Junkscience.com -- Archives, November 2009

Ultimately, the climate frauds were seeking power over our economies, our liberties, and our countries. (See full PJM/PJTV coverage of Climategate here.)

Those are successful and profitable conspiracies, at least for the insiders. They are dreadful for average citizens, because in a kleptocracy it is corruption that rules the streets. That is why the inner city schools in Chicago still fail their children; it is why drug gangs kill teenagers on the South Side; it is why kids have kids, and just pass on the social pathology; it is why Chicagoans who can afford it move out of the blasted neighborhoods, leaving them to gangsters and their victims; and it is why Governor Blagojevich openly demanded his share of the loot before appointing a U.S. senator to follow Obama.

It is no comfort to know that Barack Obama rose to power in the hustler world of Chicago politics and that Mayor Daley, Michelle Obama, and Valerie Jarrett, all faithful creatures of the machine, decided on all the appointments in this administration.

So what about the Climategate fiasco, the Watergate scandal of our age and time? Well, the global warming fraud is simply machine politics on the international level. Mark Steyn has coined the word “tranzi” for the transnational left that runs the UN, the European Union, most European capitals, and both left coasts of the United States. Tranzis are the political machine of our time.

The good news is that “anthropogenic global warming” — the most costly and widespread scientific fraud in history — just crumbled to fairy dust. We have emails from some of the biggest malefactors to prove it. (James Lewis, PJM)

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have.

What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.

So they desperately try to portray it as the routine "messy" business of science, lamely insisting, "nothing to see here folks, move along."

Before the Internet -- which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called "wise elites" -- they might have gotten away with it.

But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.

The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.

Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power. (Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun)

Well, maybe not my top 10…but the first ten that I thought of. (Roy W. Spencer)

IPCC expert reviewer Gray — whose 1,898 comments critical of the 2007 report were ignored — recently found that proof of the fraud was public for years.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.

But only recently did I realize that I had evidence of their fraud in my possession almost from the birth of my interest in the subject. (Vincent Gray, PJM)

My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama "St Elsewhere" but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist." He's currently in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it. Anyway, Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit, in which the world's leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to "hide the decline" and other interesting matters.

Nothing to worry about, folks. "We'll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies," said Ed airily. "Those are the key words here, Stuart. