuel economy standards under the Energy Policy and
Conservation Act (EPCA), as amended by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007(EISA)." [Emphasis added] We recognize the varied opinions on increasing corporate
average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, but we need not delve into them here. Congress gave explicit authority to NHTSA to regulate fuel economy under the EPCA and that
authority was amended by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The main point is that, as Vincent conceded, if Murkowski became law, NHTSA's work would continue
unimpeded because the resolution would only affect EPA's new administratively-created GHG authority, and not NHTSA's CAFE authority rooted in statute. (Inhofe EPW Press Blog)
Small businesses and the American economy, beware: Once again Washington politicians are conspiring to help you out. Apparently, Sens. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) and Thomas
Carper (D., Del.) are planning to “save” you from the onerous rules regulating greenhouse gases being hatched at the EPA.
The basis of the EPA’s regulatory efforts is the agency’s finding that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that supposedly “endangers” us by causing global warming.
Once the EPA made this unprecedented and unsupported endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act, it put the enormous regulatory machinery of the federal government in gear to
generate rules regulating CO2, rules that will damage every aspect of the U.S. economy. Thankfully, substantive legal challenges to the endangerment finding and the rules the
EPA is generating have been filed.
One rule the agency has already issued, something known as the tailoring rule, seems, at first glance, different than its economy-stifling kin. The tailoring rule was
supposedly designed to exempt smaller CO2 emitters from the new regulations until 2016. While the Clean Air Act itself states that pollutant emissions of 250 tons or more must
be regulated, EPA’s tailoring regulation simply contradicts the law, stating that for now the agency will only regulate CO2 sources emitting 50,000 tons or more.
How, you may ask, can a federal agency just overturn a law by regulation? Good question. The reality is that the EPA is well aware that the tailoring regulation contradicts
black-letter law; consequently, it knows legal challenges have high prospects for success. So why would an agency like the EPA that has no trouble flexing its regulatory
muscles exempt tens of thousands of potential regulatory targets with such a rule? Quite simply, in addition to recognizing the regulation’s tenuous legal grounds, the EPA
realizes that as the number of individuals aware of the pending regulatory burden grows, the stronger the backlash against its CO2 rules will be. Crafty bureaucrats also know
that the biggest hurdle they now face is beginning the process of regulating CO2 — striking out against our national economy from the regulatory beachhead of the EPA’s very
questionable endangerment finding. (Hans A. von Spakovsky and Robert Gordon, Planet Gore)
California, that former land of opportunity, was one of the first states to pass its own version of "cap and trade" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007
when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, called AB-32, he said it would propel California into an economy-expanding, green job future. Well, a new study by the
state's own auditing agency—its version of the Congressional Budget Office—has burst that green bubble.
The study released May 13 concludes that "California's economy at large will likely be adversely affected in the near term by implementing climate-related policies that
are not adopted elsewhere." While the long-term economic costs are "unknown," the study finds that AB-32 will raise energy prices, "causing the prices of
goods and services to rise; lowering business profits; and reducing production, income and jobs."
The economic reality here is what the Legislative Analyst's Office calls "economic leakage." That's jargon for businesses and jobs that will "locate or relocate
outside the state of California where regulatory-related costs are lower." The study says the negative impact on most California industries will be "modest," but
energy-intensive industries—specifically, aluminum, chemicals, forest products, oil and gas and steel—"may significantly reduce their business activity in
California."
Yes, some new "green jobs" will be created. But the "net economywide impact," it says, "will in all likelihood be negative." Sorry.
The green lobby typically tries to discredit such results when they're sponsored by business, as if anything business commissions isn't credible. But no one can say that
California's state auditing agency has an industry bias.
Some Californians may shrug and say that such costs are worth it to save the planet from CO2. But the report bursts that bubble too, concluding that the California law's impact
on carbon emissions will be de minimis because "the economic activity that is shifted will also generate" greenhouse gasses outside the state.
Recognizing this problem, California politicians are busy trying to get a Western regional pact to reduce carbon emissions, but so far Arizona, Montana, Oregon, Utah and
Washington have refused. They'd rather have the jobs. (WSJ)
Europe will introduce a surprise new plan today to combat global warming, committing Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world. The plan
proposes a massive increase in the target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in this decade.
The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member
states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies. (The Times)
You've seen the calculations, total cessation of all U.S. coal-fired generating
emissions from the end this year delivers a trivial Δ forcing of 0.15 W/m2 at end of century -- 90 years of austerity to achieve a "saving" of 0.15 °C
in mean temperature, if and only if the climate is as sensitive as the IPCC pretends while we all know the more plausible value is a completely meaningless 0.045 °C. We
simply cannot knowingly and meaningfully influence the climate by tweaking such minor peripheral variables as trace gas emission.
Moreover, the biosphere benefits from our returning carbon to atmospheric availability and certainly humanity does so, with affordable energy underpinning society. Carbon
constraint can only do harm and has no upside.
AFP - France and Germany on Tuesday gave a less than warm response to the EU Commission's suggestion that Europe unilaterally binds itself to cut greenhouse gas emissions by
30 percent by 2020.
The message from German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle and French Industry Minister Christian Estrosi came on the eve of the publication of a commission paper laying out the
reasons in favour of deepening Europe's emission cuts from 20 percent, the current agreed rate, to 30 percent compared with 1990 levels.
"We have shared our concerns at the commission's proposal," said Estrosi. (AFP)
BERLIN, May 25 -- The German industry has lashed out against a plan by the European Commission to boost Europe's climate protection efforts.
Germany's two biggest industry associations said they are against boosting the European Union's carbon dioxide emissions reduction target from 20 percent to 30 percent compared
to 1990 levels.
"The German industry -- probably like no other in the world -- commits itself to climate protection," Werner Schnappauf, the head of the German BDI industry
association, told Tuesday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "However, the BDI strongly opposes a unilateral tightening of the EU climate targets."
Martin Wansleben, the head of the DIHK industry association added that Europe "can't afford costly solo attempts." (UPI)
A senior Chinese climate official said on Tuesday that negotiators aim to seal a binding global pact on warming by the end of 2011, a blow to any lingering hopes the world
could reach a deal at talks this year in Mexico.
Xie Zhenhua, who led China's delegation to fractious negotiations in Copenhagen last year, said the only target for a December gathering in coastal Cancun city was a
"positive result."
Top European and U.N. officials had already all but ruled out a deal this year, but Xie's comments are the first time the world's number one emitter has confirmed it also does
not expect to seal a new pact in 2010.
"Everyone is now taking pragmatic measures, and working hard in a positive manner, in order that we can achieve a legally binding agreement at next year's meeting in South
Africa," Xie told a Sino-European political forum. (Reuters)
The United Nations urged rich nations on Tuesday to keep a pledge to give $30 billion to poor nations by 2012 to cope with climate change, saying it was "not an
impossible call" despite budget cuts in Europe.
Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, also said it was extremely unlikely that a new U.N. climate treaty would be agreed in 2010 after the Copenhagen summit
in December fell short of a full, legally binding treaty.
He said that one priority for 2010 was for rich countries to deliver on key elements of that Copenhagen Accord, including a promise of $10 billion a year in aid from 2010-12
for developing nations, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. (Reuters)
Mount Everest is becoming increasingly dangerous to climb because global warming is melting glacier ice along its slopes, according to a Nepalese Sherpa who has conquered
the world’s highest summit 20 times. (TDT)
At what altitude do they think the ice is melting? As pressure decreases with altitude air expands and cools, the rate is about 6.5 °C per vertical
kilometer, so all things being equal from about 3,000 meters air temperature will be 20 °C less than sea level and declining. By about 6,000 meters even mid summer
temperatures remain below freezing. Everest summit temperature roughly fluctuates between -20 °C during summer and -35 °C.
Surely there are changes observable but global warming? Very doubtful given the changes in atmospheric conditions (the Asian Brown Cloud from cooking fires and lack of
baseload electricity altering cloud composition, precipitation and soot deposition). They are attacking the wrong target, the subcontinent needs far more coal-fired
generating capacity and particularly wealth generation to clear the atmosphere and reduce anthropogenic influence on Himalayan snow accumulation.
The world's emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas should rise 43 percent by 2035 barring global agreements to reduce output of the gases blamed
for warming the planet, the top U.S. energy forecaster said on Tuesday.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide from the fossil fuel sources should rise from 29.7 billion tonnes in 2007 to 42.4 billion tonnes in 2035, the Energy Information
Administration said in its annual long-term energy outlook.
Much of the rise will occur in rapidly growing developing countries like China and India where electricity demand is expected to soar. (Reuters)
Emissions from electricity, cement and waste have more than doubled since 1994, making it the world's fifth biggest emitter
India claimed to be a front-runner among developing nations for emissions disclosure today with its first national survey of greenhouse gases in more than a decade.
The government study based on 2007 data showed a sharp increase in industrial activity since the last assessment in 1994 has made India the world's fifth biggest emitter after
China, the US, Europe and Russia.
Since then, emissions from electricity, cement and waste have more than doubled, in addition to substantial rises in the transport and residential sectors.
According to the latest inventory, India relied on coal for 90% of its electricity, which accounts for more than a third of the country's emissions. However, despite rapid
economic growth, the report notes that India's emissions are about a quarter of those from China and the United States.
Its carbon intensity – emissions relative to economic output – fell by 30% between the two reporting periods. (The Guardian)
Seventy percent of firms with revenue of $1 billion or more say they plan to increase spending on climate change initiatives in the next two years, a global survey reported
on Tuesday.
Nearly half of the 300 corporate executives who responded to a survey conducted for the accounting and consulting giant Ernst & Young said their climate change investments
will range from 0.5 percent to more than 5 percent of revenues by 2012.
More than four out of five respondents, or 82 percent, said they plan to invest in energy efficiency in the next 12 months, with 92 percent saying energy costs will be an
important driver over that period. (Reuters)
Efficiency is always good but dressing that up as "addressing climate change"? Meh...
Could the global warming hypothesis meet the rigorous evidentiary standards of a legal trial? The answer, according to Jason Scott Johnston, is clearly negative.
Johnston is the Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His
79 page essay, Global
Warming Advocacy Science: A Cross Examination, published by the Institute of Law and Economics, examines a broad range of evidence both for and against the conclusions
drawn by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
After a comprehensive examination of the peer-reviewed literature, the author concludes that there is a tendentious use of evidence by the IPCC, revealing “a systematic
tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while
concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change” (1).
Johnston is not attempting to arrive at a scientific conclusion regarding the global warming hypothesis. Rather, he is cross examining the “established climate
story” by asking “very tough questions, questions that force the expert to clarify the basis for his or her opinion, to explain her interpretation of the literature, and to
account for any apparently conflicting literature that is not discussed in the expert report” (6).
This approach raises some fundamental questions about the role of non-specialists in critiquing science. Scientists would like to believe that their disagreements can
be settled by evidence alone. However, the reality is that science possesses an underlying grammar which includes the rigorous use of opposing evidence, critical
thinking, mathematics, logic, and internal consistency. Most of these elements are shared by other fields, including - and especially- the legal profession.
Anyone who is competent in these areas may weigh-in on their proper, or improper, use without a full understanding of the scientific facts. When I first read the
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment (2007) I had very little background in climate science, though I had worked in operational meteorology. Yet, it became fast apparent to me that
the supporting evidence for the IPCC’s projections did not warrant the high level (90%-95%) of confidence expressed by its authors. Indeed, it was the authors
themselves who raised fundamental doubts about our scientific understanding of radiative forcing agents and climate change, both past and present. As Johnston concludes,
these projections are not reliable enough to make public policy decisions.
After pouring over years of mainstream literature, Johnston discovered numerous scientific uncertainties “which are rarely if ever even mentioned in the climate change law
and policy literature” (8-9):
* “There seem to be significant problems with the measurement of global surface temperatures over both the relatively short run - late 20th century - and longer run - past
millennium - problems that systematically tend to cause an overestimation of late 20th century temperature increases relative to the past;
* Continuing scientific dispute exists over whether observations are confirming or disconfirming key short-run predictions of climate models - such as an increase in
tropospheric water vapor and an increase in tropical tropospheric surface temperatures relative to tropical surface temperatures;
* Climate model projections of increases of global average surface temperature (due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2) above about 1 degree centigrade arise only because of
positive feedback effects presumed by climate models;
* Yet there is evidence that both particular feedbacks—such as that from clouds - and feedbacks in total may be negative, not positive;
* Confidence in climate models based on their ability to causally relate 20th century temperature trends to trends in CO2 may well be misplaced, because such models do not
agree on the sensitivity of global climate to increases in CO2 and are able to explain 20th century temperature trends only by making arbitrary and widely varying assumptions
about the net cooling impact of atmospheric aerosols;
* Similar reason for questioning climate models is provided by continuing scientific dispute over whether late 20th century warming may have been simply a natural climate
cycle, or have been caused by solar variation, versus being caused by anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2;
* The scientific ability to predict what are perhaps the most widely publicized adverse impacts of global warming - sea level rise and species loss - is much less than
generally perceived, and in the case of species loss, predictions are based on a methodology that a large number of biologists have severely criticized as invalid and as almost
certain to lead to an overestimate of species loss due to global warming;
* Finally, many of the ongoing disputes in climate science boil down to disputes over the relative validity and reliability of different observational datasets, suggesting
that the very new field of climate science does not yet have standardized observational datasets that would allow for definitive testing of theories and models against
observations.”
Johnston cross examines and juxtaposes conclusions from numerous scientists to reveal “a rhetoric of persuasion, of advocacy that prevails throughout establishment climate
science"(9). Complexities and uncertainties that might shake the confidence of policymakers are often concealed. For example, there is no mention of water
vapor feedbacks in the IPCC AR4 “Climate Science” documents intended to influence the public and the media - the Policymaker Summary and Technical Summary (24).
By oversimplifying the climate story, it appears that the IPCC’s projections are just straightforward physics: The 2 C to 6 C projected rise in global average
temperature is the direct, linear result of increasing CO2. But in reality, the IPCC claims that CO2, acting alone, will result in only a 1.2 C rise in temperature.
The rest depends on whether the climate amplifies (positive feedback) or diminishes (negative feedback) CO2 forcing.
As Johnston demonstrates from the scientific literature, the complex and chaotic processes underlying these mechanisms, especially as they relate to cloud formation and
precipitation, constitute anything but straightforward physics. The issue of feedbacks and climate sensitivity is probably the greatest question facing climate science.
But policymakers are left blissfully ignorant of these controversies.
Johnston concludes by calling for a change in climate science practices and funding. Since one of the major sources of disagreement between scientists lies in the use
of different datasets, he recommends that “public funding for climate science should be concentrated on the development of better, standardized observational datasets that
achieve close to universal acceptance as valid and reliable.” On the other hand, the continued development of “fine-grained climate models,” in the absence reliable data,
only perpetuates “faith-based climate policy” (77-79).
Johnston’s essay echoes the experience of many reputable scientists whose work has been marginalized or rejected by IPCC gatekeepers. As we learned from the
‘Climategate’ emails, there was indeed a concerted effort behind the scenes to insure that only one side of the story was heard. If the climate science community is
serious about transparency, then they need to abandon their “tidy story” and provide a bone fide forum for opposing views. These views should be incorporated as an
alternative report in both IPCC and governmental publications, including the summaries for policymakers. With so much hanging in the balance, decision makers need to hear
both sides of the debate.
Special thanks to Roger Pielke Sr. for finding Johnston’s article. See
PDF.
Bill DiPuccio served as a weather forecaster and lab instructor for the U.S. Navy, and a Meteorological/Radiosonde Technician for the National Weather Service. More
recently, he was the head of the science department for Orthodox Christian Schools of Northeast Ohio. (Icecap)
Driving from Canberra to West Wyalong last Sunday morning I tried out a temperature logger and scored this
signature from the centre of the village of Barmedman which is in flat country between Temora and West
Wyalong – conditions were not windy.
Barmedman is so small that very few places with a population as low as 227 would rate a BoM temperature station. So Jones et al/IPCC data would not contain very many
stations from sites with populations as small – yet Barmedman sure has a very pronounced UHI. The lesson is – think before you are conned by pro-IPCC lies. (Warwick Hughes)
After reading this BBC article on modeling the “tipping point” of polar bear populations, it seemed this photo summed it up well, especially since modeling was
substituted in lieu of “nearly non-existent data”. I wonder how the bears survived the Roman Warm Period, or the Medieval Warm Period?
Image: via "Alek" on a Churchill Polar Bear Tour - click for more
From the BBC: Polar bears face ‘tipping point’
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News
Climate change will trigger a dramatic and sudden decline in the number of polar bears, a new study has concluded.
The research is the first to directly model how changing climate will affect polar bear reproduction and survival.
Based on what is known of polar bear physiology, behaviour and ecology, it predicts pregnancy rates will fall and fewer bears will survive fasting during longer ice-free
seasons.
These changes will happen suddenly as bears pass a ‘tipping point’.
Details of the research are published in the journal Biological Conservation.
Educated guesses
Until now, most studies measuring polar bear survival have relied on a method called “mark and recapture”. Continue
reading →(WUWT)
The biodiversity of small mammals in North America may already be close to a "tipping point" causing impacts "up and down the food chain" according to a
new study by U.S. scientists.
Examining fossils excavated from a cave in Northern California, biologists from Stanford University, California uncovered evidence that small mammal populations were severely
depleted during the last episode of global warming around 12,000 years ago.
Many species, say researchers, have never recovered their populations leaving them vulnerable to future rises in temperature.
Deposits in Samwell Cave in the foothills of the southern Cascades mountain range revealed that populations of gophers and voles during the period (the end of the Pleistocene
epoch) were on a par with those of deer mice.
But while the deer mice population thrived in the warming period and has become one of the most common small mammals in the U.S. today, gophers, voles and other small species'
populations fell away permanently.
The decline in small mammal species during the period contributed to a 30 percent decline in biodiversity, according to the study. (CNN)
Droughts in the late 20th century rival some of North Africa's major droughts of centuries past, reveals new research that peers back in time to the year 1179.
The first multi-century drought reconstruction that includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia shows frequent and severe droughts during the 13th and 16th centuries and the latter
part of the 20th century.
An international research team figured out northwest Africa's climate history by using the information recorded in tree rings. The oldest trees sampled contain climate data
from the medieval period. One tree-ring sample from Morocco dates back to the year 883.
"Water issues in this part of the world are vital," said lead researcher Ramzi Touchan of the University of Arizona. "This is the first regional climate
reconstruction that can be used by water resource managers."
In most of North Africa, instruments have been recording weather information for 50 years or less, too short a time to provide the long-term understanding of regional climate
needed for resource planning, he said.
"One of the most important ways to understand the climate variability is to use the proxy record, and one of the most reliable proxy records is tree rings," said
Touchan, an associate research professor at UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
The team has developed the first systematically sampled network of tree-ring chronologies across northwest Africa, said co-author David Meko, also of UA's Laboratory of
Tree-Ring Research.
The network allowed the researchers to analyze the patterns of past droughts over the whole region, said Meko, a UA associate research professor. The width of the annual growth
rings on trees in semi-arid environments is highly correlated with the amount of precipitation. (University of Arizona)
Interesting, they seem to have noticed the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age expressed as North African droughts. Doesn't sound much like Mann's
stable gradual cooling until the industrial era with sudden onset of recent dramatic warming really, does it?
Knight, J. et al. Global oceans: do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions? Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 90, S56–S57 (2009).
Figure 3.4 top in this article is presumably the data that Lyman et al 2010 are referring to. The tropical ocean average anomalies in Figure 3.4 5th figure
also shows an absence of further warming since 1998 although, as with the global average, it remains above the long term average (1950 to 2008).
There are important consequences of this lack of a continued global average ocean surface temperature increase:
since an increase of atmospheric water vapor is required to amplify the radiative heating from added CO2 and other human inputs of greenhouse gases, the absence of continued
ocean surface warming suggests this water vapor feedback to radiative forcing is more muted than predicted by the IPCC multi-decadal model predictions. This more muted
response in the real world is consistent with what has been reported in the study De-Zheng Sun, Yongqiang Yu, and Tao Zhang, 2009: Tropical
Water Vapor and Cloud Feedbacks in Climate Models: A Further Assessment Using Coupled Simulations Journal of Climate, Volume 22, Issue 5 (March 2009) pp. 1287–1304.
The claims that warming is continuing (e.g. see) is,
therefore, based on the land portion of the surface temperature record [warm equatorial ocean temperature anomalies in recent years, particularly in the Atlantic, are
offset elsewhere in the ocean]. With respect to the land surface temperature trends, we have documented a warm bias as we report in our paper Klotzbach, P.J., R.A.
Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for
differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841.
Of course, as I and others, including Kevin Trenberth, have repeatedly urged (e.g. see
and see) we need to move to the use of the ocean heat content change as the
metric to assess global warming and cooling. Ocean heat content changes provide a much more robust metric than surface temperature trends as the metric to assess global warming
and cooling (e.g. see and see).
I have presented two analyses of ocean surface temperature anomalies below; one for mid May 2010 (top) and one for mid May 1997 (bottom). The format has changed and the
center point of geography is different (which makes it harder to compare the two figures], but what stands out is not a clear difference in the ocean average,
but the remarkably large spatial variations in the anomalies. It is these anomalies that have a much greater effect on the climate that society and the environment experience
(e.g. drought, floods, hurricanes, etc) than a global average trend (which has not even been evident for several years).
What is missing from the otherwise excellent website, of course, are time plots of the global average sea surface temperatures, as well as averages for different
subregions of the oceans. With that information, we could more readily track the ocean contribution to the global average surface temperature trend, as well as anomalies
within the subregions. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Subject Index Summary: Roman Warm Period (Europe -- Mediterranean): In the lands of what was once the Roman Empire, the
Roman Warm Period contemporaneously reigned supreme.
Plant Growth Database:
Our latest results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
are: European Beech (Fleischmann et al., 2010), Quaking
Aspen (Darbah et al., 2010), Red Alga (Xu et al., 2010), and Rice
(Li et al., 2010).
Medieval
Warm Period Project:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 833
individual scientists from 496 separate research institutions in 43
different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record comes from Middle and
Southern Ural Mountains, Russia. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.
(co2science.org)
BP’s attempts to limit the financial damage from the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico suffered a blow yesterday when almost half the syndicates in the
Lloyd’s of London insurance market launched a legal action against the company.
The syndicates are attempting to block efforts by the oil giant to claim on cover held by the rig operator Transocean.
BP, which had no external insurance in place for the accident, is trying to claim up to $700 million through a policy held by Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig
that BP has blamed for the April 20 blast. A spokesman for BP said: “We believe we may be entitled to coverage for the incident under Transocean’s insurance.”
But in legal documents filed in a Houston court, 38 separate Lloyd’s underwriting syndicates plus a string of other international insurers affected by the disaster, rejected
BP’s claim.
They have asked a US judge to declare the group has “no additional-insured obligation to BP” for the clean-up or for any damages resulting from the spill.
The Lloyd’s syndicates claim that BP’s contract to lease the rig from Transocean specifies that its insurers would only be held responsible for damage to the rig itself —
not for pollution caused by a leak from it. (The Times)
In a tense standoff, BP continued to spray a product called Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday to break up a vast oil spill despite a demand by federal regulators that
it switch to something less toxic.
The Environmental Protection Agency had set a Sunday night deadline for BP to stop using two dispersants from the Corexit line of products. The oil company has defended its use
of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the agency used to estimate its toxicity.
At a news conference Monday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response” and had ordered the oil giant to take
“immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants.”
Ms. Jackson called BP’s safety data on dispersants insufficient and said government scientists would conduct their own tests to decide which dispersant was best to use. She
said the amount of chemicals applied to control the oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon well — more than 700,000 gallons so far on the gulf’s surface and a mile
underwater at the leaking well head — was “approaching a world record.”
Ms. Jackson said that in theory, BP’s deployment of dispersant directly onto the l well head, a novel use of the chemicals, would reduce the amount of oil on the surface and
the need for application of dispersant there. She said the company could reduce its use by 50 percent to 75 percent, regardless of which dispersant was used.
Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said that while the government had approved the use of dispersant beforehand, “no one anticipated that it would ever be used at
this scale and this scope.”
Admiral Landry said the preferred method of responding to oil on the ocean was to burn it or to soak it up with devices like absorbent booms. Dispersant applications should be
a second line of defense, for when the weather is too severe to rely on other techniques, she said.
It was not clear how the environmental agency would enforce the demand that BP reduce its use of the dispersant. (NYT)
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection
reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector
general’s report to be released this week.
The report, which describes inappropriate behavior by the staff at the Minerals Management Service from 2005 to 2007, also found that inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to
sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry.
Although there is no evidence that those events played a role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the report offers further evidence of what many critics of the Minerals
Management Service have described as a culture of lax oversight and cozy ties to industry.
The report includes other examples of troubling behavior discovered by investigators. (NYT)
A FINANCIAL black hole is threatening Scotland's transformation to a low carbon economy, the head of Lloyds Banking Group has warned.
Lady Susan Rice, the group's managing director, told a conference yesterday she estimated £20 billion was needed to fund investments in renewables needed to bring about green
schemes such as major wind farms and new marine renewable technology.
This was far higher than the one-off £2bn government funding set for a planned new Green Investment Bank, she said.
"We know what needs to be done," she told the conference at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. "The big question is, how do we fund it?" (The Scotsman)
No, the question is: "Why should we fund it?" There is nothing more pointless than panicked measures to "decarbonize" the economy. The
best thing humanity has every done for the biosphere is return to availability some of the carbon lost through accidental sequestration. Green plants love atmospheric carbon
dioxide and we love green plants, that our fossil fuel use restores some atmospheric carbon dioxide is just win-win, all the way.
Waste, and not wind, should be the focus of the new Government’s energy policies, according to the chief executive of one of Britain’s rubbish collectors.
“Energy from waste accounts for about 1.5 per cent of energy produced in the UK and the target is to get that up to 6 per cent by 2015,” Colin Drummond, the chief executive
of Viridor, said, “but the Government needs to be much more ambitious than that. Energy from wind farms can be variable, but energy from waste is base load power [it can
produce electricity as and when needed].”
Viridor’s operations — clearing bins, running landfill dumps, producing and generating power from landfill gas and burning waste for energy and recycling — are becoming a
more important part of its parent, Pennon, whose main operation is running South West Water. Viridor’s 35 per cent surge in profits last year means that it accounted for
nearly 30 per cent of Pennon’s pre-tax earnings of £189 million in the year to March 31, which were reported yesterday. (The Times)
[Editor's note: This is the third of four posts on (elevated) fossil-fuel emissions associated with firming otherwise intermittent wind
power. Part I introduced the issues. Part
II showed negated emission savings for the Netherlands at current wind penetration (about 3 percent). Part III (below) and Part IV tomorrow examine the higher
emissions from wind in Colorado and Texas, respectively, according to a new study by Bentek.]
The Bentek study is a significant contribution to the wind/fossil-fuel emission
literature despite some notable limitations. The study analyzes the PSCO system, which dominates Colorado’s needs, and the ERCOT system in Texas, which manages 85%
of that state’s electricity.
The analysis includes SO2, NOx and CO2 emissions. Bentek looks at coal cycling events only in both cases, ignoring any gas cycling, while noting PSCO’s
acknowledgement that wind impacts gas as well as coal.
There are reasons why coal cycling is focused upon:
Although gas turbine plants are better suited for cycling to support wind, for both PSCO and ERCOT gas resources are insufficient to balance all the wind energy produced.
There is a small amount of pumped storage available to PSCO, which can run for only four consecutive hours.
Wind is strongest at night when base load coal plants predominate, and there is reduced gas generation, which may not be sufficient to safely cycle gas plants.
As a result, reported gas cycling events at PSCO are less frequent than that for coal.
Both analyses utilize published production information. As PSCO does not reveal hourly wind production, for emissions analysis purposes, Bentek has to rely on a few
coal cycling events in relation to detailed wind production provided in PSCO training manuals. This limitation is offset by the information available on a notable increase in
coal cycling, which has occurred during the period of wind introduction, and which is arguably attributable to wind. As ERCOT does release wind production at 15 minute
intervals, the same analysis approach is used in the Texas system to validate the Colorado results, which it does.
Criticisms that the PSCO analysis is based on two days experience only, are well answered in the Bentek report. The reality is that PSCO does not make the necessary
information available, and Bentek has done well with what they had to work with. Also, the validation of results based on the ERCOT experience is important. Finally, Bentek
appropriately acknowledges limitations by calling for more comprehensive studies based on detailed information.
Having established that RPS appear to add to the emissions problem, Bentek concludes that, given RPS, it will be necessary to incorporate adequate flexible fuel capacity
facilities (gas plants) to ensure reduction in emissions, which is true enough. What is missed in this logic is that incorporating such new facilities without RPS will achieve
even lower emissions. More on this is provided below. There are not only more emissions with RPS than without them, but also there is duplicate capacity installed (wind) at
significantly higher costs, which adds notably to the costs of electricity. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
90 top global warming scientists have turned their sights on the biomass energy industry, until recently seen as allies, warning that biofuels sometimes increases rather
than decreases greenhouse gas emissions.
““There may be a public perception that all biofuels and bioenergy are equally good for the environment and are all lower in carbon emissions than fossil fuels,
but that’s not true,” said one of the signatories, Dr. William Schlesinger of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in a press release yesterday aimed at the U.S.
Congress. “Many produce just as much or more carbon pollution than oil, gas, and coal. If our laws and regulations treat high-carbon-impact bioenergy sources,
like today’s corn ethanol, as if they are low-carbon, we’re fooling ourselves and undercutting the purpose of those same laws and regulations.”
That ethanol in your gas tank, the climate change scientists are telling us, could be bringing us closer to Armageddon by undercutting their efforts at saving the world.
“Many international treaties and domestic laws and bills account for bioenergy incorrectly by treating all bioenergy as causing a 100% reduction in emissions regardless of
the source of the biomass,” the scientists explain.” Under some scenarios, this approach could eliminate most of the expected greenhouse gas reductions during the next
several decades.”
The letter by the 90 scientists is a response to the American Power Act, which was recently introduced by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. This proposed legislation
promotes the bioenergy sector while downplaying wind and solar. Under the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, the National Academies of Sciences would study the role that biomass could
play in reducing greenhouse gases while contributing to energy independence. The Environmental Protection Agency would then submit recommendations to Congress based on the NAS
study and another study, this one a joint effort by EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Agriculture Congress would then act on the basis of the new
information before it.
To prevent this steamroller from flattening plans for windmills and solar collectors, the 90 scientists decided to take on the biomass lobby head-on. The biomass industry is
now gearing up to counter the 90 with scientists of their own.
In a rebuttal by BioFuels Digest, a leading industry journal, the letter from the 90 “represents a narrowly-held view within the scientific community, rather than
consensus,” as it “was primarily signed by biologists and ecologists and did not include leading scientists noted in the development of bioenergy technologies.”
Then came the call to action: “The Digest urgently calls on its friends in the scientific community, through the National Academy of Sciences, or other appropriate
vehicles, to develop a point of view which can be generally said to be representative of a broad scientific consensus. We have seen what a lack of consensus can do to
side-track the discussion of climate change.”
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The
Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud. The letter by the 90 scientists can be found here.
(Financial Post)
Passage of Obamacare will have negative consequences for practically all Americans. However, it is the nation’s senior citizens who will get the short end of the
stick after enactment of the President’s health care agenda. In a recent paper,
Heritage health policy expert Robert Moffit, Ph.D., lays out the specific provisions of Obamacare that will hurt seniors:
Less Choice. Obamacare will reduce payments to Medicare Advantage, likely decreasing benefits and causing approximately
half of current participants to drop out. These seniors will have little choice but to go back to traditional Medicare, and buy a supplemental policy to cover
Medicare’s big gaps in coverage.
The new law requires insurers to charge enrollees of the same age the same average premium, regardless of health status. That’s a price control, and it will cause premiums
for healthy people to rise dramatically and thus lead to massive adverse selection. Healthy people will gravitate to less-comprehensive insurance — in particular,
HSA-compatible high-deductible plans — where the implicit tax is smaller.
As premiums for comprehensive plans spiral upward (ultimately causing comprehensive
plans to disappear) and as ObamaCare proves more costly than projected, supporters will be desperate for new revenue. They will call for the elimination of both HSAs
and high-deductible health plans on the grounds that those products — not the price controls, mind you — are causing the market to unravel.
HSAs allow young and healthy consumers to avoid the raw deal that ObamaCare offers them. And that’s precisely why ObamaCare’s supporters will try to kill HSAs. We will
end up repealing one or the other. (Cato at liberty)
Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S.
voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.
Prior to today, weekly
polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.
Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.
The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.
The $800 billion stimulus package is shipping American jobs overseas. More
than 79 percent of “green jobs” funding under the stimulus package went to foreign firms. Meanwhile, to pay for the stimulus package, the government borrowed a
huge amount of money from the American people, money that would otherwise have been spent on American products, or been invested in America’s companies.
Spain’s “green jobs” program, a model for
Obama’s green-jobs and global-warming programs, has turned out to be a
complete bust, destroying jobs and contributing to Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit. (Earlier, Obama’s green jobs czar, Van Jones, resigned
over his…
“The focus on green economy is no longer just a case of sensitivity towards the environment, but an issue of creating a sustainable economy
also,” Papandreou told the 3rd Climate and Energy Security Summit for Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean…
Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change Tina Birbili announced the subsidization of photovoltaic installations and the connection
of the subsidy with the guaranteed price of kilowatt for solar energy.
In addition, the program to upgrade the energy efficiency of buildings is progressing, that is to be followed by an energy conservation
program in homes, with subsidies for making structural improvements.
In the same breath, the Greek Prime Minister also blasts speculators:
“[C]loser international cooperation is needed to develop forward-thinking energy policies, as well as face the speculators who now attack
Southern European countries.”
Speculators – people who invest their own, not taxpayers’, money – see that his silly policies do harm. And they see that the
World Bank ranks Greece 109th, behind Egypt, Ethiopia and Lebanon, in business friendliness. No wonder the Prime Minister doesn’t like speculators.
That the leader of a bankrupt country thinks he should spend more to “go green” says a lot a lot about the power of the Green myth. I’ll cover than on my FBN show
Thursday. (John Stossel)
Picked
up by BBC Scotland lat week, after being aired by the farming
press and the trade, it appears that there is a proposal going
through the EU parliament to ban certain rat poisons.
In the frame are anticoagulant rodenticides – the most widely used group of rat poisons – and in this case the problem stems from an update to the EU's Biocides Directive,
legislation introduced more than a decade ago to control the use of chemicals used to kill living organisms.
What has happened is that Christa
Klass, a German MEP from the EPP group, has inserted a clause into the update to remove rodenticides from the market. Under her proposal, they would fail safety cut-off
criteria because they are "toxic to human reproduction" and they would fail a derogation clause to keep chemicals deemed too important to lose.
According to Tory MEP Struan Stevenson, the proposal – crazy though it is – is already "well on its way" through the regulatory system. He is urging the
agricultural industry and fellow politicians to step up their game to stop it in its tracks. "This is not scaremongering," he says. "There is a real possibility
that we could see a ban."
If it does go through, farmers, public health professionals and householders will be left without a decent tool to tackle rodents. The result could be massive and dangerous
levels of infestation, with very real risks of disease – just at a moment when local authorities here want to move to universal two-weekly refuse collection.
The matter goes before the EU parliament's environment committee in early June and then before the full parliament in July. Hazel Doonan, from the Agricultural Industries
Confederation, is saying that there is "no logical reason why the legislation should go ahead". But she warns: "MEPs don't always listen to logic."
NEW YORK - Parents can rest assured that getting kids their vaccine shots on time will not hurt their mental skills later on, doctors said on Monday.
"A lot of parents are concerned that children receive too many vaccines too soon," said Dr. Michael J. Smith, of the University of Louisville School of Medicine in
Kentucky. Some parents skip recommended vaccines out of fear of autism, for instance, and some choose to space out shots.
Although there is no evidence that would be safer, Smith said, he wanted to study the issue to address parents' concerns. So he and a colleague tapped into data from more than
1,000 preteen kids who had undergone extensive psychological tests of IQ, memory, attention, and language.
Then they divided the kids into those who had received all their shots on time in their first year of life and those who got them late, or only got some.
"Those children who were late, they never did better in any analysis," said Smith, whose study is published in the journal Pediatrics.
In fact, when comparing kids who had received the largest number of vaccines as toddlers against those who had received the smallest, the first group scored higher on 15 out of
42 tests.
But when the researchers took factors such as parents' education level into account, that difference disappeared for all but two tests. And for those, the difference was
minimal, Smith said.
Earlier studies based on the same data had shown that the mercury compound thimerosal, which was used as a preservative in vaccines until recently, had no impact on kids'
mental skills.
But until now, nobody had studied whether getting several vaccinations in a short time could have negative consequences, for instance by overloading the immune system, as many
parents believe, according to Smith. He found that receiving as many as 10 different shots -- including flu and whooping cough -- had no impact.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher said the new findings send an important public health message.
"Parents that are considering delaying vaccination should realize that there aren't any specific benefits, and that they are putting their child at risk, and not only
their child but also the community," said Dr. David Sugerman, of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service in Atlanta. (Reuters Health)
LONDON - A doctor whose claims of links between vaccination and autism triggered a scientific storm before being widely discredited was struck off Britain's medical register
on Monday for professional misconduct.
Dr Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study led many parents to refuse to have their children vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot and has been blamed for a big rise
in measles cases in the United States and parts of Europe in recent years.
A disciplinary panel of the General Medical Council (GMC) found that Wakefield had acted in a "dishonest", "misleading" and "irresponsible" way
during his research.
The ruling means Wakefield, who now lives and works in the United States, can no longer practise as a doctor in Britain, but can continue to work in medicine outside the UK.
His paper, published in The Lancet medical journal but since widely discredited, caused one of the biggest medical rows in a generation.
"The panel has determined that Dr Wakefield's name should be erased from the medical register," the GMC said in a statement.
Wakefield had failed to disclose various details about the funding of the study - a failure the GMC described as "dishonest and misleading" - and had acted
"contrary to the clinical interests" of the children involved in his research.
Striking Wakefield off the medical register was "the only sanction that is appropriate to protect patients" and was in the wider public interest. It was also
"proportionate to the serious and wide-ranging findings made against him", the statement said.
Data released last February for England and Wales showed a rise in measles cases of more than 70 percent in 2008 from the previous year, mostly due to a fall in the number of
children being vaccinated. Vaccination rates are now recovering.
Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the false suggestion of a link between autism and the MMR vaccine had caused
"untold damage" to vaccination programmes. (Reuters)
DALIAN, China, May 24 -- Researchers in China suggest reducing the niacin added to many fortified foods may help prevent obesity.
The researchers at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Medical College, Dalian University in China looked at oral glucose tolerance tests with and without nicotinamide --
a water-soluble vitamin and part of the vitamin B group -- in the same five healthy subjects.
The researchers linked eating the foods with increased niacin to increased early phase insulin resistance and late phase hypoglycemia, which, in turn seemed to contribute to
oxidative stress and increased appetite.
The study, published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology, used lag-regression analysis to find the increase in obesity in U.S. children and teenagers paralleled the
increase in the per capita niacin consumption with a 10-year lag.
The researchers suggest niacin fortification in ready-to-eat cereals and other grain products may play a role in obesity and recommend long-term safety of niacin fortification
be carefully evaluated. (UPI)
Could help scientists track paleoclimate, determine whether dinosaurs and other species were warm- or cold-blooded
PASADENA, Calif.— Was Tyrannosaurus rex cold-blooded? Did birds regulate their body temperatures before or after they began to grow feathers? Why would evolution favor
warm-bloodedness when it has such a high energy cost?
Questions like these—about when, why, and how vertebrates stopped relying on external factors to regulate their body temperatures and began heating themselves
internally—have long intrigued scientists.
Now, a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has taken a critical step toward providing some answers. (California Institute of Technology)
Jeremy Irons is a very suitable standard-bearer for eternal misanthropes: his particular talent on film is to exude moroseness from every pore
Why can't actors stick to acting? They do it so well. That's why we admire and sometimes even worship them – which is when the trouble starts. The subject of that
hero-worship starts to believe that he (or she) can use that fame to save the world. The latest victim of this thespian folie de grandeur is Jeremy Irons. In last weekend's
Sunday Times he launched himself as a "green campaigner", telling the newspaper that he will be making a documentary about "sustainability" in the style of
Michael Moore, but, he insists, "not as silly".
Unfortunately, silly is what Irons goes on to reveal himself to be, although in a manner endorsed by many less famous people; he duly trots out the trite and tired old theme
that "there are just too many of us" and that something must be done about "the hugely-growing population worldwide". In fact, Irons asserts that if we do
nothing about it, nature will take care of it anyway: "I suspect there'll be a very big outbreak of something. I hope it will be a disease, not war."
Memo to Irons: please try to find out what's really happening in the world before deciding to "do something about it". To this end, he could do no better than buy a
copy of Peoplequake, by Fred Pearce. Published earlier this year by Eden Project Books, it tackles the poisonous myth of overpopulation from the perspective of a man who has
reported on the issues of the environment and development from 60 countries over the past 20 years.
You don't need Pearce to point out – although he does it very well – how the population of the developed world is in dramatic decline. Thirty years ago, 23 European
countries had fertility rates above replacement levels; now, none do. If you use exactly the kind of straight-line extrapolations always favoured by the population-explosion
scaremongers, as Pearce points out: "Italy will lose 86 per cent of its population by the end of the century, Spain will lose 85 per cent, Germany 83 per cent and Greece
74 per cent."
Irons told the Sunday Times that we in the developed nations would need to set up a "ring-fence and keep everybody out" from an increasingly "starving"
world "who will want to come to us". The opposite is the case: the European economy and public services will find it increasingly necessary to import the labour (and
talent) that its own plunging fertility rates will have denied it. (The Independent)
Environmental campaigners are fighting to ban the release of synthetic life forms into the wild.
Craig Venter, a multi-millionaire geneticist, last week announced that he had made a living cell from artificial chromosomes, paving the way for the creation of more complex
synthetic organisms.
Now a Canadian environmental group aims to ensure the new life forms are never released into nature, where it is feared they could prove a threat to the survival of other
species.
The Etc Group has already laid claim to a degree of success after helping to come up with a "de facto moratorium" on synthetic biology at the UN Convention on
Biological Diversity in Nairobi, Kenya.
The proposals, designed by the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, could prevent any experiments where the synthetic creations are released into
nature, the Etc Group said. (TDT)
NEW YORK - Consumers who opt for organic foods often believe they are improving their health, but there is currently no strong evidence that organics bring nutrition-related
health benefits, a new research review finds.
A "disappointingly small" number of well-designed studies have looked at whether organic foods may have health benefits beyond their conventional counterparts',
according to the review, by researchers with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health in the UK.
Moreover, they found, what studies have been done have largely focused on short-term effects of organic eating -- mainly antioxidant activity in the body -- rather than
longer-term health outcomes. And most of the antioxidant studies failed to find differences between organic and conventional diets.
The review, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, adds to findings reported last year by the same research team.
In that study, the researchers combed through 162 articles published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, and found no evidence that organic and conventional
foods differ significantly in their nutrient content.
For the current review, the researchers were able to find only 12 published studies that met their criteria for evaluating the health effects of organic foods.
"A surprising and important finding of this review is the extremely limited nature of the evidence base on this subject, both in terms of the number and quality of
studies," write Dr. Alan D. Dangour and his colleagues. (Reuters Health)
President Barack Obama recently delivered another speech about his jobs agenda. He said government can “create the conditions for small businesses to grow and thrive and hire
more workers.” His administration, he said, is working to “knock down the barriers that prevent small-business owners from getting loans or investing in the future.”
With all due respect, it’s hard to take his words seriously.
Instead of knocking down bureaucratic barriers, this administration has thrown up more walls. The president has devoted his first 16 months in office to passing legislation
that creates more red tape and makes it harder for businesses to create new jobs.
If this is help, Americans don’t want it. They just want Washington to get out of the way.
Since the beginning of his administration, this president has promoted legislation that’s either wasteful (see stimulus), ineffective (see stimulus) or dangerous (see health
care and cap and trade).
Fortunately, members of the Senate from both sides of the aisle believe that Obama’s cap-and-trade bill should not become law. The American people have made it clear that
they do not support legislation that will increase their energy bills and kill more jobs in our country.
Unfortunately, the president and members of his administration have tuned out the American people. They’ve decided that Washington knows best. Since Congress isn’t likely
to pass cap and trade, the administration is now planning to implement it by enacting more regulations.
The Environmental Protection Agency is now attempting to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide. The Clean Air Act was originally written to regulate traditional air
pollutants — not something ever present in the air.
As now written, the Clean Air Act requires that any sources that emit more than 250 tons of carbon dioxide a year capture the emissions. The threshold is so low that not only
would power plants and refineries be required to capture but also farms, rural schools and hospitals. (Politico)
Whatever prospects lie ahead for cap and trade legislation moving through the Senate might not matter if the Environmental Protection Agency continues forward on its path to
regulate carbon dioxide. The EPA’s endangerment finding, which took place earlier this year, gives the agency the authority to use Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases
(GHGs). New restrictions on automobiles were the first step in what could eventually be a long, economically painful set of regulations imposed by unelected government
bureaucrats – unless Congress steps up to the plate and stops them.
Lisa Murkowski’s (R–AK) resolution of disapproval would do just that. As Heritage Senior Policy Analyst Ben Lieberman explains,
“In order to provide a means of stopping unwarranted or ill-advised regulations, Congress and President Clinton enacted the Congressional Review Act in 1996. The statute
allows Congress to pass, by simple majority and with limited debate time, a resolution of disapproval against any newly promulgated federal regulation it opposes, thus revoking
the regulation. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate application of the Congressional Review Act than a disapproval against the EPA’s attempt to regulate energy use in
the name of addressing global warming.”
To restore the constitutional separation of powers and democratic accountability, Congress must overturn EPA‘s endangerment finding. S. J. Res. 26, a resolution of
disapproval, introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), provides an appropriate vehicle to accomplish that.
Pension funds must shift more capital into low-carbon energy to drive long-term returns, British academic Nicholas Stern told Reuters Global Energy Summit, adding that a
cold U.S. and European winter had sapped urgency on global warming. (Reuters)
Pension funds need to go for real returns, not attempt to farm subsidies paid by ... pensioners, among others.
Top climate-change expert Mike Hulme tells spiked it is a scandal that scientific claims are increasingly usurping politics and morality.
‘To say that the science demands a certain policy response to climate change is just a wrong reading of the relationship between science and policy.’
Mike Hulme, professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, is a passionate advocate of science. Yet, as he tells spiked,
when it comes to climate change, too many people expect too much of science. Physics and ethics seem to have become conflated in the climate change debate. We see politicians
expecting science to determine policy; we see environmental campaigners, armed with peer-reviewed papers, expecting it to win all the arguments; and, in turn, we see so-called
sceptics expecting their science to refute the green vision of society. But for Hulme, author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, science cannot, and should not, be
expected to do these things. It is no substitute, he argues, for politics or for moral judgements.
‘The phraseology that I object to – because it’s inappropriate – is “the science demands this” and “the science demands that”, as though the making of climate
policy, or policy in general in fact, is a simple process of translating scientific evidence or scientific knowledge claims directly into policy. In no area of policy is that
the case – least of all in climate change, where the making of policy has to bring in a much wider range of pieces of evidence and also political and ethical
considerations.’ (Tim Black, spiked)
At first, Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph" didn't like
being mocked in a YouTube video. Now Mann is alleging he's a victim of hate groups.
On ABC's May 23 "World News Sunday," a segment from anchor Dan
Harris alleged that threatening e-mails Mann received were part of a "spike" in violence aimed at the global warming alarmist community.
"The ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf is keeping the debate over climate and energy very much in the headlines and that debate is becoming increasingly venomous
with many prominent scientists now saying that they are being severely harassed," Harris said.
"The FBI tells ABC News it's looking into a spike in threatening e-mails to climate scientists like Penn State's Michael Mann," Harris said.
And Mann, who has a lawsuit against Minnesotans for Climate Change, a group that publicly mocked him for his discredited hockey stick graph, where he allegedly intentionally
hid data to accentuate the argument of global warming alarmism, complained that the e-mailers
are trying to trample his free speech rights. (NewsBusters)
For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could
become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when
the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.
Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before
combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.
Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of
compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if
they ever were.
When the Union’s president, Laura Winwood, announced the result in the Victorian-Gothich Gladstone Room, three peers cheered with the undergraduates, and one peer drowned his
sorrows in beer. (SPPI)
Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley pulled an enormous calculator out of the inside pocket of his finely tailored English suit, pointed to a formula in the paper he
was holding, punched some buttons, and explained, showing me the calculator results, that if we shut down the entire world’s economy for 25 years, the maximum possible impact
on global temperatures would be 1 degree centigrade.
That’s what passed for light banter at the Heartland Institute’s 4th Annual Conference on Climate Change, which I had the good fortune to attend for three days last week,
meeting a pantheon of climate “skeptic” heroes including Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, Steve McIntyre and Roy Spencer, just to name a few of the dozens of
speakers hailing from two dozen nations.
Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, set the tone the first night while addressing the meeting’s roughly 800 attendees. Bast quoted a scientist—and I use that term very
loosely—from the University of East Anglia, home of the Climategate scandal, who actually wrote in a recently published book: “We need to ask not what we can do for climate
change, but what climate change can do for us.” Rarely has there been a more public statement of the mindset of global warmists. (Ross Kaminsky, Human Events)
LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has
not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined
targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in
recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41
percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate
Change Gallery as had previously been planned. (NYT)
No mystery guys -- baseless fears can only be maintained for so long before people begin to notice the promised apocalypse failed to materialize.
One of the grandest of all catastrophes predicted by climate alarmists to occur as a result of CO2-induced global warming is that many plant and animal species will not be
able to migrate poleward in latitude or upward in altitude fast enough to remain within the temperature regimes suitable for their continued existence, and, therefore, many of
them will likely be driven to extinction.
Andrew Wakefield claimed the vaccine could cause autism, a claim that led to panicked parents opting not to vaccinate their children, which in turn led to needless
deaths.
Wakefield could not have caused the huge scare single-handed. He needed the help of compliant sections of the media which like to alarm their readers. And I think that
those journalists who did so much to spread the scare should ask themselves serious questions about the extent to which they properly examined the facts or were
simply swept along by the general hysteria and by their desire to relate a sensational story.
Eventually the medical journal Lancet retracted
the original paper, but that won’t bring dead kids back or soothe the souls of parents that failed to vaccinate their children.
Andrew Wakefield lost his job, his career and his credibility as punishment for his central role in the MMR scare. In the global warming arena, Michael Mann is being investigated
for fraud for his debunked
hockey stick graph, a central element in the junk science of the global warming hoax.
Other warmist scientists are bleating about being held accountable for their words. As Dr
Wakefield has discovered, people don’t like being taken for fools and the consequences of unethical, dishonest science are far more real than his manufactured conclusions
ever were. (Daily Bayonet)
BACK in 1993, a boy playing football near Nanjing, China, suddenly fell through the ground. He had inadvertently found a new cave, later named Hulu, which has turned out to
be a scientific treasure chest. Besides two Homo erectus skeletons, it contains stalagmites that have helped solve one of the greatest mysteries in climate science: why the ice
ages came and went when they did.
For more than 2 million years, Earth's climate has been oscillating wildly. Immense ice sheets slowly advance across northern lands, then suddenly melt away to leave the planet
basking in a relatively brief period of warmth before the ice creeps back again. Climate scientists have long suspected that these glacial cycles are triggered by changes in
our planet's orbit. Yet while this theory has had many successes, it fails to explain one critical fact: why the ice ages end every 100,000 years or so. "It's a big
problem," says Larry Edwards of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Edwards is part of a group of researchers who may finally have the answer, thanks to Hulu and other nearby caves. If their conclusions are right, then the greatest ice sheets
of the past were remarkably vulnerable, melting away when there was just a glimmer of extra sunlight. But what have stalagmites in China got to do with the vast ice sheets that
covered much of Europe and Siberia, and North America? ( Stephen Battersby, New Scientist)
Since CO2 increase does not precede warming and rising ocean levels it simply can not be causal (maybe they're dyslexic and confuse the order of
cause and effect?). Try to remember fellas: if something is precedent it might be causal but if it is subsequent it can not be causal.
According to climate-alarmist theory, as the air’s CO2 content rises in response to ever-increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and as more and more carbon dioxide
therefore dissolves in the surface waters of the world’s oceans, the pH values of the planet’s oceanic waters should be gradually dropping.
As readers of my weblog know, there are a set of posts giving e-mails among Kevin Trenberth, Josh Willis and I, and blog posts by Roy Spencer, on the
issue of “missing heat” in the climate system. These posts can be viewed at
There is now a new contribution by Kevin on Nature (it is actually not new in one sense, since Kevin (and J. Fasullo) recently posted a commentary on the same
subject at Science magazine. Nature soliciting the same person (no matter how qualified) to write a comment is not expanding our perspective on this issue
(Roy Spencer, for example, would have been a good choice as he has a different viewpoint than Kevin expressed in his Science comment). (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what
alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced videoconferencing — can cut back the amount we fly? (Elisabeth Rosenthal, e360)
In March, Cato published my review of every rail transit system in America (as of 2008),
showing that in nearly every case buses would have been more cost-effective at moving people. This same view was expressed
last week by a surprising source: Peter Rogoff, the Obama administration’s appointee in
charge of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).
Appropriately, Rogoff spoke before the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, whose transit system, he pointed out, is in a “grim” state. Nationwide, he noted, America’s
transit industry suffers from $78 billion worth of deferred maintenance — most of which is due to rail transit lines that cities cannot afford to keep in shape. Rogoff was
disturbed that cities were asking for federal grants to build more rail lines when they can’t keep the existing trains in a state of good repair.
Rogoff says he has been telling transit managers, “if you can’t afford to operate the system you have, why does it make sense for us to partner in your expansion?”
Cities that build “shiny new rails now . . . need to be mindful of the costs they are teeing up for future generations.”
“Let’s start with honesty,” he said: “Paint is cheap, rails systems are extremely expensive.” He suggested that, instead of expensive trains, many cities can
attract just as many riders onto transit by painting buses on specific routes in distinctive colors (as Boulder,
CO has done).
Part of the problem, Rogoff knows, is that Congress has given cities incentives to build high-cost transit projects. To address this issue, the last transportation bill, in
2005, included a section requiring the Federal Transit Administration to evaluate the incentives created by federal funding.
Unfortunately, the FTA dropped the ball: the resulting report said nothing about existing incentives and addressed
only the question of whether new incentives could be created to encourage agencies to bring their properties up to a state of good repair. While that is a laudable goal, it is
an input, not an output.
According to historic data published by the American
Public Transportation Association, the productivity of public transit — outputs per unit of input — has declined dramatically since the federal government began funding
transit in 1964. From 1964 through 2008, the inflation-adjusted cost of operating transit increased by more than 360 percent, while transit ridership grew by a mere 24 percent
and fares by 62 percent.
Ultimately, transit should be privatized, but in the meantime Congress or the administration can adopt a race-to-the-top program similar to the one the administration is
using to improve education. Rogoff should direct his agency to rewrite its incentive report before Congress takes up
transportation again in 2011. (Cato at liberty)
The planned discount on new electric cars could become a casualty of the government's cost-cutting drive
The £5,000 discount on all new electric cars, which had been due to be introduced next year, could be scrapped as part of the government's cost-cutting drive, the Guardian has
learned.
The Department for Business has told car industry executives the planned offer was being reviewed. Scrapping the discount would be a set back for the electric car market, which
accounts for 1% of the 26m cars on British roads. The industry has already begun marketing its new electric models on the basis that the offer would remain in place. Last month
Nissan announced that its Leaf, a 100% electric five-seater, would go on sale next year for £23,350 – including the £5,000 discount.
Kieren Puffett from Parkers, the used car guide, said that even at that price only the most environmentally conscious motorists would buy it.
The £5,000 discount – along with financial support promised to Vauxhall, Ford and Nissan by the previous government this year – is being reviewed and a decision is
expected in "weeks not months". (The Guardian)
Faced with mounting criticism of its handling of the clean-up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP pledged today to set aside up to $500 million to fund a ten-year
research programme into the environmental impact of the disaster.
Tony Hayward, the chief executive, said: “BP has made a commitment to doing everything we can to lessen the impact of this tragic incident on the people and environment of
the Gulf Coast ... There is an urgent need to ensure that the scientific community has access to the samples and the raw data it needs to begin this work.”
The oil group’s move came hours after it admitted that the amount of oil it was siphoning off from its ruptured well in the Gulf was far less than earlier and less than half
the total amount leaking each day. (The Times)
Fury over the handling of the BP oil disaster intensified yesterday as state officials challenged federal authorities, accusing them of bureaucratic fumbling and betrayal as
the slick took over 65 miles of Louisiana coastline.
Even as the oil company continued to empty toxic dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico — defying an order by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop, and using data
protection regulations to keep details of its content secret — those fighting the spill complained that they were being made to seek formal permission for their efforts,
resulting in critical delays.
Millions of feet of protective boom requested weeks ago have not arrived. Fishing boats commissioned by BP to help to set up defences remain idle, prompting parish officials in
Louisiana to commandeer 30.
In the absence of a long-awaited permit from the US Army Corps of Engineers to start creating offshore sand barriers, the mayor of one city said he had even contemplated
resorting to piracy. (The Times)
Jean-Michel Cousteau, one of the world’s leading ocean explorers, has spoken of his “frustration at the human species” over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and called
for it to become a catalyst for political, industrial and environmental change. (The Times)
WASHINGTON — In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental
waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to
records.
The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at
least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf
of Mexico.
Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.
Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for
new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.
But critics say the moratorium has been violated or too narrowly defined to prevent another disaster. (NYT)
When considering the global energy sector, one of the most difficult tasks is understanding the gargantuan scale of our energy consumption. [Read
More] (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)
Statoil, 67 percent held by the Norwegian state, is one of the world's largest oil and gas producers and the world's second largest natural gas exporter behind Russian giant
Gazprom.
A Statoil gas processing plant in Kaarstoe, Norway. Statoil, 67 percent held by the Norwegian state, is one of the world's largest oil and gas producers and the world's second
largest natural gas exporter behind Russian giant Gazprom.
A Norwegian flag waving in front a Statoil prototype floating wind turbine. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy demand will be 40 percent higher
in 2030 than in 2007, while electricity demand will grow 76 percent, with natural gas up 42 percent.
A Statoil gas processing plant in Kaarstoe, Norway. The main problems for wind, solar and other renewables in replacing oil is that they involve massive investment and it is
unclear if in practice they will ever be capable of supplying reliable energy on a large scale.
AFP - As Norway prepares for the day its massive oil reserves run out, industry players say natural gas is the best replacement, freely available and more efficient than
renewables and less controversial than nuclear.
"It's a battle between idealists and realists and it will not be an easy discussion. But gas will be part of the solution," said Brian Bjordal, who heads up Norwegian
gas transport company Gassco.
Rune Bjoernson, who leads the natural gas unit at Norwegian energy group Statoil, agrees.
Natural gas is "competitive on price, predictable when it comes to costs, ... it has a very low carbon footprint (and) reserves are huge," he told AFP.
Statoil, 67 percent held by the Norwegian state, is one of the world's largest oil and gas producers and the world's second largest natural gas exporter behind Russian giant
Gazprom.
"We have enough reserves to cover 250 years of global consumption," Bjoernson boasted. (AFP)
THE government has been flayed for undermining confidence in the resources sector, but an early version of its energy policy advocates doing everything possible to ensure
Australia remains an attractive destination for investment.
A draft of a section of the government's energy green paper, obtained by the Herald, also criticises foreign governments that invest directly in oil companies, claiming the
trend would undermine the development of free markets and harm Australia's long-term economic strength.
The green paper was to have been released late last year, but has been delayed by the government, which claims it needed to be informed by the prospect of an emissions trading
scheme and the Henry review's recommendations.
But a draft paper circulated by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism to state governments in October makes clear the government is banking on a huge expansion of the
energy industry, so that ''Australia reaps the rewards of increasing long-term world demand for energy''. (SMH)
[Editor's note: This is the second part in a four-part series on two new studies examining the negation of windpower emissions savings from fossil-fuel firming. The
Netherlands study below, which is found to be consistent to Mr. Hawkins's calculator approach, indicates a total negation of emissions savings from
fossil-fuel fill-in.]
Windpower has traditionally been considered a substitute for carbon-based energy and thus a strategy for reducing related emissions, including that of carbon dioxide
(CO2). However, reality is more complicated. Either natural gas-fired or coal-fired power must rescue wind from its intermittency problem, a role that creates incremental
fuel usage and emissions compared to a situation where the conventional capacity could operate on a steadier basis.
Previous studies have highlighted this unsettling tradeoff for proponents of windpower. And a new study by C. le
Pair and K. de Groot based on actual experience in the Netherlands finds:
The use of wind energy for electricity generation in combination with the requirement for fossil fuel powered stations to compensate for wind
fluctuations can easily lead to loss of the expected saving in fuel use and CO2 emission. In addition, the conventional stations will be subject to accelerated wear and tear.
It is recommended to get an accurate and quantitative insight into these extra effects before society
sets out to apply wind energy on a large scale. All producers must be required to publish data on the efficiency effects and fuel use when wind energy is added on.
This post reviews their study and compares its results with that produced by my fossil fuel and CO2 emissionscalculator,
both of which show how quickly any claimed saving from wind can become negative given the reality of fossil-fuel backup to firm-up intermittent power. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Entergy Corp Chief Executive J. Wayne Leonard said on Monday that building new nuclear plants remains too costly and will prevent many utilities from participating in the
fledgling nuclear renaissance in the United States.
"Utilities do not want to take that risk," Leonard said at the Reuters Global Energy Summit in Houston. "It's risk we don't control."
New Orleans-based Entergy suspended two license applications filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for proposed new reactors to be built either in Louisiana or
Mississippi in 2008 after being unable to negotiate a favorable construction contract.
While a few U.S. companies are moving ahead to develop new reactors, Leonard said that to make the economics of nuclear work for Entergy, he would need to see
"double-digit natural gas prices and carbon blow-out prices" starting at $25 per ton and escalating toward $50.
Congress has been debating legislation that would set a price on carbon emitted into the atmosphere. (Reuters)
If you've ever wondered how a chemical that earned the 1948 Nobel Prize could get blacklisted two decades later, you have to read The Excellent Powder: DDT's Political
and Scientific History. Authors Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, of the group Africa Fighting Malaria, have done a superb job,
and have somehow made the book suitable for the techie and layperson alike.
You'll read about the incredible junk science put forth by St. Rachel Carson, and the shameless posturing against this compound by elite journals such as Science.
Meanwhile, millions of Africans were dying, but according to evil hacks like Paul Ehrlich, that was just fine.
If banning DDT is what founded the modern environmental movement, then it was founded on a gigantic lie. Read my book
review in Health News Digest.
In anticipation of the e-mails: She is "Saint" Rachel since even though most Greens with a science background now acknowledge that her anti-DDT screed was complete
nonsense, she has attained such iconic status that it doesn't matter. Yes, yes, I realize that the use of "Saint" is theologically incorrect, as all canonizations are
infallible and go through an extensive vetting process, which our secular Saint Rachel did not—until it was too late. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
The White House knows its signature health care legislation is still deeply unpopular with the American people,
which is why it has been desperate to speed up implementation as much as legally possible. But many of the
law’s new costs and limitations are still scheduled to kick into effect years down the line, when Congress hopes voters aren’t paying attention anymore.
Think you can keep your current plan? Think seniors and the disadvantaged will get a fair shot at the care they want and need? Watch and find out. For more
information on the side effects of Obamacare, visit the Side Effects blog. (The Foundry)
Remember how Obamacare was going to save big bucks and reduce wait time in emergency rooms? The idea was that millions of previously uninsured Americans accustomed to using
ERs for basic medical treatment would snatch up Obamacare coverage and start getting primary care from regular (and cheaper) medical practices.
Nice thought. But it doesn’t look like it’ll pan out.
Indeed, notes Rick Dallam, it looks like “it’s going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years.” In an article in The
Hill, Dallam, a health care partner at a firm that designs health care facilities, notes: “We don’t have the primary care infrastructure in place in America to cover
the need. Our clients are looking at and preparing for more emergency department volume, not less.” Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
PARIS — Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro
has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.
Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting
it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.
Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety
net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.
But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.
With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant
changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.
“We’re now in rescue mode,” said Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister. “But we need to transition to the reform mode very soon. The ‘reform deficit’ is the real
problem,” he said, pointing to the need for structural change.
The reaction so far to government efforts to cut spending has been pessimism and anger, with an understanding that the current system is unsustainable. (NYT)
“The Europe that protects”? They've been freeloading on American defense since WWII and using America's comparative austerity and productivity
to fund vote buying and pampering of their unproductive socialist fantasy -- now the chooks are coming home to roost, Socialism simply does not and can not work. The only way
it can do so is by having an enslaved population supporting a tiny all-powerful dictatorial elite in exactly the same way as social insects do (fine if you are royal bees or
ants but a really crappy life for the masses of workers -- and this is the model for the "workers paradise"...). The only way workers can hope for lifestyle
improvements and comfortable retirement is in a free-market capitalist system.
LONDON, May 21 - Rotavirus vaccines made by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck & Co are safe to use despite being contaminated with a pig virus, Europe's drugs watchdog said on
Friday.
The decision echoes a similar ruling from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week.
Glaxo's Rotarix and Merck's Rotateq, which is sold in Europe via a joint venture with Sanofi-Aventis, target rotavirus, which can cause fatal diarrhoea. DNA from porcine
circovirus (PCV) had been found in both vaccines.
The European Medicines Agency said there was no evidence that the PCV in the oral vaccines presented a risk to public health, noting PCV was not known to cause disease in
humans.
The agency said it was awaiting further information from the manufacturers on steps being taken to rid their vaccines of PCV and would consider the need for further
recommendations in its meeting in July, as further data emerge. (Reuters)
LONDON, May 21 - People using cholesterol-lowering statins have a higher risks of liver dysfunction, kidney failure, muscle weakness and cataracts and such side effects of
the drug should be closely tracked, doctors said on Friday.
In a study covering more than 2 million people in Britain, researchers from Nottingham University found that adverse side effects of statins, which are prescribed to people
with high levels cholesterol to cut the risk of heart disease, were generally worst in the first year of treatment.
The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, are unlikely to affect the use of best-selling medicines like Pfizer's Lipitor and AstraZeneca's Crestor, but the
study's authors said patients taking statins should be "proactively monitored" for side effects. (Reuters)
I'm still waiting for anything remotely resembling compelling evidence cholesterol levels are important drivers of disease or that statins are really
beneficial.
The scientific consensus is that devices that emit electromagnetic radiation have little effect on the body.
Most children would remember being told that sitting too close to the television would give them square eyes.
Despite this comical myth there have been genuine concerns from scientists and the public about the effect various devices can have on people's health.
A common concern of the past decade has been the effect things such as mobile phones, microwave ovens, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth devices and baby monitors, which emit electromagnetic
radiation, could have on the body.
Yet the executive director of the Australian Centre for Radio Frequency Bioeffects Research, Rodney Croft, said that despite decades of research, there was little evidence to
suggest that technology that emits electromagnetic (EM) radiation had a negative affect on the body.
In a study reviewing the average level of electromagnetic radiation given off by various electronic devices, Croft found faulty microwaves emitted the most EM radiation.
But these emissions were only about 10 per cent of the daily limit that was considered safe by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, a government
organisation which sets the standards on EM radiation, he said.
''All of these technologies used EM radiation and if there was a notable health impact of one device, it would be relevant to all of them,'' he said. (SMH)
WASHINGTON, May 20 - Older women with early stage breast cancer can safely skip radiation therapy and go straight to taking pills that help keep tumors from coming back,
researchers reported on Thursday.
They said the finding, to be presented next month to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, may save many women and their doctors a lot of trouble, not to
mention the costs of radiation.
"This study confirms that for older women with early stage breast cancer, lumpectomy without radiation is a viable alternative, and tamoxifen may replace the need for
radiation," said Dr. Kevin Hughes of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study.
Hughes and colleagues now have 12 years of data on 636 women aged 70 or older who had stage I breast cancer, the easy-to-cure type that has not spread and that is so-called
estrogen receptor-positive. (Reuters)
More than 20 percent of untreated water samples from 932 public wells across the nation contained at least one contaminant at levels of potential health concern, according
to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.
About 105 million people — or more than one-third of the nation’s population — receive their drinking water from one of the 140,000 public water systems across the United
States that rely on groundwater pumped from public wells
The USGS study focused primarily on source (untreated) water collected from public wells before treatment or blending rather than the finished (treated) drinking water that
water utilities deliver to their customers.
“By focusing primarily on source-water quality, and by testing for many contaminants that are not regulated in drinking water, this USGS study complements the extensive
monitoring of public water systems that is routinely conducted for regulatory and compliance purposes by federal, state and local drinking-water programs,” said Matthew C.
Larsen, USAGES Associate Director for Water. “Findings assist water utility managers and regulators in making decisions about future monitoring needs and drinking-water
issues.” (USGS)
WASHINGTON — Thirsty for new sources of cash, health-conscious lawmakers in cities and states across the country are reaching for the refrigerator, proposing taxes on
sports drinks, teas and soda.
Politicians say the taxes will help curb rates of obesity and diabetes and can pay for health programs. But retailers and the beverage industry say the taxes are unpopular,
unfair and simply won't work.
Last year, federal lawmakers dropped a proposal to use a penny per ounce drink tax — an extra $1.44 for a 12-pack of soda — to help pay for health care reform legislation.
In the year since, however, lawmakers in more than a dozen states and a handful of cities have become the new cola crusaders, proposing similar taxes either to plug budget gaps
or fund new programs. (AP)
Beverage Makers Step Up Campaigns Against Levy as Cities, States Weigh Idea
Makers and sellers of soda and other sweet drinks have intensified a fight against proposed taxes on their products, as a growing number of cities and states are weighing the
measures to help fill depleted coffers. (WSJ)
There are too many humans and disease may restore the balance, the actor claims
The world is becoming so overpopulated that nature will one day wreak its revenge, claims Jeremy Irons, the actor.
Launching himself as a green campaigner, Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to Michael Moore, the
controversial film maker, although “not as silly”.
The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources, Irons said, and the gulf between developing countries and westerners living a
bountiful “pie-in-the-sky” existence must be addressed.
“One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable,” he said in an interview with The Sunday
Times. “I think we have to find ways where we’re not having to scrap our effluent junk and are a really sustainable planet.”
Natural systems of selfregulation may stop population growth, he said: “I suspect there’ll be a very big outbreak of something because the world always takes care of
itself.”
The 61-year-old actor went on to speculate that either disease or war, “probably disease”, could become nature’s way of halving the population. (Sunday Times)
The European Union is bogged down in a power struggle over who speaks for the bloc at international meetings, threatening action on environmental issues from mercury
pollution to whaling, EU officials say.
The discord has emerged since the 27-country bloc adopted its new Lisbon Treaty late last year, which sowed confusion by empowering a new European Council president and foreign
policy chief.
"We're in a bit of a mess," one senior EU official said on Friday. "We're still feeling our way forward." (Reuters)
Fewer children are dying around the world, with deaths among children under 5 falling in almost every country, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.
Using a new method of calculating mortality that they say is more complete and accurate than previous methods, the team at the University of Washington says the number of
deaths of children under 5 has plummeted from 11.9 million in 1990 to 7.7 million in 2010.
The findings are similar to a September report by the United Nation's children's fund that showed better malaria prevention and using drugs to protect newborns of AIDS-infected
mothers lowered mortality from 12.5 million under-five deaths in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2008.
But the new estimates suggest that 800,000 fewer young children died than UNICEF estimates.
"Previous estimates had shown child deaths falling slowly and neonatal deaths nearly at a standstill," Julie Knoll Rajaratnam, who led the study, said in a statement.
"We were able to double the amount of data and improve the accuracy of our estimates to find that children are doing better today than at any time in recent history,
especially in the first month of life."
Globally, the team says 3.1 million newborns died in the past year, 2.3 million infants and 2.3 million children aged 1 year to 4. (Reuters)
Recently, I reported here on the environmentalists’ trumped-up
scare campaign targeting atrazine, a valuable, widely used agricultural herbicide. I quoted a Wall
Street Journal editorial that observed, “The environmental lobby also figures that if it can take down atrazine with its long record of clean health, it can get the
EPA to prohibit anything.”
In fact, the attack on atrazine is just part of the total war against man-made chemicals that is waged today by environmentalists inside and outside of government.
On May 6, the President’s Cancer Panel fired the latest salvo in this battle, in the form of its annual report, Reducing
Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now. The report follows in the scare-mongering tradition established by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a major green
lobby. As I noted earlier, the NRDC’s 1989 pesticide report—citing bogus rodent experiments—fomented a nationwide panic over the chemical alar, abetted by media
sympathizers. Last year, the group issued a similar faux “study” to gin up alarm over atrazine.
The presidential panel’s report similarly relies on “junk science” to reach alarmist conclusions, and was pre-released to reliably green journalists to maximize its
visibility. Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times was one. In “New Alarm Bells
About Chemicals and Cancer,” Kristof proclaimed that “the mission control of scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel” was “poised to join
ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.” Reuters likewise reported the story under the scary title, “Americans
‘Bombarded’ with Cancer Sources: Report.”
Yet, jarringly, the first sentence in the report’s cover letter to President Obama begins: “Though overall cancer incidence and mortality have continued to decline in
recent years . . .”
How to reconcile this admission with the report’s frightening thesis: that the “American people—even before they are born—are being bombarded continually with myriad
combinations of these dangerous exposures”? If cancer-causing chemicals are widespread and increasing, why do overall cancer rates and deaths continue
to fall?
To its credit, the New York Times highlighted strong criticism by the
American Cancer Society leveled against the government report. ACS epidemiologist Dr. Michael Thun blasted the study as “unbalanced by its implication that pollution is
the major cause of cancer,” and for claiming, without proof, that environmentally caused cancer cases are “grossly underestimated.”
In truth, says the ACS, only six percent of all U.S. cancers are related to “environmental causes”—four percent from occupational exposures and just two percent from
all other settings. “Environmental causes” thus represent only a tiny fraction of the overall incidence of U.S. cancers, which are due overwhelmingly to non-environmental
factors—mainly genetics and voluntary lifestyle choices.
“If we could get rid of tobacco, we could get rid of 30 percent of cancer deaths,” Dr. Thun said, adding that poor nutrition, obesity, and lack of exercise contribute
far more to cancer susceptibility than do pollutants.
But that’s not the conclusion the presidential panel wants you to reach. (Big Government)
Beekeepers lost one in six hives last winter due to disease and cold weather, according to the latest statistics.
The losses are much higher than the natural rate of up to 10 per cent and reflect growing concerns that bee numbers are falling in Britain.
However, beekeepers are optimistic that colonies are in better shape than previous years, especially after such a harsh winter.
In 2008/09 one in five hives were lost over the winter and a third died out the year before.
The British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) said it was good news that 80 per cent of honey bee colonies made it through the coldest winter in 31 years. The highest losses of
26 per cent were recorded in the north of England, and lowest losses of 12.8 per cent were recorded in the south west of England. (TDT)
OSLO, May 21 - Scientists are reviving long-ignored African rice to cut dependence on Asian varieties that may be less able to withstand the impact of climate change on the
poorest continent, a report said on Friday.
Historically, scientists have focused on breeding useful traits such as disease resistance from African rice into Asian rice. Now the focus is on the reverse -- using African
rice as the basic crop and improving it with Asian genes. "African rice was initially ignored by mainstream research," said Koichi Futakuchi, a scientist at Africa
Rice Center (AfricaRice) in a statement.
"Now for the first time, we're reversing the gene flow."
Asian and African rice are the only two cultivated species of the crop in the world but the usually higher-yielding Asian type, introduced to Africa by the Portuguese in the
16th century, has become the dominant type to meet surging demand.
Africa imports 40 percent of its rice with import bills estimated at $3.6 billion in 2008.
"With climate change a reality, the work of developing crop varieties adapted to the changing environment is going to keep plant breeders busy for decades,"
AfricaRice said in a study coinciding with U.N. International Biodiversity Day on May 22. (Reuters)
Broadening the stock base is good and yes, climate change is and always has been real but the ridiculous panic over mythical catastrophic enhanced
greenhouse effect (which is what Al and the clown cohort carry on about under the misleading nomenclature of "climate change") must stop -- it simply misdirects
effort and finance.
As if it's not bad enough for them with pollution, fishing by dynamiting, global warming and ocean acidification, the world's coral reefs face a new threat – from noise.
Scientists have discovered that baby corals, in their first days as free-swimming larvae in the ocean, find their way home by listening to the noise of animals on the reef, and
actively swimming towards it.
But the findings raise new concerns for the future of coral reefs, as increasing human noise pollution in the world's oceans, from ships' engines to drilling to seismic
exploration, is masking reef sounds. (The Independent)
So, guess we better hunt down all those noisy whales and dolphins then, so coral larvae can hear reef noise easier...
Goods and services from the natural world should be factored into the global economic system, says UN biodiversity report
The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the
United Nations will declare this summer.
The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around
1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.
The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination,
medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them. (The Guardian)
Whales and dolphins should get "human rights" to life and liberty because of mounting evidence of their intelligence, a group of conservationists and experts in
philosophy, law and ethics have argued. (TDT)
As soon as you contemplate bestowing human rights on critters and blurring the distinction of humanity you open the door to treating humans as animals.
What's the criteria for "human"? Intelligence? Oh, so it's OK to put down an idiot child then? Think how we could cleanse society of all kinds of
"burdens" as we euthanize the autistic, Down Syndrome and what, say those with an assessed IQ <100? Critters aren't human and we must never blur that
distinction, if for no other reason than fear of what other people will do under such license.
Human rights must be reserved for humans.
I've opened a forum discussion here -- self-register
for your free account if you haven't already done so and join the discussion if you have an opinion.
Sometime before June 7, the so-called Murkowski resolution to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases will be voted on in the Senate. Democrats up for re-election this fall
may want to think twice about a knee-jerk “no” vote.
Finalized last December but not yet implemented, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases would be even worse economically than cap-and-trade, which is already bad enough. (How bad
is cap-and-trade? So bad that massive Democrat congressional majorities can’t pass it.)
EPA greenhouse gas regulation would empower the agency to control energy use (and, hence, the economy) without any of the potential ameliorative effects from the trade part of
cap-and-trade or the dividend part of Cantwell-Collins’ cap-and-dividend. EPA regulation would just be cap-and-pain.
Some quick-learning Democratic senators, like Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln, and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson have already figured out the politics of EPA
cap-and-pain. They joined Sen. Lisa Murkowski when the resolution was introduced in January.
But senators like Colorado’s Michael Bennett, Nevada’s Harry Reid, and North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan are still dithering hoping that Murkowski will either not bring her
resolution to the floor for a vote or that it will be overtaken by a separate effort by West Virginia’s Jay Rockfeller that would delay EPA regulation for two years.
But Sen. Murkowski seems undeterred in what could be the only Senate vote this year on climate. (Steve Milloy, Daily Caller)
WASHINGTON The University of Virginia indicates it will challenge Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's request for records produced, using taxpayer resources, by former
Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences Michael Mann. This is regrettable. Cuccinelli is following smoke to see if there is fire, prompted by troubling revelations in
leaked documents that raise serious questions about Mann's activities while at the university.
UVa's Faculty Senate has condemned Cuccinelli's request, calling it a serious infringement upon academic freedom and assault on the freedom of scientific inquiry. It joins a
chorus of voices enjoying massive financial support from the taxpayer but who, it seems, believe that this should come without conditions, established by law, which follow the
money.
On its face, their problem is with a 2002 statute that passed both state legislative chambers unanimously, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. It bears no hint of
exempting academics, scientists, or others from its prohibitions or inquiries that attach to the use of appropriated funds. It empowers the attorney general to compel
documents, and testimony about them.
No one claims the law doesn't apply here. With a straight face, scientists and academics instead merely argue against applying it to them. Academic freedom apparently means
taking taxpayer money free from accountability under standards applying to the rest of us. Since when? (Christopher Horner, Richmond Times-Dispatch)
On a coral atoll just a two-hour boat ride from Queensland's Gladstone Harbour, past the endless line of tankers queued to load coal for export, a half-dozen scientists work
frantically against the tide.
Their objective? To explore the consequences of rising atmospheric carbon on the delicate chemistry of the reef and the creatures living there.
The project team, led by Dr David Kline from the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute, is completing tests on a new underwater laboratory that will expose corals
on the Great Barrier Reef to the more acidic conditions forecast for oceans by the end of the century.
The team has spent weeks working around the tides, connecting four chambers built on the reef shelf to a floating platform of 50 instruments that will manage and monitor the
water in them. Fish and currents can move freely through the porous structures, two of which will be dosed with low pH seawater. (SMH)
Figures! Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of course... low pH seawater presumably means acid, which is not a plausible outcome no matter how much carbon dioxide humans
manage to emit (ocean "acidification" actually means slightly reduced alkalinity). What they should do is simply bubble CO2 through some of the chambers
to allow increased solution and reduced alkalinity if they really want to see what could happen under extreme conditions or, they could simply check out what happens around
and downstream from natural sea floor CO2 vents (there are some nice inshore shallow water examples around New Guinea quite adjacent to flourishing coral reef
structures). Really stupid stunt!
SCIENTISTS believe gassy mammoths helped to fill the atmosphere with methane and keep the Earth warm more than 13 thousand years ago.
Experts estimate that, together with other large plant-eating mammals that are now extinct, they released about 9.6 million tonnes of the gas each year.
When the megafauna disappeared there was a dramatic fall in atmospheric methane which may have altered the climate, British scientists say.
Analysis of gases trapped in ice cores suggests that the loss of animal emissions accounted for a large amount of the decline. ( AAP)
And dinosaur farts warmed the Jurassic? This enhanced greenhouse hypothesis is out of control and we have no sound reason to believe it is of any real
significance in Earth's climate.
VAST sheets of ice that threatened to freeze much of the Earth may have been turned back by tiny changes in the level of sunlight, scientists have found.
The finding could be a vital breakthrough in solving one of science’s great mysteries. Researchers have long known the planet has gone through about 20 ice ages in the past
2.5m years. What they have been unable to work out is why each of those ice ages ended. (Sunday Times)
But still persisting with CO2-fascination: "They found that, at the start of that period, volcanic eruptions raised the levels of CO2 in
the air to about 400 parts per million, pushing global temperatures up to several degrees higher than they are now." Uh, fellas... that would require enormous
climate sensitivity to small perturbations in a minor greenhouse gas -- at least 10 °C for a doubling of CO2 to change the glaciated state to "several
degrees" warmer than current temperatures despite our having witnessed a miserable ~5% of that change from an effectively similar change (all changes of atmospheric
greenhouse trace gases converted to CO2-equivalent and summed already yields a figure well north of 400 ppm).
Forget enhanced greenhouse effect, it's really not that big a deal.
Solar scientists are finally overcoming their fears and going public about the Sun-climate connection
Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that
humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at all, saying they feared for their
funding, or they feared other recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to
give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier. Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.
Global Warming Denier Says His Side Gets Threats, Too
Climate scientist Michael Mann says he has received hundreds of them -- threatening e-mails and phone calls calling him a criminal, a communist or worse. (ABC News)
"Global warming denier"... and then it goes on to call Mann a "climate scientist"!
Sadly the flowers have refused to follow the BBC's climate change rules, says Christopher Booker
Last Monday, in its obsession with global warming, the BBC got comically caught out. It devoted a whole hour-long edition of its popular nature programme Springwatch to one of
the more familiar themes of warmist propaganda, the way in which springs have been noticeably moving forwards in recent decades, with flowers, tree leaves and much else
appearing weeks earlier than they used to do.
A familiar instance to any observer of the countryside has been the dramatic advance in flowering times of those three hedgerow indicators, blackthorn, hawthorn and elder.
These used to blossom with unfailing regularity in the closing days of April, May and June, and their recent flowering weeks earlier has undoubtedly been a reflection of a
warming climate. But contradicting any belief that this change in our climate is "irreversible" has been the fact that this year, after the hardest of three cold
winters running, nature's calendar has dramatically reverted to "normal". The blackthorn burst into flower with unusual intensity in late April, may blossom is only
now appearing, as it used to do, in the last 10 days of May.
To all this, Springwatch was oblivious. Dozens of times the presenter Chris Packham babbled on about global warming and even our "moral duty" to fight climate change,
without any sign that he had noticed what is happening in the real world. He tried to alarm us about how the warming of Welsh mountaintops is threatening the extinction of the
Snowdon lily, when, from the BBC's own archives, he could have found film showing how in the last two Aprils, the Snowdon railway has still been closed by feet of snow. (TDT)
CLIMATE scientists have warned that 2010 could turn out to be the warmest year in recorded history.
They have collated global surface temperature measurements showing that the world has experienced near-record highs between January and April.
Researchers working independently at the Met Office and Nasa are soon to publish data that reveal the trend is likely to continue for the rest of the year.
James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), a world centre for climate monitoring, said: “Global temperatures, averaged over the past 12
months, were the warmest for 130 years.
“December to February was also the second-warmest of any such period.”
Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “It was a cold winter in Europe but, globally, January to March was one of the seven warmest starts to the
year on record.
“This year has more than a 50% chance of being the warmest on record.” (Sunday Times)
The El Nino of 2009/10 is over. Temperatures in region NINO34, the key region used for official El Nino assessment are now negative (-0.1C).
The warming peaked in the central tropical Pacific in December / January. Some lingering warmth has been found in the east as cooler water has surfaced in the east central
(below, enlarged here).
LA NINA - SISTER OF THE EL NINO COMING ON
You can see the colder water emerging here in the recent weekly. Also the warmer water is seen mixing out quickly as upwelling of cold water increased in this
animation.
Ocean heat content in the tropical Pacific is shown to dive, similar to what happened in 1998 and 2007. (below, enlarged
here).
The cross section along the equatorial Pacific shows the warm water gone with a large plume of sub-surface water ready to be tapped by upwelling - the onset of La Nina
(below, enlarged here). Note the similarity to May in 1998 and 2007 when El Ninos gave way to La Nina in the
summer/fall (below, enlarged here).
.
Most ENSO models indicate La Nina is likely. All dynamical models show negative anomalies. Some statistical models show La Nada (neutral) conditions (below, enlarged
here).
EL NINOS TRANSITIONING TO LA NINAS TEND TO LEAD TO WARM, DROUGHTY SUMMERS IN CORN BELT AND YET GLOBAL COOLING
These maps are for the Corn Belt. (below, enlarged here and here).
Rapidly falling ENSO indices have led to lowered corn production in 1983, 1988, 1995. 1998 did not see such a decline. Warm water lingered in the eastern TROPAC that year
(below enlarged here).
In 2007, slow movement west of the cold water led to late season issues, affecting mainly beans.
The best analogs suggest a warm summer though cooler than normal and wet conditions in the southern plains (below, enlarged here
and here).
Soil moisture models have been coming around to this thinking (below enlarged here).
WILDCARDS - SOLAR SLUMBER AND VOLCANIC RUMBLINGS
One of the wildcards is the sun, which returned to a quiet state in late April and early May with two extended strings of spotless days and a return of solar flux to solar
minimum levels. We continue to track close to the cycle 5 in the Dalton Minimum 200+ years ago. Unprecedented solar levels and long period of quiet solar may enhance the global
cooling effect as La Nina comes on. Note the rapid global temperature (MSU satellite lower atmospheric temperatures shown) declines in prior La Nina episodes post strong El
Ninos (red arrows) (below, enlarged here). You can also see clearly the effects of volcanic aerosols and El
Nino (warming) and La Nina (cooling).
Note similarity of sunspot activity to cycle 5 at the start of the Dalton Minimum. Cycle 14 a century ago is also shown and has been regarded by some as another possible
analog/ Note the more rapid recovery that cycle. That was also a cold period though not as cold as the Dalton (below, enlarged
here).
Also Eyjafjallajokull continues to erupt. Though most days the ash and aerosols remain below the stratosphere, occasional eruptions are more explosive. Much more dangerous
Katla historically has been triggered by Eyjafjallajokull eruption periods which often last for long periods. A major eruption would change the weather picture globally quickly
by affecting the AO and ash and aerosols could affect crops in Europe. Redoubt and Sarychev affected the hemisphere’s climate last two summers and last winter.
As some of you may know, my recent paper at the Heartland global climate conference has been attacked by Gareth Renowden and posted by Tim
Lambert on his blog.
Although I don't normally even read this kind of garbage, I responded to an inquiry by Andy Revkin with the attached.
Don Easterbrook
"When you are losing an argument on the basis of facts and evidence, the oldest trick in the world is to invent some outrageous lie, the more outrageous the
better, and while people are reacting to the lie, attention is diverted from the real issue. It is a sure sign of desperation in distracting attention from facts and data. The
outrageous charge of fraud made by a self professed "photographer and truffle grower" (Gareth Renowden) is not worthy of response, but because the charge is so easily
refuted, I will do so......"
Please click PDF file to download FULL response to "hides the incline" from Don Easterbrook
Researchers criticised for saying mosquito control is more influential than a warming world in the spread of malaria (Mićo Tatalović for SciDev.net, part of the Guardian
Environment Network)
Criticized? By who? Oh... by a Penn State researcher with a $1.8million grant to create alarm about disease vectors in a warming world, with familiar
hockey stick fabricator, Mikey Mann: “2009-2013 Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF
[Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)]. $1,884,991"
On Monday, May 17th, I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at the Heartland
Institute Chicago ICCC4 conference with regular WUWT contributor Dr. Indur Goklany. He gave his views on the declining mortality we’ve seen worldwide and has published
several pieces here on WUWT. He also the author of the book: “ The
Improving State of the World”. “Goks” (as his friends call him) gave a PowerPoint presentation on declining
mortality in a warming world and you can view the PPT File here.
I’ve culled one of the slides he presented below. If this doesn’t offer proof that when it comes to mankind that “warmer is better”, I don’t know what would. Note
the reversal in the southern hemisphere with Australia and New Zealand.
click for a larger image
But the most interesting slide is number 10, showing the drop in Malaria worldwide: Continue
reading → (WUWT)
As nearly eight million animals are wiped out by the paralysing cold, UN predicts influx of up to 20,000 herders into the cities (Andrew Jacobs, The Observer)
Editors' note: This piece is co-authored by Willie Soon and David R. Legates
We’re often asked, "What really causes all these alarms about global warming disasters?"
As scientists and policy analysts who’ve studied our ever-changing climate for a combined 65 years and attribute the changes primarily to natural forces, we’ve wondered
that ourselves and also asked: Why is warming always framed as bad news? Why does so much “research” claim a warmer planet “may” lead to more childhood insomnia, more
juvenile delinquency, war, juvenile delinquency, violent crime and prostitution, death of the Loch Ness Monster – and even more Mongolian cows dying from cold weather? (Paul
Driessen, Townhall)
The strongest piece of evidence the IPCC has for connecting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to global warming (er, I mean climate change) is the computerized climate
model. Over 20 climate models tracked by the IPCC now predict anywhere from moderate to dramatic levels of warming for our future in response to increasing levels of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. In many peoples’ minds this constitutes some sort of “proof” that global warming is manmade.
Yet, if we stick to science rather than hyperbole, we might remember that science cannot “prove” a hypothesis….but sometimes it can disprove one. The
advancement of scientific knowledge comes through new hypotheses for how things work which replace old hypotheses that are either not as good at explaining nature, or which are
simply proved to be wrong.
Each climate model represents a hypothesis for how the climate system works. I must disagree with my good friend Dick Lindzen’s recent point he made during his keynote
speech at the 4th ICCC meeting in Chicago, in which he asserted that the IPCC’s global warming hypothesis is not even plausible. I think it is plausible.
And from months of comparing climate model output to satellite observations of the Earth’s radiative budget, I am increasingly convinced that climate models can not be
disproved. Sure, there are many details of today’s climate system they get wrong, but that does not disprove their projections of long-term global warming.
Where the IPCC has departed from science is that they have become advocates for one particular set of hypotheses, and have become militant fighters against all others.
They could have made their case much stronger if, in addition to all their models that produce lots of warming, they would have put just as much work into model formulations
that predicted very little warming. If those models could not be made to act as realistically as those that do produce a lot of warming, then their arguments would carry more
weight.
Unfortunately, each modeling group (or the head of each group) already has an idea stuck in their head regarding how much warming looks “about right”. I doubt that
anyone could be trusted to perform an unbiased investigation into model formulations which produce very little warming in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations.
As I have mentioned before, our research to appear in JGR sometime in the coming weeks demonstrates that the only time feedback can be clearly observed in
satellite observations — which is only under special circumstances — it is strongly negative. And if that is the feedback operating on the long time scales associated with
global warming, then we have dodged the global warming bullet.
But there is no way I know of to determine whether this negative feedback is actually stabilizing the climate system on those long time scales. So, we are stuck with a bunch
of model hypotheses to rely on for forecasts of the future, and the IPCC admits it does not know which is closer to the truth.
As a result of all this uncertainty, the IPCC starts talking in meaningless probabilistic language that must make many professional statisticians cringe. These statements
are nothing more than pseudo-scientific ways of making their faith in the models sound more objective, and less subjective.
One of the first conferences I attended as a graduate student in meteorology was an AMS conference on hurricanes and tropical meteorology, as I recall in the early 1980’s.
Computer models of hurricane formation were all the rage back then. A steady stream of presentations at the conference showed how each modeling group’s model could turn any
tropical disturbance into a hurricane. Pretty cool.
Then, a tall lanky tropical expert named William Gray stood up and said something to the effect of, “Most tropical disturbances do NOT turn into hurricanes, yet your
models seem to turn anything into a hurricane! I think you might be missing something important in your models.”
I still think about that exchange today in regard to climate modeling. Where are the model experiments that don’t produce much global warming? Are those models any less
realistic in their mimicking of today’s climate system than the ones that do?
If you tell me that such experiments would not be able to produce the past warming of the 20th Century, then I must ask, What makes you think that warming was mostly due to
mankind? As readers here are well aware, a 1% or 2% change in cloud cover could have caused all of the climate change we saw during the 20th Century, and such a small change
would have been impossible to detect.
Also, modelers have done their best to remove model “drift” — the tendency for models to drift away from today’s climate state. Well, maybe that’s what the real
climate system does! Maybe it drifts as cloud cover slowly changes due to changing circulation patterns.
It seems to me that all the current crop of models do is reinforce the modelers’ preconceived notions. Dick Lindzen has correctly pointed out that the use of the term
“model validation”, rather than “model testing”, belies a bias toward a belief in models over all else.
It is time to return to the scientific method before those who pay us to do science — the public — lose all trust of scientists. (Roy W. Spencer)
On these eight pages, he first modestly sketches some facts about his impressive scientific background.
He says that the climate has been largely warming for 200 years or so, that the CO2 is rising because of us, that CO2 probably causes less than 2 °C of warming per doubling,
that the empirical evidence increasingly speaks against large positive feedbacks, or any net positive feedbacks for that matter, that the models have been often wrong, that
"modeler" Lord Kelvin was wrong when he argued against Charles Darwin's correct statement that the Earth had to be very old, that a "team B" should be
created to critically evaluate the conclusions by "team A" (this IPCC2 is originally an idea due to Václav Klaus, and I also think that the names "team A"
and "team B" should be naturally reversed relatively to Happer's proposal), that CO2 is naturally present in much higher concentrations in our breath etc. and is
beneficial for the plants.
You shouldn't be shocked that the text is far from impartial. The myth is written in the quotation marks while Harrabin himself complains that the vegetarians have been
underrepresented, among other bizarre attempts to attack the skeptics.
But otherwise, he offers some meaningful insights into the sociology of climate change - and to the internal diversity of the climate realists in particular. You should see
I sometimes hear my fellow climate realists say that a globally-averaged surface temperature has little or no meaning in the global warming debate. They claim it is too
ill-defined, not accurately known, or little more than just an average of a bunch of unrelated numbers from different regions of the Earth.
I must disagree.
The globally averaged surface temperature is directly connected to the globally averaged tropospheric temperature through convective overturning of the atmosphere. This is
about 80% of the mass of the atmosphere. You cannot warm or cool the surface temperature without most of the atmosphere following suit.
The combined surface-deep layer atmospheric temperature distribution is then the thermal source of most of the infrared (IR) radiation that cools the Earth in response to
solar heating by the sun. Admittedly, things like water vapor, clouds, and CO2 end up also modulating the rate of loss of IR to space, but it is the temperature which is the
ultimate source of this radiation. And unless the rate of IR loss to space equals the rate of solar absorption in the global average, the global average temperature will
change.
The surface temperature also governs important physical processes, for instance the rate at which the surface “tries” to lose water through evaporation.
If the globally averaged temperature is unimportant, then so are the global average cloudiness, or water vapor content. Just because any one of these globally-averaged
variables is insufficient in and of itself to completely define a specific physical process does not mean that it is not a useful number to monitor.
Finally, the globally averaged temperature is not just a meaningless average of a bunch of unrelated numbers. This is because the temperature of any specific location on the
Earth does not exist in isolation of the rest of the climate system. If you warm the temperature locally, you then will change the horizontal air pressure gradient, and
therefore the wind which transports heat from that location to other locations. Those locations are in turn connected to others.
In fact, the entire global atmosphere is continually overturning, primarily in response to the temperature of the surface as it is heated by the sun. Sinking air in some
regions is warmed in response to rising air in other regions, and that rising air is the result of latent heat release in cloud and precipitation systems as water vapor is
converted to liquid water. The latent heat was originally picked up by the air at the surface, where the temperature helped govern the rate of evaporation.
In this way, clouds and precipitation in rising regions can transport heat thousands of kilometers away by causing warming of the sinking air in other regions. Surprisingly,
atmospheric heat is continually transported into the Sahara Desert in this way, in order to compensate for the fact that the Sahara would actually be a COOL place since it
loses more IR energy to space than it gains solar energy from the sun. (This is because the bright sand reflects much of the sunlight back to space).
Similarly, the frigid surface temperature of the Arctic or Antarctic in wintertime is prevented from getting even colder by heat transport from lower latitudes.
In this way, the temperature of one location on the Earth is ultimately connected to all other locations on the Earth. As such, the globally averaged surface temperature —
and its intimate connection to most of the atmosphere through convective overturning — is probably the single most important index of the state of the climate system we have
the ability to measure.
Granted, it is insufficient to diagnose other things we need to know, but I believe it is the single most important component of any “big picture” snapshot of climate
system at any point in time. (Roy W. Spencer)
Without doubt Roy has accumulated plenty of credibility capital and we are always delighted to reprint his thoughts, even though this time I freely admit
some reservation. There are an infinite number of possible combinations of local, regional and hemispheric temperature changes that can yield a specific global mean
temperature and therefore the metric is of extremely limited diagnostic value, certainly from a human perspective since we are intimately concerned with local temperature and
precipitation.
Only 62% of Britons interested in subject, down from 80% in 2006, according to YouGov survey
Popular concern about climate change has declined significantly, following this year's harsh winter and rows over statistics on global warming, a survey has found.
The numbers of those interested in where Britain's electricity comes from have also slipped back, according to a survey commissioned by the energy company EDF, demonstrating
what appears to be growing consumer complacency in an era of electric-powered gadgetry.
At the same time resistance to building new nuclear power stations appears to be slackening. The results of the YouGov poll, based on a sample of 4,300 adults questioned during
the week after the general election, show that interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62%. Only 80% say they
are interested in where electrical power is made, down from 82% the previous year.
Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics – those unsure
whether human activity is warming the planet – has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now. (The Guardian)
The mainstream media actively promoted global warming, then effectively ignored evidence of corrupt climate science and essentially ignored the whitewash investigations of
the activities of members of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They promoted Al Gore’s movie “An
Inconvenient Truth” yet ignored the evidence of major scientific errors. They quickly condemned Martin Durkin’s documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” because
of one small error on a graph. Durkin withheld the DVD until the error was corrected. Al Gore’s movie is still shown uncorrected in most schools, although a UK court ordered
the government to have teachers advise students of the bias and errors. (Tim Ball, CFP)
Another one of the standout presentations at the Heartland Institute’s fourth International Conference on
Climate Change was the one by Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. His
talk focused on sea level increases and the difference between observed data and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model’s predictions.
Morner was a former reviewer on the IPCC report and when he was first made a reviewer he
said he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one.” Morner discussed the realities of a
number of countries and islands claimed to be doomed from climate change. He started with the Maldives, which some reports claim will be submerged in the next fifty years.
Morner pointed out that the sea level around the Maldives has been much higher before and actually fell 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) during the 1970s. He also asserted that sea
levels have been stable for the past three decades.
This topic is a particular peeve of mine, so I hope I will be forgiven if I wax wroth.
There is a most marvelous piece of technology called the GRACE satellites, which stands for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is composed of two satellites
flying in formation. Measuring the distance between the two satellites to the nearest micron (a hundredth of the width of a hair) allows us to calculate the weight of things on
the earth very accurately.
One of the things that the GRACE satellites have allowed us to calculate is the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Cap. There is a new article about the Greenland results
called Weighing Greenland.
Figure 1. The two GRACE satellites flying in tandem, and constantly measuring the distance between them.
People have asked me if the Rudd Government’s postponement of the ETS means we’ve won, as in game over, time for that beach holiday in Broome? But the end of the game is
nowhere in sight while our government still has a Department of Climate Change stacked with high paid executives that soak
up $90 million a year. The gullible guys who leapt in with both feet are still top-dogs. The end is not even close while two of our largest daily papers don’t realize they
are the real Deniers they disparage, or when the second in charge of our opposition still thinks we
need to trade carbon. Joe Hockey (our shadow treasurer) said this week that “a
carbon price is inevitable”. He used the same old line: “scientists say blah”, as if a consensus of “scientists” is either (a) faultless and incorruptible,
or (b) in control of the weather.
Carbon trading, “inevitable“? How about “inane”? Even better: perilous, fraud-prone, and serpentine. It boils down to forced markets trading fake goods that
nobody would willingly buy. It’s not a “carbon” market, it’s a Permit Market. And a permit (especially to something unmeasurable) is not a commodity to be
traded. What better recipe to bake a crooked cake, and fan the flames of darker human instincts? Yea verily, let’s feed the dark side and invite the charlatans to our table.
Why not give them press secretaries, diplomatic immunity, and an expense account as well?
Speaking of dark: the propaganda rolls on (thanks to your money) More » (Jo
Nova)
“Jason Scott Johnston has published dozens of articles in American law journals, such as the Yale Law Journal,and in peer-reviewed economics journals, such as the
Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He is currently working on books about the law and economics, corporate environmentalism, global warming policy, and the
comparative law and economics of environmental federalism. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association and on the National Science
Foundation’s Law and Social Science grant review panel. He won Penn Law’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003.”
Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active
in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of
activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from
potentially very high temperature increases.
This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic
tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while
concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size
but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while
climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may
be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture
painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility
that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models
to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global
warming impacts such as species loss.
Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread
misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization
of the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science
supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science away
from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against which
existing climate models can be tested.
Keywords: Climate change, greenhouse effect, ghg emission reductions, catastrophic risk, comparative scientific analysis, open scientific questions, size and direction of
feedback effects, inherent non-linear temperature changes, methodological validity of climate models, gradual and reversible policy choices.
Jim Hansen responded in 2005 to a comment we made on ocean heat content with respect to a Science Express article he wrote in that year [Pielke
and Christy, 2005; our Comment was (no surprise) rejected by Science]. Jim’s entire 2005 response can be read here.
“Contrary to the claim of Pielke and Christy, our simulated ocean heat storage (Hansen et al., 2005) agrees closely with the observational analysis of Willis et al.
(2004). All matters raised by Pielke and Christy were considered in our analysis and none of them alters our conclusions.
The Willis et al. measured heat storage of 0.62 W/m2 refers to the decadal mean for the upper 750 m of the ocean. Our simulated 1993-2003 heat storage rate was 0.6 W/m2 in
the upper 750 m of the ocean. The decadal mean planetary energy imbalance, 0.75 W/m2, includes heat storage in the deeper ocean and energy used to melt ice and warm the air
and land. 0.85 W/m2 is the imbalance at the end of the decade.”
With the new 2010 paper
John M. Lyman, Simon A. Good, Viktor V. Gouretski, Masayoshi Ishii, Gregory C. Johnson, Matthew D. Palmer, Doug M. Smith, Josh K. Willis, 2010: Robust
warming of the global upper ocean. Nature 465, 334-337 (20 May 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09043 Letter
we can update how well Jim Hansen’s prediction is comparing to observations. My
last update was on February 9 2009 [I have a post on Keven Trenberth's commentary on the Lyman et al paper on Monday].
The Lyman et al 2010 paper concludes that
“Accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty, a composite of several OHCA curves using different XBT bias corrections still yields a statistically significant
linear warming trend for 1993–2008 of 0.64W per meter squared (calculated for the Earth’s entire surface area), with a 90-per-cent confidence interval of 0.53–0.75
W per meter squared.”
The 1993 to 2008 value is close to the Hansen prediction despite the flattening of the heating of the upper ocean reported in the Lyman et al 2010 paper
since 2003 [if we use Jim Hansen's expected radiative imbalance at the end of the 1990s of 0.85 Watts per meter squared and use 80% of that to represent the
upper ocean heat content change, his prediction of the heating rate of the upper ocean is 0.68 Watts per meter squared. This is within the uncertainty of the Lyman et al
analysis].
However, there are important questions with respect to conclusion of Jim Hansen’s forecast as well as an opportunity. First, since the heating rate is
dominated by the time period prior to 2004, an assessment of whether the GISS model (which is the basis of Jim’s forecast) produces interruptions of the heating for this long
needs to be made and reported. Also, over 40% of the heating occurred in just the time period 2002 and 2003 with about 30% more in 1999. Does the GISS
model predict such shorter term bursts of heating?
With respect tot the lack of recent heating, the Lyman et al 2010 paper write
“The individual OHCA curves all flatten out after around 2003, with some variability among curves in the year in which this levelling occurs. The causes of this
flattening are unclear, but sea surface temperatures have been roughly constant since 2000. Although sea level has continued to rise steadily during this period, an increase
in the amount of water added to the ocean by melting continental ice in recent years may account for most of this rise even with very little change in ocean heat
content….The flattening of OHCA curves also occurs around the time (2004) that the Argo array of autonomous profiling floats first achieved near global coverage and
became the primary source of OHCA data.”
A consequence of this absence of heating is that we should soon see a return to the radiative imbalance predicted by Jim Hansen, if he is correct. Indeed, this
provides us the best opportunity we have over the next few years to test the robustness of the multi-decadal global models to predict the climate
system radiative imbalance (i.e. global warming). (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
Canadian mogul and avowed socialist Maurice Strong manipulates governments to benefit his "green" portfolio and those of his friends: George Soros, Ted Turner,
Al Gore, and China.
May 24, 2010
- by Ed Lasky
Intercontinental Exchange has agreed to purchase the parent company of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the preeminent market for trading carbon credits. This is a market that
exists solely to capitalize on possible federal legislation that would mandate reduced greenhouse gas emissions or the purchase of “pollution credits.”
Politicians created this market out of thin air by fiat, and not surprisingly, cronies of these politicians will be the beneficiaries. These climate change profiteers include
Maurice Strong.
We know of the usual suspects who have invested, either directly or indirectly, in the Climate Exchange: Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, and Chicago’s Joyce Foundation (which made an
investment when Barack Obama sat on its board), among others. Franklin Raines, while he headed Fannie Mae, purchased and patented the mechanism used for trading under the
cap-and-trade system — an investment that could fare far better than the trillion dollars worth of bad mortgages he saddled Fannie Mae with.
The European Commission is under pressure to shelve plans to raise its target for greenhouse gas emission cuts from 20% to 30% amid fears that further uncertainty would be
too damaging to fragile world markets.
The EU is planning to publish a paper this week urging carbon emission reductions targets for Europe’s biggest polluters to be raised to 30% by 2020, an announcement that is
likley to cause a sudden surge in the price of EU Allowances, the European carbon permits.
Until now Europe has agreed only to cut emissions by 20% from 1990 levels. However, the commission believes this is not enough. It argues in a paper to be given to the 27 EU
member states on Wednesday that “an EU target of 20% by 2020 is not enough to put emissions on to the right path” to reach the goal of limiting the rise in average global
temperatures to 2C.
It estimates that the total cost of such a move would be some €81 billion (£70 billion) — just €11 billion more than originally predicted.
However, experts are insisting that the EU shelve the plans because of last week’s market turbulence caused by concerns over the euro and Europe’s growing debt crisis.
Senior market sources are concerned that further pressure on Europe’s industrial giants to reduce emissions could send markets plummeting.
“The commission was hoping to issue a paper on the costs of a 30% reduction target. The events of the past few days may now put those on hold,” said one source. (Sunday
Times)
Champaign, Il – May 3, 2010 - An article in the current issue of Global Change Biology Bioenergy reveals that Miscanthus x giganteus, a perennial grass, could effectively
reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, while lowering atmospheric CO2.
Using a simulation tool that models the future global climate, researchers predict that the carbon that is released into the atmosphere from the loss of natural vegetation will
be paid back by Miscanthus within 30 years. Previous estimates for other liquid biofuels, such as corn ethanol, were estimated to take 167-420 years to pay back their carbon
debt.
The global concern over climate change has challenged researchers to explore ways to mitigate the damage we are doing to our environment. They are looking more closely at
energy crops, like Miscanthus, to replace our need for fossil fuels like natural gas and oil, which raise atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
According to John Hughes, UK Met Office Research Scientist, "Our study demonstrates the huge potential of energy crops, in particular of Miscanthus. Also, by scaling the
results up to the global scale as we do in this study we are developing a new set of tools for evaluating energy crops." (Wiley-Blackwell)
People are beginning to recall that CO2 is an atmospheric resource and essential trace gas. It is an essential trace gas and more is a major
benefit to the biosphere -- we really don't want to reduce its availability and nor should we.
Who would've ever thought that a federal bureau within the U.S. Department of Interior mandated to "conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants"
could possibly have such a significant and potentially damaging effect on our nation's energy security.
Nearly 4,800 miles from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) — which is tucked away in Alaska's northeast corner along the Canadian border — the Washington, DC-based
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is readying a proposal that could severely undercut our nation's ability to safely and responsibly develop homegrown, job-creating oil and
clean-burning natural gas resources in this energy-rich region.
This misguided proposal to place much of the region within the National Wilderness Preservation System will hamstring local economies and native tribes that rely on these lands
for survival. Native Alaskan tribes — which have lived off these lands for centuries — may have their livelihoods upended. How so? Economic development of any kind would
not be allowed on Native-owned lands. And subsistence hunting access to wildlife would be tough in the coastal plain, a place where things are plenty tough already.
And it's not just public, taxpayer-owned lands that will be affected — privately owned land and energy resources could also be placed off-limits if this proposal is enacted.
Worse yet, the FWS proposal to place the nearly 1.5 million acres of ANWR's coastal plain — the largest onshore oil prospect in the United States, according to the Energy
Information Administration (EIA) — off-limits would not only be far-reaching, it could also be permanent. (Richard Glenn, IBD)
WASHINGTON — President Obama established a bipartisan national commission on Friday to investigate what caused the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and figure
out where the government went wrong so as to “make sure it never happens again,” as he put it.
Mr. Obama tapped two prominent former officials to lead the commission — Bob Graham, the former senator from Florida, and William K. Reilly, the former administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency — and gave them six months to come up with a plan to revamp federal regulation of offshore oil drilling.
“If the laws on our books are inadequate to prevent such an oil spill, or if we didn’t enforce those laws, I want to know it,” Mr. Obama said in his Saturday radio and
Internet address. “I want to know what worked and what didn’t work in our response to the disaster, and where oversight of the oil and gas industry broke down. We know, for
example, that a cozy relationship between oil and gas companies and agencies that regulate them has long been a source of concern.”
Mr. Obama said he wanted to hold both the government and BP accountable for the spill that continues to spew thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day. But
he did not retreat from his plan to expand offshore oil drilling and in fact portrayed the commission as a means to make that possible despite the disaster. (NYT)
MORGAN CITY, La. — In some parts of the country, the sight of oil drifting toward the Louisiana coast, oozing into the fragile marshlands and bringing large parts of the
state’s economy to a halt, has prompted calls to stop offshore drilling indefinitely, if not altogether.
Here, in the middle of things, those calls are few. Here, in fact, the unfolding disaster is not even prompting a reconsideration of the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and
Petroleum Festival.
“All systems are go,” said Lee Delaune, the festival’s director, sitting in his cluttered office in a historic house known as Cypress Manor. “We will honor the two
industries as we always do,” Mr. Delaune said. “More so probably in grand style, because it’s our diamond jubilee.”
Louisiana is an oil state, through and through. A gushing leak off of its coast has not, apparently, changed that. (NYT)
Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to
help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the
laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its
biggest clients.
Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex. He opted instead to get a waiver so
he could send his county’s samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.
Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that
would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.
“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “I’m not a conspiracy
theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.” (NYT)
Well, maybe... but there is a strong likelihood of people with the expertise and equipment for oil testing to be used by, um, oil companies, no? And having
all testing done by a centralized entity gives more assurance of consistent standards and compatibility of all test results.
The question of the week seems to be just how much oil is leaking from the damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico. [Read
More] (Geoffrey Styles, Energy Tribune)
There
has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This unprecedented accident for the American offshore drilling
industry, the first significant spill in 40 years, will certainly have a calamitous impact on the Gulf marine environment and surrounding coastal areas. What is less certain,
but potentially even more dangerous, is the effect that this spill will have on the US domestic oil industry. While environmentalists clamor for a shut down of all offshore
drilling in the Gulf, realists know that this will make the threat to ocean life even greater. What has not being told to the public is that nature itself leaks more oil into
the ocean each year than mankind, and has been doing so for millions of years. What is even less known is that offshore drilling can actually reduce the amount of crude
released into the seas.
While the knowledge that nature spills more oil into the ocean environment than humans in noway reduces the amount of harm this accident will cause, or
excuse those in both industry and government who are responsible for the event occurring, it should be a reminder to all that man's transgressions against nature, as bad as
they are, are nothing compared with nature's own. Indeed, offshore drilling is responsible for half of the oil spillage as tankers, and together these man-made spills only
account for 1/16 the amount released by natural seeps. Scientists are well aware of this situation, as was reported in a recent paper
in Nature Geoscience, entitled “Asphalt volcanoes as a potential source of methane to late Pleistocene coastal waters.” In it, David L. Valentine et al.
report:
A recent assessment of oil sources to the ocean revealed that natural seepage accounts for nearly half of all input1. Oil seeps occur in a range of
environments from the continental shelves, to continental slopes, and deep basins. Satellite imagery from the northwest Gulf of Mexico suggests ~1,900 km of persistent
natural oil slicks at the sea surface in that region alone, with many other seep regions dispersed globally. Oil seeps also typically release large quantities of methane, a
potent greenhouse gas. The co-occurrence of oil and gas at seeps is thought to increase the atmospheric methane flux through the formation of protective surface coatings on
gas bubbles, but significant fractions of methane still dissolve into the water; for example, approximately half the methane emitted by the seeps at Coal Oil Point,
California, dissolves in the water column
When methane dissolves into the ocean it depletes the water's oxygen content, which is why investigators on the scene of the current Gulf spill have noticed
the oxygen content of the surrounding water dropping. This is obviously a threat to any sea life in the area. In California, where being green is almost a requirement of
residency, offshore drilling has been suppressed for years even though it probably does no good. Valentine et al. explain: “The timing and volume of erupted
hydrocarbons from the asphalt structures can explain some or all of the documented methane release and tar accumulation in the Santa Barbara basin during the Pleistocene.”
Tar bubble at the La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles. Photo Daniel Schwen.
This means that, even without human drilling activity, there would still be escaping methane, robbing the seas of oxygen, and oil washing up on the beaches
as sticky tarballs. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. After all, one need only look at the famous La
Brea Tar Pits and ask “what would happen if a similar tar pit occurred underwater?” But asking such questions unsettles the blame-humanity-first crowd.
Since
1975, offshore drilling in the Exclusive Economic Zone (within 200 miles of US coasts) has a safety record of 99.999%. This means that only 0.0001 percent of the oil produced
has been spilled. In the waters of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), between 1993 and 2007 there were 651 oil spills, releasing 47,800 barrels of oil. Given 7.5 billion
barrels of oil produced during that period, one barrel of oil has been spilled in the OCS per 156,900 barrels produced. The truth is, the amount of oil spilled from platforms,
tankers, and pipelines is small, relative to the amount of oil extracted and transported.
Even so, oil spills remain an unpleasant reality of offshore oil drilling. Certainly, any amount of oil spilled into the ocean is undesirable, but offshore
oil operations contribute relatively little of the oil that enters ocean waters each year. By far the largest source of human caused oil release is through “normal” use of
oil products—people just dumping used oil away. According to the National Academies’ National Research Council, natural processes are responsible for over 63% of the
petroleum that enters North American ocean waters and over 45% of the petroleum that enters ocean waters worldwide.
According to research by scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), 8 to 80 times the amount of oil spilled in the
Exxon Valdez accident has leaked from petroleum seeps near Coal Oil Point in the Santa Barbara Channel. Published in the May 15 issue of Environmental Science & Technology,
documents how the oil is released by the seeps, carried to the surface along a meandering plume, and then deposited on the ocean floor in sediments that stretch for miles
northwest of Coal Oil Point. In “Weathering and the Fallout Plume of Heavy Oil from Strong
Petroleum Seeps Near Coal Oil Point, CA,” Christopher Farwell et al. report a seepage rate of 20−25 tons of oil daily in that area alone.
Oil seeps naturally from the sea floor.
According to oceanographers at Old Dominion University: “the
oceans have been receiving natural oil for at least 400 million years. The city of Santa Barbara, California, receives more gases from natural seeps, than from all man made
sources. The Gulf of Mexico has over 600 sources of natural oil leaks. And
the oceans have absorbed more oil than all that is currently left on the planet.” Earth's ecosystems are more resilient than most people realize.
In contrast to what green activists will tell you, offshore drilling can actually reduce the amount of oil leaking into the sea. Research shows that, because
it relieves the pressure that drives oil and gas to leak from ocean floors, drilling can reduce natural seepage. In 1999, two peer-reviewed studies found that natural seepage
in the northern Santa Barbara Channel was significantly reduced by oil production. The researchers documented that natural seepage declined 50% around Platform Holly over a
twenty-two-year period, concluding that, as oil was pumped from the reservoir, the pressure that drives natural seepage dropped (See “Oil
and Gas Seepage from Ocean Floor Reduced by Oil Production”).
Though offshore drilling has proven to be less environmentally dangerous than shipping oil in tankers, occasionally an accident will focus the world's
attention on the damage crude oil can do when spilled. Just such a spill, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore and 5,000 feet underwater, erupted into the news in late
April, 2010.
Fire boat crews battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. Photo US Coast Guard.
The US Gulf coast states have a love hate relationship with the oil industry. America gets around 30% of its oil from the more that 3,500 offshore drilling
rigs that dot the Gulf of Mexico. These rigs bring jobs, both on the drilling platforms and at the onshore refineries that turn the crude into heating oil and gasoline. Most of
the time, the residents of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are happy to have the oil industry in the Gulf. In fact, the governors of other states had called
on the federal government to relax restrictions so oil exploration could take place off their shores.
President Obama had publicly announced his administration's support for expanded drilling for domestic oil and gas. Exploratory offshore drilling was planned
for several parts of the east coast of the United States that were previously off limits. Then the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased and operated by British Petroleum
(BP), suffered the worst offshore oil disaster since the Exxon Valdez sank off the coast of Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in 1989.
The immensity of the disaster in the Gulf unfolded slowly over several weeks. It started with an explosion and fire on the platform, 11 workers went missing
and are presumed dead. After burning for several days the platform eventually sank on April 22. Only then did rescue workers on the scene realize that there was oil leaking
from the site. The oil leak was not at the surface but at the base of the bored hole.
To avoid just this type of spill, all offshore oil rigs have safety devices that are supposed to shut off their wells in the event of an accident. Something
obviously went terribly wrong on the Deepwater Horizon. Oil from the fractured drilling pipe now threatens Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough
waters hampered clean-up efforts. The miles of floating barriers have proven ineffective and the well continues to spew oil into the fisheries and fragile ecosystems of the
Gulf.
Oil burns during a controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico, May 6, 2010. Photo US Navy.
How to cap the massive blowout, which is leaking and estimated 200,000 gallons a day, remain elusive. Capping a geyser of oil 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below
the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is a feat never before attempted. “The sort of occurrence that we've seen on the Deepwater Horizon is clearly unprecedented,” BP spokesman
David Nicholas told the Associated Press. “It's something that we have not experienced before ... a blowout at this depth.”
The Transocean Ltd. rig that sank was worth over $600 million and BP was reportedly leasing the rig for $500,000 per day. Under US law and international
treaty, BP is responsible for all expenses stemming from the accident—the damages could run into the billions. As of this report, BP is frantically trying to contain the
spill and clean up costs are running $6 million per day. Environmental damage is being estimated at close to 8 to 12 billion dollars but, in the end, the worst damage may be to
the US domestic oil industry.
Eco-activist group Oceana is trying to collect a half a million signatures to stop all new offshore drilling (stopthedrill.org).
So far the total is only around 33 thousand. And there is little chance that existing production wells will be shut down either. As mentioned, the Gulf provides about 30% of
America’s 6.7m barrel-a-day domestic output and Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who is heading the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon accident, says production will
not be halted. When green politics collide head-on with America's energy needs there is little question, at least in politician's minds, what the outcome will be.
The crude facts are these:
Restricting offshore drilling will lead to the US importing more oil from other sources, which will increase spillage, as well as weaken national security.
Drilling farther out than 75 miles falls under Federal jurisdiction, not under the control of individual states. Drilling closer to shore is safer than drilling farther
off the coasts, but green groups have forced drilling to be done out of sight and in deeper water.
Under some conditions, drilling wells in offshore waters can reduce the amount of oil released from natural seeps by reducing the pressure in the oil traps.
The US gets ~30% of its domestic oil from the Gulf. There is no way that the Obama or any other administration will shut it down.
Seawater covered with thick black oil splashes up in brown-stained whitecaps. AP Photo.
As usual, the green position is totally untenable. Offshore drilling will continue until America and the rest of the world can break their oil addiction,
which will not be any time soon. Until an acceptable alternative to the internal combustion engine is found, and the hundreds of millions of cars and trucks on the road today
are replaced, the world will continue to run on oil. Not that BP, Transocean and Halliburton should be left off the hook—they should pay for cleaning up their mess and for
the hardship inflicted upon the local people, whose lives they have harmed, even it it drives all three into receivership.
Through their whining and wailing, the eco-lobby has pushed drilling farther off shore where accidents are more probable and containment harder—nature
suffers but they get to feel pious and smug. Ignorant and ideological, the greens lash out at those they do not like and offer “solutions” that cannot work: Biofuels
that consume more energy than they produce and produce more pollution than the fuels they replace, all while laying waste to the worlds remaining forests; wind
turbines that kill birds and bats and can alter local climate; solar
power plants that ruin fragile desert ecosystems and have the greens themselves up in arms. The world's energy problems will not be solved by consumer abstinence and a
gaggle of wonky alternative energy sources. Blinded by their own fanaticism, every time greens get involved in energy matters they make the problem worse.
We all need to remember that, every time the lights come on when we throw a switch, every day we hop into our vehicles to take the kids to school or commute
to work, every day we go shopping in the grocery store and find it filled with fresh produce from around the world, those things are possible, at least in part, due to oil. For
most of the history of mankind, kings and queens could not live as well as the average citizen of a developed country does today. The Deepwater Horizon accident is a
catastrophe for many reasons—not the least of which being the deaths of 11 men who laboured at one of the most dangerous jobs around to support their families and allow the
rest of us to live comfortable lives.
The threat to the ecosystems in and around the Gulf of Mexico is real and tragic, as is the damage to the local tourist and fishing industries. With every
picture of an oil soaked bird or sea turtle the voices of those who wish to shut down the oil industry everywhere, on land and sea, will become more strident. We cannot hide
our heads in the sand and ignore the world's growing need for energy, and we cannot wish the hazards of drilling for oil to go away. Life is full of hard choices and we need to
act like educated adults: let us punish those responsible to the limit of the law, regulate the offshore drilling industry to ensure this does not happen again, and insist that
our government takes serious action towards solving our energy problems.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay sceptical.
We cannot hide from the world's growing energy needs. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
Global warming - and the worst environmental disasters - will only be tackled when green lobbyists in the US stop taking cash from Big Oil and Big Coal (The Independent)
President Barack Obama unveiled a government push on Friday to boost auto fuel economy for model-year 2017 passenger vehicles and beyond, and introduce a truck efficiency
target for the first time.
Obama's policy initiative was characterized by leading environmental groups as an especially welcome step in the wake of the BP Plc Gulf Coast oil spill.
"I believe it's possible in the next 20 years for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half the pollution that they do today," Obama said at a White House
ceremony.
Separately, Canada announced similar steps for heavy trucks and hopes to propose a draft regulation within several months.
Cars and trucks account for more than 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption and more than 25 percent of domestic carbon pollution, environmental statistics show. (Reuters)
Again with the "carbon pollution" thing -- atmospheric carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas and undeniably more is much better.
Ford Motor announced Thursday it will use its influence to reduce the carbon footprints of its suppliers.
In partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project , the World Resources Institute, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Ford plans to survey 35 of its top
suppliers worldwide with regard to their sustainability practices. Ford said this is just the initial phase of a long-term plan to eventually have all suppliers institute
better sustainability practices. The suppliers chosen for this round include those who make tires, metal components, seats, and steering systems.
Based on the collected data and using modeling software from PTC InSight , Ford will then make recommendations as to how each supplier might make changes to reduce its carbon
footprint. (CNET)
Following the embarrassment of having recommended Spain's failed "green" programs, Obama switched to using Denmark as a model. Best out of five?
May 24, 2010
- by Christopher Horner
President Obama was caught flatfooted by the embarrassing truth about Spain’s “green economy” after he instructed us — on eight separate occasions — to “think about
what’s happening in countries like Spain” as a model for a U.S. future. Spain, of course, is suffering an economic meltdown from enormous public debt incurred through
programs like a mandated “green economy.”
But Obama also just implored Spain to drastically scale back or risk becoming Greece. A flip he immediately flopped, by pushing hard to enact the Kerry-Lieberman “path to
insolvency” bill based on … Spain. (Cue Benny Hill theme.)
So, embarrassed — or perhaps shameless — Obama changed his pitch: “Think about what’s happening in countries like Denmark.”
Of course, the experience of Denmark — a country with a population half that of Manhattan’s, not exactly a useful energy model for our rather different economy and society
— is no great shakes, either.
There is no convincing proof that utility-scale wind plants reduce fossil fuel consumption or CO2 emissions. Although there are are a number of reports claiming
gains can be made that will combat climate change, free us from fossil fuel “addiction,” provide energy independence and needed 21st century industrial
development, such reports are not substantiated by definitive and comprehensive analyses.
To determine the actual effects will require long-term time series, at intervals significantly less than one hour, of wind production and fuel consumption due to fast
ramping of fossil fuel plants to compensate for wind’s volatility in an electricity system where wind represents approximately at least 1-2% of production.
As opposed to wind proponents’ claims, studies based on actual experience with wind integration are emerging that demonstrate the fossil fuel and CO2
emissions gains are not valid. The two reviewed here are examples but are limited by the lack of availability of complete information on operational performance, especially of
wind plants. Fortunately, enough information can be gleaned that provides a strong indication of what those who have studied this objectively have long suspected.
Why is more complete information about wind performance and integration not available? Is it because wind proponents, including some policy makers and wind industries, do
not want the realities disclosed, or, in the case of many environmentalist organizations, because they would interrupt established agendas? Or is it that these groups believe
it unnecessary because they do not understand the realities of utility-scale wind power? [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Honda’s R&D chief thinks he may at least be in his underwear.
It is unlikely you have ever heard of Tomohiko Kawanabe. But if you are interested in cars, and particularly the future of electric cars, it might be useful to listen to what
he has to say.
The media and assorted environmentalists and green technology types seem eager to assure us that the “future is now” for electric vehicles, or EVs. We are told that people
are lining up to order Nissan’s attractive electric four-door Leaf, that anticipation is high for General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, that the Tesla roadster (even at $100,000
each) is a sports car dream and that other pure battery cars like Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV are ready in the pipeline. Nissan’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, expects his company to have the
capacity to build half a million electric cars a year by 2012. He and some other EV advocates predict that one out of every ten cars sold by the end of this decade will be
battery-powered.
Kawanabe begs to differ.
He is the chief of research and development for Honda Motor Co., a company with a reputation for staying on the technological edge of the automobile. Honda has been seriously
working on electric cars since 1988. It gained a lot of real-world knowledge about electrics from feedback on the more than 300 EV Plus nickel-metal hydride battery-powered
cars it leased in the United States between 1997 and 2000. Last fall it introduced an electric “concept car,” the EV-N, to show that it is still keeping its hand in the
game.
Kawanabe is not saying anything new, but he is saying something that is either ignored or has yet to sink in with electric enthusiasts. Electric cars—including the very best
of them—don’t go very far.
What Honda knows about electric cars is considerable. But what Honda, as one of the world’s leading manufacturers, knows about the car business is even more considerable. And
as to the electric part of that business, Kawanabe says “We lack confidence” in it.
“We are definitely conducting research on electric cars,” he recently told Bloomberg News, “but I can’t say I wholeheartedly recommend them.”
Why? As a leading engineer for the builder of some of the world’s most popular cars, Kawanabe’s answer is right to the point. “It is questionable whether consumers will
accept the annoyances of limited driving range and having to spend time charging them.”
Kawanabe is not saying anything new, but he is saying something that is either ignored or has yet to sink in with electric enthusiasts. EVs—including the very best of
them—don’t go very far. They go even less far if they go fast. They go even less far if they contain passengers or any significant cargo. Or if it is very cold. Or if it is
very hot.
And, investment in charging infrastructure aside, the laws of physics seem, thus far, to be less than accommodating about the dream of a “quick” battery charge that comes
anywhere close to the few minutes it takes to fill a gas tank. (Ralph Kinney Bennett, The American)
Since I first issuedmy
challenge to debate “anyone anytime anywhere” on the (un)constitutionality of Obamacare, a lot has happened. For one thing, Randy
Barnett and Richard Epstein, among many others, have published
provoctive articles looking at issues beyond the Commerce Clause justification for the individual mandate — such as the argument that Congress’s tax power justifies the
mandate penalty and that the new Medicaid arrangement amounts to a coercive federal-state bargain. (Look for to a longish article from yours truly due to come out in next
month’s issue of Health Affairs.) For another, as
Michael Cannon noted, seven more states — plus the National Federation of Independent Business and two individuals – have joined the Florida-led lawsuit against
Obamacare. Perhaps most importantly, such legal challenges are gaining
mainstream credibility.
Here’s a brief look at some important legal filings from the past 10 days:
On May 11, the U.S. government filed a response to the Thomas
More Center’s lawsuit asking a federal court in Michigan to enjoin Obamacare on various grounds, including, distinct from other suits I’ve seen, religious
liberty violations from having to pay for abortions. The government argues that the plaintiffs lack standing because it’s unclear whether the individual mandate
will harm them and in any event this provision doesn’t go into effect until 2014 at the earliest. The government also predictably argues that the mandate is a valid
exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce and to provide for the general welfare. There is nothing surprising here and we now await the court’s
preliminary ruling.
On May 12, the U.S. Citizens Association (a conservative group) and five individuals filed a
new suit in Ohio, as Jacob Sullum notes. In addition to the
government powers arguments that are being made in most Obamacare lawsuits (most notably the state suits), this suit claims a violation of: the First Amendment freedom
of association (the government forces people to associate with insurers); individual liberty interests under the Fifth Amendment; and the right to privacy under the
Fifth Amendment’s liberty provision, Ninth Amendment retained rights, and the rights emanating from the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments (such is the
Court’s convoluted jurisprudence in this area). I’ll add that the attorney filing this suit, Jonathan Emord, worked for Cato over 20 years ago.
On May 14, Florida filed an
amended complaint that, along with adding seven states, two individuals, and the NFIB — so all potential standing bases are covered — beefs up relevant factual
allegations and, most importantly, shores up a few legal insufficiencies to the previous claims. This is a solid complaint, and alleges the following counts: (1) the
individual mandate/penalty exceeds Congress’s power under both the Commerce Clause and taxing power and, as such, violate the Ninth and Tenth Amendments; (2)
the mandate violate’s the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause; (3) the mandate penalty is an unconstitutional capitation or direct tax because it is unapportioned;
(4) the Medicare expansion constitutes a coercive federal-state bargain that commandeers state officials; (5) a different formulation of coercion/commandeering; and (6)
interference with state sovereignty and functions under the Tenth Amendment. After further briefing, oral arguments on the government’s expected motion to
dismiss are scheduled for September 14 in Pensacola.
At least one enterprising analyst has determined that the 2,400-page bill lacks
a severability clause. This means that if one part of the bill is struck down as unconstitutional, the whole thing falls! — and would mean that the drafters
committed legal malpractice of the highest order. I guess it goes to show that nobody has read the whole thing.
Finally, if anybody is reading this is in Seattle, I’ll be debating Obamacare at the University of Washington Law School next Thursday, May 27 at 4:30pm. This
debate, sponsored by a number of groups, including the law school itself and the Federalist Society, is free and open to the public. For those interested in
other subjects, I’ll be giving a different talk to the Puget Sound Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter the day before at 6:30pm at the Washington Athletic Club ($25, rsvp to
Michael Bindas at mbindas@ij.org). The title of that one is “Justice Elena Kagan? What the President’s Choice Tells Us About
the Modern Court and Confirmation Process.” Please do introduce yourself to me if you attend either event. (Cato at liberty)
Innovative licensing agreements between Western and Indian drug companies are leading to sustainable profits and increased access to quality medicines.
Over the past decade, the developing world has become the battleground in the global debate about drug patent protection and access to essential medicines. And the debate
continues at this week's World Health Assembly in Geneva. Part of the solution, which will unfortunately not likely be discussed at the WHA, is innovative licensing agreements
between Western and Indian drug companies.
Until recently there had been much heat and little light in the fights between the governments of India, Thailand, and Brazil, which had threatened innovator companies to lower
drug prices or face losing patent protection, and innovator companies, which steadfastly defended their patent rights. The epicenter of the patent and drug access debate is
India. The caricature is simple: for health activists, India is the medicine chest to the world’s poor, whereas to Western industry it is often a cheating competitor in the
global market. (Roger Bate, The American)
(May 19) -- If you found out that you were exposed to a chemical in food packaging that was linked to a host of health problems including obesity, breast and prostate
cancer, diabetes, heart disease, brain disorders and erectile dysfunction, you'd want to have it banned. Even if the risk wasn't that great or the science fully proven,
precaution would seem to be the most sensible course of action given those charges.
This would seem to be the case with bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to coat the linings of cans and in the manufacture of various plastics.
And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., thinks so. She has proposed an amendment to
the current food safety bill to ban the chemical. And to buttress her case, a coalition of activist groups released a "study" Tuesday claiming that "meals
involving one or more cans of food can cause a pregnant woman to ingest levels of BPA that have been shown to cause health effects in developing fetuses in laboratory animal
studies."
But while public concern about BPA has steadily increased, the science behind the alleged health risk has so far failed to justify any such ban. In fact, banning BPA could do
more harm than good.
Here's the background. (Trevor Butterworth, AOL News)
NEW YORK - One of the first symptoms of pancreatic cancer -- often noticed even years before diagnosis -- is indigestion. A new study suggests that these timely tummy
troubles may be enough to explain away previous links made between a high carbohydrate diet and an increased risk of the disease.
"We started out just aiming to replicate other studies that looked at the association between carbohydrates and pancreatic cancer," Rachael Stolzenberg-Solomon, from
the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland and an investigator on the new study, told Reuters Health. "But it turned out to be something more interesting."
It also turned out to be more complicated. (Reuters Health)
The results of drinking 20 ounces of Coca Cola on an empty stomach shocks starving journalist into having a sugar high.
Recently, two ABC News reporters, Yunji de Nies and Hanna Siegel, headed to the University of Pennsylvania's Rodebaugh Diabetes Center. Their assignment was to act as human
guinea pigs in an “experiment” designed to show the malevolent effects of drinking soda on blood sugar levels and the human body drank 20 ounces of Coca Cola on an empty
stomach and then had her blood sugar measured. The results were broadcast on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer with the tag, “Do you know what an average soda does to your
body”:
“The glucose in the sugar, or corn syrup, is quickly turned into energy, fructose, which is sweeter, is more likely to turn into fat.
After you drink a soda, the glucose hits your bloodstream, and your pancreas immediately begins making insulin to balance the sugar rush.
My glucose level started at 79, and then it rapidly shot up, because I had just put the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar into my body. That is 10 more teaspoons of sugar
than the American Heart Association recommends a woman like me consume in an entire day.
After 40 minutes, my glucose level had reached 107.”
This is called digestion, absorption, and metabolism – and it happens whenever you eat. Something similar would have happened if the ABC reporter had eaten any
carbohydrates for breakfast. These break down into sugars and are absorbed into the bloodstream where they are either used immediately to power the body or stored as
easily-accessible fuel in the form of glycogen. (Trevor Butterworth, STATS)
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- It may seem intuitive that greater amounts of exercise lead to less obesity, but an Indiana University study has found that this conventional wisdom
applies primarily to white women. The findings draw attention not only to racial, ethnic and gender differences regarding exercise but also to the role work can play.
In his study involving more than 12,000 people in a nationally representative sample of U.S 20- to 64-year-olds, obesity expert Dong-Chul Seo found that obesity rates in
general declined as the amount of weekly leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) increased. White women, however, saw the steepest decreases, particularly when meeting minimum
national guidelines for weekly physical activity. This was not always the case for men and for women who were African American or Hispanic.
"For the majority of health professionals, even health researchers, they say the more leisure-time physical activity you engage in, the less likely you'll get obese,"
said Seo, associate professor in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation's Department of Applied Health Science. "This is true but it's probably only
applicable to white women and some of the white men."
Surprised by the results, Seo looked deeper and found that job-related physical activity might have influenced obesity rates. Studies have found, for example, that men and
Hispanic women are more likely to have manually demanding jobs than white women, which could affect the amount of LTPA they accumulate. For Hispanic women, their obesity rates
dropped as their amount of occupational physical activity (OPA) increased. However, a different pattern was seen for men. (Indiana University)
A majority of D.C. Council members signaled their opposition Thursday to a 1-cent-per-ounce tax on soda, probably killing the proposal for the year.
The council's decision followed several weeks of intense lobbying that pitted grocers and the beverage industry against nutrition advocates, including actor Morgan Freeman, who
made a last-minute pitch in support of the bill. (WaPo)
New York Governor David Paterson on Thursday proposed lifting the sales tax on diet soda, while adding a new "sugar tax" to full-calorie drinks, in a fresh bid to
boost revenue for the cash-strapped state. (Reuters)
'Spare tire' had strongest association with senility, study found
THURSDAY, May 20 -- A preliminary study suggests that excess fat in the abdomen during middle age boosts the risk of dementia later in life.
An estimated 24.3 million people worldwide suffer from dementia, which can stem from Alzheimer's disease or other causes.
In the new study, Dr. Sudha Seshadri, of Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues examined the medical records of 733 people with an average age of 60. About 70
percent were women.
The research confirms that increasing levels of body-mass index -- a measurement of whether someone's height and weight are proportional -- in middle-aged people corresponds
with lower brain volumes when they are older, Seshadri said in a news release. (HealthDay News)
NEW YORK - Pregnant women who down six coffee cups' worth of caffeine every day may have smaller babies than those who consume less caffeine, a new study finds.
Researchers found that among more than 7,300 Dutch women followed from early pregnancy onward, between 2 and 3 percent said they consumed the caffeine equivalent of six cups of
coffee per day during any trimester. On average, their babies' length at birth was slightly shorter than that of newborns whose mothers had consumed less caffeine during
pregnancy.
Heavy caffeine consumers also had an increased risk of having a baby who was small for gestational age -- smaller than the norm for the baby's sex and the week of pregnancy
during which he or she was born.
That finding, however, was based on a small number of babies, and the significance is uncertain. Of 104 infants born to women with the highest caffeine intakes, seven were
small for gestational age. (Reuters Health)
Health ministers, alarmed at the growing number of obese children, agreed on Thursday to try to reduce children's consumption of junk food and soft drinks by asking member
states to restrict advertising and marketing. (Reuters)
Heinz’s decision to change its ketchup recipe after 40 years is a sign of our health-obsessed, killjoy times.
I have a friend – hang on, I have two friends – for whom everything tastes of tomato ketchup. Not because they suffer from a weird medical condition, but because they drown
every meal they eat in a tsunami of red sauce. For them, thanks to the red stuff, food can always be relied on to taste great – even if it always tastes exactly the same.
When we talk about tomato ketchup, we really mean Heinz Tomato Ketchup. It is far and away the biggest-selling brand, with 60 per cent of the US market. Created in 1876,
ketchup is Heinz’s No.1 selling item. According to the Heinz website: ‘Over 650million bottles of Heinz Tomato Ketchup are sold around the world in more than 140 countries,
with annual sales of more than $1.5billion.’
Yet now, Heinz has announced a change to its long-standing recipe, though this particular change will only affect the US version of the ketchup (Heinz tweaks the recipe for
different markets). It plans to reduce the sodium content – that is, the amount of salt – in its US ketchup by 15 per cent. A spokesperson for Heinz in the US, Jessica
Jackson, told the New York Post that the decision ‘came from the changing needs of our consumers and our commitment to health and wellness’ – which is garbled
public-relations speak for ‘the government was leaning on us to do this and we finally gave in’. (Rob Lyons, spiked)
Scientists are reporting that mercury levels in a popular species of game fish in Lake Erie are increasing after two decades of steady decline. The study, the most
comprehensive to date on mercury levels in Great Lakes fish, is in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal. (ES&T)
I had a quick look at the numbers and definitely advise against anyone eating more than 1,000 pounds/day of these fish (it could be harmful!). Beyond
that... meh!
WASHINGTON — Federal health officials knowingly used flawed data in a study that calmed public fears about lead in the District of Columbia's drinking water in 2004,
according to a congressional investigation released Thursday.
The report by a House science and technology subcommittee admonishes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the study's methodology and says the CDC has
"failed its public health responsibilities" by refusing to withdraw the report.
District officials say the problem with high lead levels in drinking water has since been fixed.
A CDC official defended the federal agency, saying it reported as factually as it could in 2004, based on information it had. A second analysis — with many more blood tests
— was later conducted.
"We have concluded that CDC's initial reports did not understate the magnitude of the problem," said Dr. Robin Ikeda, the CDC's deputy director over environmental
health. (AP)
Federal and local political leaders, D.C. parents and health advocates reacted Thursday with a mixture of anger and fear to news that a federal agency misled them about the
harm that lead in the District's water had caused -- and might still be causing.
The furor came as a House investigative subcommittee released a report showing that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knowingly used flawed data when
telling D.C. residents that their health hadn't been harmed by spikes in lead in the drinking water in 2004. The investigation, the subject of a congressional hearing Thursday,
also disclosed new cause for alarm: Internal CDC research shows that an effort to fix the lead problem since 2004 puts residents in 9,100 D.C. homes at much higher risk of lead
poisoning.
Some city parents, along with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), accused the CDC of engaging in a coverup to shield the water utility and federal regulators from blame. (WaPo)
It's pretty much an irresistible combination -- chocolate and depression -- and everyone from the Boston Globe to the BBC took a bite the other week.
Researchers from two campuses of the University of California released a report that said people who consider themselves depressed eat more chocolate than people who consider
themselves otherwise.
It sounded all learned and scholarly and stuff. Heck, it was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, and any magazine most of us have never laid eyes on must be smart.
As another very wise person from a college on the opposite side of the country points out, though, the report had all the weight and heft of a Kit Kat bar. Like so many of the
health tidbits that wind up in print or on the 11 o'clock news, this one melts in your hand.
Maybe chocolate makes you depressed. Maybe it cures depression. Maybe it ruins your complexion and then you get depressed so you need to buy more chocolate when you stop at
Rite Aid for Clearasil. The only thing you can tell for sure from the report, suggests Rebecca Goldin, is that the people who compiled it don't know diddley-squat about the
candy aisle. (Detroit News)
HONG KONG - Lui Sang, now 81, was diagnosed with leprosy as a boy shortly after his older brother came down with the same infection, notorious for centuries for causing
disfiguring skin lesions and stigma.
Now, patients such as Lui -- who lost his left leg -- may be helping not only in eradicating leprosy but in battling another ancient scourge, tuberculosis. (Reuters)
LONDON - Scientists have found a group of gene variants that increase susceptibility to infectious diseases like tuberculosis and malaria and say the discovery may help in
designing new drugs to tackle several illnesses at once.
Researchers from Britain and Singapore found that several different mutations of a gene called CISH are linked to a higher risk of contracting infectious diseases.
Having just one of these mutations can raise the risk by 18 percent, they said.
"That one small gene can be involved in multiple infectious diseases at a very fundamental level is a rare and unexpected finding," said Judith Swain, director of the
Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, whose researchers worked on the study.
She said the discovery had "far-reaching implications" because it added to scientists' understanding of the mechanisms of infectious disease, which in turn would help
the search for new and more effective medicines.
Although there are drugs available to treat them, malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and bacterial blood infections still kill millions of people around the world.
According to the World Health Organization, malaria and TB combined kill almost 2.7 million people every year. (Reuters)
But neither of them really says much about it. Don’t bother with the articles, just go
buy the book. It’s a compelling, comprehensive case — with more than 100 charts and tables — for the case made in the title, which deserves to be bullet-pointed. It
shows that the state of the world is improving because
Jobs: A Spanish economics professor said attempts by his country to create a green economy would fail. Now a Spanish government report confirms his findings, blunting claims
that the professor's report was biased.
The professor, Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, produced a 41-page study last year on the European experiment of going full bore on the conservation
front. He found that "the Spanish/EU-style 'green jobs' agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs."
For every green job created by the Spanish government, Alvarez found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed elsewhere in the economy because resources were directed politically and not
rationally, as in a market economy.
"The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices," the professor told the
press.
Alvarez's findings, of course, were rejected by the environmental left, which tried to smear him as a stooge of the oil industry.
But inconveniently for the eco-conscious, his results have been backed up by Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia, a couple of researchers from the Italian think tank Istituto
Bruno Leoni.
They found that in Italy, the losses were worse than they were in Spain: Each green job cost 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector and 4.8 jobs across the entire economy.
"Green investments are an ineffective policy for job creation," they say in their report. Despite the other merits of investments in new energy, "to the extent
that the 'green deal' is aimed at creating employment or purported as anti-crisis or stimulus policy, it is a wrong policy choice."
Even more inconvenient for the environmental left is a study by the Spanish government. This leaked document supports the Alvarez report. The green lobby can't claim bias in
this analysis because the Zapatero administration that compiled it is a socialist government that sees windmills when more rational people see dragons. (IBD)
Law: A federal judge has struck a blow for California's water-deprived Central Valley, ruling that draconian federal water cutbacks violate human rights because —
surprise! — people also belong in the ecosystem.
Next time a concept like, say "death panels" from the federal government seems far-fetched, consider the ordeal California's Central Valley has endured for the past
two years.
Based on a judicial ruling, some of the most prized and productive agricultural land in the country was turned into a wasteland after its water was shut off.
The ruling was derived from an 800-page "biological opinion" put out by regulators enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act, ostensibly to protect a
finger-sized fish called the delta smelt and some other wildlife. Regulators complained that smelt were getting ground up in pumping stations that brought river water from
California's north to its south, so the water had to stop.
Even the judge was appalled at being forced into the ruling but had no choice, given the law, and tried to cushion the impact.
Tuesday, that same judge, District Judge Oliver Wanger declared to federal regulators that they must consider the impact of their "draconian" actions on human
communities, something they've never done up until now.
"Federal defendants completely abdicated their responsibility to consider alternative remedies," Wanger wrote.
He also ripped into the environmental regulators for their junk science "guesstimates," stating that their shut-off "lacked factual and scientific justification,
while effectively ignoring the irreparable harm (their regulations) have inflicted on humans and the human environment," according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
It's a landmark ruling that makes a superb use of checks and balances on power, given that up until now, these bureaucrats have never been held accountable for their actions.
It also has a nice symmetry with current laws, given that businesses must examine at great cost the environmental impact of their actions on even the smallest changes to their
businesses for the sake of regulators. Now environmentalists are on notice that they'd better start looking at what they do to communities next time they insist on protecting a
fly or a fish.
It can't happen too soon. The water shut-off has been a nightmare for California. Huge farms growing the world's finest grapes, peaches, almonds, pistachios, plums and walnuts
— as well as cotton, carrots, cantaloupe and the other lush truck crops that come out of California's temperate weather and rich soil — have gone fallow.
Adding insult to injury, water has increasingly been turned into a bargaining chit, with Washington using access to it as political leverage to force local congressmen to vote
for unpopular bills like health care reform.
But the worst part of these decisions is the high human cost. California's communities have suffered terrible disruption, with unemployment as high as 45% in some towns and
farm workers forced to stand in food lines for bags of Chinese-grown carrots near fields they once harvested.
Socialists of all stripes have an awful record on land issues.
From communist China's harsh uprootings of population to build the massive Three Gorges Dam to Hugo Chavez's expropriations of farms in Yaracuy, Venezuela, there are always
great costs from bureaucrats who claim good intentions for their environmental schemes. Even so, it boggles the mind that such disruptions could happen here. But they have.
Fortunately America's democracy, with its separation of powers, has now broken up the environmental regulators' monopoly.
Judge Wanger is a hero for ruling that federal water regulators must consider the impact of their rulings on human communities along with the fish they seek to protect.
Americans' rights have been trampled by out-of-control environmentalism, which at times seems to grant more rights to fish and other creatures than humans.
No community should have to bear the entire brunt of a man-made water shortage because of heartless, ignorant bureaucrats.
The judge's ruling has restored some sanity into what has up until now been an atrocious out-of-control bureaucracy. (IBD)
Why are junkistas and extortionists making Canadian forest policy?
Steve Kallick of the Pew Charitable Trusts — who is reported to have “brokered” this week’s Boreal Forest Agreement — gave a little
“colour” to the Toronto Star about the negotiations. When dining with Avrim Lazar, the head of the Forest Products Association of Canada, Mr. Kallick said he had
been lectured by Mr. Lazar, a vegetarian, over eating a “big sloppy piece of beef.” “It was an ironic twist,” said Mr. Kallick, “being lectured by the head of the
logging association about not being kind to the planet.”
There are a few other ironic, not to mention questionable, twists to this deal, which bans logging for three years in 29 million hectares of Canada’s vast northern
wilderness.
Why was a representative of a giant American foundation sitting down to negotiate Canadian forestry policy? Also, how can a “broker” simultaneously be funding one side
of the “negotiation?” This agreement was dubbed a “ceasefire,” but only one party was ever shooting, and Pew was providing the bullets. Meanwhile surely the biggest
irony is that Pew — which has become a multi-billion dollar fount of junk science-fuelled activism — was set up with money made by the stout free marketers who first
commercialized the Alberta oilsands.
RESIDENTS of coastal properties will be forced to pay special coastal protection levies in threatened areas under legislation proposed by the state government.
The legislation would enable owners of threatened properties to take emergency measures to protect their own properties for the first time, and open the door for councils to
impose coastal protection levies.
The emergency measures include permitting sandbagging where severe erosion results from storms or ''an extreme or irregular event'' or when such beach erosion is imminent. (SMH)
Personally ambivalent about this -- councils already rake off big rates from high-value coastal properties so they've really already priced in the extra
costs of coastal protection measures. Then again, if you live by the sea you accept the risks of so doing...
After years of chemical-free eating, Clive Aslet admits that he has given up organic produce in favour of cheaper, local and even (whisper it) intensively reared food. (TDT)
The Senate will likely vote on a climate change measure in the next few weeks.
But it won't be on comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has until the week of June 7 to call for a floor vote on her resolution to handcuff
U.S. EPA's forthcoming climate regulations.
Many observers see Murkowski's resolution as doomed, in part because it is unlikely to win President Obama's signature if it clears both chambers of Congress or withstands a
veto. But even if it fails, observers say the vote could signal whether the Senate is prepared to quash or kick-start the climate bill from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe
Lieberman (I-Conn.).
"I think everybody's going to be reading the tea leaves on this," said Dan Weiss, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "I think not
only who wins but by how much is important, too."
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) fears that a failed attempt to block EPA could send the wrong signal.
Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and leading skeptic of climate science, has said that he is leaning against calling for a vote
on the EPA resolution unless victory is assured. Otherwise, he said, the backers of Senate climate legislation would interpret the votes against the resolution as votes for a
cap-and-trade bill.
"If for some reason it didn't win, all of a sudden you'd have Barbara Boxer [D-Calif.] and John Kerry saying, 'Everything changes, they've realized the error of their
ways,' and interpret that as those votes are for cap and trade," Inhofe said recently. "Which in fact is not true."
Industry attorney Scott Segal said that even if Murkowski gets fewer than the 51 votes needed under Congressional Review Act procedures, a strong showing of support might make
supporters of the Kerry-Lieberman bill wonder whether they will be able to get the 60 votes needed for that bill.
"If she gets 48 votes, for example, I think that a lot of political analysts might conclude that it may be difficult to find 60 votes to vote for Kerry-Lieberman,"
Segal said.
Murkowski already has 41 co-sponsors, including three Democrats: Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. ( ClimateWire)
The betting in Washington is that the cap-and-trade carbon bill introduced in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut
hasn't got a chance of passing this year. That may explain why public outcry against yet another economy-choking piece of legislation has been fairly muted.
But we're not taking anything for granted, remembering that in January, after Scott Brown scored his stunning victory in the Massachusetts race for the U.S. Senate, the smart
money said that health care reform was dead, too. And look what happened.
This bill ought to be labeled "The Kill Any Hope for Economic Recovery Act." Its negative impact on jobs and economic development in this country will be enormous, as
will be its contribution to job creation and economic growth in China, Brazil and India. What's left of America's manufacturing base will pack up and head for places where
energy is still cheap and environmental regulations are less onerous. You think making cars in Detroit is tough now, watch what happens if the Kerry-Lieberman bill passes.
(Detroit News)
Prof Scott Denning of Colorado State University was one among two de facto AGW believers who accepted the invitation to the Fourth International Conference on Climate
Change.
We kind of know what fellow skeptics would say although some talks were rather innovative. But I found this mainstream guy's comment refreshing, too:
He's very polite, he has learned a a lot, he complains that his colleagues don't attend such meaningful conferences, and he says that paranoia isn't helpful and that
pro-market forces suffer because they're not sufficiently represented among physical scientists which is why physical scientists inevitably give far left-wing recommendations
whenever science intersects with policymaking. Very true.
To compare, check this annoying, boring, lousy, repetitive, frustrating, and dishonest commencement
speech by Al Gore. It's kind of amazing for a university to invite something like that for the commencement festivities.
Via Tom Nelson and Freedom Pub (The Reference Frame)
National Academy of Science study: Ancient times were warmer
The planet has never been warmer than it is right now, if you believe what global warming alarmists have to say. Mankind's selfishness in producing "excessive"
amounts of carbon dioxide has set us on a path toward global cataclysm, they insist. The problem with this tale is that it neither fits with the historical record nor with a
growing body of scientific evidence.
The alarmists must imagine that 50 years before the birth of Christ, men like Julius Caesar spent their summers strolling the streets of Rome wearing sweaters to guard against
catching a chill - instead of abandoning the sweltering capital in favor of temperate seaside villas. A study published in the March 8 edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science casts further doubt on the warmist premise by concluding that the sun beat down more harshly on the Caesars than it did on anyone else in the past
2,000 years.
Instead of using tree rings as a proxy for air temperature, the study's authors extracted data from sea shells preserved in deep sedimentary layers, using them as a proxy for
sea temperature in the North Atlantic over the course of two millennia. According to the study, the "reconstructed water temperatures for the Roman Warm Period in Iceland
are higher than any temperatures recorded in modern times." The heat lasted from approximately 230 B.C. to 140 A.D. After that, temperatures rose and fell over time with a
second peak taking place during the better-known Medieval Warm Period.
The researchers confirmed their temperature estimates against records of human settlement patterns and descriptions found in Norse sagas and other historical writings. People
settled in the region when it was warm; cold spells coincided with descriptions of famine. (Washington Times)
Global warming is all-but irrelevant to the spread of malaria, according
to a study released today in Nature. In contrast, global warming policies based on the belief that global warming promotes malaria are harming efforts to eradicate
malaria.
“Climate change is, in our view, an unwelcome distraction from the main issues,” according to Oxford University’s Peter Gething, the study’s lead researcher. Gething
notes that malaria has been steadily decreasing while global temperatures increased. Instead of focussing on a non-issue, Gething believes, malaria-fighting resources should be
directed to measures needed to maximize the progress in fighting this disease.
Gething’s comments, reported today by the BBC, supports the long-standing views of the Pasteur Institute and other prestigious malaria research bodies, all of whom have
long been critical of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1995 report. This report fostered misinformation that then sent malaria prevention off on a wild
goose chase.
To decide where to intervene to prevent the spread of malaria, researchers use models that predict where their efforts are best focussed. Models based on climate change
redirected disease-prevention efforts away from regions where they were most needed to address the true health needs of Africa. Read
More » (Financial Post)
If
a letter appearing in the May 7, 2010, issue of Science is any indication, it looks like climate science traditionalists are trying to stage a comeback. The article by
P. H. Gleick and a cast of hundreds, entitled “Climate Change and the Integrity of Science,” states that “we are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political
assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular.” Decrying the attacks on climate scientists by “deniers,” the letter reiterates the
signatories' support for dogmatic climate change theory. While admitting that the IPCC “quite unexpectedly and normally, made some mistakes,” they call for an end to
“McCarthy-like threats” against themselves and their colleagues. Painting themselves as victims, they have gone on the offensive—like the evil Empire of Star Wars fame,
climate science is striking back.
Likening climate change to the theories of the origin of Earth, Evolution and the Big Bang, the letter's signatories state: “There is compelling,
comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.” They quickly
play the uncertainty card, repeating the tired better-safe-than-sorry
argument, saying “for a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.” Their song remains the same: we
don't have real proof but we should act anyway, just in case we are right.
A foreshadowing of the letter's credibility was the use of a now famous photoshopped picture of a single polar bear, stranded on a small ice-flow (clicking
on the small picture at the begining of the article will bring up the bogus “collage”). The Science article on-line
contains this correction:
Due to an editorial error, the original image associated with this Letter was not a photograph but a collage. The image was selected by the editors, and it
was a mistake to have used it. The original image has been replaced in the online HTML and PDF versions of the article with an unaltered photograph from National Geographic.
The replacement image, perhaps acknowleding that the ice isn't melting.
Photo: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic/Getty Images.
If only they would admit their larger transgressions so easily. Aside from the pictorial faux pas, the letter itself repeats the same tired old
arguments. And of course, they can not help but call those who question their theory “deniers.” If anyone is in denial it is this group. The central points of the letter
are reproduced below, judge for yourself.
Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests
or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other
scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some
mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about
climate change:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and
deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level
rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v)The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater
ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
These cranky boffins must think that, if they repeat the same lies enough times, everyone will start believing them again. No serious skeptic claims that a
single cold winter reverses the past century's warming trend, though AGW supporters constantly trumpet the warmest this and that. The truth can be seen in the chart below,
produced by NASA's GISS.
Mean global temperature has not changed for over a decade. NASA/GISS.
This graph appeared in “Playing the Uncertainty Card,”
but bears repeating, as does the statement by Mark A. Cane: “Over the past decade, the mean global temperature did not rise much, if at all.” Gleick et al. assert
that Earth's climate is “now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.” Dr. Cane, a distinguished climate scientist from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, seems to
think that nature is doing the overwhelming: “This pause in global warming cannot be attributed to cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions by the planet's human population, so
it must be nature taking a turn towards colder temperatures.”
At the end of the letter, it is claimed that skepticism of anthropogenic global warming has created a hostile environment for climate scientists. These
pedants are amazed that people get upset when they are purposefully lied to, when data are manufactured to prove climate scientists' pre-ordained outcomes, and when leading
experts collude to mislead the public. The same protests have been made by hucksters and confidence men down through the ages.
We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment
of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science
and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good
news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.
Do they really expect everyone to accept their assertions of imminent disaster based on the flimsy, and often falsified, evidence present by the IPCC? Do
they really think that the peoples of the world would accept a crash program to reorganize the economies of every nation without overwhelming proof that significant change was
occurring? These “scientists” not only don't live in the real world, they have abandoned it in favor of perfidious computer models. Immersed in their models' fantasy
worlds, where they can play god with Earth's climate and reassure themselves that their half-formed notions are true.
The signatories are all members of the US National Academy of Sciences but do not claim to be speaking on its behalf. The Academy itself, however, has
embarked on a new course of open advocacy and decided to overtly recommend a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax. “We really need to get
started right away. It's not opinion, it's what the science tells you,” said academy panel vice chairman Robert Fri, prompting Roger
Pielki Jr. to label that statement “the boneheaded comment of the day.”
Pielki uses the term “stealth issue advocate” to describe someone, like Fri, who hides their advocacy behind science. The Gleick et al. letter is
a veritable who's who of stealthy and not so stealthy advocates. Below is the full list of signatories to the Science letter. I propose that, when the notion of
dangerous, human caused global warming is finally put to rest, we raise a monument to scientific folly, with a bronze plaque containing the names of those listed here.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
British tax investigators arrested four more people on Thursday they said were believed to be connected to a 38 million pound ($54.5 million) suspected tax fraud in European
carbon credit trading.
The HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) investigators also found firearms and large amounts of cash during the early morning raids on seven properties in London and Leicester areas,
the agency said in a statement.
"These arrests are the result of the hard work that our investigators have carried out during a sustained and complex 15 month operation," said Chris Martin, an
assistant director at the HMRC. (Reuters)
Jovian factories and SUV’s caused the giant planet to lose a red ring, the activist group Climate Camp is tearing itself apart over a Bolivian blowout and a Canuck paper
says that 75% of the global population will be dead in 19 months. (Daily Bayonet)
It’s like watching the lights go out over the West. Sinan Unur has mapped the surface stations into a
beautiful animation. His is 4 minutes long and spans from 1701-2010. I’ve taken some of his snapshots and strung them into a 10 second animation.
You can see as development spreads across the world that more and more places are reporting temperatures. It’s obvious how well documented temperatures were (once) in the
US. The decay of the system in the last 20 years is stark.
For details on just how sinister the vanishing of data records is, see my previous post on Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo’s extraordinary summary of Policy
Driven Deception.
The Great Dying of Thermometers
…
I’m sure one day the chronological spread (and decay) of thermometers will be a useful marker for some socio/economic/historic marker (though it’s hard to put my finger
on exactly what). This is not a measure of population growth — some of those dots in Australia 100 years ago are just stations (as in big farms). It’s not just “money”
(Europe booms post WWII), it’s not measuring the spread of “English” though English speaking countries are well represented, Japan suddenly comes “online” in
about 1880. What was it exactly, that swept countries up with the idea and the wherewithal to measure temperatures and record them?
The full 4 minute animation is (below), it’s a twinkling silent testament to human endeavor. You can also rate it on Youtube,
or go to Sinan’s site and leave a comment there to say thanks. More
» (Jo Nova)
Just an update…as the following graph shows, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the equatorial Pacific (“Nino3.4″ region, red lines) have been plunging, and global
average SSTs have turned the corner, too. (Click on the image for the full-size, undistorted version. Note the global values have been multiplied by 10 for display purposes.)
The corresponding sea level pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin (SOI index, next graph) shows a rapid transition toward La Nina conditions is developing.
Being a believer in natural, internal cycles in the climate system, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that global-average SSTs will plunge over the next couple of
months. Based upon past experience, it will take a month or two for our (UAH) tropospheric temperatures to then follow suit. (Roy W. Spencer)
We are fortunate to have a guest post by Will Alexander (see his earlier one here).
WJR (Will) Alexander is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Honorary Fellow of the South African
Institution of Civil Engineering. He spent the past 35 years of his career actively involved in the development of water resource and flood analysis methods as well as in
natural disaster mitigation studies. His interest in climate change arose from claims that it would have an adverse effect in these fields. In his subsequent studies of very
large hydrometeorological data sets he was unable to detect any adverse human-related changes. He has written more than 200 papers, presentations and books on these subjects. [alexwjr@iafrica.com]
GUEST POST By Will Alexander (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
A proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean as early as this summer received initial permits from the Minerals Management Service office in Alaska at the same time
federal auditors were questioning the office about its environmental review process.
The approvals also came after many of the agency’s most experienced scientists had left, frustrated that their concerns over environmental threats from drilling had been
ignored.
Minerals Management has faced intense scrutiny in the weeks since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An article in The New York Times reported that it failed to get some
environmental permits to approve drilling in the gulf and ignored objections from scientists to keep those projects on schedule.
Similar concerns are being raised about the agency’s handling of a plan by Shell Oil to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. (NYT)
Large amounts of solar and wind power could be added to the western U.S. power grid without significant spending if utilities make operational changes, the U.S. Department
of Energy said on Thursday.
The DOE report, conducted by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) over a 3-year period, focused on how the WestConnect power grid would respond if 35 percent of its
electricity was generated by renewable sources.
The results, researchers said, were surprising.
"You need to make some significant changes to operational practice to accommodate wind and solar, but you don't need a whole lot of additional infrastructure to handle
that," said Debbie Lew, a senior project manager at NREL.
Wind and solar power together make up less than 3 percent of the total U.S. power generation, but both are growing rapidly amid a range of state and federal incentives.
(Reuters)
May 20 -- As Europe grapples with the fallout from Greece’s economic woes, at least one unexpected corner of the economy is suffering: renewable energy companies.
That’s because few wind, solar, and other green power installations would be profitable without subsidies, and as governments across Europe curb spending in response to the
Greek crisis, those funds are being cut back, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 24 issue.
“The uncertainty in Europe is a further burden in a market that is still challenging,” said Kathleen McGinty, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton’s administration
who now helps manage $800 million in clean-energy investments as a partner at private equity firm Element Partners in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
The aid to renewable energy, paid by consumers in their power bills, is being slashed by governments that want to cut costs for businesses to boost economic growth and generate
tax revenue as bond investors scrutinize their plans to rein in budget deficits as much as three times the European Union limit. (Bloomberg)
40 years go, when there were credible fears we could "run out" of energy and a fresh naivety that "alternatives" could supply baseload
power, there was a case to be made for nurturing/sheltering these upstart technologies. Now we know better, so why is taxpayer money still being squandered on these useless
schemes?
Recently in the Wall Street Journal, David Ranson pointed out what tax
economists have known for a long time: no matter what changes Congress makes to the existing tax code, it will continue to raise the same amount of revenue as a percentage
of GDP year-after-year. Ranson writes:
Despite big changes in marginal tax rates in both directions,”Hauser’s Law,” as I call this formula, reveals a kind of capacity ceiling for federal tax receipts at
about 19% of GDP.
The income tax is the predominant revenue raiser for the federal government, and fluctuations
in the revenue it collects have the biggest effect on the total change in tax collections year-to-year. Over the course of its history the top rate has been as high
as 91 percent and as low as 28 percent. Even with such large variations in top rates, the income tax has raised a remarkably consistent amount of revenue as the chart
shows. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
When Britain’s new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, walked into his office last week, he found a letter from his predecessor, Liam Byrne. Laws assumed it
contained useful advice.
But when he opened the envelope, he found that the letter – which he characterized as “honest but slightly less helpful” than he had expected – had only a single
line:
Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.
And so there isn’t. Americans don’t realize just how bad Britain’s situation is. True, Britain’s not in the Euro, which is a huge help. But Britain’s got a larger
structural deficit – in other words, the deficit after you factor out the effects of the recession – than Greece, and its borrowing one pound for every four it spends. It
will take years for Britain to recover from the pain New Labour has inflicted. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
Trade critics charge that free trade damages U.S. firms and workers. It’s true that individuals can experience trade-related job loss. Balanced against that,
however, must be the overall gains in U.S. employment and productivity that stem from an open trading environment. Indeed, free
trade fosters economic efficiency, which is the basis for dynamic growth and job creation.
In a recent report entitled “Opening
Markets, Creating Jobs: Estimated U.S. Employment Effects of Trade with FTA Partners,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce points out that more than 17 million American jobs
depend on trade with U.S. FTA partners, and in 2008 alone, over five million jobs were created by the boost in trade unleashed by the FTAs. Chamber President and CEO Tom
Donohue appropriately
remarked, “I defy anyone in town to name another budget-neutral government initiative that has generated anything like this number of jobs.” Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
“It is the exquisite communion between the interior landscape of the body and the exterior,” Sandra Steingraber says, barely panting, as we pad down the streets of the
Oakwood neighbourhood side by side. She is talking about scenes from the new documentary Living Downstream, based on her book of the same title.
But she could be speaking about running, which she does in every city she drops into to give yet another speech about the soup of industrial chemicals we bob in and how it is
killing us. (Toronto Star)
The first lunatic did more than enough damage the first time round, thanks very much. Haven't dimwitted green chemophobes killed enough people with their
superstitious crap?
GENEVA, May 19 - Production and sale of counterfeit drugs is on the rise in rich and poor countries, with more unwary consumers buying them over the Internet, experts warned
on Wednesday.
Fake or substandard versions of medicines are often hidden in cargos taking circuitous routes to mask their country of origin as part of criminal activity worth billions, they
add.
"They put people at risk of harm from medical products that may contain too much, too little, or the wrong active ingredient and/or contain toxic ingredients," said
Margaret Hamburg, head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
"Counterfeiting is growing in complexity, scale and geographic scope," she said in a speech to the annual ministerial meeting of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
(Reuters)
LONDON - Patients whose doctors over-prescribe antibiotics may develop drug resistance that lasts up to a year, putting them and the population at risk when more serious
treatment is needed, scientists said on Wednesday.
The more antibiotics are prescribed for coughs and flu-like illnesses, or urine infections, the more bacteria become resistant in a vicious cycle, said British researchers who
analysed 24 previous studies of antibiotic resistance.
"The effect is greatest in the month immediately after treatment, but may last for up to a year, and this residual effect may be a driver for high levels of resistance in
the community," said Alastair Hay, a consultant senior lecturer in primary health care at Bristol University, who led the research.
Medical experts say overuse of antibiotics in Europe, the United States and other wealthy regions is building widespread resistance in and threatening vital medical treatments
from hip replacements and cancer therapies, to intensive care.
Hay said his study showed how individual resistance was building up, and how that then translated into community- or population-wide problems. (Reuters)
HONG KONG, May 20 - A common bacteria found in the human nose and on skin which can cause diseases like meningitis and pneumonia can be destroyed by another bacteria found
in the nasal passage, researchers have found.
The discovery may help experts find new ways to control the Staphylococcus areus (S. aureus) bacteria, which has become more threatening in recent years because it has grown
resistant to many powerful antibiotics. (Reuters)
Breathing polluted air increases stress on the heart's regulation capacity, up to six hours after inhalation of combustion-related small particles called PM2.5, according to
Penn State College of Medicine researchers. (Penn State)
LONDON, May 19 - People who drink moderate amounts of alcohol have better health on average than those who are teetotalers, French scientists said on Wednesday.
Researchers found that most of the health benefits in drinkers were not a direct result of the alcohol, but due to indirect links such as being less stressed, engaging in more
physical activity and enjoying a better social status.
"Moderate alcohol intake is a powerful marker of a higher social level, superior general health status and lower cardiovascular risk," said Boris Hansel, of the
Hospital of Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris, who led the study.
He stressed, however, that the study did not show any causal links, and should not be used as evidence to promote alcohol. (Reuters Life!)
It's clear that the simple fact of growing older -- chronological ageing -- is relentless and unstoppable. But experts studying the science of ageing say it's time for a fresh
look at the biological process -- one which recognises it as a condition that can be manipulated, treated and delayed.
Taking this new approach would turn the search for drugs to fight age-related diseases on its head, they say, and could speed the path to market of drugs that treat multiple
illnesses like diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer's at the same time.
"If ageing is seen as a disease, it changes how we respond to it. For example, it becomes the duty of doctors to treat it," said David Gems, a biogerontologist who
spoke at a conference on ageing in London last week called "Turning Back the Clock".
At the moment, drug companies and scientists keen to develop their research on ageing into tangible results are hampered by regulators in the United States and Europe who will
licence medicines only for specific diseases, not for something as general as ageing. (Reuters)
The United States does not produce or import anywhere near enough fruits and vegetables to provide Americans the right kind of diet to prevent cancer, government researchers
said on Wednesday. (Reuters)
Gov. David A. Paterson is considering a new strategy in his effort to pass a soda tax, hoping to win over reluctant lawmakers and the beverage industry by pairing the
proposal with a state sales tax exemption on diet sodas and bottled water.
When put into full effect, the original penny-per-ounce tax on sugary sodas was supposed to garner $1 billion a year, an important sum for a state anxiously trying to close a
multibillion-dollar shortfall. But since the Senate and Assembly have been firmly opposed to a soda tax, administration officials seem willing to settle for the $815 million a
year they estimate the new proposal, with its exemption for diet drinks, would bring in. (NYT)
WASHINGTON, May 19 - A popular diet that eliminates wheat and milk protein does not appear to help children with autism, but early behavioral treatments do, researchers
reported on Wednesday.
The findings are sure to disappoint many parents who have been trying to manage autism, which affects as many as 1 in 100 U.S. children.
"It would have been wonderful for children with autism and their families if we found that the gluten-free, casein-free diet could really help, but this small study didn't
show significant benefits," said Dr. Susan Hyman of the University of Rochester in New York, who led the study.
Gluten is the protein found in wheat, rye and other grains, while casein is a milk protein.
"The removal of gluten and casein from the diet of a controlled group of young children with autism, all of whom were screened for celiac disease ... did not demonstrate a
change in sleep habits, bowel habits, activity or core symptoms of autism," Hyman said.
Autism includes a range of conditions, from the social awkwardness seen in Asperger's syndrome to profound and severe disabilities. There is no cure and little information
about treatments that work. (Reuters)
"Commercialized" science distorts science, writes the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) on the webpage of its "Integrity in Science"
project. The very name of the project suggests that such science somehow inherently lacks integrity.
Attacks like these on industry-funded science are often cloaked in a call for simply more disclosure of the source of funding for a given study. And who could be against more
disclosure?
The problem is that the only type of disclosure in vogue these days is that which comes from industry science. And for many people, that’s just fine; as the folks at CSPI
surely know, simply reporting that science is funded by industry – even when there is no impropriety – undermines the credibility of the findings. It harms our
understanding of science, and even deters industry from funding much-needed research, since business leaders know the credibility of anything they fund will be received with
suspicion.
The media eagerly comply with CSPI's suggestion that they "routinely ask scientists and others about their possible conflicts of interests and to provide this information
to the public."
But if the source of funding really does suggest the possibility of bias, the "disclosure" advocates aren't giving us the whole story. They are focused only on one
type of funding – one type of potential for bias. But disclosure can’t be selective.
Take last week's Institute of Medicine (IOM) report that called for giving the FDA greater regulatory authority over dietary supplements. The recommendation may be a wise one,
but the media failed to take note of the fact that the report was sponsored by the FDA, even though the IOM's own press release made that plain Yes, the FDA funded a study that
calls for giving the FDA more authority … and the media, which widely touted the report, failed to point out this obvious conflict. (Jeff Stier, Townhall)
The nutritional benefits of organic foods have been called into question by some very discerning diners – wild garden birds trying to survive the winter.
British researchers found that birds such as robins and house sparrows "instinctively" preferred non-organic seeds to the more naturally grown varieties as it
appeared to provide them with greater nutritional value through the cold months.
When offered both varieties of wheat seed, they were able to discern between the two and ate up to 20 per cent more of the conventional grown variety than the organic. (TDT)
Bottom line? Unlike people birds are not superstitious and so choose optimal return from foraging effort.
WASHINGTON — The farm herbicide atrazine, used widely worldwide, has been shown to affect reproduction in fish, according to a US government study released Wednesday.
"Concentrations of atrazine commonly found in agricultural streams and rivers caused reduced reproduction and spawning, as well as tissue abnormalities in laboratory
studies with fish," said Donald Tillitt, lead author of the US Geological Survey study published in Aquatic Toxicology. (AFP)
I wonder how applicable this lab tank study is to the real world?
“We’re trying to minimize the package,” [Sen. John] Kerry said yesterday of the 987-page
bill. “We’re trying to keep it simple. We’re trying to keep it transparent and open and understandable for why
something took place.”
- Darren Samuelsohn, “Kerry-Lieberman Bill Uses ‘Fewer Buckets’ in Giving Out Highly Prized Allowances,” E&E News, May
14, 2010.
“One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.”
The late postmodern philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) would find intellectual kinship in the political debates about climate and energy coming from the party
in power. If alive today, Derrida would nod approvingly at Senator John Kerry’s above I-say-it, it-is-true inversion of reality. It ranks right up there with Ken Lay
and Jeff Skilling telling the world after the Enron collapse that Enron was a great company.
But if Enron’s executives were neither incompetent nor crooked, what brought Enron down? I believe it was a culture of corporate values
rooted in postmodernism. These were not your grandfather’s businessmen.
Montana utilities and environmentalists are giving a cool reception to what appears to be the U.S. Senate’s main global-warming bill.
Rural electric cooperatives worry that their consumers will bear the financial burden of pollution caps placed on coal-fired power plants under the Senate’s American Power
Act, similar to an earlier global-warming bill by House Democrats.
Environmental groups say they, too, were hoping for something different from the Senate, namely more rewards for conservation-minded Montana consumers and more incentives for
developing renewable energy sources. (Billings Gazette)
WASHINGTON -- As part of its most comprehensive study of climate change to date, the National Research Council today issued three reports emphasizing why the U.S. should act
now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change. The reports by the Research Council, the operating
arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, are part of a congressionally requested suite of five studies known as AMERICA'S CLIMATE CHOICES.
"These reports show that the state of climate change science is strong," said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. "But the nation
also needs the scientific community to expand upon its understanding of why climate change is happening, and focus also on when and where the most severe impacts will occur and
what we can do to respond." (NAS)
No one on the planet can accurately determine what temperature the planet "should be" and so we have no way of telling whether it is currently
warming or simply recovering from being too cool. If Cicerone actually believes we understand climate and its drivers he should be booted as a dangerously ignorant dill.
Since we don't think of Ralph as being particularly stupid the alternative is that he is simply empire-building -- a common thing in what passes for research today but no
more acceptable.
The America's Climate Choices suite of studies will include two additional reports that will be released later this year: Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related
to Climate Change will examine how to best provide decision makers information on climate change, and a final overarching report, America's Climate Choices, will
build on each of the previous reports to offer a scientific framework for shaping the policy choices underlying the nation's efforts to confront climate change.
If your organization has an important forum or event where you'd like to hear more about the America's Climate Choices studies from the reports' authors, please contact Nancy
Huddleston at 202-334-1260.
For media inquiries, email the National Academies' Office of News and Public Information at news@nas.edu or call 202-334-2138.
Writing for AP, Seth Borenstein says that the US National Academy of
Sciences has embarked o0n a new course of open advocacy and decided to overtly recommend a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax, which he associates with specific legislation
being considered in Congress:
Ditching its past cautious tone, the nation's top scientists urged the government Wednesday to take drastic action to raise the cost of using coal and oil to slow global
warming.
The National Academy of Sciences specifically called for a carbon tax on fossil fuels or a cap-and-trade system for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, calling global
warming an urgent threat.
The academy, which advises the government on scientific matters, said the nation needs to cut the pollution that causes global warming by about 57 percent to 83 percent by
2050. That's close to President Barack Obama's goal. . .
In the past, the academy has called climate change a problem, but it has never recommended a specific policy. The impetus for its bolder stance now was a set of questions
posed by Congress on climate change and how to deal with it.
The cap-and-trade idea, which is supported by the Obama administration, has been proposed for several years in Congress but never passed the Senate. It would set overall
limits on carbon dioxide pollution, but would allow companies to pollute more by paying for it and buying pollution credits from cleaner companies.
Last year, the House approved a cap-and-trade bill, but it stalled in the Senate as health care legislation took center stage. A new version, that doesn't use the
cap-and-trade phrase but has similar characteristics, was introduced last week.
In what probably qualifies as the boneheaded comment of the day, the panel co-chair says that it is science that is telling us to act, not anyone's opinions (emphasis added):
"We really need to get started right away. It's not opinion, it's what the science tells you," said academy panel vice
chairman Robert Fri, who was acting Environmental Protection Agency chief under President Richard Nixon. "The country needs both a prompt and a sustained commitment to
reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
By contrast Andy Revkin sees not much new in terms of advocacy in the report, or
in its discussion of policy options:
The Academies, the country’s preeminent scientific advisory body, have issued strings of reports on global warming over the decades. In 1991, the language was already
strong and urgent, noting that the risks were sufficient to justify action even with substantial unanswered questions: “Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming
is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now.”
Revkin also finds no clear linkage with Obama Administration policies or those currently being debated in Congress:
The report on “Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change” lays out what would be required to drive an energy revolution in the United States —
greatly cutting output of greenhouse gases while sustaining economic well being. It’s a familiar mix of finding ways to add a price to pollution, moving forward with
standards and policies that fulfill the huge potential for cutting energy waste and also invigorating the innovation
pipeline by greatly boosting investment — public and private — in research
and development and the other steps required to generate insights and turn them into new and widely disseminated technologies.
It does not expressly endorse a “cap
and trade” approach as opposed to a carbon tax but does recommend creating an overall “budget” for greenhouse gas emissions over a stretch of decades that
can lead to a clear, directly measurable goal.
Who has got this right Borenstein or Revkin? Obviously, somebody is spinning madly. (Roger Pielke Jr)
The Council of the American Physical Society (APS) has adopted on April 18, 2010 a "Climate Change Commentary" to append to their definitive and
"incontrovertible" 2007 policy statement on climate change. The commentary allows considerable backpedaling from the prior policy while appearing to save
face. The commentary removes the word incontrovertible because such words are "rarely used in science because by its very nature science questions prevailing ideas."
The statement "While there are factors driving the natural variability of climate (e.g., volcanoes, solar variability, oceanic oscillations), no known natural
mechanisms have been proposed that explain all of the observed warming in the past century." is added, and while not true since there are a number of papers
which show that ocean oscillations and solar variability can explain all of the 0.7 degree warming of the past century, it is a step in the right direction from the 2007 policy
which makes no mention of natural forcing and blames climate change on man-made emissions of CO2. (Hockey Schtick)
Even though the Constitution does not include the words "separation of church and state," liberals have long treated that concept as a hallowed fundamental
doctrine of constitutional law. But no more. With the recent introduction of new Senate cap and trade legislation, ultraliberal supporters Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Nancy
Pelosi, Barack Obama and others have now completely abandoned that doctrine in their quest to establish global warming dogma as the official, established religion of the United
States.
Under that legislation, everyone in America will be forced to tithe to the new religion through higher prices for electricity, gasoline, natural gas, coal, home heating oil,
jet fuel, food (especially meat), and every product produced or transported with such energy sources. Indeed, prices will soar high enough to reduce fossil fuel use and the
resulting carbon dioxide emissions back to the per capita levels of 1870! (Peter Ferrara, American Spectator)
A row over academic freedom has broken out in the US over a state attorney general's demands that a university release documents relating to research-grant applications.
Ken Cuccinelli, attorney general of Virginia, issued a "civil investigative demand" to the University of Virginia last month demanding documents relating to grants
obtained by climate scientist Michael Mann.
Mr Cuccinelli is investigating possible violations of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act in relation to five research grants obtained by Professor Mann, who left Virginia
in 2005 and is now based at Pennsylvania State University.
In defence of the move, Brian Gottstein, Mr Cuccinelli's spokesman, cited the controversy caused by the distribution of documents that were leaked or stolen from the Climatic
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia last year.
"Climategate indicates that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions," he said.
"The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. The only prudent thing to do was to look into it." (THE)
The Weather: A state attorney general is challenging the creator of the global warming hockey stick graph, and the researcher's allies are yelping about intimidation. But
who are the real academic bullies? (IBD)
The leftwing-activist Union of Concerned Scientists may have done more harm than good to its favored cause, global warming. It released a letter
signed by 800 Virginia scientists urging the state's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, to drop his taxpayer
fraud investigation directed at the University of Virginia's records of Climategate figure Michael Mann.
Cuccinelli, who received a Bachelors of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia, is showing no signs of favoritism to his alma mater.
The scientists' letter is long on drama, and devoid of substance. Its gist is that the laws of the universe -- or at least the civil laws of Virginia -- should not apply to
scientists because . . . well, because they are scientists. The letter reads in part:
Science thrives on rigorous debate and a frank exchange of differing ideas and perspectives. The freedom of scientists to openly disagree and discuss critical scientific
topics has brought Virginia and the United States prosperity and global leadership in science. Research shows that scientific discovery is held back when government officials
harass scientists.
Of course, public policy, religion, economics, indeed all areas of thought, conscience and prosperity, also thrive on rigorous debate and frank exchange.
Earth to scientists: government officials have been harassing people without PhDs for a long time.
The Virginia investigation, however, isn't about probing science's boundaries or honest mistakes; it is about whether Professor Mann intentionally misrepresented or omitted
material facts to procure a taxpayer grant. The standards of the law are higher than those of science in this matter. Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment, and is not
an academic liberty.
As Dr. S. Fred Singer wrote, "ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness
and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud." Ironically for the UCS, its letter to Cuccinelli supports Dr. Singer's observation far more
than refutes it. (American Thinker)
Four days after Senate Democrats introduced a new bill to limit carbon emissions, an international conference discussing the scientific holes in the theory of man-made
global warming began in Chicago.
Despite the attendance of hundreds of scientists from across the globe, as well as polls finding Americans becoming less and less convinced that man has anything to do with the
warming trend the planet has experienced since 1850, our nation's media couldn't care less.
The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change included such renowned scientists as MIT's Richard Lindzen, University of Virginia's S. Fred Singer, and former NASA
astronaut and Senator Harrison Schmitt.
The event kicked off Sunday evening with a detailed discussion of the facts surrounding last year's ClimateGate scandal by Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre (videos in three
parts follow with commentary): (NewsBusters)
Growing numbers of firms are linking executive remuneration to environmental performance – Andrew Williams investigates those companies pioneering the concept of carbon
bonuses (Andrew Williams for BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network)
So, shut down the business and max out on carbon bonuses? Idiots.
The European recession last year slashed more than 11 percent off climate-warming emissions from heavy industry, the European Union's executive said on Tuesday.
The EU said carbon dioxide emissions from more than 12,600 installations regulated by its Emissions Trading Scheme fell by 11.6 percent to 1.873 billion tonnes.
The decrease was also helped by low prices encouraging greater use of natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than the coal it replaced to generate electricity.
"Because of the crisis it suddenly became easier to reduce emissions," European climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in a statement. (Reuters)
A study published today in the journal Nature casts doubt on the widely held notion that warming global temperatures will lead to a future intensification of malaria and an
expansion of its global range.
The research, conducted by the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP), a multinational team of researchers funded mainly by the Wellcome Trust, suggests that current interventions could
have a far more dramatic – and positive – effect on reducing the spread of malaria than any negative effects caused by climate change.
A steady stream of modelling studies have predicted that malaria will worsen and its range will spread as the world gets warmer. Malaria already kills more than a million
people each year, mainly young children and pregnant women, with some 2.4 billion people at risk from its most deadly form.
Last year the Malaria Atlas Project produced a new map of modern-day malaria risk, giving researchers a unique opportunity to examine the effects that climate change may have
had on the disease.
The new research compared this modern-day map with a historic reconstruction of malaria at its assumed peak, around 1900, and measured changes in the disease risk since that
time. Although it is widely known that malaria has receded from many areas where it was previously endemic, such as the United States and much of Europe, the researchers were
able to measure for the first time the extent of this recession and show that even in tropical areas the intensity of transmission has declined substantially this century. (Wellcome
Trust)
Indur Goklany was involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as an author, U.S. delegate and reviewer since before its inception. His focuses are climate
change and economic development, among others, and his presentation at Heartland’s
4th International Climate Change Conference on global warming and mortality was one of the standout presentations in the entire conference. His talk establishes the
long-standing fact that cold kills more than warmth and that global warming policies cost more lives than global warming itself. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
Solar scientists worldwide are working to disprove the hypothesis that man is primarily responsible for climate change, according to Dr. Jeff Kuhn, Associate Director of the
Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. In the view of Dr. Kuhn and other top scientists, the Sun changes Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data,
I simply can’t accept (the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate),” he states.
Dr. Kuhn last week announced breakthrough research on the role of the Sun – after years of precise satellite measurements, undistorted by Earth’s stratosphere, he and
his team discovered that the Sun did not change much in size, as has generally been believed. Rather, the Sun is surprisingly stable, its diameter changing by less than one
part in a million during the last 12 years.
Dr. Kuhn’s team, which includes scientists from Stanford University in California and Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa in Brazil, used NASA’s SOHO satellite
to obtain resolutions 10 times better than telescopes on Earth, allowing them to measure the Sun’s diameter of approximately 865,000 miles to an accuracy of a few hundred
feet. In 2017, when the world’s most powerful telescope — his institute’s Advanced Technology Solar Telescope – starts operating on Hawaii’s Mt.
Haleakala’s summit at a resolution 10 times better still, he expects to zero in on details that unravel the mystery of how minute changes on the Sun’s surface affect
climate on Earth. NASA’s SOHO satellite revealed that 100 metre high bumps 90,000 kilometres apart cover the Sun’s surface. With his new telescope, Dr. Kuhn expects to
capture never-before-seen details of the solar surface.
“We can’t predict the climate on Earth until we understand these changes on the sun,” concludes Kuhn.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and
author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, a scientist who has written more than 150 peer-reviewed papers has unveiled evidence
for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon. (Gene J. Koprowski, FOXNews.com)
A Trend is a trend But when will it end? Will it reach for the sky Or burn up and die Or will it just go round the bend? Whitehall doggerel
The CSIRO paper “State of the Climate” is as much a commentary on the state of the climate scientists who put the document together. The CSIRO has waded into a large
government funded trough and is not inclined to publish anything that gets between it and the trough. (Quadrant)
The world's oceans are warming up and the rise is both significant and real, according to one of the most comprehensive studies into marine temperature data gathered over
the past two decades. (The Independent)
We're only just beginning to get a handle on ocean heat content with deployment of the Argo floats completed in
2007 with earlier records dreadfully sparse and less than reliable. Recent figures show a slight cooling:
Despite alarmist claims* to the contrary, according to both tide gauge and satellite altimetry data, the rate of sea level rise since 1900 (and over the past 6000 years
according to paleologic data) has been decelerating, not accelerating. Carefully selected tide gauge data by Simon Holgate of the UK Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory is
shown in his poster
below, which notes that the rate of sea level rise decelerated in the second half of the 20th century (despite exponential increases in CO2 emissions):
Furthermore, the rate of sea level rise as determined by satellite altimetry (which is only available since 1992 and is calibrated
to tide gauges) has also decelerated over the past 5 years from 3.2
mm/yr to only 1.5 mm/yr, about the same rate as calculated by Holgate for the period 1954-2003. Paleologic data also indicate sea level rise has greatly
decelerated over the past 6000 years, and that sea levels have been rising
naturally since the last ice age.
Al Gore apparently doesn't need to be concerned about his purchases of a $4.5 million condo and
$8.8 million villa, both near
the Pacific ocean.
*The recent NAS letter states that man-made global warming is causing
"climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle."
(Hockey Schtick)
CHICAGO -- Global warming advocates say rising sea levels will soon drown Venice. But a top scientist says they're full of hot air -- and he says he’s got the data to
prove it.
In a new scientific paper, Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, says that observational
records from around the world -- locations like the Maldives, Bangladesh, India, Tuvalu and Vanuatu -- show the sea level isn't rising at all.
Morner's research, revealed Monday at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, demonstrates that there is no “alarming sea level rise” across the globe, and
it says a U.N. report warning of coastal cities being deluged by rising waters from melting polar ice caps “is utterly wrong.” (Gene J. Koprowski, FOXNews.com)
From CO2 Science Volume 13 Number 20: 19 May 2010
Editorial: The Response of Tundra Vegetation to High Arctic Warming: Has it been positive or negative over the past
quarter-century of what climate alarmists describe as a period of unprecedented global warming, especially in the Arctic?
Subject Index Summary: Roots (Grasses): How might the roots of various species of grass respond to further global warming
and continued increases in the air's CO2 content?
Plant Growth Database:
Our latest results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
are: European Beech (Fleischmann et al., 2010), Quaking
Aspen (Darbah et al., 2010), and Rice (Li et al., 2010).
Medieval
Warm Period Project:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 831
individual scientists from 494 separate research institutions in 43
different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record comes from Southwestern
Tver Province, Russia. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here. (co2science.org)
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Tuesday the U.S. government was investigating another big BP oil rig while admitting his agency came up short in preventing the
massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Salazar testified at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing about the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, BP Plc a drilling rig, four weeks ago that caused a
massive oil spill deep in the Gulf. He said offshore drilling was vital to meeting U.S. energy needs but that additional safety measures were required.
Salazar told the committee the government was now investigating safety concerns at BP's Atlantis oil production platform in the Gulf after the April 20 explosion on the
Deepwater Horizon killed 11 people and spilled vast amounts of crude. (Reuters)
The U.S. Minerals Management Service, which grants offshore drilling permits, set aside safety regulations for oil exploration in parts of the Gulf of Mexico, environmental
groups alleged in a lawsuit on Tuesday.In a 2008 notice to oil companies with drilling leases off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- areas now threatened by
the spill from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig -- the agency known as MMS waived requirements for documentation on what would be done in case of a blowout or a "worst-case
scenario" spill, the lawsuit said.
The suit, filed on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Gulf Restoration Network by the environmental law firm Earthjustice, comes on the heels of more than 100 other lawsuits
spawned by the spill. This federal suit seeks to reverse what it called an illegal waiver of safety regulations. The waiver was granted in 2008 and extends through 2013,
according to a copy of the MMS notice to the oil firms obtained by Earthjustice. (Reuters)
CONKLIN, Alberta — Beneath the subarctic forests of western Canada, deep under the peat bogs and herds of wild caribou, lies the tarry rock that is one of America’s top
sources of imported oil.
There is no chance of a rig blowout here, or a deepwater oil spill like the one from the BP well that is now fouling the Gulf of Mexico. But the oil extracted from Canada’s
oil sands poses other environmental challenges, like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.
In addition, critics warn that American regulators have waived a longstanding safety standard for the pipelines that deliver the synthetic crude oil from Canada to refineries
in the United States and have not required any specific emergency plans to deal with a spill, which even regulators acknowledge is a possibility.
Oil sands are now getting more scrutiny as the Obama administration reviews a Canadian company’s request to build a new 2,000-mile underground pipeline that would run from
Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast and would significantly increase America’s access to the oil. In making the decision, due this fall, federal officials are weighing the
environmental concerns against the need to secure a reliable supply of oil to help satisfy the nation’s insatiable thirst.
The gulf accident adds yet another layer of complexity. Regulators and Congress are weighing new limits on drilling off the coastline after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,
increasing the pressure to rely more heavily on Canada’s oil sands. At the same time, political consciousness of the risks has grown.
Canadian oil sands are expected to become America’s top source of imported oil this year, surpassing conventional Canadian oil imports and roughly equaling the combined
imports from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. (NYT)
A new generation of offshore wind and tidal farms could produce £14 billion of electricity every year for Scotland but pose a “significant” threat to wildlife, the
fishing industry and islanders’ ferries, an official report has warned. (TDT)
David Cameron, Britain’s new prime minister, may have succeeded in bridging his country’s political power gap, but another looms that could very quickly short-circuit
the Tory leader’s grip on national power, unless his coalition government gets real, and quickly, over energy and environment. [Read
More] (Peter C Glover, Energy Tribune)
No one ever needed government regulations or subsidies to want to become more efficient.
David Cameron last week renewed his promise to cut the U.K. government's carbon emissions by 10% in the next 12 months, and is now taking suggestions on how to achieve that.
Here's a thought: How about cutting the central government itself by 10%? That's about the only way the new Prime Minister can simultaneously reduce government emissions and
the cost of government.
If, on the other hand, the government's plans for shrinking its emissions involve similar measures as its plans to "green" the private sector, Mr. Cameron might ask
himself whether, with a budget deficit of 12% of GDP, he can afford this particular boondoggle. (WSJE)
The future of the British motor industry and renewable energy in the UK is at stake as the new Government combs over the billions committed by Labour to supporting UK
companies. (The Times)
A large but limited amount of land can be used to provide plant-based fuel without cutting the world's food supply, environmentalists and consultants told a global biofuels
gathering on Wednesday.
Governments around the world have promoted biofuels in order to cut greenhouse emissions and their dependence on fossil fuels, as well as prevent pollution. (Reuters)
That would be wildlife habitat -- land not plowed down for food production then?
All new buildings constructed in Europe after 2020 will have to be virtually carbon-neutral after the European Parliament gave new energy standards the last approval they
needed Tuesday.
The standards are expected to have a significant long-term impact on the EU's bills for gas imports for heating from Russia, Norway and Algeria, worth tens of billions of euros
each year.
The European Union's mandate for "nearly zero-energy buildings" will kick in for all new public buildings in the European Union after 2018, and for all new homes and
offices two years later.
Environmentalists gave the standards a guarded welcome, but said they would take effect too late and would do little to encourage the renovation of Europe's existing housing
stock. (Reuters)
ObamaCare creates incentives not to climb the economic ladder. It also creates incentives not to
work at all; able-bodied people can quit their jobs, safe in the knowledge that the suckers working man will foot the bill for any health care they may need.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks that’s a not a bug, but a feature of the new law, at least if those able-bodied non-paycheck earners are artists. (HT: CNS
News.)
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2019,
ObamaCare will cover 32 million U.S. residents who would otherwise have been uninsured. Half of those coverage gains would come from expanding the
Medicaid program, which has been criticized for poor-quality
care.
we find that uninsured and Medicaid patients are treated by lower-quality physicians both because of the hospitals these patients attend and because of sorting within
hospitals…Our study concluded that patients in government hospitals that treat large numbers of uninsured and Medicaid patients are least likely to be treated by a
board-certified or top-trained physician.
The study has plenty of limitations. For one, physician training is an input, not an output. What matters are health outcomes, and so it will be interesting to
see what the Oregon Health Study has to say about Medicaid’s effects on health. (Cato at
liberty)
People face fines if they fail to provide information on their health and lifestyle to ABS researchers
UP TO 50,000 people face a fine of $110 a day if they refuse to divulge information on their health and lifestyle to Australian Bureau of Statistics researchers.
The Australian Health Survey announced in last week's Budget will be the most comprehensive research on the health of Australians ever undertaken and will be jointly funded by
the National Heart Foundation.
But the 50,000 people chosen to take part will be compelled to do so.
Participants will be weighed and measured and will be asked to give a blood and urine sample.
They will also be asked detailed questions on what they drink and eat and their physical activity.
The ABS said participation "is ultimately compulsory for those chosen by random sampling to ensure the survey accurately represents the Australian population as a
whole".
However, participants would only be compelled to answer questions. Providing a blood and urine sample and weighing in would be voluntary.
While it would seek co-operation of those selected, the ABS said it had the power to direct unwilling respondents to provide information.
"If a participant was directed in writing and continued to refuse to comply, they may be prosecuted under the Census and Statistics Act 1905 and a fine may be
imposed," a spokesman for the ABS said.
"A fine of up to $110 per day may be imposed until such time as the information is supplied." (Daily Telegraph)
Several people have already asked us how they can avoid being so compelled and given a variety of reasons for wishing to do so. The advice given has been
that if approached to immediately advise Health Surveyors they will not willingly participate and that if compelled to answer they will provide random responses to some or
all of the survey questions.
If anyone is actually charged with failing to comply with a nationalized invasion of privacy we will of course coordinate a defense fund and media response.
MORE than 2.5 million baby boomers are likely to have a potentially fatal heart attack or stroke in the next five years because they refuse to lose weight, exercise or take
blood pressure medication.
A report, released today by Access Economics, found more than three-quarters of people over 55 were inactive and overweight, more than half had hypertension and high
cholesterol and a quarter had diabetes - all risk factors for heart attack and stroke.
But most were not aware they were in danger or refused to get treatment, believing they would always be healthy, a cardiologist and vascular physician at Liverpool Hospital,
Greg Conner, said yesterday. (SMH)
The White House may be leading the battle in the war against childhood obesity, but it's not alone.
As Michelle Obama and Cabinet officials held a news conference Tuesday to unveil the results of a White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, D.C. officials were wrapping up a
two-day conference on obesity in the District. (WaPo)
The classic way for lobbyists to defend their client’s interest is to insist that they are not actually defending their client’s interest. Really, they say, they are
just looking out for ordinary Americans.
Tobacco lobbyists spent years fighting regulation by claiming to be defending individual freedom, not the profits of tobacco companies. Detroit’s lobbyists did much the same
to push back against seat belt and pollution laws. Wall Street has spent months opposing the financial regulation bill in the name of families and small businesses.
The latest example comes from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the rest of the soda industry, which is trying to defeat a soda tax now before the District of Columbia Council. The
industry has succeeded recently in beating back similar taxes in New York and Philadelphia, and in keeping one out of the federal health overhaul bill. But the Washington
Council seems to be seriously considering a penny-per-ounce tax on nondiet sodas, energy drinks and artificial juices. Council members are set to vote on the issue next week.
(NYT)
Dioxins in general decreasing, but those derived from triclosan increasing
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (05/18/2010) —Specific dioxins derived from the antibacterial agent triclosan, used in many hand soaps, deodorants, dishwashing liquids and other
consumer products, account for an increasing proportion of total dioxins in Mississippi River sediments, according to University of Minnesota research.
The study appears online in the May 18 issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
The researchers, from the university's Institute of Technology (soon to be College of Science and Engineering), found that over the last 30 years, the levels of the four
dioxins derived from triclosan have risen by 200 to 300 percent, while levels of all the other dioxins have dropped by 73 to 90 percent. (UM News)
The model used to predict the spread of the volcanic ash was condemned as "outdated and inappropriate" as the airlines criticised Monday's closure of airports. (TDT)
While it is true that atmospheric models are extremely primitive and of little prognostic value, if any, it is quite unfair to blame the people attempting
to keep air travel safe. Just imagine the calls for public execution should they declare the skies safe for flying only to see airliners dropping out of them with their
engines clogged with ash.
WAKING up bleary-eyed on Sunday morning after a night clubbing, Nick Van Breda never thought much about the ringing in his ears. That was until he found out the sound levels
he had exposed himself to were the equivalent of listening to a chainsaw all night. (SMH)
In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmentalist group, launched a nationwide panic over the presence on apples of alar, a chemical growth
agent. On TV shows such as “60 Minutes” and “Donahue,” and in major women’s magazines, NRDC (with the aid of its expert consulting toxicologist, actress Meryl Streep)
claimed that alar “might” eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers.
This carefully choreographed publicity stunt terrified parents, cost alar’s manufacturer millions, caused over $100 million in losses to apple growers—all while creating a
fundraising bonanza for the NRDC.
The scare campaign was based on junk science—on experiments on laboratory rodents in which dose levels were so absurdly high that the animals were dying of simple poisoning.
These tests were so shoddy that an independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA—called a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP)—dismissed the findings as scientifically
worthless.
Under political pressure to find something, however, the EPA ordered new tests on mice at dose levels that, again, were so outrageously high that 80 percent of the animals were
poisoned to death. Not surprisingly, this overdosing produced the tumors the agency was looking for, and gave it the excuse to ban all use of the chemical.
I spent six months investigating this scam for a special report that appeared in the October 1990 Reader’s Digest. After its publication, many people—echoing the rock group
The Who—concluded that “we won’t be fooled again” by environmentalist fear-mongers.
But now a new pesticide panic is underway. Once again, it is being incited by the NRDC, with additional litigation pressure from trial lawyers. Once again, the scare campaign
rests on studies that amount to little more than “junk science.” This time, though, the target is an herbicide that plays a far more significant role in agriculture:
atrazine. ( Robert James Bidinotto, Big Government)
If it were so inclined, the Environmental Protection Agency could highlight the herbicide atrazine as a farm chemical that is clearly safe and effective. For more than 50
years atrazine has been a primary crop protector for 60 percent of corn, 75 percent of sorghum and 90 percent of sugarcane produced in the United States.
However, America’s farmers are concerned that the use of atrazine may be threatened by a new EPA review of its safety. Despite a proven safety record and demonstrated
economic need, EPA in October launched a comprehensive evaluation of atrazine’s effects on humans, which will culminate in a decision whether to revise the compound’s risk
assessment and impose new restrictions on its use.
Atrazine has a stellar safety record. In 2006, the EPA completed a 12-year review that included 6,000 studies and 80,000 public comments. When agreeing to re-register the
product, EPA concluded that it provided no harm to people. Moreover, the World Health Organization has found no health concerns with atrazine. (American Farm Bureau Federation)
University of Illinois study reveals importance of atrazine for Midwest crops
[ClickPress, Wed May 19 2010] A study at the University of Illinois aims at showing how important atrazine is to crops in the Midwest. The study looked at 175 sweet corn fields
in the Midwest.
“While the vast majority of our Kansas corn growers raise field corn, which is a feedgrain, this research is valuable because it helps us understand how vegetable farmers
also rely on atrazine,” according to Jere White, Executive Director of the Kansas Corn Growers Association.
Researchers noticed atrazine was being applied to two-thirds of the sweet corn acres; row cultivation was used on about half of the sweet corn acreage. Here is what one of the
researchers, Marty Williams had to say about the study:
"If the use of atrazine was phased out completely, our data indicate the greatest burden would be on those growers who rely on less tillage for weed control, have
particularly weedy fields, have early season crop production, and grow sweet corn in rotation with other vegetables such as snap or lima beans," said U of I and USDA
Agricultural Research Service ecologist Marty Williams. "Vegetable crops have fewer herbicide options and there tends to be poorer levels of weed control in those crops.
When more weeds escape, more weed seed are produced, and crops succeeding those vegetables can have challenging weed problems." (ClickPress)
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, signed by most of the Canadian forestry industry and environmental activists, is nothing less than historic. (Globe and Mail)
We need a ‘Do not Donate’ campaign against these green extortionists
Behind all the feel-good eco-speak of this week’s Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement lies a simple bargain: the forest-products industry gets a
bunch of NGOs off its back (at least for the moment); the NGOs get to demonstrate their ability to bring the forest industry, or indeed any industry, to heel.
As Todd Paglia, the executive director of ForestEthics, one of the NGO signatories, noted a few years ago, “We are going to provide these companies with an option of doing
it the easy way. If they want to do it the hard way, we can see a tremendous amount of negative press and damage to their brand.”
So the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), which signed this deal with nine NGOs on behalf of its 21 members, has effectively cried “uncle” and called it
accommodation.
BOULDER, Colo. - Some scientists call it the biggest environmental disaster no one's heard of, and those scientists are gathering starting today to try and change that. At
issue is nitrogen pollution from fertilizers and other sources that can affect both water and air quality, and has associations with possible health issues. (Ag Weekly)
The agency is making federal decisions without the consent of Congress.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history. The agency has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set
climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act--powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this by declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public
health and welfare, in a proceeding known as the "endangerment finding."
On Tuesday the U.S. Senate will debate and vote on Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's resolution of disapproval to overturn the endangerment finding. The resolution is absolutely
necessary to restore democratic accountability in climate policymaking.
If allowed to stand, the EPA's endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Act. America could be burdened with a regulatory regime
more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, yet without the people's representatives ever voting on it.
Consider how the endangerment finding will expand the EPA's power beyond any plausible congressional mandate. (George Allen and Marlo Lewis, Forbes)
If you've been watching the global warming debate of late, you will notice that supporters of cap-and-trade are getting anxious. They realize that the political environment for
cap-and-trade couldn't be more favorable: liberals control the House, liberals control the Senate, and liberals control the White House. But they also realize that time is
running out: the November elections are looming, the legislative calendar is shrinking. As Sen. Kerry (D-Mass.) put it, this is "the last call" to pass a bill.
That's exactly what Sen. Kerry is trying to do. But he won't get 60 votes; he won't get support from Democrats in the Heartland; and he won't convince the American public that
they need a massive new energy tax. I say this with confidence because the bill Sen. Kerry introduced last week with Sen. Lieberman (I-Conn.) is the same old cap-and-trade
scheme the Senate rejected in the McCain-Lieberman bill in 2003, the McCain-Lieberman bill in 2005, the Lieberman-Warner bill in 2008, and the Waxman Markey bill in 2009.
(Inhofe EPW Press Blog)
Former Thatcher adviser documents fraud by global body
CHICAGO – Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, called for the abolishment of the United Nations climate
committee and the indictment of the U.N.'s chief climate scientist for financial fraud.
Monckton was the featured speaker today at the closing luncheon of the Heartland Institute's Fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago.
"While we are on the subject of the IPCC," Monckton told the conference, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "my policy
for the future of that body is that it should be abolished."
Monckton objected to the IPCC misrepresenting scientific data to advance Penn State climatologist Michael Mann's "hockey stick" chart to argue that human activity is
responsible for global warming, the core thesis of the IPCC-advanced theory of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW. (Jerome R. Corsi, WorldNetDaily)
Scientists, economists, and other experts present the case against manmade global warming fears at the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate
Change. May 18, 2010
- by S. T. Karnick
In the wake of the Climategate scandal, panelists and audience members at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC4) indicated growing confidence that the
tide is turning in favor of those who believe that manmade global warming is not a crisis.
More than 700 people — including a good many scientists, along with economists, policy analysts, and legislators — have gathered together since Sunday night, discussing the
once-settled but increasingly controversial proposition of an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crisis. Any triumphalism was averted by a general agreement to explore
real-world facts and test the assertions of alarmists. The presenters and audience members continually asked whether the data says what the modelers say it does. (PJM)
As the science underpinning anthropogenic (man-made) global warming steadily erodes in light of new data and in the midst of scandal, the public policy rationale has also
shifted. The proponents of Kyoto-type legislative proposals now claim that it is vital to invest in renewable energy sources and green technology to keep pace with
international competitors.
Fortunately, for U.S. taxpayers, the political class is not going unchecked and unchallenged in its drive for greater government control, regardless of how their schemes are
packaged.
Over 70 climate scientists, economists and policy experts are convening in Chicago this week for the fourth Annual Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate
Change just as "cap and trade" has been reintroduced in the U.S. Senate. Chris Horner, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is among the
many participants.
"The issue is never the issue," he has observed. "This is not about the environment. It is about wealth transfers and lifestyle restrictions." (Kevin
Mooney, American Spectator)
The wonderful “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” statement attributed to Senator Everett
Dirksen may be apocryphal, but it remains a prescient warning to our
nation’s leaders. At a time when Congress is throwing billions of dollars around like pocket change based on claims of scientists and engineers, a real quote
of Dirksen may be equally important (Congressional Record: June 16, 1965, p. 13884):
One time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat fell in a well 100 feet
deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the well?
Johnny worked assiduously with his slate and slate pencil for quite a while, and then when the teacher came down and said, ‘How are you getting along?’ Johnny said,
‘Teacher, if you give me another slate and a couple of slate pencils, I am pretty sure that in the next 30 minutes I can land that cat in hell.
The nation needs Johnny. In fact, it may be time we hired a team of people like Johnny for every large science-based policy proposal Congress contemplates funding.
Carbon Capture and Storage: A Known Boondoggle
Consider, for example, the $4.4 billion Congress is putting into carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research, nearly half of that to come from the Kerry-Lieberman
climate bill. As Robert Bryce points out in the New York Times, “That’s a lot
of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly
captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering.” [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
The heart of the proposed “American Power Act,” aka: the Kerry-Lieberman bill, is a national cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet,
we’re already well down the road to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and, whether one thinks that such efforts are horribly misguided (as I do) or desperately needed (as Al
Gore does), one cannot help but wonder: Why would anyone propose something like Kerry-Lieberman at all? (Rich Trzupek, Front Page)
After 7 months of negotiations, Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman last week unveiled a major climate bill to a chorus of…silence. On the day after the rollout, the
American Power Act failed to make the front page of a single paper with a national scope. The Sunday political talkies also ignored the bill. I didn’t hear a single mention
of the American Power Act on Fox News Sunday, ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, the McLaughlin Group, or the Chris Matthews Show.
What gives? The mainstream media LOVES global warming as an issue, because it’s divisive and it’s yellow. So why would they ignore it? The only explanation I can think
of is that the media believes the bill…
The compromise climate change proposal unveiled last week in the Senate is in legislative limbo, its fate apparently uncertain until at least next month.
Barack Obama | Green Business | COP15
The plan by Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming is not the subject
of any committee hearings; it's not being debated on the Senate floor; it's not even been formally introduced. (Reuters)
The Republican primary candidate for governor now wants California to roll back AB 32. Four years ago he called the law a bold effort to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. (
Michael Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times)
Russian scientist to alarmists: 'Sun heats Earth!'
CHICAGO – A new "Little Ice Age" could begin in just four years, predicted Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo
Astronomical Observatory in Russia.
Abdussamatov was speaking yesterday at the Heartland Institute's Fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, which began Sunday and ends today.
The Little Ice Age, which occurred after an era known in scientific circles as the Medieval Warm Period, is typically defined as a period of about 200 years, beginning around
1650 and extending through 1850. (WorldNetDaily)
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said Tuesday that his investigation into the research activities of a former University of Virginia climate change scientist is about rooting
out possible fraud and does not infringe upon academic freedom.
“The same legal standards for fraud apply to the academic setting that apply elsewhere,” said Cuccinelli, who on Tuesday attended a fundraiser barbecue in Ivy for an
abstinence-only education group. “The same rule of law, the same objective fact-finding process will take place.”
Cuccinelli sent a Civil Investigative Demand to UVa to obtain documents related to the work of Michael Mann, a leading researcher in climate change who was part of UVa’s
faculty between 1999 and 2005.
UVa has hired a law firm to explore its options, possibly signaling that the university will fight Cuccinelli’s demand. (Daily Progress)
The ranks of Virginia academics who oppose Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's demand for records from the University of Virginia related to the climate change research of a
former professor have grown.
The latest letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Cuccinelli boasts signatures from more than 800 faculty members at state colleges and universities. (
Virginian-Pilot)
Nicky da Mutt
(pictured left) is a concerned scientist or at least of member of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS or "yuks" as we like to call them), although admittedly
he's no longer financial (you can be a UCS member too, no qualifications required, just as long as you give them a donation).
He's the only one I have immediate access too (he and several other members of the household pack are sleeping around the desk as I write) and has expressed absolutely no
concern regarding Cuccinelli's actions.
In fact, during one of his periods of activity earlier in the day I asked whether he was happy about Mann being thoroughly investigated and he was as happy as all-get-out
about it (or perhaps it was the dog chews I was handing out at the time).
Anyway, I've seen no evidence credentialed scientists are really troubled about this civil investigative demand and most I've talked with believe academics should be held to
a higher standard of veracity and accountability than say a dodgy salesman.
Academics should certainly have freedom of inquiry but this in no way means they should have freedom from inquiry. You dine on the public purse then you darn
well better be prepared to account for every penny and certainly show all lab notes, workings, collaborative communications and results generated while so dining. Why does
anyone have a problem with that?
The University of Virginia has hired the big law firm Hogan Lovells to help the school evaluate its options in responding to a civil subpoena from the state attorney general
seeking documents related to the work of a former professor. It's the strongest indication yet that the school is seriously considering fighting the subpoena in court, as
various academic groups have urged.
"The University and its Board of Visitors believe it is important to respond to this [civil information demand]," said John O. Wynne, the Rector of the university, in
his first statement on the issue. "Research universities must defend the privilege of academic freedom in the creation of new knowledge. Hogan Lovells will help us to
explore the appropriate options for a response." (WaPo)
University of Virginia students pledge not to lie, cheat or steal under the nation's oldest student-run honor system -- and to report any of their peers who do.
But U.Va. administrators apparently don't think they have an obligation to do the same. On April 23, university officials received a subpoena from Virginia Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli requesting the e-mails of former U.Va. climatologist Michael Mann in an investigation into whether Mann fraudulently used manipulated climate data to apply for
$500,000 worth of taxpayer-funded research grants.
At first, they indicated their intention to comply. However, angry protests from academics around the country accusing Cuccinelli of a "witch hunt" convinced them to
take a second look at their "options." But those options boil down to two: Turn over the documents subpoenaed under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by the
July 26 deadline, or ignore Cuccinelli's request for any "correspondence, messages or e-mails" between Mann and 39 other prominent scientists between 1999 and 2005.
(Washington Examiner)
An environmental group that made its name battling on behalf of pandas, polar bears and pelicans now is fighting for what it fears is a politically imperiled species: U.S.
climate legislation that has a global perspective.
The World Wildlife Fund spent the past year lobbying zealously for a bill that would provide assistance preserving forests, funds to spark demand for clean technologies in
developing countries and money to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to climate-induced changes. It won almost none of what it wanted in the legislation from Sens. John
Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).
The group now is forming strategies to persuade lawmakers that those international provisions are necessary and that climate legislation needs to become law. ( Greenwire)
That misanthropists are so keen should tell you all you need to know about this nonsense...
The ACTU says cutting carbon emissions will create more than 100,000 new farming and mining jobs.
A report commissioned by the union movement and the Australian Conservation Foundation finds the work in primary industry will be created over the next 20 years if a climate
change policy is introduced. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)
BUSINESSES are planning an unlikely alliance with the Australian Conservation Foundation to prod the nation's leaders into fundamental action on climate change.
The federal government's decision to shelve its carbon emissions trading scheme has jeopardised investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars, driving some companies to plan
a climate circuit-breaker.
One plan under review is a revival of the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, which emerged four years ago when the Howard government was baulking at action.
The roundtable was remarkable for teaming an environmental group, the Australian Conservation Foundation, with six big members of the corporate world: Westpac, the re-insurer
Swiss Re, Insurance Australia Group, Origin Energy, Visy Industries and BP Australasia.
The group's landmark report of 2006 warned of grave economic harm if Australia did not take early action on global warming - a view that '' took courage'' at the time, one of
the founding members recalled this week.
''Between them the chief executives of these companies lobbied all the east coast premiers, the then prime minister, and the opposition leader. A lot of senior-level heavy
lifting went on behind the scenes after the launch of our report, and that probably had more effect than the report itself.''
When the Howard government reluctantly moved to adopt an emissions trading scheme, the group faded, thinking its work done.
But the decision to delay the emissions trading scheme raised the prospect of a new alliance. (SMH)
Scientists from the University of Miami are surprised at how rapidly the ice is melting in Greenland and how quickly the land is rising in response. Their findings are
published in Nature Geoscience
VIRGINIA KEY, FL (May 18, 2010). — Greenland is situated in the Atlantic Ocean to the northeast of Canada. It has stunning fjords on its rocky coast formed by moving
glaciers, and a dense icecap up to 2 km thick that covers much of the island--pressing down the land beneath and lowering its elevation. Now, scientists at the University of
Miami say Greenland's ice is melting so quickly that the land underneath is rising at an accelerated pace.
According to the study, some coastal areas are going up by nearly one inch per year and if current trends continue, that number could accelerate to as much as two inches per
year by 2025, explains Tim Dixon, professor of geophysics at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) and principal investigator of
the study.
"It's been known for several years that climate change is contributing to the melting of Greenland's ice sheet," Dixon says. "What's surprising, and a bit
worrisome, is that the ice is melting so fast that we can actually see the land uplift in response," he says. "Even more surprising, the rise seems to be
accelerating, implying that melting is accelerating."
Dixon and his collaborators share their findings in a new study titled "Accelerating uplift in the North Atlantic region as an indicator of ice loss," The paper is
now available as an advanced online publication, by Nature Geoscience. The idea behind the study is that if Greenland is losing its ice cover, the resulting loss of weight
causes the rocky surface beneath to rise. The same process is affecting the islands of Iceland and Svalbard, which also have ice caps, explains Shimon Wdowinski, research
associate professor in the University of Miami RSMAS, and co-author of the study. (University of Miami)
This one sets the ol' spidey senses tingling. That is a lot of isostatic rebound, if that's what it is. Do we have evidence of significant ice loss from
Greenland and commensurate sea level rise? Actually no. We have some evidence in increased geothermal activity, which may be related -- or not. We have some suggestion of
increased ice accumulation in central Greenland which might result in elastic deformation of the island (depression causing saucer uplift around the periphery). So much ice
loss that all of Greenland is getting taller? Very, very doubtful...
An international team of scientists have discovered that climate change played a major role in causing mass extinction of mammals in the late quaternary era, 50,000 years
ago. Their study, published in Evolution, takes a new approach to this hotly debated topic by using global data modelling to build continental ‘climate footprints.’
“Between 50,000 and 3,000 years before present (BP) 65% of mammal species weighing over 44kg went extinct, together with a lower proportion of small mammals,” said lead
author Dr David Nogues-Bravo working from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate in University of Copenhagen. “Why these species became extinct in such large
numbers has been hotly debated for over a century.”
During the last 50,000 years the global climate became colder and drier, reaching full glacial conditions 21,000 years before present time. Since then the climate has become
warmer, and this changing climate created new opportunities for colonization of new regions by humans. While both of these global change actors played significant roles in
species extinction this study reveals that changing climate was a significant force driving this mass extinction.
“Until now global evidence to support the climate change argument has been lacking, a large part of existing evidence was based on local or regional estimates between numbers
of extinctions, dates of human arrivals and dates of climate change,” said Dr Nogues-Bravo.
“Our approach is completely different. By dealing with the issue at a global scale we add a new dimension to the debate by showing that the impact of climate change was not
equal across all regions, and we quantify this to reveal each continent’s “footprint of climate change.”
The study shows that climate change had a global influence over extinctions throughout the late quaternary, but the level of extinction seems to be related to each
continent’s footprint of climate change. When comparing continents it can then be seen that in Africa, where the climate changed to a relatively lesser extent there were
fewer extinctions. However, in North America, more species suffered extinction, as reflected by a greater degree of climate change. (Wiley)
There is little doubt that
the political forces promoting climate change hysteria are under attack and in retreat around the world. It has also become obvious that little global consensus exists among
climate scientists regarding how to regain the public's trust. There is, however, ample evidence that the climate change alarmists have not learned their lesson. At a recent
conference held in Washington, D.C., an eminent climate policy expert urged that scientists and policy leaders embrace the persuasive power of uncertainty. If you cannot
convince the public with the facts, frighten them into going along anyway seems to be the message. This is not science, it is subterfuge justified by blind faith.
“There is no doubt that humans are causing climate change and that existing technology can limit greenhouse gas emissions,” Mohamed El-Ashry said at the
10th Annual Science & Technology in Society Conference cosponsored by AAAS. But science and policy leaders might gain more traction in the public debate over emissions by
“highlighting the uncertainty of what might happen over the next 50 years, which is much scarier,” he said. It is a sad state of affairs when an “eminent” climate
scientist's best argument in support of a theory is uncertainty, and that is because uncertainty can be used to scare the public.
This revealing statement was reported in
the “AAAS News and Notes” section of the April 30, 2010, issue of Science,
the flagship journal and official organ of the AAAS. El-Ashry called for more regional modeling of climate change and better assessment of how healthy ecosystems support local
and national economies. Focusing on near term, local effects—like harsher weather conditions or changes in the timing of snowmelt used in agriculture—could help governments
recognize that climate change has an impact “not just over there in the Arctic,” he said, “but on our farms and within our borders.”
To accomplish this refocusing of global warming, from global climate a hundred years in the future to local changes over the next ten years, will require
climate scientists to do something they have never been able to do before—predict climate change on a decadal time scale. “Decision makers are in need of decadal climate
forecasts,” says Mark A. Cane, writing in Nature Geoscience.
“When—or whether—climate modellers will be able to deliver is not yet clear.” Cane, G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences at Columbia University's
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, stated the problem facing the climate science community like this:
Over the past decade, the mean global temperature did not rise much, if at all. This pause in global warming cannot be attributed to cutbacks in
greenhouse-gas emissions by the planet's human population, so it must be nature taking a turn towards colder temperatures. The extent to which such natural climate
variability can be predicted on decadal timescales is not known.
Of course, the tool of choice in the pursuit of short term predictions is the IPCC's old friend, the computer climate model. Reporting from a workshop held
in January, 2010, on “Predicting the Climate of the Coming Decades,” Cane noted that the anomalously frigid weather kept the gathered scientists and policymakers inside the
auditorium in their winter coats—the workshop was being held in Miami, Florida. “It was a visceral reminder that the climate of the next few decades depends as much on
natural climate variations as it does on anthropogenic forcing,” wrote Cane. Perhaps he should have added that it was also an indication of scientists' inability to
accurately predict future climate change based on CO2 emissions.
Mean global temperature has not changed for over a decade. NASA/GISS.
Decadal prediction was described as “demand driven” by Kenneth Broad, an ecological anthropologist from the University of Miami. No doubt many decision
makers would like to incorporate climate change into their decision making processes. Unfortunately, the century-long span of typical climate change projections, heretofore
favored by the IPCC and other climate change alarmists, does not fit with the decadal outlook of resource managers. Spurred on by demand, and the prospect of funding, a number
of institutions and organizations are diving into the decadal forecasting business. Indeed, as part of the next assessment from the IPCC, many climate modeling groups will be
producing decadal forecasts. These include the UK Met. Office, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, to name just a few.
This effort may all be for naught, however. “[T]he hope for useful skill in predicting natural variability is far from assured,” states Cane. “The
climate system is chaotic and it is not known how predictable decadal variations are, even if we had perfect models and sufficient observations to determine the initial state
with high precision.” In other words, science may not be able to predict climate, even if they new how the climate system works and could incorporate that knowledge in a
working computer model. So far the effort has fared no better the the IPCC's GCM behemoths:
Enthusiasm for decadal forecasts was greatly stimulated by two recent attempts, that do provide forecasts that are closer to observations than the most
basic forecasts assuming the persistence of existing conditions or on-average climate conditions. However, both studies are less persuasive in showing that their forecasts
are significantly better than models that do not use detailed information about the present state of the climate. It is noteworthy that one of the two forecasts, predicts
that the next five years will be warmer than the past decade, whereas the other predicts the opposite.
It seems that the model offered by Doug M. Smith et al. says that “climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009
predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.” You can see how it might gain favor with the climate change catastrophe crowd (see “Improved
Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model” in Science).
Welcome to sunny Florida.
Alternatively, the model proffered by N. S. Keenlyside et al. doesn't see things that way: “[W]e make the following forecast: over the next decade,
the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures
will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged.” (see “Advancing
decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector” in Nature).
Does this story strike anyone as familiar? Following the age old management dictum, “when the plan fails change the objective,” climate science is trying
to move the goal posts from a century out to just ten years from now. How bleak their prospects have become is demonstrated by the fact that the climate change community is
excited by two new decadal models that not only don't work but give opposite forecasts. The researchers themselves admit that climate may not be predictable—ever. Perhaps
they hope that, if nothing else, the attempts at decadal prediction will provide ample uncertainty for Dr. El-Ashry to scare the public with.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
The global crisis, now well rooted in its third year, continues to rock the world’s political and economic foundations. Regimes have been replaced, capitalism has shifted
gear, and even the future of the European Union is being tested. [Read
More] (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)
PJM has received a leaked internal document confirming Spain realizes its green failures, just as Obama pushes the American Power Act based on Spain's program. (Click
here for the original Spanish document. An English translation is provided in this article.)
May 18, 2010 - by Christopher Horner
Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by
non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives.
On eight separate occasions, President Barack Obama has referred to the “green economy” policies enacted by Spain as being the model for what he envisioned for America.
Later came the revelation that Obama administration senior Energy Department official Cathy Zoi — someone with serious publicized conflict of interest issues — demanded an
urgent U.S. response to the damaging report from the non-governmental Spanish experts so as to protect the Obama administration’s plans.
Most recently, U.S. senators have introduced the vehicle for replicating Spain’s unfolding economic meltdown here, in the form of the “American Power Act.” For reasons
that are obvious upon scrutiny, it should instead be called the American Power Grab Act.
But today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy. (PJM)
As Elisabeth Rosenthal and I discuss in an article appearing Wednesday in Business Day, oil sands — or tar sands, as their detractors like to call them — have a serious
image problem, even among fossil fuels.
Oil sands are most frequently mined from giant pits carved out of Canada’s boreal forest, home to wild herds of caribou and millions of migratory birds. And the process of
extracting oil from the sands can emit triple the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil production.
Even high-pressure steam extraction wells, which tear up less forest and wildlife habitat than the surface mines, depend heavily on the burning of natural gas, making them
serious emitters of greenhouse gases.
But the oil industry says it is working on the problem. “We have work to do on that, and we admit that right up front,” said Chris Seasons, Devon Energy’s president for
Canadian operations.
Mr. Seasons said that with new technologies, the industry can make oil sands production more efficient and reduce the emissions to a level comparable with conventional oil and
gas production.
Indeed, the industry claims to have already reduced greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands by 27 percent since 1990 through a variety of techniques. That’s important because
Canadian oil sands are poised to become the leading source of imported oil to the United States this year, according to IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. (NYT)
Improved efficiency in extraction is good but greenhouse? Meh...
That came a week after the Norwegian government served notice it will block similar efforts forcing state-owned Statoil to pull out of the oil sands.
But don’t think for a minute that these shareholder activist attempts to green up and clean up operations in northern Alberta are headed down a blind alley. (GoO)
CALGARY -- Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has made what it says are "promising" steps in solving some of the most challenging environmental problems associated
with oil sands tailings ponds.
The Calgary-based company said it is is using far less - only 12% to 14% - of the fresh water it expected to remove from the Athabasca River at its Horizon oil-sands mine near
Fort McMurray.
Furthermore, Canadian Natural thinks it has sped up the time needed to clean up the toxic ponds, all while also sequestering carbon dioxide, key in reducing emissions.
"It looks like a very, very promising process," Steve Laut, the company's president, told reporters Tuesday. (Carrie Tait, Financial Post)
CALGARY - The Alberta government has chosen Calgary-based North West Upgrading Inc. to refine the heavy, sticky oilsands product it will receive in place of cash through its
bitumen-royalty-in-kind initiative.
In an announcement Tuesday, Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert said negotiations will begin exclusively with the privately held company to eventually take up to 75,000 barrels
per day into its refinery.
Insiders who asked not to be identified have said the three phases of the project could cost as much as $18 billion, at $5 billion to $6 billion per 50,000 bpd phase.
Calgary’s Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., which completed its 110,000 bpd Horizon oilsands project last year, bought a 50 per cent share in North West earlier this year.
“This is great news,” said North West chairman Ian MacGregor. “We’ve been through a long tendering process now and the next thing is to work on the details.” (Dan
Healing and Shaun Polczer, Calgary Herald)
The nonsense from green energy lobbyists is nothing short of crazy talk. Why is Congress, or anyone else, buying it? May 18, 2010
- by John Droz, Jr.
“Renewable” electrical energy sources are not even remotely equivalent to conventional energy sources, and this is perhaps the most important reality of energy to
understand.
Green lobbyists go to great lengths to disguise this. Everything they propagate is based on an “equivalency” between “renewables” and conventional power sources that
does not exist in the real world. Even generally objective sources, like the Energy Information Administration (EIA), seriously err when they show levelized cost charts that
have wind energy and nuclear power in contiguous columns. (PJM)
If you ever had any doubt that even a worthy mission such as fighting cancer could be undermined by political correctness, you need only read small sections from this
ridiculous document.
This utter bilge has been condemned by virtually every single cancer authority—not to mention my friends at...
To produce a 240-page document that raises environmentally-induced cancer to anything more than minuscule importance is positively shameful, and this panel—consisting of
two whole people—should be condemned, nay mocked by the scientific community.
To the clueless LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., M.D., F.A.C.S. and Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D. I would say this:
The only proven cancer risk from chemicals derived from a very small number of cases of heavy occupational exposure, and this was pre-OSHA, of course. Almost nothing in your
absurd report can be backed up, and the production of this document should force both of you into immediate retreat from public life.
More than that, you have discredited the work of every agency currently in place that, if anything, has gone overboard to limit exposure to toxic chemicals.
This is truly a disgrace, and you both richly deserve all the negative feedback. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
Public Spending: Government gobbled up the British economy with amazing speed in the past decade. Here's how it happened — and why something very much like it could happen
in the U.S.
It was not so long ago that Great Britain was rightly seen as the most "American" of the major European economies, with a tilt toward free-market capitalism and a
relatively lean public sector.
No more. The U.K. is now, in the words of the Cato Institute's Daniel J. Mitchell, "the new France." Its public-sector spending has exploded over the past decade so
that it now makes up more than half the economy. (IBD)
NEW YORK - Allergic reactions to soy may be a cause of asthma symptoms in some workers at soy processing plants, a new study suggests.
Soy is among the most common sources of food allergies, and some studies have found that people who work in soy processing have higher-than-average rates of respiratory
symptoms such as wheezing.
Those findings raised the question of whether breathing in soy "dust" may lead to airway inflammation and asthma in some workers. (Reuters Health)
Children exposed to higher levels of pesticide found on commercially grown fruit and vegetables in the United States were more likely to have attention
deficit/hyper-activity disorder (ADHD), according to a study published on Monday.
Researchers in the United States and Canada studied data from 1139 children aged between eight and 15 and found children with higher residue levels of pesticides known as
organophosphates were roughly twice as likely to have ADHD, the study in the journal Pediatrics found.
"The present study adds to the accumulating evidence linking higher levels of pesticide exposure to adverse developmental outcomes," the study concluded. (AFP)
I haven't seen this study, has anyone got the numbers? What was the dose response curve? How significant was the association?
Not inspiring confidence (from a Reuters report): "They interviewed the children's mothers, or another caretaker, and found that about one in ten met the criteria for
ADHD." and "For a 10-fold increase in one class of those compounds, the odds of ADHD increased by more than half." Hmm... again.
NEW YORK - The number of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea dropped sharply after the U.S. introduced rotavirus vaccination in 2006, a new government study
finds.
Rotavirus is the top cause of severe gastroenteritis among children worldwide. Because infants and small children can quickly become dehydrated, the diarrhea and vomiting
caused by the infection can be dangerous and even fatal.
In 2006, the U.S. licensed Merck's RotaTeq, or RV5, vaccine for immunizing infants against rotavirus.
In the new study, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that after the vaccine's introduction, hospitalizations for gastroenteritis among
children younger than 5 fell substantially.
During the 2008 rotavirus season (January to June), the rate of such hospitalizations across 18 U.S. states was 45 percent lower than the rates for the years 2000 to 2006, the
study found.
The typical hospitalization rate during those pre-vaccine years was 101 per 10,000 children younger than age 5. In 2008, the rate was 55 per 10,000 children, the researchers
report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK - Children who develop celiac disease appear to be more likely to be born by cesarean section, German researchers say.
Celiac disease is a disorder in which eating gluten -- a type of protein found in wheat, barley, and rye -- causes the body's immune system to attack and damage the small
intestine. In the U.S., researchers think nearly 1 out of every 100 people has celiac disease.
Dr. Mathias Hornef, from Hannover Medical School in Germany, and his colleagues knew that people with certain inflammatory bowel diseases - such as celiac disease, Crohn's
disease, and ulcerative colitis - have a different mix of bacteria in their intestines.
How a child is delivered can affect that mix, so the researchers wondered if children with those diseases would have a higher rate of cesarean birth. (Reuters Health)
Or is there something in common between mothers needing to deliver offspring via cesarean section and who have children prone to celiac disease? A more
useful investigation would seem to be to swab for bacterial cultures and compare gut fauna directly.
LONDON - Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumors, said on Sunday their research
gave no clear answer.
A study by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the largest ever to look at possible links between mobile phones and brain
cancer, threw up inconclusive results but researchers said suggestions of a possible link demanded deeper examination.
"The results really don't allow us to conclude that there is any risk associated with mobile phone use, but... it is also premature to say that there is no risk associated
with it," the IARC's director Christopher Wild told Reuters.
The results of the study have been keenly awaited by mobile phone companies and by campaign groups who have raised concerns about whether mobile phones cause brain tumors.
Years of research have failed to establish a connection. (Reuters)
PRESIDENT OBAMA has started an ambitious global health initiative that will deliver urgently needed medicine and preventative care to hundreds of millions of people in poor
countries. Included in the plan are efforts to devote resources to “neglected tropical diseases,” afflictions like hookworm infections, river blindness and elephantiasis
that many think have gone the way of smallpox, but which still make up the most common ailments among the world’s bottom billion.
When we talk about these diseases, we tend to think of distant places like West Africa and South Asia. As we develop the plan, however, it’s crucial that we remember that
they plague communities much closer to home as well. (Peter J. Hotez, NYT)
A new trial of the Red Heart polypill, four drugs in a single tablet, launches today to assess whether those at risk of heart attacks and strokes will take it regularly and
whether it will saves lives. (The Guardian)
Medicalizing life... wonder how many will suffer the side effect of statins, for example (not a fun prospect for those who don't tolerate them well) and
how much activity will be sacrificed to blood pressure lowering ...
NEW YORK - People with papillary thyroid cancer that hasn't spread beyond the thyroid gland appear to have good outcomes regardless of whether or not they are treated, new
research shows.
Papillary thyroid cancer is the most common type of thyroid cancer. Among more than 35,000 people with "localized" papillary thyroid cancer who underwent immediate
surgery to remove half or all of their thyroid gland, researchers found that 99 percent were still alive 20 years later. For the 440 patients who didn't undergo immediate
treatment, 97 percent were still alive after 20 years. (Reuters Health)
CHICAGO - Eating bacon, sausage, hot dogs and other processed meats can raise the risk of heart disease and diabetes, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that
identifies the real bad boys of the meat counter.
Eating unprocessed beef, pork or lamb appeared not to raise risks of heart attacks and diabetes, they said, suggesting that salt and chemical preservatives may be the real
cause of these two health problems associated with eating meat.
The study, an analysis of other research called a meta-analysis, did not look at high blood pressure or cancer, which are also linked with high meat consumption.
"To lower risk of heart attacks and diabetes, people should consider which types of meats they are eating," said Renata Micha of the Harvard School of Public Health,
whose study appears in the journal Circulation.
"Processed meats such as bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs and processed deli meats may be the most important to avoid," Micha said in a statement. (Reuters)
Kudzu, an invasive vine that is spreading across the southeastern United States and northward, is a major contributor to large-scale increases of the pollutant surface
ozone, according to a study published the week of May 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Kudzu, a leafy vine native to Japan and southeastern China, produces the chemicals isoprene and nitric oxide, which, when combined with nitrogen in the air, form ozone, an air
pollutant that causes significant health problems for humans. Ozone also hinders the growth of many kinds of plants, including crop vegetation.
"We found that this chemical reaction caused by kudzu leads to about a 50 percent increase in the number of days each year in which ozone levels exceed what the
Environmental Protection Agency deems as unhealthy," said study co-author Manuel Lerdau, a University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences and biology.
"This increase in ozone completely overcomes the reductions in ozone realized from automobile pollution control legislation." (University of Virginia )
NEW YORK – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 unless fishing fleets are slashed and stocks allowed to recover, UN experts warned Monday.
"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev,
head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given
protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry. (AFP)
Study suggests pollution reductions could help restoration efforts
A new study to be published in the academic journal Reviews in Fisheries Science recommends that efforts to restore the endangered California delta smelt and other declining
pelagic fish should more sharply focus on reducing nutrient pollution to the species' native waters. The research indicates these fish populations would greatly benefit from
reductions in the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay-Delta from wastewater treatment plants and balancing the ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus
contained in the discharged water.
"While a great deal of emphasis has been placed on ensuring there is enough water for delta smelt, we also need to recognize that the water also has to have the right
chemical balance," said Dr. Patricia Glibert of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "The research shows us that reducing the amount of
nitrogen from Bay-Delta wastewater treatment plants should aid the recovery of the delta smelt population. The high nutrient loads are affecting the algae at the base of the
food web, which in turn, affect the food supply for the fish. This has altered the ecology of the system over many years."
For her research, Dr. Glibert analyzed 30 years of water chemistry, river flow, plankton, fish population and effluent discharge data to determine possible linkages to the
population of the delta smelt and other pelagic fish in the Bay-Delta system. The analysis reveals that declines in delta smelt population most closely coincide with effluent
changes from the region's major wastewater treatment plant. (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science)
Some of Canada's largest forestry firms and environmental groups are expected to unveil a landmark deal on Tuesday to end their battle over logging in the country's massive
northern forest.
Industry and environmental representatives have scheduled a news conference in Toronto to unveil "a major announcement on conservation and competitiveness in Canadian
forestry," according to a press release on Monday.
No details have been released, but a published report in the Province newspaper in Vancouver last week said producers would agree to stop logging in some protected areas in
return for green groups allowing logging elsewhere in the continent-wide boreal forest. (Reuters)
" green groups allowing logging"? Sheesh! Who gave them the right to bestow or withhold permission?
Last month, three activists were caught trying to bomb an IBM plant. Their motivation wasn't religion or politics – but the state of the planet. This is the dark side
of green, says Nick Harding
Until last month the small market town of Langnau in the rolling Swiss hills had two claims to fame; it was both a centre for the production of Emmental cheese and also one of
the sunniest places in Switzerland. Today, thanks to a routine police traffic inquiry, it has the dubious honour of being the location where one of Europe's biggest alleged
acts of eco-terrorism was foiled.
On the night of 15 April local officers pulled over a car on one of the town's quiet streets. Inside the vehicle they found a large cache of explosives, primed and ready to
detonate. The three people in the car are alleged to have been members of the murky Italian anarchist group Il Silvestre, who were reportedly on a mission to blow up the nearby
unfinished £55m IBM nanotechnology facility.
The apparent attack is believed to be part of a new co-ordinated wave of eco-terror on the continent. The IBM site is due to be opened next year and will be the most advanced
centre for nano- and biological scientific research in Europe. According to reports, the eco anarchists Il Silvestre are opposed to all forms of nanotechnology. The group was
formed in Tuscany and is considered by some to be one of the rising "eco-terror" groups in Europe, with a rigid cell structure, access to explosives, and a membership
that supposedly has no qualms about killing to achieve its goals.
Supporters, on the other hand, argue that the group, which publishes the militant magazine Terra Selvaggia, are "radical ecologists" and "revolutionaries".
The idea that green activists are willing to destroy, maim and kill in their crusade to protect the planet goes against the domestically fostered image of cuddly, eccentric
green campaigners epitomised by Swampy, the dreadlocked former public schoolboy sitting in a muddy hole in Devon waiting for the bulldozers to arrive. With labels like
tree-hugger, hippy and bunny lover, there is a quaint Britishness about the subterranean Twyford Downs protesters and the Canbury Gardens activists, who lived in tree houses
for weeks to save a row of Poplars in Kingston-upon-Thames from the developer's chainsaw in the late Nineties. So when did the cosy eco-warrior become seen as a hardcore
terrorist? And just how much of a threat is environmental extremism? (The Independent)
Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new
geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene. (Elizabeth Kolbert, e360)
Gulf nations hope science will turn desert areas into arable land to boost food security and avoid the risks inherent in buying farmland abroad, industry insiders said
Monday.
Farming in the Gulf battles against little water supply, high soil salinity and extreme heat. But many of the countries in the region have the cash to adopt expensive solutions
that others could not.
Abu Dhabi has conducted a soil survey to identify areas with underground water supplies and soil quality that could be enhanced, said Faisal Taha, who headed the project by the
Abu Dhabi Environment Agency.
The survey found over 200,000 hectares of land that could be used for agriculture given the right investment, Taha told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference in
Abu Dhabi.
"We are talking about tens of millions of dirhams in investments ... but it's worth it because with this land vegetable and fodder production could be increased by up to
70 percent," said Taha. (Reuters)
A vast majority of soybeans and corn planted in this country, and in much of the world, are genetically engineered, and the technology is rapidly pushing its way into many
more crops.
For farmers, the benefits are real — with these seeds they can spend less time plowing and cultivating and can use more benign agricultural chemicals to kill weeds. But
according to a recent report from the National Research Council, there are also signs of trouble, chief among them the appearance in various parts of the country of
herbicide-resistant weeds.
Such weeds could undermine the main purpose of genetically engineered crops: their ability to tolerate spraying with glyphosate, an environmentally benign herbicide marketed by
Monsanto, one of the major producers of genetically engineered seeds, under the name Roundup. As ever, nature is finding its way around our defenses.
Well, kind of. Glyphosate resistance is a natural trait (where do people think Monsanto acquired it for incorporation into engineered seeds?) and we have
always known the proliferation of resistant weeds is inevitable. The correct answer is to keep developing stacked trait crops and hitting weeds with an array of herbicides to
reduce resistance development. There is nothing unexpected or alarming here though and certainly not worth an editorial in a broadsheet.
ON a farm in Wyoming, USA, goats are being milked for their spider webs.
And if that sounds bizarre, molecular biologist Randy Lewis claims that within two years, spider silk milked from goats could replace your body's tired or strained tendons and
ligaments - maybe even bones.
Professor Lewis and his team at the University of Wyoming have successfully implanted the silk-making genes from a golden orb spider into a herd of goats and are now, finally,
producing one of nature's strongest products in useable quantities.
The technology is cutting edge, but the science isn't. Spider silk has been used for centuries to dress wounds with varying degrees of success, but the problem has until now
been how to get it. (news.com.au)
Nanoscientist Molly Stevens is working on techniques to enable a damaged heart to repair itself or bone tissue to regenerate (Robin McKie, The Observer)
Global warming conference participant says reduced sunspot activity may cause extreme cold fatalities, mass starvation. (Jeff Poor, Business & Media Institute)
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli is a smart, aggressive conservative who scares the heck out of the Left, which includes the establishment media. And former University
of Virginia tree-ring expert Michael Mann is a darling of the same crowd.
This ensured a combustible mix when, exercising his authority (and, I suggest, responsibility) under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, Cucinelli sought records from the
University of Virginia which were produced during Mann's days there. It was from this perch that Mann developed the infamous and now disgraced "hockey stick." The
Hockey Stick portrayed for the first time a stable climate until the horrors of Industrial Man. Then temperatures began an unprecedented spike. Or so we were told. Often and
loudly.
Mann's algorithm rewrote history so that it was no longer as those who lived it had chronicled in diaries, agricultural records and cultural artifacts. That politically
expedient abandonment of a thousand years of accumulated knowledge was just too good to receive a skeptical reception. It was instead hailed as the "smoking gun" of
the IPCC Third Assessment Report – in a chapter which, by chance, Mann was lead author – and proof of man-made global warming.
Upon scrutiny by the Wegman Committee, this proved to be no more than Mann-made warming. Mann's house of cards began to collapse, but not before he had parlayed it into a
research unit at Penn State. Along the way Mann used University of Virginia resources and otherwise hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars building on his work and the name
he had created for himself with the Hockey Stick.
Then late last year ClimateGate exposed the climate industry, through 1,000 emails, computer code and code annotations showing how scientists collaborated to subvert the
peer-review process, distort research, and violate transparency laws. The focus of much of this subterfuge was protecting Mann's work from challenge. (Climate Depot)
The person who was most instrumental in debunking Climategate scientist Michael
Mann's hockey stick chart, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, said last night that he did not believe his scientific
misrepresentations rose to the level of fraud. At the Heartland Institute's Fourth
International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, McIntyre delivered a compelling account of his adventures in trying to obtain temperature data and in successfully
challenging Mann's work, but then left much of the ballroom disappointed by letting Mann off the hook. My Heartland colleague Dan Miller recounts:
Citing a particularly controversial email in the Climategate emails that referred to hiding an unexpected but inconveniently inexplicable decline in global
temperatures, McIntyre concluded, “To the extent that things like the ‘trick’ (to "hide the decline") were common practice, the practices need to be
disavowed. The scientists do not need to be drummed out, but there has to be some commitment to avoiding these sort of practices in the future.”
But the audience was having none of McIntyre’s forgiving rhetoric, and questioner after questioner pressed the Canadian to acknowledge legal, if not moral,
culpability.
“I don’t even think in those terms,” McIntyre insisted.
As Miller and Heartland president Joe Bast noted, it was an extremely odd audience reaction: McIntyre received a standing ovation upon his introduction, thanks to his dogged
research and unrelenting demand for information and accountability, but then his blase' attitude about scientists' behavior -- particularly Mann's -- left most of the audience
cold and some even angry. The applause for McIntyre was tepid upon the conclusion of his remarks. I don't think I've ever seen that before.
McIntyre said he believed expressing emotions and anger over the episode was counterproductive and even self-indulgent, and that simply proving Mann and others wrong was
sufficient. Perhaps if McIntyre personally lent or gave a few million dollars for Mann to indulge in his deceptive research, instead of taxpayers
footing the bill, then he might feel more self-indulgent himself. (Spectator)
McIntyre has never professed to have a dog in the hunt, he just wanted to sort out the derivation of the graph. I think anyone expecting him to champion
any position is wrong and the reaction of the audience as recounted above is appalling. McIntyre never offers an opinion on whether AGW is or is not a looming catastrophe, is
always polite and generally seems to think the world is a lovely place where everyone should play nice. He may well say someone has used the wrong methodology or arrived at
unsupportable conclusions but he does not present as ever likely to accuse anyone of fraud whatever the provocation. If the above is a fair and accurate representation of
audience reaction then I think it churlish and that McIntyre is owed an apology.
The Kerry - Lieberman American Power Act (APA) is a disastrous, unnecessary solution for a non-existent problem. Worse, it’s a problem that exists only in a grossly
inadequate computer model whose projections have never been correct. It is predicated on the false assumption that an increase in CO2 causes a temperature increase. Every
record of any duration for any period in Earth’s history shows temperature increases before CO2 increases. The false assumption is the basis of all global warming and climate
change used in the corrupted research and models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is impossible to imagine such an unjustified basis for any action,
except to undermine the US economy for political gain. (Tim Ball, CFP)
Rudd let slip a line in his frustration this week that reveals how little he knows about the topic he holds so dear. He has so completely swallowed the PR on climate
science, that when poked, he reflexively fires back exaggerated scientific claims that would make even the IPCC blush. In 2007 the IPCC and Gore et al offered Rudd the perfect
Election-Wedge-on-a-Platter. They’d primed the audience with propaganda; trained the crowd to recite: Carbon is pollution. It looked like a no-brainer. Yet having
based his leadership and campaign on it, it’s obvious he had not done even the most basic of checks (and still apparently hasn’t).
It’s an abject lesson in the importance of doing some homework before rewriting a nation’s economy.
Last week Tony Abbott (the Australian opposition leader) told school children that it was warmer ”at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth”. This banal line
set off a flurry of denial and bluster.
Rudd was incredulous in the Parliamentary Hansard record to the opposition members last week:
…how is it that, in the 21st century, you could support this Leader of the Opposition, who says that the world was hotter in Jesus’ time? How could you actually hold
to a belief, in defiance of total science around the world, that somehow in the last 2000 years the world has become cooler, not warmer? How could you stand behind a leader
who says that the industrial revolution, in effect, did not happen?
In defiance of “total science”? Or totalitarian science?
It’s true it’s difficult to know the exact temperature of the globe in the year one (it’s difficult to know the exact global
temperature in 1975, too), but there are scientists reporting in journals from all over the world that back up Mr Abbott. We know it really must have been warmer in Europe
thanks to written historical records and artefacts that pop out of melting glaciers. As William Kinninmonth
points out, Hannibal took an army of elephants across the Alps in winter in 200 BC. And we all know that the Romans are not known for wearing fur coats.
Rudd is apoplectic with the non-sequiteur about the industrial revolution: If temperatures were warmer in 10BC, somehow that nullifies the steam engine 1800 years later? In
Rudd-land, no one can even imagine the parallel universe where carbon might not control the climate.
A warmer world in Roman times?
A quick tour of peer reviewed research around the globe shows it was also warmer in China, North America, Venezuela, South Africa, and the Sargasso Sea 2000 years ago. And
of course, Greenland tells an evocative tale. More » (Jo Nova)
The United Nations appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica on Monday to be its climate chief to head stalled international talks on how to contain the world's greenhouse
gas emissions. (Reuters)
You can look at the warming of Lake Tanganyika as a geographical and scientific curiosity; but you're probably wiser to look at it with a considerable sense of foreboding.
Africa may well be the region where global warming hits hardest in the coming century, a possibility clearly spelled out in the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007. (The Independent)
Why would we view warming with a sense of foreboding, especially for Africa? When the Earth was warmer North Africa was forest, savanna and wetland
complete with hippos and crocodiles, now it's desert. Cooling really hasn't done much for the place.
Trout and salmon are among the world's most familiar freshwater fishes, but numbers have fallen over recent decades – in some areas, dramatically.
Pollution, habitat loss and over-fishing have all been blamed in the past, but new evidence from Cardiff University shows that climate change could be a major factor, putting
both species at risk.
The scientists studied populations of young salmon and trout in the River Wye in Wales, traditionally one of the UK's best angling rivers. Professor Steve Ormerod and
colleagues from the Cardiff School of Biosciences found salmon numbers fell by 50% and trout numbers by 67% between 1985 and 2004 - even though the river itself became cleaner.
The fish were hit hardest following hot, dry summers such as 1990, 2000 and 2003. The results suggest that warmer water and lower river levels combine to affect both species.
As both trout and salmon favour cool water, they face potentially major problems if climate warming continues as expected in the next two to three decades. (Cardiff University)
But we are not really expecting warming over the next two to three decades...
There has been considerable discussion on the divergence in recent years of temperature trends derived from tree ring data and from surface air temperature measurements. I
have discussed this in two past posts on my weblog:
In the first post, the abstract of the paper includes the text
“An anomalous reduction in forest growth indices and temperature sensitivity has been detected in tree-ring width and density records from many circumpolar northern
latitude sites since around the middle 20th century. This phenomenon, also known as the “divergence problem”, is expressed as an offset between warmer instrumental
temperatures and their underestimation in reconstruction models based on tree rings.”
In the second post, I wrote
“Dear Drs. Wilson and D’Arrigo
Thank you for your announcement and invitation for this very important
session. While I will not be able to attend the AGU Conference this
December, I did want to e-mail to encourage you to add another topic to
your list of questions. This is
How accurately does the in-situ (station data), when used to construct the
regional temperature trends, compare with the tree-ring data that are used
represent the actual temperature environment in which the trees grow?
Also, is the statistical relationship improved when the comparison with
the tree ring derived data is compared with maximum and minimum
temperatures, as well as different temperature measures of the growing
season, such as first and last date below selected threshold temperatures.
For the growing set of documentation of the USHCN sites, the siting of the
in-situ temperature measurement sites is a major problem (see http://www.surfacestations.org and http://www.climateaudit.org). A
presentation of photographs for the surface temperature stations that are
used as part of the calculation of the temperature trends for each region
might be very insightful. Satellite derived surface temperatures (e.g. see
Comiso, 2006: Weather. pages 70-76) can be very helpful also in this
assessment, but the interpretation to the heights that the tree responds
to is also a challenge, as well as that the satellite is not sampling on
all days.
The testing of the robustness of the air temperature data trends would be
quite informative, and the availability of these photographs would be
valuable.”
With respect to the science of the issue raised in the otherwise excellent Der Spiegel
article I (and others) disagree with their statement that
“….Tree-ring data indicates no global warming since the mid-20th century, and therefore contradicts the temperature measurements. The clearly erroneous tree data was
thus corrected by the so-called “trick” with the temperature graphs.”
The reason that the tree ring data differs from the surface air temperature data in recent years has not been answered, despite the above statement from Der
Speigel. Possible (speculative) explanations (besides the issues with the relationship of the surface air temperature data to the tree ring proxy data that
I reported on above) include the effect of the increase of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and/or nitrogen deposition from human emissions on tree
growth. The increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and/or the addition of nitrogen to the soil in which the trees grow could be altering their relationship to temperature
from what it was in previous years.
Since the microclimate of the trees that were sampled are quite different from the microclimate where the surface air temperature data has been
collected, this is also a possible explanation that needs to be examined. Photographs of the locations where the tree ring and surface air temperature data are
collected should be a priority.
The tree ring proxy temperature data is not necessarily erroneous, but it is has diverged from the in-situ measured air temperature trend analysis.
The reason for this difference needs further exploration. (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
Although the US petroleum industry is understandably in a state of panic after the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico and some, both friend and foe, have even resorted to
outrageous speculation that the accident would mean “the end of offshore oil,” there is an optimistic take to the events. [Read
More] (Michael J. Economides, Energy Tribune)
Instead of concentrating on the cause of the oil spill, lawmakers on Capitol Hill appear to be focused on liability limits and oil tax increases. The White House and some
Members of Congress are pushing for a one-cent increase per-barrel of oil produced – from eight cents to nine. In reality, this is an indirect gas tax that will be passed
onto the consumer. Currently the direct federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon with the mean state tax being 27.2 cents per gallon. The purpose of the newly proposed tax hike
is to increase the amount of funds available in the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund and ostensibly collect more money for the clean up. But the real purpose is to make political
ends meet.
Although it doesn’t sound like much, the Wall Street Journalreports
that “The one-cent increase would raise about $5 billion over 10 years to help offset the cost of the tax package, which is nearing $200 billion. The tax could go to 10 cents
a barrel in 2017.”
Wait. What tax package? Politico says, “The added revenue is coveted by tax writers, still
struggling to find close to $50 billion in offsets needed to pay for an election-year package of infrastructure investments and popular tax break extensions.” This makes one
wonder: is this about cleaning up the Gulf or making ends meet for other political agendas? Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
Energy giant BP said on Monday it had "turned the corner" in a weeks-long effort to contain an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico even as the company faced fresh
questions about its industry safety record.
London-based BP Plc said its latest "quick fix" -- a mile-long siphon tube deployed by undersea robots down to the leaking well-- was capturing about a fifth of the
oil leaking from the ruptured well.
Officials cautioned that the tube is helping contain the oil but will not stop the flow.
The company's stock rose more than 2 percent in London on the news but later shed its gains.
More efforts to stem the spill were under way and there is another smaller leak besides the one now being targeted.
"I do feel that we have, for the first time, turned the corner in this challenge," BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward said in Florida after meeting with Governor Charlie
Crist.
"Over the last 48 hours, we're beginning to meet with some significant success," Hayward said. (Reuters)
The Boston Globerecently reported that National
Grid will pay 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour for Cape Wind electricity production starting in 2013, with increases of about 3.5% a year for 15 years. This radically uneconomic
cost figure challenges the pro-wind studies of the project–and confirms the analyses of authors at MasterResource.
A Charles River Associates (CRA) report previously indicated that the
Cape Wind projects would save electricity customers billions of dollars. This expectation was immediately
challenged in a MasterResource post by Glenn Schleede, who documented the study’s out-of-date data, doubtful assumptions, and missing costs. His conclusion
was that the electric customers in New England – as well as the taxpayers – deserve a far more complete and objective analysis of the potential cost impacts on them of the
proposed Cape Wind project than was provided by CRA and released by Cape Wind. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Away
from the likes of Chris Huhne and his mad vision of a land covered with wind turbines, the real world is beginning to intrude.
According to the independent business intelligence service Wind
Energy Update, wind turbine operation and maintenance (O&M) costs are increasing sharply, rising to two or three times more than first projected and causing a 21
percent decrease in returns on investments.
O&M costs were found to be especially high in the United States, now the world's largest wind power market, but the even the average world costs are coming out at 27 US
cents per kilowatt hour, compared with the 20 cents earned in the US through production credits.
The report says that while close to 80 percent of the world's wind turbines are still under warranty, "this is about to change." R&D is focusing especially on
gearbox reliability. Many gearboxes, designed for a 20-year life, are failing after six to eight years of operation, the report finds.
The bizarre thing is that, while Huhne is so insistent that nuclear should not be given any subsidy, even with the massive subsidy it already gets, wind cannot be made to pay.
And yet, in the economics of the madhouse which characterises British energy policy, it is wind which is set to inherit the earth.
There must be a special kind of madness that inflicts politicians – clearly, their brains are not wired the same as in normal human beings. (EU Referendum)
Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for
your doctor, more power for your government.
'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's
nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009.
The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes.
And how will that care be rationed? It seems Berwick is a great fan of Britain's National Health Service, specifically its Orwellian-named National Institute for Clinical
Excellence, or NICE. NICE is the body that decides what health treatments are available in Britain and who is worth receiving them.
In the 2009 interview, Berwick opined: "We can make a sensible social decision and say, 'Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug
or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds." Sounds like denial of care to us. (IBD)
WASHINGTON - An influential small business lobby group said on Friday it had joined 20 states in a lawsuit arguing insurance coverage requirements in the newly enacted
healthcare overhaul are unconstitutional.
The National Federation of Independent Business announced its decision ahead of a news conference in Florida with state Attorney General Bill McCollum to discuss the lawsuit.
McCollum is seeking the Republican nomination to run for Florida governor and was one of the first state officials to sue the federal government over President Barack Obama's
sweeping healthcare reform passed by Congress in March.
"The outpouring of opposition to this new law was overwhelming and our members urged us to do everything in our power to stop this unconstitutional law," NFIB
President and chief executive Dan Danner said in a statement. (Reuters)
MOSCOW - Russia has confirmed its first polio case in 13 years in an infant visiting from Tajikistan, but there is no immediate threat of a wider outbreak, the country's
main public health body said Friday.
The 9-month-old girl was diagnosed with the disease after arriving in the Siberian region of Irkutsk from the Central Asian state, where at least 12 people have died from a
polio outbreak, said Rospotrebnadzor spokeswoman Lyubov Voropayeva.
"All the necessary epidemiological measures have been taken. There is not currently any threat the disease will spread," Voropayeva said.
Tests in a Moscow hospital found that a second girl from Tajikistan, also 9 months old, was carrying the polio virus but had not developed the disease, Voropayeva said. The
last case of polio was confirmed in Russia in 1997.
Polio, which spreads in areas with poor sanitation, attacks the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours of infection. Children under the age of 3 are
most vulnerable.
The disease was practically eliminated as a public health problem in industrialized countries in the 1960s, but remains endemic in seven countries, including India, Nigeria and
Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). (Reuters)
WASHINGTON - Rotavirus vaccines made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Merck & Co Inc are safe to use despite being contaminated with a pig virus, U.S. health regulators ruled
on Friday.
The Food and Drug administration, in a statement, said it was safe for doctors to resume giving patients Glaxo's Rotarix and continue using Merck's Rotateq. The agency said
there was no evidence the contamination caused any harm and the vaccines were important in preventing hospitalizations and death.
Worldwide, rotavirus kills more than 500,000 infants each year, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. Deaths are rare in the United States, but severe illness that
requires a hospital stay is possible. (Reuters)
The idea that eating fruit and veg can help to ward off cancer is repeated over and over again. Despite not being true.
The American humourist Mark Twain said: ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’ Twain’s famous
words rang especially true a fortnight ago when the latest study on the link between fruit and vegetable consumption and cancer prevention landed on our desks.
It simply has to be true that eating fruits and vegetables helps to ward off cancer. After all, such purveyors of pristine science as the World Health Organisation, the
National Health Service, Cancer Research UK and the American Cancer Society have all told us it is true. But behind these claims – and the catchy marketing campaign to eat
‘five a day’ – there is little solid science.
In a new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the claim that
eating daily amounts of fruit and vegetables can prevent cancer was revealed as nothing more than a piece of junk science. The study, led by Paolo Boffetta from the
International Agency for Research on Cancer, followed almost half a million Western Europeans for over eight years in an effort to determine whether cancer can be prevented by
high intake of fruit and vegetables. Strikingly, the study failed to find any significant statistical relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and reduced risk of
cancer. Eating fruit and vegetables simply did not protect one from getting cancer. (Basham and Luik, spiked)
Homeopathy is "witchcraft" and the National Health Service should not pay for it, the British Medical Association has declared.
Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific
basis to support them.
The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the
evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS.
Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has gone further, with a vote overwhelmingly supporting a blanket ban, and an end to all placements for trainee doctors which teach
them homeopathic principles. (TDT)
A burger and fries are not only bad for the waistline, they might also exacerbate asthma, a new study suggests.
Patients with asthma who ate a high-fat meal had increased inflammation in their airways soon afterward, and did not respond as well to treatment as those who ate a low-fat
meal, the researchers found. (LiveScience)
New research into front air bags in automobiles is raising troubling questions about their effectiveness for drivers wearing seat belts.
The research suggests that when compared with the versions they replaced, the newest air bags, required in all vehicles beginning in 2008 and in some as early as 2004, may
place belted drivers at greater risk of death.
About 80 percent of all drivers wear seat belts, according to federal estimates, but government standards for air bags are intended to maximize protection for unbelted drivers,
a holdover from years ago when very few drivers buckled up.
The finding has surprised carmakers, which were required to install the so-called smart bags in response to concerns that older versions were injuring drivers and passengers,
especially shorter and older ones. The carmakers, along with federal safety regulators, are now trying to determine if there is cause for alarm. (NYT)
Prolonged mobile phone use could be linked to a type of cancer, the largest investigation of its kind will show next week.
A landmark study will include some evidence that those who regularly hold long conversations on handsets are at increased risk of developing potentially fatal brain tumours.
Its findings may lead the Government to update its health advice on the safety of mobile phones, which has remained unchanged for four years despite increased usage in Britain
particularly among children.
But the scientists in 13 countries who contributed to the decade-long, £15 million Interphone project are likely to face criticism that despite the time and expense involved
in their work, the data obtained are inconclusive and susceptible to error. (TDT)
A large international study into the link between cellphone use and two kinds of brain cancer produced inconclusive results, according to a report to be released Tuesday in
Geneva.
But researchers of the report noted flaws in the methodology of the long-awaited study. And they urge more investigation into the topic to account for how cellphone use is
affecting the health of youths, who are among the fastest growing population of cellphone users. The head researchers of the project said the behavior of cellphone users has
changed since the study was launched in 2000, which calls for fresh research on the topic. The study's results echo past research that the cellphone industry has cited for
nearly two decades -- a murky picture that there is not a conclusive link between cellphone use and cancer nor conclusive results that such a connection isn't possible.
The U.S. was not a participating member of the 13-nation long-term epidemiological study.
The survey of almost 13,000 participants found cellphone use didn't increase the risk of developing meningioma — a common and frequently benign tumor — or glioma — a
rarer but deadlier form of cancer.
The 10-year study, which was conducted by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, concluded there were "suggestions" that heavy
use could increase the risk of glioma but "biases and error prevent a causal interpretation" that would directly blame cellphone radiation for the tumor.
Heavy use was defined as 30 minutes or more of calls a day.
But the leaders of the project acknowledged that the study had flaws. (Washington Post)
At the instigation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, federal bureaucrats at the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are
studying whether to require the nation’s hot-dog makers to redesign hot dogs to reduce the likelihood of choking.
Now, as every parent knows who makes sure to cut up a hot dog for the smallest eaters, the risk of choking on one of these food objects is not zero (though it is very, very
low; 13 children’s deaths in 2006 were linked to hot-dog asphyxiation, but children eat nearly 2 billion hot dogs a year). In that sense, the proposal is less obviously batty
than some other federal regulatory initiatives that have upended whole sectors of commerce over risks
that have never been shown to have harmed anyone at all.
But notice that the only truly effective way to keep the familiar cylindrical hot dog off the plates of small children would be to ban it for everyone — the logical
end point, perhaps, of a policy that infantilizes parents by assuming they cannot be trusted to watch out for their children’s safety. If on some future Memorial Day you find
only squared-off frankfurters or triangular-prism bratwursts in the supermarket cooler, don’t say you weren’t warned. (Cato at liberty)
This is the kind of stupid government nannyism that always reminds us of "Just Say No to
Toast"
What does it mean to be white? An explosive new book by an American academic argues that whiteness isn't biological at all – in fact, it can be learned. Precious Williams
disagrees (The Independent)
Socially this might be quite correct and socially there is no real value in distinguishing by race or ethnicity but there are genuine biological issues
that must be remembered, like the differing response to medications, for example.
It would be too easy to dismiss all this as a load of crap, but when you consider the broad media coverage given to a minute number of complaints on the product, is there a
better descriptive phrase?
My latest HND piece takes a hard look at the complaints logged by some parents on the new diaper
formulation, and suggests that empowerment of the clueless by social media might not be a good thing. Very telling is that Procter & Gamble is logging the same number of
complaints (and that's a scant few) as it did with the old formulation of Pampers.
Here's a portion of a statement from Dr. Kimberly Thompson, founder of Kids Risk, Inc.—a non-profit organization dedicated to pediatric safety and risk issues—and
adjunct associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health:
From a public health standpoint, parents need to know that the diapers are safe, they have been extensively tested, and that the millions of babies who have already used
the over 2.2 billion Pampers diapers sold to date with the new technology do not appear to be experiencing any increase in the number, types, or severity of diaper rashes.
Phys-ed mandate costly, would take away class time, educators say
The fight against childhood obesity in Ohio will go on without a requirement that students get at least 30 minutes of exercise per day while in school.
Last week, a Senate committee approved a bill backed by a powerful coalition of businesses and health-care advocates that would increase nutrition standards for a la carte food
and beverages served in schools and require students to get body-mass-index screenings.
After hearing strong pleas from public-education officials, sponsors removed a requirement that schools provide students with at least 30 minutes of exercise per day outside of
recess, and that high schools add a half-unit of physical education to state graduation requirements. (Columbus Dispatch)
NEW YORK - Children whose mothers developed diabetes while pregnant are at increased risk of being overweight by age 11, a new study shows.
The study also found that children born to obese mothers are more likely to have a weight problem than children born to lean mothers.
"The best advice is to get lean and fit before you get pregnant," Dr. Lois Jovanovic of the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute in Santa Barbara, California, who was
not involved in the study, told Reuters Health. (Reuters Health)
Tackling obesity may become a little easier as a nasal spray developed by a group of researchers can restrain people from having temptation of overeating and unhealthy
foods.
The anti-binge nasal spray that could help tackle obesity by removing the rewards the brain gets from gorging on unhealthy foods and drinks would benefit millions of people
because it attacks the root cause of over-indulging, reports telegraph.co.uk.
According to researchers, when people over-eat and drink the brain releases compounds known as endorphins which produce a ‘rush’ or feeling of well-being.
Over time, this becomes a ‘craving’ or addiction and leads to unhealthy patterns of behaviour such as binge eating and binge drinking. (IANS)
The coalition agreement between the two parties has no less than 20 environmental commitments, nearly twice as many as in any other area, observes Geoffrey Lean. (TDT)
The U.K. has real problems and they are messing around with tinkerbell warm and fuzzies...
Twenty-five years ago this month, a small team of scientists discovered that the ozone layer above their Antarctic station was thinning more and more every spring. The layer
protects life on earth from the sun’s ultraviolet light. The response to that discovery is a rare, happy environmental morality tale. (NYT)
Many more of Iceland’s volcanoes seem to be stirring
THE Icelandic eruption that has caused misery for air travellers could be part of a surge in volcanic activity that will affect the whole of Europe for decades, scientists have
warned.
They have reconstructed a timeline of 205 eruptions in Iceland, spanning the past 1,100 years, and found that they occur in regular cycles — with the relatively quiet phase
that dominated the past five decades now coming to an end.
At least three other big Icelandic volcanoes are building towards an eruption, according to Thor Thordarson, a volcanologist at Edinburgh University.
“The frequency of Icelandic eruptions seems to rise and fall in a cycle lasting around 140 years,” he said. “In the latter part of the 20th century we were in a low
period, but now there is evidence that we could be approaching a peak.” (Sunday Times)
Ivy is good for walls and helps to protect them against the elements, according to a new study which overturns years of popular belief that the plant destroys buildings. (TDT)
An Israeli consortium unveiled the world's largest reverse osmosis desalination plant on Sunday in the coastal city of Hadera, hoping to help alleviate the arid country's
water shortage.
Israel's H2ID, which is jointly owned by IDE Technologies and Shikun & Binui, said its plant will supply 127 million cubic meters of desalinated water a year, or about 20
percent of the yearly household consumption in Israel.
It is the third in a series of five desalination plants being built over the next few years that will eventually supply Israel with about 750 million cubic meters annually as
traditional water sources dwindle with a rising population and low winter rainfalls. (Reuters)
Farmers and state officials are exploring solutions to nitrate pollution in heavily impacted parts of the state, including regulating Central Valley farmers who rely on
commercial fertilizer.
"The largest problem is irrigated agriculture," said Jean Moran, professor of earth and environmental science at Cal State East Bay and a former research scientist at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (Julia Scott, California Watch)
A REPORT by the National Research Council last month gave ammunition to both sides in the debate over the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. More than 80 percent
of the corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States is genetically engineered, and the report details the “long and impressive list of benefits” that has come from
these crops, including improved soil quality, reduced erosion and reduced insecticide use.
It also confirmed predictions that widespread cultivation of these crops would lead to the emergence of weeds resistant to a commonly used herbicide, glyphosate (marketed by
Monsanto as Roundup). Predictably, both sides have done what they do best when it comes to genetically engineered crops: they’ve argued over the findings.
Lost in the din is the potential role this technology could play in the poorest regions of the world — areas that will bear the brunt of climate change and the difficult
growing conditions it will bring. Indeed, buried deep in the council’s report is an appeal to apply genetic engineering to a greater number of crops, and for a greater
diversity of purposes.
Appreciating this potential means recognizing that genetic engineering can be used not just to modify major commodity crops in the West, but also to improve a much wider range
of crops that can be grown in difficult conditions throughout the world.
Doing that also requires opponents to realize that by demonizing the technology, they’ve hindered applications of genetic engineering that could save lives and protect the
environment. (NYT)
The Bloomberg administration announced on Friday that it was moving to simplify the process for New Yorkers to obtain gun permits, thus speeding up a set of byzantine
licensing requirements that gun-rights advocates have long criticized as among the most restrictive in the country.
Administration officials said that the move was forged by a City Hall focused on efficiency and that it would allow for better investigation of applicants who might not qualify
for a gun while more swiftly satisfying those fit to have them.
But the timing of the decision was curious to some, as it follows a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that struck down parts of the gun-control law in the District of Columbia and
subsequent challenges to gun laws in other places.
“If I were working for the mayor in New York, in the legal department particularly, I’d be saying: ‘Are we sure we can defend these laws? Are there things to do, ahead of
time, that will make it easier for us to defend them?’ ” said Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “I would be surprised if that were
not the thinking.”
The announcement was an unexpected turn for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made national headlines with his efforts to take guns out of criminals’ hands and stem their
trafficking, like using private investigators to pose as gun buyers in sting operations and suing gun dealers in several states. (NYT)
Months before he loaded his SUV with propane tanks and fireworks and drove to Times Square, police say, Faisal Shahzad went to a firearms store and bought a rifle. It was
found in his other car at Kennedy Airport, where his name showed up on the no-fly list in time to keep him from escaping.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is one of many people wondering why a suspected terrorist can be barred from flying but not from purchasing a gun. It "defies common
sense," he says, that "the rights of terrorists are placed above the safety of everyday Americans."
Well, not exactly. Anyone convicted of terrorism has no right to buy a gun, since felons are barred under federal law. And Lautenberg neglects to mention that in denying
constitutional rights to people merely suspected of dangerous connections, he would deny rights to lots of peaceable "everyday Americans." (Steve Chapman, Townhall)
Roger Harrabin has posted a short report from the Heartland Conference which is actually not too bad. There are a couple of irrelevant asides about tobacco funding, but
there is a definite change in tone.
You don’t have to look far for proof that this country must cut its dependence on fossil fuels and develop cleaner sources of energy.
It can be found in the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico. It can be found in China’s aggressive efforts to win the global competition for green technologies and green jobs. And,
most urgently, it can be found in the inexorable math of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions.
And where is the Senate? After a year of talking, utterly nowhere. Paralyzed by partisanship, hobbled by indifferent leadership, it is unable to muster a majority (much less a
filibuster-proof 60 votes) for even a modest energy and climate bill. (NYT)
After
some last minute tweaking to overcome concerns raised by the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the American Power Act, a bill proposing a Cap & Trade
system for reducing US carbon dioxide emissions, was introduced in the Senate by John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent. Notable by
his absence was South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham, who came to his senses just in time to back out of the bill writing troika. Purportedly, the bill aims to reduce
emissions by 17% by 2020 and by over 80% in 2050. What it really does is levy a stealth tax on carbon based energy, hiding it behind a “carbon trading” market scheme that
would have made Enron proud.
“Our bill will create jobs and transform the American economy; make our country more energy independent, which in turn will strengthen our national
security; and improve the quality of the air we breathe,” Senator Lieberman said. “We are proud to have support from a growing and unprecedented coalition of business,
national security, faith, and environmental communities, who are energized to work hard to pass this bill this year.” What Joe doesn't mention is that the “unprecedented
coalition” only exists because of the unprecedented level of giveaways and special interest provisions in the draft legislation.
Senator Kerry said, “We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world's clean energy leader. This is a bill for
energy independence after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs, and a bill to end
America's addiction to foreign oil and protect the air our children breathe and the water they drink.” He should have added: A bill to raise the cost of everything in America
and insinuate government control deeper into the lives of every US citizen. (The Resilient Earth)
The new Kerry-Lieberman climate bill mandates a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. It first targets power plants that provide reliable, affordable
electricity for American homes, schools, hospitals, offices and factories. Six years later, it further hobbles the manufacturing sector itself.
Like the House-passed climate bill, Kerry-Lieberman also requires an 83% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. Once population growth and transportation, communication and
electrification technologies are taken into account, this translates into requiring US emission levels last seen around 1870!
House Speaker Pelosi says “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” to ensure that America achieves these emission mandates. This means replacing what
is left of our free-market economy with an intrusive Green Nanny State, compelling us to switch to unreliable wind and solar power, and imposing skyrocketing energy costs on
every company and citizen.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is implementing its own draconian energy restrictions, in case Congress does not enact punitive legislation.
It’s time to ask these politicians some fundamental questions. (Paul Driessen, CFACT)
President Obama has now begun regulating how much energy Americans can use. Freedom Action supports Senator Lisa Murkowski's Resolution to stop his EPA from using the Clean Air
Act to ration energy and raise prices. If Congress acts now, EPA will be stopped in its tracks. (Freedom Action)
Nearly two weeks ago, I blogged about some strange procedural
developments in the big global warming case coming out of the Gulf Coast, Comer v. Murphy Oil USA. On the eve of final briefing deadlines before the en
banc Fifth Circuit, an eighth judge of that court recused from the case (we don’t know the reason, but the previous seven recusals were presumably due to stock
ownership) and so the court was faced with an unprecedented situation: losing an en banc quorum after previously having had enough of one to vacate the panel
decision and grant en banc rehearing in the first place. We were all set to file our brief when the Clerk of the Fifth Circuit issued an order notifying the
parties of the lost quorum and canceling the scheduled hearing — and nothing more. Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to go ahead with filing late last
week.
Again, here’s the situation: Mississippi homeowners sued 34 energy companies and utilities operating in the Gulf Coast for damage sustained to their property during
Hurricane Katrina. The homeowners alleged that the defendants had emitted greenhouse gases, which increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which
contributed to global warming, which accelerated the melting of glaciers, which raised the global sea level, which increased the frequency and severity of hurricanes, which
caused the destructive force of Hurricane Katrina. The district court concluded that it lacked the authority to resolve the public debate over global warming and dismissed the
case. A Fifth Circuit panel reversed this dismissal, holding that the homeowners have standing to raise some of their claims and that those claims are appropriate for
resolution by the federal courts. The Fifth Circuit then granted rehearing en banc. (Cato at liberty)
If you don't have MS Office, I recommend you to download the new and free PowerPoint
viewer which is much faster than e.g. OpenOffice.
As AP mentioned, Pachauri "cautioned" the meta-IPCC panel not to "undermine the scientists' motivation". In other words, the railway engineer blackmailed
the would-be independent panel and asked them not to dare to insult the AGW bigots' religious sensibilities and funding.
The slides are mostly about the "impressive" U.N. institutions and their complicated relationships. But let me choose slide 6 of 12 from Pachauri's talk. It shows the
number of papers about climate change:
That's a pretty scary growth, especially if we appreciate the fact that the research hasn't found anything substantial about the climate in the last 15 years.
The head of the UN's climate change panel has defended the use of unproven science to justify climate change by saying the "grey literature" cannot be ignored. (TDT)
He has to defend it now despite previously claiming the IPCC used only peer-reviewed literature because people are finally beginning to check and have
found how far that is from the truth.
The AGW community is behaving exactly like the UFO cult studied by psychologist Leon Festinger in his classic study of cognitive dissonance. May 16, 2010
- by Art Horn
The release of the Climategate emails has caused the world to look at the methods of leading climate scientists with much greater skepticism and concern.
The well-documented, thoroughly dissected emails revealed that data was manipulated to hide temperature trends that were not favorable to researchers’ intended outcomes.
Using their positions of power in the field, leading climate scientists kept man-made global warming skeptics from publishing in scientific journals. They perverted the “peer
review” process by reviewing their research papers among themselves. Emails were deleted to hide information from authorities after Freedom of Information Act requests were
made (Nixonian behavior which made the “Climategate” moniker especially apt).
The list of questionable — and possibly criminal — activities goes on and on. (PJM)
RP Jnr says I've misrepresented his views in the post before last. If
so, then I apologise.
I'm still not sure that I understand Roger's views precisely. I think the confusion may be based in the semantics of the terms "fudge" and "fraud" and I
want to explore the subject again here.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has used the power of government to seek documents from the University of Virginia regarding its former professor and Climategate
figure of "hockey stick" fame, Michael Mann. Mr. Cuccinelli is investigating whether Professor Mann engaged in fraud to obtain taxpayer money to fund his research.
(Mark J. Fitzgibbons, American Thinker)
Let me first start by saying that before science tries to learn something from the last millenium (to tell us about the future "climate change", which is
the fashionable question that Mann is trying to promote), it may be a good idea to actually learn something about the last millenium.
But you know, paleoclimatology which used to be an academic subject about the truth concerning practically irrelevant questions has become an applied science: the main goal is
how can we benefit from the answers, not necessarily true ones, to those questions. You know it's not about the truth at all: it's about something plausible.
But the TRF readers may be interested in the truth for its own sake. And as Mann's article clearly shows, pretty much nothing nontrivial has been learned about
the spatial climate patterns in the last millenium, despite billions of dollars that are being invested into this discipline.
In the early 1980s, both Gentlemen would come to MIT. Richard Lindzen was a registered Democrat. Kerry Emanuel had just voted for Ronald Reagan, being more right-wing than
Attila the Hun according to Lindzen. ;-)
Both men are relaxed and other things made them natural friends.
As their discipline found itself at the epicenter of a major political battle, times were getting harder. Kerry Emanuel was slowly transformed into an AGW believer, at least
superficially. Now, Richard Lindzen gave us some hints that because of their special closer relationship, he knows something more about Emanuel's motivation. And Emanuel has
explicitly told Lindzen that joining the AGW bandwagon could be good for their department, the funding, and so on.
A decision by a climate-change group to fly leading activists 12,000 miles to a conference threatens to tear the movement apart.
The leadership of Climate Camp – which is opposed to flying and airport expansion – have been accused of hypocrisy after they sent two members on a £1,200 round-trip to
Bolivia.
The leaders argued it was necessary to attend the ‘transnational protest’ – even though the flights generated eight tons of carbon dioxide greenhouse gases.
Now a furious backlash against the trip threatens to split the group, which in the past has blockaded Heathrow airport and clashed with police at demonstrations against
coal-fired power stations. (Daily Mail)
Volcanoes blast; glaciers melt; economies implode; currencies nose dive and voters revolt. It is the worst of worlds for the climate change movement, and the outlook
continues to darken.
None of this dimmed the glory of the majestic moment in Amsterdam yesterday as the part-time IPCC chair and part-time sleazy book
author Rajendra Pachauri emerged from the seclusion in which he has unwillingly been lurking since international outrage over some high
profile and amateurish errors at the IPCC and his vituperative and vindictive attacks on quite justified
critics made him an international laughingstock at the beginning of the year.
The occasion for the prominent Indian novelist’s return to the limelight was the first open
session of a review commission convened by the United Nations to examine the work of the IPCC and, hopefully, to make recommendations that will insure that the IPCC’s
next report on climate change will be less vulnerable to critics than the document produced under Dr. Pachauri’s lackadaisical supervision last time.
Politically, the commission will fail. That is, the panel will not satisfy the hundreds of engaged and vocal critics pushing back against the ‘consensus’ on
climate change — and will do even less to convince an increasingly skeptical
public opinion that a strict global treaty on climate change is humanity’s only hope of escaping devastating consequences in the near future.
[Charles Hendry, Conservative MP for Wealden, and newly-appointed Minister of State at the Ministry of Energy and Climate
Change]
Perhaps there is a nuclear glow in the gloaming after all, despite the dispiriting appointment of Liberal Democrat, Chris Huhne, to the post of Secretary of State for Energy
and Climate Change in the newly-formed Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, an...
[‘A Block for the Whigs - or, the new State Whirligig’ - the Fox-North Coalition, caricatured by James Gillray
(1783).This vibrant cartoon shows a carousel, on which sit government ministers: Charles Fox, Lord North, Edmund Burke, and Admiral Keppel. In the centre of the carousel is a
pillar topped by a bust of King George III, a wig, and Union Jack suspended over the bust. In the background, two...
I herewith reproduce below the latest excellent ‘Newsletter’ (14/05/2010) from The
Scientific Alliance. It seems to me that this makes a great deal of sense, and that it is well worth the read and promulgating to a wider public.
The Scientific Alliance was formed in 2001, and is a non-profit membership-based organisation, now based in Cambridge. It brings together both scientists and non-scientists...
WUWT
was the first sensible source to notice that Nude Socialist has jumped the shark once again (and recently they've been doing almost nothing else): the whole new issue is
dedicated to "climate deniers" (and, more generally, some other "deniers").
After the scientific giants such as Garrett Lisi, Marcelo Gleiser, and Lee Smolin with their deep and likely "mainstream" theories of everything and nothing (who deny
that there are any symmetries, laws of physics, or theorems - but they're surely not deniers, are they? They are so liberal!) were given most of the attention in the previous
issues, it's great to be a part of a community described by this "prestigious" and "scientific" magazine. :-)
Among seven articles about the "denialists", there is even one written by our "friend". Michael Fitzpatrick says that the "deniers" shouldn't be
called names because they deserve as much respect as those who think that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. ;-) Thank you so much for your generosity, Mr Fitzpatrick.
National Review Online contributing editor Jim Manzi, in an April 21 post, uses Mark Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny as an example of conservative writers (quoting Ross
Douthat) “offering bromides instead of substance, and … pandering instead of grappling with real policy questions.” I think he’s wide of the mark. (James M. Taylor, The
Heartland Institute)
Peter Sinclair AKA "Greenman" a cartoonist and Al Gore disciple has been hard at work creating YouTube videos that smear skeptics and their arguments. The
following is a complete rebuttal to his "Crock of the Week - 32000 Scientists" video
challenging the petition of 31,486 scientists who reject global warming alarm. (Popular Technology)
A printer-friendly PDF version of the Citizen Audit report I released last month is now available. It’s 30 pages in total, includes clickable links to supplemental online
material, and at 500 kb isn’t too huge a file.
Mr Tony Abbott MP
Leader of the Opposition
Parliament House,
Canberra, ACT
Dear Mr Abbott,
Although I am travelling in the US at the moment I have become aware of the controversy over your comments at an Adelaide school last week, including the public response by
[a] scientist with an alarmist global warming bent.
You might be interested in the graph below. The data are temperatures reconstructed from Greenland ice cores and published in the peer reviewed literature. The data confirm
pre-IPCC understanding of the climate history of the Earth: Earth warmed from the last glacial maximum about 15,000 years ago when great ice sheets covered North America and
northern Europe and sea level about 130 m lower than today. By 9,000 years ago Earth had warmed to the Holocene maximum when temperatures were warmer than today; the Holocene
maximum lasted until about 4,000 years ago and there has been irregular cooling since.
The IPCC alarmist claim that Earth’s temperature has been steady for the last 10,000 years but this view is at odds with historical and archaeological evidence Read
the rest of this entry » (via SPPI)
This article from today's Canberra Times – which so often reads like a GreenLeft news sheet – fumes at signs climate skeptic ideas are lurking within
Australia’s peak science academy.
It seems The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering has circulated a short draft statement that is not 100% IPCC compliant.
Pro-IPCC sources are quoted in force by the Canberra Times whining about this lapse from orthodoxy.
My spies tell me that other science bodies downunder might also be harbouring climate skeptics.
The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national
mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.
The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C
for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.Read the rest of this entry » (via SPPI)
Africa's lake Tanganyika has heated up sharply over the past 90 years and is now warmer than at any time for at least 1,500 years, a scientific paper said on Sunday, adding
that fish and wildlife are threatened. (Reuters)
... But the paper admits that other factors, like overfishing, may be doing more harm than any warming.
People in cities around the Mediterranean including Athens, Rome and Marseilles are likely to suffer most in Europe from ever more scorching heatwaves this century caused by
climate change, scientists said on Sunday.
The number of heatwaves was likely to surge to almost 3 each summer from 2071-2100 in the Mediterranean region from just one every third year from 1961-1990, it said. Most
other parts of Europe would suffer far less.
The number of Mediterranean summer days with temperatures above 105 Fahrenheit (40.6C), a threshold in the United States for public health warnings, would rise to about 16 a
year from 1.6 in the same period.
Heat-related health problems would be felt most by people living near the coast or in low-lying river valleys, according to scientists in Switzerland and the United States
writing in the journal Nature Geoscience about health and heat projections.
"Some of the most densely populated European regions, such as the urban areas of Athens, Bucharest, Marseilles, Milan, Rome and Naples, would experience the severest
changes in health indicators," they wrote. (Reuters)
It's a good thing no one lives in climate models, eh?
The most recent El Nino event is rapidly dying, as seen in the following plot of sea surface temperature (SST) variations averaged over the Nino3.4 region (5N to 5S, 120W to
170W) as measured by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite during its period of record, 2 June 2002 through yesterday, 13 May 2010:
The 60-day cooling rate as of yesterday was the strongest seen yet in the 8 year period of record for the Nino3.4 region.
A similar plot of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) data, based upon the sea level air pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin is consistent with the SST cooling,
showing an increase in the pressure gradient across the tropical South Pacific, which portends increasing trade winds and cooling of the ocean surface:
A plot of these two time series against one another (next plot) reveals that the most recent SSTs are unusually warm for the 60-day average SOI value:
There are at least three ways to interpret this excursion from the average relationship seen in the plot. One is that longer-term warming, whether natural or anthropogenic, has
raised the temperature ‘baseline’ about which the El Nino/La Nina events oscillate.
A second possibility is that we are in for continued rapid cooling in the Pacific as the SSTs fall to values more consistent with the SOI index.
A third is that the current excursion toward La Nina territory is going to reverse, and SOI values will decrease to more neutral conditions, while SSTs remain relatively
high.
As is always the case, all we can do is sit back and watch. (Roy W. Spencer)
Monsoon rains, critical to farm output in India's trillion-dollar economy, will arrive on May 30, two days before normal, India's Earth Sciences Minister Prithviraj Chavan
said on Friday.
India's weather office has already forecast a normal June-September monsoon this year after the 2009 season saw the worst drought in nearly four decades.
The forecast will be updated next month.
A statement from the India Meteorology Department said monsoon clouds would appear over the Andaman Sea next week and move to the mainland ahead of the normal onset date of
June 1.
"The model suggests the date of onset of south-west monsoon over Kerala is likely to be on May 30, with a model error of four days," the statement said. (Reuters)
Ten months have passed since my last post on the slow transition between solar cycles 23 & 24 and my graphics
series showing the utter failure of the April 2007 NASA/NOAA prediction. Seems just yesterday but it was Dec 2006 when we first talked about a slow
transition to a cooler cycle 24.
Trying this new graphic (data from SWO) it looks to me as though cycle 23 is not yet out of the woods.
I must dig out the latest NASA/NOAA prediction and track this later in the year.
Currently at the SolarCycle24.com web pages they talk about a very quiet sun. (Warwick Hughes)
The prognostications based on spotless days are now a distant memory. From here, given that the green corona brightness indicates that solar maximum will in 2015, the big
unknown is what the maximum amplitude will be. We are now eighteen months into a six year rise to solar maximum. What is interesting is that in the last few days, the F10.7
flux has fallen to values last seen in late 2009:
The red line is a possible uptrend based on the data to date. That uptrend would result in a maximum F10.7 amplitude in 2015 of about 105. Using the relationship between
F10.7 flux and sunspot number, that in turn means a maximum amplitude in terms of sunspot number of 50 – a Dalton Minimum-like result. Dr Svalgaard has kindly provided a
graphic of the relationship between sunspot number and F10.7 flux:
Dr Svalgaard has also done the work to show that Solar Cycle 24 is looking less and less like Solar Cycle 19:
'Expect global cooling for the next 2-3 decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been'
CHICAGO -- A prominent U.S. geologist is urging the world to forget about global warming because global cooling has already begun.
Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook's warning came in the form of a new scientific paper he presented to the 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago on May 16,
2010. Dr. Easterbrook is an Emeritus Professor at Western Washington University who has authored eight books and 150 journal publications. Easterbrook's full resume is here.
Dr. Easterbrook joins many other scientists, peer-reviewed research and scientific societies warning of a coming global cooling. Easterbrook is presenting his findings
alongside other man-made global warming skeptics at the three day conference in Chicago. (Marc Morano, Climate Depot)
Out of curiosity I looked at what the UKMO/Jones et al are using for Irkutsk now and compared to gridbox data. Because Irkutsk is at 104.3 East I took the two 5 deg gridboxes
50 to 55 North – 100 to 110 East , puts Irkutsk fairly central.
The difference between CRUT3 and UAH MSU 1979-2009 for the gridbox 50 to 55 North – 100 to 110 East is now 0.137 deg decade and for Irkutsk station minus UAH MSU 0.159 deg
decade.
To wrap up for now, a graphic of Irkutsk and smaller regionals UKMO station data compared to satellite lower
troposphere and a graphic of Irkutsk UKMO minus Barguzin. Note both Barguzin and Zigalovo have identical huge gaps
from 1990-2008 so we have just 2009 building the time series again. Maybe some Russian readers might know where the missing data may be. (Warwick Hughes)
WASHINGTON — The political ripples from the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster spread in the capital on Thursday as six West Coast senators proposed a permanent ban on drilling
in the Pacific and another group tried to raise oil company liability in a spill to $10 billion from the current $75 million.
The move by senators from California, Oregon and Washington, all Democrats, was largely symbolic because there are no plans at present to open the West Coast to drilling. Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, withdrew a modest plan for new offshore drilling shortly after the gulf accident. (NYT)
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday angrily assailed the finger-pointing among the three companies involved in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a “ridiculous
spectacle,” even as his own administration came under criticism for failing to do enough to prevent an environmental calamity.
In remarks during an appearance in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama also criticized what he called the “cozy relationship” between the government and the oil industry that has
existed for decades, even into his own administration. He acknowledged that federal agencies had failed to ensure that safety and environmental standards were being met and
announced a thorough review of the oversight process. (NYT)
WASHINGTON — The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required
permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the
gulf.
Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands
of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.
The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of
certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists.
Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to
occur or if wildlife might be harmed. (NYT)
Is it any wonder that the BP calamity occurred? Here’s what has been preoccupying its environmental regulator, the Minerals Management Service, ever since MMS was
established in 1982.
“Record for number of lease sales in a year,” MMS crowed, referring to its success in 1983. “Greatest high bid dollar amount received in a lease sale,” it added,
displaying its haul to the very last digit: “US$3,469,214,969 in the Central Gulf of Mexico.” In 1984, more records: “Most tracts offered at a lease sale (8,868 tracts in
Eastern Gulf of Mexico)”; “Record number of exploratory wells drilled in a year (597)”; and “Record number of platform installations in a year (229).”
A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected an effort by environmental and Native American groups to stop exploratory oil drilling off the coast of Alaska that could begin
this summer.
The decision, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, rejected several claims by the groups, including that the United States
Minerals Management Service did not adequately consider the possibility that the project could cause a large oil spill in the remote Arctic.
The project is led by Shell Oil, which paid $2.1 billion in 2008 for rights to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, off Alaska’s north coast. (NYT)
In the first significant progress in nearly a month toward stopping a massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said a 1.6km-long tube was siphoning most of the crude from a blown
well to a tanker ship after three days of wrestling to get the stopgap measure into place on the seafloor.
BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the contraption was hooked up successfully and sucking most of the oil from the leak. Engineers remotely guiding robot submersibles had worked
since Friday to place the tube into a 53cm pipe nearly 1.6km below the sea.
Previous attempts to use emergency valves and a 100-tonne container had failed to stop the leak that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, threatening sea life,
commercial fishing and the coastal tourism industry from Louisiana to Florida. BP has also been burning small amounts of floating oil and spraying chemical dispersants above
and below the surface.
Researchers, meanwhile, warned on Sunday that kilometers-long underwater plumes of oil from the spill could poison and suffocate sea life across the food chain, with damage
that could endure for a decade or more. (AP)
The oil slick from the huge uncontrolled spill in the Gulf of Mexico has broken into smaller parts, and while potentially catastrophic, may pose less threat of a massive
landfall, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen said on Friday.
"The character of the slick has changed somewhat, it is disaggregated into smaller patches of oil," said Allen, who is leading the response to contain what could be
the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
"It's not a monolithic spill, we're dealing with oil where it's at," Allen added.
Thin surface oil "sheen" and globs and balls of tar from the spill so far mostly have affected outlying parts of the Louisiana coastline. Tar balls also have washed
ashore on Alabama's Dauphin Island. (Reuters)
Polonius. To England send him, or
confine him where
Your wisdom best shall think.
King. It shall be so.
Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.
Exeunt.
Once again Christopher Booker is a lone voice in pointing out the most egregious and dangerous appointment in the cobbling together of the UK Con-Lib coalition. This is the appointment
of Chris Huhne to be Minister for Energy and Climate change. We have seen before how cavalier Huhne is with
data misrepresentation. If he is allowed to carry on with his pro-wind and anti-nuclear campaign from a position of Governmental authority, power
cuts are inevitable and will be dire. People are going to die. (Number Watch)
The parties are divided over nuclear power, offshore oil drilling and many other green issues - and critics say that will hinder the fight against global warming
Fears that the UK's fight against climate change will be lost in the confusion of the Liberal-Conservative coalition were underlined yesterday when divisions between the two
parties were exposed over nuclear power, renewable energy, airport expansion and offshore oil drilling.
It emerged that the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne – one of the most senior Lib Dems in the Cabinet – is to cede responsibility for civil nuclear
energy policy to his Tory deputy, Charles Hendry, who will steer any legislation through Parliament. Mr Huhne is opposed to nuclear power on public spending grounds. (The
Independent)
This Huhne bloke seems to be either serially misquoted or a total loon: "Mr Huhne yesterday reiterated his opposition to nuclear power. He told The
Times: "This is an island surrounded by sea; we can use offshore tidal power, wind power, and we are sitting on enormous stocks of coal. We ought to be able to
put together a policy that is non-carbon and independent from foreign sources.""
Editor’s note: This is the conclusion of the series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The
previous posts in this series can be seen at:
America’s dominant mode of electricity generation is via combustion of bituminous and sub-bituminous coal in large thermal stations. All such plants have boilers and steam
turbogenerators and electrostatic precipitators to capture fly ash, but they burn different qualities of coal that may come from surface as well as underground mines, have
different arrangements for cooling (once-through using river water or various cooling towers) and many have flue gas desulfurization to reduce SO2 emissions.
Consequently, these conversions of chemical energy in coal to electricity feature widely differing power densities: for the power plants alone they are commonly in excess of 2
kW/m2 and can be as high as 5 kW/m2. When all other requirements (coal mining, storage, environmental controls, settling ponds) are included, the
densities inevitably decline and range over an order of magnitude: from as low as 100 W/m2 to as much as 1,000 W (1 kW)/m2.
In contrast, compact gas turbines plants (the smallest ones on trailers and larger facilities that can be rapidly assembled from prefabricated units), which can be
connected to existing gas supply, can generate electricity with power density as high as 15 kW/m2. Larger stations (>100 MW) using the most efficient
combined-cycle arrangements (with a gas turbine’s exhaust used to generate steam for an attached steam turbine) will operate with lower power densities, and if new natural
gas extraction capacities have to be developed for their operation then the overall power density of gas and electricity production would decline to a range similar to that of
coal-fired thermal generation or slightly higher, that is in most cases to a range of 200-2000 W/m2. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
[David Kruetzer is research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the Heritage
Foundation in Washington, D.C.. This is his first post at MasterResource.]
Building on the misconception that renewable energy is cheap, some legislators and activists propose mandating that minimum fractions of our electric supply come from
designated renewables. Wind and solar are at the top of this list. Al Gore wants 100
percent renewables in less than a decade; others propose less ambitious targets.
The problem is that renewables are expensive, not to mention unreliable and environmentally questionable. Mandates would only force consumers to pay ever higher electric
rates as this minimum in an renewable electricity standard (RES) grows year by year.
The Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation recently
analyzed the economic impact
of an RES, such as proposed in federal legislation. We found that starting with a 3 percent mandate in 2012, and ramping it up by 1.5 percent each year, will by 2035:
Reduce national income (GDP) by over $5 trillion even after adjusting for inflation, which translates to an average annual loss of $2,400 for a family of four.
Destroy a million jobs.
Raise electric rates by 35 to 60 percent (after adjusting for inflation).
These impacts are driven by the fact that the cheapest renewable electricity source costs twice as much per megawatt-hour as the most economical conventional sources. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
In order to incorporate more renewable energy – especially offshore wind – into the European grid, financing and technological questions must be addressed. (Renewable
Energy World)
Policy Failure: Greece was told that if it wanted a bailout, it needed to consider privatizing its government health care system. So tell us again why the U.S. is following
Europe's welfare state model.
The requirement, part of a deal arranged by the IMF, the European Union and the European Central bank, is a tacit admission that national health care programs are
unsustainable. Along with transportation and energy, the bailout group, according to the New York Times, wants the Greek government to remove "the state from the
marketplace in crucial sectors."
This is not some cranky or politically motivated demand. It is a condition based on the ugly reality of government medicine. The Times reports that economists — not
right-wingers opposed to health care who want to blow up Times Square — say liberalizing "the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are
among the highest in Europe."
Of course most of the media have been largely silent about the health care privatization measure for Greece, as it conflicts with their universal, single-payer health care
narrative. (IBD)
Some legal scholars, including some who normally lean to the left, believe the states have identified the law’s weak spot and devised a credible theory for eviscerating
it…
Jonathan Turley, who teaches at George
Washington University Law School, said that if forced to bet, he would predict that the courts would uphold the health care law. But Mr. Turley said that the federal
government’s case was far from open-and-shut, and that he found the
arguments against the mandate compelling.
“There are few cases in the history of the court system that have a more significant assertion of authority by the government,” said Mr. Turley, a civil libertarian
who acknowledged being strange bedfellows with the conservative theorists behind the lawsuit. “This case, more than any other, may give the court sticker shock in terms of
its impact on federalism.”
Supporters claim the individual mandate will pass muster with the Supreme Court because in the
past the Court has declared that the U.S. Constitution’s interstate commerce clause authorizes Congress to regulate non-commercial activity that affects interstate
commerce. Sack writes:
Lawyers for the government will contend that, because of the cost-shifting nature of health insurance, people who do not obtain coverage inevitably affect the pricing and
availability of policies for everyone else. That, they will argue, is enough to satisfy the Supreme Court’s test.
But to [the attorneys' general outside counsel David] Rivkin, the acceptance of that argument would herald an era without limits.
“Every decision you can make as a human being has an economic footprint — whether to procreate, whether to marry,” he said. “To say that is enough for your
behavior to be regulated transforms the Commerce Clause into an infinitely capacious font of power, whose exercise is only restricted by the Bill of Rights.”
Sack’s article contains an inaccuracy. He writes:
Congressional bill writers took steps to immunize the law against constitutional challenge…They labeled the penalty on those who do not obtain coverage an “excise
tax,” because such taxes enjoy substantial constitutional protection.
In fact, the law uses the term “excise tax” several times, but never in reference to
the penalty for violating the individual mandate. It describes that penalty solely as a penalty. (The law does refer to the penalty for violating the employer
mandate as a tax, but not an excise tax.)
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is stuck using crude tools to measure the benefits of food, drugs and supplements and needs a whole new set of standards,
a panel of experts said on Wednesday.
Relying on so-called biomarkers is confusing the entire process of drug development, the public and doctors alike, they said.
The FDA also needs to use the same strict standards for assessing health claims of food and supplements as it does for drugs, said the panel appointed by the Institute of
Medicine, which advises the federal government.
The committee recommended a new framework the FDA could use for judging studies that companies provide to support health and safety claims for their products.
"Congress may need to strengthen FDA authority to accomplish this goal," the institute's report reads.
The Obama administration is tackling the issue of food and health on several fronts. On Tuesday, first lady Michelle Obama released a 70-point plan for reducing childhood
obesity, including a call for marketing healthier food.
The committee's report focuses on biomarkers, which can include measures as simple as temperature. Common biomarkers include levels of cholesterol and blood sugar.
Drugs to treat diabetes are often approved simply because they lower blood sugar and heart drugs can win FDA approval because they lower cholesterol. But the report said this
does not mean they make patients healthier.
"This is a groundbreaking report that tells us we should really think carefully about the use of biomarkers and surrogates," Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at
Yale University who sat on the panel, said in a telephone interview. (Reuters)
NEW YORK - Everyday exposure to perchlorate, an industrial chemical found in drinking water and a range of foods, may not impair thyroid function in pregnant women, a new
study suggests.
"Our data are reassuring," lead researcher Dr. Elizabeth N. Pearce, of Boston University School of Medicine, told Reuters Health in an email. "Although low-level
perchlorate exposure was ubiquitous in the pregnant women we studied, perchlorate exposure was not associated with alterations in their thyroid function."
Perchlorate is used to manufacture rocket propellant, fireworks, flares and explosives. It is also found as an impurity in some industrial and consumer products, like cleaners
and bleaches. In the environment, perchlorate is found at low levels in drinking water and foods such as milk, wheat and a range of fruits and vegetables, and a 2002 U.S.
government study found perchlorate in urine samples from all 2,820 adults included.
In the body, sufficiently high levels of perchlorate slow down the transport of iodine to the thyroid gland, which churns out hormones that regulate metabolism and requires
iodine. So there are concerns that perchlorate exposure could impair thyroid function -- an effect that would be particularly troubling during pregnancy, as adequate thyroid
hormone is necessary for fetal brain development. (Reuters Health)
BOSTON - Children whose malnourished mothers took vitamin A during pregnancy had stronger lungs throughout childhood, with the benefits measurable well past the age of 9,
researchers reported on Wednesday.
Lung capacity was about 3 percent higher in children whose mothers took vitamin A compared to those whose mothers received a placebo, the study of 1,371 children in Nepal
showed.
"Early interventions involving vitamin A supplementation in communities where undernutrition is highly prevalent may have long-lasting consequences for lung health,"
Dr. William Checkley of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.
When mothers were given beta carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, their children did not score higher on the lung capacity test.
The benefits are believed to have come from treatment during pregnancy because all the children received regular vitamin A supplements after birth. (Reuters)
Scientists and journalists have been publishing overblown reports for a century – no wonder people still don't trust them
"It would be difficult to think of any article of diet which has not, at one time or another, been blamed as a cancer-producing substance. The list includes tea, coffee,
cocoa, white bread – and also brown bread – cheese, butter, eggs, meat, fish, and poultry."
This is a quote from the Times newspaper, and many people will empathise with its sense of exasperation at the steadily increasing and sometimes contradictory list of things we
are told apparently either causes or prevents cancer.
After all, how many of us have not at some point picked up a newspaper with a cancer-related headline and muttered something about scientists always changing their minds?
But what people might find surprising is that this quote appeared in the Times way back in 1927.
We tend to think of the idea that your diet affects your risk of cancer as being a relatively new thing, and it is true this area of science has only really come into its own
in the last 30-odd years. But this quote suggests that while the evidence has been strong enough to form the basis of solid lifestyle advice only relatively recently, the
feeling of being bombarded with health messages has a longer history.
Again, most people would not be surprised to see the Daily Mail run a story headlined "The truth about cancer", citing the reason for many cases as apparently a lack
of potassium in the body. But what people might not expect is that this story was published in 1916.
The Guardian, meanwhile, was reporting in 1927 that "there does not appear to be any hereditary disposition to cancer", and that "cancer, as far as we know, is
not caused by any special food or foods, nor by the absence of special foods". Research has since shown this is incorrect. When you realise that newspapers have been
publishing these sorts of stories about cancer for at least a century, it is understandable that people are cynical about what scientists tell them. (Richard Evans, The
Guardian)
No, they are not new and they are still not right, either. The simple fact is most cancers are a perfectly natural result of aging as imperfect cell copies
proliferate over time.
NEW YORK - Children of highly educated parents may be more prone to an irritating skin disorder than peers from less educated families, a new study suggests.
Austrian researchers note in the journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology that as many as one in five children between the ages of 6 and 14 suffer from atopic dermatitis, a
common type of eczema, which causes itchy and scaly rashes.
According to the study's authors, Dr. Gerald Haidinger and his Medical University of Vienna colleague, Dr. Andrea Weber, children whose parents had a high school or college
diploma were, on average, about 30 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with eczema than children whose parents had less education. (Reuters Health)
Hmm... higher education is also associated with higher income levels and a greater affordability for and propensity to seek treatment for mild conditions
and irritations. Could it be that mothers with lower qualifications and commensurate incomes are simply more likely to seek OTC remedies rather than actually having their
kids officially diagnosed and treated?
For decades, we have known that heavy metals and chemicals can cause grave physical harm. Going back to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” we have known and been amply
warned of the serious consequences of using or being exposed to these poisons in our daily activities. Thousands of these are well-documented carcinogens.
Building on Carson’s ground-breaking research, ... (Global Research)
WASHINGTON, May 13 - Congress should ban sugary sodas from the $58 billion-a-year U.S. food stamp program as a step to combat the obesity crisis, the House Agriculture
Committee was told on Thursday.
Wellesley College professor and food expert Rob Paarlberg suggested the ban during a hearing to review the 2008 farm law, which includes food stamps as well as crop subsidies.
Food stamps help low-income people buy food. One in eight Americans receives food stamps.
The anti-hunger program accounts for 40 percent of Agriculture Department spending and outweighs crop subsidy and land stewardship spending of $10 billion this year.
"I would argue caloric soda should be made ineligible for purchase under SNAP, like tobacco and alcohol," said Paarlberg, using the new name for food stamps, the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He later said sugary sodas are "a huge part of the obesity problem." (Reuters)
California just adopted effective next year a requirement that all new one- and two-family
dwellings include indoor sprinkler systems. Otherstates
are debating similar mandates, spurred by changes to national
building code standards. Earlier legal mandates have required the inclusion of smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms, but the cost of those devices is relatively minor,
whereas full-blown sprinkler systems add measurably to the cost of a new home, as well as posing challenges in such areas as maintenance, aesthetics, and risk of property
damage through accidental activation.
It will surprise not a single reader of these columns, I suspect, to learn that the fire sprinkler industry has been
a majorforce in pushing the new mandate.
As for the opposition, home builders have managed to mount a bit of resistance — New Jersey, for example, saw the current depressed state of the residential construction
business as reason to postpone its mandate for
a year. But the builders are pretty much on their own in the fight, since future buyers of new homes are a group with no organized political presence whatsoever.
Real estate blogger Christopher Fountain writes that
he’s “never heard of a home buyer voluntarily ordering this equipment when building a house, so it sounds to me like one more instance of people who know better dictating
to those who don’t.” Exactly. A South Carolina
paper quotes a state official as saying if buyers feel priced out of the new home market by the cost of the mandate, they have other ways to save money “such as choosing
less expensive flooring or countertops, or not installing yard sprinklers”. Easy to make someone else’s budget decisions for them, isn’t it? And shouldn’t the
“affordable housing” community be taking more of an interest? (Cato at liberty)
“Congress is designing everything from the braking system in your next car to the loan with which you’ll finance it. Be very afraid.”
Today Paul Ingrassia points out that the government is making sure that your next car will cost you much more.
“Having spent more than $100 billion to rescue the American auto industry, Congress now seems intent to destroy what it saved.”
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) demand even more safety regulation. They want elaborate and expensive electronic data recorders, or
"black boxes” to be installed in all new cars within two years.
“The legislation is prompted by the fast-fading furor over unintended acceleration in Toyotas. It's about as necessary as a law protecting people from elephant
stampedes in Central Park.”
That, plus America’s existing CAFE standards, suggest that the politicians wish to force car companies to produce vehicles that most Americans don’t want to buy.
"In most businesses that's a recipe for losing money. But if it happens to the car companies, well, Congress can always mount another bailout.”
Today’s
New York Times carries the headline: “With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion”
You bet. Were there cheers and high-fives in the newsroom when they wrote that? It’s like Tiger Woods announcing: “More women at PGA events.”
The Times suggests that the Bush Administration’s “deregulatory agenda had gone too far.”
To that I say, what deregulatory agenda? Bush talked about deregulation, but his bureaucrats added more pages to the Federal Register than any other
administration. Bureaucrats never stop passing rules.
The Times quotes the new activist head of OSHA: “We have to turn up the volume to make it very clear that OSHA is on the job.”
What nonsense. Agencies like OSHA are job-killers that rarely make us safer. Here’s a graph showing that workplace deaths declined since OSHA was created:
OSHA administrators like showing that graph. It looks impressive if you don’t look at the next graph, which shows that deaths had dropped just as fast before OSHA existed.
In a free country, things get better on their own. Big Government lovers cannot fathom that idea. (John Stossel, Fox Business)
In case you had any doubts about whether Washington bureaucrats were completely out of touch with ordinary Americans, the Environmental Protection Agency is here to reassure
you—they are.
While Americans across the country have been tightening their belts and dealing with a
wave of new taxes, fees, and regulations, the EPA has launched a video contest to celebrate their brand of
over-regulation. They are offering $2,500 to whomever puts together the best video lauding the merits of regulation in American life. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
AN AUSTRALIAN judge has torn strips off the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, accusing him of ''wilful disobedience'' in a case involving a senior UN
official who claimed he was unfairly denied a promotion.
The NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Adams has refused to allow Mr Ban's lawyers to speak in court until they comply with an order to produce internal documents related to the
case.
''In my review the refusal constituted an attack on the rule of law embodied in the statute of the tribunal,'' he wrote in a ruling on March 8.
The UN lawyers have argued that Justice Adams has no authority to interfere with Mr Ban's appointment of top officials, comparing Mr Ban's decision-making powers to those of a
head of state appointing a member of cabinet.
Mr Ban has refused to comply with numerous orders from a new UN personnel tribunal to hand over confidential documents and other sensitive information needed to resolve legal
claims by UN employees of unfair treatment, according to court documents. (SMH)
ELECTRICIANS installing roof-top wind farms, plumbers advising on waste recycling and suburban accountants calculating the carbon footprint of the corner store.
It will all be part of the service once a sizeable chunk of the workforce has been transformed into a green-collar army, new research reveals.
The Skills for Green Jobs in Australia project from Sydney University's Workplace Research Centre has found traditional blue- and white-collar jobs are going green as demand
for energy-efficient products and services increases. (SMH)
AN INNER-CITY network of bike paths would deliver economic benefits more than triple the cost of building it, according to the first full economic appraisal of cycleways in
Australia.
The report, commissioned by the City of Sydney and to be released today, says the 293-kilometre network proposed by 15 councils would deliver $506 million in economic benefits
to the community over 30 years, $3.88 for every dollar spent. (SMH)
Getting road lice out of the real transport system is definitely a plus. What we really need is for punitive registration and taxation of any of the
hazardous things that interfere with actual road transport, something commensurate with the societal costs imposed by their slowing thousands of journeys and wasting hundreds
of potentially productive man hours with every mile they are on the roads. Where to start? One bicycle registration about the same cost as 10,000 passenger vehicles or maybe
1,000 semitrailers? Nowhere near their nuisance value, I know but you have to start low and give people time to convert to more socially appropriate transport methods.
We should be neither too pessimistic nor complacent about environmental collapse (Simon Lewis, The Guardian)
Let's see, dazzling examples of the wonderful environments provided by Socialist central planning and control, coupled with marvelously reduced standards
of living would be: the former USSR; North Korea and; Zimbabwe? Capitalism is just so environmentally terrible, isn't it?
Ideologically fuelled climate sceptics, such as Fox News' Beck claim global warming is being used by malevolent forces to achieve their master plan (Leo Hickman, The
Guardian)
Maybe Leo should try a little back grounding -- say start with "International Man of Mystery: Who is
Maurice Strong?" by Ron Bailey. Perhaps check out the UNEP agenda from the 40th session, 1988,
where so many of the nonsense environmental issues were promoted to seize world governance (they are all there, acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming and deforestation
and none of them are real global issues).
When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing the country, fewer than 3 percent mention the environment. But when asked to name the most serious
problem facing the planet if left unchecked, the environment and global warming rise to the top, according to a May 2010 study by Woods Institute Senior Fellow Jon Krosnick.
Krosnick and colleagues from Stanford and the Associated Press analyzed the results of a recent Internet survey of 906 adults. When asked "What do you think is the most
important problem facing the country today?" about 49 percent of respondents answered the economy or unemployment, while only 1 percent mentioned the environment or global
warming.
But when asked, "What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?" 25 percent said the environment or
global warming, and only 10 percent picked the economy. In fact, environmental issues were cited more often than any other category, including terrorism, which was only
mentioned by 10 percent of respondents. (Woods Institute for the Environment) [not to be confused with the prestigious research institute Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)]
I wonder what kind of pleading it took: "But, imagining every real problem has been fixed, what would you worry about then? It'd be the
environment, right, like global warming, you'd worry about it then, wouldn't you? Come on, you'd have to be worried about stuff like that sometime... please?"
Prescribed fires are necessary to preserve a prairie ecosystem, but the smoke causes regulatory problems for cities downwind. It's the EPA versus nature. May 14, 2010
- by Patrick Richardson
Representative Jerry Moran (R-KS) recently introduced legislation in the House to require an exemption to the Clean Air Act for prescribed burns of the Flint Hills region of
Kansas and Oklahoma.
The exemption is needed because the Environmental Protection Agency is requiring something impossible — a plan which would lay out the time, location, and frequency of the
burns which are required to keep the prairie healthy and intact. Given the variability of weather in Kansas, these three things are simply impossible to predict in an area that
stretches hundreds of miles from northeast Kansas to northeast Oklahoma. (PJM)
A new, less selective approach to commercial fishing is needed to ensure the ongoing productivity of marine ecosystems and to maintain biodiversity, according to a paper in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (CSIRO)
Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide interfere with plants’ ability to convert nitrate into protein and could threaten food quality, according to a new study by
researchers at the University of California, Davis. The scientists suggest that, as global climate change intensifies, it will be critical for farmers to carefully manage
nitrogen fertilization in order to prevent losses in crop productivity and quality. (UC Davis)
Quite literally thousands of studies have been performed over the years on CO2 growth enhancement in green plants -- that it is particularly
good for them is the reason commercial growers spend good money generating CO2 to increase diurnal levels in their greenhouses. Now here we have some Left-coast
loons so determined to follow the teachings of the prophet Al on the evils of CO2 they've contrived a "plant food is bad for plants" piece.
Well guess what? Nature just doesn't seem to share their particular enthusiasms as even NASA has made releases on increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels so greening the
world it's observable from space.
A once minor pest has ravaged fruit orchards and cotton fields in China after farmers stopped spraying insecticide in crops of a genetically-modified type of cotton
resistant to bollworms, experts said.
China started growing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton in 1997 because it gave better yields and stood up to bollworms, but a key fallout has been a thriving population of
mirid bugs, which were earlier just an insignificant pest.
"Entire swathes of agricultural land that never had any problem with this pest are facing a major problem," said Kongming Wu at the State Key Laboratory for Biology
of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests in Beijing.
The bug had infested plantations of apples, strawberries, pears, peaches and vegetables, Wu told Reuters by telephone, adding that the problem emerged after regular insecticide
spraying had been halted.
"Bollworms love to go to cotton fields in June," he said. "So when we were cultivating normal cotton in the past, we would spray insecticides every June. That
meant every June, other pests were also eradicated.
"After we started cultivating Bt cotton, we no longer needed to spray insecticides. That's why other pests like the mirid bug are thriving in cotton fields and have become
a major pest." (Reuters)
Growing Bt cotton reduces pesticide applications and incidental non-target insect kill (wasn't that what enviros wanted?) and this is supposed to be a bad
thing because it has reduced pesticide applications and incidental non-target insect kill... And this is different from the side-effects of reduced pesticide organic
agriculture how, exactly?
A battle is quietly being waged between the industry that produces genetically modified seeds and scientists trying to investigate the environmental impacts of engineered
crops. Although companies such as Monsanto have recently given ground, researchers say these firms are still loath to allow independent analyses of their patented — and
profitable — seeds. (Bruce Stutz, e360)
Governments have a responsibility to ensure public safety, and a vested interest in providing human security and an environment conducive to development to their citizens.
However, the excessive accumulation and universal availability of small arms negatively impact on security, human rights and social and economic development in many parts of
the world.
Last October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the Obama administration’s support for the
United Nations plan to regulate “convention arms transfers.” Brady-endorsed Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D, CA-10)
was chosen as under secretary for arms control and international security in the State Department.
Fortunately, sufficient data exists among UN non-governmental organizations to determine if civilian firearms ownership will “negatively impact on security, human rights
and social and economic development.”
The Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, publishes an annual report entitled “Small Arms Survey.” This organization doesn’t support
civilian firearms ownership. Its mission page illustrates its agreement with the UN’s goals:
The proliferation of small arms and light weapons represents a grave threat to human security. The unchecked spread of these weapons has exacerbated inter- and intra-state
conflicts, contributed to human rights violations, undermined political and economic development, destabilized communities, and devastated the lives of millions of people.
The 2003-2005 and 2007 editions of “Small Arms Survey” contain estimates of civilian
firearms ownership rates in 59 surveyed countries.
Freedom House, founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and others “concerned with the mounting threats to peace
and democracy,” is a leading international advocate for personal liberty. Their annual report, “Freedom in the World,” rates each country’s level of individual
political rights and civil liberties, defined as follows:
Political rights enable people to participate freely in the political process, including the right to vote freely for distinct alternatives in legitimate elections,
compete for public office, join political parties and organizations, and elect representatives who have a decisive impact on public policies and are accountable to the
electorate. Civil liberties allow for the freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference
from the state.
Freedom House rates countries on a scale of 1 to 7 for each category, with 1 equating with the most rights. Countries are “Free” if they attain an average score of 1 to
2.5 (for both political and civil rights). Countries averaging between 2.5 and 5 are “Partly Free;” countries over 5 are “Not Free.”
The chart below collates countries’ average political and civil rights ratings with their level of civilian firearms ownership. The overall trend line shows the general
correlation between firearms ownership and freedom. As civilian firearms ownership increases, freedom ratings decrease: more guns, more political and civil rights.
According to UN rhetoric, as firearms ownership increases, people should be less free: the trend line should slope up as it travels from left to right.
The Heritage Foundation is America’s “most broadly supported public policy research institute,” promoting “public
policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
Each year, the Heritage Foundation publishes the “Economic Freedom Index,” which
analyzes ten economic variables for each country. The Heritage Foundation defines economic freedom as:
[I]ndividuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, and that freedom is both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.
The Heritage Foundation rates countries by the following grading scale: Economically “Free” countries have an overall score of 80-100; “Mostly Free” between 70 and
79.9; “Moderately Free” between 60 and 69.9, “Mostly Unfree” between 50 and 59.9; and economically “Repressed” countries average an overall score under 50.
The Heritage Foundation explains the difference between economic freedom and repression:
All government action involves coercion. Some minimal coercion is necessary for the citizens of a community or nation to defend themselves, promote the evolution of civil
society, and enjoy the fruits of their labor…
When government coercion rises beyond the minimal level, however, it becomes corrosive to freedom—and the first freedom affected is economic freedom.
The chart below collates countries’ economic freedom with civilian firearms ownership. The overall trend line shows that as civilians firearms ownership increases, people
have more economic freedom: more guns, more prosperity.
According to the UN, “excessive accumulation and universal availability of small arms negatively impact … economic development.”
Transparency International is a “politically non-partisan” global organization “leading the fight against
corruption.” They publish an annual report entitled “Corruption
Perceptions Index,” which evaluates “the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians.”
The index “defines corruption as the abuse of public office for private
gain.” The ideal government would score a 10: organized government corruption doesn’t exist; there’s no manipulation of political and economic processes for personal gain
by bureaucrats or their families and associates.
The chart below collates countries’ corruption indices with civilian firearms ownership. The overall trend line shows that as civilians firearms ownership increases,
governments are less corrupt: more guns, better-behaved government.
In the face of such facts, the UN’s agenda becomes obvious: By disarming civilians, governments will have free reign to abuse public office for private gain. Moreover,
people won’t be able to do anything about it, because civilian disarmament also correlates with reduced political and civil rights. Disarmament also correlates with reduced
economic freedom.
When added together, the result is feudalism, which historically is the most common socio-economic system, where the elite few control the vast majority of arms, power, and
resources.
In case you think our Second Amendment will protect you, consider Obama’s perspective regarding our unique right to liberty as you watch him bow to the Saudi
king and China’s president.
Instead of bowing to the UN’s global aspirations, we should share our hard-earned lessons of liberty with the rest of the world.
(The UN plans to take the next step on their arms treaty at the meeting planned for July 12-23, 2010.)
Former civilian disarmament supporter and medical researcher Howard Nemerov investigates the civil liberty of self-defense and examines the issue of gun control,
resulting in his book Four Hundred Years of Gun Control: Why Isn’t It Working? He appears frequently on NRA News as their “unofficial” analyst and was
published in the Texas Review of Law and Politics with David Kopel and Carlisle Moody.
There are only three things you need to know about the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill that was released Wednesday—it will accomplish nothing for the environment; it
will cost a lot of money and it will financially enrich and politically empower a host of scoundrels.
Regardless of what you think about manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, it is undeniable that the emissions reductions contemplated by Kerry-Lieberman don’t
amount to a hill of beans. The goal of Kerry-Lieberman, like the goal of the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill, is to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent of 2005
levels by 2050.
But rather than such paltry emissions cuts, let’s say that starting next year, we just shut down America—zero emissions—and kept it shut down for the next 100 years. What
difference would that make atmosphere-wise?
Roughly speaking, U.S. energy use (at 2005 levels) adds to atmospheric CO2 at a rate of about 1 part per million every three years. So after 100 years, U.S. energy
use would add about 33 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere. Is that a lot?
Well, atmospheric CO2 has increased by over 35 ppm since 1995 without producing any global warming at all—that’s according to IPCC contributor and Captain
Climategate himself, the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones. Moreover, physicists agree that every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere has less global
warming potential than the molecule that preceded it. So the next 35 ppm of atmospheric CO2 will have less impact than the preceding 35ppm, which had no discernible
effect.
None of this is a secret, the EPA did this analysis for itself in 2007. ( Steve Milloy, Daily Caller)
WASHINGTON — The long delayed and much amended Senate plan to deal with global warming and energy was unveiled on Wednesday to considerable fanfare but uncertain
prospects.
After nearly eight months of negotiations with lawmakers and interest groups, Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of
Connecticut, produced a 987-page bill that tries to limit climate-altering emissions, reduce oil imports and create millions of new energy-related jobs.
The sponsors rewrote the section on offshore oil drilling in recent days to reflect mounting concern over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, raising new hurdles for any
future drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts while allowing it to proceed off Louisiana, Texas and Alaska.
Mr. Kerry said the United States was crippled by a broken energy policy and falling behind in the global race for leadership in clean-energy technology. (NYT)
ON Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and
sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on
top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.
That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move
the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can
help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions. (Robert Bryce, NYT)
The Obama Administration finalized rules on Thursday to cut greenhouse gas emissions from big factories and power plants starting next year aimed at giving momentum to the
troubled climate bill.
Starting next year, the Environmental Protection Agency rules would require large power plants, factories and oil refineries that add capacity or do plant work to get permits
proving they are using the latest green technology to cut emissions. The rule sets emitters up to face a host of future regulations if the climate bill fails.
"It's long past time we unleashed our American ingenuity and started building the efficient prosperous clean energy economy of the future," EPA Administrator Lisa
Jackson said.
Although mounting industry lawsuits question EPA's authority on climate, President Barack Obama hopes the measure will push lawmakers in states heavily dependent on fossil
fuels to support the climate bill. (Reuters)
Just legislate the EPA out of the picture and be done with it.
No paranoid fantasy of the Birthers ranks with the conviction that industrial society threatens life on Earth
The world is filled with wacky ideas. Some are much more dangerous than others. A tiny minority refuses to believe that President Obama has a
U.S. birth certificate. Another fringe group holds that 9/11 was an inside job. And then there’s the conviction that man-made climate change threatens life on earth and
demands vast new restrictions on wealth and freedom. This latter belief is preached by the same governments and supranational organizations that led the world into the current
regulatory and sovereign debt morass, and are responsible for the even greater threat implied by unfunded welfare commitments. Climate catastrophism is also enthusiastically
embraced by virtually all giant corporations (including the currently much-troubled BP and Toyota) and by state-funded and UN-promoted eco NGOs.
So let me see, where should we concentrate our political concerns: the “Birthers,” the “Truthers,” or the “Warmers?”
Mike Hulme says we need to stop looking for climate change scapegoats and start engaging in honest discussion (Mike Hulme for ChinaDialogue, part of the Guardian Environment
Network)
Great! How about we start with: "What is the expected temperature of the planet?" There's some background information and references here
for everyone to get started and even a scripted calculator to help you out.
If a climate scientist falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
Not if the old media have anything to do with it. Thankfully, in 2010, their hold on the news has started to weaken.
But it’s not like they didn’t try. For more than five months, from Nov. 20, 2009, to April 1, 2010, the broadcast networks did all they could to hide a crisis in the
climate alarmist movement.
That first event, now called Climate Gate, has grown into a series of global warming scandals that have shaken faith in both the science we are fed on a regular basis and the
scientists who do the feeding.
This week in Chicago, the Heartland Institute is bringing together the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, a meeting of hundreds of scientists and policy experts
who dare to challenge so-called conventional wisdom on global warming.
Instead of having a meeting, they should be having a celebration.
Not that they’ve won. They haven’t. But for the first time in many years, there is a public understanding that our daily diet of climate propaganda might be somewhat or
even entirely bogus. That’s due in a large part to the embarrassments that came out of the initial Climate Gate report where e-mails from University of East Anglia’s
Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were leaked to the world. (Dan Gainor, Townhall)
OTTAWA - Canada brushed aside a direct public demand Wednesday by the visiting United Nations chief and reiterated that it will not make climate change a priority agenda
item when it hosts the G20 summit next month.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper stuck to his G20 plan to keep the summit's focus squarely on the global economic recovery after he met UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his
Parliament Hill office.
Ban said he wanted climate change front and centre on the agenda when Canada hosts the G20 summit next month in Toronto. Ban also exhorted the Conservatives to live up to the
greenhouse-gas reduction targets Canada negotiated under the Kyoto Protocol.
"Canada has a special role and special responsibility to play. That is what I am going to emphasize here," Ban told about 500 diplomats, civil society leaders and
academics in a packed hotel ballroom before meeting Harper.
"I urge Canada to comply fully with the targets set out by the Kyoto Protocol. You can strengthen your mitigation target for the future."
Harper has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated by the previous Liberal government and calls for a six per cent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020 based on 1990
levels. (Canadian Press)
The investigation into the alleged global warming data fraud by Virginia’s Attorney General may soon have a whole new angle. This comes from a previously overlooked
connection between discredited tree-ring proxy researcher, Michael Mann and Yale’s now deceased climate professor, Barry Saltzman.
Despite his legacy, outside of climate science few people will have heard of Saltzman. It was only right at the end of his 40-year career that this esteemed analyst produced
his greatest achievement: a unified theory of climate that drew worldwide plaudits.
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) and Journal of Climate among others posthumously gave Saltzman the ultimate accolade, “father of modern climate theory” on the
publication of his ground breaking ‘Theory of Climate’ (2002).
The AMS tells us, “Barry Saltzman led the revival of the theory that variations of atmospheric CO2 are a
significant driver of long-term climate change.”
As Professor of Geophysics, Saltzman served Yale University with distinction from 1968 until his death in 2001. Michael E. Mann’s position in the highly politicized sphere of
climatology has since grown to be just as significant-but far more controversial. But we may have stumbled upon a sinister connection between the two researchers. (John
O'Sullivan, Climate Realists)
We read a lot of magazines in our house. Occasionally, an issue arrives in which nearly every article is engaging and (in the case of cooking magazines) every recipe sounds
amazing. In short, the issue is a keeper.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had an experience like that. It was
so impressed by one edition of the academic journal Climatic Change that
it cited 16 of the 21 papers published that month. The journal editors should take a bow. When three-quarters of a single issue of your publication is relied on
by a Nobel-winning report, you're doing something right.
Except for one small problem. The issue in question - May
2007 - didn't exist yet when the IPCC wrote its report. Moreover, none of the research papers eventually published in that issue had been finalized prior to
the IPCC's cutoff date.
...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies...
That's what the rules say. And that's what was supposed to have happened. But according to the online abstracts for each of the 16 papers cited by the IPCC and published in the
May 2007 issue of Climatic Change (see my working notes here):
15 of them weren't accepted by the journal until Oct. 17, 2006
the other wasn't accepted until May 18, 2006
The first date is highly significant. As the second box on this page makes clear, the IPCC
expert review period ended on June 2, 2006 for Working Group 1 and on July 21, 2006 for Working Group 2. This means the expert reviewers had
offered their comments on the second draft and had already exited the stage. It means the IPCC had reached the utmost end of a process that represented years of collective
labour.
So how could 16 papers, accounting for 39 new citations across fours chapters and two working groups, have made it into this twice vetted,
next-to-finalized IPCC report? Those citations don't reference research papers the wider scientific community had already digested. They don't even reference
papers that were hot off the press. Instead, in 15 of 16 cases, no expert reviewer could possibly have evaluated these papers since they
hadn't yet been accepted for publication by the journal itself.
Where do these 39 citations of the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change turn up in the IPCC report? [working notes here]
Chapt. 11 by Working Group 1 references ten papers (20 citations in total)
Chapt. 12 by Working Group 2 references nine papers (15 citations in total)
Chapt. 2 by Working Group 2 references two papers (2 citations in total)
Chapt. 3 by Working Group 2 references two papers (2 citations in total)
Among the 10 papers cited in Chapter 11 three were co-authored by Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen. I'm sure it's
sheer coincidence that this gentleman served as one of two coordinating lead authors for that
chapter.
see the first abstract here (cited twice as Jacob et al.
2007 on this page of the IPCC report)
second abstract is here (cited as Déqué et al. 2007 on this
page)
third abstract is here (cited as Christensen et al. 2007
on this page)
I'm equally certain there's no connection whatsoever between the fact that Jørgen E. Olesen was a lead
author for the IPCC's Chapter 12 and that a paper he co-authored in the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change got cited four times in that chapter. (That abstract is here.
Cited as Olesen et al., 2007 four times on this page.)
Welcome to the strange world of the IPCC. Whenever one turns over a new rock there's something shady beneath.
..
Coming soon: the research paper that wasn't accepted for publication until May 2008, yet got cited seven times in the IPCC's 2007 report (No Consensus)
20 percent of all lizard species could be extinct by 2080, researchers say
For many lizards, global climate change is a matter of life and death. After decades of surveying Sceloporus lizard populations in Mexico, an international research team has
found that rising temperatures have driven 12 percent of the country's lizard populations to extinction. An extinction model based on this discovery also forecasts a grim
future for these ecologically important critters, predicting that a full 20 percent of all lizard species could be extinct by the year 2080.
The detailed surveys of lizard populations in Mexico, collected from 200 different sites, indicate that the temperatures in those regions have changed too rapidly for the
lizards to keep pace. It seems that all types of lizards are far more susceptible to climate-warming extinction than previously thought because many species are already living
right at the edge of their thermal limits, especially at low elevation and low latitude range limits.
Although the researchers' prediction for 2080 could change if humans are able to slow global climate warming, it does appear that lizards have crossed a threshold for
extinctions—and that their sharp decline will continue for decades at least. (AAAS)
I've seen at least four releases on this one today. Thing is, it's absurd in its basic hypothesis. Earth temperatures are simply not homogeneous or even
stable but vary, inter alia, by hour of day, season, altitude and latitude, let alone trends induced by solar cycle, multi-decadal oceanic cycles and who yet knows
what else.
Lizards are here now. They have been here for millions of years. Earth has had warm periods and cold ones while lizards have survived on the planet. Just since the last great
glaciation the world has warmed at least 6 °C and it was probably a couple or even three degrees warmer still about 6,000 years ago, at a time when the Sahara and Sahel
were lush and wet (see, e.g.). How did lizards survive such enormous changes if they are so
fragile that they are supposedly extirpated by an alleged +0.4 °C change since the late 1970s? Inter annual variations are much, much greater than that, so how do these
poor little critters survive those changes? The "researchers" have built a hand-waving model too ridiculous for words.
Mainstream television has extreme or severe weather reports when they are actually reporting natural events.
Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards are all natural events and warnings for potential loss of life are commendable, but the focus creates a false impression. It reinforces the
false IPCC claims of more severe weather with global warming.
The syndrome created is comparable to when you are introduced to someone and it seems every time you turn around they are there. They were always there but just not part of
your perception. This is reinforced by the advent of cameras and video so that many more events are recorded, reported and seen. How many tornadoes occurred when nobody was
watching? How many would have died if current population densities existed? Of course, we also have the benefit of fewer deaths because of advanced warming. (Tim Ball, CFP)
Al Gore invokes the memory of Elvis to sell the global warming hoax, which is awkward because Elvis might be the only thing deader than Al’s favorite scam. A hippie blames
an airline’s cheap flights for his traveling habit, the UK gets a Green MP and Ed Begley Jr. hates the planet. (Daily Bayonet)
Scientists review the benefits and tradeoffs of current methods in forest carbon storage
While the U.S. and other world leaders consider options for offsetting carbon emissions, it is important to take into account the role forests play in the global carbon cycle,
say scientists in a paper published in the spring edition of Issues in Ecology. Currently, the carbon stored in forests and harvested wood products offsets 12-19 percent of
U.S. fossil fuel emissions—growth primarily the result of recovery from the large scale harvesting that occurred around 100 years ago. These high offsets are not permanent
but have the potential to increase; however, not without tradeoffs.
"Several strategies for offsetting carbon emissions have been proposed or are currently being implemented in the U.S.," says Mike Ryan from the United States
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and lead author of the paper. "Some of the important tradeoffs are worth mentioning because many people have viewed forests as a
simple and uncomplicated partial solution to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, and they are not."
Mike Ryan and colleagues discuss eight strategies being used or proposed in the U.S., and the risks, uncertainties and tradeoffs of each. These include avoiding deforestation,
afforestation (planting or replanting forests), decreasing harvests, increasing the growth rate of existing forests, using biomass energy from forests to reduce carbon
emissions, using wood products in place of concrete or steel for building materials, implementing urban forestry and using fuel management to reduce fire threats.
The tradeoffs of these strategies need to be taken into account accordingly. By reducing harvests, avoiding deforestation or afforestation, for example, we could increase the
amount of forest carbon in the U.S. But the demand for forest products would still remain, so tree harvesting or other current land use may move to other areas, canceling out
the carbon benefit to the atmosphere of the changes in the U.S. (Ecological Society of America)
Locking more carbon away from biological availability is exactly the wrong thing to do. More atmospheric carbon dioxide is a major benefit for life on
Earth. Leave it alone or, better still, add more to it.
Forests have a growing value as a result of climate policies, but the complexity of carbon markets coupled with the effects of the financial crisis are deterring investment,
investors and analysts said in London on Thursday.
In plantation forests, new demand for wood to generate low-carbon renewable power generation to replace fossil fuels is adding to traditional pulp and paper demand, potentially
fuelling values.
For managers of natural and virgin forests, new carbon markets to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) are emerging to pay owners not to chop down trees.
But investors said they were deterred by the complexity of those new markets, and were wary of making investments in plantation forests for bio-energy.
"We see potential in the REDD process, but from an investor perspective it's difficult to make a convincing case right now," said Marko Katila, a partner at
Finland-based timber fund Dasos Capital, which raises money from institutional investors.
"Our fund right now is not looking seriously at these types of investments," he added, referring to payments for not chopping natural forests, speaking on the
sidelines of an Environmental Finance forestry conference in London. (Reuters)
Chris Colose (click) thinks that Steve Goddard - and, to a lesser extent, your
humble correspondent - are reinventing climatology as well as astrophysics.
"Venus and Cupid" by Lorenzo Lotto, late 1520s
Well, you can say it in this way: after these fields, especially the first one, have been contaminated by an ideological pseudoscience, the only way to proceed is to reinvent
the disciplines.
Unfortunately, the flooding of the disciplines by poorly verified and "morally driven" myths has already begun in the modern, rather than postmodern, era, and it was
initiated by as likable characters as Carl Sagan. He was nice but very far from infallible.
One must carefully check which insights are legitimate science and which things were politically imported myths - and when it's necessary, you have to start from scratch. But I
don't want to degenerate into these moralist rants, so let's jump onto the physics of the problem.
Colose's criticism is simple: he claims that Goddard and I do not realize that the linear functions (of one variable) have two terms (rather than one), the slope term and the
intercept:
y = mx + b
We think that there is one term only, we learn. That's a nice hypothesis and it's always nice to learn new things about my own brain :-) but thank you, I understood linear
functions when I was 3 years old.
Since
the Mid-Brunhes Event, around 430,000 years ago, interglacial periods have grown warmer and their CO2 levels higher. Research confirms that Croll and
Milankovitch were right: Earth's orbital cycles seem to be the cause of these documented cases of true global warming, with CO2 playing a supporting
role, not the lead. Many of the catastrophic events warned of by climate change alarmists turn out to be well within the range of natural variation. Moreover, new findings
indicate that the effects of the cycle induced changes, through their impact on the environment in the Southern Hemisphere, are not correctly accounted for in the IPCC models.
One of the big questions in climate science comes from studying recent interglacial periods—those relatively warm periods between bouts of ice age
glaciation. It has been known for some time, that average temperatures during recent interglacials were warmer than during older ones. Writing in the April, 2010, edition of Nature
Geoscience, Q. Z. Yin and A. Berger propose an answer as to why the amplitude (i.e. warming) of the glacial interglacial cycles increased significantly after the Mid-Brunhes
Event (MBE) with cooler interglacials before the MBE than after. In their paper, entitled “Insolation
and CO2 contribution to the interglacial climate before and after the Mid-Brunhes Event,” they describe their work as follows:
In parallel to the reconstruction of palaeoclimate based on proxy records, climate models are used to better understand past climate behaviour. In
particular, efforts have been made over the past decade on modelling the most recent interglacials, namely the Holocene, the Eemian and the past five interglacials. Here, we
focus on the forcing and global response of the climate system at the interglacial peaks of the past 800 kyr, using snapshot simulations to try to understand the difference
between the post-MBE and the pre-MBE interglacials. The model used is LOVECLIM, with the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and vegetation components interactively coupled and the
ice sheets kept as today.
The Mid-Brunhes Event, ~430,000 years ago, signaled significant long-term changes in global atmosphere and ocean circulation. As a consequence, there was a
transition to more humid interglacial conditions in equatorial Africa, and in the Northern Hemisphere to more glacial oceanic conditions. In a paper in Science, “A
Mid-Brunhes Climatic Event: Long-Term Changes in Global Atmosphere and Ocean Circulation,” J. H. F. Jansen, A. Kuijpers, and S. R. Troelestra document the event through
marine and continental records from various latitudes. Their conclusion was that the change was probably due to a change in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit.
“We present evidence of a global climatic change 4.0 x 105 to 3.0 x 105 years ago on a time scale of 1
x 105 to 1 x 106 years which is superimposed on the glacial and interglacial cycles,” they report. “Unlike other Late
Cenozoic climatic variations reported so far, the change shows opposite trends in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.” The trends referred to are warmer Northern
Hemisphere winters and Southern Hemisphere summers, accompanied by the opposite for Northern Hemisphere summers and Southern Hemisphere winters, which are cooler. This shift
also brought an increase in humidity to the south.
It was Jansen et al. who first proposed a mid-Brunhes transition to more humid, interglacial conditions in the southern hemisphere. Over the millions
of years of the Pleistocene ice age, slow changes in ocean basin circulation due to tectonic activity (i.e. shifting continents) caused recognizable changes in climate, but the
mid-Brunhes change represents something different. Both Jansen et al. and now Yin and Berger concluded that small changes in the pattern of solar radiation energy
received at Earth's surface, insolation, were responsible. This was triggered by a change in one of the three Croll-Milankovitch cycles that affect Earth's orbit and attitude,
primarily eccentricity. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
It is no secret that a majority of the peer-reviewed climate change literature lays blame for global warming on human greenhouse gas emissions.
But despite the abundance of research supporting anthropogenic global warming, there is a sizable community of qualified scientists who believe the so-called consensus view on
global warming is completely wrong. I wanted to find out why, so I contacted one skeptical researcher to ask.
Dr. Roy Spencer is a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. For many years he served as a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center, and his research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Geophysical Research Letters and The Journal Of Climate. Dr. Spencer was kind
enough to explain to me what convinced him that the consensus view on global warming is incorrect and what he believes is responsible for the rising temperatures we have
observed. (Cameron J English, Scientific Blogging)
Edited 1:35 p.m. CDT 5/13/10: Trivia question added, at the end of the post.
Despite its relative simplicity, I continue to find myself trying
to explain to experts and lay persons alike how scientists made the Great
Global Warming Blunder when it comes to predictions of global warming.
On the bright side, this morning I received an e-mail from a chemist who looked at the math of the problem after reading my new book, and then came to the understanding on
his own. And that’s great!
For the most part, though, the climate community continues to suffer from a mental block when it comes to the true role of clouds in global warming. All climate models now
change clouds with CO2 warming in ways that amplify that warming, some by a catastrophic amount.
As my latest book describes, I contend that they have been fooled by Mother Nature, and that in fact warming alters clouds in ways that mitigate – not amplify — the
small amount of direct warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2.
The difference between clouds magnifying versus mitigating warming could be the difference between global warming being little more than an academic curiosity…or a
disaster for life on Earth.
So, once again I find myself trying to explain a concept that I find the public understands better than the climate experts do: when it comes to clouds and temperature,
the direction of causation really does matter.
Why Are There Fewer Clouds when it is Warm?
The “scientific consensus” has been that, because unusually warm conditions are observed to be accompanied by less cloud cover, warming obviously causes cloud cover to
decrease. This would be bad news, since decreasing cloud cover in response to warming would let more sunlight in, and amplify the initial warming. That’s called positive
cloud feedback.
But what they have difficulty understanding is that causation in the opposite direction (cloud changes causing temperature changes) gives the ILLUSION of positive cloud
feedback. It turns out that, when less cloud cover causes warmer temperatures, the cloud feedback in response to that warming is almost totally obscured.
Believe it, the experts have not accounted for this effect. I find it bizarre that most are not even aware it is an issue! As far as I know, I am the only one actively
researching the issue.
As a result, the experts have fooled themselves into believing cloud feedbacks are positive. We have demonstrated theoretically in our new
paper now accepted for publication in JGR that, even if strong negative cloud feedback exists, cloud changes causing temperature change will make it LOOK like positive
cloud feedback.
And this indeed happens in the real climate system. The only time cloud feedback can be clearly seen in the real climate system is when temperature changes are caused by
something other than clouds. And in those cases, we find that the net feedback is strongly negative (around 6 Watts per sq. meter of extra energy lost by the Earth per
deg. C of global-average warming).
Unfortunately, those events only occur on relatively short climate time scales: 1 month or so. Whether this negative feedback also exists for long-term climate warming is
less certain.
Do Climate Models Agree With Satellite Observations of Clouds and Temperature?
The fact that all the climate models which produce substantial global warming also approximate what we measure from satellites is NOT a validation of the feedbacks in those
models. So far, after analyzing thousands of years of climate model runs, I have found no convincing way to validate the climate models’ long-term feedbacks with short-term
(approx. 10 years or so) satellite observations. The reason is the same: all models have cloud variations causing temperature variations, which then obscures the feedback we
are trying to measure.
But there’s another test that could be made. The modelers’ case would be stronger if they could demonstrate that 20 additional climate models, all with various
amounts of negative – rather than positive — cloud feedback, are less consistent with our satellite observations than the current crop of models, all of which had
positive cloud feedback.
I suspect they do not spend much time on that possibility. A climate model that does not produce much climate change is going to have difficult time getting continued
funding for its support.
Trivia Question to Illustrate the Point: Assume continually increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is the only source of climate variability, and we experience
continuous slow warming as a result. Will the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR, or infrared) being emitted by the Earth increase…or decrease…during this process? (I will
post the answer tomorrow.)
Technical Note: We have found from modeling studies that if the natural cloud variations were truly random in time, the error in diagnosed feedback would be
random, not biased toward positive feedback, and would average out to near zero in the long term. But in the real climate system, these cloud variations have preferred time
scales….in other words, they have some degree of autocorrelation in time. When that happens, there ends up being a bias in the direction of positive feedback. (Roy W.
Spencer)
Since I keep getting requests for the data from which I do my analyses, I’ve decided to provide the main dataset I use here,
in an Excel spreadsheet. The comments at the top of the spreadsheet are pretty self-explanatory and include links to the original data. After you click on and open the file
with Excel, save it to your computer so you can analyze the data.
From original satellite data online at 2 sources, I have calculated daily global-average anomalies (departures from the average annual cycle) in (1) total-sky emitted
longwave (LW, or infrared) radiative flux; (2) total-sky reflected shortwave (SW, or solar) radiative flux, and (3) UAH tropospheric temperatures (TMT).
The original radiative flux data that I computed these anomalies from are the Terra satellite CERES Flight Model 1 (FM1) instrument-based ES4 (ERBE-like) daily global
gridpoint datasets, available here. These are large files in a binary
format, and are not for the weak of heart.
The original UAH TMT temperature data come from here.
All of the original data were area-averaged over the Earth for each day during the 9.5 year Terra CERES period of record, March 2000 through September 2009. An average
annual cycle was computed, filtered with a +/- 10 day smoother applied every day, and then anomalies were computed by subtracting the smoothed average annual cycle values from
the original data. I program these calculations in Fortran-95, put the data in an Excel spreadsheet, then do all future calculations and graphical plots in Excel.
There is a press release from Purdue University by Elizabeth K. Gardner and Greg Kline regarding a study by Matthew Huber of Purdue and Steve
Sherwood of the University of New South Wales. The press release is titled
“Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress
imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wetbulb temperature TW, is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. TW never
exceeds 31 °C. Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible.
While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C
warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel
burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat
stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record.”
The article is edited by Kerry A. Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
The study has a major fault in that it has not properly assessed the actual behavoir of the atmosphere if such warming
occurred in the lower troposphere. Moreover, this is another example of the publication of a paper with predictions that cannot be tested.
I discuss these issues in more depth below. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Transocean Ltd, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and sank last month killing 11 people, wants to limit its liability for the accident to about $27 million,
according to a U.S. court filing on Thursday.
With analysts anticipating many years of legal jostling related to the Horizon disaster, Transocean is seeking to set an upper limit on the damages that might arise from more
than 100 lawsuits already filed against the company.
Transocean said its liability under federal law should be limited to the value of its interest in the rig and its freight, including accounts receivable as of April 28, or
$26,764,083, the document filed in U.S. District Court in Houston said.
The company, which had said last week that it was in "reasonably fluid" negotiations to renew its insurance for another year, said in a statement on Thursday that it
was seeking the protection under the U.S. Limitation of Shipowner's Liability Act at the instruction of its insurers and to preserve insurance coverage.
"This step is necessary to protect the interests of its employees, its shareholders and the company," Transocean said in the statement. (Reuters)
An explosion and fire on a drilling rig on April 20 left 11 workers missing and presumed dead. The rig sank two days later about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. Since
then, attempts to shut off the flow of oil streaming into the Gulf of Mexico have been unsuccessful and the search continues for a cause and for ways to prevent such blowouts
in the future. Questions persist about who will be liable for damage from the spill and the risks to local wildlife. Following is an updated oil spill primer. (NYT)
After days of deepening gloom, BP and two Obama administration officials suggested on Wednesday that the company was closer to a solution that might halt the seemingly
uncontrollable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The officials said engineers and scientists at BP’s command center in Houston had drafted plans to work on and around an underwater blowout preventer, a massive safety device
that is designed to seal an oil well in an emergency but failed to do so after the explosion at the rig on April 20.
The oil giant has “increasing confidence that we can intervene directly in the B.O.P. at acceptably low risk,” a BP spokesman, Andrew Gowers, said. Successive efforts to
plug the spill over the past three weeks have failed.
Sent by President Obama to Houston, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met with top engineers and scientists at the BP command center for several
hours on Wednesday.
“Things are looking up,” Dr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, told reporters after the meeting. “Progress is being made.” He cautioned that the situation was still not
under control and declined to detail the reasons for his optimism. But when pressed, he said, “I’m feeling more comfortable than I was a week ago.” (NYT)
Exasperated Canadian legislators grilled the head of BP Plc Canadian unit on Thursday, concerned about the risks of the company's plans to drill in Arctic waters after the
catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
But Anne Drinkwater, president of BP Canada, offered few answers at a hearing at Parliament's Standing Committee on Natural Resources on the safety of drilling in the Far
North.
Drinkwater, who has also run BP operations in Indonesia, Angola and Norway, declined to answer technical questions and said she had not compared Canadian and U.S. drilling
regulations, straining the credulity of some on the committee.
"You'd think coming to a hearing like this that British Petroleum would have as many answers as possible to assure the Canadian public. We got nothing today from
them," said Nathan Cullen of the left-leaning New Democrats.
"I was very disappointed. I think British Petroleum is going to have to do a lot better job if they want to drill in Canadian waters," Cullen told reporters
afterward. (Reuters)
Editor’s note: This is Part IV of a five part series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The previous posts in this
series can be seen at: Part I – Definitions Part II – Coal- and Wood-Fired Electricity Generation Part III – Natural Gas-Fired Electricity Generation
Photovoltaic Electricity Generation
Satellite measurements put the solar constant – radiation that reaches area perpendicular to the incoming rays at the top of the atmosphere (and that is actually not
constant but varies with season and has negligible daily fluctuations) – at 1,366 W/m2. If there were no atmosphere and if the Earth absorbed all incoming
radiation then the average flux at the planet’s surface would be 341.5 W/m2 (a quarter of the solar constant’s value, a sphere having four times the area of a
circle with the same radius: 4πr2/πr2). But the atmosphere absorbs about 20% of the incoming radiation and the Earth’s albedo (fraction of radiation
reflected to space by clouds and surfaces) is 30% and hence only 50% of the total flux reaches the surface prorating to about 170 W/m2 received at the Earth’s
surface, and ranging from less than 100 W/m2 in cloudy northern latitudes to more than 230 W/m2 in sunny desert locations.
For an approximate calculation of electricity that could be generated on large scale by photovoltaic conversion it would suffice to multiply that rate by the average
efficiency of modular cells. While the best research cells have efficiencies surpassing 30% (for multijunction concentrators) and about 15% for crystalline silicon and thin
films, actual field efficiencies of PV cells that have been recently deployed in the largest commercial parks are around 10%, with the ranges of 6-7% for amorphous silicon and
less than 4% for thin films. A realistic assumption of 10% efficiency yields 17 W/m2 as the first estimate of average global PV generation power density, with
densities reaching barely 10 W/m2 in cloudy Atlantic Europe and 20-25 W/m2 in subtropical deserts. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
One desperately wishes to give the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government the fairest of winds. The debt crisis demands that it must succeed, and that some
compromises must be made to achieve this. But one Cabinet appointment beggars belief, and is a compromise too far and too dangerous for the country.
The lamentable fact that David Cameron has appointed Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh, Hampshire, as the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change,
underscores one’s profoundest fears that our leading politicians have still still not grasped, despite all the red flag warnings, the depth and urgency of the UK energy
crisis. This, after all, is the man who is avowedly opposed to the development of a new generation of nuclear powers stations, who believes that we can fill our looming energy
gap with wave, wind, and waffle, and who is totally uncritical of the ‘global warming’ message. (Philip Stott, The Clamour of the Times)
Fields in Gloucestershire’s rolling countryside, immortalised by Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, may soon be covered by thousands of solar panels.
Despite the lack of guaranteed sunshine, the solar farms will make a guaranteed profit because of a generous subsidy funded through increases in household energy bills.
The rate of installation of solar panels will increase five-fold in Britain this year because of this feed-in tariff, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ecotricity, a
renewable energy company based in Stroud, is planning dozens of solar farms and is considering sites near its headquarters. (The Times)
Václav
Klaus returns an amendment to the Air Protection Act to the deputies
Dear Chairwoman Ms Němcová,
I am using the competency given to me by Article 50 of the Czech constitution and I am returning a bill to the lower chamber of the Parliament. The bill in question is an
amendment to Bill No 86/2002 Collection, which was a law about the protection of the atmosphere and about the change of some additional bills, the so-called Air Protection Act,
as articulated by newer directives. The amendment was approved by the chamber on April 28th, 2010.
The negative effects of Obamacare will impact every American. However, it is those who are the very backbone of the United States’ high-quality health care system
who will be most severely affected: physicians. In a recent paper, Heritage’s
health policy expert Robert Moffit, Ph.D., details the changes American doctors can expect to see in the way they practice medicine as a result of the recently-passed law.
Moffit outlines the following as being most detrimental to the practice of medicine:
Medicaid Expansion and Payment. As it is, doctors receive heavily reduced pay for treating Medicare patients, and reimbursement for Medicaid is even lower.
In many areas, doctors who accept Medicaid do so at their own loss, as reimbursement rates do not even cover the expense of seeing the patient. Writes
Moffit, “Medicare payment
has resulted in sporadic access problems for Medicare patients, and the lower Medicaid payments have already contributed to serious access problems for low-income persons
and worsened hospital emergency room overcrowding.” By adding an estimated 18 million people to this system, Obamacare will aggravate these existing dilemmas.
Health Care: The Democrats' reform is barely out of the gate and the Congressional Budget Office already says its previous cost estimate was too low. Either the bill's
supporters lied or they're profoundly ignorant.
Either way, they are not fit to serve the country, much less rule it, which many of them seem to believe is their divine right.
As noted on these pages and elsewhere, government programs always cost far more than their original projections. Medicare has cost more than 10 times as much as initially
estimated. It took Medicaid, the government's other mammoth health care program, a mere five years to spend twice as much as early estimates said it would. (IBD)
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us
just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Well, the nation’s post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion
implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO
was too overwhelmed with the Democrats’ other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.
This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of
millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1
billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not
only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these
companies might have to dump their employees’ and retirees’ health care coverage all together.
Then the Obama administration’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final
cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next
decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in
penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3)
14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare
providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”
The most troubling aspect of the West’s current policy turmoil is not the European meltdown led by Greece and Spain. It is instead President Barack Obama’s unflinching
insistence on rushing America headlong into the very mandates, and resulting debt levels, that precipitated that meltdown.
Obama is scripting a repeat of Europe’s disaster, here, by cramming down on the American people the same policy fetishes our Left has obsessed about for decades, and which
Europe used to bring this down upon itself: statist management of health care and energy. (Christopher Horner, Energy Tribune)
U.S. debt will soon be equal to 100% of GDP. Health spending will only make that worse
In the past four years — 2007 to 2010 inclusive — U.S. budget deficits have totalled $3.6-trillion and are projected (by the White House’s
OMB and Congress’s CBO) to total just as much over the coming four years, even with an economic upswing. Whereas the deficit was 1.2% of GDP in 2007, at the end of 2010
it’ll be 10.6% of GDP.
For comparison, consider that Greece, which is now getting a bailout of $160-billion, currently has a deficit-to-GDP ratio of 13.6%. Unlike Greece, which participates in the
euro and thus has no power to print its own money, the United States does have such power and is exercising it (as it has since 1971). Washington will default on its debt
surreptitiously, by inflation. Not only does destructive Fed policy create new federal debt, it also then recklessly monetizes it, causing inflation. Read
More » (Financial Post)
The European economic model is dead. Don’t believe us? – Ask The
Washington Post. Yesterday’s front-page story reported that the loans being made to stave off the debt crisis come with conditions which, if enforced, would require
“European governments [to] rewrite a post-World War II social contract that has been generous to workers and retirees but has become increasingly unaffordable for an aging
population.”
What’s worse, the Post and many other commentators have understated the failure of the European model. For two generations after post-war reconstruction, Europe and
America have moved in different economic directions. The American model favored growth, income, and vibrancy; the European model was said to favor fairness, equality, and
stability. The long-term superiority of the American model with regard to growth was well-established before the financial crisis, but the extent of that superiority may be
surprising to some. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
The great muddle of Keynesian economics is crashing in on statists everywhere
Anybody remember the last G20 Summit? Hard to forget. It’s only been — what? — six months since the event, held in Pittsburgh last
September. The words of our leaders, triumphant and self-congratulatory, still ring out today. Boasting of having launched “the largest and most co-ordinated fiscal and
monetary stimulus ever undertaken,” the G20 looked back at the London Summit, where Gordon Brown, the soon to be former PM of Britain, orchestrated a rousing session around
the theme of spend, spend, spend to get the world out of economic crisis. “At that time [in London], our countries agreed to do everything necessary to ensure recovery, to
repair our financial systems and to maintain the global flow of capital. It worked.”
Yesterday, the subprime government debt crisis, the direct product of the above-mentioned summits and other meetings of the world’s economic and political leaders,
produced another threat. The European Union, its members sliding into stimulus debt and losing market confidence, would again do “whatever is necessary” to end the crisis,
restore confidence and protect the euro. Read More »(Financial Post)
The taxation required to keep the Ponzocracy of Fannie and Freddie afloat saps the U.S. private sector
‘Canada is not an island,” declared Finance Minister Jim Flaherty last week. He was presumably alluding to Elizabethan poet John Donne’s
famous meditation “no man is an island,” which concludes with those ominous words “and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Certainly, no country is outside the range of the current contagion, but if Mr. Flaherty had wanted to use a more up-to-date — and perhaps relevant — cultural reference,
he might have chosen the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. That’s because danger to Canada comes not merely, or even primarily, from the prospective
disintegration of the European Union, but from the related crisis to our south. Symbolic of that mess — and its government origins — is a monster called “Freddie”
(different spelling, same nightmare slasher principle), which, along with its twin sister “Fannie,” is threatening to further shred U.S. public finances.
May 12 - More than two thirds of the estimated 8.8 million deaths in children under five worldwide in 2008 were caused by infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhoea and
malaria, according to a study on behalf of the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
The study, published in the Lancet on Wednesday, found that infectious diseases caused 68 percent of deaths in under fives, led by pneumonia (18 percent, 1.58 million
children), diarrhoea (15 percent, 1.34 million) and malaria (8 percent, 0.73 million). (Reuters)
A new report, commissioned by the federal government, finds the field is rife with poorly done studies, misdiagnoses and tests that can give misleading results.
While there is no doubt that people can be allergic to certain foods, with reproducible responses ranging from a rash to a severe life-threatening reaction, the true incidence
of food allergies is only about 8 percent for children and less than 5 percent for adults, said Dr. Marc Riedl, an author of the new paper and an allergist and immunologist at
the University of California, Los Angeles.
Yet about 30 percent of the population believe they have food allergies. And, Dr. Riedl said, about half the patients coming to his clinic because they had been told they had a
food allergy did not really have one.
Dr. Riedl does not dismiss the seriousness of some people’s responses to foods. But, he says, “That accounts for a small percentage of what people term ‘food
allergies.’ ”
Even people who had food allergies as children may not have them as adults. People often shed allergies, though no one knows why. And sometimes people develop food allergies as
adults, again for unknown reasons. (Gina Kolata, NYT)
CHICAGO - Brain plaques, long considered the chief killer of brain cells and the cause of Alzheimer's disease, may actually play a protective role, under a new theory that
is changing the way researchers think about the disease.
Instead of sticky plaques, free-floating bits of a toxic protein called amyloid beta may be what's killing off brain cells in Alzheimer's patients, U.S. researchers say.
If the theory is right, then drugs that target plaque, including bapineuzumab - being developed by Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Elan - may be aiming at the wrong target,
they say.
"The plaque is not the main culprit in terms of toxicity," said Dr. Scott McGinnis of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who treats
Alzheimer's patients and runs clinical trials testing new Alzheimer's drugs.
For more than two decades, the prevailing plan of attack for researchers and drug companies has been to find a way to remove sticky clumps of a protein called amyloid beta from
the brain.
But several recent studies in mice and rats now suggest that floating pieces of amyloid beta called oligomers are the real bad actors in Alzheimer's disease.
And instead of being the chief toxin, several teams suspect, the plaques may be the body's way of trapping and neutralizing oligomers.
"If you say Alzheimer's, everyone immediately thinks that it's the plaques that actually cause the disease. That couldn't be further from the truth," Andrew Dillin,
of the Salk Institute in California and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told reporters in London this week at a conference on aging.
"The data actually suggest these plaques are a form of protection that the body tries to put on. So this is a sign that your brain was trying to do something very useful
and helpful to you, and the remnant was the formation of amyloid plaques," Dillin said. (Reuters)
Snickers has almost no real chocolate; Lindt Excellence has lots; so which did the depressed chocoholics actually eat?
Chocolate is a national, if not international, obsession. Two years ago, news stories abounded about the heart health benefits of antioxidants in chocolate; now, however,
chocolate is coming under fire as a new study links it to depression.
Mood and chocolate have been associated with one another in countless films and images that pervade the American psyche – the awkward boy gives a box of chocolates to his
crush, or the heart-broken young woman eating chocolates in bed as she cries over being jilted. No doubt the cultural obsession with chocolate (and its relationship to that our
emotional lives) spurred on researchers to consider the possibility of a statistical association between chocolate and depression.
The study, published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found a strong correlation: people who consume more chocolate are more depressed. The study was reported by
the Los Angeles Times with some caveats about causality; even the researchers acknowledge that there is limited knowledge of whether eating chocolate leads to
depression, depression leads to eating chocolate, or some third factor (such as stress) leads to both depression and chocolate consumption. Impressively, the author of the Los
Angeles Times article noted the difficulty in making causal conclusions.
But a closer look at the study suggests that the results have little if anything to do with chocolate. Perhaps the LA Times should have had someone at the food desk take
a look. (Rebecca Goldin, STATS)
Two worst-case scenarios prove less deadly than expected.
The past few weeks have given 7 million people the opportunity to think about risk. They ruminated in train stations and on buses; they cogitated in hotels as they clocked up
visa charges; but they could reassure themselves that they weren't plummeting from the sky, swatted down by ash from the great cloud of the world's most unpronounceable
volcano, Eyjafjallajokull.
Or so they thought. But as the days passed and airlines began to envisage losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it became apparent that Europe wasn't exactly following
a model of dispassionate risk evaluation: There was insufficient data to actually model the cloud; the U.S. had a different approach to dealing with volcanic ash which would,
if it had been implemented, have negated much of the chaotic standstill; and airlines appeared to be able to run test flights without any signs of engine failure. These
revelations all raised the question: Had there been a massive, costly over-reaction? (Trevor Butterworth, Forbes)
A new study suggests expanding community recycling programs beyond newspapers, beverage containers, and other traditional trash to include an unlikely new potential
treasure: Cigarette butts. Terming this tiny trash "one of the most ubiquitous forms of garbage in the world," the study describes discovery of a way to reuse the
remains of cigarettes to prevent steel corrosion that costs oil producers millions of dollars annually. It appears in ACS' Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a
bi-weekly journal.
Jun Zhao and colleagues cite one estimate that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts find their way into the environment each year. Studies show that cigarette butts are more than an
eyesore. They contain toxins that can kill fish and harm the environment in other ways. Recycling could solve those problems, but finding practical uses for cigarette butts has
been difficult.
The scientists showed that extracts of cigarette butts in water, applied to a type of steel (N80) widely used in the oil industry, protected the steel from rusting even under
the harsh conditions, preventing costly damage and interruptions in oil production. They identified nine chemicals in the extracts, including nicotine, which appear to be
responsible for this anti-corrosion effect. (ACS)
Climate/Climate change/Global warming
Demonstrating how invested they are in gorebull warbling, here's the media on Kerry-Lieberman:
Interestingly, I haven't yet noticed any media pointing out that there's a bucket load of new spending in this "costless" bill. If it doesn't
cost anything then where does the $7billion annually for infrastructure and efficiency come from? Same with the $5billion annual clean-technology incentives and what about
the new $multi-billion revenue stream for agriculture? There's the couple of $billion annual carbon sequestration (CCS) R&D, the 'broad package" of nuke incentives
and a host of "support" goodies and "pilot projects", all needing funding from somewhere. Where? See page 987 about compliance with PAYGO -- you get to
pay for this crap upfront :-)
To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." (Interview with This
Week, February 5, 1976)
A draft bill setting out sharp cuts in US greenhouse gas emissions was unveiled in the Senate yesterday, offering new incentives for nuclear power and offshore drilling at a
time when the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico makes support for oil exploration politically difficult.
The draft, however, includes several new protections against spills, including one that allows states to veto drilling plans up to 75 miles from their shores or if they stand
to suffer significant adverse impacts in the event of an accident. (Financial Times)
WASHINGTON — Coastal states could veto offshore drilling plans under long-awaited legislation to curb global warming unveiled Wednesday.
The bill, sponsored by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., would allow states to opt out of federal drilling up to 75 miles from their shores, a concession
to lawmakers concerned about offshore exploration in the wake of the Gulf Coast oil spill.
The measure also would allow states directly affected to veto drilling plans of nearby states if they could show that significant negative effects would result from an
accident. (AP)
WASHINGTON — Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman unveiled a long-awaited bill Wednesday that aims to curtail pollution blamed for global warming, reduce oil imports and
create millions of energy-related jobs.
The 987-page bill, the product of more than seven months of negotiations and tweaked recently in response to the Gulf oil spill, also includes new protections for offshore
drilling and for the first time would set a price on carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power plants and other large polluters.
The legislation aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent by 2050. Both targets are
measured against 2005 levels and are the same as those set by a House bill approved last year.
"We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world's clean energy leader," Kerry, D-Mass., said at a news conference, surrounded
by environmentalists and leaders from an array of energy companies. (AP)
WASHINGTON, DC, May 12, 2010 - The American Power Act, a bill proposing a cap and trade system for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, was introduced today in the U.S.
Senate. Written by Senators John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, the bill aims to reduce emissions by 17 percent in 2020 and by
over 80 percent in 2050.
Senator Kerry said, "We can finally tell the world that America is ready to take back our role as the world's clean energy leader. This is a bill for energy independence
after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs, and a bill to end America's addiction
to foreign oil and protect the air our children breathe and the water they drink."
Senator Lieberman said, "The American Power Act is fundamentally different from previous energy and climate bills, and not just because it will be the one that actually
passes." (ENS)
Washington, D.C. - Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, commented today on the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade
bill and its eventual political fate in the Senate:
"My first reaction to the Kerry-Lieberman bill is that it's the same old cap-and-trade scheme that the Senate has defeated three times since 2003,"
Senator Inhofe said. "In fact, it has a strong resemblance to the disastrous Waxman-Markey bill. Only now, along with paying skyrocketing electricity prices,
consumers will pay a gas tax.
"The Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal is just like Waxman-Markey in another key respect: it will destroy millions of good-paying jobs, many of which will
be lost in regions, such as the Midwest, South, and Great Plains, which depend on coal for electricity. Given these facts, it's no wonder that this massive energy tax is
opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike, and that is has virtually no chance of passing the Senate."
"The sooner we reject global warming cap-and-trade legislation, and get to work on an all-of the-above energy policy, the sooner the American public will have
access to affordable, abundant, American-made energy."
Regulations: Call it cap-and-trade or bait-and-switch, but John Kerry and Joe Lieberman continue to tilt at windmills with a bill to restrain energy growth in the name of
saving the planet.
The bill introduced Wednesday and sponsored by the two senators is called the American Power Act, an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Like President Obama's offshore
drilling program, for every "incentive" there is a restriction. It's as if Hamlet were to be appointed Secretary of Energy.
The legislation has little to do with developing America's vast domestic energy supply. It's cap-and-trade meets pork-barrel spending. It's about regulations, restrictions and
research. It does not deal with exploiting America's vast energy reserves but with finding ways to mitigate their alleged harmful effect. (IBD)
Last year Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) rolled out a
companion cap and trade bill to the Waxman-Markey version that passed in the House of Representatives. Boxer-Kerry was essentially dead on arrival so Senator Kerry went
back to work, this time with Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Although Senator Graham is urging his colleagues to slow down, Senators Kerry and
Lieberman are trudging forward and have
introduced the American Power Act – the latest big climate change bill. Subtitled, “A New Start for Clean American Power and a New Economy,” this bill fails when it
comes to energy production and job creation. APA is a new climate bill that tells the same old story: corporate handouts that raise energy prices for years to come.
John Kerry made his sales pitch in The Hill today saying,
“There’s a reason why people and American businesses that have always opposed and fought against previous legislation – quite successfully! – are standing behind this
one.” It’s because they were offered a seat at the table leaving the rest of America to pick up the tab. Take the words of one major electricity CEO who said,
“We don’t flinch from the charge that, yes, some of our motivation and enthusiasm comes from the fact that we should make money on it if it happens.” As the Competitive
Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner stresses, the handouts
will go to the businesses that won the
lobbying battle while the costs will be passed onto the consumer. It’s no surprise “influence spending” is
up 25 percent for the first quarter of 2010 compared to last year.
Climate Depot has obtained an advance memo circulating on Capitol Hill about the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill. Below is a list of 60 new Programs, Studies, and Reports
created by the Kerry-Lieberman bill. (Marc Morano, Climate Depot)
Three separate events late last year knocked the air out of international climate alarmism. Combined, they put the kibosh on global warming legislation in the United States
for the foreseeable future. Now the only ones keeping such legislation alive are a handful of powerful special interests. Contrary to what you normally hear, big business is
pushing, not opposing, climate legislation. (Iain Murray, Washington Examiner)
From his sprawling new $9 million ocean-view villa in Montecito, California, with its high
ceilings, wine cellar, terraces, six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, pool and 6,500 square feet of living space, former Vice President Al Gore is asking a favor of
the American people. He’d like you to tighten your belt and shell out big time
for higher electric bills, all in the name of fighting global warming.
In a renewable electricity standard (RES) proposal now before Congress, those costs would be huge. A new
Heritage Foundation study modeled the effects of a generic RES and found that the average family of four would lose $2,400 per year in national income, and their share of
the national debt would increase by $11,000.
The Heritage analysis assumes an RES proposal that calls for 37.5% of the electricity we consume to be renewable energy by 2035; by contrast, Gore’s man-on-the-moon pipe
dream calls for 100 percent renewable energy by 2018. Both would be incredibly costly to average Americans, which might be more palatable if you, like the former veep, can
afford to add solar panels to the roof of one of your mansions. (Gore also owns a 10,000-square-foot
mansion in Belle Meade, Tenn., where he has been depicted working in the soft
glow of three 30-inch Apple cinema display monitors, which retail for a hefty $1,799
each.)
“The global temperature “savings” of the Kerry-Lieberman bill is astoundingly small—0.043°C (0.077°F) by 2050 and 0.111°C (0.200°F) by 2100. In other words, by
century’s end, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% will only result in global temperatures being one-fifth of one degree Fahrenheit less than they would otherwise
be. That is a scientifically meaningless reduction.”
Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman have just unveiled their latest/greatest attempt to reign in U. S. greenhouse gas emissions. Their one time collaborator Lindsey
Graham indicated that he did not consider the bill a climate bill
because “[t]here is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.” But make no mistake. This is a climate bill at heart, and thus the Kerry-Lieberman
bill sections labeled “Title II. Global Warming Pollution Reduction.”
So apparently someone thinks the bill will have an impact on global warming. But those someones are wrong. The bill will have no meaningful impact of the future
course of global warming.
That is, unless the rest of the world—primarily the developing nations—decide to play along.
In fact, the United States and the rest of the developed countries have little role to play in the future course of global warming except as developers of new energy
technologies and/or as guinea pigs of making do with less fossil fuels.
Our attempts at domestic emissions savings will have only minimal direct climate impact, but instead they will serve as an example for the developing world of what, or what
not, to do. So if Kerry and Lieberman were interested in directly tackling the climate change issue, they would be working with China’s National People’s Congress to draft
legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not the U. S. Senate.
But, everyone already knows this, as we demonstrated the non-impact of U.S. emissions reduction efforts in Part I and Part
II of our analysis of last summer’s Waxman-Markey offering. And as far as the global warming goes, Kerry-Lieberman’s The American Power Act of 2010 is similar to
Waxman-Markey’s American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.
Kerry-Lieberman’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions reduction schedule is 17% below 2005 emissions levels by 2020, 42% below by 2030, and 83% below by 2050. Compare that
to Waxman-Markey’s 20% reduction in emissions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. Except for a bit of relaxation of near term targets, the bills’
long-term intentions are identical.
The impact of this slight emissions difference on the resulting future global temperature savings is not manifest until the third digit past the decimal point—in other
words, thousandths of degrees C. Climatologically, in other words, the bills are identical. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Today at 1:30 pm Eastern time Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will host a press conference announcing the fifth Senate reinvention of
"cap-and-trade" global warming legislation since 2003, the "American Power Act". Call it the American Power Grab Act, instead, for reasons that will become
obvious momentarily.
The orchestrated spectacle, with a cast expected to be in the dozens which massive alignment of special interest groups is apparently supposed to persuade you of the justness
of their cause, is in fact a manifestation of all that is wrong with Washington and what Americans have become increasingly enraged by. (Chris Horner, Spectator)
Senate climate change legislation proposed Wednesday is a reasonable compromise, Exelon Corp. Chairman and CEO John W. Rowe said, but he put long odds on it going anywhere
this year. (Crain's)
DALLAS - T. Boone Pickens, energy expert and creator of the Pickens Plan to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, released the following statement regarding energy
legislation unveiled today by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.): (Business Wire)
Major players in Washington cheered the latest version of an energy bill, which tries to buy votes with “something for almost everyone.” But beleaguered consumers
will get stuck with skyrocketing bills after others feast on new government benefits.
We can expect any new “green jobs” to be offset by a larger loss of existing jobs, possibly
up to 3-million, depending on details of how the bill’s cap-and-trade system is implemented to tax carbon dioxide emissions. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
[Editor note: The following post, "Cap-and-Trade: The Temple of Enron,"appeared one
year ago in MasterResource. It is being reprinted in conjunction with the release of the outlines of the Senate energy/climate proposal.
Robert Bradley, formerly with Enron, further documents Enron's cap-and-trade shenanigans in other MasterResource articles listed at the end of this post. Two press
releases from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
the Institute for Energy Research
on the Senate outline are reproduced as well.]
“Since 1976, Enron [and predecessor company] employees have been at the forefront of developing air credit trading policies for governments and businesses…. Enron
today is the largest and most sophisticated air emissions credit and allowance trading organization in the United States. Since 1990, Enron has participated in over 80 SOx
allowance transactions and has also been active in establishing policies for trading NOx in the United States and carbon [dioxide] world-wide.”
- “Enron Corp.’s Participation in Air Trading,” Enron Capital & Trade Resources, November 4, 1996 (copy in files).
“If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative…. The endorsement of [CO2]
emissions trading was another victory for us…. This agreement will be good for Enron stock!”
- John Palmisano (December 12, 1997) from Kyoto, Japan. Quoted in Bradley, Capitalism at Work, p. 307.
“If anyone has environmental credit needs, that’s what we do. We want to be to be the clearing house to monetize available credits or to manage risk.”
- Kevin McGowan, director of coal and emissions trading, Enron Corp., (Enron Biz, November 29, 2000, copy in files)
“We are a green company, but the green stands for money.”
- Jeff Skilling, CEO, Enron Corp., quoted in Capitalism at Work, p. 310.
Enron is Exhibit A against Waxman/Markey’s [Kerry-Graham-Lieberman's] cap-and-trade proposal. Enron was
poised to make money coming and going by being the nation’s and the world’s largest market-maker in CO2 permits, and the “smartest guys in the room” were
ready to game and game for incremental dollars (remember California?).
Enron’s business model, in retrospect, had to do with regulatory complexity, as I note in the introduction to my book Capitalism at Work. Enron gamed the highly
prescriptive accounting rules (GAAP), tax system (the corporate tax division was actually a profit center as told in an exposé in the Washington
Post). [Read more →] (MasterResource)
A grand vision of a global carbon market to limit greenhouse gas emissions may be decades off as U.S. senators unveiled a climate bill on Wednesday, facing tough Republican
opposition.
But far from being dead, national and regional cap and trade schemes are emerging as a possible patchwork successor to the international Kyoto Protocol on global warming, whose
present round ends in 2012, in the absence of workable alternatives.
Some policymakers outside Europe have downgraded their ambition for a new global treaty or protocol following a disappointing U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December.
Cap and trade schemes aim to limit greenhouse gases by issuing to industry a certain quota of tradable emissions permits, following a five year old European Union model.
Such schemes are emerging as an imperfect, international system for limiting carbon emissions after Kyoto, said Kjetil Roine, manager of carbon market research at Point Carbon.
U.S. legislation similar to the EU scheme would unite U.S. and EU climate diplomacy, said MIT economist Denny Ellerman. "That changes the game, it starts to look like a
global system," he said. (Reuters)
THE unveiling of a long-awaited US Senate bill to establish an American emissions trading scheme shows Australia is being left behind in terms of action on climate change,
say environmentalists. (SMH)
A DECIDEDLY cranky Kevin Rudd has launched an impassioned defence of his handling of climate change policy.
Pressed by ABC 7.30 Report host Kerry O'Brien last night on why he had abandoned his climate change campaign, the Prime Minister said the Liberal Party had backflipped and
voted down his emissions trading scheme legislation: "That is the reality we had to confront.
"The second reality is this: that when we got to Copenhagen, it didn't produce the sort of progress in the global agenda that we all had hoped. "Therefore, where do
we go from here? Our commitment on climate change hasn't changed one bit. It's happening."
"But it . . ." interrupted O'Brien.
"Hang on, let me finish," said Mr Rudd, as the climate in the studio heated up noticeably. (Brendan Nicholson, The Australian)
THE deferral of Australia's emissions trading scheme for three years allows us time for additional scientific studies that may be critical in shaping future legislation.
A touchstone in the debate on causes of global warming is the record of global temperatures of past millennia. Most who follow this debate are familiar with the cooling from
the 16th to 18th centuries known as the Little Ice Age; this is generally accepted as a global phenomenon. Most are also aware of the Medieval Warm Period covering much of the
9th to 15th centuries. This has been the source of greater debate because, while it is clear in anecdotal descriptions from Europe, such as Vikings growing crops in Greenland,
it is less clear whether it is a global phenomenon. The debate has high stakes because the rate of warming and temperatures attained in Europe during the MWP are of similar
order to the warming of past decades. If the MWP were to be proven to be global, then the basis of present science stating that industrial-era carbon emissions are the dominant
cause of today's warming would be significantly undermined.
One of the giants of global warming science, Wally Broecker of Columbia University in New York, wrote a discussion in 2001 of evidence for the MWP being a global phenomenon,
concluding tentative support for its global nature. Three years later, Phil Jones, now director of the Climate Research Unit, East Anglia, co-authored a review that concluded
the MWP was a regional phenomenon. The IPCC4 report of 2007 concluded similarly; curiously, Broecker's paper did not get a mention. (Michael Asten, The Australian)
A green investment bank and national programme of home insulation will be top of the agenda for the new Government.
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP, will head up the department for Energy and Climate Change.
He will drive forward a number of policies in the first Queen's Speech to make the UK's out-dated building stock more energy efficient and boost renewable energy. Already
environmentalists are celebrating a vow to scrap the third runway at Heathrow, although plans for nuclear power stations remain on course. (TDT)
In the national interest, the Global Warming Policy Foundation wishes the new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government every success. We welcome the fact that its
first priority is to reduce substantially the alarming and unsustainable deficit in the public finances, which is leading to a rapidly-growing burden of public debt. In the
circumstances, it is clear that the UK cannot afford, above all unilaterally, to move to a low carbon, let alone a zero carbon, economy. A low carbon economy means a high
energy cost economy. (Benny Peiser, GWPF)
PARIS — Evidence for global warming has mounted but public awareness of the threat has shrunk, due to a cold northern winter and finger-pointing at the UN's climate
experts, a top scientist warned Wednesday.
James Hansen, a leading NASA scientist whose testimony to the US Congress in 1988 was a landmark in the history of climate change, said he was worried by "the large
gap" in knowledge between specialists and the public, including politicians.
"That gap has increased substantially in the last year," Hansen told a press conference during a visit to Paris.
"While the science was becoming clearer, the public's perception became less clear, in part because of the unusually cold winter in both North America and Europe, and in
part because of the inappropriate over-emphasis on small minor errors in IPCC documents and because of the so-called Climategate." (AFP)
This from the fellow who admits we have no agreement even on what we are attempting to
measure with global mean temperature.
NEW DELHI: If IPCC chief R K Pachauri remained under attack for the better part of last month, his reputation was more than resurrected in the last two days, with government
heads and leaders from across the world voicing their support for the man and his organisation.
With help pouring in from all quarters, it was, in fact, the climate change debate that benefited. Attending the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2010, ministers from
across the world spoke about the necessity of creating a new energy future, where the role of renewable energy was highlighted. Government representatives from UAE, Japan,
Czech Republic, Australia, France and Belgium talked about individual targets, while emphasising the urgency to shift to new energy sources. (Times of India)
As part of its most comprehensive assessment to date, the National Research Council – the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of
Engineering – will release three new reports examining how the nation can combat the effects of global warming. One focuses on the science that supports human-induced climate
change, and the others review options for limiting the magnitude of and adapting to the impacts of global warming. The reports are part of a congressionally requested suite of
studies known as America's Climate Choices.
At a public briefing to discuss the reports, Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, will deliver opening remarks, and members of the panels that
wrote the reports will discuss their recommendations and take questions. The briefing starts at 10 a.m. EDT Wednesday, May 19, in the Lecture Room of the National Academy of
Sciences building, 2100 C St., N.W., Washington, D.C. Those who cannot attend may watch a live video webcast and submit questions at www.national-academies.org.
Reports to be released on the 19th are:
Advancing the Science of Climate Change
Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change
Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change
###
Advance copies of the reports will be available to reporters only beginning at 2 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 18. THE REPORT IS EMBARGOED AND NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE BEFORE 10
A.M. EDT MAY 19. To obtain copies of the reports or to register for the briefing, contact the Office of News and Public Information; tel. 202-334-2138 or e-mail < news@nas.edu >.
America's Climate Choices also includes two additional reports that will be released later this year: Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change will
examine how to best provide decision makers information on climate change, and an overarching publication will build on the previous reports to offer a scientific framework for
shaping the policy choices underlying the nation's efforts to confront climate change. (NAS)
“…The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a
solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your
legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.” ~John Adams
Adams is talking about contrarians, people who challenge prevailing opinion whom he sees as a positive force in society. Now those pushing the myth that humans are causing
warming or climate change want society to think it is a negative force. As Adams notes, in order to create a negative perception of contrarians they are subjected to nasty
attacks. Collectively imply they don’t care about the environment, the planet, the children, or the future.
This is part of the claim to the moral high ground by environmental groups and extremists. It also involves the claim that every change is caused by human activity, which
reaches a height of illogic with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to humans and is almost the sole cause
of global warming since the 1950s. The reality is the claim is not proven except in their computer models and cannot be proven until we understand how much climate varies
naturally. The inverse of that is how much change is due to humans. (Tim Ball, CFP)
The winter camps of southern Mongolia are quiet during this year's breeding season, after an unusually harsh winter wiped out herds and left nomadic families with little but
debt to their name.
The bitter winter killed an estimated 8 million animals, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), leaving exhausted, poverty-stricken herders struggling to
survive and increasing demands on Mongolia's already-stretched national budget. (Reuters)
[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]
This statement provides my analysis of the effects of ocean acidification on our living resources and our economy. It lightly touches on the other topics of the Hearing: the
oil spill and the EPA role in ocean health. (SPPI)
The authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for April 2010 discusses the panic among the climate-extremist faction as none of their predictions of doom comes to pass – plus
lots more.
[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]
The authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for April 2010 discusses the panic among the climate-extremist faction as none of their predictions of doom comes to pass – plus
lots more (SPPI)
I am impressed that Glikson replied politely, rose above any ad hominem or authority based arguments, and focused on the science and the evidence. This kind of exchange is
exceedingly rare, and it made it well worth continuing. Links to Part I and II are at the end.
Depending on flawed models
by Joanne Nova
May 11, 2010
For
a sentence, I almost think Dr Glikson gets it. Yes, it’s a quantitative question: Will we warm by half a measly degree or 3.5 degrees? It’s not about the direct CO2
effect (all of one paltry degree by itself), it’s the feedbacks—the humidity, clouds, lapse rates and other factors that amplify (or not) the initial minor effect of
carbon.
Decades ago, the catastrophe-crowd made guesses about the feedbacks—but they were wrong. Instead of amplifying carbon’s effect two-fold (or more!) the feedbacks dampen
it.
Dr Glikson has no reply. He makes no comment at all about Lindzen [1], Spencer [2] or
Douglass [3] and their three peer reviewed, independent, empirical papers showing that the climate models are exaggerating the
warming by a factor of six. (Six!) He’s probably unaware that the assumptions about positive feedback are wrong, and all the portents of disaster were built upon
those guesses. Everything else is just an error cascade flowing from a base assumption that is implicit and essential (and wrong). Don’t expect the IPCC to explain it in an
easy-to-read brochure though. More
» (Jo Nova)
The concepts presented are similar to what we recommend in our article
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip
Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate
change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union (Roger Pielke
Sr, Climate Science)
I noted on the news that there is a new plan afoot to cool down the planet. This one supposedly has been given big money by none other than Bill Gates.
The plan involves a fleet of ships that supposedly look like this:
Figure 1. Artist’s conception of cloud-making ships. Of course, the first storm would flip this over immediately, but heck, it’s only a fantasy, so who cares? SOURCE
The web site claims that:
Bill Gates Announces Funding for Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines
The machines, developed by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining, turn seawater into tiny particles that can be shot up over 3,000 feet in the air. The
particles increase the density of clouds by increasing the amount of nuclei contained within. Silver Lining’s floating machines can suck up ten tons of water per second.
What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant plan?
“Urban heat islands are a result of the physical properties of buildings and other structures, and the emission of heat by human activities. They are most pronounced on
clear, calm nights; their strength depends also on the background geography and climate, and there are often cool islands in parks and less-developed areas. Some old city
centers no longer show warming trends relative to rural neighbourhoods, because urban development has stabilised. This article reviews the effects that urban heat islands may
have on estimates of global near-surface temperature trends. These effects have been reduced by avoiding or adjusting urban temperature measurements. Comparisons of windy
weather with calm weather air temperature trends for a worldwide set of observing sites suggest that global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by
urban warming trends; this is supported by comparisons with marine surface temperatures. The use of dynamical-model-based reanalyses to estimate urban influences has
been hindered by the heterogeneity of the data input to the reanalyses and by biases in the models. However, improvements in reanalyses are increasing their utility
for assessing the surface air temperature record. Highresolution climate models and data on changing land use offer potential for future assessment of worldwide urban warming
influences. The latest assessments of the likely magnitude of the residual urban trend in available global near-surface temperature records are summarized, along with the
uncertainties of these residual trends.”
The paper, however, has serious flaws. (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
There is a new paper which adds to the literature of the role of land surface processes within the climate system. It is
Pongratz, J., C. H. Reick, T. Raddatz, and M. Claussen (2010), Biogeophysical versus biogeochemical climate response to historical anthropogenic land cover change,
Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L08702, doi:10.1029/2010GL043010. (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
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 (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
Oil companies face an immediate tax rise of 1 cent per barrel to help to pay for the clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico under proposed legislation rushed out by the White House
yesterday.
The measure, unveiled as BP began a new attempt to contain the ruptured well that has leaked millions of gallons of crude oil into America’s southern coastal waters, would
put an extra $500 million (£340 million) over ten years into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which covers damage caused by such disasters. (The Times)
Any effort to limit off-shore drilling in the wake of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill would be a "gross over-reaction" that would further batter the Louisiana
economy, the state's treasurer said on Friday.
"I think that it would be a gross over-reaction to stop drilling," State Treasurer John Kennedy told Reuters. "Do we need to learn from our mistakes? Certainly
we do."
Off-shore drilling drives nearly a third, or $65 billion, of the state's economy in direct and indirect revenue, Kennedy said. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed breaking up the agency responsible for both policing the oil industry and acting as its partner in drilling
activities, seeking to end a decades-old relationship between industry and government that has proved highly profitable — and some say too cozy — for both.
The administration has been under pressure to address weaknesses in federal oil regulation since the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico three weeks ago. (NYT)
Laws to overhaul Australia's renewable energy scheme were introduced into parliament on Wednesday in a move that should reassure industry and underpin billions of dollars in
investments.
The laws are expected to pass a vote in the Senate in the coming weeks, a step that would be a rare victory for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's otherwise stalled efforts to fight
climate change and a boost ahead of elections later this year.
Australia has laws to ensure 20 percent of electricity comes from renewable energy by 2020 and the three bills introduced into the lower house of parliament will refine this by
splitting the scheme to separate the small-scale household market from larger renewable energy projects.
The new arrangements will start in January 2011. (Reuters)
We do love our wonder-crops. We want plants that yield large amounts of biofuel, and can do it on marginal soil. We want them to be drought resistant and require little
fertilizer. And when one fails to deliver per the hype, we move right on to the next one without having learned the lessons of the last one. [Read
More] (Robert Rapier, Energy Tribune)
The electricity industry is spending billions on building new, transnational power lines to harness electricity from renewable energy sources. The intelligent grid is
designed to make distribution more reliable and efficient, but are consumers playing along? (Spiegel)
Last month Politico reported that the alternative energy sector had upped its lobbying efforts from $2.4
million in 1998 to $30 million in 2009. So what is the renewable power industry getting for its investment? Studies like this
one by Navigant Consulting, Inc. for the Renewable Electricity Standard-Alliance for Jobs. The RES Alliance study found that
“that a 25% by 2025 national RES would result in 274,000 more renewable energy jobs over no-national RES policy.”
Which is great news if you own a renewable electricity business. But what if you’re not? What if you manufacture widgets and you need inexpensive power to stay in
business? The RES Alliance study tells you nothing about what happens to those jobs. It never even tries.
The reality is that Renewable Electricity Standards will cause energy prices to go up and that those higher energy prices will lead to job losses throughout the economy.
Just ho many jobs will RES destroy on net? The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis crunched
the numbers and found that an RES would reduce employment by more than 1,000,000 jobs. Continue
reading...
Once you've carpeted the wilderness with wind-farm turbines, and crushed any guilt about the birds you're about to kill, prepare to be underwhelmed and underpowered.
Al Gore has a dream, a dream increasingly shared, according to opinion surveys, by people all over the world. It is that the 19th century, the age of steam and iron and coal,
will finally end and that, as Mr. Gore wrote in an article for the New York Times in 2008, the time will soon come for "21st-century technologies that use fuel that is
free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth."
It might be better, and much more realistic, says Robert Bryce in "Power Hungry," to imagine our journey toward a "green" energy Arcadia in units of Saudi
Arabia. "Over the past few years," he writes, "we have repeatedly been told that we should quit using hydrocarbons. Fine. Global daily hydrocarbon use is about
200 million barrels of oil equivalent, or about 23.5 Saudi Arabias per day. Thus, if the world's policy makers really want to quit using carbon-based fuels, then we will need
to find the energy equivalent of 23.5 Saudi Arabias every day, and all of that energy must be carbon free."
"Power Hungry" unfolds as a brutal, brilliant exploration of this profoundly deluded quest, from fingers-in-the-ears "la-la-la-ing" at the mention of
nuclear power to the illusion that we are rapidly running out of oil or that we can turn to biomass for salvation: Since it takes 10,000 tons of wood to produce one megawatt of
electricity, for instance, the U.S. will be chopping down forests faster than it can grow them.
Mr. Bryce also points to the link between cheap power and economic productivity and asks why we should expect much of the world to forgo the benefits of light bulbs and regular
energy when we enjoy these privileges. But if "Power Hungry" sounds like a supercharged polemic, its shocks are delivered with forensic skill and narrative aplomb.
(Trevor Butterworth, WSJ)
The ferocious opposition from Massachusetts liberals to the Cape Wind project has provided a useful education in green energy politics. And now that the Nantucket Sound wind
farm has won federal approval, this decade-long saga may prove edifying in green energy economics too: Namely, the price of electricity from wind is more than twice what
consumers now pay.
On Monday, Cape Wind asked state regulators to approve a 15-year purchasing contract with the utility company National Grid at 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour, starting in 2013
and rising at 3.5% annually thereafter. Consumers pay around nine cents for conventional power today. The companies expect average electric bills to jump by about $1.59 a
month, because electricity is electricity no matter how it is generated, and Cape Wind's 130 turbines will generate so little of it in the scheme of the overall New England
market.
Still, that works out to roughly $443 million in new energy costs, and that doesn't count the federal subsidies that Cape Wind will receive from national taxpayers. It does,
however, include the extra 6.1 cents per kilowatt hour that Massachusetts utilities are mandated to pay for wind, solar and the like under a 2008 state law called the Green
Communities Act. Also under that law, at least 15% of power company portfolios must come from renewable sources by 2020.
Two weeks ago, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved Cape Wind, placing it in the vanguard of "a clean energy revolution." A slew of environmental and
political outfits have since filed multiple lawsuits for violations of the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act,
certain tribal-protection laws, the Clean Water Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Rivers and Harbors Act.
There's comic irony in this clean energy revolution getting devoured by the archaic regulations of previous clean energy revolutions. But given that taxpayers will be required
to pay to build Cape Wind and then required to buy its product at prices twice normal rates, opponents might have more success if they simply pointed out what a lousy deal it
is. (WSJ)
Mexico may build up to 10 new nuclear power stations by 2028 under one scenario being evaluated by the state electricity monopoly, the company said in a presentation on
Wednesday.
Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE, currently has four scenarios for new power generation capacity from 2019- 28 that range from a heavy reliance on coal-fired
power plants to meet growing demand to a low-carbon scenario that calls for big investments in nuclear and wind power, said Eugenio Laris, who is in charge of investment
projects at the company.
Mexico currently operates a single nuclear power station at Laguna Verde in the state of Veracruz along the Gulf of Mexico. (Reuters)
The successful nuclear fusion by our scientists has made a definite breakthrough towards the development of new energy and opened up a new phase in the nation's development
of the latest science and technology.
Congratulations, comrades. They may have burned the last piece of pork that was left in the country and decided that there was some hydrogen in it, too.
Technically, it was easy to achieve fusion: they chose the right day, the birthday of the holy founder of the state, Kim Il-Sung, also known as the "Day of the Sun".
Because the holy communist father is the Sun and there's fusion in the Sun, He gave them the gift of fusion, too.
Your humble correspondent is laughing but let me be honest: I feel pretty uncertain. They may have found something, after all. What do you think? ;-)
GENEVA - An expert panel advising the World Health Organization on pandemics will review the status of the H1N1 virus later this month or in early June to decide whether the
swine flu pandemic is over.
The Emergency Committee is waiting for the onset of winter in the southern hemisphere before making its recommendation, spokesman Gregory Hartl said.
That meant the 15-member independent panel would probably meet at the end of May or in early June, after the WHO's governing World Health Assembly next week, he told a
briefing. (Reuters)
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and other agencies, it is a no-brainer. "All" you have to do is tear out all the drywall in your house, and
rebuild it. Doing this will cost the affected homeowner about $35/square foot ($377/square meter). The quoted price includes a treatment to the remaining surfaces, which, even
though not mentioned by the Feds, is clearly necessary. Without this, your new drywall will get contaminated by what's left in the studs and concrete.
Note that the necessity for this treatment is not mentioned by any of the agencies. Of course, there are many who say that the Feds (and the state agencies for that matter) are
"AWOL on drywall."
Since the affected homeowners are going to have to pay the total cost of this remediation out of their own pockets, with no insurance coverage, and no help of any other kind on
the horizon, many are understandably wondering if they can live with the problems—or at least postpone having to fix them.
Don't bother looking for guidance on this matter on any government website. Remember "AWOL..."?
Sadly, with certain life safety issues in play, delay in remediation is not without its risks. My latest HND
piece covers this topic is some detail. Check it out! (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
Soldiers deployed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War were exposed to high concentrations of particulate matter (PM) and other airborne pollutants. Their exposures were largely
the result of daily windblown dust, dust storms, and smoke from oil fires. On returning from deployment, many veterans complained of persistent respiratory symptoms. With the
renewed activity in the Middle East over the last few years, deployed military personnel are again exposed to dust storms and daily windblown dust in addition to other types of
PM, such as diesel exhaust and particles from open-pit burning. On the basis of the high concentrations observed and concerns about the potential health effects, DOD designed
and implemented a study to characterize and quantify the PM in the ambient environment at 15 sites in the Middle East. The endeavor is known as the DOD Enhanced Particulate
Matter Surveillance Program (EPMSP).
The U.S. Army asked the National Research Council to review the EPMSP report. In response, the present evaluation considers the potential acute and chronic health implications
on the basis of information presented in the report. It also considers epidemiologic and health-surveillance data collected by the USACHPPM, to assess potential health
implications for deployed personnel, and recommends methods for reducing or characterizing health risks. (NAP)
NEW YORK - A new study strengthens evidence linking long-term lead exposure to the risk of developing the fatal neurological condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The findings do not definitively prove that lead exposure contributes to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. And even if lead does contribute, the risk of any one person
developing the relatively uncommon disease due to lead exposure would be quite low, researchers say.
Still, the results strengthen the case that lifelong lead exposure may play a role in ALS, according to senior researcher Dr. Freya Kamel, a staff scientist at the U.S.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
ALS is an invariably fatal disease in which the nerve cells that control movement progressively degenerate, leading to paralysis and death from respiratory failure. It is
diagnosed in about 5,000 Americans each year. (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK - Overweight children from lower- and middle-income neighborhoods may fall short of their thinner peers in one measure of cardiovascular fitness -- but the same may
not be true of those from more affluent areas, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that among 480 children and teenagers who underwent treadmill exercise tests, those with a high body mass index (BMI) tended to have a slower heart rate
recovery after their workout -- but only if they were from lower- or middle-income neighborhoods.
Extra pounds did not generally seem to affect heart rate recovery among kids from the highest-income areas, the study found.
Heart rate recovery refers to the amount of time it takes a person's heart rate to return to its resting rate after a bout of exercise. It is one measure of cardiovascular
fitness.
It's not certain why a high BMI would affect kids' heart rate recovery differently based on income, but there are a couple potential explanations, according to lead researcher
Dr. Tajinder P. Singh, of Children's Hospital Boston. (Reuters Health)
WASHINGTON - Economic incentives to provide inexpensive healthy food and insurance coverage for prevention are among a list of 70 immediate steps that can reduce U.S.
childhood obesity, a White House task force recommended in a report on Tuesday.
The report to U.S. President Barack Obama calls for specific actions that can be taken by government and private industry to battle a national health crisis but does not call
for new funding or legislation.
The panel suggests economic incentives could help eradicate so-called "food deserts" - urban and rural areas with few, if any, supermarkets and grocery stores. The
incentives would improve access to healthy, affordable food.
"Effective policies and tools to guide healthy eating and active living are within our grasp," said the report by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity.
"The next step is to turn these ideas into action." (Reuters)
WASHINGTON - U.S. health officials will encourage physicians to report misleading promotions from pharmaceutical salespeople who pitch medicines in doctors' offices or over
dinner.
The effort to be announced on Tuesday aims to increase regulators' reach into the largest area of prescription drug promotion - the private contacts between drug company
salespeople and prescribers.
The law requires prescription drug marketing to be truthful and balanced. Food and Drug Administration staffers routinely check ads on television or in magazines or medical
journals, but it is tough to track closed-door pitches such as a chat inside a doctor's office or a sales presentation over lunch or dinner.
Starting this month, the FDA staff will set up booths at major medical conferences to tell doctors how to spot questionable pitches. The agency also is sending a letter to
about 33,000 healthcare providers about the campaign, dubbed the Bad Ad Program.
"We are asking doctors to increase their awareness and report questionable activities to us," said Thomas Abrams, head of the FDA's division of drug marketing,
advertising and communications. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON - The evidence is stronger than ever that pollution from industry, traffic and power generation causes strokes and heart attacks, and people should avoid
breathing in smog, the American Heart Association said on Monday.
Fine particulate matter from burning fossil fuels such as gasoline, coal and oil is the clearest offender, the group said.
"Particulate matter appears to directly increase risk by triggering events in susceptible individuals within hours to days of an increased level of exposure, even among
those who otherwise may have been healthy for years," said Dr. Robert Brook of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who headed the group writing the report.
A review of six year's worth of medical research also showed strong evidence that pollution can help clog arteries, and a "small yet consistent" association between
short-term exposure to air pollution and premature death. (Reuters)
Given the "evidence" is pathetic, "stronger" doesn't inspire much.
LONDON - People working 10 or 11 hours a day are more likely to suffer serious heart problems, including heart attacks, than those clocking off after seven hours,
researchers said on Tuesday.
The finding, from an 11-year study of 6,000 British civil servants, does not provide definitive proof that long hours cause heart disease but it does show a clear link, which
experts said may be due to stress. (Reuters)
And possibly people who clock off earlier have lives, engage in regular activities (sports or other exercise?) or spend their time stuffing their faces
with fast foods or salty snacks. they really don't have much to work with here.
WASHINGTON - The Agriculture Department announced on Monday new standards to reduce the levels of salmonella and campylobacter in poultry, which the government said if
successful, could prevent an estimated 65,000 illnesses each year.
USDA said stricter performance standards would hold slaughterhouses more accountable by reducing the incidence of foodborne illnesses in young chickens and turkeys. The plan
would set a percentage of sampled poultry that could test positive for a specific pathogen that an establishment must achieve.
"The new standards announced today mark an important step in our efforts to protect consumers by further reducing the incidence of salmonella and opening a new front in
the fight against campylobacter," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.
The proposal is open to public comment for 60 days. (Reuters)
NEW tourism laws could pave the way for supermarkets, rifle ranges, car race tracks, and even fast food chains to be built in national parks across NSW, environment groups
have claimed.
Legislation amending the National Parks and Wildlife Act is expected to be introduced in this session of Parliament.
The draft bill would allow the state government to grant exclusive leases and licences to private companies wanting to establish tourist accommodation, shops, restaurants,
cafes, conference facilities, and sport and recreational activities in national parks, nature reserves and conservation areas.
Independent legal advice commissioned by environment groups suggests the new laws, which hand the environment minister the power to approve the leases, would open national
parks to large-scale commercial operations like chain restaurants.
''It extends well beyond accommodation for tourists and visitors,'' barrister Tim Robertson, SC, said. ''It includes supermarkets … fast food outlets such as McDonald's and
Kentucky Fried Chicken, reception lounges for weddings and other celebrations, venues for conferences, sporting facilities such as rifle ranges, car racing circuits and horse
racing tracks, fun parks and, of course, tourist resorts. (SMH)
... it'd definitely be a plus if it did but there seems no hope of getting parks into productive use.
The destruction of ancient forests has fallen to its lowest level for 20 years as countries finally begin to deliver on their commitment to protect animal and plant species,
according to a UN report. (The Times)
[SPPI Note: The UN is a world socialist organization with a penchant for massive corruption
and theft, wasteful mismanagement, and an agenda for transnational legal and financial frameworks (world governance) financed through compulsory wealth transfers from Americans
to it itself and its constituency of "developing" nations and third world dictators.The following story is yet another example.]
By George Russell
The World Health Organization is moving full speed ahead with a controversial plan to impose billions of dollars in global consumer
taxes on such things as Internet activity and everyday financial transactions like paying bills online — while its spending soars and its own financial house is in disarray.
The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations’ public health arm, is moving full speed ahead with a controversial plan to impose global consumer taxes on such
things as Internet activity and everyday financial transactions like paying bills online — while its spending soars and its own financial house is in disarray. Read
the rest of this entry » (SPPI Blog)
Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are be- yond suspicion and above the law? That's the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney
General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming's poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.
Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann's
hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other
documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.
Mr. Cuccinelli's rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann's claim to fame - the infamous "hockey stick" graph - is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether
it is intentional fraud.
Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann's hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past
millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated
into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth") as proof that humans
were destroying the planet.
But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was - pure bunk. (Steve Milloy, Washington Times)
Read here, PDF,
here, here and here.
Way back in 1997, researchers published a paper that was based on data from 6,000 plus borehole sites from all the continents. The reconstructed temperatures clearly showed a
Medieval Period warming that was, and is, unprecedented. The data also makes clear that subsequent warming began well before the growth of human CO2 emissions and this natural
rebound would obviously lead to temperatures similar to the Medieval Period.
A year later, the infamous Mann hockey-stick temperature chart was published to wild
acclaim by the IPCC and AGW-centric activists. So popular did the Mann chart become, the 6,000+ borehole chart was completely ignored since its data refuted the Mann study. The
borehole scientists then decided to re-publish their study with primarily only the blue-side (the typical AGW-favored data cherry-picking) of the chart below. This repackaged
borehole study became accepted by the AGW-centric scientists as it seemed to support their cause and the Mann's hockey-stick. (click on image to enlarge)
The
authors searched the large database of terrestrial heat flow measurements compiled by the International Heat Flow Commission of the International Association of Seismology and
Physics of the Earth's Interior for measurements suitable for reconstructing an average ground surface temperature history...Based on a total of 6,144 qualifying sets of heat
flow measurements obtained from every continent of the globe, they produced a global climate reconstruction, which, they state, is "independent of other proxy
interpretations [and] of any preconceptions or biases as to the nature of the actual climate history."...From their reconstruction of "a global climate history from
worldwide observations," the authors found strong evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was indeed warmer than it is now."
"Quite suddenly, the same borehole authors - Pollack, Huang, Shen published a new, two-page-long paper in Nature: it appeared in October 1998. The paper contained a
rather different graph than the graph from 1997...The new paper was using temperatures and 358 sites only instead of the 6000 sites used in 1997 (94 percent of sites
eliminated) and it has erased 19,500 years out of 20,000 years (97.5 percent of the time interval eliminated) from the paper written in 1997 in order not to contradict Mann et
al....That's what they call "independence". Moreover, if someone wanted to extend the record as far as possible while avoiding any hints of a warmer period in the
past such as the medieval warm period, he would have made the same cut: 500 years ago. What a coincidence."
More historical charts here. Other climate
history postings here. Modern temperature charts. (C3 Headlines)
A U.S. Senate compromise bill aimed at battling global warming would cut emissions of greenhouse gases 17 percent by 2020, according to a summary given to senators and
obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.
The legislation, being offered by Democratic Senator John Kerry and Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, faces a tough battle for passage in the Senate this year -- especially
without a Republican sponsor. (Reuters)
Well, well, sweeteners for agriculture, manufacturing and Boone Pickens, that's nice... What's not nice is the idiotic carbon constraint concept
altogether. We note too that there's a nifty little carbon tax accelerator built in -- a floor price of $12 plus inflation plus 3% and a ceiling price of $25 plus
inflation plus 5%. Doesn't sound too unreasonable? Say we have inflation of 3% (given the trillions flushed into liquidity by the US and EU recently that is definitely
a lowball), so in 10 years that would be a floor of $21 and a cap of $54, in 20 years $38 and $116; in 30 years $69 and $251... Sure could make for expensive energy, couldn't
it? And that isn't even including the inflationary pressure of rapidly escalating energy costs caused by... the carbon tax itself.
That's only a small part of this idiotic recipe for American decline but it is ample reason to flush it completely. Its insane sponsors should go with it.
David Roberts explains why the US climate bill backed by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman is worth passing (David Roberts for Grist, part of the Guardian Environment Network)
That's a lot to read but represents only a small portion of the articles written about "green" corruption, especially regarding activities involved with cap and
trade schemes. The cap and trade dollar potential is gigantic, and as it turns out, can easily be leveraged and manipulated with a variety of corrupt tactics.
What do organized crime, Goldman Sachs, Gore, and Soros all have in common? If you think it's their
desiring a better planet, you've definitely got your head up your arse with blinkers on.
If you prefer viewing instead of reading, take the time to watch these videos about what 'cap and trade' is really about. (C3
Headlines)
A hung Parliament could mean tougher policies on climate change, with parties agreed on building more wind turbines and insulating homes. (TDT)
Britons voted essentially "none of the above" because they didn't want all this greenie nonsense and ended up stuck with an even worse version.
What a tragedy.
India's greenhouse gas emissions grew 58 percent between 1994 and 2007, official figures released on Tuesday showed, helped up by a largely coal-reliant power sector that
nearly doubled its share in emissions.
Total emissions rose to 1.9 billion tonnes in 2007 versus 1.2 billion in 1994, with industry and transport sectors also upping their share in Asia's third largest economy and
confirming India's ranking among the world's top five carbon polluters.
By way of comparison, between 1994 and 2007, India added more than the entire emissions produced annually by Australia. India is still low on per-capita emissions, about a
tenth that of the United States. (Reuters)
A little more effort and they'll really start to feed the biosphere. Good on them.
A new paper by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) explores recent revelations of the commercial links and associations of IPCC Chair Dr Pachauri, including his
direct involvement with carbon trading as advisor to the Chicago Climate Exchange and as chairman of its Indian subsidiary. SPPI is a Washington, D.C. non-profit research and
education organization. (TransWorldNews)
A major change of approach is needed if society is to restrain climate change, according to a report from a self-styled "eclectic" group of academics.
The UN process has failed, they argue, and a global approach concentrating on CO2 cuts will never work. (BBC News)
It will not work because carbon dioxide does not and can not control the climate. These clowns are still on about "decarbonization" and so are as
completely mistaken as the rest.
Ancient woodland would not have the same response to climate factors, such as temperature or rainfall, as oak trees today
In April, the UK Information Commissioner's Office ruled that Queen's University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree
rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie, the man who collected most of that data, called the ruling a "staggering
injustice". He explains his opinion below... (The Guardian)
While we agree "treemometers" are not climate data and are of little use in reconstructing temperature time series we take issue with the concept
academics on the public teat get to control and hide their work product.
Norway should limit soot from emerging Arctic industries such as oil or shipping that risk accelerating a thaw of ice around the North Pole caused by global warming, a
report said on Tuesday.
The study also said climate change, likely to be felt strongly in the Arctic, would shift Norway's fish stocks, forests and reindeer pastures northwards and even bring a need
to re-design hydropower dams to cope with more rain.
"The Norwegian Arctic is becoming warmer and wetter, with big local variations," the 71-page report led by the Norwegian Polar Institute said of an area from the tip
of the European mainland to islands 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole.
Black soot can blanket ice and snow with a dark layer that absorbs more of the sun's energy, speeding a thaw of ice. The Arctic is already warming fast since dark water or
ground soaks up more heat than reflective ice. (Reuters)
“Ocean acidification is the new climate scare,” writes Dennis Ambler in a recent paper for the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington D.C. non-profit research
and education organization. (TransWorldNews)
In the following interview, Dr. Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, questions the prevailing dogma of man-made
global warming and challenges his peers to “take back climate science.” His remarks are his personal opinion based upon 19 years of scientific research. (SPPI blog)
It seems Rudd has wasted yet more billions on his green folly:
AUSTRALIA’S focus for slowing climate change - the planned storage of power-station carbon dioxide emissions - has been dismissed by a US study as “profoundly
non-feasible’’.
The Rudd and Bligh governments have made carbon capture and storage (CCS) - under which planet-warming emissions from power stations would be removed and stored
underground permanently - their biggest single direct investment in new technologies to fight global warming.
The Rudd government is spending $2.4 billion on CCS projects and is putting $100 million a year into the Global CCS Institute it created last year…
Michael Economides and Christine Ehlig-Economides, in a study published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, found that for one commercial-scale coal-fired
power station, the underground storage area for the removed CO2 emissions would have to be ``enormous, the size of a small US state’’…
The brilliant young Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, a charming man I met last year, explains why
cosmic rays may be more important than man in influencing our climate.
Shaviv also features in a beautifully filmed new Danish series on cloud theory, which stars Henrik
Svensmark and starts here:
(Via Chiefio. Thanks to readers John and Rick.) (Andrew Bolt)
After some unthoughtful early criticism, your humble correspondent endorsed the arguments. Most
of the excessive warmth on Venus is not due to the greenhouse effect - even though I used to parrot this meme just a week ago myself.
Titian's Venus
Tamino didn't like the conclusion so he decided to dismiss Goddard's arguments:
Grant Foster's counter-arguments are remarkably simple:
I’ll leave that to others to dissect Goddard’s arguments.
Given the well-known estimate that Tamino is a relatively smarter alarmist, i.e. that most alarmist readers' IQ is about 30 points below Tamino's IQ, that will be pretty hard a
task for them to fulfill! ;-)
High Northern Latitude Carbon Balance Over the 21st Century: Will it be positive, extracting carbon
from the atmosphere and reducing global warming? ... or will it be negative, releasing carbon to the atmosphere and thereby enhancing global warming?
Plant Growth Database:
Our latest results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
are: Paper Birch (Darbah et al., 2010), Prickly
Pear Cactus (Nobel et al., 1994), Quaking Aspen (Darbah et al., 2010), and Rice
(Li et al., 2010).
Medieval
Warm Period Project:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 829
individual scientists from 492 separate research institutions in 43
different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record comes from Loch
Sunart, Northwest Scotland Coast. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.
(co2science.org)
Over the weekend BP learned that its latest effort at stanching the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — placing a huge metal dome over the leak — had failed. With the oil
slick now washing up on the Louisiana shore, the Op-Ed editors asked five experts for their thoughts on what should be done now — and how we can avoid future catastrophes.
(NYT)
Deepwater Horizon was operating at the outer limits of the industry’s technology, which is why capping the leaking well is proving fiendishly difficult.
While BP’s efforts to stop the leak on the seabed using subsea robots and metal boxes have so far failed, the company has had a few modest successes in controlling the
existing slick.
The use of chemicals and booms seems to have prevented oil reaching the shore in large amounts. But this is not a risk-free strategy and concerns are growing that the vast
quantities of dispersants being applied may present an environmental hazard in their own right.
Since the rig sank on April 22 more than 325,000 gallons of chemicals have been sprayed from aircraft or injected directly into plumes of oil under water.
The powerful detergents do not destroy the oil, but simply break it up into tiny droplets, forcing it to sink towards the seabed rather than coalesce into a slick. Their use
offers benefits for birds and mammals that might be threatened by a surface oil slick — particularly if it hits land — but the impact of such chemicals underwater is hardly
benign. (The Times)
Although significant steps have been taken over the last 15 years to reduce the size and frequency of oil spills, the sheer volume of petroleum consumed in the United States
and the complex production and distribution network required to meet the demand make spills of oil and other petroleum products inevitable. Approximately 3 million gallons of
oil or refined petroleum products are spilled into U.S. waters every year. Oil dispersants (chemical agents such as surfactants, solvents, and other compounds) are used to
reduce the effect of oil spills by changing the chemical and physical properties of the oil. By enhancing the amount of oil that physically mixes into the water, dispersants
can reduce the potential that a surface slick will contaminate shoreline habitats. Although called for in the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 as a tool for minimizing the impact of
oil spills, the use of chemical dispersants has long been controversial. This report reviews the adequacy of existing information and ongoing research regarding the
effectiveness of dispersants as an oil spill response technique, as well as the effect of dispersed oil on marine and coastal ecosystems. It includes recommended steps to be
taken to better support policymakers faced with making hard choices regarding the use of dispersants as part of spill contingency planning efforts or during actual spills.
(NAP)
The BP Spill: Tuesday on Capitol Hill, oil executives were subjected to the Senate's latest show trial. Senators did not say the accident in federal waters was a federal
responsibility or that nature spills more oil every day.
The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and the afternoon session before California Sen. Barbara Boxer's
Environmental and Public Works Committee prove White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's dictum that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste — especially when your goal is
exploiting the Deepwater Horizon disaster to scapegoat oil execs and the shutting down of needed domestic oil exploration.
Certainly BP and the oil companies bear responsibility for the maintenance and safety of offshore oil rigs, but drilling in deep water is no walk in the park. Accidents have,
do and will happen again. Ignored in this accident is the federal government's responsibility to react and contain it.
Unlike Katrina, where disputes and confusion quickly arose between federal, state and local authorities over who should have done what and when, the handling of this accident
in federal waters was a clear federal responsibility. It was the failure of this administration to implement a 1994 plan that made the situation far worse. (IBD)
Executives from BP Plc and other companies involved in a deadly Gulf of Mexico offshore oil well blowout blamed each other in Washington on Tuesday as troops and prison
inmates rushed to shore up Louisiana's coast against a huge oil slick.
The oil bosses were grilled by members of the Senate Energy Committee in the first of two days of hearings, with committee chairman Jeff Bingaman saying it appeared the April
20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig was due to a "cascade of errors, technical, human and regulatory. (Reuters)
BP has admitted that it dramatically underestimated the cost of its leaking Gulf of Mexico oil well – sending shares in the oil giant lower despite a 5pc rise in the FTSE.
(TDT)
How can the U.S. reduce its dependency on oil -- both foreign and domestic?
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has spotlighted the risks that accompany offshore drilling, and environmental groups have responded by demanding a ban. Advocates of drilling in
U.S. coastal waters counter that this country needs to become less reliant on imports from the Middle East. Forty percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. comes from oil. And
70 percent of that oil is imported.
Will the massive oil spill in the gulf have any impact on the U.S. relationship to oil? Will it spur more investment in so-called clean energy? Will it improve the prospects of
climate and energy legislation? (Amy Harder, NationalJournal.com)
Facts not in evidence: need to "wean off oil"; desire to "wean off oil"; any possible value in "weaning off oil".
Editor’s note: This is Part III of a five part series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The
previous posts in this series can be seen at:
Part II – Coal- and Wood-Fired Electricity Generation
Boilers of electricity-generating stations burning coal can be converted to burn liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons (fuel oil, even crude oil, and natural gas) and such
conversions were fairly common during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Burning natural gas rather than coal has clear environmental advantages (it generates less, or no, sulfur
dioxide and no fly ash) but the overall conversion efficiency of the boiler-steam turbogenerator unit changes little. In contrast, gas turbines, particularly when coupled with
steam turbines, offer the most efficient way of electricity generation. This results in much higher power densities than is the case with coal-fired plants. Overall densities
of the fuel extraction and electricity generation process are also kept high because of the relatively high power densities of natural gas production (depending on the field
they vary by more than an order of magnitude, with minima around 50 W/m2, maxima well over1 kW/m2) and even more by the fact that new gas-powered
generation often does not need any major new infrastructure as it can tap the supply from existing fields and pipelines.
Gas turbines were first commercialized for electricity generation by Brown Boveri in Switzerland during the late 1930s but in the US their installations became common only
during the late 1960s, spurred by the November 1965 US Northeast blackout that left 30 million people without electricity for up to13 hours. Nationwide capacity of gas turbines
rose from just 240 MW in 1960 to nearly 45 GW by 1975, a nearly 200-fold rise in 15 years. This ascent was interrupted by high hydrocarbon prices (as well as by stagnating
electricity demand) but it resumed during the late 1980s. By 1990 nearly half of the 15 GW of all new capacity ordered by the US utilities was in gas turbines and by 2008
almost exactly 40% of the US summer generating capacity (397.4 GW) was installed in gas-fired units, either single- or combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT). Unlike a single gas
turbine that discharges its hot gas, CCGT uses the turbine’s hot exhaust gases to generate steam for a steam turbine, boosting overall efficiency. While the best single gas
turbines can convert about 42% of their fuel to electricity, CCGT convert as much as 60% and are now the most efficient electricity generators. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Solar power can provide up to a quarter of the world's electricity by 2050, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday, but it needs government lifelines in the next
decade until it can compete with conventional power.
Solar power currently accounts for 0.5 percent of world supply, but the IEA said this needed to grow in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.
(Reuters)
For the last 4 decades solar has needed government lifelines for the next decade in order to compete. When does it ever deliver?
A boom in offshore wind power sparked by the European Union's espousal of the technology runs the risk of becoming a bubble unless installation, running and repair costs are
more clearly defined.
As major European countries backpedal over state aid for so called "immature technology" like solar power, other EU members are charging into offshore wind, despite
cost estimates being notoriously unreliable after nearly two decades of working wind farms in European waters. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Saturday touted the benefits of his healthcare overhaul, renewing a bid to counter Republican criticism and ease public doubts more
than a month after he signed reform into law.
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama made clear he would keep up his campaign to promote the healthcare revamp, which is already shaping up as key issue in the
campaign for pivotal congressional elections in November. (Reuters)
CNN reports that AT&T, Verizon, John Deere and others may well drop the health care coverage they now offer their employees. Obamacare makes it much cheaper for these
companies to dump their workers into the government-controlled health exchanges and pay a penalty for NOT insuring them. From CNN:
Continue reading... (The Foundry)
WASHINGTON - Health insurance companies are trying "to water down" critical spending rules being implemented under the recently passed health reform law, U.S.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller warned the Obama administration on Monday.
Rockefeller, in letters to the U.S. health secretary and a state insurance group, said insurers are seeking to undermine new reforms governing how much insurers spend on
medical care versus other costs, known as medical loss ratios (MLRs), and that the Obama administration and state insurance group should be skeptical of any industry proposals.
(Reuters)
As more details emerge about the massive 2,700-page health overhaul law, even those who supported its passage are shocked by its sweeping implications and reach into every
corner of our lives and society. (Grace-Marie Turner, IBD)
One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have "a duty to die," rather than become a burden to
others.
This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will
authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken
over by the government.
Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is
going to save serious money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly. (Thomas Sowell, IBD)
Politicians are stirring up hatred of Wall Street to pass their latest
plans for big-government intrusion. Consider this press release from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:
Goldman
Sachs and JP Morgan support more regulation.
That’s why its refreshing to hear from Cliff Asness, who runs the AQR hedge fund, a rare businessman publicly making the case for freedom. In an
open letter to Congress titled “Keep the Casinos Open”, he argues against banning “derivatives” and other financial assets. He points out that market activity is
good for society, and that there should be a high burden of proof before government acts: (John Stossel, FBN)
Bailout: When the federal government plays mad scientist, it doesn't destroy the monster it realizes it's built. Instead, after wreaking global economic havoc, Fannie Mae
gets the taxpayers' blank check.
The Federal National Mortgage Association, "Fannie Mae," a mutant hybrid with the worst features of government agency and private business, holds about $6 trillion in
mortgages. Now it wants another $8.4 billion in cash.
More largesse for Fannie and its equally evil twin, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., "Freddie Mac," is like emptying a dump truck full of taxpayer cash down a
bottomless pit. (IBD)
Supporters of Sen. Chris Dodd’s financial regulation bill say it will end financial bailouts. In fact, the Senate — anxious to reassure Americans on that fact — even
added an amendment last week, with a stated purpose “To prohibit taxpayers from ever having to bail out the financial sector.” But someone forgot to tell the folks across
town at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Freddie last week announced it had lost $8 billion in the first quarter of the year, and would be asking for another $10.6 in taxpayer help.
And today, its twin Fannie announced a $11.5 billion loss, and asked for a further $8.4 billion in
aid from taxpayers. That’s in addition to the nearly $145 billion in aid to Fannie and
Freddie have already received.
So did the two government-sponsored enterprises slip this bailout in under the wire before Congress stopped them? Not quite. In fact, the plan does nothing to reform either
Fannie or Freddie. That apparently is not a priority. Sen. Mark Warner, in fact, said that a plan for reform of these out-of-control firms will have to wait
until next year.
Sens. John McCain, Richard Shelby and Judd Gregg are planning to introduce
an amendment to the Senate legislation to require action to address Fannie and Freddie. It’s not expected to pass.
This is a serious hole in the USS Dodd. And it’s the American taxpayer who will be drenched as a result. (The Foundry)
Abstract: This study was conducted to determine the potential of bisphenolA (BPA) to induce functional and/or morphological effects tothe nervous
system of F1 offspring from dietary exposure duringgestation and lactation according to the Organization for EconomicCooperation and
Development and U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency guidelines for the study of developmental neurotoxicity.BPA was offered to female Sprague-Dawley
Crl:CD (SD) rats (24per dose group) and their litters at dietary concentrationsof 0 (control), 0.15, 1.5, 75, 750, and 2250 ppm daily fromgestation
day 0 through lactation day 21. F1 offspring wereevaluated using the following tests: detailed clinical observations(postnatal days [PNDs] 4,
11, 21, 35, 45, and 60), auditorystartle (PNDs 20 and 60), motor activity (PNDs 13, 17, 21, and61), learning and memory using the Biel water maze (PNDs
22and 62), and brain and nervous system neuropathology and brainmorphometry (PNDs 21 and 72). For F1 offspring, there were notreatment-related
neurobehavioral effects, nor was there evidenceof neuropathology or effects on brain morphometry. Based onmaternal and offspring body weight reductions,
the no-observed-adverse-effectlevel (NOAEL) for systemic toxicity was 75 ppm (5.85 and 13.1mg/kg/day during gestation and lactation, respectively), withno treatment-related effects at lower doses or nonmonotonicdose responses observed for any parameter. There was no evidencethat BPA is a
developmental neurotoxicant in rats, and the NOAELfor developmental neurotoxicity was 2250 ppm, the highest dosetested (164 and 410 mg/kg/day during
gestation and lactation,respectively). (Oxford Journals Toxicological Sciences)
WASHINGTON - A cancer report that concludes Americans are under constant assault from carcinogenic agents has heartened activists, who hope that finally government and
policymakers will pay attention to their concerns.
But the report from the President's Cancer Panel on Thursday has underwhelmed most mainstream cancer experts and drawn only a puzzled response from the White House. Even
members of Congress who usually are eager to show they are fighting to protect the public have been mostly silent.
Cancer experts say for the most part that we already know what causes most cases of cancer and it's not pollution or chemicals lurking in our water bottles. It's tobacco use
and other unhealthy behaviors, says Dr. Graham Colditz of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
"The lack of physical activity, weight gain, obesity clearly account for 20 percent or more of cancer in the United States today," Colditz said in a telephone
interview.
The report, he said, gives people an excuse to ignore the risk factors most in their control.
"The damage is that it distracts us, as a society, from actually acting on the things that are already in our grasp. I can take tobacco as the best example," said
Colditz, noting that more than 20 percent of Americans still smoke despite nearly 50 years of cancer warnings.
And no state has even come close to banning smoking, although limits are going into place to restrict smoking in public.
"We know that alcohol causes 4 percent (of cancers) and we deal with that to too little extent, as well," said Colditz, an expert in the epidemiology of cancer. Red
meat is a known cause of colon cancer, he adds. "We don't run out and ban all beef just because beef is a cause of colon cancer." (Reuters)
CHICAGO, IL, May 7, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The May 6 report by the
President's Cancer Panel is well-documented. It warns of scientific evidence on avoidable causes of cancer from exposure to carcinogens in air, water, consumer products, and
the workplace. It also warns of hormonal risks from exposure to Bisphenol-A (BPA) and other toxic plastic contaminants, says Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., Chairman of the Cancer
Prevention Coalition (CPC).
CHICAGO, IL, May 7, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- Chairman of the Cancer
Prevention Coalition, Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is urging public support for the recently introduced Toxic Chemicals Safety Act of 2010, which establishes a program to review and
protect children from risks of toxic exposures, including Bisphenol-A (BPA), a common contaminant in consumer goods.
CHICAGO, IL, May 4, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The Cancer Prevention
Coalition is encouraging people to support the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) on April 15 this year. The bill amends the 1976 Toxic
Substances Control Act by requiring manufacturers to prove the safety of chemicals before they are marketed.
IN AN Australian first, researchers have shown that people with a family history of diabetes gain more weight from overeating than those with no family history of the
disease. (SMH)
NEW YORK - Babies who are bottle-fed early on may consume more calories later in infancy than babies who are exclusively breastfed, a study published Monday suggests.
Researchers found that among 1,250 infants followed for the first year of life, those who were bottle-fed during their first six months -- whether formula or pumped breast milk
-- showed less appetite "self-regulation" later in infancy.
The investigators say this so-called "bottle effect" could be one reason that studies have found a correlation between breastfeeding and a lower risk of childhood
obesity.
In most research on the question of whether and how breastfeeding might protect against excessive weight gain, the focus has been on the components of breast milk. For
instance, breast milk contains certain hormones, including leptin and adiponectin, which could help regulate infants' appetite and metabolism.
But the new findings suggest that the way infants are fed also matters, lead researcher Dr. Ruowei Li, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an
interview. That is, breastfeeding may encourage greater appetite self-regulation in the long term. (Reuters Health)
LONDON - Far fewer children are dying and rates of malnutrition, HIV and tuberculosis are declining thanks to good progress on health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday.
In its annual health report for 2010, the U.N. body said some countries had made impressive gains, although others may struggle to meet some of the 2015 targets.
"With five years remaining to the MDG deadline in 2015 there are some striking improvements," said the report, which is based on data collected from WHO's 193 member
states. (Reuters)
Between 1960 and 2000, Asian and Latin American food production tripled, thanks to the use of high-yielding varieties of crops. Africa can follow suit, but only if depletion
of soil nutrients is addressed. (Nature Geoscience)
The 'collective failure' of the world to stop environmental degradation could cut off water supplies, push up food prices and even cause wars, the United Nations has warned.
(TDT)
The salient question, of course, being whether anyone believes anything sourced from the UN anymore. It seems highly unlikely.
Common species of seaweed can devastate coral reefs, scientists have discovered.
The plants kill off coral by releasing deadly chemicals when the two come into contact on the sea floor.
The new threat it the latest problem to the delicate marine ecosystems already suffering from the effects of pollution and climate change.
Over-fishing is allowing the seaweed to proliferate and become an increasing danger, say scientists.
Professor Mark Hay, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, said: ''The evolutionary reasons why the seaweeds have these compounds are not known.
''It may be that these compounds protect the seaweeds against microbial infection, or that they help compete with other seaweeds. But it's clear now that they also harm the
corals, either by killing them or suppressing their growth.'' (TDT)
Plotting the world's water is expensive – a satellite designed for the job cost £280m. Holly Williams explains why its findings will be worth the investment (The
Independent)
The chance that the Senate will pass a comprehensive energy-rationing (a k a climate) bill this year remains close to zero. BP’s big oil spill in the Gulf changes
very little.
The global warming movement peaked last June 26 when the House passed the Waxman-Markey bill. When members went home for the Fourth of July, many who voted for it
discovered that their constituents were angry and mobilized.
Seeing the public reaction, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped plans to move a cap-and-trade bill before the August recess and turned to health care reform.
It’s been all downhill since then.
The Kerry-Boxer bill, which is very similar to Waxman-Markey, passed the Environment and Public Works Committee last fall, but it was clear…
Americans are growing skeptical about the threat of global warming because “they don’t get” the complex information that scientists deliver, according to Rep. Emanuel
Cleaver (D-Mo.).
Unless scientists can simplify their arguments to the level of newspapers that “print at the sixth grade level,” Cleaver said, the public is “going to get a headache and
bail out.”
Cleaver made his comments to a panel of scientists on Capitol Hill at a hearing last Thursday of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
The committee was investigating the “foundation” of climate science after the Climategate scandal saw thousands of damaging e-mails leaked from scientists at the University
of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. (CNSNews.com)
Perhaps we can help:
The planet's temperature depends on the net result of just 3 things:
The amount of energy arriving from the sun
Net amount of that energy that is absorbed and not reflected
How much atmospheric feedback (greenhouse effect) slows return of that energy to space
We have a pretty good idea on the first item but don't on the second (IPCC documents range reflection [albedo] over several percent). The third rather depends on the first
two. As we have shown you before (and provided calculators so you can see the effect for yourself), albedo
makes a big difference. Even making the sun cool (and so reducing the energy at top of atmosphere to 1360 W/m2), commonly used numbers for albedo (0.3 or 30%) and
feedback (greenhouse effect of 0.4 or 40%) we end up estimating Earth's expected temperature at 16 °C (289 K), which is about 1.5 °C warmer
than we think it currently is.
Of course there are a range of figures for the variables that will produce about the "right" results for observations but we do not know which are correct. If
you plug in the sun temperature to suit the TOA irradiance we think we are getting (5777 K to yield 1365 W/m2) then you can drop albedo to 29% with GHE
(greenhouse effect) of 38%, arriving near the figures we think we have measured (about 15 °C or 288 K).
NASA's fact sheet claims we receive 1367.6 W/m2 so you'll have to play around
increasing albedo or reducing greenhouse effect to get back to the temperature we think Earth might currently be and you'll be about as right as anyone else. You see, no one
really knows Earth's "correct" temperature and the globe may actually still be too cool.
Amusingly we have an ongoing stick fight over imagery when absolutely no one on Earth can state definitively whether the Earth is warmer or cooler than should be
anticipated or why it should be so. This is all such a silly game...
…a fantastic peek into the way the climate denial “machine” works…small but vocal part of the infosphere dominated by the climate deniers…try to paint the
entire climate science community as fake…attempt by climate deniers to divert public attention once again from the facts of climate change…
As it is apparent, when errors are pointed out, they are not corrected before a paranoid rant gets published. And what about “fame still awaits anyone who could show
these theories to be wrong“? I don’t think so: in the case of climate science, that’s abuse and organized bullying what awaits them. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)
[Update
#3: The image above is the one originally published by Science and since removed, as discussed in Update #2. Peter Gleick's response
is discussed here.]
[Update #2: Peter Gleick doesn't get it. In a new essay at Huffington Post he
writes:
Here is the logic of the climate deniers: the photo is manipulated, therefore we can claim the science of climate change to be manipulated and we won't have to challenge
the actual content of the letter.
Nice try, but no. This focus on the art the editors chose to accompany the letter is an attempt by climate deniers to divert public attention once again from the facts of
climate change. This is exactly what the scientists are talking about in the letter.
Instead of challenging the science with better science, the vocal deniers are grasping at any straw to muddy the waters and confuse the public about the real climate threats
we face. Mistakes found in the IPCC assessment of climate? Oh, then all climate science must be mistaken.
There are real mistakes in the IPCC and real problems in the institutions of climate science. They are not excused by a need to counter the
most extreme voices opposed to action.]
[Update: Randy
Olson has some blunt things to say about this episode:
In response to my making hay of this blunder, many scientists will say, “So what. The editors made a trivial mistake, there’s no need to call further attention to it. The
point is the climate attacks need to be stopped.” They will label me as the enemy for even engaging in criticism of the science community. . . it matters if you publish a
letter of outrage, complaining about being smeared as dishonest, and yet your article is accompanied by a photograph that is tainted by the word “Photoshop” which
virtually EVERYONE in today’s society knows symbolizes one big thing — WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH.
In
the comments Peter Gleick, lead author of the sign-on letter in Science takes aim at Randy Olson and me for our criticisms of the use of
the photoshopped polar bear image that Science magazine originally used to accompany the letter. Presumably the
following comment is directed at Randy Olson:
Oh, and what do you know? Science has replaced the photoshopped image of the polar bear on an ice floe, with what? A real picture of a polar bear on an ice floe.
Roger, sometimes you offer good, thoughtful pieces here. Not this time -- this one is outrageously off the mark: indeed, a cheap and misdirected shot. Of course scientist
must try to get the facts as right as possible, and be willing to acknowledge and admit mistakes. And of course the photoshopped photo is a metaphor for the problem.
But you (and many in the denial community -- a perfectly proper term, despite their complaining about it) are conflating my dismissal of the selection of bad ART, with my
dismissal of those who would rather talk about ART as metaphor than science as fact.
And we (the scientists) didn't "fudge the facts" -- how dare you? That's precisely the subterfuge and misdirection used by climate deniers. We had NO role in
selection of the photo, and frankly, its a triviality anyway. A fine metaphor and opportunity for a cheap shot, but a triviality.
You say I shouldn't shoot the messenger? That's what you're doing to the signers of the letter. How about posting something on the SUBSTANCE of the letter?
In response, I think Gleick protests too much. I never accused him or his collaborators of "fudging the facts." Here is what I wrote in context:
The general lesson here should be that no matter the virtues of the "cause" it does not justify cutting corners or fudging
the facts. When errors are found, the proper response is not to shoot the messenger or ask people to ignore mistakes in the context of larger truths, but rather, to just
get things right.
. . . it matters if you publish a letter of outrage, complaining about being smeared as dishonest, and yet your article is accompanied by a photograph that is tainted by the
word “Photoshop” which virtually EVERYONE in today’s society knows symbolizes one big thing — WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH.
The ppt presentation Policy-relevance of the Working Group II Contribution to IPCC
AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) by Jean-Pascal van Ypersele (IPCC Vice-chair) "with the kind collaboration of Chris Field, IPCC WGII Co-chair, and the IPCC
Secretariat" at a UNFCC conference in Barcelona, 3 November 2009, contains "cases studies on impacts", among them on page 5 an assessment of the Glacial
retreat in the Himalaya
•receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming; in addition, high population density near these glaciers and
consequent deforestation and land-use [changes have] adversely affected these glaciers
•the total glacial area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 (or disappear entirely) by the year 2035
•the 15,000 Himalayan glaciers form a unique reservoir of water which in turn, is the lifeline of millions of people in South Asian countries
•it is likely that glacial melt will turn the big Asian river systems into seasonal rivers and affect economies in the region
The reason for having this [disinformation] still on the web may be an attempt for keeping the documents historically in order - the talk has seemingly given in this way,
and the original, unchanged material is provided on the IPCC web-site. This reason would have to be applauded. However, it shows that the false claim of a consensus view in
this matter was not just somewhere hidden in a technical document, but used prominently by leading IPCC persons, namely a vice chair of AR4, and - as it seems - the new chair
of WG 2.
I have asked Chris Field for an explanation. (Hans von Storch, Klimazwiebel) [typos edited]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be a science body. But it is also an organization. Organizations have
rules. When they refuse to abide by their own rules we learn they cannot be trusted. When they flout their rules outrageously - yet insist they've followed them religiously -
their chances of regaining our confidence are minuscule.
A few weeks ago, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri declared in an essay that one of the reasons the 2007 IPCC
report (also called AR4 - which stands for Fourth Assessment Report) is perceived as being too conservative in some respects is because it:
...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies...[this] other published material will be assessed in
the AR5, which is scheduled to be completed in 2014. [bold added]
As I observed shortly afterward, the above statement is false. The
Stern Review, a UK government document, was first released on October 30, 2006. It was by no stretch of the imagination completed prior to January of that year. Yet
the AR4 cites it 26 times in 12 different chapters.
Pachauri attempts to impress us in the same essay by reminding us that 2,500 expert reviewers provided
feedback on two different drafts of the AR4. But the startling reality is that after all the reviewers had made their contributions, after the deadlines to submit their review
comments had passed, certain other people continued to mess with the report in extravagant fashion.
By adding in material the reviewers had been given no opportunity to assess, these people undermined the integrity of the entire review process. There's
little point asking thousands of souls to share their thoughts with you (which they did, in good faith) if afterward you're going to sit around in a back room and insert all
sorts of brand new content.
Indeed, to do so would seem - and I use this word with great care and for the first time ever in my writings on this topic - fraudulent. If
you claim your report should be trusted because you involved thousands of people and because you followed a particular process you cannot substantially
subvert that process and yet still boast about the reputable nature of your report.
Yet that is what appears to have happened. It's not just the Stern Review that got added in, but responses to the Stern Review are also cited. A conversation
occurs in the pages of AR4 about documents that weren't published until nearly a full year after the December 2005 cutoff date Pachauri insists
was honoured. The following reference is cited in Chapter 1 of the Working Group 3 report:
Dasgupta, P., 2006: Comments on the Stern Review’s Economics of Climate Change. <http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/dasgupta/STERN.pdf> accessed 15. December 2006.
[see it in the list here]
If one follows the link provided in the above reference one arrives at a 9-page PDF dated November 2006. That
same AR4 chapter cites another document which challenges parts of the Stern Review:
Nordhaus, W.D., 2006: The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12741. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. [see it
in the list here]
An abstract of the above paper reveals that it wasn't released until December 2006. (And please note that not one of
these documents was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal - despite the IPCC chairman's repeated
claims that the AR4 is based solely on peer-reviewed literature.)
But this is only the beginning. In Chapter 2 of Working Group 1's report, six papers are cited that weren't published prior to January 2006 - despite Pachauri's assurances to
the contrary. Nor were they published prior to January 2007. Rather, they all appeared sometime during the 2007 calendar year (see them in the list here):
Betts, R.A., P.D. Falloon, K.K. Goldewijk, and N. Ramankutty, 2007: Biogeophysical effects of land use on climate: model simulations of radiative forcing
and large-scale temperature change. Agric. For. Meteorol., 142, 216-233.
Feng, Y., and J. Penner. 2007: Global modeling of nitrate and ammonium: Interaction of aerosols and tropospheric chemistry. J. Geophys. Res.,
112(D01304), doi:10.1029/2005JD006404.
Menon, S., and A. Del Genio, 2007: Evaluating the impacts of carbonaceous aerosols on clouds and climate. In: Human-Induced Climate Change: An
Interdisciplinary Assessment [Schlesinger, M., et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, in press.
Ming, Y., et al., 2007: Modelling the interactions between aerosols and liquid water clouds with a self-consistent cloud scheme in a general circulation
model. J. Atmos. Sci., 64(4), 1189–1209.
Muscheler, R., et al., 2007: Solar activity during the last 1000 yr inferred from radionuclide records. Quat. Sci. Rev., 26, 82-97,
doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2006.07.012.
Penner, J.E., et al., 2007: Effect of black carbon on mid-troposphere and surface temperature trends. In: Human-Induced Climate Change: An
Interdisciplinary Assessment [Schlesinger, M., et al., (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, in press.
If you think that's bad, Chapter 11 of Working Group 1's report cites 17 papers with a 2007 publication date (see them in the list here):
Angeles, M.E., J.E. Gonzalez, D.J. Erickson, and J.L. Hernández, 2007: Predictions of future climate change in the Caribbean region using global general
circulation models. Int. J. Climatol., 27, 555-569, doi:10.1002/joc.1416.
Beniston, M., et al., 2007: Future extreme events in European climate: An exploration of regional climate model projections. Clim. Change,
doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9226-z.
Chapman, W.L., and J.E. Walsh, 2007: Simulations of Arctic temperature and pressure by global coupled models. J. Clim., 20, 609-632, doi:
10.1175/JCLI4026.1.
Chou, C., J.D. Neelin, J.-Y. Tu, and C.-T. Chen, 2007: Regional tropical precipitation change mechanisms in ECHAM4/OPYC3 under global warming. J. Clim.
19, 4207-4223.
Christensen, J.H., T.R. Carter, M. Rummukainen, and G. Amanatidis, 2007: Evaluating the performance and utility of regional climate models: the PRUDENCE
project. Clim. Change, doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9211-6.
Déqué, M., et al., 2007: An intercomparison of regional climate simulations for Europe: assessing uncertainties in model projections. Clim. Change,
doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9228-x.
Furrer, R., S.R. Sain, D.W. Nychka, and G.A. Meehl, 2007: Multivariate Bayesian analysis of atmosphere-ocean general circulation models. Environ. Ecol.
Stat., in press.
Graham, L.P., S. Hagemann, S. Jaun, and M. Beniston, 2007: On interpreting hydrological change from regional climate models. Clim. Change,
doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9217-0.
Jacob, D., et al., 2007: An intercomparison of regional climate models for Europe: design of the experiments and model performance. Clim. Change, doi:
10.1007/s10584-006-9213-4.
Kattsov, V.M., et al., 2007: Simulation and projection of Arctic freshwater budget components by the IPCC AR4 global climate models. J. Hydrometeorol.,
8, in press.
Kjellström, E., et al., 2007: Variability in daily maximum and minimum temperatures: recent and future changes over Europe. Clim. Change, doi:
10.1007/s10584-006-9220-5.
Leckebusch, G.C., et al., 2007: Analysis of frequency and intensity of winter storm events in Europe on synoptic and regional scales from a multi-model
perspective. Clim. Res. 31, 59–74.
Lenderink, G., A. van Ulden, B. van den Hurk, and E. van Meijgaard, 2007: Summertime inter-annual temperature variability in an ensemble of regional
model simulations: analysis of the surface energy budget. Clim. Change, doi: 10.1007/s10584-006-9229-9.
Rockel, B., and K. Woth, 2007: Future changes in near surface wind speed extremes over Europe from an ensemble of RCM simulations. Clim. Change, doi:
10.1007/s10584-006-9227-y.
Ruosteenoja, K., H. Tuomenvirta, and K. Jylhä, 2007: GCM-based regional temperature and precipitation change estimates for Europe under four SRES
scenarios applying a super-ensemble pattern-scaling method. Clim. Change, doi: 10.1007/s10584-006-9222-3.
van Ulden, A., G. Lenderink, B. van den Hurk, and E. van Meijgaard, 2007: Circulation statistics and climate change in Central Europe: Prudence
simulations and observations. Clim. Change, doi: 10.1007/s10584-006-9212-5.
Vidale, P.L., D. Lüthi, R. Wegmann, and C. Schär, 2007: European climate variability in a heterogeneous multi-model ensemble. Clim. Change, doi:
10.1007/s10584-006-9218-z.
Given that numerous sources cited by the AR4 were published well after the IPCC's expert reviewers were out of the picture, how much of the final report could actually have
been evaluated by them?
Is there any rule the IPCC's inner circle did follow? And has chairman Pachauri ever read this report? (No
Consensus)
DOHA//Professor Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thinks Arab states should shore up their food security
as global warming places stress on the world's agricultural resources.
But he is not thinking of recent government initiatives to buy fertile farmland in other countries.
Instead, Dr Pachauri suggests Arab oil exporters invest in tracts of scrub-land at home.
"We've got to convert oil wealth into soil wealth," he told the 9th Arab oil conference in Doha earlier today. "The soil quality is poor, but can be improved
substantially, enhancing food security." (The National)
Sounds like a good idea... what's in it for Pachauri?
“The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies
across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with 1 billion pounds by illicitly trading carbon credits,” reports Lawrence Solomon. ( Jack
Dini, Hawaii Reporter)
In the aftermath of the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference, revelations of serious corruption in IPCC science, and unseasonable weather in much of the world, the general
public and increasingly more media are starting to take a more meaningful view of climate change. Opinion polls in many countries show that an increasing fraction of the public
now regards the past century’s warming as being primarily due to either natural or unknown causes, and that a human-induced, or ‘anthropogenic,’ global warming (AGW)
catastrophe is improbable. Not surprisingly, there has also been a related erosion in public support for expensive ‘greenhouse gas’ reduction policies.
Consequently, some mainstream media, especially in the United Kingdom, are displaying a new openness to alternative points of view concerning the supposedly ‘settled’
science of global climate change. They are gradually taking notice of the thousands of climate experts who have endorsed open letters, petitions, and other declarations
disagreeing with the IPCC’s alarmist conclusions. Some reporters and government representatives have even suggested ‘skeptics’ be invited to take a more active role in
future IPCC Assessment Reports and government climate hearings.
These advances have led some observers to confidently assert that the collapse of the global warming scare is imminent and that the war for science-based climate policy is all
but won. (Tom Harris, The Heartland Institute)
Ignore the warnings of a warming planet — the worst eras for humanity occurred during periods of cold weather.
May 10, 2010
- by Dennis T. Avery
We’ve been warned that man-made global warming will cause unprecedented turmoil within and among the Earth’s human societies. Yet the Earth’s history over the past 2,000
years shows that wars, disease epidemics, and famine were all far more likely when the Earth’s climate was cold.
Equally interesting? The war-likely periods occurred in cycles — clearly tied to the temperature variations during the cold phase of the solar-linked 1,500-year climate
cycle.
When an agricultural society suffers cold and cloudy summers, early frosts, and more crop-destroying hailstorms and floods, food production is severely hampered. When food
production is reduced year after year, it impacts population numbers through starvation, disease, and warfare.
David Zhang at the University of Hong Kong writes that China’s three historic “peak war clusters” all occurred during cold periods. As did all seven periods of Chinese
nationwide social unrest, and nearly 90 percent of changes in its imperial dynasties.
The “peak war” problem impacted both Europe and China during the same cold climate periods — though the two regions were completely separate.
Zhang’s team notes the “General Crisis” of the Earth’s 17th century: The Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) occurred while nearly every European country had massive crop
destruction, famine, and disease. Elsewhere around the globe, internal revolts spread through the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Berbers fought Arab immigrants in
Mauritania. The Shimabara peasant rebellion occurred in Japan, and the Ming Dynasty collapsed in China.
Earlier, a similar global cold period saw Mediterranean temperatures drop about 1.5 degrees C after 1250 BC. The Mycenaean culture collapsed in Greece, along with the Hittite
Empire in the Fertile Crescent and the Harappan culture in the Indus Valley of India. China lost another dynasty, as the Zhou replaced the Shang.
Can such widespread violence and suffering really be tied to weather? Famine speaks for itself.
Cold droughts have repeatedly killed livestock and forced the Mongols to invade northwestern China. They also triggered the Mongols’ invasion of Europe after 1200 AD.
Bubonic Plague depopulated Europe during both the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age, as cold and drought drove Asian rats carrying the “plague fleas” to hitchhike westward
on traders’ ships and camels.
What about our modern warming? We’ve had less than 0.7 degrees C of warming in the 160 years since the Little Ice Age ended. Both the Roman and Medieval Warmings were
somewhat warmer than now. The warming cycle typically delivers about half its total warming in its early decades — implying only another 0.7 degrees of warming over the next
several centuries. Not enough to disrupt modern crop production.
Dutch researchers recently pointed out that U.S. corn yields have soared 240 percent since 1961, despite rising temperatures. Some seed experts predict they will double again
by 2030. Mexican soybeans are averaging higher soybean yields than the U.S. despite higher temperatures, and Brazil is getting higher cotton yields than the U.S. despite much
higher Brazilian temperatures.
In addition, higher levels of CO2 in the air will buffer the impact of any warming on agriculture. Doubling the level of CO2 in the air stimulates the growth of crop plants by
30 to 50 percent.
Extended droughts will be the biggest warming danger, but crop water use efficiency will greatly increase through technology that is waiting on the shelf. In the modern world,
trade can move food surpluses from Canada to California if necessary.
The outlook for today’s cultures is far brighter than the warfare, disease, and decimated populations that Mother Nature imposed on the Greek Dark Ages (1200–200 BC), the
Dark Ages (540–900 AD), and the Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD).
Rejoice, but fear a future cold cycle. (PJM)
Dennis T. Avery served on the staff of the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission from its inception in 1974 until 1980. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hudson
Institute in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years.
Climate: The Counter-Consensus by Bob Carter is due for publication in the UK in May, and release in Australia in June.
The
counter-consensus to quasi-scientific hype and induced panic on climate change is at last assembling. The argument is not in the first place as to whether or not climate change
has been taking place, but whether any recent warming of the planet is appreciably due to human activity and how harmful it will prove.
Tom Stacey, in his eloquent and provocative introduction, investigates our tendency to ascribe this and other perceived planetary crises to
some inherent fault in ourselves, be it original sin or a basic moral failing.
Climate Change goes on to examine, with thoroughness and impartial expertise, the so-called facts of global warming that are churned out and
unquestioningly accepted, while the scientific and media establishments stifle or deride any legitimate expression of an opposing view. In doing so, the book typifies the
mission of Independent Minds to replace political correctness and received wisdom with common sense and rational analysis.
There are two problems with Al Gore. First, he's a demagogue who lacks an appreciation for the ethics and methods of science. Second, he's a not a scientist, but a celebrity
and politician who does not understand the technical aspects of science. Put succinctly, the man simply doesn't know what he's talking about. But Gore is now advising the world
on complex technical issues related to energy and climate. That's a problem for the human race. (David Deming, American Thinker)
Bill Gates, the Microsoft gazillionaire, is funding a geo-engineering project that
aims to form white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays and ‘reduce global warming.’
…the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white
clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They
believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an
alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.
Artificial white clouds will do what the scientists expect them to do, research into the effects of volcanic
ash in the stratosphere show that cooling can be promoted by particles.
…research has been carried out by eminent climate scientists, including Professor Mojib Latif. He is a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. He and his colleagues predicted the cooling trend in a 2008 paper, and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva in September.
Reckless lone wolf solutions could well make a bad situation worse, crop yields are sensitive to temperature in a simple way: warm is good, cold is bad. Gates might
well believe in global warming and think his solution a good one, but if he’s wrong there could be a high body count.
Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said that experiments with potential consequences beyond national borders needed international
regulations. He told The Times: “I do not see any geoengineering solution which does not have unintended consequences or is not far too
expensive.”
Someone needs to sit the world’s richest nerd down and explain that the planet doesn’t come with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete option. (Daily Bayonet)
New Scientist doesn’t have enough column space to tell you that Briffa’s Yamal tree ring series depends heavily on just one freak 8-standard deviation tree in
Northern Russia, and that multiple temperature reconstructions use that highly dubious series, but they do have time to warn the world about the effect
of melting sea-ice on global sea levels.
Melting icebergs boost sea-level rise
Because sea ice is fresh water, it has a lower density than salty ocean water, so even though floating ice won’t raise water levels by melting, the fresh water in the ice
blocks can apparently make a small difference. “Small” being the word.
“…they estimate that about 746 cubic kilometres of ice are melting each year, overall. The ice melting is diluting the oceans, decreasing its density and raising sea
levels as a consequence,” says Shepherd.
Watch out for that extra twentieth of a millimetre. Literally 0.049 mm per year.
Imagine, at this rate, in just one hundred years, sea levels could be… five millimeters higher.
Would New Scientist take part in reporting naked speculation based a wild extreme?
“…if all the sea ice currently bobbing on the oceans were to melt, it could raise sea level by 4 to 6 centimetres.”
And what are the chances that all the worlds sea ice will melt? All 16 – 22 million square kilometers.
And if millions of square kilometers of sea ice did melt, you’d suppose we had more to worry about than the 5 cm extra on top of the usual high tide. (Jo Nova)
This news story about Taiwan has been making the rounds with the usual alarming news outlets. My view is clearly on subsidence, caused by poor land use practice. See below
the Continue Reading line for the easily found reasons.
File picture of rescuers searching for residents trapped by the rising flood waters sparked by typhoon Morakot in Pingtung, southern Taiwan last year
TUNGSHIH, Taiwan (AFP) – When worshippers built a temple for the goddess Matsu in south Taiwan 300 years ago, they chose a spot they thought would be at a safe remove from
the ocean. They did not count on global warming. Continue
reading → (WUWT)
“Despite all these advantages, 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. A new metric to account for the vertical structure of radiative forcing is recommended below.”
and
“Although the traditional TOA radiative forcing concept remains very useful, it is limited in several ways. It is inadequate to describe fully the radiative effects of
several anthropogenic influences including
absorbing aerosols, which lead to a positive radiative forcing of the troposphere with little net radiative effect at the top of the atmosphere;
effects of aerosols on cloud properties (including cloud fraction, cloud microphysical parameters, and precipitation efficiency), which may modify the hydrological
cycle without significant radiative impacts;
perturbations of ozone in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, which challenge the manner in which the stratospheric temperature adjustment is done; and
surface modification due to deforestation, urbanization, and agricultural practices and surface biogeochemical effects.”
Unfortunately, the 2007 IPCC inadequately considered this perspective that was presented in the 2005 NRC study.
There is a new article, however, that reaffirms the NRC conclusion and recommendations. It is
While the paper is specifically with respect to aircraft contrails, their findings and recommendations apply to all heterogeneous climate forcings. The article has a very
effective summary table on page 494 that is titled “A comparison of the metrics and modeling tools that can be used for the evaluation of aviation’s climate impact”.
Extracts from this table list the disadvantages of several climate metrics including radiative forcing where it is reported that
“Without modification (efficacy factors) it does not account for differences in climate response between forcings (see Fuglestvedt et al. 2003; Berntsen et al.
2005); it is far removed from eventual climate impact; and it does not adequately account for regional variations of the climate effect.”
With respect to global warming potential, they write
“Far removed from climate impact and without modification, it does not account for differences in climate response; changing background atmosphere is not taken into
account; does not account for regional variation in impact.”
This study illustrates the continued awakening by the climate research community of the diverse range of influences of humans within the climate system that we presented in
our paper
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip
Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate
change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union,
as well as further evidence that the 2007 IPCC report failed to adequately consider the role of all of the first order human climate forcings. (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate
Science)
The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal
oversight, complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm. (John
McQuaid, e360)
Oil giant BP has accepted responsibility for cleaning up the oil spill from the sunken rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which could be the biggest environmental catastrophe in
American history. In an interview with SPIEGEL, BP CEO Tony Hayward says that, while his company is ready and able to pay for containing the damage, the spill does not mean the
end for deep water drilling. (Spiegel)
BP on Monday restarted operations to stream dispersants directly into the main Gulf of Mexico oil leak despite fears the chemicals could themselves be harmful to the
environment.
A 1.6km-long tube was fed down to the leaking pipe on the sea floor and directly shot the dispersant into the flow, guided by remotely-operated robotic submarines.
State and federal agencies "consented to the third test today of subsea dispersant", BP spokesman John Curry said. (SMH)
Never letting a crisis go to waste, liberals have advanced the idea that all drilling in the ocean should be stopped and no new drilling allowed. (AWR Hawkins, PJM)
U.S. government inspectors have completed checking out some 30 deepwater drilling rigs searching for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and found no safety problems that would
require any rigs to temporarily cease operations, a government spokesman told Reuters on Monday.
President Barack Obama ordered the inspections after a rig leased by BP exploded last month, killing 11 workers and causing a growing oil spill that threatens businesses and
beaches along the Gulf Coast.
"Throughout our inspections, no deepwater facilities have been shut-in due to safety concerns," said John Romero, spokesman for the Interior Department's Minerals
Management Service that oversees offshore drilling.
Romero said MMS personnel will now begin inspecting 47 deepwater production platforms that are already pumping crude oil on a commercial basis.
"These inspections may take up to a month to complete," he said. (Reuters)
We need only to recap the experience of the 1970s and 1980s to understand why massive public national deficit financing of Keynesian-type spending to restore global economic
growth will almost surely end with a 1970s style oil shock. [Read More]
(Andrew McKillop, Energy Tribune)
The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and
toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.
Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances
is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.
Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.
General
Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import
taxes.
Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter
of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.
The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation
program, energy experts said.
The article also foreshadows a possible revision in China's energy consumption data, with surprises perhaps to come:
Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy
statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that
China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.
Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the
National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20
percent improvement in energy efficiency.
China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Wind
energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind
turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.
Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.
The article also included a statement from Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, who seems to be in complete denial about what is actually going on in China:
“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning
of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but
also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”
The article is accompanied by the following graphic, which pretty much tells the story itself:
The Pentagon is working hard to promote development of biomass fuels that could power future fighter jets and other warplanes, but defense officials say it could take years
to get a full-fledged industry on its feet. (Reuters)
For his sake, let’s hope that Bruce Arnold at the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t get the Gabriel Calzada treatment from the American Wind Energy Association and the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
To freshen your memory, Gabriel Calzada is the economist at the King Juan Carlos University who got out his calculator and analyzed the green job situation in Spain—the
same Spain whose job-crushing subsidies are supposed to be a model for our green recovery. The professor found that subsidizing green energy costs more traditional jobs than
are created in the green sector. More than two jobs were lost for every single green job created by subsidies.
Because his scholarship raised important red flags, it caused quite a stir in the policy debate. Such a stir that it appears the American Wind Energy Association (funded by
the wind-power industry) helped
coordinate a smear job on Calzada by the tax-payer-funded National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Electricity will cost twice as much as power plants
The controversial Cape Wind project will cost taxpayers and ratepayers more than $2 billion to build - three times its original estimate.
That colossal cost is the driving force behind the sky-high electric rates it plans to charge Massachusetts customers in coming years.
Cape Wind, which wants to build 130 wind turbines off the coast of Cape Cod, and National Grid announced yesterday that they’ve reached an agreement to start charging
customers 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour in 2013 - more than double the current rate of electricity from conventional power plants and land-based wind farms.
Under the 15-year National Grid contract, the price of Cape Wind’s electricity would increase 3.5 percent each year, pushing the kilowatt price to about 34.7 cents by the
time the contract ends.
The current price of National Grid’s non-wind electricity is now about 9 cents per kilowatt. That means the cost of fossil-fuel generated electricity would have to increase
nearly four-fold just to keep pace with Cape Wind’s prices over the next 15 years. ( Jay Fitzgerald, Boston Herald)
Spain may join Germany in relaxing a pledge to scrap nuclear power and let plants run on for decades, softening an anti-nuclear stance that was one of the firmest in Europe.
Less than a year ago, Spain ordered the aging Garona nuclear plant to close rather than renew a 10-year operating permit, in line with a 2008 electoral pledge to replace
nuclear power with its successful renewable energy sector.
Permits for another three of Spain's eight nuclear plants expire in June and July 2010, and the government is legally entitled to let them close, too.
However it may allow the Alamaraz I, Almaraz II and Vandellos II plants to run for another 10 years.
Spain's CSN nuclear watchdog has already said in a non-binding report that two of the plants up for renewal are safe to run for another 10 years, although the Industry Ministry
has the final say.
Power producers' association UNESA has also said that a government road map for greening Spain's economy has already suggested seven of Spain's nuclear plants would run until
at least 2020. (Reuters)
ATLANTA — The cost of treating cancer in the United States nearly doubled over the past two decades, but expensive cancer drugs may not be the main reason why, according
to a surprising new study.
The study confounds conventional wisdom in several respects. The soaring price of new cancer treatments has received widespread attention, but the researchers conclude that
rising costs were mainly driven by the growing number of cancer patients.
The study also finds cancer accounts for only 5 percent of total U.S. medical costs, and that has not changed in the last few decades.
"I will say I'm a bit surprised," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who said he would have expected the proportion of cancer costs to rise.
The researchers also found that private insurers now cover a greater share of cancer treatment costs — about 50 percent — while patients' out-of-pocket costs have fallen
over the past two decades. (AP)
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The newly published President’s Cancer Report puts this quote in bold type:
“I believe it is time for a new human experiment. The old experiment is that we have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons . . . throughout our shared environment.
They’re in our amniotic fluid . . .They’re in our mothers’ milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to these poisons in our agricultural system? We
won’t really know the answer until we do the other experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, and see what
happens.”
Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Steingraber’s ignorance of biochemistry and agriculture is breathtaking. We’ve actually been running a long-term experiment on chemical-free farming for
about 5,000 years: It’s called Africa. Africans don’t produce much food, and the little food they produce comes at a fearful price in human stoop labor, horrifying soil
erosion, and increasing displacement of wildlife by low-yield crops.
Africans get cancer at an alarming rate even so—though many die too young for the old age cancers. In Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s father lived, the life expectancy is 20 years
shorter than America’s 78 years. Cancer has recently made the “Top Ten Killers” list, but Kenyans worry more about the epidemics of malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis.
Don’t look for any new science in this new President’s Report. There isn’t any. The report includes much talk of the precautionary principle, and how we might begin to
find these “hidden” cancer sources. It’s just the same old fears and alarms that have circulated since Rachel Carson. Indeed, Dr. Steingraber has been called “the new
Rachel Carson.” That’s no compliment; Rachel’s rant against DDT has cost more than 50 million needless malaria deaths. (Dennis Avery, CFP)
WASHINGTON - Pieces of DNA from a pig virus were found in Merck & Co Inc's vaccine against a diarrhea-causing infection, but U.S. health officials said on Thursday there
was no evidence of a risk to people.
DNA from the same virus was found in a rival GlaxoSmithKline Plc vaccine. Glaxo and the Food and Drug Administration in March urged doctors to suspend use of that vaccine, but
there was no similar recommendation for Merck's product.
The FDA will seek input on both vaccines, which fight rotavirus infection, at an advisory panel meeting on Friday.
Merck said the company's preliminary testing found "very low levels" of DNA from porcine circovirus, or PCV, in its Rotateq vaccine.
"There is no evidence at this time that DNA from PCV causes any disease in humans," Merck said in a statement.
The FDA said the number of virus DNA fragments in the Merck vaccine may be smaller than what has been found with Glaxo's product, called Rotarix.
"FDA has no evidence to date that these findings pertaining to Rotarix and RotaTeq pose a safety risk. Both vaccines have strong safety records, including clinical trials
involving tens of thousands of patients and clinical experience with millions of patients," the agency said in a statement. (Reuters)
GAITHERSBURG, Md. - The benefits of rotavirus vaccines from GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Merck & Co Inc outweigh any risk from recently discovered contamination with a pig
virus, members of a U.S. advisory panel said on Friday.
Pieces of DNA from porcine circovirus, or PCV, have been detected in Glaxo's Rotarix and Merck's Rotateq. Health officials say there is no evidence the virus is harmful to
people. (See related Reuters Health story, May 7, 2010.)
Members of a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said the vaccines carried impressive benefits from preventing rotavirus, which can cause fatal diarrhea, and agreed
there was no evidence so far of harm to people from PCV.
Any risks "are at best theoretical," said Dr. Melinda Wharton, a panelist and deputy director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. (Reuters)
NEW YORK - You can keep on chugging coffee without worrying about whether your java will increase your risk of colon cancer, according to new research.
The same appears true for soda, while in the study tea was tied to a small increase in risk of the common cancer. However, that finding could have been due to chance, the
researchers say. (Reuters Health)
Scientists have found out how some fat cells are turned into calorie-burning brown fat known as brown adipose tissue rather than into the white fat associated with obesity.
The discovery may help researchers develop ways to fight the obesity epidemic that is sucking up health budgets and resources in rich nations and quickly spreading to the
developing world.
Stephan Herzig of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, who led the study, said scientists could now try using stem cells to generate brown fat cells in a lab dish
to then implant them into the body and help speed up calorie burn. (Reuters)
Obesity has become a common issue in urban areas. This tendency is becoming a headache to the society. People are adopting various weight loss techniques to stay it and
slim.
But as per a recent study losing 1.5lbs of weight a week is going to be less effective than half a pound a week. Nutrition experts are emphasizing on long-term weight
control and this has been an effective one.
A team from the University of Florida has found out that slow rate of losing weight is more effective and less dangerous than that of a rapid loss of weight. They
have considered 262 obese women who had followed a six-month routine program to lose weight.
Nutrition expert have divided the participants into three groups according to how much weight they lost during the first month of program. Then the researchers have found
out that the rapid weight loss is discontinuous and harmful to human body.
On the other hand slow rate of weight loss was effective and has less possibility to regain weight. (Top News)
GAINESVILLE, Fla., May 7 -- The best way to keep weight off long term is to lose it quickly, not gradually, in the initial stages of obesity treatment, U.S.
researchers said.
Lisa Nackers and colleagues at the University of Florida analyzed data for 262 middle-aged obese women who took part in the Treatment of Obesity in Underserved
Rural Settings trial.
The women followed a six-month lifestyle program encouraging eating fewer calories and increasing the intensity of physical activity to achieve an average weight loss of 1
pound per week. One year later, the women were contacted twice a month in the form of group sessions, telephone contact or newsletters.
Nackers divided the women into three groups according to the first month's weight loss.
Women in the fast group lost 1.5 pounds per week, those in the moderate group lost between one-half pound and 1.5 pounds per week, and women in the slow group lost less than
one-half pound per week in that first month.
The study, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, found among those who maintained weight loss long term, women in the fast group were five times
more likely to maintain 10 percent weight loss at 18 months. (UPI)
A Queens woman's 16-year popcorn habit left her with permanent lung damage, a lawsuit charges.
Between 1991 and September 2007, Agnes Mercado daily devoured two to three bags of Act II Lite microwave popcorn flavored with diacetyl.
Workers who packaged the popcorn for manufacturer ConAgra Foods developed "popcorn lung," an airway obstruction that does not respond to medicine.
The food giant dumped diacetyl from its recipe in 2007.
Mercado, just diagnosed last month, uses an oxygen tank and is "likely to require a lung transplant," the Queens Supreme Court suit against ConAgra says. (NY Post)
Reports of an alarmingly high level of a banned pesticide in Meadow Creek and Schenk’s Branch were the result of a mathematical error, according to state officials.
“It made it look 1,000 times worse than it really was,” said Bill Hayden, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, of chlordane levels found in the
two Charlottesville creeks.
The Virginia Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services acknowledged the error. The false results came after the initial round of sampling, done last spring by the state’s
environmental quality agency.
A subsequent round of sampling done in January showed that the chlordane levels were not high at all. The agency then completed a third round of tests to resolve the
discrepancy.
Those results, finalized late last month, showed that the chlordane levels were not a problem, Hayden said.
“That pretty much brings the chlordane story to a close,” Hayden said. (Charlottesville Daily Progress)
Alex, I’ll take “What’s going on here? for $1,000.”
The answer is: “It has been used for 50 years without any problem, it makes food economical, and the EPA is searching for any reason to prohibit its use.”
“What is atrazine?”
“You’re correct for $1,000!”
So with that bit of televised repartee, you learn all about atrazine and find that it is in jeopardy. And coincidentally, once again. This popular and effective herbicide, used
on 60% of the corn, 75% of the sorghum, and on 90% of the sugarcane in the US (according to Illinois Corn Growers Association) is again the subject of an investigation by the
US Environmental Protection Agency. In technical farmer vernacular, it is called, “witch hunt.”
Atrazine was introduced to the fathers and grandfathers of today’s farmers in the late 1950’s and has been killing grass in cornfields ever since. It has not only made a
lot of money for Syngenta, which makes it, but has also benefited every farmer across the Cornbelt who has applied it to his fields. That benefit is to kill unwanted vegetation
which is competing with corn and other crops for moisture and nutrients. Weed specialists at all of the Land Grant Universities can provide many examples of how yields are
diminished when weeds and grass are allowed to grow.
Take Marty Williams for example. He works at the University of Illinois under contract with USDA’s Agriculture Research Service on the improvement of sweet corn. He’s
concerned about the loss of atrazine as a crop protectant chemical, which he says will diminish commercial sweet corn yields. That means less sweet corn, higher prices for
consumers, and the use of greater quantities of other herbicides to control grasses that lesser amounts of atrazine would control. ( Stu Ellis, Herald-Review)
Modified bacteria seek out and metabolize a harmful pollutant.
Common lab bacteria have been turned into scavengers that seek and destroy the herbicide atrazine, an environmental pollutant that can be harmful to wildlife. Key to the
transformation is the combination of a synthetic switch that allows the bacteria to chase the chemical and a gene taken from another species of bacteria for breaking down
atrazine.
Some wild bacteria have evolved the ability to metabolize atrazine. Using a synthetic biology approach, a team at Emory University in Atlanta has now equipped a synthetic
strain of E. coli with the ability to hunt down atrazine and metabolize it. (Technology Review)
"Harmful pollutant" is seriously overstating the case but I suppose if you can consider an essential trace gas like carbon dioxide a
"pollutant" there really are no rules...
ANIMAL and plant species are being killed off faster than ever before as human populations surge and people consume more, a United Nations report is expected to say this
week.
It will warn that the expansion of countries such as China, India and Brazil is adding hugely to the environmental threats already generated by developed western nations, and
that a third of species could face extinction this century. (Sunday Times)
Actually 100% of species face extinction all the time. The looming threat as constantly proposed by the misanthropy brigade is a different matter though
and is a nonsense. There was a wave of extinctions, mostly of obscure, isolated, island-bound sub-species following the age of discovery as sailing ships, by accident or
design, distributed feral species (rats, cats, goats and pigs, mainly). Most of that occurred in the 15th through 17th Centuries and there have been few
extinctions over the last century.
Media: What does it say when 11 men who perish on an exploding oil platform, or 30 poor souls who die in a 1,000-year Tennessee flood, get less coverage than two oil-soaked
birds? It says news is driven from the left.
It is to the credit of the one media outlet that reported the paparazzi-like scrums of reporters trailing rescue workers as they tried to clean off one oil-soaked gannet caught
in the oil spill off Louisiana waters after a rig exploded in the Gulf on April 20. Not only did the U.S. and European media obsess breathlessly about the bird, and later about
a brown pelican that followed, they seemed to be panting for more.
That's because birds are convenient tools for driving the radical green agenda to halt all oil drilling. TV media and the national papers pounded the bird story because it
served a political purpose.
It's getting obvious that that's the pattern: A parallel example is in the media coverage of combat deaths in Afghanistan. During the Bush years, the media reported deaths of
soldiers daily because it advanced an anti-war agenda. With President Obama now at the helm, they've dropped coverage.
A look at the Los Angeles Times' oil spill coverage, for one, shows birds featured daily in its blog and paper while the 11 oil platform workers have barely registered. On the
blog, the news of the deaths wasn't acknowledged until May 5, eight days after the workers' employer identified them in a memorial Web site.
Is this important? Yes. Regardless of the worries about the birds, the workers' deaths are more tragic and have more implications for society. But as people, they hardly serve
an agenda. (IBD)
It is odd, really more like eerie, how similar many of the fetishes of dead totalitarian systems of the last century are to the curiosities of modern leftism. The Nazi war
on tobacco, for example, mirrors modern jihads against smoking, which invariably portray tobacco companies as evil. Mussolini, the leader of Fascism, prided himself on not
smoking or drinking, just as Hitler, the leader of Nazism did, who was also a vegetarian. (Winston Churchill, by contrast, drank, smoked, and ate copiously.)
Nazis bragged early about putting into the horrors of concentration camps those who committed cruelty to animals. Fascists in Italy also pointed out to the world that their
system of totalitarianism was solicitous of the welfare of animals. There was, in Italy, a “Fascist Society for the Protection of Animals” and the Fascists took early steps
to preserve endangered animal species.
One overlooked area in which Nazism and modern leftism converge is the worship of nature, the expansion of a gentle and loving appreciation of divinely created beauty into an
obsession bordering on religious fanaticism. Mark Musser, in his new book, Nazi Oaks, Advantage Inspirational, not only explores the historical development of radical
environmentalism within the Nazi movement but he explains how this totalitarianism is grounded in a violent rejection of the historical Judeo-Christian worldview, which views
nature as a blessing created for man by God. The Old Testament, as Musser explains, has an historical and a metaphysical prelude to problems which we associate with modern and
thoughtful secularism. (Bruce Walker, CFP)
Machakos, Kenya - Fog shrouds the terraced hills, and a stream is swollen from the rain that fell overnight, but the damage of a drought that left 10 million Kenyans
dependent on food aid is still evident. On many of the small farms, the ground is bare at a time when corn crops should be several feet tall.
"We had no maize because we planted and there was no rain," said Victor Mutua, who feeds an extended family of 15 from his 20-acre plot.
Poor small-scale farmers like Mutua are at the center of a battle over the future of global agriculture and biotechnology. Scientists are preparing to test in Kenya a
genetically modified variety of corn that would be resistant to drought. The seeds are the product of a $47 million project funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates'
foundation and using technology and breeding expertise donated by U.S. seed giant Monsanto Co.
The project could have sweeping ramifications. Experts say genetically modified seeds could help boost food production, which must rise 70 percent by 2050 to feed a growing
population, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.
According to one study, corn production in five East African nations is expected to grow about 14 percent by 2050, but demand for corn could nearly triple. (Des Moines
Register)
The Select Committee, in its letter inviting testimony for the present hearing, cites various scientific bodies as having concluded that
1. The global climate has warmed;
2. Human activities account for most of the warming since the mid-20th century;
3. Climate change is already causing a broad range of impacts in the United States;
4. The impacts of climate change are expected to grow in the coming decades. (via Icecap)
WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the chief sponsors of a nascent plan to address energy and climate change in the Senate, said Friday that the proposal had no
chance of passage in the near term and called for a “pause” in consideration of the issue (NYT)
The White House said on Friday the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico showed the need for climate change and energy legislation, dismissing calls from a Republican
backer of the bill to hold off.
Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman said they will unveil the legislation battling global warming on Wednesday, although passage looks
increasingly doubtful without Republican support. (Reuters)
Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday that he and Sen. John Kerry are pressing forward with climate change legislation despite losing the support of a key senator, telling
"Fox News Sunday" the bill has a "real shot" at passing. (FOXNews.com)
India and China said it would be very difficult to achieve a strong international agreement on climate change at the summit in Mexico later this year that will be the
follow-up to the Copenhagen conference last December. (Financial Times)
China's top climate negotiator said on Saturday although progress had been made in negotiations for a new accord to combat global warming, there was still some distance to
go before a binding deal could be secured. (Reuters)
BEIJING — The chance of a climate change agreement this year is remote because the United States and China are unwilling to make more commitments during the talks, India's
environment minister said Sunday. (AP)
BEIJING, May 9 -- China needs more reasonable carbon emission quotas to buoy the nation's fast economic development amid the progressing industrialization and urbanization,
said an official with the nation's top economic planner Sunday.
Economic development is still a priority for China as it has to enable the 1.3 billion people to live decent lives, Su Wei, director of the climate change department of the
National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said at the International Cooperative Conference on Green Economy and Climate Change.
The "high carbon" characteristic rooted in China's energy structure would not be fundamentally changed in a short term as the development and use of clean energy such
as wind and solar power started late in China, he said. (Xinhua)
COMMENT: ABC recently reported on a letter signed by 250 scientists published in the journal Science.
The letter is accompanied by a photo of a lone Polar Bear on an ice berg credited to ISTOCKPHOTO.COM.
The photo is a fake with the following note in the photo caption at Istockphoto: "This
images is a photoshop design. Polarbear, ice floe, ocean and sky are real, they were just not together in the way they are now."
The same background is also available with one emperor penguin (HERE) or
three (HERE)
What does the use of a faked photo say about the scientific credibility of the journal in question?
Wonder why the ABC didn't pick this one up, they do have previous experience with Polar
Bears. (ABC News Watch)
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The journal Science, which has long had an editorial stance pushing for action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, published a piece of artwork last week that provided a nice
bit of raw meat for foes of such steps.
A photograph of a polar bear standing balefully on a small ice floe was used to illustrate the letter from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences decrying attacks on
climate research and pressing for swift action to blunt global warming. As some professional opponents of climate action almost instantly noticed, the caption provided by the
photo agency said it was a montage of several images — what the agency called “a Photoshop design.”
You could say, well, it’s just a piece of art, not even a factual error. Nothing about the glitch undercuts the content of the letter, and the authors weren’t even involved
in illustrating their missive.
The problem, as Randy Olson has emphasized, is that imagery and appearance matter — particularly in an information landscape where passionate Web trollers questioning warming
are so seamlessly tied in with professional partisans fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases through the amplifier of conservative talk radio and columnists. (NYT)
The thing Andy forgets is that this whole nonissue is largely driven by fraudulent art work:
Images and impressions matter. How does keeping them honest make us "passionate Web trollers" or professional partisans?
Since the Climategate scandal establishment figures have relentlessly stymied unwelcome scrutiny by legal experts. The latest wagon-circler is Dr. Judith Curry, an esteemed
member of NASA’s Climate Research Committee for over three years. Now Curry has become a self-appointed apologist for the unethical and some say, fraudulent, conduct of Penn.
State University’s climate professor, Michael Mann.
In an interview with Thomas Fuller of the Environmental Policy Examiner (May 4, 2010) this well-heeled establishment scientist criticizes Virginia Attorney General, Ken
Cuccinelli, for doing his job. Somehow Dr. Curry manages to fudge the line between a deliberate pre-meditated criminal fraud and an honest mistake.
Her tirade was prompted by Cuccinelli’s legal demand for access to Mann’s records from his former employers at Virginia State University where the tree-ring researcher
benefited by almost $500,000 in taxpayer funding. (John O'Sullivan, CFP)
Michael Mann's infamous "hockey stick" graph, which purported to show steady temperatures on Earth for around a millenium until the 20th century, is the source of
much of the misguided hysteria that surrounds the global warming movement. Mann achieved the hockey stick through mathematical errors or mathematical tricks, take your pick.
Recently Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, filed a Civil Investigative Demand for documents from the University of Virginia relating to the work done by Mann while
he was at the University. Cuccinelli wants to know whether taxpayer funds were used to help Mann perpetrate a hoax.
Cuccinelli's subpoena has been greeted with howls and protests from warmists and others who view inquiry into a scientist's work as an infringement of academic freedom--the
freedom, that is, to make stuff up, hide or falsify data, and thereby impose trillions of dollars of costs on consumers, all while being supported by taxpayers. (In other
contexts, this is commonly known as "fraud.") The Science and Environmental Policy Project puts the controversy into context:
Since those objecting raise issues such as academic freedom and scientific advancement, it is important to recap a bit of history.
By the 1970's, HH Lamb, the pioneer of modern climate research, compiled extensive physical evidence showing that climate change is normal and that during the last 10,000
years there were periods colder than today and warmer than today. The first two assessment reports of the UN IPCC included charts showing temperature change for the last 1000
years that included the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The Summary for Policymakers of the 2001 Third Assessment Report eliminated these temperature changes and
substituted Mann's now infamous "hockey stick" graph produced by statistical techniques that purport to show that temperatures were relatively stable for about 900
years then shot up in the 20th Century. The results of a computer model trumps physical evidence. The research was "peer reviewed" but not available for independent
review.
In 2006, Professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, headed a team of
statisticians testing the methods used by Mr. Mann. Professor Wegman testified before Congress that Mann's faulty statistical techniques always produce the infamous hockey
stick configuration, even from random data.
If Mr. Mann had been open with his research data and methods, and permitted their review by independent scientists, his errors may have been appropriately corrected in a
scientific setting rather than in a political one. Instead, he chose to withhold the information. It is imperative to understand the full extent to which Mann's now
discredited study distorted the climate and energy policies of the US government - at great cost to the taxpayer and energy consumer.
Those who invoke "academic freedom" and "scientific freedom" would do well to ask themselves how are these noble goals served when research is kept
secret? How is democracy served when government- funded research so critical to public policy is kept secret?
It is a remarkable fact that warmists claim the right to keep their data secret and avoid any critical assessment of their work, while at the same time demanding that every
country in the world fashion its energy policies on the basis of their alleged findings. No doubt there is a precedent, somewhere, for such arrogance. But I am not sure there
is any precedent, anywhere, for governments being stupid enough to accede to such unreasonable demands. (Power Line)
Apparently, head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research Kevin Trenberth thinks
so. However, according to the US Climate Extremes Index for precipitation, there has been no trend in US precipitation over the past 100 years:
Above graph from the US Climate Extremes Index shows the sum of the percentage of the United States with a much greater than normal number of days with precipitation plus
the percentage with a much greater than normal number of days without precipitation. Five year mean is shown in green.
Did anthropogenic global warming also cause the highest recorded flood in Nashville in 1926 & 1927 according to the US
Army Corps of Engineers? And severe Nashville flooding in 1937, 1975, and 1977? (Hockey Schtick)
TONY ABBOTT is under pressure to justify telling students it was considerably warmer when Jesus was alive after leading scientists said his claim was wrong.
He urged year 5 and 6 pupils at an Adelaide school to be sceptical about the human contribution to climate change, saying it was an open question.
In a question-and-answer session on Friday, the Opposition Leader said it was warmer "at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth" than now.
Leading scientists said there was no evidence to suggest it was hotter 2000 years ago. (SMH)
Actually these "leading scientists" are either misinformed or have been seriously misquoted because there is ample evidence of the Roman Warm
Period, with suggestions it was as much as 2 °C warmer than today.
A glacier in Greenland slides up to 220 percent faster toward the sea in summer than in winter and global warming could mean a wider acceleration that would raise sea
levels, according to a study published Sunday.
A group of experts led by Ian Bartholomew at Edinburgh University in Scotland said the variability was much stronger than earlier observations of glacier movement in Greenland.
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is a new piece of a puzzle to understand the world's second biggest ice sheet behind Antarctica. Greenland has enough ice
to raise world sea levels by about 7 meters (23 ft) if it all melted.
The study said GPS satellite measurements of the glacier in south-west Greenland, up to 35 km (22 miles) inland and at altitudes of up to 1,095 meters (3,592 ft), showed that
the ice in some places slid at 300 meters per year at peak summer rates.
"Our measurements reveal substantial increases in ice velocity during summer, up to 220 percent above winter background values," it said.
Uh... just a moment. At summer peak rates it equals 300 mtr/yr, so in winter it's less than 150 mtr/yr and overall, what? 225 mtr/yr, maybe? Why, that's a
whole couple of feet per day on average! Not really a speed demon after all...
A recent study has found that global warming has impacted the nature of symptoms experienced by obsessive compulsive disorder patients.
Climate change related obsessions and/or compulsions were identified in 28% of patients presenting with obsessive compulsive disorder. Their obsessions included leaving taps on
and wasting water, leaving lights on and wasting electricity, pets dying of thirst, leaving the stove on and wasting gas as well as obsessions that global warming had
contributed to house floors cracking, pipes leaking, roof problems and white ants eating the house.
Compulsions in response to these obsessions included the checking of taps, light switches, pet water bowls and house structures.
"Media coverage about the possible catastrophic consequences to our planet concerning global warming is extensive and potentially anxiety provoking. We found that many
obsessive compulsive disorder patients were concerned about reducing their global footprint," said study author Dr Mairwen Jones. (Voxy)
PARIS, May 7 , 2010 - Faced with rising sea levels, dying coral reefs and decreasing fish stocks, small island developing states (SIDS) are feeling the effects of ocean
decline, and they want wealthier countries to do more to ensure the survival of the world’s seas and other waterways. (IPS)
The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of
white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak
outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect
itself from global warming.
Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and
artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.
However, a study last year calculated that a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater
from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity. (The Times)
We certainly have no knowledge of a need to cool the planet and this particular methodology could have some severe downsides.
Increasing the number of cloud particle nuclei could mean droplets don't become large enough to precipitate out, denying downwind regions rainfall (that could cause some
arguments with the neighbors whether it's a fact or mere supposition).
All these nice bright clouds could have the effect of reducing sea surface temperature and evaporation (those relying on say, Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall, might have a
fair bit to say about that).
And how are they going to aviod mulching vast quantities of plankton and fish/mollusk/crustacean/coral larvae with each of these machines slurping up 600 m3 of
near-surface seawater every minute. The fleet of ships they talk of would be converting 1.6 cubic kilometers of highly productive surface waters to particles ever day. A fish
kill like that could get a guy into a lot of trouble.
At Otarian, menus have a feelgood global-warming index. A gimmick, or the next step in ethical eating?
It was only a matter of time. We've had organic vegan restaurants; eateries that only have raw uncooked food and Fairtrade bistros. Now comes a restaurant offering a menu aimed
at saving the planet from climate change. (Independent on Sunday)
Does the planet look fat in its increasing greenery? No? Then stop trying to put it on a low carb diet!
Large
portions of the globe rely on the seasonal monsoon for water. Across much of Asia, agriculture depends on the coming of the monsoon rains. One scare tactic employed by global
warming extremists is to claim that human caused climate change will keep the monsoon from coming, causing drought, failed crops and famine. In truth, science does not fully
understand the complex interactions of ocean, atmosphere, and land that influence the monsoon, or how it impacts climate in other parts of the world. Now, a new Monsoon Asia
Drought Atlas (MADA) provides reconstructions of summer moisture for the region going back to 1300 AD. It documents a long sequence of droughts so persistent that scientists
call them “megadroughts.” These megadrought events, the worst of which may have toppled ancient kingdoms, show that unreliable monsoon seasons have afflicted mankind
throughout history—long before the clamor over climate change arose.
Drought is not an unusual occurrence. For several years, the American South had suffered under a long-lasting severe drought, until this year's wet El Niño
driven winter and spring. Half a world away, the southwestern corner of Australia was in the grip of a devastating drought since the 1970s. These events have naturally been blamed
on global warming by publicity seeking researchers. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
I need to get rid of a bookmark on my toolbar. So let me make a small posting about these two papers.
A few months ago, someone (a Czech climate skeptic) sent me an interesting link to Mr Jiří Grygar's "Discovery
Harvest 2008" (Žeň objevů 2008, in Czech, EN).
Every year, this astronomer and the most famous Czech science communicator presents the discoveries related to astronomy and celestial bodies from the previous year.
There are many interesting things over there but my source was impressed by an interesting comment
about deserts.
Alas, there was some mention of it in a July 2007 Elsevier
book. But who cares? What is important is that the stale orthodoxy about Venus’ “runaway greenhouse effect” is starting to dissipate.
Venus’ retrograde rotation, incredibly massive atmosphere and relatively young (<500 million years) surface will be elegantly explained by the crash of a massive
satellite half a billion years ago (with subsequent melting of much if not the whole crust, and humongous outgassing).
Current lead-melting surface temperatures will be just as beautifully explained by simple adiabatic processes.
The role of CO2 in the heating of the atmosphere via some “greenhouse effect” will be seriously reconsidered and almost completely dismissed.
WASHINGTON — Two years ago, feisty Republicans commandeered the darkened House chamber during the summer recess to loudly demand that oil companies be allowed to “drill
here and drill now.”
Now, with an ominous oil slick threatening the Gulf Coast from a deep-well blowout, Republican cries for more offshore oil production have grown quieter. But they have not
ceased.
“The American people want to see our country develop our domestic resources in an environmentally responsible way, and they know we can,” Representative Mike Pence of
Indiana, the No. 3 House Republican and a ringleader of the 2008 uprising on the House floor, said Thursday.
It was a notable Republican triumph. With gas prices hitting $4 per gallon, House Republicans were able to pressure the Democratic majority in Congress to relent on a coastal
drilling ban that had been routinely enacted every year since the early 1980s. But the BP spill has made the politics of oil much more slippery for Republicans, and they are
treading carefully. (NYT)
Washington laid the groundwork for the Gulf oil spill by letting the offshore oil industry dodge its liabilities
BP deserves to be excoriated for contaminating the Gulf of Mexico. Preoccupied with phony multi-million-dollar PR campaigns to cast itself as
green and “Beyond Petroleum,” it failed to focus on the actual multi-billion-dollar environmental catastrophe that could come of a worst-case blow-out.
But BP’s bad conduct is as nothing compared to that of the real villain in this piece: the U.S. federal government.
I blame the U.S. government not because, as the owner of the Outer Continent Shelf where the accident occurred, it bears ultimate responsibility for activities that occur on
its property. Neither do I blame the U.S. because it actively solicited bids from oil firms for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. Accidents happen, despite best efforts.
Spacecraft can explode. Olympic lugers can crash. Nuclear plants can melt down. Coal mines can collapse. Elevators can plummet. Hydro dams can fail.
I blame the U.S. government not because an accident happened but because it failed to ensure that BP — along with every other firm drilling off the U.S. coast — had every
incentive to avoid an accident. Read More » (Financial Post)
As a high-stakes operation to shut off a blown-out oil well unfolded on the seabed and a 130-mile wide slick menaced the coastline of four US states, a top US official was
warning that the survival of BP as a company was under threat. (The Times)
After BP’s Texas City, Tex., refinery blew up in 2005, killing 15 workers, the company vowed to address the safety shortfalls that caused the blast.
Enlarge This Image
The next year, when a badly maintained oil pipeline ruptured and spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope, the oil giant once again promised to clean up
its act.
In 2007, when Tony Hayward took over as chief executive, BP settled a series of criminal charges, including some related to Texas City, and agreed to pay $370 million in fines.
“Our operations failed to meet our own standards and the requirements of the law,” the company said then, pledging to improve its “risk management.” (NYT)
EVEN before taking over BP from Lord Browne, Tony Hayward admitted to a group of employees in America in 2006 that the group needed to restore the company’s core skills in
engineering to reverse his predecessor’s drastic cuts.
Hayward knew that Browne’s legacy had made the company vulnerable to costly disasters. Four successive accidents in America in 2005 and 2006 had shredded BP’s reputation
and, without insurance cover, had cost the company billions of pounds in repairs, compensation and lost revenue.
The explosion at the Texas City refinery that killed 15 people, the dangerous list of the $1 billion Thunder Horse oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and two oil spills from
pipelines in Alaska had aroused outrage across America. In Hayward’s opinion, Browne’s strategy had been short-sighted. (Sunday Times)
ANCHORAGE — An ambitious plan to drill for oil off the northwest coast of Alaska has been moving ahead despite the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but the project is now
facing new questions from federal regulators.
Led by Shell Oil, the project has not been formally halted and could still begin exploratory drilling as early as this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
In a letter late Thursday, the director of the United States Minerals Management Service asked the president of Shell, Marvin E. Odum, to provide more information about safety
precautions for the project while the agency, part of the Interior Department, conducts an “expanded review” of permit applications “based on the Deepwater Horizon
disaster.”
“We request that Shell provide detailed information with respect to additional safety procedures that the company is proposing to undertake in light of the Deepwater Horizon
disaster,” wrote S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, the director of the Minerals Management Service. (NYT)
There is a huge inventory of oil spill response equipment around the state and companies have to prepare viable contingency plans
When it comes to oil spills, most people would agree that prevention is the best cure. But, as the tragic accident in the Gulf of Mexico has emphasized, it is always necessary
to plan for the possibility of disaster. So, just how well prepared is Alaska for a major oil spill, should one occur?
The game changer for Alaska oil spill response came in 1989 when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, spewing at least 10.8 million barrels of crude oil into the
pristine waters of Prince William Sound. That accident spawned a rapidly growing and evolving oil spill response industry in Alaska, with a huge stock of spill response
equipment now staged at various locations around the state. (Alan Bailey, Petroleum News)
[Editor’s note: This is Part I of a five-part series by Vaclav Smil that provides an essential basis for the
understanding of energy transitions and use. Dr. Smil is widely considered to be one of the world's leading energy experts. His views deserve careful study and understanding
as a basis for today's contentious energy policy debates. Good intentions or simply desired ends must square with energy reality, the basis of Smil's worldview.]
Energy transitions – be they the shifts from dominant resources to new modes of supply (from wood coal, from coal to hydrocarbons, from direct use of fuels to
electricity), diffusion of new prime movers (from steam engines to steam turbines or to diesel engines), or new final energy converters (from incandescent to fluorescent
lights) – are inherently protracted affairs that unfold across decades or generations.
Many factors combine to determine their technical difficulty, their cost and their environmental impacts. A great deal of attention has been recently paid to the pace of
technical innovation needed for the shift from the world dominated by fossil fuel combustion to the one relying increasingly on renewable energy conversions, to the likely
costs and investment needs of this transitions, and to its environmental benefits, particularly in terms of reduced CO2 emissions.
Inexplicably, much less attention has been given to a key component of this grand transition, to the spatial dimension of replacing the burning of fossil fuels by the
combustion of biofuels and by direct generation of electricity using water, wind, and solar power. Perhaps the best way to understand the spatial consequences of the unfolding
energy transition is to present a series of realistic power density calculations for different modes of electricity generation in order to make revealing comparisons
of resources and conversion techniques. Detailed calculations will make it easy to replicate them or to change the assumptions and examine (within realistic constraints) many
alternative outcomes. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Editor’s note: This is Part II of a five part series that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. The
previous post in this series can be seen at Part
I.
Baseline calculations for modern electricity generation reflect the most important mode of the U.S. electricity generation, coal combustion in modern large
coal-fired stations, which produced nearly 45% of the total in 2009. As there is no such thing as a standard coal-fired station I will calculate two very
realistic but substantially different densities resulting from disparities in coal quality, fuel delivery and power plant operation. The highest power density would be
associated with a large (in this example I will assume installed generating capacity of 1 GWe) mine-mouth power plant (supplied by high-capacity conveyors or
short-haul trucking directly from the mine and not requiring any coal-storage yard), burning sub-bituminous coal (energy density of 20 GJ/t, ash content less than 5%, sulfur
content below 0.5%), sited in a proximity of a major river (able to use once-through cooling and hence without any large cooling towers) that would operate with a high capacity
factor (80%) and with a high conversion efficiency (38%).
This station would generate annually about 7 TWh (or about 25 PJ) of electricity. With 38% conversion efficiency this generation will require about 66 PJ of coal.
1 GW x 0.8 = 800 MW
800 MW x 8,766 hours = 7.0 TWh
7.0 TWh x 3,600 = 25.2 PJ
25.2 PJ/0.38 = 66.3 PJ
Assuming that the plant’s sub-bituminous coal (energy density of 20 GJ/t, specific density of 1.4 t /m3) is produced by a large surface mine from a seam
whose average thickness is 15 m and whose recovery rate is 95%, then under every square meter of the mine’s surface there are 20 t of recoverable coal containing 400 GJ of
energy. In order to supply all the energy needed by a plant with 1 GWe of installed capacity, annual coal extraction would have to remove the fuel from an area of
just over 16.6 ha (166,165 m2), and this would mean that coal extraction required for the plant’s electricity generation proceeds with power density of about 4.8
kW/m2:
15 m3 x 0.95 x 1.4 t = 19.95 t
19.95 t x 20 GJ/t = 399 GJ
66.3 PJ/399 GJ = 166,165 m2
800 MW/166,165 m2 = 4,814.5 W/m2
A much larger area has to be occupied by the plant itself, but in a mine-mouth power plant without coal storage yard, with once-through cooling and with the disposal of fly
ash into the excavated area the station’s complete infrastructure (boiler and turbogenerator halls, electrostatic precipitators, maintenance buildings, offices, roads,
parking) could cover as little as 600,000 m2. This means that the total area whose other uses would be preempted every year by coal extraction and the permanent
infrastructure of a coal-fired power plant would be roughly 766,000 m2 and the power density of the entire extraction-generation enterprise would be about 1,000 W/m2:
800 MW/766,000 m2 = 1,044.4 W/m2
An even larger area would be needed by a plant located far away from a mine (supplied by a unit train or by barge), [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Three years ago, automakers' support was crucial for the passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act which mandated massive increases in ethanol for the Nation's
gasoline . But back then automakers hadn't gone into the abyss financially and were looking for ways to sell more flex-fuel vehicles while securing government bailouts. Detroit
needed the support of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and the political support of Big Ethanol. [Read
More] (Nicholas E. Hollis, Energy Tribune)
The era of carefree motoring may soon be over, according to a study which reveals that drivers of the new generation of electric cars are plagued by nagging fears of being
left stranded by a flat battery.
They narrow their horizons and rarely venture far from home, abandoning the old notion of the freedom of the open road.
A six-month trial involving 264 drivers found that almost all experienced “range anxiety” and travelled only short distances.
They were over cautious when planning journeys and allowed themselves a generous safety margin to avoid the need to recharge en route. They tended to avoid using their cars if
the battery indicator showed that the charge level was less than 50 per cent. (The Times)
People are always going to mistrust the rotten things until such time as you can run out and then get going again almost immediately with a spare can of
electrons. Can't do that? Better make really sure you don't run out then, eh?
A proposed subsidy for green central heating will lead to a sharp rise in energy bills, threaten the manufacturing recovery and drive companies abroad, consumer watchdogs
and business groups say.
The renewable heat incentive, due to be introduced next April, will benefit anyone who installs renewable heating devices such as biomass boilers, solar-thermal water heaters
or ground-source heat pumps.
But such equipment is expensive and suitable only for owner-occupiers. However, the bills of all energy consumers will go up to pay for the subsidy.
Businesses and consumer groups are concerned that interventions in the energy market are forcing up bills. (The Times)
WASHINGTON - Americans are being
"bombarded" with chemicals, gases and radiation that can cause cancer and the federal government must do far more to protect them, presidential cancer advisers said
on Thursday.
Although most experts agree that as many as two-thirds of cancer cases are caused by lifestyle choices like smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise, the two-member panel said
many avoidable cancers were also caused by pollution, radon gas from the soil and medical imaging scans. (Reuters Health)
Is this purely enviro-whacko gibberish or is there a more sinister factor at play?
The timeline is certainly troubling: Obamacare rammed through; Obamacare must cut costs; medical imaging costs much $s; scare people about medical imaging; clone Big Tobacco
profit theft and claim Big Chemical and other industry "causes" expensive to treat cancers; misappropriate business profits to prop up socialized medicine...
Are Kripke and Leffall associated with total looney tunes Frederick vom Saal per chance? I do know that in 1987, Dr. Kripke served as Chair of the Environmental Protection
Agency Science Advisory Board Subcommittee on Causes and Effects of Stratospheric Ozone Depletion -- the insane bunch that decided that, by preventing a 10-percent decline in
ozone and a concomitant rise in ground-level UVB, the agency was preventing millions of UVB-induced skin cancers. EPA's estimate of monetized benefits from the rules ranged
from $8 trillion to $32 trillion dollars. And, despite study after study conceding that the predicted longterm UVB increase has not been measured, and no clear evidence of a
link between ozone loss and increasing skin cancer incidence or even that UVB is the radiation of significance, no one at the agency has ever suggested that the ludicrously
high estimate of benefits was wrong.
A government report claims that the way Americans farm could be putting the public at risk for cancer and recommends people eat more organic products.
The study was issued today by the President’s Cancer Panel and is a look at the potential risks from the environment. The cancer panel has two members – the third seat is
vacant – and both were appointees of President George W. Bush.
The study includes a chapter on agriculture and goes into a number of potential health hazards, including from pesticides such as the herbicide atrazine that’s used on corn
fields but also from nitrogen fertilizers and veterinary pharmaceuticals. Fertilizer may increase cancer risk through the breakdown of the nitrogen during digestion, the study
said. Nitrogen from fields seeps below ground and into drinking water supplies. (Philip Brasher, Des Moines Register)
With the presidential ink not quite dry on the health overhaul legislation, Republicans and their conservative allies promise to repeal it. That could prove a long battle,
one that could stretch out for years.
But opponents of the administration's plan should take heart. One of its main proposals is on the cusp of being repealed. Not here in America, but across the Atlantic in the
United Kingdom.
With health costs spiraling, one of the core ideas of the White House's health takeover is the creation of an independent body of experts to steer clinical decisions.
IPAB, the Independent Payments Advisory Board, is founded on the belief that Washington bureaucrats can help manage health care decisions, adjusting Medicare payments to reward
excellence and punish waste.
The idea doesn't sound unreasonable. As the president has noted, there often is a red pill and a blue pill, with the red one costing twice as much, yet no more effective.
If the logic is seductive, it's easy to understand why Britain's prime minister embraced the idea in 1999. Faced with rapid inflation in the socialized National Health Service,
Tony Blair created NICE, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence. (IBD)
NEW YORK - Most black adolescents have insufficient amounts of the sunshine vitamin in their blood, even those living in the sunny southeastern US, new research shows.
About a third of white teens also had insufficient vitamin D levels, Dr. Yanbin Dong of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and colleagues found. And while actual
deficiency of the vitamin was rare among whites -- seen in only 3 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys -- it was common for black adolescents, especially girls.
Several studies have found a high prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency in adolescents, the researchers note. However, investigations in sunnier locales have looked at vitamin
D levels in the winter months, when scarcer sun means levels are lower. (Reuters Health)
Maybe it's a cost Kripke and the EPA forgot to factor in when they did that absurd ozone layer hysteria thing... Gosh the loons have a lot to answer for.
LONDON - Weight-loss surgery should only be used in the most severely obese of children, and then only with extreme caution due to the risks and the fact its effectiveness
remains unknown, health experts advised on Thursday.
In a review of studies on the obesity epidemic, scientists from Britain and the United States said lifestyle changes such as better diet and more exercise should always be the
first option, and treatment with drugs should be used rarely.
Bariatric surgery, or weight-loss surgery, such as operations to apply gastric bands to limit the stomach size of severely overweight people, should be a last resort, they
said.
"The risks of bariatric surgery are substantial, and long-term safety and effectiveness in children remain largely unknown," Sue Kimm of the University of New Mexico,
Debbie Lawlor of Britain's Bristol University and Joan Han of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote in The Lancet journal. (Reuters)
AFRICA is the “underdammed” continent. It is the least irrigated and electrified, yet it uses only 3% of its renewable water, against 52% in South Asia. So there is
plenty of scope for an African dam-building boom. Ghana long ago dammed the River Volta, Egypt the Nile, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique the Zambezi. But there are new projects
aplenty.
Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for instance, is so proud of the new Merowe dam in the north of his country that he made it a selling-point in his recent election
campaign. Costing $1.8 billion, it will produce 1,250 megawatts and create a lake 174km (108 miles) long, above the Nile’s fourth cataract. If all goes well, it may even
fulfil an old dream to irrigate swathes of farmland in northern Sudan, while sending electricity to run the thirsty air-conditioners of Khartoum. And all without dirtying the
atmosphere, once the dams have been built.
China is building most of Africa’s new dams out of its own pocket, with all sorts of hoped-for spin-offs. International Rivers, a lobby that tries to save rivers from dams it
says are destructive, admits that the Chinese are much greener these days. China Eximbank cancelled a loan for a dam in Gabon on environmental grounds. Even so, political
instability, graft and incompetence have meant that many African dams, once built, have failed to produce what was promised. The Inga I and II dams on the Congo river have
generated a fraction of the power they were meant to. The technology is demanding. Seasonal rains produce muddy rivers, with higher sedimentation than northern countries’
dams filled with melted snow. That means a shorter lifespan and heavier maintenance. Angola has spent $400m overhauling its dams and transmission lines. (The Economist)
In a perfect world, scientific research is supposed to be completely objective and free of conflicts of interest. But University of South Florida researchers say that
politics can overtake facts, with potentially detrimental effects for the integrity of science and the health of ecosystems.
In a paper published in the journal Conservation Letters, biologists Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy document the impacts of conflicts of interest on science, humanity,
biodiversity and ecosystem services, educate the readers on how to identify the many guises of conflicts of interest, and offer recommendations to reduce conflicts of interest
for enhanced environmental and human health. (PhysOrg.com)
Yeah? Do they tell people how to identify misanthropists? Best advice I've seen is "Do something for the planet -- eat your greens".
Study claims to have turned up many dozens of errors and misleading statements in a review of published data.
Buried within a new paper discussing conflict-of-interest issues is an intriguing little case study. It looks at risks to wildlife from atrazine — a widely used herbicide —
as assessed by a massive peer-reviewed analysis of published data. It charges that this analysis “misrepresented over 50 studies and had 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading
statements.”
Strong charges, and worth investigating. But after talking to the lead authors of the review paper and its critique, I come away with a suspicion that the real take-home
message here is about something quite different: publishing’s ability to vet massive quantities of scientific information. The issue emerges in an examination of a 2008 paper
in Critical Reviews in Toxicology. “Based on a weight of evidence analysis of all of the data,” it concluded, “the central theory that environmentally relevant
concentrations of atrazine affect reproduction and/or reproductive development in fish, amphibians, and reptiles is not supported by the vast majority of observations.” For
many other potential toxic endpoints, it said, “there is such a paucity of good data that definitive conclusions cannot be made.” (Janet Raloff, Science News)
Under-investment in agriculture has left many governments across Africa struggling to feed their people, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
director-general Jacques Diouf said on Thursday.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, since 2009, over 265 million people are malnourished and 30 percent of the population suffers from hunger," Diouf said at the 26th session of
FAO's Regional Conference for Africa in Luanda.
"This situation clearly demands our urgent and undivided attention."
He said only nine African countries had kept a promise made at an African Union Summit in 2003 to allocate at least 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture.
(Reuters)
As the world's aid agencies scramble, yet again, to feed millions of hungry in Africa's Sahel, some smallholders in the semi-arid region are reporting bumper harvests of
onions, potatoes and tomatoes.
The reason? Drip irrigation systems made up of water tanks and rows of black pipes, an Israeli innovation that some predict could end the area's aid dependency. Others however,
including supporters of the system, warn of caveats.
"With the watering cans, we couldn't do more than one harvest per year. With this innovation, we can do as many as three, so our earnings are multiplied by three,"
said Yamar Diop, a 73-year-old father of ten.
During a visit to the region last week, U.N. aid chief John Holmes appealed not just for the tens of millions of dollars needed to keep people alive, but for more action to
address the root causes of the recurrent food crises.
Farmers like Diop say they are doing just that. He is one of about 2,500 farmers across the Sahel who, over the last few years, have taken part in the African Market Garden, an
Israeli initiative to use low pressure drip irrigation to break dependence on rain and boost crops, nutrition and incomes.
Diop's harvests will earn him 800,000 CFA francs ($1,624) over the year, while the U.N. will spend $190 million over the same period to get through the food crisis, prompting
calls for the donors to invest more on long term projects.
"Niger is going to have a big problem this year," said Dov Pasternak, the head of the Sahel programme at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid
Tropics (ICRISAT), referring to the rush to bring aid into the land-locked nation.
"This will cost millions but how much is being spent on agriculture? I have a gut feeling the ratio is huge in favor of food relief," he said. "It is the poverty
that we have to deal with, rather than providing food security." (Reuters)
Climate and agricultural researchers, policy makers, donors, and development agencies, both governmental and non-governmental, from all over the world have just met in
Nairobi for a one-day conference, ‘Building Food Security in the Face of Climate Change’. The conference was an important part of a big international Mega Programme on
Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The programme’s secretariat is based at LIFE- Faculty of Life Sciences at University of Copenhagen. (Press Release)
All hysteria aside, we have no reason to expect significant warming and planning should not assume it will occur.
Climate change experts face a "McCarthy-like" persecution by politically-motivated opponents, some of the world's leading scientists have claimed.
In a letter published in the journal Science, more than 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates, condemned the increase in
"political assaults" on scientists who argue greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet.
The 'climategate' scandal and mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have led to a surge in attacks on climate scientists around the world. (Louise
Gray, TDT)
Scientists "disappear" historically well-documented events like the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age cold through tricks and data hiding
to perpetrate a fraud with potential societal costs of trillions of dollars and literally millions of lives but reigning in this fraud is "McCarthyism"?
Scientists who politicize their fields, or allow them to be politicized really can't whine about "political assaults", can they? Climate is one
of the biggest political games of contemporary times -- even the alleged arbiter is the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change, not the Interdisciplinary Panel or
the Dispassionate Science Panel but the purely political IPCC.
At its 40th Session in 1988 the WMO Executive Council decided on the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and you've had since
that time to raise concerns about political interference (which has always been considerable, to say the least) but you did nothing.
Interestingly, this was the same session in which the ozone farce was successfully launched (Sherwood Roland and
Mario J. Molina had been peddling that nonsense since 1974 from UC Irvine although the "issue" was allegedly "discovered" in 1985 -- just conveniently
ignoring that the seasonal phenomenon was actually observed in 1956 and hasn't changed since). So, too, was "acid rain" created as an issue although it has since
properly died a quiet death -- 1988 was a big year for Maurice Strong and the people haters.
Louise Gray’s latest article in the Daily Telegraph suggests that climate scientists caught in the Climategate and other scandals are
feeling picked on. In fact they ‘likened the situation to the ‘McCarthy era’ in the US where anyone suspected of communist links was threatened with
persecution.’
Specifically, members of the US National Academy of Sciences said:
“We call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by
politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them,” the letter read.
Where was the National Academy of Sciences and Louise Gray when skeptical scientists were being threatened with violence, prosecution and even execution? Or is it only
a matter of concern when warmists are feeling the heat, so to speak?
Here are TEN very real threats issued to skeptics:
Heidi
Cullen, of The Weather Channel ‘is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their “Seal of Approval” for any television weatherman who
expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.’
Talking
Points Memo pondered the question ‘at what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?’
Death
threats were made against Tim Ball and others.
Greenpeace uttered a threat to skeptics, ‘we know where you live’
David
Suzuki called for politicians who questioned global warming science to be jailed.
Joe
Romm wanted to strangle skeptics in their beds.
NASA’s
James Hansen suggested skeptics be tried for high crimes against humanity.
Notice the difference between the skeptics being threatened and the warmists crying McCarthyism is that in the first instance, many prominent warmists were performing the
McCarthyism.
I guess it would asking too much for Louise Gray to try and do a journalist’s job. Even once. (Daily Bayonet)
It looks like the University of Virginia does not plan to resist a subpoena from Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) asking for documents related to the work of climate
scientist and former professor Michael Mann, despite requests from some advocacy groups that it does so.
In a statement this evening, university spokesman Carol Wood said the school has received a 60-day extension to reply to the civil investigative demand. The new date for
handing over documents related to Mann's work is July 26. But while she said that it is appropriate for groups like the ACLU and the American Association of University
Professors -- both of which have urged the university's visitors to go to court to resist Cuccinelli's request -- to weigh in, the school plans to turn over documents it
retains from Mann's tenure at the school. He left in 2005.
"The attorney general has broad authority to initiate an investigation such as this. And we are required by law to comply with the AG's request," Wood said. "At
the same time, it is important that groups like the Faculty Senate and the AAUP take a stand. They are the ones able to initiate a public debate about state policy and whether
the policy needs to be reviewed.
"The University has never received a complaint or allegation of academic misconduct on the part of Professor Mann. Had we, as a research institution, we have ample
procedures in place to address such allegations. And while we may not understand the basis of the CID, we will gather what information may still reside at the University."
(WaPo)
WE KNEW Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) had declared war on reality. Now he has declared war on the freedom of academic inquiry as well. We hope that Gov.
Robert F. McDonnell (R) and the University of Virginia have the spine to repudiate Mr. Cuccinelli's abuse of the legal code. If they do not, the quality of Virginia's
universities will suffer for years to come. (WaPo)
Odd. I just can't seem to locate their spirited defense of that State Climatologist of Virginia. Now, what was his name... ? Oh yeah: "In 1980, the
University of Virginia recruited the [1980-2006] current Climatologist, Dr. Patrick Michaels, to become the permanent State Climatologist. On July 8th, 1980, Governor
Dalton sent a letter of appointment to Dr. Michaels in which he states: 'It is my pleasure to appoint you as State Climatologist.'" I know the WaPo must have
raised such a spirited defense but it just doesn't seem to be immediately available from archive...
A long-awaited bill to reduce pollution that contributes to global warming could be unveiled in the Senate next week, but likely without the public backing of an influential
Republican lawmaker, Senator Joseph Lieberman said on Thursday. (Reuters)
Oh... Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric
pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon
dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not
an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric
pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon
dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not
an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric
pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon
dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not
an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric
pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant! Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant!
Rep. James Sensenbrenner today releases a report calling the science behind the EPA's endangerment finding for carbon dioxide into question.
May 6, 2010
- by Charlie Martin
This morning, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), ranking member of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, will release a staff report on the scientific
issues that tend to discredit the EPA’s endangerment finding for carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
The report’s release coincides with the opening of a committee hearing entitled “The Foundation of Climate Science.” During the hearing the committee will hear testimony
from five experts — four defending the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its reports against the criticisms raised since the release of the Climategate
files last November, and one, Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who is a noted skeptic (as well as a Pajamas Media contributor).
The report summarizes a number of revelations that, according to Rep Sensenbrenner’s staff, combine to call into question the scientific validity of the IPCC’s Fourth
Assessment Report (AR4). Many of these have been reported in Pajamas Media since our original report on the Climategate files. (PJM)
The United States, Canada, and Mexico have proposed to amend a landmark global pact protecting the ozone layer to fight emissions of a refrigerant chemical thousands of
times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the U.S. EPA said on Thursday.
The proposal would expand the Montreal Protocol to phase down emissions of hydroflourocarbons, also known as HFCs, which are up to 14,000 times more damaging to the planet's
climate system than carbon dioxide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said.
"Reducing HFCs would help slow climate change and curb potential public health impacts," the EPA said in a release. (Reuters)
AUSTRALIANS are rebelling against the idea they should pay to fight global warming, entrenching the Federal Government's woes on the issue.
A new survey showed more than a third of voters don't want to pay for climate-change bills.
The authoritative Galaxy opinion survey also found that those who buy the family groceries and low-income earners are in the forefront of the new resistance.
It is a sign much of the electorate accept Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's ETS description as "a great big new tax".
The Government's abrupt, three-year pause in introducing an emissions trading scheme angered many of the 35 per cent of voters who believe human activity is changing the
climate.
Now even some of those believers are refusing to pay the rises in power bills and other household costs which would be caused by an ETS, the survey has found.
About 35 per cent of all voters told Galaxy they did not want to pay a cent, and that group included 15 per cent of people who agreed with the concept of man-made climate
change.
Of the change believers, 27 per cent would not pay more than $100 a year extra.
Almost half - 47 per cent - would not pay more than $100 a year to combat climate change, the poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs showed.
About 60 per cent would not pay more than $300 a year.
If you buy the family groceries, you strongly oppose paying much if anything for an ETS.
The survey found 37 per cent of those who bought family supplies would not pay anything, and just over half would not pay more than $100 a year.
The survey showed two-thirds of respondents were not convinced by man-made climate change, despite "billions of dollars of government propaganda," said John Roskam of
the Institute of Public Affairs.
"These polls also show Australians won't pay huge amounts of money to fix a problem they are not sure exists," said Mr Roskam.
The lower your income, the less you are likely to want higher bills, which is why nearly half the unemployed oppose the idea.
The greatest opposition to paying even a cent extra came from Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. (Malcolm Farr, The Daily Telegraph)
Backers of a state initiative to suspend California’s global warming law, AB 32, say they’ve turned in nearly twice the number of signatures needed to qualify for the
Nov 2. ballot.
I’m going to use this post to describe the reasoning and evidence for the initiative and some of the evidence questioning the theory of man-caused climate change —
especially the preoccupation with carbon dioxide.
This perspective is usually downplayed by other reporters, many of whom seem to think of themselves as part of a save-the-planet crusade, with a duty to persuade the public to
join. I disagree. Moreover, since the conventional wisdom is so widely available elsewhere in the media, I don’t feel the need to repeat it here. (Bradley Fikes, NC Times)
A leading Chinese government adviser has criticised the gap between Kevin Rudd's action and rhetoric on climate change, saying he has reduced the chance that the world can
curb global warming before it is too late.
Pan Jiahua, who addressed the Politburo on climate change policy in February, said the Prime Minister's decision to postpone the emissions trading scheme gave rich countries an
excuse to do less and discouraged developing countries from doing anything.
''If he gives up on the ETS it suggests Australia will do nothing and the private sector will get the signal not to do anything to cut emissions,'' said Professor Pan, director
of the Research Centre for Sustainable Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
''It is bad for Australia's image and sends a very negative message to the global community that the global target of limiting global warming to 2C by 2050 will not be
achieved. The message to the developing world is that 'if even an industrialised country like Australia can't do it, how can we do it?''' (SMH)
Hopefully that's the message the world will take from it (likely to be the only leadership K.Rudd will ever be able to claim). It is time to bury gorebull
warbling.
A group of European development agencies will launch a joint climate change fund to promote low-carbon and sustainable investments in emerging countries, the agencies said
on Thursday.
The European Investment Bank (EIB), France's Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD) and 12 members of the European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI) will sign a
memorandum of understanding to launch the Interact Climate Change Fund at a meeting in Bruges, Belgium on Friday.
The fund will create a portfolio of climate friendly private sector investments across countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, the agencies said in
a statement. (Reuters)
Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It's about money and
power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren't corrupted. Europe's
Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it's turned out to be a scam built upon a scam. (IBD)
Small investors could be big losers if a greenhouse gas reduction plan known as cap and trade becomes law and accounting standards for carbon credits have not been
established, according to a new study released today by a University of California, Davis, professor.
In an analysis of pending federal legislation and accounting practices, UC Davis management professor Paul Griffin determined that U.S. companies would receive up to $36
billion in climate change allowances next year under provisions of a bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed last year.
But their balance sheets would show only $7.5 billion in allowances using an accounting procedure set by a federal energy agency. Companies also could choose from one of
several other established accounting standards, each of which would produce very different results, according to Griffin.
"There will be confusion," said Griffin, an accounting expert at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. "The average public investor will be at a
disadvantage relative to a professional investor like Goldman Sachs." (UC Davis)
Imagine a green fuel that could power our cars, keep the wheels of industry turning, and wean us off our addiction to oil - a fuel called CO2 (Duncan Graham-Rowe for Green
Futures, part of the Guardian Environment Network)
Look what they envisage: "A fuel that could stop climate change in its tracks, and send carbon levels plunging to pre-industrial levels. A fuel
that allows business as usual to carry on as before – emissions and all. Because that fuel is… CO2." God help us all!
Look you morons, atmospheric carbon dioxide is an environmental asset -- a resource nourishing the biosphere (that's wild critters and their habitat as well as us). We do not
want to reduce its availability under any circumstance. What have you got against life anyway?
“[Robert] Mendelsohn’s position is rather similar to yours…. He believes the impacts are not negative at all for the US and most of the
developed countries. Most impact studies seem to be showing this. It leads us to think that a little warming is not so bad. Glad I have kept my mouth shut on this issue of
which I know so little.”
- Gerald North (Texas A&M) to Rob Bradley (Enron), November 12, 1999
“I agree that the case for 2C warming [for a doubling of manmade greenhouse gas forcing in equilibrium] is pretty strong.”
- Gerald R. North to Rob Bradley, email communication, August 13, 2007.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published my letter-to-the-editor rebutting Kerry
Emanuel’s letter, which, in turn, was critical of his fellow MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate
Science in Denial.”
My arguments opposing those of Professor Emanuel (see entire letter below)
are fairly straightforward, but I end with this challenge:
“But when will many climate scientists, including Mr. Emanuel, face Climategate and the fact that the human influence on climate, on net, is
as likely to be positive than negative?”
Is this challenge rash, or is it backed by the facts? Well, let’s consider the views of an esteemed climate economist and an esteemed
climate scientist. They are, respectively,
Robert O. Mendelsohn (Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy;
Professor of Economics; and Professor, School of Management)
Gerald R. North (Distinguished Professor, Physical Section,
Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the
Department of Oceanography).
Dr. North’s long held sensitivity estimate of 2ºC for a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations is one-third below the “best guess” of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (or the IPCC’s best guess is one-half greater than that of Dr. North). That is a big difference, and if you believe Mendelsohn et al. that a 2ºC for
2x results in net positive benefits for the world, then voila!
Is it radical to believe that the human influence on climate, on net, has more positives than negatives for many decades out and even beyond a century or more?
After all, the CO2 fertilization effect is a strong positive, and warmer and wetter is going in the right direction for the biopshere…
Perhaps CO2 as the green greenhouse gas is ‘closet’ mainstream, if North’s (private) views are considered. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
UK voters head to the polls today to choose any new government they want, as long as it comes in green. The EPA does some Californication to farmers and the Guardian
continues its countdown to the end of the world (you have about 6.5 years left, in case you were interested). (Daily Bayonet)
On our ABC there’s
lots of talk “about evidence” but next to nothing of actual evidence. (The empty homage to “evidence” is handy though, it keeps the pretense alive that
it’s a scientific conversation). Stefan Lewandowsky is still doing his Picasso-brain-best to search in all the wrong places for enlightenment.
Is the planet warming from man-made CO2? Lewandowsky “knows” it is. Why? Because the 9/11 truthers are conspiracy theorists (and conspiracies are always wrong).
O’ look, a few people ask odd questions about an accident in a building years ago, and sometimes those people are also the species Homo Sapiens Climata Scepticus (!). So it
follows (if you are insane) that because some people still doubt the official story of an unrelated past event, man-made global warming will contribute 3.7W/m2 in
the year 2079, and we’ll all become souffles in the global Sahara.
I’m not making this stuff up. I’ve tallied up the obvious errors from both articles. His power to confuse himself with red herrings is … “impressive”.
Lewandowsky scorecard for logic and reason
Argument from authority 4
Baseless Assertion
3
Unsubstantiated Name-calling 1
Ad hominem
2
Red Herring
6
Total
– 16
Lewandowsky uses his Magic Fairy Debating Dust to preemptively stop discussions of climate science evidence. If anyone complains against any mainstream position on
anything, he can define whatever it is as a “conspiracy theory”. Then his omnipotent powers as a cognitive scientist kick in. I quote: “The nature of conspiracy
theories and their ultimate fate is reasonably well understood by cognitive scientists”.He who knows can foresee the ultimate fate of all conspiracy theories.
A handy talent which could save us doing expensive Royal Commissions, or Supreme Courts, or heck, we could just use this talent to save us the bother of any courts or
commissions or investigations at all.
So God and Lewandowsky, apparently, can always tell the difference between a whistle-blower and conspiracy theorist. (Too bad some conspiracies have turned out to be right.
And who cares if a lot of skeptics don’t think it’s a conspiracy in any case). Lewandowsky uses the name-calling to “poison the well” against people who don’t
even believe in a conspiracy, but happen to also be skeptical… More
» (Jo Nova)
It might not feel like it, but summer in Britain now arrives 18 days earlier than half a century ago, according to a new study. (TDT)
... does this include or is it in addition to "In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a
resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually."? (The Cooling World, Newsweek, April 28, 1975)
A La Nina weather phenomenon, the lesser-known cousin of the more famous El Nino weather anomaly, will most likely develop in the second half of 2010, the U.S. Climate
Prediction Center said Thursday.
La Nina will come hard on the heels of an El Nino blamed for excessive rains in Brazil and the worst drought in 37 years in India. That raises the distinct possibility of more
storms developing during the Atlantic Hurricane season which begins on June 1.
CPC, a unit of the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said a large number of computer models indicates "the onset of La Nina conditions."
CPC said that many computer models have shown an increased tendency for cooler sea surface readings.
This, in addition "to various oceanic and atmospheric indicators, indicate a growing possibility of La Nina developing during the second half of 2010." (Reuters)
I’ve mentioned before how chosen color schemes greatly influence how people see surface temperature data. Frank points out that sea surface temperature presentations
suffer from the same problem. – Anthony
Guest post by Frank Lansner
This is no news – but still needs to be told. NOAA can in many contexts come up with the hottest temperatures available. Here we take a look at the European Sea Surface
Temperatures as of 3 may 2010.
NOAA vs. UNISYS, SST, Europe. When I look at this compare, again and again I have to check if these SST are from the very same date, 3 may 2010. But they are. Differences
are immense to an extend where it hardly makes sense to look after the European SST?
NOAA is hotter than UNISYS in for example these waters: Continue reading →
(WUWT)
Potential climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide might be better understood by examining fossil plant remains from millions of years ago, according to
biogeochemists. The types of carbon within the leaves can serve as a window into past temperatures and environmental conditions.
"Carbon isotopes are really important for understanding the carbon cycle of the past, and we care about the carbon cycle of the past because it gives us clues about future
climate change," said Aaron Diefendorf, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State.
Carbon naturally occurs in two non-radioactive isotopes -- different forms of the same element -- carbon 12 and carbon 13. Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere as carbon
dioxide. The ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 within a plant mirrors the ratio in the atmosphere, which varies with changes in the carbon cycle -- the cycling of the element
carbon through plants and animals, the ocean, the atmosphere and Earth's crust.
Clues about how the environment responded to global warming events millions of years ago can be found in carbon isotope ratios from ancient fossil leaves, sediments and pollen.
However, environmental conditions also impact leaf carbon isotope ratios, a complexity that Diefendorf and Kevin Mueller, graduate student in ecology, Penn State, set out to
resolve with their study. (Penn State)
They're sticking with the faddish modern assumption atmospheric carbon dioxide drives rather than responds to temperature. We have no evidence that that is
true or even possible.
The classic cure for hyperventilation is to put a paper bag over your head, which increases your CO2 levels and reduces the amount of Oxygen in your bloodstream.
Global warmers have been hyperventilating over CO2 on Venus, ever since Carl Sagan made popular the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect. That was when he wasn’t
warning about nuclear winter.
I bought off on the “runaway greenhouse” idea on Venus for several decades (without smoking pot) and only very recently have come to understand that the theory is beyond
absurd. I explain below. Continue reading →
(WUWT)
“In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific
activity, and where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage.”
Today I present a clear example of the use of the National Academy of Sciences [as represented by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences- PNAS] to
promote a particular set of policy actions, where climate science, as percieved by the authors of the PNAS, is used as the reasoning.
“At last, all the major emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have agreed under the Copenhagen Accord that global average temperature increase should be kept below 2 °C.
This study develops the criteria for limiting the warming below 2 °C, identifies the constraints imposed on policy makers, and explores available mitigation avenues. One
important criterion is that the radiant energy added by human activities should not exceed 2.5 (range: 1.7–4) watts per square meter (Wm−2) of the Earth’s surface. The
blanket of man-made GHGs has already added 3 (range: 2.6–3.5) Wm−2. Even if GHG emissions peak in 2015, the radiant energy barrier will be exceeded by 100%,
requiring simultaneous pursuit of three avenues: (i) reduce the rate of thickening of the blanket by stabilizing CO2 concentration below 441 ppm during this century (a
massive decarbonization of the energy sector is necessary to accomplish this Herculean task), (ii) ensure that air pollution laws that reduce the masking effect of
cooling aerosols be made radiant energy-neutral by reductions in black carbon and ozone, and (iii) thin the blanket by reducing emissions of short-lived GHGs. Methane and
hydrofluorocarbons emerge as the prime targets. These actions, even if we are restricted to available technologies for avenues ii and iii, can reduce the probability of
exceeding the 2 °C barrier before 2050 to less than 10%, and before 2100 to less than 50%. With such actions, the four decades we have until 2050 should be exploited to
develop and scale-up revolutionary technologies to restrict the warming to less than 1.5 °C.”
The text in the abstract highlights the advocacy nature of this article; i.e.
“This study……… identifies the constraints imposed on policy makers”
The authors present the problem with the climate system as a result of the human emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and then discusses the “Policy Makers’
Dilemma”.
The next section in the paper, titled “Challenges for Policy Makers”, further illustrates that the two authors recommend policy. This section reads
in part
The planet is very likely to experience warming in excess of 2 °C if policy makers stringently enforce existing air pollution laws and remove reflecting aerosols without
concomitant actions for thinning the GHG blanket…”
I have posted on this recommendation by Dr. Ramanthan in the past and conclude that ANY attempt not to enforce existing air pollution laws is a serious mistake with
respect to human health; e.g.
However, regardless of the merits of the policy recommendations of Ramanathan and Xu, 2010, the National Academy of Sciences publication is being used to lobby for a
particular set of policy actions, which they justify by their presentation of the climate science issue. Since Dr. Ramanthan is a member of the National Academy of
Sciences, he is able to straightforwardly publish in this journal.
Readers of my weblog can decide for themselves if this is the proper use of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, it is clear that advocacy is
being framed using climate science, as the authors perceive it, as the justification for their policy prescriptions.
The confirmation of Dick Lindzen’s issues with respect to the lack of scientific objectivity also is evident in the news release on the Ramanathan and Xu,2010
paper. The news release by Brian Moore of Scripps is titled
“The ‘low-hanging fruits’ approach to one of mankind’s great challenges is very appealing because it is a win-win approach,” said Jay Fein, program director in
NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funds much of Ramanathan’s research. “It cleans up the environment, protects human health and helps to
sustain the 2-degree C threshold.”
Thus, as Dick Lindzen wrote
”….we have the new paradigm where ….. government largely determines the nature of scientific activity.”
Clearly, NSF itself has become an advocate for particular policy actions. I will have more examples of how the NSF is limiting research in upcoming posts on my weblog.
(Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
THE explosion that claimed 11 lives and sent the Deepwater Horizon, a billion-dollar oil rig, to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, was bad enough. But for the inhabitants of
America’s Gulf coast, for BP, the huge British firm that owns the well, and for the oil industry as a whole, the bad news is flowing as relentlessly as the oil gushing from
ruptured pipes a mile below the waves (see article). Efforts to close an emergency shut-off valve have failed. BP is trying to drop huge domes over the leaks and siphon off the
oil they collect. But if that fails, it could be months before a second well is completed, reducing the pressure in the first and thus stemming the flow. (The Economist)
DRILLING for oil is a balancing act. If the pressure of the working fluids in the well, or the strength of concrete holding the piping in place, cannot balance the immense
pressure of the oil down below, then things get very bad, very quickly. On April 20th, for some reason as yet unknown, the pressure in a well that had been drilled by the
Deepwater Horizon, a rig that BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies, was using to explore a new field in the Gulf of Mexico, got out of balance. The well blew its top,
causing an explosion and subsequent fire which claimed the lives of 11 of the rig’s crew of 126 and eventually sent the rig itself to the bottom of the ocean, a mile below
the surface and some 40 miles (64km) off the Louisiana coast. (The Economist)
WHEN the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989 and dumped its oily cargo into Alaskan waters, it killed hordes of beautiful creatures and cost billions to clean up. The current
spill in the Gulf of Mexico could prove even worse. A tanker can leak its load, but no more. A broken pipe connected to an oilfield may continue leaking until it is fixed. And
since fixing it involves sending remote-controlled submarines a mile below the surface to tinker with mangled machinery in the dark, that could take a while. Small wonder that
Barack Obama sounds so grave. (The Economist)
BARACK OBAMA’S administration has promised to keep its boot firmly applied to BP’s neck. Many people would be happier if the boot were a blade. Fishermen who worry that
their livelihoods are in peril; shareholders who have seen the value of BP’s shares plunge; local Democratic politicians who want to make sure they cannot be blamed for
reacting too slowly: the list of boot-and-blade wielders is growing longer by the day. (The Economist)
As they struggle to plug a leak from a ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, BP and federal officials are also engaging in one of the largest and most aggressive
experiments with chemical dispersants in the history of the country, and perhaps the world.
With oil continuing to gush from the deep well, they have sprayed 160,000 gallons of chemical dispersant on the water’s surface and pumped an additional 6,000 gallons
directly onto the leak, a mile beneath the surface.
John Curry, director of external affairs at BP, said the company was encouraged by the results so far. But some environmental groups are deeply nervous. (NYT)
In the wake of the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the attempted terrorist bombing of New York’s Times Square, the broadcast media have been full of the
sackcloth and ashes crowd pronouncing once more the end of the hydrocarbon era and the vital need for the U.S. to “break our oil addiction” ASAP.
Their soundbites start with a half-truth and end with a fallacy. We are told that “60 percent of U.S. energy supplies still come from oil and gas,” with the
implication that (i) all of that is imported; and (ii) the pittance that we produce domestically all comes from offshore facilities.
It is true that 60 percent (actually 62.5%) of our energy comes from oil and gas. But the portion that comes from natural gas, about 24% of total U.S. energy
supply, is 85 percent domestically sourced. With oil and liquids, about 45% is domestically sourced. Sure, we use a lot of oil and gas, and most of it, more
than 60%, comes from the U.S. More than two-thirds of that domestic production comes from onshore production facilities.
The fallacious recommendation that emanates from the incomplete data is that the U.S. has no chance to remain a viable society and economy if we continue to rely on all this
foreign (onshore, Alaska, ethanol, Saudi Arabia, Russia, what’s the difference?) and offshore supply. “Therefore, we have no alternative but to turn to .
. . wind, solar, biomass?” The agenda pushers never want to let a good crisis go to waste. But very quietly, mostly out of sight of the
energy policy crowd in Washington, we have seen the emergence of major new sources of domestic energy production – natural gas from coalbeds and shale formations. So
great has been the rise in domestic gas production that it has weakened gas prices worldwide, benefitting users in homes and industry.
Moreover, the US example is setting off emulation in Australia, Canada and China, as well as Europe, promising still further major gas production increases. Without
this production the major conventional gas powers – Russia, Qatar, Algeria, Iran, Libya, Nigeria – would be able to garner ever-increasing market share, and with that
monopoly rents and political power. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
U.S. regulators exempted BP Plc from a detailed environmental review of the exploration project that ultimately resulted in the deadly Gulf of Mexico explosion and
subsequent oil spill, documents show.
The Minerals Management Service granted BP's project a "categorical exclusion" from full environmental analysis normally required under the National Environmental
Policy Act, according to documents made available by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.
BP had argued in a letter to the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a White House agency, last month that the use of the exclusion for projects did not mean environmental
impacts were being ignored, only that an agency agrees they are deemed to be minimal or nonexistent.
The MMS, the branch of the U.S. Interior Department that is responsible for managing oil, gas and other resources on the outer continental shelf, approved the exploration
project on April 6, 2009.
The exclusion puts pressure on President Barack Obama's administration to show it could not have done more to prevent what may become the most damaging oil spill in U.S.
history. (Reuters)
Britain's safety regulator criticized Transocean in 2005 and 2006 over blowout prevention equipment which did the same job as the gear which failed two weeks ago and caused
a huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued Transocean with an improvement notice in 2006, criticizing the testing of a so-called blow out preventer (BOP).
"The multi-purpose tool used in blow-out preventer pressure testing was not so constructed as to be suitable for the purpose for which it was provided: and failed in
service, exposing persons to risks that endangered their safety," the regulator said in a notice in June 2006.
A year earlier, the HSE issued an improvement notice criticizing the condition of the equipment used to operate the BOP on another Semi Submersible Mobile Drilling rig, which a
BP spokesman said was on contract to the London-based oil major.
The regulator's 2005 warning said Transocean had failed to ensure that a remote BOP control panel had been properly maintained.
The notices are available on the regulator's website but the regulator was unable to immediately give further details on the matters on Thursday. On April 20, the Deepwater
Horizon, a semi-submersible drilling rig owned and operated by Transocean and contracted to drill a well for BP, exploded and caught fire.
The companies believe a BOP failed to operate properly when the well hit a pocket of high pressure, causing the explosion. (Reuters)
WASHINGTON — The safety benefits of importing Canadian oil by pipeline should be a consideration in formulating United States energy policy in the wake of the BP oil spill
currently polluting the Gulf of Mexico, a senior State Department official said Thursday.
"It's certainly true that oil that comes by pipeline has far less potential to cause economic damage of that scale because if the pipes are properly constructed, there is
an ability to shut them off if there is an explosion or leakage," David Goldwyn, a senior State Department adviser for international energy issues, told a summit on North
American energy security. (Sheldon Alberts, Canwest News Service)
Brazil will ask oil companies operating its offshore fields to provide information on well control systems and to review their emergency response protocols in the wake of
the BP Gulf of Mexico spill, the ANP energy regulator said late Wednesday.
The vast majority of the roughly 2 million barrels per day that state oil company Petrobras produces in Brazil come from offshore fields, and most of the country's future
output growth is seen coming from ultra-deep water fields.
The ANP said in a statement it had decided to "send information requests to all the concession-holders that operate in Brazilian waters seeking information on well control
systems for offshore drilling."
It will also "ask concession-holders to reevaluate their emergency plans and send documentation to the (ANP) about their respective response capacity." (Reuters)
Energy: After BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, federal and state governments moved quickly to shelve plans to drill off the U.S. coast. But a new poll taken after the
spill suggests Americans still support drilling.
Preliminary results of an IBD/TIPP Poll of 795 U.S. adults, taken from April 30 to May 5, show that a large majority — 59% — approve of "oil exploration and drilling
in America's national territorial waters." Just 31% said they disapprove.
Interestingly, the share who approve of offshore drilling has fallen only a bit since the last time we polled Americans on this topic in July 2008. Back then, 64% supported
offshore drilling — while 25% disapproved — for a swing of just five percentage points.
Why do people still support drilling? The oil spill notwithstanding, Americans are tired of $85 a barrel oil and understand that the panaceas for our energy ills peddled by the
green movement and the left — wind, solar, biomass — are still years off, if ever, from being economically viable.
The cold reality is we need oil. A retreat from drilling would be economically unwise. BP's mess must be put into perspective. (IBD)
Today, few countries are as honest about their energy present and future as China. While American pundits and politicians have been praising China’s solar and wind forays,
Han Xiaoping, an energy expert from the China Energy Net, said that “the so-called ‘new energy’ such as wind power and solar energy can never support China’s
civilization process.” [Read More] (Michael Economides and Xina Xie, Energy
Tribune)
This strange substance could provide vast quantities of natural gas; no surface targets, where warming could release methane into atmosphere
Methane hydrate, sometimes referred to as ice that burns, is a strange lemon-sorbet-looking material that exists naturally in huge quantities in a number of places around the
world, and locks up vast quantities of methane, the primary component of natural gas. Scientists have estimated that there may be somewhere in excess of 1,000 billion tons of
methane hydrate in existence worldwide, a figure thought comparable to the total remaining amount of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and more conventional forms of natural gas.
One of a class of substances referred to by the somewhat arcane scientific name of “clathrates,” methane hydrate consists of methane (which is a gas at normal temperatures
and pressures) trapped in a solid lattice of water molecules, somewhat like ice. The material is only stable within a certain range of pressures and temperatures—shift the
temperature or pressure outside that stability range and methane hydrate will break down, releasing a volume of methane gas amounting to about 164 times the volume of the
original hydrate.
The sensitivity of the material to pressure and temperature means that naturally occurring methane hydrate tends to exist only in certain specific situations, such as in cold
sediments under the coastal margins of the world’s oceans, or deep under the frozen tundra of Arctic lands. Essentially, the hydrates have formed where methane bubbling from
the decomposition of buried organic material has become trapped in wet sediments, where the pressures and temperatures are conducive to hydrate formation. (GoO)
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources met this morning and, among other things, discussed a national renewable electricity standard (RES). The RES, which
mandates that a certain percentage of our nation’s electricity production come from wind, solar, biomass and other renewable energies, already passed out of committee but is
likely to be a part of any energy agenda this year. A new
Heritage Foundation study analyzing the costs of an RES finds that a national mandate for pricier, less reliable electricity would be harmful to American families, American
businesses and the American economy.
The Heritage analysis models the effects
of an RES that starts at 3 percent for 2012 and rises by 1.5 percent per year. This profile mandates a minimum of 15 percent renewable electricity by 2020, a minimum of 22.5
percent by 2025, and a minimum of 37.5 percent by 2035. It looks solely at onshore wind, which is currently the cheapest renewable energy source that can be scaled in
significant fashion. While some studies have attempted to model the economic effects of an RES and found only marginal price increases, they fail to take into account the true
cost of renewable sources. Wind is not dependable, it cannot be stored and it must be built in geographically disadvantageous locations that require significant new build for
transmission lines. A detailed analysis of this can
be found in the study. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis
projects that an RES would: Continue reading... (The
Foundry)
Germany's Bundestag lower house of parliament approved on Thursday controversial cuts for solar power incentives to take effect from July.
Solar subsidies for rooftop installed solar power will see a one-off cut of 16 percent, while most open-field installations will be cut by 15 percent. Support for farmland
solar systems is to be scrapped completely from July. (Reuters)
Health Care: The Democrats' overhaul was going to boost the number of insured Americans, wasn't it? And everyone who liked his own plan could keep it. Except for the 14
million who will lose their coverage at work. (IBD)
It must not be easy being Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, these days.
His latest task is to sell a skeptical Congress on the Obama Administration’s $90 billion bank tax with something of a convoluted snake oil sales pitch. He tried
to make his argument to the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday.
You see, Geithner explained, “Banks should bear the costs for bank failure,” and the tax is really a “too-big-to-fail tax” designed
to recoup funds used to bail out banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Unfortunately for Geithner, that went over about as well as trying to sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. And with good reason.
Here’s why. The banks who received bailout funds already repaid the government, so
the very premise of the tax is null and void. Then there’s the fact that those who haven’t repaid their bailout funds – Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and
Chrysler – don’t have to pay the tax. And the worst
feature? Consumers will bear the brunt of the tax, according
to the Congressional Budget Office.
The United States has the second highest corporate tax rate of any of the 30 countries in the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – a collection of the most economically developed countries in the world. The federal rate is 35 percent. Add on the average
state corporate income tax and United States businesses pay a top rate over 39 percent. This is just below Japan which has a rate slightly over 39.5 percent.
The average corporate income tax rate in the OECD is about 25 percent. The United States’ rate is almost 15
percentage points higher. Of the 30 countries in the OECD, 27 of them have cut their corporate income tax rates since 2000. By standing still, the United States has fallen
behind.
The top marginal tax rate is the tax rate a business will pay on new investment, so it is an important determinant for businesses when they make decisions about where to
locate new facilities. The high U.S. corporate income tax rate is driving jobs overseas as businesses work to remain as competitive as possible in the global marketplace. It
doesn’t help that the United States is the only country in the world that taxes its businesses on the income they earn in foreign countries. Every other country only taxes
businesses on the income earned within their borders. A reduction of the corporate income tax rate down to at least the average 25 percent rate in the OECD is long overdue. Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
ASHBURN, Va. — For generations, the prototypical search-and-rescue case in America was Timmy in the well, with Lassie barking insistently to summon help. Lost children and
adolescents — from the woods to the mall — generally outnumbered all others.
But last year for the first time, another type of search crossed into first place here in Virginia, marking a profound demographic shift that public safety officials say will
increasingly define the future as the nation ages: wandering, confused dementia patients like Freda Machett.
Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer’s disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door.
Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory, are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once,
health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85.
(NYT)
Unfortunately,
CSR may be most effective before it’s a big deal
By William Watson
When BP says it will pay the whole cost of the Gulf of Mexico clean-up, even when its maximum legal liability may be much less, is it making a virtue of necessity? After
all, the U.S. government is promising to “stand on its throat” to make it pay. Might as well volunteer for what is going to happen anyway. Or is it trying to salvage
whatever glimmer of good publicity it can from the oily sludge? Or, finally, is it exhibiting “corporate social responsibility” and being a good “corporate citizen.”
(Many people who object to the idea that corporations can be legal persons nevertheless want them to be good citizens.)
A new paper by the French economists Jean Tirole of the University of Toulouse and Roland Bénabou of Princeton puts corporate social responsibility (CSR) under the lens of
mainstream economics. Mainly, we don’t understand corporation social responsibility. Corporations should seek profits, we think. To do so they must produce desired goods and
services at low prices. If they do, society is well served.
DAR ES SALAAM - African leaders from 26 countries have launched a fresh drive to eliminate malaria using a combination of bed nets, insecticides and medication, Tanzania's
President Jakaya Kikwete said on Wednesday.
About one million people die every year worldwide from the disease, of whom 85 percent are in Africa, Kikwete said.
"We believe that if we cover everybody in Africa with bed nets, insecticides and medication by the end of this year, we will have zero deaths or near zero deaths from
malaria in Africa by 2015," said Ray Chambers, a U.N. special envoy for malaria.
This three-pronged approach had cut malaria cases in the archipelago of Zanzibar to below 1 percent from 40 percent, Kikwete told a news conference of the African Leaders
Malaria Alliance on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Africa.
U.S. Malaria Coordinator Timothy Ziemer said the U.S. government has made a budget request of $680 million for the fight against malaria in 2011. That includes $100 million for
the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, which together account for about half of the world's malaria cases.
Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito. The disease costs Africa over $40 billion a year in treatment and sick days.
(Reuters)
HONG KONG - Childhood vaccines may trigger early onset of a severe form of infant epilepsy, but researchers say the disorder is ultimately caused by defective genes and
lifesaving vaccines should not be withheld from these children.
The researchers said they feared the study published in the Lancet medical journal would scare parents away from getting their children vaccinated but stressed the babies in
the study would likely have developed seizures within months regardless of the vaccine.
The disorder, called Dravet syndrome, generally begins with seizures around six months of age. These children have poor language and motor skills and difficulty relating to
others.
Up to 80 percent of them have mutations in the SCN1A gene.
Anne McIntosh of the University of Melbourne's Epilepsy Research Centre and colleagues examined the medical records of 40 Dravet syndrome patients with the genetic mutation who
had been vaccinated against whooping cough, or pertussis.
They said 30 percent of these children developed their first seizures within two days of receiving the vaccine but symptoms of their disorder were no worse than the other
children who had their first seizures later on.
"In about 30 percent of people, it appears that (first seizures) came on rather quickly after the vaccination. But the overall message is that the outcome to the patients
did not differ regardless of whether the onset of the disorder was shortly after the vaccination, or later on," said McIntosh. (Reuters)
NEW YORK - Moderate drinkers who continue the habit after suffering a heart attack may fare better than their counterparts who give up alcohol, a new study suggests.
Many studies have linked light-to-moderate drinking to a lower risk of developing heart disease, compared with both heavy drinking and abstention. The new findings, published
in the American Journal of Cardiology, are the first to link moderate drinking after a heart attack to health benefits.
Researchers found that among 325 moderate drinkers followed for several years after having a heart attack, those who continued their usual drinking habits generally had better
physical function than those who quit drinking.
They also tended to have less chest pain and report a higher health-related quality of life, but those differences were not significant in statistical terms, so may have been
chance findings.
The findings do not prove that moderate drinking is the reason for the better physical function. (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK - If you've cut down on milk because you think your gut can't tolerate the sugar in it -- called lactose -- you might be doing your health a disservice, a new study
suggests.
Researchers found that in fact, more than half the patients who thought they couldn't digest lactose were mistaken. When they drank a lactose solution corresponding to an
entire quart of milk in the lab, their gut absorbed the sugar normally and they experienced less cramping, gas and other bowel trouble than at home.
"There is extended belief among patients with abdominal symptoms that these are caused by lactose in dairy products," the Spanish researchers write in the journal
Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
"Although one should think that symptom intensity has to be greater after a large lactose load than in daily life at home, our study shows just the opposite," they
add. (Reuters Health)
A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics
over the last 60 years. Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage
treatment technology that broadly improves water quality in surrounding environments. Their report appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science and Technology.
(American Chemical Society)
What is not implicitly stated is that agricultural use can not be driving the trend since the trend is unchanged despite severe restriction in ag usage
over sustained time.
Steve Connor on how the hole in the ozone layer was discovered by UK scientists a quarter of a century ago
It was perceived as one of the greatest environmental threats of the late-20th century. Twenty-five years ago this month, a hole in the ozone layer was detected high in the
atmosphere over the frozen wastes of Antarctica; scientists warned it might spread to other parts of the world, leading to dangerous increases in cancer-causing radiation from
the Sun.
The Earth's protective layer of ozone shields all life from the damaging effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays, and its gradual depletion by the release of man-made chemicals into
the atmosphere threatened a dramatic increase in lethal skin cancers and blinding cataracts – a threat so serious it forced politicians to act.
Just two years after the discovery was publicised in 1985 by a team of three British scientists, the international community had drafted the Montreal Protocol, designed to curb
and eventually ban the use and manufacture of ozone-destroying chemicals, such as the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in products ranging from fridges to aerosol sprays.
The protocol soon led to CFCs being phased out in many countries. Britain ceased production and consumption of CFCs in 1995, followed five years later by other developed
nations. By 2009, all UN member states had signed the basic protocol, which was seen as one of the most successful international agreements on the environment. (The
Independent)
(1) The “fear of looking foolish” seems a particularly childish approach to Science.
Insofar as one is able to argue the reasons for a particular choice in an “unsettled” scientific field, there is of course no foolishness to speak of.
In fact, looking at this the other way around, the fact that one was “very right” once, means nothing about being right in the future. Otherwise, all we would have to do
would be to listen to former Nobel Prize winners.
Sadly, after the trip to Stockholm very few of them are capable of achieving anything remotely important as their acclaimed feat.
(2) There is little hope for Science really, if the goal is to hold on until an orthodoxy develops, and then sheepishly hang on to that.
We can’t simply evolve into separate tribes showing no critical thinking of what happens in other fields. And orthodoxies are meant to crumble, otherwise it is not
“Science”. By the time they become widespread enough for the likes of Wolff to take them as “Truth”, they will likely be ripe for destruction by the next generation of
scientists.
Come to think, a certain guy called Galileo would have failed on the Wolff strategy left, right and centre. Luckily he wasn’t afraid, and didn’t look the other way.
(Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)
Australia has earned the dubious honour of being in the top 10 countries with the worst environmental impact on the planet, according to a major international study of more
than 200 nations. (SMH)
Here's a result to raise national pride -- basically because we emit more greenhouse gas we're seen as environmentally naughty (hold the coal, Santa,
we're major exporters & can look after that part ourselves). As major grain exporters we also use a fair bit of fertilizer in our spectacularly successful dry land
farming (much of our grain is grown on country the UN classifies as "desert" with less than 300 mm annual rainfall). Our fisheries are down a bit, mostly because
greenie-influenced governments and quangos like GBRMPA (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority) have closed enormous and highly productive fisheries, not because the
resources are depleted but because they plain don't like people. Some of our wildlife is in trouble too, mainly because feral cats and foxes are far more efficient
predators against which indigenous critters have no evolved defenses and due to competition and habitat alteration by feral rabbits, camels, goats, horses, donkeys and pigs
-- cane toads too, cause the death of predators unable to cope with bufotoxin (the toads' natural defense) and predate upon and out consume small native critters.
We should do more about the ferals and we should open up a lot more coastline to commercial fisheries, it's true but on the whole Australia can be very proud of the
development about which these dipsticks are so upset. How ironic that one of the things that so upsets them is our greenhouse emission that is helping to green the planet
and shrink the deserts. And some people wonder why I so despise watermelons...
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Travel from the tropics to the poles, and you'll notice that the diversity of mammals declines with distance from the equator. Move from lowland to
mountains, and you'll see diversity increase as the landscape becomes more varied. Ecologists have proposed various explanations for these well-known "biodiversity
gradients," invoking ecological, evolutionary and historical processes. (UMich)
Looking for Asian carp that could pose a dire threat to billion-dollar Great Lakes fisheries, U.S. authorities announced plans on Wednesday to poison, net and shock any
invaders in Chicago-area rivers.
Authorities want to find out if any of the invasive Bighead and Silver Carp -- which have populated the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers -- have made it past electric barriers
erected near Chicago to keep them out of the Great Lakes.
Carp DNA has been found in Lake Michigan, prompting neighboring states to file a lawsuit seeking to have locks closed. The suit seeks a permanent separation of the century-old,
man-made links between the Mississippi River and Great Lakes watersheds.
So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected efforts to close the locks, much to the relief of the commercial barge industry, recreational boaters, and tour operators. (Reuters)
Several species of weeds have developed resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup), threatening crop yields in sections of farmland across the country. According
to the New York Times, “The National Research Council [NRC], which advises the federal government on scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying
that the emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.”
“Herbicide resistance is not a new problem, but it has become a very real problem with specific weeds in certain specific areas,” says Dr. Ross. “This issue will require
some novel approaches as well as application of some older technologies to fight the next round in the ongoing battle between man and weed. It’s also important to note that
NRC report did not suggest that weed resistance would make genetically modified crops obsolete. It just said that the problem is real and that it needs to be managed to
preserve optimum benefits from the technology.”
“Activist groups are touting this report as an argument against biotechnology,” says Stier. “This story has something in common with the unscientific attacks on
genetically modified alfalfa – now the subject of a Supreme Court case – and the attacks on the herbicide atrazine: rather than sound science, they all have their
‘roots’ in the same ideological campaign against the use of modern technology in agriculture.” (ACSH)
Conflicts Of Interest: Supporters of suspending California's climate-change law submit signatures for a November ballot initiative. Among the initiatives' opponents is an
administration energy official who stands to profit from its defeat.
Opponents of California's draconian global warming law, Assembly Bill 32, on Monday submitted 800,000 signatures, almost double the amount required, to put an initiative to
suspend the law on the November ballot.
They believe, as we do, that AB32 will, when implemented, cost California, a state with 12.6% unemployment, more jobs in an already bleak economy, while raising energy prices
and driving away more business with its unfriendly climate, pun intended.
AB32 was signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. It requires that by 2020, California's emissions of carbon dioxide, which every human being exhales and every green plant
inhales, and other so-called greenhouse gases be reduced to 1990 levels. That's a required drop of about 25%. The law's provisions take effect Jan. 1, 2012.
If approved by the voters on Nov. 2, the California Jobs Initiative, sponsored by California Assemblyman Dan Logue, would suspend the implementation of AB32 until California
has four consecutive quarters where the unemployment rate is 5.5% or less.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, personae non gratae with the Obama administration, cites a 2009 study done by economists at California State University at Sacramento and
commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable. It found that implementation costs for AB32 "could easily exceed $100 billion" and that the program would
raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household annually by 2020.
The futility of AB32 is magnified by the fact that California is downwind from the world's biggest polluter, the "developing" nation of China, exempt from such
onerous restrictions. The ballot initiative sensibly puts saving California above saving the planet. (IBD)
“It is the Responsibility of the Patriot to protect his country from its government” ~Thomas Paine
$10,000,000,000,000
Ten trillion dollars. That’s the conservative estimate of the amount of money Barack Obama, Albert Gore Jr., and a whole cast of criminals stand to make yearly (gross) off
of the greatest scam in human history: “global warming.”
If you have ever sat back, scratching your head and wondering why the Marxists are pushing for a “cap and trade” bill that would not only make energy costs “necessarily
skyrocket,” to quote Barack Obama, but do absolutely nothing to effect fictional “climate change, ” one way or the other, you are about to find out.
We have long known this Marxist idea was nothing more than a continuation of the communist desire to “spread the wealth” by forcibly stealing from those who
create and earn, and giving to those that don’t. This is an inbred mental defect that can’t be cured, only contained, the most effective way being: not to elect these evil,
corrupt people in the first place!
When we first learned of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) we smelled a rat. No one has been more radical than Barack Obama when it comes to pushing the “global
warming” hoax, and the “cap and trade” scheme. Being based in Chicago, common sense told us that Obama was somehow involved, and it was as corrupt as the
day is long.
It took Glenn Beck to put it all together, and he has done a remarkable job of spelling it all out. In the videos below, Glenn documents Obama’s ties to the multi-trillion
dollar carbon trading scam, Goldman Sachs, the Joyce Foundation, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers’ brother, Al Gore, George Soros, Maurice Strong and a whole cast of
ne'er-do-wells.
Beck does a great job of connecting the dots here, as well as spelling out the scam itself. It’s quite interesting to note that all of the Marxist-democrats were pounding
Goldman Sachs in their “show trial” for their handling of derivatives, a “synthetic” financial product, created out of thin air. Never mind it was the
Marxist-democrat Party controlled Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac who were involved in the creation of this product, and President Bill Clinton who sanctioned it. (Cyprus Times)
WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Michael Burgess, R-Texas, ranking member of the Oversight and
Investigations Subcommittee, today asked the Government Accountability Office to review the U.S. funding for, and the scientific integrity and reliability of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessments. (Press Release)
The normally dull company AGM has become an unlikely battleground as green-minded pension fund members take on the energy giants exploiting the controversial tar sands of
western Canada.
Christopher Hall is an unlikely rebel. Aged 74, the retired canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, wears wire-rim glasses and a tweed jacket, and lives with his wife in a
cottage in a village just outside Banbury. He reads, he gardens and he enjoys being with his children and grandchildren. It is scarcely the lifestyle of extreme radicalism and
yet Canon Christopher Hall is one of a new breed of activists.
The target of his unhappiness is Shell. Canon Hall does not want the global giant mining in Canada's oil sands. He is not alone in this. Canada is the world's second largest
source of future oil after Saudi Arabia. The tar sands of Alberta, which cover an area greater than the size of England and Wales, have attracted the world's biggest oil
companies: Shell, Total, Statoil and PetroChina. But extracting the oil is costly and fraught with environmental and social difficulties. For Canon Hall, the most significant
issue is the greenhouse gas emissions. 'Three times as much CO2 is emitted compared with traditional methods of oil extraction, and in the present situation when climate change
is upon us it makes no sense whatsoever,' he says.
Canada's 'dirty oil' has triggered protests all over the world: Rainforest Action dropped a 70ft banner over Niagara Falls last summer; a climate protester glued his hand to a
window of the Canadian High Commission in London in December; and two women chained themselves to petrol pumps at a BP garage in Devon last month. But Canon Hall is part of
different kind of protest: a coordinated drive to influence BP and Shell, two British companies with investments in tar sands, through pensions.
"People are beginning to recognise that this dreary thing called a pension can be a real source of power," says Catherine Howarth, the CEO of Fair Pensions, a
British-based lobbying group for 'responsible investment'. (It was Howarth who contacted Canon Hall through the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility, a church-based
investor group of which he is a member. But she says she will represent anyone with a pension; indeed, any investor.) Fair Pensions points out that everybody who has a private
or company pension owns a tiny share of almost all the big stock-market companies. Most of us, however, don't make the connection because it is obscured by a long and
convoluted chain of people that runs from pension-fund trustees to fund managers. Fair Pensions is aiming to collapse this distance and say, look, if you feel strongly about
something a company is doing, you should use your voice as a shareholder. (TDT)
The answer is to put your money into a pension fund that invests only in the companies doing what you like. It is not beholden on real companies to alter
their behavior to suit people's climate superstitions. It is certainly not for companies to abandon their core mission (basically generating profits by doing what they do
best -- in this case finding, extracting and refining oil).
NLPC is sponsoring a PepsiCo shareholder proposal asking for a report on the company’s lobbying priorities. At the PepsiCo annual tomorrow in Plano, Texas, I will argue
that the company’s lobbying priorities are seriously out of whack.
I will cite PepsiCo’s membership in U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of corporations and environmental groups. USCAP’s mission is to “quickly enact
strong national legislation to require significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” The House of Representatives has obliged in the form of the Waxman-Markey bill
that would destroy over 1.1 million jobs, hike electricity rates 90 percent, and reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by nearly $10 trillion over the next 25 years. (Peter
Flaherty, NLPC)
This is much more like it -- keeping companies focused on their core mission.
Sen. John Kerry is predicting widespread support from electric utilities, chemical companies and Big Oil as he enters his seventh month of closed-door negotiations on a
comprehensive energy and climate bill that still hasn't made its way into public view.
Speaking at the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference today in Washington, D.C., Kerry said he expects to be joined by the CEOs of General Electric Co., DuPont, FPL Inc. and American
Electric Power Co. Inc. when his climate legislation is ready for release.
"Every one of them are among the top emission polluters in the country," Kerry said. "But they all know this is good for America, and we have to do it. What they
want is business certainty of knowing what the next 20, 30, 40 years are going to look like so they can plan accordingly." (Darren Samuelsohn, E&E)
What really went on at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen? Secret recordings obtained by SPIEGEL reveal how China and India prevented an agreement on tackling climate
change at the crucial meeting. The powerless Europeans were forced to look on as the agreement failed. (Spiegel)
A United Nations agency on Wednesday cut its forecast for pre-2012 Kyoto Protocol carbon offsets, estimating for the first time that less than 1 billion tonnes will come to
market before the climate pact expires.
"Due to the medium issuance in March (11.4 million) and in April (9.9 million), our projection for the amount of (Certified Emissions Reductions) to be available by the
end of 2012 decreased a little from 1,035 million to 992 million," the UNEP Risoe Center said on its website.
Under Kyoto, efforts to cut greenhouse gases can be outsourced to emerging countries through investment in clean energy projects that have been registered under the UN's Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme.
Investors receive offsets in return, called Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), which can be used toward emissions reduction goals or sold for profit.
CER supply forecasts are of particular interest to utilities and industrial firms in the European Union, as they can use CERs for compliance under the bloc's emissions trading
scheme.
But the future of Kyoto and the CDM are unclear after 2012, the year the climate pact's first leg expires, due to the failure for rich and poor nations to agree a successor
treaty. (Reuters)
Yeah, hurray! Almost a billion useless hot air certificates...
May 5 -- U.K. consumers can expect higher utility bills no matter which party wins tomorrow’s election, with all three pushing to get more electricity from renewable
sources and from plants that burn coal more cleanly.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, the Conservative opposition and the Liberal Democrats all want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the nation’s reliance on
imported fossil fuels by installing wind turbines and building plants that inject carbon dioxide into rocks underground.
“Investment in the infrastructure needed to transition Britain to a low-carbon economy is part-financed by subsidies paid for through consumer energy bills,” said Ben
Caldecott, head of policy at Climate Change Capital in London. “All things being equal, this will increase average energy bills.” (Bloomberg)
Europe's cash-strapped airlines could be saddled with mounting costs to buy emissions certificates after a volcanic ash cloud that swept across Europe cut the number of free
certificates they stand to receive.
WORLD
Most of Europe's airspace was closed for nearly a week from April 15 after a huge ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano stranded millions of business passengers and holidaymakers
and paralyzed freight and businesses.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said the airlines lost more than $1.7 billion of revenues due to the volcano crisis.
But that's not the end of it. The less European airlines' planes can fly this year, the fewer free certificates they will get when the European Emissions Trade System (ETS) is
extended to include airlines in 2012.
Under the ETS, each airline gets a certain number of free certificates, or licenses to pollute the air, which is partly based on its emissions in 2010.
Beyond that, airlines need to pay for certificates. IATA has put the industry cost at 3.5 billion euros in the first year, with an increase in costs every year after that.
(Reuters)
U.S. emissions of the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas fell a record 7 percent in 2009 due to the recession and more efficient use of
fuels, the Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday.
Carbon dioxide emissions from energy sources, which make up about 80 percent of the country's output of gases blamed for warming the planet, fell more than 400 million tonnes
last year, the EIA said.
"While emissions have declined in three out of the last four years, 2009 was exceptional," the EIA, the statistics arm of the Energy Department, said in an annual
report. (Reuters)
So much for the "stimulus" as the U.S. crashed into recession.
Using data from the EIA and the BEA,
the graph above shows that the rate of decarbonization of the US economy indeed did increase to above 2.0% in 2009, but that is only slightly above rates observed in a number
of years in recent decades. To achieve aggressive emissions reductions targets for 2020 and 2050 as proposed in various US policy proposals would require annual rates of
decarbonization of 5% or more.
To suggest, as Romm does, that "It really isn’t bloody hard" to reduce US emissions is to be highly misleading (to put it kindly). As soon as economic growth
returns to positive values, we will see US emissions increase once again. Switching to natural gas is never going to be a successful strategy for a sustainable acceleration of
the decarbonization of the US economy. The real lesson from 2009 is that fundamental nature of the US energy economy has not changed much, despite the economic downturn, and to
suggest otherwise is just incorrect. The economy has become marginally more efficient and marginally less carbon intensive.
The emissions reduction challenge remains huge -- don't be fooled otherwise. (Roger Pielke Jr)
What he's really talking about, of course, is normal development and industrial efficiency delivered by free market competition (exactly what the Left
tries to prevent, aiming for top-down, centralized control under socialism). The U.S. and indeed most industrialized nations produce greater value per unit of energy over
time but this is not out of any desire or "need" to "decarbonize" -- it's simple smart business and the only way to survive in a competitive marketplace.
U.S. real dollar return per unit of energy has more than doubled since 1970 and this trend will continue with "business as usual".
To pretend that "decarbonization is somehow necessary or even desirable is just plain wrong. There is no value in moving away from the cheapest and most useful energy
sources, mainly coal and other carbon-based fuels.
'The forecasting procedures described in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report violated 81% of the 89 principles relevant to climate forecasting' (via Climate Depot)
The Executive Council of the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia
has now weighed in on Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's civil investigative demand, which sought
a wide range of documents dealing with the work the climate scientist Michael Mann. Mann's former colleagues write that the "unusual" request appears to be
motivated by a difference of opinion with Mann's findings and threatens academic freedom:
We maintain that peer review by the scientific community is the appropriate means by which to identify error in the generation, presentation and interpretation of scientific
data. The Attorney General's use of his power to issue a CID under the provisions of the Virginia [Fraud Against Taxpayers Act] is an inappropriate way to engage with the
process of scientific inquiry.
His action and the potential threat of legal prosecution of scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer-review standards send a chilling message to scientists engaged in
basic research involving Earth's climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline. Such actions directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the
knowledge upon which informed public policy relies.
Read the whole statement, issued in the name of Faculty Senate Chair Ann B. Hamric, here.
(WaPo)
Wouldn't need the Attorney General to step in if academia and peer review had actually done their job, would we? This is not a threat to academic freedom
but correction of a catastrophic failure of academic integrity. Cuccinelli might manage to rescue climate science's credibility by weeding out some of the frauds and
charlatans who have flocculated around what is really now reduced to voodoo science. We wish him every success in what is undoubtedly the correct course.
Former vice-presidential candidate's tormentor may get 20 years - but Palin was happy to make use of leaked UEA emails (Leo Hickman, The Guardian)
Son of a Democrat politician hacks into Republican Governor's e-mail account seeking to damage political opponent.
Whistleblower leaks file assembled for freedom of information request regarding fudged publicly funded data and possible deliberate fraud potentially costing world economy
trillions and reducing the standard of living for all the world's population.
One of these perpetrators should be prosecuted and one should be rewarded, you think? Hickman disagrees.
A speaker from Natural Resources Canada followed me at a conference on “Global Climate Change: Forest Industry Impacts and Responses.” He was speaking in a
section titled, “Science and Climate Change Modeling” presumably providing the official government position. Did the Minister approve his position? Government employees
doing research almost guarantees a compromise with science. Worse, they have the entire power of government to impose their views. It is at the heart of the problems with
climate science because Maurice Strong promoted the bad science through the bureaucracies of the UN and then weather agencies in every country. Instead of disproving the
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis following normal scientific procedure they worked to prove it. The conference tells the story. It was more about dealing with
government policies than with the validity of the science on which those policies were based. (Tim Ball, CFP)
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature continues warm: +0.50 deg. C for April, 2010, although it is 0.15 deg. C cooler than last month. The
linear trend since 1979 is now +0.14 deg. C per decade.
Arctic temps (not shown) continued a 5-month string of much above normal temps (similar to Nov 05 to Mar 06) as the tropics showed signs of retreating from the current El
Nino event. Antarctic temperatures were cooler than the long term average. Through the first 120 days of 1998 versus 2010, the average anomaly was +0.655 in 1998, and +0.602 in
2010. These values are within the margin of error in terms of their difference, so the recent global tropospheric warmth associated with the current El Nino has been about the
same as that during the peak warmth of the 1997-98 El Nino.
As a reminder, two months ago we changed to Version 5.3 of our dataset, which accounts for the mismatch between the average seasonal cycle produced by the older MSU and the
newer AMSU instruments. This affects the value of the individual monthly departures, but does not affect the year to year variations, and thus the overall trend remains the
same as in Version 5.2. ALSO…we have added the NOAA-18 AMSU to the data processing in v5.3, which provides data since June of 2005. The local observation time of NOAA-18 (now
close to 2 p.m., ascending node) is similar to that of NASA’s Aqua satellite (about 1:30 p.m.). The temperature anomalies listed above have changed somewhat as a result of
adding NOAA-18.
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers
(PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT's are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.] (Roy W. Spencer)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Among the worrisome environmental effects of global warming is the thawing of Arctic permafrost---soil that normally remains at or below the freezing
point for at least a two-year period and often much longer. Monitoring changes in permafrost is difficult with current methods, but a study by University of Michigan
researchers offers a new approach to assessing the extent of the problem.
The new study approach, which relies on chemical tracers in stream water, is described in the journal Chemical Geology.
Overlying permafrost is a thin "active layer" that thaws every summer, and increases in the thickness of this layer over the years indicate thawing of permafrost.
Both physical measurements and modeling suggest that active layer thickness has increased in some areas over the 20th century and that if present warming trends continue,
increases of up to 40 percent could occur by the end of the 21st century. (University of Michigan)
There continues to be confusion that controls on the emissions of CO2 and other human of greenhouse gases is the main response that is needed with respect to climate policy.
That is, if we can control these emissions, we can prevent a dangerous intervention into the climate system.
Unfortunately, the climate system is not that simple. The need for a broader perspective was summarized in our paper
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip
Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate
change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.
where we wrote
“If communities are to become more resilient to the entire spectrum of possible environmental and social variability and change [Vörösmarty et al., 2000], scientists
must properly assess the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the choices made by modern society and anticipate the demands for resources several decades into the
future.”
There is considerable discussion on the relative roles of adaption and mitigation with respect to the findings in the 2007 IPCC report (e.g., see).
Thus, I have concluded that it is worthwhile to specifically define my views on this subject, as I did on the related subject of the human role within the climate system; see
First, it needs to be emphasized that climate and energy policies, while there are overlaps, are distinctly different issues. As reported on Climate Science (e.g. see and
see), the 2007 IPCC approach, and other related reports, are actually
energy policy proposals cloaked in the guise of climate change.
Following is a short summary of my view on climate and energy policies with respect to adaptation and mitigation:
Climate policy in the past has been, with the limited exception of deliberate weather modification (see),
focused on adaptation. Dams, zoning so as to limit habitation in flood plains, etc are examples of this adaptation.
For the coming decades, adaptation still needs to be the primary approach. As reported in the 2005 National Research Council report (Radiative
forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties) the human influence on the climate system involves a diverse range of forcings. Thus, a
focus on controlling the emissions of carbon dioxide by itself (i.e. mitigation) is an inadequate approach for an effective climate policy.
Energy policy, however, clearly must emphasize an active management policy since a vibrant economy and society requires energy. However, all energy sources
are not the same in terms of how they affect the environment and their availability. For example, the dependence of the United States, Europe and other countries on
oil from politically unstable regions of the world needs to be eliminated.
The current focus of the IPCC and others on climate change with their emphasis on global warming, as a guise to promote energy policy, therefore, is an erroneous and
dishonest approach to communicate energy policy to policymakers and the public. The optimal energy policy requires expertise and assessments that involves a much
broader community than the climate science profession.
The take home message is
“…..the 2007 IPCC approach, and other related reports, are actually energy policy proposals cloaked in the guise of climate change”.
The use of a narrow focus on climate (as represented by the emphasis on just one human climate forcing type – CO2 and few
other greenhouse gases) as the vehicle to effect energy policy changes is very seriously flawed. [see also the post from yesterday - http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/05/reality-check.html].
(Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
An oil spill similar to the one in the Gulf Mexico could easily happen in Norway, said the country's environment minister, while Statoil's chief said the Nordic oil nation
could learn lessons from the accident.
Environment Minister Erik Solheim said the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico showed that freak accidents can happen anywhere with current technologies, no matter how tight
the safety plans.
"This was not a backyard company in an obscure African dictatorship ... (It was) one of the most well-reputed world companies with a very modern rig in one of the most
advanced industrial societies on the entire globe," he said.
"After this no one can seriously claim that this could not happen in Norway or anywhere else," he told Reuters. "If you are not completely blind it will affect
everyone on the entire globe." (Reuters)
Workers toiled above and below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday to plug a gushing oil leak and protect the U.S. shoreline in one of the biggest spill
containment efforts ever mounted.
London-based energy giant BP loaded a massive metal device on a barge that is designed to channel the flow of leaking oil from the seabed to a drilling ship on the surface.
The device, seen as the best chance to stem the oil leak in the short term, will take about 12 hours to reach the leak site off the Louisiana coast. After installation, it
could begin capturing the oil on Monday, BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said at a briefing.
Prevailing winds have kept the giant oil slick offshore, two weeks after a deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig triggered the breach, and the slick was barely
moving on Wednesday.
"If you look at our trajectory for the next 72 hours, they don't show a whole lot of real movement from where it's at," said Charlie Henry, a meteorologist with the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The calm weather allowed for teams to conduct a series of "controlled burns" of the massive oil slick, the first such attempts since a 28-minute blaze on April 28
that removed thousands of gallons of fuel.
Controlled burns remove oil from the open water in an effort to protect shoreline and wildlife. Wednesday's burns were targeted at areas with the heaviest concentration of oil,
typically closer to the leak site and further from shore. (Reuters)
Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa is keen on investing in Israeli technology companies specializing in oil-sands and water technologies, Israel's Finance
Ministry said on Tuesday.
Li expressed his interest during talks in Hong Kong with visiting Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, the ministry said.
Hutchison's subsidiary Hutchison Water has a 49 percent stake in SDL Desalination Ltd, which last year won a government tender to build Israel's largest desalination plant.
Li also controls Husky Energy Inc, Canada's No.3 oil exploration and refining company. Husky last month completed initial engineering work on the first phase of the Sunrise oil
sands project, which it co-owns with BP Plc.
The partners have issued tenders for engineering and construction work at the site, which is expected to produce its first oil in 2014. (Reuters)
Forget about corruption and cover-up scandals in the energy industry. Europe’s renewable sector is specializing in perjury. They have begun claiming that all of Europe’s
fossil fuel needs can be replaced with renewable sources by 2050. [Read More]
(Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)
There is no precedent for reducing the ratio of debt to GDP by simply growing our way out of it.
At the end of World War II, the United States had a federal debt of more than 100 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In fiscal year 2009, federal debt was 53 percent of
GDP, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects it will rise to at least 90 percent of GDP by 2020 and continue rising thereafter, unless either policy changes or
investors lose confidence in American fiscal policy and refuse to extend further credit.
Given that the United States recovered from its WWII debt burden, could we recover again? I think it helps to analyze how the debt evolved over the past several decades, in
order to see what lessons history might teach us. (Arnold Kling, The American)
So what is the VAT anyway? Will it really resolve the deficit? May 4, 2010
- by Patrick Richardson
As the administration pushes a value-added tax, while in typical Barackonian fashion claiming they’re not pushing a VAT, I thought it might be prudent to examine exactly what
a VAT is.
The VAT is essentially a sales tax, but of a very specific sort.
What happens is every time value is added to a product or service, there is a tax added.
In the case of bread, for example, there is a tax when the wheat is harvested, another when the wheat is sold, another when the wheat is ground into flour, another when the
flour is baked, another when the bread is sold to the retailer, and finally one when the bread sold to you.
And this happens on every purchase, whether a good or service.
This value-added tax has been used in Europe for some time and is rather unpopular there. It also has the effect of depressing consumption, as a large tax tends to keep people
from buying things. (PJM)
Overregulation: As California's pumped-up governator prepares to push a costly cap-and-trade law on the state's manufacturers, CEOs are sending a not-so-subtle message to
him: Your state stinks.
Hearing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tout his job-killing environmental law at a time California is hemorrhaging jobs couldn't help but be demoralizing and confusing for the
state's citizens and businesses.
Recent polls show Californians in a deep funk over the state's prospects. A new study of corporate leaders in Chief Executive magazine shows why. Asked to rank states by
business climate, CEOs put California dead last. Texas was No. 1. (IBD)
At the request of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the present letter report evaluates the effectiveness of EPA's Title 42 program. Title 42 authority was
granted to EPA for 5 years, from 2006 to 2011. As that period draws to a close, it was thought that a review of the current program would be appropriate.
This letter report first provides some background information on the origin of EPA's Title 42 program and then more detailed information on the committee's task and its
approach to the task, comments on implementation of the Title 42 program, and suggestions for strengthening the program. The report concludes with the committee's overall
findings and recommendations. Although the Title 42 program at EPA is still evolving, the committee found that the agency has implemented the program appropriately. Most
important, the Title 42 appointees have already had a favorable effect on EPA's scientific research even after such a short time since implementation of the program. A leading
example is the development of the National Center for Computational Toxicology. (NAP)
NEW YORK - Whether breast cancer should be labeled as an occupational disease is still unclear, researchers behind a new study from China suggest.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, and so far only one country (Denmark) has awarded compensation to shift workers who develop the disease. If more
were to follow suit, it could have far-reaching economic consequences.
The new report, however, showed no sign of a connection between night-shift work and breast cancer.
"We basically found no association, even among women who had more than 25 years of shift work," said Wong-Ho Chow, a researcher with the National Cancer Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland, who worked on the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. (Reuters Health)
LONDON - Giving vitamin A to women 15 to 45 years old living in poor nations does not cut maternal death rates, scientists said Tuesday in a study that contradicts earlier
research showing a dramatic drop in death rates.
Researchers working in Ghana on a trial involving almost 208,000 women found there was no difference in pregnancy-related death rates between those who were given vitamin A
pills and those given placebos, or dummy pills.
Vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem in more than half of all countries, particularly in Africa and South-East Asia, hitting young children and pregnant women in
low-income countries the hardest.
It is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children and can increase the risk of disease and death from severe infections, according to the World Health Organization.
But Betty Kirkwood, a nutrition and public health specialist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the Ghana study, said her trial showed that giving
vitamin A pills did nothing to cut maternal death rates. (Reuters)
Teens might be tempted to stay up late, cramming for an exam or text messaging with friends. But the lack of shut eye could lead to expanding waistlines, particularly for
boys, a new study finds.
The results, based on a sample of 723 adolescents, show that the less sleep teens gets the more likely they are to be obese, at least for boys, but not girls. The relationship
between less sleep and weight gain was also stronger for middle-school students than for high-school students, the researchers say.
While previous studies have shown a link between little sleep and weight gain, most have focused on either young children or adults – not teens. The current study is also one
of the first to take into account other factors that could affect weight gain, such as how much adolescents ate and exercised, and whether they experienced depressive symptoms.
(LiveScience)
Airline passengers can expect disruption from the volcanic ash cloud throughout the summer, aviation regulators warned yesterday, after continued eruptions in Iceland
grounded hundreds of flights once again. (The Times)
Air passengers could face further random disruption from volcanic ash in the coming weeks, a Government adviser warned yesterday.
Bill McGuire, a volcanologist and member of the Government's Cobra emergency committee, said the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland could cause further problems for up to a
year, even though its explosions had become less intense. "It hasn't gone away," he said. "Previous eruptions have emerged over a year so it can carry on and on
for a long time." (The Independent)
Toronto has moved to toughen its idling bylaw, slapping motorists with a $125 ticket if they are caught with engines running for more than a minute in what the city's
medical officer of health acknowledges stems from efforts ''to shift people out of cars.''
Currently, the fine applies to anyone who idles for more than three minutes, but enforcement is admittedly weak: last year, just 88 tickets were handed out. The changes
approved yesterday by the Toronto Board of Health include a request that parking enforcement officers be given the power to ticket idlers.
"While we're trying to shift people out of cars, into bikes and other forms of more active transportation, the one thing that should be easy to do is not use our cars when
we don't need to," said Dr. David McKeown, Toronto's Medical Officer of Health. (Natalie Alcoba, National Post)
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates
plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon
be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the
rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to
more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years.
“We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water. (NYT)
Today’s NYTimes features yet another scare story about industrial chemicals.
The writers say that the widespread use of the weedkiller Roundup has created “superweeds” which are herbicide resistant! That “could lead to higher food prices, lower
crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution.”
Well, it could.
The MSM always obsess about terrible things that chemicals will do. They predicted the cancer epidemic that never happened. They predicted the male sterility crisis that never
happened. Now they claim that the preservative BPA in plastic bottles is injures us. If these omnipresent chemicals are so evil, where are the bodies? We’ve been exposed for
years now, and yet Americans live longer than ever. (John Stossel, FBN)
The British Beekeepers’ Association is moving away from cash sponsorship deals with pesticide manufacturers after concerns that the chemicals may be harmful to bees.
Bee numbers in Britain are down 54 per cent in 20 years, double the rate of the rest of Europe, according to research by the University of Reading.
The 135-year-old charity endorses four pesticides — synthetic pyrethroids — used to combat the varroa mite that is linked to the collapse of colonies. In return, for the
past 12 years the association has received £17,500 a year from Bayer Crop Sciences and Syngenta.
This relationship angered many members and some left the association. Phil Chandler, a writer and beekeeper from Devon, set up a rival campaign, Biobees, to promote
chemical-free beekeeping. (The Times)
ORGANIC food does not have greater nutritional value than conventionally grown food, a major University of Sydney study has found.
In a result that will provoke dismay and anger in the organics industry, the study's authors found that food grown without pesticides or herbicides should not be promoted as
healthier because there was no evidence to show that it contained more nutrients than normal food.
And the author of the report went further, recommending consumers stick with commercially grown fruit and vegetables because they are cheaper and, therefore, people could eat
more of them.
The study, conducted by the School of Molecular Bioscience, surveyed the international literature on organic produce, conducted laboratory analyses of Australian foods and
surveyed Australian health professionals about organics, critically evaluating the results. (Sunday Telegraph)
Birds such as the skylark and lapwing are less likely to be found in organic fields than on conventional farms, according to a study that contradicts claims that organic
agriculture is much better for wildlife.
It concludes that organic farms produce less than half as much food per hectare as ordinary farms and that the small benefits for certain species from avoiding pesticides and
artificial fertilisers are far outweighed by the need to make land more productive to feed a growing population.
The research, by the University of Leeds, is another blow to the organic industry, which is already struggling because of falling sales and a report from the Food Standards
Agency that found that organic food was no healthier than ordinary produce.
Organic farmers who shun herbicides may also impose higher costs on nearby farms because the weeds that they have tolerated spread to neighbouring fields. (The Times)
The nature reserves of the future will be ‘multifunctional green spaces’ on old landfill sites or round the back of supermarket car parks under RSPB plans to
revolutionise wildlife conservation in Britain.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) fear the UK is in danger of becoming a barren urban landscape with a few tiny pockets of wildlife fenced-off in old
fashioned reserves.
Under a radical new approach to nature conservation, the charity propose making huge areas of the country wildlife-friendly habitat – whether that is alongside a motorway, on
and old Ministry of Defence shooting range or next door to the local sewage works.
The new ‘Futurescapes programme’ will not only ensure animals can move easily around the country along ‘green corridors’ but provide the local community with
‘breathing space’ in often deprived areas. (TDT)
One of the most critical issues facing the United States today is the proper management of our water resources. Water availability and quality are changing due to increasing
population, urbanization, and land use and climate change, and shortages in water supply have been increasing in frequency in many parts of the country. The National Science
Foundation (NSF) has entertained the Water and Environmental Research Systems (WATERS) Network as one possible initiative whereby NSF could provide the advances in the basic
science needed to respond effectively to the challenge of managing water resources.
The WATERS Network, a joint initiative of the Engineering, the Geosciences, and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorates at NSF, is envisioned as an integrated
national network of observatories and experimental facilities supporting research, outreach, and education on large-scale, water-related environmental problems. The proposed
observatories would provide researchers with access to linked sensing networks, data repositories, and computational tools connected through high-performance computing and
telecommunications networks.
This book, the final of a series about the WATERS project, provides a more detailed review of the Science Plan and provides advice on collaborating with other federal agencies.
(NAP)
Falling in
popularity, Rudd is accused of pulling a 'mini-Chavez'
By Peter Foster
This week the increasingly unpopular Australian Labour government of Kevin Rudd announced a new “super profits tax” on the mining industry, starting in 2012. Who
couldn’t be in favour of taxing super profits? They sound awfully unfair. But what “super” means to the Ruddites is apparently any return above that of government bonds,
which will be dinged at a rate of 40%. If there were ever a definition of punishing risk-taking, this is it.
According to the government, the tax will haul in US$11-billion over its first two years. The problem is that it has knocked more than that off the value of mining stocks so
far this week.
While this doesn’t exactly rank with Canada’s infamous 1980 National Energy Program, which not only hoisted taxes but also set prices and sought to promote Canadian
ownership, it comes into the same category of no-consultation, populist, them-and-us, grab-the-windfall, damn-the-consequences political grandstanding.
If one were to seek a more recent Canadian parallel, it would be Alberta premier Ed Stelmach’s hoisting of petroleum royalty rates three years ago in the name of
“fairness.” We all know what happened next. Investment went elsewhere, the province was hit particularly hard by a drop in oil and gas prices, and two months ago Mr.
Stelmach was forced to reverse the decision, thus further imperiling his own tenuous political future.
Behind an appeal to “soak the fat cats,” Mr. Rudd’s move is a naked tax grab on behalf of a cash-strapped government. The Australian mining sector has been booming,
thanks significantly to buoyant demand from Asia in general and China in particular. Spot iron ore prices in China are up some 70% this year alone, and the value of iron ore
exports seems certain to smash the 2008-2009 record of US$34-billion. So what better time for a tax assault backed by suggestions that big mining companies are not “fair
dinkum Aussies” anyway?
One of the most depressing features of the announcement is its appeal to nationalist prejudice. Mr. Rudd argued that since mining giant BHP Billiton is 40% foreign owned and
Rio Tinto is 70%, their “massively increased profits ... built on Australian resources are mostly in fact going overseas.” This obviously applies even moreso to companies
such as Canadian miner Barrick Gold, which has significant Australian operations.
BHP, which has more than half its activities in Australia, calculates that its tax rate under the proposal would increase from 43% to 57%. Analysts have estimated the super
tax could reduce BHP’s earnings by 17% and those of Rio Tinto by 21% by 2013. The proposed hike has already caused one company to halt exploration in Western Australia, and
may also endanger U.S.-based Peabody Energy’s bid for Macarthur Coal.
According to the government, the tax grab will go to funding “good things,” such as lowering other business taxes, boosting retirement benefits, and building
infrastructure. Significantly, its role in helping pay down the hefty debts piled up in the name of “stimulus” has not been highlighted. Under Mr. Rudd’s floundering
regime, government spending as a percentage of GDP has been rising.
The impact of higher taxes is always to reduce economic activity and drive investment to lower-taxed jurisdictions. Indeed, Canada should be a beneficiary of this move.
Meanwhile its impact goes beyond mining. It makes all investors more nervous. There are already rumours that the banks might be next.
Having announced the tax without negotiation, the government is now delivering mixed messages about whether it might be prepared to negotiate, at least on existing projects.
The mining industry has inevitably come out swinging against the new tax and the perverted statistics used to sell it. The government claims it has suffered a US$35 billion
tax shortfall during the boom of the past decade. While mining profits have grown by $80-billion, it says, state royalties have increased by “only” $9 billion. But those
figures exclude corporate taxes.
BHP’s chief executive Marius Kloppers has vigorously refuted the notion of the industry not paying its “fair share.” He pointed out that mining generates more taxes
for Australia than any other sector. “Clearly,’ said Mr. Kloppers, “this higher tax will make investing in Australia less attractive and in the end this means less
investment and less wealth for all Australians.”
Mr. Rudd, however, is far more concerned with his own plummeting popularity and an election later this year. His government has just slipped behind the opposition Coalition
in the polls, and his own approval rating has recently taken a nosedive.
Mr. Rudd came into office trumpeting climate change as his number one issue but suffered a humiliating defeat when his emissions trading scheme was deep sixed. Again, this
was a scheme that would have done only harm to the Australian economy.
One critic this week accused Mr. Rudd of pulling a “mini Chavez,” referring to the business-bashing and economy-wrecking president of Venezuela. That may be a bit
strong, but Mr. Rudd’s new tax will undoubtedly damage Australia’s reputation. Mr. Rudd has presumably calculated that the spoils -- and the popular appeal -- will be worth
the cost. But only to him and his government. (Financial Post)
None other than Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel said that one should never
let a good crisis to go waste. In that spirit, one ecotard used the Gulf oil crisis to boast that the BP spill will make oil ‘the DDT of our era’.
Douglas Brinkley appeared Monday Night on CNN’s AC360 and directly compared BP to DDT. His point is that the public outcry over the Gulf spill will be a catalyst to
anti-oil activism much as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring kick-started radical environmentalism.
[Editor note: This review was completed before the BP oil spill. To the extent that cost cutting was responsible for the Deepwater Horizon rig blowup and the
uncontrolled oil spill, it was a monumental miscalculation under profit/loss accounting.]
A hallmark of the “sustainable development” mantra is the notion that business’s pursuit of profit maximization must necessarily lead to environmental degradation and
the depletion of “non-renewable resources,” and that such activities must be closely regulated by government. However, this assessment does not square with the historical
environmental record of market-based industrial progress and it ignores basic economic concepts.
Pierre Desrochers, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto, maintains,
“It is unfettered governments that are no friend to the environment.” An expert in economic geography with specialization in the study of the history of
technology, Desrochers provides an abundance of historical evidence to substantiate his position.
North American and British industrial history is replete with examples of profit maximizing firms practicing “sustainable development” long before the term was in vogue
and distorted by modern day environmentalists, he documents. It was through the discipline of free market competition and the profit motive that a lengthy history of
“green” innovations were realized, significantly predating the modern environmental movement. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Actually BP has had a series of disasters, some from just plain bad management and poor maintenance (Alaskan pipeline leaks, refinery explosion with loss
of life, current platform explosion and loss, with loss of life...). This all seems to be associated with their insane environmental tilt as "beyond petroleum"
begun by Lord Browne (with an "e"), who seemed to completely misunderstand the business in which they were engaged.
More than 300 people gathered in Vancouver to envision a healthy society without an expanding economy.
As rain splattered the windows of a small studio on the edge of Vancouver's port last Sunday, a cluster of people listened to Rex Weyler describe the early days of Greenpeace,
the global green organization he and a handful of others launched in this city 40 years ago.
Weyler regaled his listeners with the tale of the daring voyage to Amchitka, Alaska, in September 1971 that led to the halt of U.S. nuclear testing at the site. This day,
however, Weyler was more interested in talking about the future than the past. The veteran of green activism was among more than 300 citizens who attended the Vancouver
DeGrowth Conference, meant to examine "what a viable economic, social and ecological system will look like."
With runaway global warming looming, a mass extinction underway and untold tonnes of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every hour, they came together to challenge the logic
of growth economics embedded in the DNA of capitalism. ( Derrick O'Keefe, Today, TheTyee.ca)
I believe the political stars are aligning right now for the opening of a new front in the battle against our gun rights, via the election and work of an anti-gun president,
the disarmament passions of the Washington elite and the United Nations, the appointments of gun prohibitionists in the White House and Supreme Court, and the funding of an
anti-Second Amendment movement by billionaire progressives, such as George Soros.
Last week, I discussed President Barack Obama's anti-Second Amendment record and his administration's goal to use dormant treaties and global agencies to loosen the boundaries
and binds of the Second Amendment. I wish to expand upon the United Nations' participation a little further in this second part of my trilogy.
In October, the Obama administration reversed the position taken by the Bush White House by stating its support for a process that could, in 2012, result in an international
treaty to regulate conventional arms sales. Of course, "regulate" is a euphemism here for "the beginning of banning." (Chuck Norris, Townhall)
If you think that environmentalists are lamenting the Gulf oil spill, think again.
President Obama discomfited the greens in March when he announced that he would expand opportunities for offshore drilling. Although not a sincere policy proposal, the
President’s announcement nonetheless worried the greens as they thought that they might have to make a concession on offshore drilling to get oil industry support for a
climate bill.
Although the President reiterated his support for more drilling after the spill, Congressional Democrats, environmental groups and the Center for American Progress have all
publicly breathed a sigh of relief. Their view is that the spill not only strengthens their hand against more drilling, but increases the likelihood of getting a climate bill
through the Senate. “Environmentalists hope the BP spill turns into a game changer that will help propel the climate legislation’s passage much like the Exxon Valdez oil
spill led to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments,” reported Climatewire (May 4).
This is not likely to be the case since the public of 2010 is much more hip to the green agenda than it was in 1990, but the Climatewire report provides clear insight into
green-think. They don’t care about the planet’s environment so much as they do about how they can use environmental accidents to advance their social and political agenda.
(Steve Milloy, Daily Caller)
I've been thinking a lot about David Roberts's argument that the administration's response to the Deepwater oil spill shows it's not committed to pushing energy legislation
this year. "If he was looking for an opportunity to drive home the clean energy message, this was it," Roberts writes. "The Katrina of fossil fuels. Yet all he's
done is blandly reaffirm his support for offshore drilling. I haven't heard a word about clean energy alternatives or, God forbid, efficiency, which if pursued seriously could
save more oil than offshore rigs could produce, at a net savings rather than a cost, and with the added bonus feature of not occasionally leaking out and destroying entire
American ecosystems and industries."
You can see this two ways. The first is that the Deepwater spill is best understood as a national tragedy, and until the crisis phase is over, it would be both political
suicide and simply indecent to subsume it into a larger argument about clean energy, oil dependence and climate change.
On the other hand, a five-degree centigrade rise in global temperatures will be an unbelievable global catastrophe. It will dwarf the devastation caused by the spill. And the
responsible thing for Obama to do is to explain that: Dependence on fossil fuels ensures oil spills, and it also ensure a warming climate, and we need to understand the
Deepwater spill as not just a tragedy, but a predictable outcome, and a harbinger of much worse. That is not politicizing a tragedy. That is being honest about what caused it,
and what it means.
That said, this doesn't need to happen on Day 3. The larger argument about the need to wean ourselves off of oil can be made in a week. Allowing time for grieving and emergency
response does not mean a call to action can't follow. But if one doesn't follow, then Roberts is right, and it's a sign that the White House doesn't want a discussion over oil
dependence this year. (Ezra Klein, Washington Post)
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will seek to further restore the public credibility of climate science this Thursday by hosting several top American researchers in an explanatory
hearing that, his office promises, "will address the claims of deniers head-on."
The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing follows news yesterday that the InterAcademy Council, an alliance of many of the world's science
academies, had chosen its panel to review the methods of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Flaws and typos revealed in the IPCC's influential 2007
report, particularly an error exaggerating the risk global warming poses to Himalayan glaciers, have damaged the panel's standing and given ammunition to those critical of
science underlying climate change. (Paul Voosen, E&E)
In the interest of ensuring public access to climate-related documents that may be hard to find, I am posting here the original, June 1998 study by technology analyst Mark
P. Mills of the sprawling compliance burdens of EPA regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act (CAA).
Although superceded by the later report, the June 1998 report remains highly relevant to the climate policy debate.
A Stunning Regulatory Burden was a direct response to the April 1998 Memorandum by
then EPA General Counsel Jonathan Z. Cannon asserting EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). Petitioners in Massachusetts
v. EPA partly relied on the Cannon memorandum to press their claim that EPA had a statutory obligation to issue an endangerment finding and regulate GHG
emissions from new motor vehicles under Sec. 202 of the Act.
Most importantly, the June 1998 Mills study reminds us that EPA had to know all along that a victory for petitioners in Massachusetts v. EPA would
dramatically expand its regulatory reach beyond any plausible delegation of regulatory authority from Congress.
Yet during all the years when the case was being litigated (Sep. 2004 - April 2007), EPA never pointed out the regulatory ramifications of a victory for petitioners.
Only long after losing case, in its Advanced
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (July 2008) and Tailoring Rule (October
2009), did EPA acknowledge that the endangerment finding tees up the very sorts of regulatory excesses Mills warned about a decade earlier.
The 5-4 majority in Mass v. EPA decided in favor of petitioners
partly in the belief that an endangerment finding would not lead to ”extreme measures” (p. 531). But according to the Tailoring Rule, unless EPA
“tailors” — that
is, amends
— the CAA, the endangerment finding will lead inexorably to a host of “absurd results” that conflict with and undermine congressional intent.
The question arises: Why didn’t EPA explain this when it really mattered? Why did EPA pull its punches in Mass. v. EPA? Why didn’t EPA make the case that
the endangerment finding sought by petitioners would lead a regulatory cascade that Congress never intended and would not approve?
I think the answer is obvious. For EPA, losing the Massachusetts case meant gaining the power to regulate fuel economy for the auto industry and, more importantly,
the power to determine climate and energy policy for the nation. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that EPA wanted to be thrown into the greenhouse briar patch all along.
(Cooler Heads)
Climate proposals due to be unveiled before the Senate would strip 23 US states of their power to act on climate change
The collapse of an energy reform proposal in Congress last week could return power to north America's historic actors on climate change: the regions.
In Washington, even Barack Obama's fellow Democrats are reluctant to take up proposals in Congress that would put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions — prompting the sole
Republican ally to withdraw his support.
In Ottawa, Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, has adopted an action plan on climate change that would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions over the next
decade.
By default, that leaves regional governments as the drivers for tougher action on climate change in what is now becoming a familiar role, the White House admits.
"If the states hadn't taken the positions they have in the last four or five years we wouldn't have any programmes in place," Carol Browner, the White House climate
adviser, told reporters recently. (The Guardian)
An the whole world would be the better for it, Carol. There is no human or environmental upside to carbon constraint.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has sent a letter to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, asking him to rescind his demand for documents from the University of Virginia
related to the research of a climate science professor.
Cuccinelli has asked the university to turn over a wide range of documents related to grants sought by Michael Mann, a leading proponent of global warming who worked at U-Va.
until 2005. Cuccinelli says he is investigating the possibility that Mann violated the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
"It is unacceptable to put forward allegations against Dr. Mann and other climate scientists simply because their research results do not comport with one's
preconceptions," writes Francesca T. Grifo, director and senior scientist of the group's Scientific Integrity Program, in the letter. (WaPo)
Wonder how Mikey liked his greeting at the handwringer's warm-in:
If your goal is keeping the earth’s temperature rise below 2°C, the only thing you have left is hope. Hope that the climate sensitivity—how much the global temperature
rises from an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations—is far beneath what the climate models calculate it to be. When it comes to trying to use emissions cuts to achieve
the 2°C goal, the cat is already out of the bag—maybe not in terms of emissions-to-date, but almost certainly so for emissions-to-come.
Such is the conclusion implicit in the recent analysis by Joeri Rogelj and colleagues published in a recent issue of Nature magazine.
Rogelj et al. did yeoman’s work in collecting all the varied (non-binding) efforts pledged by all of the various countries of the world to reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions under the Copenhagen Accord that came out of last December’s big United Nations Climate Conference. From these pledges (which only extend to the year 2020 and of
which Rogelj et al. commented “It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are”), Rogelj and colleagues kludged together a set of emissions pathways into the future.
Since some countries had a range of pledges emissions reductions, Rogelj et al. developed both an “optimistic” and a “pessimistic” emissions scenario to the year
2020.
What is supposed to happen after 2020 is anybody’s guess. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
Australian polls have plummeted, and the credibility gap I mentioned earlier has
already translated into votes. Whether people agree or disagree with the Emissions Trading Scheme, no one is impressed when a leader hypes something in the most hyperbolic and
inflammatory terms, then bails suddenly, as if it was not a big deal.
KEVIN Rudd’s personal standing has taken a hammering after his decision to dump his climate change policy last week, and for the first time since 2006 the
Coalition has an election-winning lead.
Curiously, while the Labor Party dropped 8%, the Greens primary vote (10%) didn’t pick up a single point. The Coalition (the main opposition) gained just 3% (to
43%), so most of the rest of the disillusioned voters went to “others and independents”. All the commentators are writing it up to the “Climate” issue.
It may have taken a long time to come, but eventually things based on bullying and bluster crash to Earth. Both sides of politics could have stood taller in this if they had
bothered to get a forum of advocates and skeptics together in the same room (perhaps a Royal Commissioner’s room) to politely explain both sides of the story, and it should
have been done in John Howard’s time when Kyoto was being floated. It’s not that they would have necessarily become skeptics, but they would have been informed–they would
have realized that very little was as certain as the IPCC described–and that it was precipitously dangerous to base their own reputations on the one-sided propaganda material
coming from there. More » (Jo Nova)
Australia's Westpac bank has begun buying carbon offsets from New Zealand forest owners with the aim of selling them to big polluting firms as part of the country's
emissions trading scheme, the bank said on Tuesday.
The bank has approached about 600 foresters to pool carbon offsets issued to them to sell in large lots to firms such as refiners and cement makers that will have to meet
carbon costs under the scheme.
New Zealand's emissions trading scheme (ETS), only the second national scheme outside Europe, ramps up from July 1 with the entry of power generators, transport and steel and
cement makers, which emit about half of the nation's greenhouse gas pollution. (Reuters)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to deadly temperatures for humans in coming centuries, according to research findings
from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia.
Researchers for the first time have calculated the highest tolerable "wet-bulb" temperature and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in
human history in future climate scenarios if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate. (Purdue)
These fowls cranked up a model with a general +12 °C scenario and it got hot in places. [!] How do they do it?
Even more ludicrously their "scenario" was allegedly an enhanced greenhouse due to CO2 emissions. <chortle> So, let's use the IPCC's absurdly
inflated figures and see what it would take. According to the IPCC each doubling of atmospheric CO2 delivers an additional 3.7 W/m2 forcing, which
after the marvelous magical multipliers have been applied, should yield +3 °C (no calls or e-mails please, we know their own numbers of ∆2.6 W/m2 and
+0.7 °C don't support that but just go with it for now, OK?). So, to get +12 °C we need 4 doublings, presumably from pre-industrial parts per million (ppmv) of
the atmosphere, call it 300-600; 600-1,200; 1,200-2,400 and 2,400-4,800. <snigger> In 250 years we have managed to increase atmospheric carbon dioxide roughly 300-400
ppmv so we only have about 4,400 to go. Even assuming we all get really busy drilling, mining and burning to the point we could increase atmospheric levels by 10 ppmv per
year (a big ask) we'd still need to keep it up for 440 years.
Who can view the efficiency progress and technological development of the last century and imagine we'll be burning fossil fuel at rates to meet the above calculated
emissions for another 4.4 centuries? Could we lay our hands on that much fossil fuel?
And these numbers are from the IPCC's unsupportable inflated climate sensitivity estimates, overstated probably 5-10 times real-world numbers.
This is what the PlayStation® climatologists suggest as "reasonable worst-case scenarios"... Don't know why you're laughing -- they're doing it on our dime.
Earlier this year, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson led an expedition to drill into glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the world’s fastest-warming regions.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Mosley-Thompson explains what the Antarctic ice cores may reveal and describes what it’s like working in the world’s swiftly
melting ice zones. (e360)
Tuesday, 04 May 2010 08:53 Alex Reichmuth, Die Weltwoche
The retreat of the Alpine glaciers is considered to be dramatic and threatening. Wood and peat findings, however, prove that the Alps were generally greener in recent
millennia than today. The results of a scientist’s research are tempering the fears about global warming.
Glaciologist Christian Schlüchter was shaken when he first recognized what his own research actually means: "Up to now we were convinced that the Alps always had great
ice fields with magnificent glaciers. Now you can see that this picture was wrong.” Switzerland’s glaciers covered less area for at least half the time during the last
10,000 years than they covered in 2005. (via GWPF)
“Is most of the observed warming over the last 50 years likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”?
My answer in 2005 started with the text
On Global Warming:
There are natural explanations for global warming of which a change in the output of solar energy is a candidate. However, none of the published work has convinced me that
this can explain much of the observed global warming over the last several decades. Volcanic emissions are another natural global forcing, and it is well known that they
produce cooling, such as after the eruption of Mount Pintatubo, where in August of 1991 it was estimated as -4 Watts per meter squared. There have not been eruptions of that
magnitude since, such that the absence of such major eruptions might permit greater absorbed solar radiation in the climate system than otherwise would occur. However, this
absence of eruptions resulting in any positive radiative imbalance for a period of time well after a major volcanic emission has also not been shown to occur. This leaves
anthropogenic emissions as a source for global warming.
There is new information, however, that prompts me to update my answer.
This is based on insight provided by Roy Spencer, as summarized in his post of April 20 2010 titled
where he presented his new book with the
same title published by Encounter Books.
The text in his April 20th post that provides this perspective of the natural climate system is
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or
2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not
the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
Other colleagues whose studies, in combination, have convinced me of a larger natural variability with respect to global warming and cooling, include as
examples, the following papers, blogs and presentations
Compo, G. P., and P. D. Sardeshmukh, 2009: Oceanic influences on recent continental warming. Climate Dynamics, 32,333-342. [see
my post on this paper in 2008]
A.A. Tsonis, K.L. Swanson, and S. Kravtsov, 2007: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts. Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/ 2007GL030288.
A.A. Tsonis and K.L. Swanson, 2006: What do networks have to do with climate? Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. doi:10.1175/BAMS-87-5-585.
Marcia Wyatt, Ocean Heat, April 27 & May 4, 2007 in my class on Human
Impacts on Weather and Climate [natural climate variability is currently her Ph.d. dissertation topic working with A. Tsonis and S. Kravtsov].
I am also further convinced based on the recognition that there is “missing heat” in the climate system (e.g. see the recent set of posts on this topic starting
with this one). The long term variations in atmospheric and ocean circulation features, with resulting global average changes in radiative forcing, can
explain at least part of the reason for this “missing heat”.
Roy’s perspective, bolstered by such colleagues as listed above, provides convincing further evidence that such variations in regional heating and
cooling can alter significantly the global average heating more than has been indicated by the IPCC-type multi-decadal global climate model simulations.
The solar influence also appears to be larger than was understood in 2005, as illiustrated by these papers
“Is most of the observed warming over the last 50 years likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”?
remains NO.
The added greenhouse gases from human activity clearly have a role in increasing the heat content of the climate system from what it otherwise would be. However,
there are other equally or even more important significant human climate forcings, as I summarized in my 2005 post and in the 2009 article
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E.
Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate
change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.
We now know, however, that the natural variations of atmospheric and ocean circulation features within the climate
system produces global average heat changes that are substantially larger than what was known in 2005. The IPCC models have failed to adequately simulate this effect.
The answer to Andy’s question from 2005 is an even more clearly No. That is a signficant fraction of
the observed warming over the last 50 years is NOT due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”? (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
Is There a Missing Low Cloud Feedback in Current Climate Models?
The article by Graeme is headlined on the front cover of the Newsletter with the text
“An analysis by Prof. Graeme Stephens in the article on page 5 suggests that solar radiation reflected by low
clouds is significantly enhanced in models compared to real cloud observations. This finding has major implications for the cloud-climate feedback problem in models.”
The summary of his findings include the text
“The net consequence of these biases is that the optical depth of low clouds in GCMs is more than a factor of two greater than observed, resulting in albedos of clouds
that are too high.”
and
“The implication of this optical depth bias that owes its source to biases in both the LWP and particle sizes is that the solar
radiation reflected by low clouds is significantly enhanced in models compared to real clouds. This reflected sunlight bias
has significant implications for the cloud-climate feedback problem. The consequence is that this bias artificially
suppresses the low cloud optical depth feedback in models by almost a factor of four and thus its potential role as a negative feedback.”
This study further supports the finding that I reported early today that
natural radiative forcings and feedbacks are more significant than concluded in the 2007 IPCC assessment. (Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science)
From CO2 Science Volume 13 Number 18: 5 May 2010
4th International Conference on Climate Change:
The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change will be held in Chicago, Illinois on May 16-18, 2010 at the Chicago Marriott Magnificent Mile Hotel, 540 North Michigan
Avenue, Chicago. It will call attention to new scientific research on the causes and consequences of climate change, and to economic analysis of the cost and effectiveness of
proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To register for the event, or for information about the program, speakers, co-sponsors, and more, click
here.
Editorial: Speculations Beyond the Pale of Reality: Climate-alarmist scientists are making speculative predictions about
the effects of severity levels of ocean acidification that have not the faintest possibility of ever occurring.
Subject Index Summary: Roots (Conifers): How do they respond to atmospheric CO2 enrichment? ... and
what are the consequent benefits to mankind and the rest of the biosphere?
Plant Growth Database
Our latest results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
are: Duke Forest Ecosystem (McCarthy et al., 2010) and a
Southern China Ecosystem of Six Native Tree Species (Deng et al., 2010).
Medieval
Warm Period Project
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 827
individual scientists from 491 separate research institutions in 43
different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record comes from Piancabella
Rock Glacier, Sceru Valley, Southern Swiss Alps. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click
here. (co2science.org)
WASHINGTON — The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is bad — no one would dispute it. But just how bad?
Some experts have been quick to predict apocalypse, painting grim pictures of 1,000 miles of irreplaceable wetlands and beaches at risk, fisheries damaged for seasons, fragile
species wiped out and a region and an industry economically crippled for years.
President Obama has called the spill “a potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” And some scientists have suggested that the oil might hitch a ride on the loop
current in the gulf, bringing havoc to the Atlantic Coast.
Yet the Deepwater Horizon blowout is not unprecedented, nor is it yet among the worst oil accidents in history. And its ultimate impact will depend on a long list of
interlinked variables, including the weather, ocean currents, the properties of the oil involved and the success or failure of the frantic efforts to stanch the flow and
remediate its effects.
As one expert put it, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game. No one knows the final score.
The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil
spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991. It is not yet close to the magnitude of the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in Mexico in 1979, which
spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of crude before the gusher could be stopped. (NYT)
A band of US politicians has effectively killed oil companies' hopes that vast swaths of coastline will be opened to new deepwater drilling, amid concerns about BP's
catastrophic spill.
Bill Nelson, a New Jersey senator, and Robert Menendez, a Florida senator, joined California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in condemning the US government's plans to relax
laws restricting new drilling.
"The president's proposal for offshore drilling is dead on arrival," said Mr Nelson, adding that any new climate-change laws that support offshore drilling "are
not going anywhere". (TDT)
The massive, uncontrolled oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is roiling President Barack Obama's carefully laid plans to open up America's coasts to drilling again, while
rattling Congress to a point where the oil industry's exploratory plans could face a big shake-up.
U.S. politicians are now in no mood to consider plans to open up new areas for drilling but if the crisis drags on, it could also affect exploration in existing production
areas, such as the Gulf. (Reuters)
Royal Dutch Shell has not been directed to stop Gulf of Mexico oil drillings and it is too early to say what the U.S. government will do about future drillings after a BP
offshore well ruptured two weeks ago, Shell's CEO said on Tuesday.
Chief Executive Peter Voser said investigations on the spill, which is gushing about 5,000 barrels of crude oil per day, are still ongoing, and the leak will not have much
impact on crude prices and production.
"The most important thing right now is to contain the oil spill," he told a news conference at the opening of its new petrochemical complex in Singapore.
"As of now, we have not been given instructions to stop drilling." (Reuters)
The British executive at the centre of the Gulf Coast oil disaster hit back yesterday against accusations that BP had reacted too slowly, telling The Times that the company
would have a giant steel hood in place over the worst leak by tomorrow.
For the first time since the fatal explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig two weeks ago, Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, claimed that the company was winning the race to
contain the spill and indicated that it was ready to fight some of the lawsuits heading its way.
Even as the first pictures emerged of oil breaking through protective booms and pooling round a string of islands off the Louisiana coast, Mr Hayward said the main slick had
not yet made landfall “because we’ve contained it”.
He urged the US Government to pursue a policy of “absolute co-operation” with BP. “We will only succeed if we work together,” he said — a day after President
Obama’s press secretary promised that the White House would “keep a boot to the throat of BP” to ensure that it fulfilled its responsibilities. Mr Hayward, 53, a
geologist, projects a youthful image at the top of Britain’s biggest company. At times, however, he has struggled to appear in full control of the effort to protect hundreds
of miles of coastline. But at BP’s Washington offices yesterday he gave a strikingly upbeat assessment of the operation, at odds with forecasts of environmental catastrophe.
“Let’s be very clear,” he said of the slick. “The reason it’s not getting to the beaches is because we’re containing it. We don’t know if we can continue to
contain it, but for the moment we are.” (The Times)
With millions of gallons crude oil being spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the focus now is on shutting down the leak. However, in the
cleanup efforts to come, “extreme caution” must be exercised so as not to make a bad situation even worse, says a leading bioremediation expert with the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
“The concentration of detergents and other chemicals used to clean up sites contaminated by oil spills can cause environmental nightmares of their own,” says Terry Hazen, a
microbial ecologist in Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division who has studied such notorious oil-spill sites as the Exxon Valdez spill into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
“It is important to remember that oil is a biological product and can be degraded by microbes, both on and beneath the surface of the water,” Hazen says. “Some of the
detergents that are typically used to clean-up spill sites are more toxic than the oil itself, in which case it would be better to leave the site alone and allow microbes to do
what they do best.” (LBNL)
Ben de Mayo’s idea for improving oil sands production began with potato chips.
Working for a potato chip company in the 1960s, the physics professor at the University of West Georgia devised a way to make low fat potato chips. First he heated the chips to
make the oil in them less viscous. Then he spun them to remove the excess grease.
Cut to nearly 50 years later, and de Mayo figured he could use the same general concept to separate bitumen from petroleum infused earth mined from the Alberta’s oil sands. (GoO)
India is hungry for coal and domestically there is neither the quantity nor the quality to feed the country’s needs. The situation is exacerbated because coal consumption
has soared in the construction and power generation sectors. Given ongoing high demand, the problem is expected to become even more pressing. [Read
More] (Priyanka Bhardwaj and Michael Economides, Energy Tribune)
The United States is the second largest consumer of coal in the world. Sitting just behind China, but ahead of India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and Germany, the US
consumes about 560 mtoe of coal each year. (million tons oil equivalent). US coal consumption has been largely flat the past 10 years, as the rest of the world has raced
ahead. In 2008, the most recent year for available global coal use data, total world consumption of coal reached 3303.7 mtoe. Thus, the US accounted for nearly 17.00% of
total world coal use. Within the US, coal accounts for nearly half (48.7% ) of all power generation. To give up coal completely would be impossibility but let’s imagine for
a moment such a circumstance. Question: if the United States stopped using coal today, given current coal consumption trends, how many years would need to pass before the
rest of the world (ROW) replaced the lost consumption from the US?
Here is his answer, based on the graphs that he presents above:
Based on current trends, and using a conservative 4.00% annual growth rate in global coal consumption (when in truth it is currently closer to 4.7 -5.00%), I project that the
world could replace 100% of lost US demand in 5 years. The force behind this trend of course is not the 2 billion people in the developed world, but the nearly 5 billion
people in the developing world.
These numbers suggest that the driving issue behind what is called "climate policy" is really "energy policy." Further, the challenge is not, as many in the
rich world would have things, simply about stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but doing so while simultaneously and dramatically expanding energy
supply around the world, especially among the 5 billion people in what are often called "developing countries." The world faces an energy challenge of enormous
magnitude. Climate policy discussions too often ignore or minimize the energy challenge.
There is no national "grid." And a "smart" grid will not "vastly improve" electric power generation or efficiency.
May 5, 2010
- by Larry Reisinger
Media accounts about the electric grid, the “smart grid,” and cyber attacks have been misleading, if not completely wrong. Much hoopla and misinformation comes from vendors
selling panaceas, and scaremongers selling their services.
Disclaimer: In the time between the writing of this article and its publication, this blog post came out and was
linked at Instapundit. The author was completely unaware of any such industry group and any such agenda (though the issue itself is obvious), and is completely unconnected with
any such industry group. This specific issue will be addressed in Part II of this article, and has no direct bearing in this, Part I. (PJM)
Even with modest signs of economic recovery, many Americans in 2010 are focused on the here and now: making a living and surviving the worst recession in decades. But most
also want a better future, including a secure, clean energy future — one that helps our country improve the environment while maintaining its competitive edge. And despite
the other pressing issues at hand, we must take definitive steps in planning for that future today.
As we look to address serious and broad issues — global climate change, the need for increased energy independence and our desire to stimulate the economy to promote lasting
security and meaningful job growth — our country is at an energy crossroads. Meanwhile, other countries are building modern energy systems that produce good jobs today and a
platform for economic growth in the future. (William D. Johnson, IBD)
... can't say I admire the fatalism (defeatism?) of a lot energy types today. A "carbon constrained" future will only be "inevitable"
if everyone surrenders because it for sure has no benefits to make it optimal or desirable. The planet loves carbon even more than politicians believe in their own
self-importance. Can't put it more strongly than that.
NEW DELHI - The radiation-related death of a scrap metal worker has raised concerns over nuclear safety in India, at a time when the Asian power is wooing foreign players to
its $150 billion civilian nuclear market.
Authorities have launched a probe into the unauthorized disposal of a disused machine from the chemistry department of Delhi University, which contained the radioactive
material cobalt-60 and ended up in a scrap metal hub in the capital.
A man died in hospital from exposure last week, in a case a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was quoted as saying was the most serious worldwide since
2006.
The death raised concerns over the handling of nuclear material in India at a time when the ruling Congress party is trying to push through legislation in parliament to help
foreign players access its lucrative nuclear energy market. (Reuters)
Vans and light trucks should be fitted with mandatory speed limiters in the European Union to prevent them exceeding 120 km per hour and improve their fuel efficiency,
according to an EU report.
The recommendation comes in a paper setting out the European Parliament's preliminary stance on cutting carbon emissions from vans. Parliament and the EU's 27 member countries
will hammer out a final deal in coming weeks.
"One ... way to tackle the problem would be to have mandatory speed limiters for light commercial vehicles," says the document, seen by Reuters.
"These vehicles are almost exclusively used for commercial purposes and do not need to exceed 120 km per hour," it adds. (Reuters)
The vision of tranquil modern cities, with inhabitants gliding by silently in electric cars, may be shattered by European plans to introduce artificial warning sounds to the
new generation of zero-emission vehicles.
Each manufacturer may be permitted to provide its own “signature tune”, with the regulation simply setting a minimum volume to prevent pedestrians, cyclists and especially
blind people from stepping into the path of battery-powered cars. (The Times)
EVs go fast enough to injure pedestrians? Who knew...
France could see its nascent wind power sector blown off its feet if amendments to a recent French green law are voted, the renewable energy sector body said.
A parliamentary debate on a series of amendments to a French green law voted in 2008 starts on Tuesday after an enthusiastic environmental debate took place in the wake of the
French presidential election.
But a parliamentary group led by Patrick Ollier, a leading figure of the center right UMP party, has lobbied hard to combat the law as it stands in a bid to cut down the plan
that aims to substantially boost the number of wind turbines in France. (Reuters)
Last week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the final
cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health spending by $311 billion over the next decade
and will cause 14 million Americans to lose their current employer-based health coverage. President Barack Obama unleashed his staff to attack Foster’s work. Nancy-Ann
DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and White House Communications Director Dan
Pfeiffer downplayed and criticized Foster’s analysis on the White House website. As Heritage’s Rob Bluey reports
this was not the first time the author of the report, Medicare and Medicaid chief actuary Rick Foster, had been attacked by a White House: Continue
reading... (The Foundry)
Due to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the nation’s health care system is on its way to undergoing a tremendous overhaul. The impact
of the implementation process will be felt by all, but state and local governments will play a significant role.
As former Heritage senior fellow Dennis Smith writes in a recent
paper, “While the White House would like to give the impression that the debate on health care is over, the truth is that it has just begun. Like welfare reform
legislation in the past, there are really three phases to reform. An act of Congress is just the first; now reform passes to the state level and eventually to the local level,
and it is at the state and local levels that the real impact on the country’s citizens will become apparent.”
You probably have seen that new General Motors ad were CEO Ed Whitacre claims his company has repaid their taxpayer bailout “in full, with interest, five years ahead of
the original schedule.” Don’t believe it for a second. Nick Gillespie explains why in the video to the right.
The New York Times is also calling out the Obama administration for signing off on GM’s
Enron-style accounting:
But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.
Insecticides such as DDT have long been used to combat the scourge of malaria in the developing world. But with the disease parasite becoming increasingly adept at resisting
the chemical onslaught, some countries are achieving striking success by eliminating the environmental conditions that give rise to malarial mosquitoes. (Sonia Shah, e360)
Ooh! What a misleading statement. In fact DDT has not been significantly (adequately?) used in the developing world and DDT resistance is not actually a
problem with indoor spraying for malarial control since resistance takes the form of excitation and avoidance (the bugs don't hang around to bite people, which is the desired
result).
Interestingly, swamp drainage and geoengineering are some of the ways the industrial north defeated malaria and are some of the greenies' pet hates (wetland destruction!).
Even more interesting we have riparian vegetation destruction "such as clearing vegetation along waterways" labeled as "environmentally-sensitive methods"
in this piece.
Great, I'm all for development and health improvement through disease vector control but can we please make up our minds? Are we now agreed that development is good? And
disease vector control through habitat modification/denial, that's good too? Nice to have you onboard at last. Now, can we also agree that deploying all available techniques
to improve human health and wellbeing is also a good thing and that the sooner we improve people's health and their wealth generating capacity the better off everyone and
the environment will be?
Charities have bureaucratic imperatives to grow, and they do so by moral imperialism. Amnesty is no exception. May 3, 2010
- by Theodore Dalrymple
Amnesty International started with the laudable but modest aim of supporting and if possible obtaining the release of prisoners of conscience. It would not defend those who had
advocated, incited, or perpetrated violence, which is why it would not continue to defend Nelson Mandela once he avowed his leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
But charities have their bureaucratic imperatives to grow, and they do so by moral imperialism. Here is the statement of purpose that I took from one Amnesty website:
Our purpose is to protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.
There is not much danger, then, of Amnesty working itself out of a job. (PJM)
For our new 2010 report on atrazine water contamination, I have reviewed the studies on the environmental impacts and health effects of atrazine and many other agriculture
chemicals. The findings confirm our 2009 report that showed widespread water contamination, but also provide a summary of the new science showing harmful impacts from atrazine.
I have included studies of wildlife, of lab science, and of human epidemiology. The evidence just keeps growing. Atrazine shouldn’t be in our rivers, streams, or tap water.
(Press Release)
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal notes, “With the headlines full
of oil spills and immigration, the Obama Administration's regulatory agenda is getting little attention. That's a mistake. Consider the Environmental Protection Agency's effort
to revive an assault on atrazine, one of the oldest, most well-established agricultural chemicals on the market. Just this past week, the EPA held its third ‘re-evaluation’
hearing on atrazine.”
“This editorial is right on target,” says Dr. Ross. “It basically points out that the plaintiffs’ bar and anti-chemical, anti-business activists are working hand in
hand yet again to target atrazine, which is the second most widely used herbicide in the U.S. This campaign is based on no science whatsoever, as it is already acknowledged
both by the EPA and WHO that there is no evidence that current levels of atrazine in drinking water are dangerous to humans. Lawyers, of course, will still continue trying to
extort money from companies that manufacture this chemical.”
“Keep in mind that the EPA and other agencies have now been staffed by activists,” says ACSH’s Jeff Stier. “The way democratic governments usually work is that there
are watchdog groups monitoring regulatory agencies, but now the watchdog groups are running the show. It is as important as ever for us to keep pressure on these agencies and
encourage them to prioritize science and consumers’ health interest. With support from Dispatch readers, we will continue to watch them
and fight against unscientific activism.”
Dr. Whelan adds, “Well, someone has to watch the watchdogs these days.” (ACSH)
I was down in Florida last week, where the subject of Chinese drywall is never far from anyone's thoughts. Outside the Sunshine State, though, media coverage has been a bit
spotty, for two reasons:
The victim group is wrong, being comprised mostly of middle class white people; and the extent of this environmental and financial disaster has proven (if such proof were
even needed these days) that the Feds are far better at collecting tax revenue than actually solving the problems these tax dollars are supposed to solve.
Upwards of 60,000 homes are affected in Florida alone, with one of the hardest hit cities being Cape Coral. I spent three days there last week to observe the situation first
hand. For most of the trip, I tagged along with Michael Foreman of Foreman and Associates, the state's leading purveyor of
remediation for Chinese drywall problems.
Given that Florida is already home to countless scam artists, there are probably hundreds offering a panacea to this problem. Let me assure you: Foreman is the real deal,
and he's racking up the successfully treated homes to prove it.
Remediation consists of removing all the drywall, insulation, wiring, ducting, and furring strips, cleaning the place up, and then treating all remaining surfaces with a
proprietary chlorine dioxide solution from AbissoCleanse, Inc. After this treatment, core samples are taken from block and wood, and
only after these pass muster does reconstruction of the house begin.
This is all good news, but it is overshadowed somewhat by the fact that so far, anyone who wants to clean up his tainted house is doing it on his own dime. That's right.
Currently, there is no help whatsoever for those poor souls, who—through no fault of their own—got stuck with a contaminated house.
Foreman and others are working to change this. Thousands are hoping that they will succeed.
Check out my HND article, that covers this in more detail. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
If Obama can seize the moment, this oil spill could help reverse the slide of US environmentalism
It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn't have drilled the Deepwater Horizon
well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that
led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago. And maybe, just maybe, the disaster will help reverse environmentalism's long political slide – a slide largely caused by our
success in alleviating highly visible pollution. If so, there may be a small silver lining to a very dark cloud. (Paul Krugman, The Guardian)
Media Bias: As the Gulf Coast faced ecological disaster, the president yukked it up with White House correspondents. His Saturday radio address didn't even mention the oil
spill. President Bush, call your office.
Rarely has media sycophancy been on such sharp display as in the largely indifferent response to President Obama's own indifference to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of
Mexico. The coverage has been far different from that given to President Bush's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (IBD)
The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Rudd Resource tax was just another in a long line of taxes helping to depopulate rural Australia.
The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that depopulation of the outback started with the fringe benefits tax and the removal of accelerated depreciation, both
of which penalise companies who provide housing for employees.
“Every government since then has accelerated the drift to the coastal and capital cities.
“The heavy burdens of excessive fuel taxes, coal royalties, rail freights and infrastructure bottlenecks have for years restricted the development of the outback resource
industry. Only deposits that are rich or close to the coast can pay their way, which is why the Galilee Basin has been undeveloped for so long.
“The vegetation control bans, water mismanagement and growth of carbon credit forests are depressing agriculture and will depopulate rural towns.
“Humans and their industries are also prohibited from vast areas of our land and sea sterilised by a confusing mixture of exclusion zones. And the lack and high cost of
outback infrastructure has fed the fly-in mentality of industry and governments.
“Had the money wasted just on roof insulation been spent on new infrastructure, Australia would be a more decentralised and productive place.
“The climate alarmists urge still more carbon taxes and force the usage of expensive alternative energy. All outback industry relies almost totally on carbon fuels for motive
power. None of our quad bikes, cars, trucks, road trains, tractors, dozers, trains, planes or ships are powered by solar panels or wind turbines – they need diesel, petrol,
gas and electricity (from coal). And our biggest outback industries are focussed on exploring, developing, supplying or transporting carbon products. Coal, gas, oil, beef,
sheep, dairy and timber are all threatened by more carbon taxes.
“The Rudd Resource tax is yet another centralising force, depressing outback industry and stimulating the population of drones around the government honey pots in Canberra.
It increases the risk that the belated rush to build infrastructure will leave new trains without freight and new ports without ships.
The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to
survive the winter.
The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of
thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is
causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's
Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that
bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming
methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives. (The Observer)
KOENIGSWINTER, Germany (AP) — Outgoing U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer shot down expectations of a climate treaty this year, saying Monday that a major U.N. conference in
December would yield only a "first answer" on curbing greenhouse gases.
His comments came just five months after the hyped Copenhagen climate conference failed to yield much progress despite efforts by world leaders, including President Barack
Obama.
De Boer said the next major U.N. climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, in December will "not provide an answer that is good enough." (Associated Press)
Governments must confront risks that the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol for fighting climate change will collapse because of splits about a successor treaty, the U.N.'s top climate
official said on Monday. (Reuters)
We urge governments not to let Kyoto die but to actively kill the rotten thing. Embalm, cremate and bury -- take no chances!
H/T to Marcel Crok, who has noted the announcement of the Interacademies Panel, the group appointed by the UN to look at management and organisational issues at the IPCC in
the wake of Climategate. There is a dedicated website for the review here.
RICHMOND -- Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II is demanding that the University of Virginia turn over a broad range of documents from a former professor to
determine whether he defrauded taxpayers as he sought grants for global warming research.
The civil investigative demand asks for all data and materials presented by former professor Michael Mann when he applied for five research grants from the university. It also
gives the school until May 27 to produce all correspondence or e-mails between Mann and 39 other scientists since 1999.
The actions by Cuccinelli (R) -- who has sued the federal government over its regulation of greenhouse gases and has become a leading national voice in alleging that scientists
have skewed data to show evidence the Earth is warming -- were cheered by those on the right, who have long targeted Mann as a leading proponent of the theory.
Mann, who works at Penn State, was one of the authors of the "hockey stick" graph, a study that used a variety of data, including tree rings, to chart climate change.
His research showed a rapid recent increase in the Earth's temperature.
Mann's work has been repeatedly targeted by global warming skeptics, particularly after an e-mail from him referring to a statistical "trick" he used in his research
surfaced in a series of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Mann has said the e-mail was taken out of context, and an inquiry by Penn
State concluded that there was no evidence Mann has engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data.
Mann and several academic groups decried Cuccinelli's subpoena as an unprecedented inquisition that could threaten academic freedom.
"I think he's simply trying to smear me as part of a larger campaign to discredit my science," said Mann, who left the University of Virginia in 2005. (Washington
Post) You can read the whole civil investigative demand here.
One of the interesting things about the defense of Mann by advocate and quite a few skeptics is the deafening silence when Gore abused his Senatorial
powers to persecute skeptics. As it happens I think these are entirely different issues but the contrasting reactions are fascinating. Now, Cuccinelli was elected to
represent the people of Virginia zealously and it is undeniably his function to determine whether Mann fraudulently acquired grant monies funded by said people. An AG is
somewhat different from a Senator and it seems to me that Ken Cuccinelli is behaving properly while Al Gore behaved abominably. Apparently not too many of us see it this way
but there are others:
Virginia
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has begun an investigation of Michael Mann who was working at University of Virginia between 1999 and 2005 - right after he became famous
for the his main "brainchild", the hockey stick graph - and who has received a substantial amount of the public money as a result of his hockey stick graph claims.
We're talking about half a million of dollars from the Virginia's state funds - which may be kind of "supervised" by the attorney general of the state - but of
course, Mann has collected millions of dollars from other sources, too.
Because of the CRU e-mails, it seems conceivable if not likely to the prosecutor (and many of us) that Mann has committed a fraud
against taxpayers as defined in a pretty clearly worded bill of the state of Virginia. Cuccinelli wants to see Mann's e-mails about the matters and other things. If he
wins, Mann may be forced to return all the money plus other expenses.
Steve McIntyre strongly disagrees with Cuccinelli's activities because it's a witch hunt,
Cuccinelli has become a bigger bully than Mann himself, and so on.
Thanks to Glenn Beck, we get bit more insight into the tangled web that The House of Global Warming was built on.
Who would have thought? Goldman Sachs has been working hard to save the environment for years.
Generation Investment Management (GIM) was founded by Al Gore, and a few friends, which included David Blood (former Goldman executive), Mark Ferguson (Goldman) and Peter
Harris (Goldman). They are the fifth largest shareholder in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Then in 2006, when the CCX needed some extra funding, who should step up to buy
10% of the company – Goldman Sachs.
CCX is an exchange that won’t be doing a heck of a lot if carbon trading doesn’t become mandatory. All of these players have a vested interest in Cap N Trade
legislation.
An Atlanta-based competitor to CME Group Inc. said Friday it has agreed to pay $604 million for Climate Exchange PLC, the London-based operator of the Chicago Climate
Exchange and Chicago Climate Futures Exchange -- pioneers in emissions trading. The deal by IntercontinentalExchange, known as ICE, also includes the European Climate Exchange.
"The combination of Climate Exchange's emissions markets and ICE's futures and OTC energy markets is an important and logical strategic combination for our customers and
shareholders," said ICE Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher.
The deal is a milestone for Chicagoan Richard Sandor, Climate Exchange chairman, who said the acquisition makes "strategic sense." ICE had bought a 4.8 percent stake
in the exchange last year, and already provides an electronic trading platform and clearing services. (CBB)
Much has been written over recent months about the enigmatic Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), Dr Rajendra K Pachauri. He has been labeled a
crook and a fraudster by some, because of his extensive interests in companies that stand to benefit from carbon trading, but those searching for direct and actionable evidence
of wrong-doing will be disappointed.
What they will find is someone who has used his position as IPCC Chairman to attract major funding to his own organization, The Energy and Resources Institute2 (TERI), known
previously (and concurrently by some), as the Tata Energy Research Institute. Read
more... (SPPI)
Under the leadership of Lord Rees, the Royal Society's reputation has sunk dramatically, with this once august body now widely seen as a political body and a surrogate arm
of the government, more interested in the next tranche of funding than truth. Their role in Lord Oxburgh's whitewashing may well hang over them for a long time to come.
The global warming crusade was delighted to report that the Great Lakes ice cover from the late 1990s to the mid-to-late 2000s was much lower than normal. The reason?
Clearly the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. Now, however, they are troubled and keeping quiet. The reason is that the “Great Lakes experienced extensive ice cover during
the 2008-2009 winter.
The area of Lake Superior covered by ice during the 2008-2009 winter reached 75,000 square kilometers on March 2, 2009, nearly twice the maximum average of nearly 40,000 square
kilometers. By this time, Lake Superior was nearly completely ice covered, as were Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake St. Clair, a small basin between Huron and Erie. Even
northern Lake Michigan experienced severe ice cover,” report B. J. Wang and co-authors.
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?
Here’s another one. The ice melt during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in satellite history. Therefore, you might expect
that some folks would exude a sigh of relief that perhaps things weren’t as bad as originally thought, and also tell us so. Yet, not a peep to be heard. (Jack Dini, Hawaii
Reporter)
The Arctic ice set 30 records in April, one for each day. According to satellite data received by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Arctic was more ice bound
each day of April than it had been any other corresponding day in April since its sensors began tracking the extent of Arctic Ice in mid 2002. Click
here to see this tracking on the Japan Aerospace website, run jointly with the International Arctic Research Center.
While Arctic ice has always varied greatly, expanding and contracting during the course of a year and also from year to year and decade to decade, the expansion of the
Arctic ice this decade is significant in one respect: It acts to disprove the models that had predicted that the Arctic ice in this century would not recover as it had in
previous centuries.
The expansion of the Arctic ice also acts to support a growing number of reports that Earth could be in for a period of global cooling. In one recent example, on April 14 New
Scientist in an article entitled “Quiet Sun Puts Europe on Ice” warned its readers as follows: “BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe.
Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age.
That's the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.”
New Scientist, a widely respected magazine that until recently had blamed human activity for the global warming, is now advising its readers that climate scientists
may have had their blinders on in ignoring a dominant role for the Sun. New research, the article explains, “is helping to overcome a long-standing reticence among climate
scientists to tackle the influence of solar cycles on the climate and weather.”
The new study that New Scientist refers to, which appears in Environmental Research Letters, a journal of the Institute of Physics, is entitled “Are cold
winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?” (Financial Post)
Churchville, VA—Biologists are again predicting massive species losses as the world warms. But where are the corpses? There have been few findings of extinctions among
continental bird and mammal species over the past 500 years. The species extinctions have been virtually all on islands, as humans have brought such alien predators as rats,
cats, and Canadian thistles to places where they had no natural enemies.
A new study shows that flying squirrels have been adapting to recent warming since the 1990s by both moving and hybridizing. C.J. Garroway and his research team trapped more
than 1600 of the flying squirrels in Ontario and Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2004. The flying squirrels’ DNA shows the southern G. volans flying squirrels are increasingly
mating with the northern G. sabrinus flying squirrels. The researchers say this is the “first report of hybrid zone formation following a range expansion induced by
contemporary climate change.”
That’s certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. Ice cores and fossil pollen show the earth has had six major global warmings since the last Ice Age, interspersed with
centuries-long cold periods. The earth’s temperatures are always cycling up and down. (CGFI)
Palo Alto, CA— Trees and other plants help keep the planet cool, but rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are turning down this global air conditioner.
According to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in some regions more than a quarter of the warming from increased carbon dioxide is due to its
direct impact on vegetation. This warming is in addition to carbon dioxide's better-known effect as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. For scientists trying to predict global
climate change in the coming century, the study underscores the importance of including plants in their climate models.
"Plants have a very complex and diverse influence on the climate system," says study co-author Ken Caldeira of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology. "Plants
take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but they also have other effects, such as changing the amount of evaporation from the land surface. It's impossible to make good
climate predictions without taking all of these factors into account."
Plants give off water through tiny pores in their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration that cools the plant, just as perspiration cools our bodies. On a hot day, a tree
can release tens of gallons of water into the air, acting as a natural air conditioner for its surroundings. The plants absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis through the
same pores (called stomata). But when carbon dioxide levels are high, the leaf pores shrink. This causes less water to be released, diminishing the tree's cooling power.
The warming effects of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas have been known for a long time, says Caldeira. But he and fellow Carnegie scientist Long Cao were concerned that it
is not as widely recognized that carbon dioxide also warms our planet by its direct effects on plants. Previous work by Carnegie's Chris Field and Joe Berry had indicated that
the effects were important. "There is no longer any doubt that carbon dioxide decreases evaporative cooling by plants and that this decreased cooling adds to global
warming," says Cao. "This effect would cause significant warming even if carbon dioxide were not a greenhouse gas." (Carnegie Institution)
Yes, reduced stomatal exchange is a fact in CO2-enriched atmospheres (this is the very thing that makes the plants more water efficient and
drought resistant). Does this make the planet hotter due to reduced evaporative air conditioning? Not necessarily. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas (the most prolific and
important one). The enhanced greenhouse effect of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide is actually fairly small (about 1 °C) and the whole global warming farce is
predicated on "positive feedback" from more evaporation and more water vapor in the atmosphere magnifying the warming by a factor of about 3. Now Caldeira et al
claim reduced evaporation will cause more warming. You really have to admire the versatility of global warming when both increases and decreases of a commodity cause
the same response.
Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Administrator, is keen to expand her role, get more funding and enlarge her organization. She sees “Acid Seas” as a suitable vehicle and has given
interviews claiming that the oceans are becoming more acidic and “threatening much of the life in the oceans.” Read
more... (SPPI)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Let a bunch of fluorine atoms get together in the molecules of a chemical compound, and they're like a heavy metal band at a chamber music festival.
They tend to dominate the proceedings and not always for the better.
That's particularly true where the global warming potential of the chemicals is concerned, says a new study by NASA and Purdue University researchers.
The study offers at least a partial recipe that industrial chemists could use in developing alternatives with less global warming potential than materials commonly used today.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Purdue)
... if only warming were a real problem they could be on to something.
Fulfilling Copenhagen Accord will require variety of efforts ranging from 'Herculean' to the readily actionable, scientists say
Major greenhouse gas-emitting countries agreed in December climate talks held in Copenhagen that substantial action is required to limit the increase of global average
temperature to less than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
In a paper appearing May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Yangyang Xu, climate researchers at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, UC San Diego, have identified three avenues by which those countries can avoid reaching the warming threshold, a point beyond which many scientists believe
climate change will present unmanageable negative consequences for society.
"Without an integrated approach that combines CO2 emission reductions with reductions in other climate warmers and climate-neutral air-pollution laws, we are certain to
pass the 2-degree C and likely reach a 4 degree C threshold during this century," said Ramanathan. "Fortunately there is still time to avert unmanageable climate
changes, but we must act now."
Using a synthesis of National Science Foundation-funded research performed over the last 20 years, Ramanathan and Xu describe three steps that must be taken simultaneously to
avoid the threshold, stressing that carbon dioxide control alone is not sufficient. (University of California - San Diego)
I was asked to review, and, as a courtesy to a professional colleague, I agreed to do that. I did not expect, however, that I would be riveted to such a truly
outstanding contribution to the history of meteorology!
His autobiographical discussion of his experiences, as well as others, with tornados, microbursts from severe thunderstorms, and hurricanes, and the
development of improvements in the monitoring and dissemination of their threats that the public and commerce face with this weather feature is as interesting as the
best fiction novel! He presents the plot, provides the (real world) characters, and builds each story in the book to its climax event, whether it is a
tornado, a microburst or a hurricane. After reading, you learn quite a bit about not only the science of forecasting, but also the people who were involved.
Mike also candidly illustrates serious issues with bureaucratic involvement with the development of the improvements in forecasting and the distribution of weather
information, including examples from the National Weather Service, the Air Force, Federal Emergency Management Agency and others.
He presents an effective, and very well written, evolution of how the work of the National Weather Service, private corporations and others has prevented thousands of
deaths. Ted Fujita (who I was also fortunate enough to know also) was appropriately recognized for his seminal contributions to severe thunderstorm knowledge.
The Greensburg, Kansas tornado of 2007 is presented at the end of the book to illustrate how far the meteorological community has come in alerting us to the deadly
threat of F4 and F5 tornadoes. Mike was (and remains) a major contributor to why we have made so many improvements to severe thunderstorm forecasting and why so many
lives have been saved.
I highly recommend this exceptional book. (Climate Science)
We are sure that carbon capture and storage can stall the effects of climate change
Your article reported Houston University research which claims that "governments wanting to use carbon capture and storage have overestimated its value" (US
paper raises doubts over viability of carbon capture, 26 April).
The carbon dioxide storage method injects the gas into the microscopic pores of reservoir sediments below 800 metres underground, in order to reduce atmospheric levels of this
greenhouse gas. Scientists internationally are attempting to evaluate it. The argument you report is derived from a notorious pair of articles by Michael Economides and
Christine Ehlig-Economides. (Stuart Haszeldine and Martin Blunt, The Guardian)
CCS advocates sure are a testy bunch, aren't they? What they dance around is that there is absolutely no
justification for doing it in the first place. It quite literally can not do what it is supposed to do. After that it just gets down to nit picking really but the only
examples of significant injection are enhanced oil and gas recovery schemes where there is no particular interest in keeping the CO2 sequestered and most of the
gas is returned to surface along with the increased oil and/or gas flow.
Do have a look at our calculations, based on both the IPCC's and Hansen's extreme climate sensitivity
figures and note that stopping all U.S. coal-fired electricity generation CO2 emissions from the end of this year can deliver at most an insignificant 0.15 °C
"saving" over 90 years (0.00167°C/year) . The U.K. can not hope to achieve even that with its much smaller potential emission reduction so at what cost will
you save a few hundredths of a degree over the next century?
In 2006, the Norwegian government embarked on the world’s most ambitious carbon capture project – a system that would capture the CO2 produced at gas-fired
power stations. The system had a projected cost of 27 billion NoK, roughly equivalent to US$5 billion. The two power stations concerned are situated at Mongstad near Bergen on
the west coast and Kårstø, somewhat further to the south. Mongstad had been chosen as the starting point.
NEW ORLEANS — BP prepared Monday to install a shutoff valve on one of three leaks gushing from an oil spill off the coast of New Orleans, in a bid to stem what President
Obama called a "potentially unprecedented environmental disaster." (NYT)
Energy giant BP Plc was under siege on Monday over the catastrophic oil spill from its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, as its shares fell and the U.S. government pressed it to
try to limit a major environmental disaster.
As a huge oil slick advanced toward the Gulf Coast shoreline, the London-based company came under increasing pressure to do more to stop, or at least control, what is fast
turning into the worst oil spillage in U.S. history.
Comments by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department was involved in the investigation of the incident raised the specter of wide liability for BP over the
spill after an April 20 explosion at a rig drilling its well.
A Justice Department official said it was not a criminal probe at this stage.
Holder has sent two top Justice officials to New Orleans. "We're down there to try to ensure that BP is held liable for their responsibility in the spill that has
occurred," he said. (Reuters)
A dead sea turtle lies on a beach in the small town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, approximately 55 miles east of New Orleans. Twenty dead turtles were washed up on beaches
in the state at the weekend. Five of the seven species of sea turtle live in the Gulf of Mexico ? leatherback, hawksbill, green, loggerhead and Kemp's ridley. All are
threatened or endangered.
Kitchen sink gloves at the ready, Jackye Carroll, 62, patrolled the white-sand beach of Pass Christian yesterday looking for any sign of animal distress from the oil slick
lurking over the horizon. Her vigilance soon paid off, though she was hardly pleased: a dead loggerhead turtle by the edge of the surf.
"I have been living here for 20 years," says Ms Carroll. "And I have never seen a single dead turtle on the beach." Pulling on the gloves as she had been
instructed after volunteering for turtle-watch duty the day before, she dragged the turtle, about two feet in length, up the sand to where it would be collected.
Like everyone else, animal rescue teams and ecologists are watching and waiting, almost teased by an oil spill that promises to be catastrophic in scale but which so far has
barely shown on the coastline itself. (The Independent)
Could just be cold weather or even that lots more people are looking for carcasses because it seems pretty odd for carcasses to float so far ahead of the
slick, doesn't it?
Whatever, there will be negative consequences from this accident and both BP and Transocean should be held responsible (they undertook the risks in exchange for the potential
rewards). Bottom line is whether or not the costs send these companies broke the clean up will be done and life (and oil drilling) will go on.
Short
of outright prohibition, the most effective accident-prevention mechanism is to enforce property rights and make sure that companies know in advance and under law that they are
fully and directly responsible for whatever havoc their activities cause
By Terence Corcoran
By some merciful force or just good luck, the giant BP oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday remained the greatest environmental disaster that hasn’t happened.
For more than three days, news reports have been filled with alarming tales of imminent disaster, but then the wind direction shifted and the worst failed to materialize.
Maybe millions of gallons of oil will eventually crash onto the shores of the U.S. gulf states, creating untold damage to the environment and the lives of millions of people.
Or maybe fate will push the oil on a course that will avoid an unprecedented catastrophe. If the worst does happen, let’s hope the full cost of the affair is borne by the
perpetrators. That would be BP.
A lot of gun ships are riding this oil slick with other agendas — environmental, political and economic. Environmentalists aren’t waiting; they want U.S. offshore oil
exploration and development halted. The World Socialist called the still-pending Gulf Coast event “an American Chernobyl.” Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist, warned
President Barack Obama to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd and predicted a reversal of what he called a long slide in the influence of environmentalism. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, governor of California, withdrew support for drilling off the coast of California.
On the other side, economic nationalists say offshore oil is a national imperative and America’s only hope for energy independence. A spill is a price to be paid. As a
British company, BP is being painted as an unworthy foreign operator, while the Obama administration is accused of tardy action. On the far right, the rig explosion that
triggered the oil spill is said to be the work of saboteurs of various origin.
Politicians all over, meanwhile, are coming forward to guarantee the impossible, that nothing like this should ever happen again.
In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper joined leaders from Newfoundland and British Columbia in issuing assurances that Canada’s offshore energy sector is solid and at no
risk.
“The behaviour of the companies in question is completely unacceptable,” said Mr. Harper, “and would be completely unacceptable in this country.”
But environmental disasters, no matter what their origin, are always completely unacceptable. And they will always happen, no matter what the rhetoric about absolute
prevention, zero tolerance and triple fail-safe regulation. Risk is always there.
Short of outright prohibition, the most effective accident-prevention mechanism is to enforce property rights and make sure that companies know in advance and under law that
they are fully and directly responsible for whatever havoc their activities cause.
As a company that has long claimed to be the world’s greenest oil corporation, BP has so far assured Americans that it will pay the full clean-up cost, a bill that could run
to tens of billions of dollars, depending on where the oil spill goes next.
But it is not clear whether BP would pick up all the costs, including damages.
“We will absolutely be paying for the cleanup operation,” said BP CEO Tony Hayward, appearing to leave open the issue of damages, the losses to the livelihoods of people
working in coastal fishing and tourism industries.
Environmentalists are skeptical that BP will live up to the pledge, which was offered by Mr. Hayward during U.S. television interviews.
Under U.S. law, however, the direct liability of oil companies for environmental damages appears limited.
According to the U.S. 1990 Oil Pollution Act, the liability of individual companies is set at a maximum of $75-million, the result of past compromises between politicians and
the oil industry over who will cover pollution risks. Yesterday, some U.S. Democratic Senators scrambled to retroactively change the law by introducing the “Big Oil Bailout
Prevention Act” to raise the liability limit to $10-billion.
This is classic political ass-covering. How did the original act get through Congress? The oil industry has often sought limited liability protection.
The act itself is a shambles of unfulfilled promises and commitments. It set up an Oil Spill Liability Trust, a fund to be built up by a tax on oil production. But the fund has
never been maintained properly and, thanks to Congressional fiddling, is not equipped to handle a disaster.
In its latest report, with $1.5-billion in assets, the Oil Spill Trust said it “will be able to cover its projected non-catastrophic liabilities” for years to come, leaving
catastrophic events to fate.
For years there have been warnings that the Trust’s funding is inadequate. In 2004, the fund was heading to a zero balance and a Homeland Security report said, “A single
major or catastrophic oil spill could have a significant impact” on the fund’s projections.
Now that the worst catastrophe threatens, the politicians are scrambling to cover up something that should never have been established. Some call it the polluter-pays
principle.
In law, it is simply a matter of enforcing property rights. In oil drilling, those rights are taken away and operators have less interest in avoiding disaster.
There are 3,500 oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico alone, operating under a law that limits their responsibility to protect the property of others.
BP, in the Gulf of Mexico, appears, to its credit, to be ready to stand behind property rights rather than its legal rights.
Financial Post
The US government has banned for 10 days all commercial and recreational fishing in parts of the Gulf of Mexico due to health risks from the massive crude oil spill. (TDT)
President Barack Obama said on Friday that domestic oil drilling remains an important part of energy policy and is important to U.S. security, but must be done responsibly.
He said any future offshore tracts leased to companies to search for oil would be subject to better safety measures to prevent and control spills, in the wake of the BP Plc oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"I continue to believe that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security, but I've always said it must be done responsibly for
the safety of our workers and our environment," Obama said. (Reuters)
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an unfortunate and terrible accident that poses economic and environmental challenges to the Gulf coast. The fact that the explosion
took eleven lives is regrettable and condolences to friends and families who lost their loved ones. Many questions are yet without answers; the most general and pressing being:
what went wrong? Along with stopping the leak and containing the oil slick to minimize, the imperative concern is to figure out what went wrong. There will be lots of finger
pointing and calls for action but Members of Congress and the White House should refrain from making any rash political decisions.
Despite accusations that BP cut corners on preventative measures, BP America Inc. President Lamar McKay maintains that’s not the case saying,
“My belief is that that does not have anything to do with it. I believe we’ve got a failed piece of equipment. We don’t know why it failed yet in this contracted rig.”
Whether that’s the case remains to be seen and will require a thorough investigation. The company is spending $6 million a day to reduce the environmental impact with
burnoffs, oil booms, chemical-filled barriers and other dispersant chemicals and is attempting to activate the blowout prevention mechanism that was supposed to go into effect
when the rig exploded. Answering this question must be at the top of the priority list.
After the “what happened and why” questions follow the “who’s to blame” ones. The obvious responsible party is BP and the company has vowed to pay for the clean
up costs for “legitimate and objectively verifiable claims for other loss and damage caused by the spill.” This should include reimbursing the taxpayers for government
resources allocated towards the problem, which thus far includes the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Minerals Management Services.
April saw two devastating disasters in the energy industry: a methane explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia that claimed 29 lives, and another
explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which took 11 more. The latter incident, because of the tens of thousands of gallons of oil now
pouring from the ocean floor each day, will impact the Gulf region for years if not for decades to come.
These tragedies are a terrible reminder of the trial-and-error nature of life. Humans have accomplished many wonders over the millennia – wonders that ended the
vicious cycle of crushing poverty that has been mankind’s lot throughout most of history.
But these accomplishments have often come at a very high price. Because it is in our nature to strive to better our condition and that of our children, life will never
be without risk. As terrible as the consequences of failure can be, it brings with it the seeds of hope. Hope that we can learn from our mistakes and, if not
succeed next time, at least not fail in the same way. From such tragic lessons come knowledge and strength. [Read
more →] (MasterResource)
During the weekly round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, Bill Maher made an astonishing claim. He claimed that Brazil has
“gone off oil” in the last 30 years. He said:
So, you know, I could certainly criticize oil companies, and I could criticize America in general for not attacking this problem in the ’70s. I mean, Brazil got off oil
in the last 30 years. We certainly could have.
Few issues currently before Congress are more hotly debated and critical to the future health or our economy than climate change legislation.
I strongly believe it’s essential we as a nation continue moving forward in developing cleaner forms of energy, and I believe we can do this from a balanced approach. By
promoting greater wind energy development; promoting expanded production in biodiesel, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol; investing in carbon capture and sequestration
technology; supporting nuclear energy; encouraging continued research in clean coal technology; and developing our expansive domestic supply of domestic oil and gas, I truly
believe our nation can significantly reduce carbon emissions while promoting greater energy independence.
The way forward is through investment and innovation, not taxation and regulation. I do not support sweeping cap-and-trade legislation that would have detrimental economic
impacts on our country, all while doing little to reduce overall global temperatures. The current analysis on the national impacts should the Waxman Markey bill be signed into
law is staggering. One study, conducted by the Energy Information Administration, has projected up to 2.3 million fewer jobs and cumulative losses in gross domestic product up
to $3 trillion by the year 2030. (Sam Brownback, KC Star)
Lobbying by Britain looks set to have secured a key concession in EU plans to cut power station emissions due to be voted through the European Parliament this week.
The extra time will be much-needed breathing space as Britain struggles to avoid an "energy gap" as polluting coal-fired plants are closed down by existing EU rules
on pollutants such as sulphur dioxide at the end of 2014.
After months of discussion, the European Parliament's Environment Committee is expected to agree to shift the deadline for the next stage of cuts from the end of 2015 to
mid-2019.
The original plan for a 2015 deadline is part of the integrated pollution prevention and control (IPPC) directive which will follow on from the large combustion plant directive
(LCPD). But it was opposed strongly by the European Council of member states, which proposed a 2020 deadline to give generators more time to upgrade emissions reduction
equipment.
Under the LCPD, power plants must cut emissions of proscribed gases by 94 per cent. Any unable to do so may run for a further 20,000 hours or until the end of 2014, and must
then be scrapped. Some 10 gigawatts (GW) of Britain's generating capacity are due to be retired as a result. (The Independent)
An
average US citizen or corporate entity who kills an endangered animal can be in big trouble with the law. Birds, eagles in particular, are zealously protected by nature lovers
in America and around the world. Yet a July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, California, estimated that an average of 80 golden eagles were killed there by wind
turbines each year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, estimated that about 10,000 other protected birds were being killed along with
the eagles every year at Altamont. Where is the outrage over this slaughter? It would seem ecologists have a blind spot when it comes to the wind energy industry. As a result,
the carnage caused by wind turbines, the “Cuisinarts of the Air,” is getting greenwashed. And birds are not the only creatures wind turbines kill—they kill bats and
people as well.
In the US, birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which dates back to 1918. Over the past two decades, the federal government has brought
hundreds of cases against energy companies for killing wild birds in the operation of their businesses. For example, in July 2009, the Oregon based electric utility PacifiCorp
paid $1.4 million in fines for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over a period of two years. The birds were electrocuted by poorly-designed power lines. At the same time,
wind-powered turbines are killing a vast number of birds each year yet their owners are not being prosecuted.
While the total number of birds killed in the US each year fluctuates, Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that US wind turbines
kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Justice Department is not bringing cases against wind companies. “Somebody has given the wind industry a
get-out-of-jail-free card,” Fry said, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “If there were even one prosecution,” he added, the wind industry would be
forced to take the issue seriously (see “Windmills Are
Killing Our Birds”).
A dead white-tailed eagle killed in the Smøla wind-farm, off the Norwegian coast. Photo Espen Lie Dahl.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, each megawatt of installed wind-power results in the killing of between one and six birds each year. If
environmentalists, lobby groups and some government officials have their way, the U.S. will be producing 20% of its electricity from wind by 2030. Meeting that goal will
require about 300,000 megawatts of wind capacity, a 12-fold increase over 2008 levels, according to the DOE. If that target is achieved, at least 300,000 birds will be killed
each year by wind turbines. Even so, wildlife enforcement officials do not expect to see any prosecutions of the politically correct wind industry.
America isn't alone in creating avian carnage, people across Europe have started to take notice of the true cost of “environmentally friendly” wind
power. An energy company has admitted that endangered Red Kites are at significant risk from its planned new wind farm complex in South Wales. Other reports place the kestrel
and plover in danger from wind turbines as well.
Martina
Carrete, and colleagues from the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, recorded the number of Egyptian vulture carcasses with collision injuries found around 675 wind turbines
in southern Spain between 2004 and 2008. Using a computer model containing information about turbine locations and nesting sites, the researchers estimate the rare Egyptian
vulture will go extinct ten years sooner than expected, even if no more wind farms are built in Spain. The Spanish conservation group, Gurelur,
places the current yearly damage at 409 vultures, 432 birds of prey, 671 bats and 6152 other bird species.
While some experts have downplayed the danger to birds it seems that bats are taking a greater hit—often in a literal sense. Bats, being a rather unloved
species compared to birds, do not seem to carry as much weight with the eco-conscious. Two separate sets of researchers have reported two different ways that wind farms, with
their rotating turbine blades, are dangerous, even deadly to bats. One report shows that bats, with their amazing flying and hunting abilities, are none the less being struck
down by slashing turbine blades.
It is hard to believe that these adept, acoustic radar-equipped flying mammals simply fly into the blades, but a surprising number of bats are being killed
by wind turbine farms. A study was prompted by recent finding that forest-dwelling bats are often found dead beneath operating wind turbines at wind energy facilities. Thermal
infrared video cameras were used to record the flight behavior of bats at night near these turbines in an attempt to understand the cause of these fatalities. Quoting from the
study report:
We observed bats actively foraging near operating turbines, rather than simply passing through turbine sites. Our results indicate that bats: 1) approached
both rotating and non-rotating blades, 2) followed or were trapped in blade-tip vortices, 3) investigated the various parts of the turbine with repeated fly-bys, and 4) were
struck directly by rotating blades. Blade rotational speed was a significant negative predictor of collisions with turbine blades, suggesting that bats may be at higher risk
of fatality on nights with low wind speeds.
This followed previous research that showed that bats can have their lungs ruptured from the sudden low pressure of passing turbine blades: the bats are
actually drowning in mid-air. It is not necessary for the bats to collide with the turbines, bats don't even need to come in physical contact with the turbine blades. A blade
passing close by is enough to be fatal—an unexpected hazard that was previously unsuspected. For more on the bat deaths, including infrared video footage, see “Wind
Turbines Spread While Bats Take Beating.”
Earlier this year, Judge Roger W. Titus of the US District Court of Maryland has “reluctantly” enjoined construction of a West Virginia wind farm under
the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect the Indiana bat. “Like death and taxes, there is a virtual certainty that Indiana bats will be harmed, wounded, or killed
imminently by the Beech Ridge Project,” Titus wrote in a 74-page
opinion. “The development of wind energy can and should be encouraged, but wind turbines must be good neighbors.”
The threatened Indiana bat halted construction of a wind farm.
Wind power projects in a large part of the US may now need to add Fish and Wildlife Service permits to development financing and cost estimates.
Greens may be about to do to wind power what they have previously done to the nuclear industry, creating red tape and legal
barriers to green energy deployment. It seems that some greens oppose any energy project supporting the “unsustainable” Western lifestyle.
Wind power, like every other source of power, has its hazards and negative effects on nature. There is no free lunch, ecologically speaking. Every action by
man—or any other species for that matter—affects the environment in some way. We are all for wind power where it is appropriate and can operate economically. If appropriate
means not along known bird migration routes, near nesting sites or areas with a lot of bat activity the potential for wind power may be a lot smaller than even moderate
estimates.
It may, however, be impossible to avoid the impact widespread use of wind power could have on the environment. Analysis from MIT researchers suggests
generating electricity from large-scale wind farms could influence climate—and not necessarily in the desired way. Scientists have discovered that directly interfering with
wind on a sufficiently large scale affects the climate of the atmosphere.
In a paper published online February 22, 2010, in
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, MIT researchers Chien Wang and Ronald Prinn suggest that using wind turbines to meet 10% of global energy demand in 2100 could cause
temperatures to rise by 1°C in regions where land based wind farms are installed, with a smaller increase in surrounding areas. Their analysis indicates the opposite result
for wind turbines installed in water: a drop in temperatures by 1°C over those regions. According to the paper:
Temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric
circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Turbulent motion refers to the process by which heat and moisture are transferred from the land or ocean
surface to the lower atmosphere. Horizontal heat transport is the process by which steady large-scale winds transport excessive heat away from warm regions, generally in a
horizontal direction, and redistribute it to cooler regions. This process is critical for large-scale heat redistribution, whereas the effects of turbulent motion are
generally more localized.
What the true impact of widespread, large scale wind turbine deployment will be is uncertain. What is certain is that the environment will be affected. The
MIT researchers also suggest that the intermittency of wind power could require significant and costly backup options, such as natural gas-fired power plants. For more
information about the reliability of wind power and the costs associated with its intermittency, see my previous post, “Energy
Answer Not Blowin' In The Wind.”
An Ill Breeze
In January 2008, two giant Vestas wind turbines in the UK collapsed within weeks of each other. An executive from Vestas Wind Systems gave reassurances after
it emerged that one of its turbines had fallen in Scotland just weeks before an incident near Caldbeck in Cumbria. The global manufacturer has produced about 35,000 turbines
since being formed in the 1970s. These were the first such incidents in the 29-year history of wind energy in the UK, and have prompted safety fears to be raised by anti-windfarm
campaigners.
This, and similar incidents around the world have raised questions regarding the safety and durability of wind turbines. Wind power is usually thought of as
being totally safe and benign, not a source of industrial accidents or even death. The truth is rather startling: since the 1970s there have been 482 reported
accidents resulting in 49 deaths.
Of the known deaths, 35 were wind industry workers—installers, maintenance engineers, etc—and one farmer attempting to maintain his own turbine. The most
common cause is falling from turbines. Working on wind turbines is a dangerous profession. It begins with a climb up the supporting tower, as much as 300 ft (90 m)
straight up. A fit maintenance worker can make the climb from ground to turbine in perhaps five minutes.
Wind turbine failure in Cumbria, UK. Source CLOUD.
At the top awaits a room the size of a small bus, filled with a large generator, motors, gears and electronics. A typical turbine contains 8,000 parts, and
the largest models can generate 3 MW of electricity. The turbine technician works in a cramped space, filled with complicated machinery and high voltage circuitry. A
gentle wind at ground level can be a near gale 27 stories above the surface. Like a ship at sea, the top of a wind turbine can sway from side to side, with the generator
housing constantly shifting to keep its blades facing into the wind. Under strong winds, technicians have been known to vomit. In all, not a job for the weak or faint of heart.
Outside of wind industry workers, there were 14 public fatalities reported over the past four decades, three of which were from road accidents attributed by
police to drivers being distracted by the turbines. One was from a road accident collision with a turbine transporter in which a driver was killed, while in another, the road
collapsed and a transport driver drowned.
Among the stranger circumstances was an aircraft accident where a pilot flew into a new, unmarked anemometer (a device used for measuring wind speed) that
was mounted atop a turbine. Four people died in another aircraft accident when a plane collided with a turbine in fog. A 16-year old boy strangled after his necktie became
tangled around an unprotected turbine shaft and a farmer killed himself because of public opposition to his proposed wind turbines. Perhaps the strangest incident of all was
when a German skydiver drifted into an operating wind turbine on her first unassisted jump. In doing so she became the first woman killed by wind energy.
A further nineteen accidents resulting in human injury are documented.
Thirteen accidents involved wind industry or construction workers, and a further five involved members of the public: one lost a leg in a transport accident, one was hit by
thrown ice, one suffered spinal injuries from a falling turbine part, one fell from 100 m tower during an accompanied visit, and another flew his aircraft into a wind farm
site. One 2003 accident resulted in two industry workers receiving appalling burns.
By far the largest number of incidents are due to blade failure. Blade failure can arise from a number of possible sources, and results in either whole
blades or pieces of blade being thrown from the turbine. A total of 122 separate incidents have been documented. Pieces of blade are known to have landed over 1300 feet
(400 m) from the turbine. Most of these were from older turbines that are much smaller than those being built today.
Short circuits, friction or lightening strikes can cause wind turbines to go up in flames. Photo Der Spiegel/DPA.
In Germany, blade pieces have gone through the roofs and walls of nearby buildings. Safety experts believe that there should be a minimum distance of at
least 3000 ft (1 km) between turbines and occupied housing. European countries mandate at least 6500 ft (2 km) in order to address other problems such as
noise.
Surprisingly, fire is the second most common accident cause in incidents found. Fire can arise from a number of sources and some turbine types seem more
prone to fire than others. The biggest problem with turbine fires is that, because of the turbine height, the fire brigade can do little but watch it burn itself out. While
this may be acceptable in reasonably still conditions, in a storm it means burning debris being scattered over a wide area, with obvious consequences. In dry weather there is
obviously a wider-area fire risk, especially for those constructed in or close to forest areas and/or close to housing. A total of 104 fire incidents have been reported.
Structural failure, like the incident in Cumbria, is the third most common accident cause, with 58 reported instances. Structural failure implies major
component failure under conditions which the turbine should be designed to withstand. This mainly occurs during storms, which can damage turbines and even cause tower collapse.
Dramatic footage was captured of a Danish wind turbine collapsing during a storm in February, 2008. The blades and generator housing practically exploded under the strain.
While structural failure is far more damaging than blade failure, the accident consequences and risks to human health are most likely lower, as risks are
confined to within a relatively short distance from the turbine. However, as smaller turbines are now being placed on and around buildings, including schools, the accident
frequency is expected to rise. A related type of incident is ice being thrown from the rotating blades, with distances of up to 450 ft (140 m) being reported.
Aftermath of Danish wind turbine structural failure.
The wind power industry is fond of showing tranquil scenes with contented cows munching grass underneath soaring turbine blades in a wind park. Little did we
know that the cows were in such danger. Being an engineer as well as a scientist, I accept that humans will have an impact on nature and other living things. What I cannot
abide are those sanctimonious, greener-than-thou conservationists who are mindlessly devoted to “green power” while becoming apoplectic at the mention of building new
nuclear power plants.
I am all for clean energy, but only if it is safe energy. So let's be realistic here, birds and bats do not get hacked from the air by nuke plants. And I
know from personal experience, living on Chesapeake Bay near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, that fish love
the warm water outlets from such installations. Over the past 40 years there have been more deaths attributed to wind power than to nuclear power, yet nuclear power is the one
always called “unsafe” by conservationists. It's time to grow up children—if you want to save the birds, the bats and the humans, embrace the power of the atom.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.
Green energy done right, the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant.
[ Note: most of the information presented in this post was taken directly from our new book, The Energy Gap. Look for The Energy Gap on Amazon later in May,
2010. ]
With multiple lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare’s “individual mandate,”
the law’s backers have proffered two principal arguments in its defense. First, they claim that Congress has the power to require U.S. residents to purchase health
insurance under the Constitution’s grant of power “to regulate Commerce…among the several States.”
Second, they claim the measure is authorized by the taxing power.
[T]he Court has never upheld a requirement that individuals who are doing nothing must engage in economic activity by entering into a contractual relationship
with a private company. Such a claim of power is literally unprecedented.
Barnett also explains that the text of the law precludes ObamaCare’s defenders from claiming that the individual mandate is authorized by the taxing power. The
individual mandate defines a minimum level of coverage and then imposes a penalty on people who do not purchase such coverage. Barnett notes that the law invokes the
commerce power (not the taxing power) to justify the mandate, and refers to the penalty for non-compliance as a “penalty” (not a tax):
In short, the “penalty” is explicitly justified as a penalty to enforce a regulation of economic activity and not as a tax. There is no authority for the Court to
recharacterize a regulation as a tax when doing so is contrary to the express and actual regulatory purpose of Congress.
At National Review Online, Cato chairman Bob Levyexplains,
“even if the penalty for noncompliance is deemed to be a tax rather than a fine, it does not meet the constitutional requirements for income, excise, or direct taxes,” and
would be an unconstitutional tax.
That leaves ObamaCare’s supporters to defend the individual mandate as an (unprecedented) use of the commerce power. Barnett writes:
Are there now five justices willing to expand the commerce and tax powers of Congress where they have never gone before? Will the Court empower Congress to mandate any
activity on the theory that a “decision” not to act somehow affects interstate commerce? Will the Court accept that Congress has the power to mandate any activity so long
as it is included in the Internal Revenue Code and the IRS does the enforcing?
Yes, the smart money is always on the Court upholding an act of Congress. But given the hand Congress is now holding, I would not bet the farm.
Levy concludes, “Legal refinements aside, the insurance mandate is an affront to personal liberty that will exacerbate our health-care problems. For those who care, it’s
unconstitutional as well.” (Cato at liberty)
The president’s debt commission had its first meeting this week, and all of the talk was of getting serious about putting our fiscal house in order, with everything “on
the table” for consideration.
There’s no arguing with the need to get serious. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the Obama budget were adopted in full, just the interest on the
national debt would exceed $900 billion in 2020 and consume one out of every five dollars in federal revenue. To put that in perspective, in 2007, before the financial crisis
hit with full force, interest payments on debt stood at $237 billion, or just 9 percent of total tax collections. A sudden and steep rise in the percentage of governmental
revenue dedicated to servicing past excess consumption is a clear warning sign to lenders and credit-rating agencies that a country’s finances are approaching the point of no
return.
Unfortunately, the timeline for taking corrective action may have shortened even in the past few weeks and days. What began as a slow-motion crumble of Greece’s economic
house of cards is now threatening to become a serious global crisis. The flight from sovereign debt risk is now spreading to other vulnerable, highly leveraged countries,
including Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. The implications for European economic recovery are ominous. And, if Europe’s economy slides backward again into a deep recession, no
part of the global economy will be completely spared from the fallout, including the United States.
Tens of thousands of flights were canceled in the Icelandic volcano scare, stranding millions and costing airlines almost $2 billion — proof of Europe's obsession with the
"precautionary principle."
Although Britain's transport minister admitted the shutdown was "too cautious," this is the European Union way. Faced with even a smidgen of danger, real or imagined,
we must take maximum precautions.
Now activists want the U.S. to go the same way.
San Francisco launched the trend in 2003, and now the Environmental Protection Agency has a list of new principles, including "the need to assess and manage risk in the
face of uncertainty."
This announcement, made last September, could be interpreted to mean the EPA would no longer have to demonstrate proof of harm. (Jaap Hanekamp, IBD)
The EPA opens a re-re-evaulation of a safe chemical.
With the headlines full of oil spills and immigration, the Obama Administration's regulatory agenda is getting little attention. That's a mistake. Consider the Environmental
Protection Agency's effort to revive an assault on atrazine, one of the oldest, most well-established agricultural chemicals on the market. Just this past week, the EPA held
its third "re-evaluation" hearing on atrazine.
Atrazine is the nation's second-most common herbicide. For 50 years it has been the farm industry's primary crop protector. In the U.S., the weed killer is used in the
production of 60% of corn, 75% of sorghum and 90% of sugarcane.
Since atrazine's debut in 1959, 10 Administrations have endorsed its use. The EPA in 2006 completed a 12-year review involving 6,000 studies and 80,000 public comments. In
re-registering the product, the agency concluded the cumulative risks posed "no harm that would result to the general U.S. population, infant, children or other . . .
consumers." The World Health Organization has found no health concerns.
None of this has stopped the most politicized environmental groups, which oppose both chemicals and the idea of industrial farming itself. Organizations such as the Natural
Resources Defense Council have spent years ginning up claims that atrazine in groundwater causes cancer, birth defects and other maladies. Manufacturers such as Syngenta have
been required to conduct millions of dollars worth of studies investigating these alarmist claims. EPA staff routinely review the studies in atrazine's favor.
But now the Obama Administration has begun to fill such agencies with hires who are either sympathetic to, or even hail from, these activist groups. Consider the EPA's new head
for toxic substances, Stephen Owens. As director of Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality, he so aggressively imposed an activist's climate agenda that the state
legislature voted to strip his department of authority to enact greenhouse gas rules.
In August, the NRDC and the Pesticide Action Network began a new campaign against atrazine. In October, the EPA announced it would begin a re-re-evaluation of atrazine with a
series of scientific panel meeting, and those are underway. The goal seems to be to lay the groundwork to ban atrazine.
Among the environmental lobby's new lines of attack is that some U.S. water systems occasionally show "spikes" in the chemical. This ignores that the EPA's drinking
water standard for atrazine—three parts per billion—has a built-in, 1,000-fold safety factor. It ignores EPA findings that atrazine isn't likely to be carcinogenic to
humans.
Also re-energized by the EPA's sudden interest in atrazine is, you guessed it, the plaintiffs bar. Tort kingpin Stephen Tillery, joined by Baron & Budd, filed a class
action in 2004 against atrazine makers in tort-friendly Madison County, Illinois, but they've struggled even there. The EPA's re-re-evaluation is already helping the lawyers
sign up more water-district plaintiffs—Mr. Tillery has filed a new federal class action—and it surely will provide ammunition in court.
There is an agenda here far more ambitious than getting one chemical. The environmental lobby wants more farmland retired to "nature," and one way to do that is to
make farming more expensive. The EPA notes that eliminating atrazine would cost $2 billion annually in lost crop yields and substituting more expensive herbicides. Some farmers
would go out of business or ask the federal government for more subsidies.
The environmental lobby also figures that if it can take down atrazine with its long record of clean health, it can get the EPA to prohibit anything. Sounds plausible. Between
this and its determination to regulate greenhouse gases, the Obama EPA is proving itself a regulatory fundamentalist, with scant regard for good science or economics. (WSJ)
The aftermath of the unintended acceleration hearings involving Toyota is moving to the front burner again as lawmakers are proposing legislation that would increase auto
safety regulations to address all potential sources of unintended acceleration. The bill would also increase the budget of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
as well increase the maximum financial penalty Congress could impose on an automaker. Draft legislation titled The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010 has been introduced in the
House by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.).
“The bill is likely to face opposition from automakers, in particular over a provision that would remove the existing $16.4-million cap on civil penalties against vehicle
manufacturers for violations of safety laws and boost the fine for each violation to $25,000, from the current $6,000.
It would create a new tax of $9 per new vehicle after three years, payable by the manufacturer, to help fund NHTSA and some of the new requirements of the law. The tax could
raise more than $100 million a year based on current sales figures.
Are you worried about congestive heart failure? Liver or kidney failure? Chronic fatigue? Pneumonia? Blood vessel health? Alzheimer’s or the loss of other cognitive
abilities? Do you experience muscle cramps or have high cholesterol? Perhaps you suffer from Gitelman’s syndrome or Type-2 diabetes, low libido or insomnia. Maybe your
glucose metabolism isn’t what it should be.
If any of these medical conditions applies to you, then maybe you should ask yourself if you’re getting enough salt in your diet. These and numerous other conditions — some
of them potentially fatal — could be triggered or exacerbated by a diet low in sodium.
We hear a lot from governments about the dangers to our health of consuming sodium. Governments are also subjecting us to an increasing array of sodium-related regulations,
much of it geared to protecting those suffering from hypertension, a condition associated with heart attacks. This sodium-is-dangerous theory (it is only a theory because no
proof for it has yet materialized) is credible and worth considering. But before the government’s regulatory apparatus expands, it and we should consider the far-reaching
danger in cutting back on our salt, a danger that — ironically — fully applies to those who suffer from hypertension.
NEW YORK - Spouses of patients on dialysis are likely to have chronic kidney disease themselves and should be screened for it, Taiwanese researchers reported on Friday.
For the spouses, the odds of having the debilitating disease more than doubled compared to the general population, and even exceeded those of the patients' relatives.
Being married to a patient on dialysis hadn't been recognized as a risk factor for kidney disease before, Kerry Willis of the National Kidney Foundation in New York, told
Reuters Health.
Dialysis treatment does some things that a failing kidney no longer can do. These include removing waste, salt and extra water from the body, maintaining safe levels of certain
chemicals in the blood and helping control blood pressure.
Although genetics plays a role in the development of kidney disease, the study suggests that health habits - often shared by husbands and wives -- are also important, said
Willis, who was not involved in the study.
The Taiwanese researchers, led by Hung-Chun Chen, of Kaohsiung Medical University, tested both spouses and relatives of people in dialysis. More than four in 10 spouses had the
disease, compared to less than one in 10 among age-matched controls. (Reuters Health)
HONG KONG - Children whose mothers had low exposure to sunlight during their first three months of pregnancy may have a higher risk of developing multiple sclerosis later in
life, a study in Australia has found.
Low vitamin D levels have long been linked to a higher risk of MS. Experts suspect an expectant mother's lack of exposure to sunlight - the main source of vitamin D - may
affect the fetus's central nervous system or immune system, and predispose it to developing MS later in life.
In the Australian study, researchers combed birth records of 1,524 MS patients born between 1920 and 1950, and found there were more of them born in the months of November and
December.
This means their first trimester occurred during the winter months of April to June, a time when expectant mothers in the southern hemisphere may prefer to be indoors to escape
the cold.
Conversely, there were far fewer MS patients who were born in May and June - meaning their first trimesters were in the early summer months of September to November.
"The risk of multiple sclerosis was around 30 percent higher for those born in the early summer months of November and December compared to the months of May and
June," the researchers wrote in a statement. (Reuters)
Medical breakthroughs from using existing drugs in new ways await discovery—if manufacturers have an incentive to pursue them.
A story in the health section of this week’s New York Times was a classic example of an item whose importance can be appreciated only by someone who has followed several
trends in the endlessly fascinating biotechnology industry. The story was prompted when the medical journal Ophthalmology posted the results of a clinical trial of Lucentis, a
biotech drug from Genentech, a southern San Francisco firm that after many years of independent operation recently became a fully owned (rather than partly owned) subsidiary of
Roche, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Lucentis is a monoclonal antibody fragment, an extraordinarily complex kind of product created through a combination of diverse
biotechnology tools. (John E. Calfee, American)
SMOKERS should prepare for the day when they are virtually confined to lighting up in their own backyards.
They will not be able to smoke on footpaths, and feeding their habits in public will be restricted to a few designated smoking zones.
A wide-ranging ban on outdoor smoking in public areas is the logical next step in stamping out smoking from public life altogether, according to Cancer Council NSW chief
executive Andrew Penman.
Dr Penman said it was becoming increasingly unacceptable that people could be subjected to drifts of smoke from fellow pedestrians when they walked down the street.
"It should get to the stage where there are only certain places you can smoke a cigarette, that is, smoking-permitted parks or small squares," he said. "We are
recommending to the government that outdoor smoking needs to move . . . to the assumption that smoking is prohibited from all outdoor areas unless otherwise stated."
Smokers, and retailers who sold tobacco products, needed to prepare for a "post-tobacco world", he said. (SMH)
More Accurate Standard for Obesity Measurement Needed, Researchers Say
The scale of the obesity epidemic may be much worse than currently believed since the usual measure, body mass index (BMI), is a very insensitive measure of excess body fat,
researchers said at a meeting earlier this week. (MedPage Today)
Why does the Neo-Malthusians’ dystopian worldview — that human and environmental well-being will suffer with increases in population, affluence and technological change
— fail the reality check? Why has human well-being improved in the Age of Industrialization despite order-of-magnitude increases in the consumption of materials, fossil fuel
energy and chemicals?
I offer some reasons in the last of a series of posts (1,
2,
3,
4)
at MasterResource.
I note that although population, affluence and technology can create some problems for humanity and the planet, they are also the agents for solving those problems. In
particular, human capital and greater affluence have helped the development and adoption of new and improved technologies, which empirical data show have reduced risks faster
than the new risks that may have been created — hence the continual improvement in human well-being in the era of modern economic growth. (Cato at liberty)
As oil continued to leak uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico and toward the coast Saturday, the fishing industry in the region was trying to forestall another perilous
flow — of fear and misinformation.
“I just got off the phone with 40 New Orleans chefs, and we are energized,” Harlon Pearce, chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board and owner of
Harlon’s LA Fish, said on Saturday afternoon. “We want people to know there is not tainted seafood right now. Everything we’re doing is precautionary.”
Only six of the 32 oyster beds on the east side of the Mississippi River have been closed, and the oil is still 70 or 80 miles away, according to Mike Voisin, the Chairman of
the Louisiana Oyster Task Force. (NYT)
A new model probes to new depths in search of nitrogen
MADISON, WI, May 3rd, 2010-Large amounts of nitrogen are stored in the soils of agricultural areas in Nebraska and Maryland, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Once in the soil, nitrogen can be converted to nitrate, which can readily move to groundwater.
"We expected to find nitrogen stored in organic matter in these soils, but didn't realize how much," said Tom Nolan, USGS hydrologist, who led the study. "If
mobilized, the large reservoirs of nitrogen could significantly impact water quality."
Nitrogen occurs in soil, plants, and groundwater, and it is difficult to account for all of the various forms it can take. For this study, scientists at the USGS National Water
Quality Assessment Program and the USDA Agricultural Research Service used a new version of the Root Zone Water Quality Model to estimate unsaturated zone nitrogen mass
balances at four agricultural fields. The study was reported in the May/June 2010 edition of the Journal of Environmental Quality, published by the American Society of
Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America.
The mass balances were expected to reveal the predominant forms of nitrogen in important agricultural settings. The four sites had variable climate, soils, and management
practices, and included: an almond orchard in central California; a cornfield that is about 0.6 kilometers from the almond orchard; a corn–soybean crop rotation in eastern
Nebraska; and a corn–soybean rotation in eastern Maryland. (American Society of Agronomy)
SAN DIEGO, California, May 1, 2010 - The Surfrider Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, challenging a permit that
allows Poseidon Resources to withdraw 300 million gallons of seawater a day for the state's first large seawater desalination plant. (ENS)
Humans assume other species have no right to privacy during 'intimate moments', says author of study
Wildlife documentary makers are infringing animals' rights to privacy by filming their most private and intimate moments, according to a new study.
Footage of animals giving birth in their burrows or mating crosses an ethical line that film-makers should respect, according to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the
University of East Anglia.
Mills compiled a report on animals' rights to privacy after reviewing scenes from the BBC's 2009 wildlife series "Nature's Great Events". Among the offending footage
was film of a narwhal whale that appeared to have retreated from view beneath the Arctic ice sheet.
"Instead of thinking we'll leave it alone, film-makers decide the only solution is to develop new technology so they can film it," Mills said.
"We have an assumption that humans have some right to privacy, so why do we not assume that for other species, particularly when they are engaging in behaviour that
suggests they don't want to be seen?" (Ian Sample, The Guardian)
More than three dozen environment ministers are to meet near Bonn this weekend in a bid to revive global climate talks left mangled and moribund after the UN summit in
Copenhagen. (The Local)
Connie Hedegaard accepts global deal unlikely in Mexico and denies she blamed failure of talks on Guardian 'Danish text' story (Jonathan Watts, The Guardian)
Costly cap-and-trade system isn't the political winner it once was.
It was always going to be an uphill battle for the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation in an election year. But with Senator Lindsey Graham's
likely decision to withdraw his support from the landmark bill, the prospects are now virtually zero.
That is not just because Mr. Graham had been the only Republican senator to endorse a broad approach to tackling global warming. It's because the climate, politically speaking,
has changed dramatically since June when the House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate cap-and-tax bill. President Obama's decision to make immigration reform a higher
priority in the Senate legislative calendar is a recognition of this reality: Cap-and-tax is dead. And not just in Washington either. (Tom Switzer, WSJ)
Another breach in the badly aging Kyoto wall has been opened.
After the failure of the Copenhagen meeting, the Italian Senate passed a motion
calling for a re-assessment of European Union climate policies as well as a review of the IPCC process. The motion, presented by Sen. Antonio D’Alì (chairman of the
Environment Committee) and Sen. Guido Possa (chairman of the Education Committee) as well as many other Senators, is a powerful sign of wide and growing
dissent in many EU member states.
The EU is the largest economy to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, under which it is committed to cut its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 8% below 1990 levels in
2008-12. The EU has subsequently adopted a package of directives, the so-called “20-20-20,” that mandates a 20% reduction of GHG emissions below 1990 levels by 2020 and that
20% of total energy consumption will be provided by renewable sources, with a non-mandatory target of a 20% increase in energy efficiency.
In order to achieve such ambitious goals, Europe has created a large cap and trade program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), under which over 12,000 industrial
installations are required to surrender an amount of emission allowances high enough to cover their own annual emissions. Extra allowances can be bought and sold on the market.
Theoretically, such a mechanism is supposed to create incentives for businesses to invest in clean technologies, reducing emissions through an economically efficient process.
Despite the political success of cap and trade – easily sold to voters as a means to force “big business” to pay for the pollution that they supposedly cause – cap
and trade is often criticized, even by mainstream economists, as inefficient and ineffective. The
costs, it is argued, outweigh the benefits. [Read more →]
(MasterResource)
As the spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico oozes it way toward Louisiana, Democrats are rapidly backing away from their prior support for new off-shore drilling as part of a
compromise clean energy bill. Both the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday they were re-examining the need for such drilling, citing the
April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 and began spilling crude oil into the waters as a reason.
Together, the statements deal a severe blow to the already dimming chances for a climate bill this year. The effort was hanging by a thread after a blowup between Reid and the
bill’s lone Republican co-author, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over whether the Senate would tackle that bill or immigration first. (Capital Hill)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein why he is no longer supporting the climate change bill that he helped to write. The long and the
short of it is that Graham feared he was being set up. (E2 Wire)
Al Gore’s purchase of a near nine million dollar Montecito mansion with an almost comical carbon footprint (nine
bathrooms!) probably means that he has given up on the global warming movement and decided to become a Hollywood producer (not that he ever made much of a distinction
between two).
Montecito is where the creme of the Hollywood creme go when Beverly Hills gets too crowded and nouveau riche. Among others, Michael Douglas, Kevin
Costner, Christopher Lloyd, Dennis Franz and Oprah have homes there – and they don’t even have Nobel Prizes. (Douglas and Costner do have Oscars though.)
No word on whether Al is giving up his Nashville manse… or his houseboat.
This is turning into opera bouffe. But Al always was a man of appetites. If, as La
Rochefoucauld famously said, “hypocrisy is a sort of homage that vice pays to virtue,” then Al is paying more homage on the environment than all the sinners combined
paid to all the medieval Popes for all their perversions, real or imagined.
Well, maybe not quite that much, but Al is not alone and we could go down a long list of rich enviro-phonies who, added up, would easily reverse AGW, assuming you believe
it. But I have a different suspicion. Most of them don’t believe it anymore. They won’t admit that, of course. But Lindsey Graham’s withdrawal
from the latest iteration of cap-and-trade is just a signal of what’s ahead. Get out while the getting is good. And make sure you get out the side door, if
possible.
And for Al that means forgetting how things look anymore – not that he ever seemed to care that much in the first place – and cashing in. After all, his buddy Richard
Sandor – one of the more, shall we say, complex figures of our
time – has just sold his controlling interest in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) for 606 million. According to the Chicago Sun-Times: Sandor will sell
his 17 percent stake. ICE, which already owns 4.8 percent of Climate Exchange, said other large shareholders also have agreed to sell.
Does that include Al Gore? Don’t know. Via Glenn
Beck, a number of interesting figures are involved in CCX. In any case, Al has ponied up nine million (or some down payment thereof), not to mention whatever
expenditure for all the “green” retrofitting he plans to do (at some point), on his new Italian mansion by the ocean. But who can blame Al? No offense
meant to my Tennessee friends, but Montecito is paradise. Perfect weather, stunning views of the dolphins – and no humidity.
UPDATED: It has been reported that CCX
is a LLC registered on the Isle of Man,
a noted tax haven. If this is true, Sandor’s 606 million was tax free – as would be any profits
made by our former Vice President. This would make CCX one of the great rip-offs of all time. If there is anyone out there who can confirm this, please do so via
“News Tips for PJM.” Anonymity will be respected.
MORE: One of the remaining questions is why ICE decided to buy CCX for six hundred and some million. Was this a fire sale
price? It would seem so, but I don’t have the expertise to say so definitively. Perhaps some reader does. ICE seems to have a monopoly on European carbon exchanges,
which have evidently become a cesspool of
corruption.
Incidentally, PJTV and PJM will be covering the Heartland Institute’s 4th
International Conference on Climate Change, May 16-18 in Chicago. We will be looking into the affairs of the Chicago Climate Exchange at that time.
AND MORE: This may be the new Montecito Gore digs. (Awaiting
confirmation) (Roger L. Simon, PJM)
When it comes to environmental regulation, California doesn’t wait for the Feds to ride in and lay down the law. The Golden State led the way on mandating
emissions-control equipment in motor vehicles in 1961. It pioneered tailpipe-emissions standards in 1967 and ratcheted them up into the 1990s, prompting the federal government
to follow. When the Environmental Protection Agency proved reluctant to tighten fuel-economy standards, California outmaneuvered it in 2002 by limiting carbon dioxide from
cars. That decision achieved the same end — and was the first move in the United States to control greenhouse gases.
And so it goes with climate change. By the mid-2000s, when the rest of the country was waking up to the challenge of global warming, California was already pursing an
aggressive program to assess the likely damage. According to the state energy commission’s climate research, the U.S. west coast faces sea-level rise of 12 to 18 inches by
2050, and as much as nearly six feet by the turn of the century. Precipitation is projected to fall increasingly as water rather than snow, draining into the sea rather than
lying in cold storage until the long, dry summers. Higher-than-average temperatures and more frequent extreme weather promise heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.
The sense of impending crisis sent California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger into action-hero mode. In 2006, he signed the Global Warming Solutions Act, capping carbon
emissions statewide throughout all activities and sectors. Then, last December, he stood on Treasure Island — an expanse of landfill in the San Francisco Bay that stands to
be inundated by the upwelling of glacial melt — and unveiled the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy, a plan to prepare for what many scientists regard as inevitable
changes. “We have the responsibility to have a Plan B just in case we can’t stop the global warming,” he said, apparently missing the document’s emphatic assertion that
mitigation (making efforts to minimize the onset of climate change) and adaptation (learning to live with it) are equally necessary and inherently complementary undertakings.
(Ted Greenwald, Wired)
Leaders of a drive to suspend California's landmark greenhouse gas emissions law claim they will submit enough voter signatures Monday to place the issue before voters.
The California Jobs Initiative Campaign will submit more than the required 435,000 voter signatures to qualify for the November ballot, spokeswoman Anita Mangels said.
"We're headed to the ballot," she said.
The campaign targets Assembly Bill 32, pushed four years ago by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislative leaders to require California to reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
The proposed initiative would suspend AB 32 until the state's unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year. (Sacramento Bee)
The European Union is considering border tariffs on imports from more polluting countries, but an initial assessment shows such levies could spark trade wars, draft reports
show.
Two European Commission reports do not explicitly reject a push for border tariffs by France and Italy, but say they would be fiendishly complex to calculate, create a huge
administrative burden and risk trade conflict.
"Border measures risk clashing with the obligations under the WTO (World Trade Organization)," said one study looking at the cost of increasing EU curbs on
climate-warming emissions.
France and Italy are worried that their industries, which pay for EU permits to emit carbon dioxide, will lose out to cheaper imports from countries that impose no such
charges.
The Commission said it would continue to look at how imports might be included in the Emissions Trading Scheme, the EU's carbon market and its main tool against climate-warming
emissions. But the prospect of such measures looks dim.
"The introduction of border measures may also trigger retaliatory measures and even hinder international negotiations," added the document, seen by Reuters. "The
system could at best only be envisaged for a very limited number of standardized commodities, such as steel or cement."
Sanjeev Kumar at environmental think-tank E3G said: "This is pretty much the death of the border-tax adjustment discussions in Europe. We've known for a long time it would
put the whole European economy at risk." (Reuters)
Frankfurt prosecutors said on Friday they had arrested four people in Germany and Britain in connection with suspected tax evasion in carbon permit trading and 50 more
people were being investigated.
He declined to name individuals, as is customary under German law. Deutsche Bank said seven of its employees were suspects in the investigation.
"Deutsche Bank believes the allegations raised against its employees can be rebutted," a Deutsche Bank spokesman said.
Britain's HM Revenue and Customs, which investigates tax fraud, said it could not comment.
Apart from tax evasion, the authorities were also looking into allegations of money laundering, the Frankfurt prosecutor's office spokesman said.
"There have been raids and other measures in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Cyprus," he said.
The probe in Germany, where total damage is estimated at 180 million euros ($239.7 million), follows investigations in Britain, France, Spain, Norway and the Netherlands into
carbon credit fraud over the last year. (Reuters)
A major cross-border investigation into alleged fraudulent trading of carbon credits has resulted in 22 UK arrests in a case linked to raids at Deutsche Bank.
More than 2,450 UK and German tax officers were involved in the operation, with 81 house and office searches. The UK investigation saw 13 arrests in England and eight in
Scotland as part of a major inquiry by HM Revenue & Customs.
This was connected to a large German investigation in which Deutsche Bank was raided and another man detained in the UK under a European arrest warrant.
Items seized included computers, hard drives, memory sticks, mobile phones and paperwork. Cash totalling €45,000 and £18,000 was also found and been retained under the
Proceeds of Crime Act.
The UK investigation centres on alleged “carousel fraud”, where a trader disappears without paying value-added-tax (VAT) during a cross-border transaction,
Britain removed VAT from carbon allowances last year, as European authorities revealed that carbon-trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity
in some European countries.
Criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland are estimated to have pocketed €5bn (£4.5bn). (TDT)
Norway said it would delay the decision to finance a top carbon capture project to 2014, after the life of the present parliament, in a major setback for a technology seen
as key to mitigate climate change.
Building a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facility at Mongstad in western Norway was proving too complex to do on schedule, said Oil and Energy Minister Terje Riis-Johansen.
"Given the big challenges we are facing in making the project good enough on an industrial scale, I don't think it is defensible to plan for an investment decision before
2014," he said. (Reuters)
Don't delay, ya dopey beggars, scrap the nonsense completely!
CHICAGO – U.S. Sen. James Inhofe—who has warned Congress that the threat of catastrophic global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American
people"—will keynote the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change next month in Chicago.
The Oklahoma Republican and members of his family built an igloo near the U.S. Capitol in February as Washington lay paralyzed under stupendous snowfall and cold weather,
ridiculing assertions by some climate scientists that Earth faces a crisis from warming temperatures.
Inhofe, for years the scourge of climate change alarmists, will join more than 70 of the world’s elite scientists and economists in a three-day climate conference built
around the theme "Reconsidering the Science and Economics." (Heartland Institute)
Greed, hypocrisy, incompetence and perhaps pragmatism might be the elements responsible for the threat posed to inhabitants of Bangladesh's sleepy south eastern Sitakundu
coastline, as they brave the succession of cyclones that characterise the area.
But such is the grip of the climate change obsession that no problem, however great or small, can be discussed without invoking this peril – to the detriment of those
affected by them.
So it is that we see Shafiq Alamm, writing for AFP
today, telling us that ship-breaking is exposing Bangladesh to the "climate change threat".
Quite why we should be told this, at this particular juncture, with so much happening elsewhere in the world, is something of a small mystery, except that it fits in with the
tendency we have seen over the years to keep the pump primed with a succession of stories, all to keep us in a state of fear (or, at least, concern) so that we shall do our
masters' bidding.
If this is the case, it would seem to support Thomas Fuller's recent
observation that the debate about global warming has returned to more or less the same position as was extant prior to the release of the Climategate emails. We are back to
the trench warfare, where the warmists have reverted to their steady drip-drip of alarmist propaganda. (EU Referendum)
You won't believe government's new claims about climate change
Global warming may make the world's inhabitants cranky and stressed, drive them crazy, give them cancer and even worsen their suffering from sexual dysfunction, according to a
new government report on climate change – but the scientists say more money is needed before they can be certain.
What are the consequences of doing nothing?
In a nutshell: Humanity will suffer every imaginable illness, and the world will essentially end. (Chelsea Schilling, WorldNetDaily)
Albert Einstein spoke for all who view science as a noble profession when he said he was "trying to understand the mind of God."
But I am concerned that many who promote the idea of catastrophic global warming reduce science to a political and economic game. Scare tactics and junk science are used to
secure lucrative government contracts. (Gordon J. Fulks, The Oregonian)
Experts warn the electricity consumption and carbon footprint of cloud computing will more than double from 2007 levels by 2020 (Stephan Schmidt for OurWorld 2.0, part of
the Guardian Environment Network)
Fortunately atmospheric carbon dioxide is an environmental asset, so who cares what emissions do?
AUSTRALIAN farmers are sceptical about climate change and many do not believe it will affect agriculture during their lifetimes, a report says.
But the CSIRO research is calling on rural producers to increase their knowledge of the implications of global warming so they can make their farms more resistant to changing
climatic conditions. (SMH)
Australian farmers have always coped with naught or plenty -- it's how Australia is, this land of drought and flooding rains. It'd be a short career here,
farming without being resistant to changing climatic conditions since they are the norm. Anthropogenic global warming, even if real, could hardly increase the degree of
difficulty in farming the land down-under. Why would Aussie farmers pay much attention to empirically unsupported hypotheses?
While investigating cloud feedbacks over the ocean with the CERES Earth radiation budget instruments, I thought I would take a quick look to see how lower atmospheric
temperature variations over land and ocean compare to each other. Part of my interest was the recent cold winter over the U.S. and Europe, which has seemed strange to some
since our global-average temperatures are running quite warm lately.
The following plot shows tropospheric temperature variations over land versus ocean since mid-2002 as measured by the AMSU instrument on the Aqua satellite. I’ve
restricted the averaging between 60N and 60S latitudes, which is 86.6% of the surface area of the Earth. These are daily running 31-day average anomalies (departures from the
average seasonal cycle).
In the big picture, I was a little surprised to see that, on average, there is essentially no time lag between the land and ocean temperature variations. The correlation
between the two curves is +0.63 at zero days time lag. I would have expected a tendency for oceanic changes to precede land changes, since we usually think of oceanic warming
or cooling events driving land areas more than vice versa.
We also see that the recent cold winter over the U.S. and Europe was not reflective of global land areas, which is not that surprising since those regions represent only
about 5% of the surface area of the Earth.
I have been particularly interested in the cause of the global cooling event of 2007-08, which I have circled in the plot above. I had assumed that this was primarily an
oceanic phenomenon, but as can be seen, land areas were similarly affected.
The difference between the land and ocean curves is shown in the next plot, along with a second order polynomial fit to the data. There seems to be a low-frequency change in
this relationship, with several years of land-warmer-than-ocean now switching to ocean-warmer-than-land. I have no obvious explanation to offer for this.
And if you are wondering just how real the temperature fluctuations shown above are, I also computed the oceanic atmospheric temperature variations (blue curve, 1st graph)
from the AMSU flying on a totally different satellite — NOAA-15 — and found that the curves from Aqua and NOAA-15 were virtually indistinguishable.
[The reason why the above analysis is restricted to the period since 2002 is that Aqua is the first orbit-maintained satellite. Previous satellites had decaying orbits,
which caused a change in the local observation time over the years which resulted in a long-term drift in over-land temperatures due to the strong day-night cycle in
temperature.] (Roy W. Spencer)
As I reported yesterday, there has been considerable discussion of the 2007 IPCC report and its errors and exclusion of peer reviewed scientific perspectives that differ
from those of the lead author (e.g. see Judy Curry’s perceptive discussion of this topic).
In 2007, I documented this clear bias in the IPCC reports in my second post on this subject in 2007 (Part I appeared yesterday).
I have reproduced this demonstration of bias below, as it is directly relevant to the current well-justified concerns on the accuracy, balance and value of the 2007 IPCC WG1
report. (Climate Science)
First American Ann Bancroft and Norwegian Liv Arnesen trekked off across the Arctic in the dead of the 2007 winter, “to raise awareness about global warming,” by
showcasing the wide expanses of open water they were certain they would encounter. Instead, icy blasts drove temperatures inside their tent to -58 F, while outside the
nighttime air plunged to -103 F.
Open water is rare at those temperatures, the intrepid explorers discovered. Facing frostbite, amputated toes and even death, the two were airlifted out 18 miles into their
530-mile expedition.
Next winter it was British swimmer and ecologist Lewis Gordon Pugh, who planned to breast-stroke across open Arctic seas. Same story. Then fellow Brit Pen Hadow gave it a go,
but it was another no-go.
This year Aussie Tom Smitheringale set off to demonstrate “the effect that global warming is having on the polar ice caps.” He was rescued and flown out, after coming
“very close to the grave,” he confessed.
Hopefully, all these rescue helicopters were solar-powered. Even hardened climate disaster deniers wouldn’t want these brave (if misguided) adventurers to be relegated to
choppers fueled by hated hydrocarbons. They may be guilty of believing their own alarmist press releases – and the likes of Al Gore, James Hansen, the IPCC and Michael Mann,
father of broken hockey sticks and Mann-made global warming. But missing digits or ideological impurity is a high price to pay. (Paul Driessen and Willie Soon, Townhall)
Ice Caps Melting! Temps warmest in a Kajillion Years! The sky is falling! The British are coming! Let's get real by looking at the IPCC forecast and what has actually
happened. (Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather)
As most CA readers know, a few years ago, I wondered how they knew that 1998 was the warmest year in a millennium – a claim that you don’t see in AR4. Nor, at first
(second or even fifth) glance does the assertion, once so prominent, even seem to be addressed in AR4.
The Climategate letters offer an interesting vignette. Chapter 6 authors were not unaware of the matter and worked over language on the issue like New York or London lawyers,
eventually inserting a clause deep in the chapter that gave them cover, intentionally leaving the issue out of the chapter Executive Summary. (Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit)
I’ve been given a report on glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic that I want to share with readers. There’s some compelling evidence of glacier melting and open water in
the Arctic sea in this report that I haven’t seen before.
The lake at Borebukta on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen emerged after a glacier melted. Image: Daily Mail
There are also worrisome reports of significant temperature increases, with anomalies of several degrees. Also in the report is the mention of ice free open sea of almost 2
million square kilometers, which is termed as “unprecendented in the history of the Arctic”.
It is shocking to read. I urge readers to have a look at some of the excerpts I’ve posted. Continue reading →
(WUWT)
Asking
the somewhat obvious question, “are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?” a group of scientists have announced that the answer is yes. While this may
seem unsurprising, the finding is another indication that Earth's climate is not simply driven by greenhouse gas emissions. Even so, some scientists are only grudgingly
accepting the finding, cautioning that this only applies in the central UK and refusing to admit that the Sun could affect global mean temperatures as well. Still, the
researchers found that average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest a possible return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50
years. This could be a sign that climate science is starting to recover from its CO2 fixation.
Writing in Environmental Research Letters, Mike
Lockwood et al. have verified that solar activity does seem to have a direct correlation with Earth's climate—at least in the central UK. The reason that the scope of
the study is limited to that area, or at most Europe, is that it is one of the few regions that there is a reliable, continuous temperature record going back to the Little Ice
Age. The authors explain their work:
Lower winter temperatures were common in Europe during the second half of the 17th century, famously allowing frost fairs to be held on the Thames in
London before riverine developments increased the flow rate. These cold winters coincided with the Maunder minimum in solar activity when the Sun remained virtually free of
sunspots for almost 50 years. However, establishing that this was not just a chance occurrence requires that the relationship continue to hold over a long interval, such that
cold European winters become less frequent when solar activity is high and then more common again when solar activity falls. Various indicators show that during the recent
minimum of the 11 year sunspot cycle, the Sun has been quieter than at any time in the previous 90 years. This yields an opportunity for a better test of the relationship
between solar activity and cold European winters. To do this, we require two long and homogeneous time series: one which quantifies solar outputs relevant to
seasonal/regional climate and the other relevant to European winter temperatures. We here use the Central England temperature (CET) data set which is the world's longest
instrumental record of temperature and extends back to 1659, at the start of the Maunder minimum.
What is different about the CET data and other historical records is that it consists of direct temperature readings, not proxy data, as far back as 1850.
“We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence
of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic,” the authors state. It is proposed that the reason for the cooling is the blocking of tropospheric jet streams, which
help to maintain Europe's temperate climate. “Clearly any solar control is subtle and far from being the only factor causing variability,” they report. “We stress that
this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect.”
Regional or not, 2010 was still darned cold.
It is interesting that when claims are made for CO2 emissions acting through a multitude of murky and ill-defined feedback
mechanisms are made, climate scientists quickly credit carbon dioxide with control of Earth's climate. When a link to solar activity is found, the possibility that it acts by
causing jet stream flows to be rerouted is used as a way to diminish the Sun's importance to climate. It seems irrational to say that the Sun only affects the climate of
Europe.
In The Resilient Earth we
quoted Thomas Jefferson, himself a scientist and naturalist. In response to remarks made by the Comte de Buffon, Jefferson said that it was foolish to think “that nature is
less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other ... as if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun.” In the face of this recent work,
it may well be that other mechanisms, which amplify the effects of solar variation, await discovery in other parts of the world. In fact, it is possible that the cited
mechanism is not the primary reason for the link to the Sun, even in the UK.
There was a time when climatologists credited the Sun with a much more dominant role in earthly climate. Some of the ups and downs of solar forcing has been
presented in a perspective on the Lockewood et al. paper, written by Rasmus E.
Benestad, of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in Oslo, Norway. He describes the problems in past studies this way:
One notorious problem with many previous studies was that relationships established over the calibration interval subsequently broke down. There was a
period in the mid-20th century when little work was done on solar activity and climate, but solar activity was considered a real forcing factor before 1920. With the advent
of frontal theory, orbital forcing theory, and stronger awareness of the implications of enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, the support for solar forcing seemed to have
diminished in the climatology community by the mid-20th century. But non-stationary relationships, the chaotic character of climate, weak effects, and lack of a physical
understanding behind such a link, can also explain the low support for solar forcing at that time.
Notice that non-stationary data are again at the root of analytical problems with climate data. That, plus non-linearity caused by the chaotic nature of
Earth's climate system, continue to cause headaches for researchers to this day (see “Econometrics
vs Climate Science” and “Climate Science's Dirtiest Secret”).
Little wonder that climate scientists turned to the easier to measure growth of CO2 levels in the atmosphere as the proximate cause of global warming.
Undaunted, Lockwood et al. have proceeded with analyzing the available data.
Measuring Solar Activity in the Past
To quantify solar activity, the researchers used annual means of the open solar magnetic flux, FS, which they called “the
total magnetic flux dragged out of the Sun by the solar wind flow.” This derivation of FS makes use of the fact that different measures of
the fluctuation level in Earth's magnetic field correlate strongly with different combinations of solar wind parameters. Using a combination of these parameters allowed the
reconstruction of past variations, including that in FS. Comparison with satellite observations shows that this method is extremely reliable,
even during the current exceptional solar minimum.
FS is highly anticorrelated with cosmic ray fluxes. It has been shown that cosmic rays are regulated by the activity of the
Sun and display an inverse relationship with total solar irradiance (TSI), though with a lag of 1 year. These correlations are at the center of a relationship between TSI and
solar-modulated cosmogenic isotopes, which is generally assumed in palaeoclimate studies.
Many isotopes are generated by the interaction of cosmic rays with atoms of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or the top layers of the lithosphere. These
cosmogenic isotopes includes stable isotopes such as 3He, but most of the isotopes in question are radioactive. These include 10Be,
14C, 26Al, 36Cl, 41Ca and 129I. Levels of
these isotopes can be used as proxy data for cosmic ray levels. The relationship of FS, derived from geomagnetic observations, with TSI and
galactic cosmic ray fluxes (GCRs) over the past several decades is shown in Figure 1 from the paper, shown below.
The relationship of open solar flux with total solar irradiance and galactic cosmic ray fluxes.
The second figure shows the seasonal December/January/February (DJF) means, TDJF, of the CET record, which is representative
of a roughly triangular area between Lancaster, London and Bristol. Annual means from the HadCRUT3v compilation of Northern Hemisphere observations, which is available for 1850
onwards, were extend these data back to 1659 using an ensemble of 11 reconstructions based on a wide variety of proxies. The data after 1974 were adjusted for urban warming by
comparing the modern data from long-established stations with data sequences from stations in rural areas. To identify regional effects, the average temperature for the whole
Northern Hemisphere was compared with the regional data.
Variations since the mid-17th century of temperatures and FS.
After much statistical analysis, including detrending to compensate for the nonstationarity of the data, the researchers reached the conclusion that, at
least in Great Britain, an inactive Sun results in colder winters. In the authors' words: “The results presented in section 4 allow rejection of the null hypothesis, and
hence colder UK winters (relative to the longer-term trend) can therefore be associated with lower open solar flux (and hence with lower solar irradiance and higher cosmic ray
flux).” Those interested in the gory statistical details should refer to the paper.
In his perspective article, Benstad notes that Crooks and Gray (2005) identified a solar response in a number of atmospheric variables, and Labitske (1987),
Labitske and Loon (1988) and Salby and Callagan (2000) provided convincing analyses suggesting that the zonal winds in the stratosphere are influenced by solar activity.
Furthermore, Baldwin and Dunkerton (2001) provided a tentative link between the stratosphere and the troposphere (perhaps not so tentative, see “Atmospheric
Solar Heat Amplifier Discovered”). Still, for climate science to back away from AGW driven by human CO2 emissions is too bold a leap. It seems
that many climate scientists—particularly those in thrall of computer climate models—do not like the idea of returning to the use of empirical data, the bedrock of all the
hard sciences.
“The physical picture they provide is plausible, yet empirical relationships between solar activity and any of the indices describing the north Atlantic
oscillation, the Arctic oscillation or the polar vortex are regarded as weak.,” concluded Benstad, “my impression is nevertheless that the explanation provided by the
Lockwood et al study reflects real aspects of our climate.” Trying to maintain a modicum of scientific open-mindedness, he added, “Thus, it is an example of incremental
scientific progress rather than a breakthrough or a paradigm shift.” Perhaps not a breakthrough, but a return to an older, more correct path.
Studies of cosmogenic isotopes show that the Sun has been exceptionally active during recent decades, compared to the previous 11,000 years. The recent solar
maximum has persisted for longer than most previous examples in the cosmogenic isotope record and many scientists suspect the period of heightened solar activity is ending.
“Recent activity has been abnormally high for at least 8 cycles,” state J. A. Abreu et al., in a 2008 paper.
“We find that it is only expected to last for a further 15–36 years, with the more reliable methods yielding shorter expectancies, and we therefore predict a decline in
solar activity within the next two or three cycles.” Indeed, Lockwood and others think that a new minimum may be in store.
In previous work, published in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society, Lockwood stated: “Solar outputs during the current solar minimum are setting record low values for the space age. Evidence is here reviewed that this is
part of a decline in solar activity from a grand solar maximum and that the Sun has returned to a state that last prevailed in 1924.” Citing this work, Lockwood et al.
make a cautious prediction regarding future winters.
Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the
next 50 years: the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.
So will the Sun turn somnolent, lessening the amount of radiant warmth it showers on Earth? Could another Little
Ice Age be in our immediate future? Predictions are for a less active Sun during the upcoming Cycle
24, but only time will tell. We have had decades of near hysterical warnings about rising temperatures, all of which may be negated by the unpredictable fluctuations of our
local star. It will be interesting to see how long it takes climate science to change its doomsday predictions for the next several decades. Indeed, it has taken almost half a
century for climate science to dig itself into its current hole, it may take as long to dig itself back out.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
Exxon Valdez Will Be Eclipsed; More Oil Imports Are Certain; BP Stands for “Beyond Pathetic;” E15, More Wind Energy Projects Are Certain [Read
More] (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)
I hope to elaborate later — I'm wrapping up two weeks on the road promoting Power Grab
— but it seems to me the issue with the recent oil-platform explosion and subsequent leak issue is BP, not offshore drilling.
Offshore drilling has a very good track record in the past few decades — and especially recently; BP has a terrible one. The Deepwater Horizon incident is consistent with
only one of those track records.
Like Enron — and indeed, in close cooperation with Enron on the "global warming" rent-seeking — BP got distracted from its core businesses and spent its energies
getting into solar ventures and carbon-trading schemes, and otherwise losing the plot of an energy company. The absurd re-branding to "Beyond Petroleum" (really? your
balance sheet doesn't quite agree) speaks volumes.
They thereby also lost focus on these operations and implicitly told their best people that the future did not lie there.
And for a decade we have seen BP facilities blowing up — with human and environmental consequences — all over the place.
The newsiness of this spill is testimony to its aberrant nature. The issue today isn't offshore drilling so much as it is the company that, in violation of all laws of
probability, continues to be involved in a preponderance of its various industries' high-profile workplace tragedies. (Chris Horner, Planet Gore)
Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only
to certain forms of energy.
No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates
for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment
in their own way.
The explosion that blew apart an oil rig off Louisiana's coast is far more dramatic and makes for better television. The resulting oil spill is a legitimate concern, as it
threatens marine life and local economies. Our concern is that it will do more damage as a bludgeon that forever ends hopes of expanding domestic oil production.
President Obama on Friday announced the suspension of all plans for new offshore oil drilling until authorities learn what caused the explosion of the rig Deepwater Horizon in
the Gulf of Mexico. Recently he had declared to great fanfare that certain offshore areas would be open to drilling.
The latter announcement restricted more areas than it allegedly opened and was seen as a ploy to get votes for cap-and-trade legislation, which would restrict fossil fuel use,
increase energy prices, reduce gross domestic product and increase joblessness. Administration animus toward fossil fuels is well known.
The damaged rig in the Gulf, one of 3,000 offshore oil and gas platforms operating in the Gulf of Mexico that survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without major damage, is said
to be leaking 210,000 gallons of oil per day. This is serious — but rare.
The National Academy of Sciences reported in 2003 that more than 60% — roughly 47 million gallons — of crude released in North American waters each year comes from natural
seepage from the sea floor. Only 1% comes from offshore oil and gas development. (IBD)
The US today banned all new offshore drilling as crude oil from the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig began lapping at the shores of sensitive marshland at the mouth of the
Mississippi River.
Speaking on US television, David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, declared that no company would be allowed to proceed with exploration in new areas off the US coast
until an investigation into the cause of the disaster had been completed. (The Times)
WASHINGTON — The federal government has a large rainy day fund on hand to help mitigate the expanding damage on the Gulf Coast, generated by a tax on oil for use in cases
like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Up to $1 billion of the $1.6 billion reserve could be used to compensate for losses from the accident, as much as half of it for what is sometimes a major category of costs:
damage to natural resources like fisheries and other wildlife habitats.
Under the law that established the reserve, called the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, the operators of the offshore rig face no more than $75 million in liability for the
damages that might be claimed by individuals, companies or the government, although they are responsible for the cost of containing and cleaning up the spill. (NYT)
NEW ORLEANS — Officials in charge of the cleanup of a massive oil spill now approaching three Gulf Coast states said Saturday that a new technique in battling the leaks
5,000 feet beneath the sea showed promise.
Among the various weapons employed against the gushing crude has been the distribution of chemical dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil. The new approach
involves the deployment of the dispersants underwater, near the source of the leaks. Officials said that in two tests, that method appeared to be keeping crude oil from rising
to the surface. They said that the procedure could be used more frequently once evaluations of its impact on the deepwater ecology were completed. (NYT)
Techniques to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil slick from wreaking damage to the ecology of the Louisiana delta coastline have become significantly more effective in recent
years. (TDT)
A major Arctic border deal between Norway and Russia this week gives Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg a chance to extend Norway's oil boom without splitting the
ruling government coalition.
The surprise agreement by Stoltenberg and visiting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to end a border dispute opened the way to exploring an area of the Barents Sea seen rich
with oil and gas.
The deal makes the area into the new focal point for hopes of growth in Norway's oil industry. (Reuters)
[Editor note: A profile of Guillermo "Billy" Yeatts, an Argentinean and energy expert, author, and free-market philanthropist, is at the end of this post.]
The history of oil and gas production in Latin America has been characterized by a continuing tug of war between the state as owner of the subsurface (Spanish colonial
tradition) and private producers in pursuit of profits. Private participation in the industry has been limited to brief periods and restricted to specific phases of oil and gas
production.
The typical pattern is that foreign oil and gas companies are allowed into a country to locate and initiate production. Once oil is flowing, governments nationalize the
companies’ facilities – with or without compensation – and hand them over to government-owned and operated monopolies.
Whether the oil or gas is produced by private corporations or by a government monopoly, it is almost always the government that receives most of the profits. All too often,
the money is used to keep the heads of state in power.
In the United States, by contrast, individuals own and control much of the nation’s subsurface rights to energy and other minerals. The results are starkly different.
While the oil and gas industry in the United States expanded quickly, bringing prosperity to many areas that were once underdeveloped or deserted, oil revenues in other
countries have propped up corrupt governments with little or no benefits to the general welfare.
State ownership of the subsurface removes incentives for risk-taking, investment, and technological innovation. Farmers and ranchers are pitted against oil development. In
Latin America, the prospect of an oil or gas discovery is a farmer’s worst nightmare. They reap no financial benefit from the discovery, but they do suffer land damage and
the disruption to their lives from drilling and production operations. Consequently, a landowner’s incentive is to hide any mineral wealth his property might have and to
fight any attempt to exploit such wealth.
In the United States, on the other hand, landowners dream of oil being discovered on their property. If they own the mineral rights, they are compensated for the right to
explore and receive a royalty for any minerals produced. This more than makes up for the inconvenience of oil and gas operations on their property.
Spread of Oil Nationalism in Latin America
Theories of political and economic nationalism espoused by Latin American intellectuals in 1920s provided the analytical framework for dissatisfaction with the distribution
of wealth. Nationalists became convinced that the state had to play a major role in the operation and development of the oil and gas industry. This led to a domino strategy of
government confiscations of privately owned energy facilities in both Latin America and the Middle East. [Read
more →](MasterResource)
Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras said on Friday it would invest 1.6 billion reais ($920 million) in one of the country's largest sugar and ethanol groups, Acucar
Guarani, to expand in biofuels production.
The deal between Petrobras and French sugar group Tereos, Guarani's parent company, will give the Brazilian oil company a 46 percent stake in the local ethanol and sugar
producer.
"This investment will translate Petrobras' strategic plan for the ethanol sector (into reality)," said Miguel Rossetto, president of Petrobras Biocombustivel, to
journalists. (Reuters)
Robert Bryce's new book, Power
Hungry, looks at green energy and concludes that it's rotten (H/T Matt Ridley). There's a summary
of the main arguments here.
The article is very interesting, although a commenter a Matt's reckons the security of supply arguments may be wrong. But how about this for killing off the argument that
Denmark has shown us the way?
Denmark, the poster child for wind energy boosters, more than doubled its production of wind energy between 1999 and 2007. Yet data from Energinet.dk, the operator of
Denmark's natural gas and electricity grids, show that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2007 were at about the same level as they were back in 1990,
before the country began its frenzied construction of turbines. Denmark has done a good job of keeping its overall carbon dioxide emissions flat, but that is in large part
because of near-zero population growth and exorbitant energy taxes, not wind energy. And through 2017, the Danes foresee no decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from
electricity generation.
Editor’s note: Notwithstanding some recent gains, e.g. Cape Wind’s Interior Department permit, the projected U.K. Thames Array, and the
politically motivated Danish pronouncement of renewed offshore installations, global offshore wind has progressed very slowly, especially in Germany. This article by
Ms. Linowes, founder of the Industrial Wind Action Group, provides some
of the reasons why offshore wind is such an environmental and economic troublemaker.
After nine years of debate and millions of public and private dollars, the decision to permit America’s first offshore wind project fell on the shoulders of one man, U.S.
Department of the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar. Hindsight notwithstanding, there was no chance Salazar could disapprove the Cape Wind application. Does anyone doubt the
Obama administration would dare to ignore the tsunami of political favoritism already bestowed on the project, no matter how unjustified? And given the administration’s
stated goal to nurse the U.S. economy back to health through the green movement, a denial of the permit would have unleashed a public firestorm virtually impossible to contain.
Let’s face it, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound had an uphill battle in the message war from the beginning. As early as
2003, even before Windaction.org was organized, everyone knew about the wealthy ‘NIMBYs’ (”Not in my backyard”) on the Cape waging war against the one opportunity in
the region to see renewables built in a substantial way. At the time, New England had less than ten megawatts of wind installed and most people were convinced Cape Wind
represented an environmentally safe, low cost, economically beneficial development that could lead the nation in eliminating our reliance on fossil fuel. The NIMBYs, even those
with the Kennedy name, were discredited in the press as little more than self-serving hypocrites unwilling to take one in the view for the betterment of the whole.
This attitude still prevails today in some quarters but the realities of wind energy’s flaws are beginning to take hold and we believe the Alliance and its supporters will
ultimately be vindicated. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
In response to a national call for homegrown, Earth-friendly fuels to fill Americans' gas tanks, a couple of University of Maryland researchers are planting trees.
Fuel derived from the hardy, fast-growing common poplar could eventually replace some of the billions of gallons of petroleum-based fuel now pumped a year, say biologist Gary
Coleman and engineer Ganesh Sriram, who have partnered to help turn the woody plant into a widely used biofuel. (Meredith Cohn, The Baltimore Sun)
Image: via "Alek" on a Churchill Polar Bear Tour - click for more
The Australian Department of Climate Change
Nicky da Mutt
(pictured left) is a concerned scientist or at least of member of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS or "yuks" as we like to call them), although admittedly
he's no longer financial (you can be a UCS member too, no qualifications required, just as long as you give them a donation).
There is little doubt that
the political forces promoting climate change hysteria are under attack and in retreat around the world. It has also become obvious that little global consensus exists among
climate scientists regarding how to regain the public's trust. There is, however, ample evidence that the climate change alarmists have not learned their lesson. At a recent
conference held in Washington, D.C., an eminent climate policy expert urged that scientists and policy leaders embrace the persuasive power of uncertainty. If you cannot
convince the public with the facts, frighten them into going along anyway seems to be the message. This is not science, it is subterfuge justified by blind faith.
This revealing statement was reported in
the “
by Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri
The
counter-consensus to quasi-scientific hype and induced panic on climate change is at last assembling. The argument is not in the first place as to whether or not climate change
has been taking place, but whether any recent warming of the planet is appreciably due to human activity and how harmful it will prove.
Falling in
popularity, Rudd is accused of pulling a 'mini-Chavez'
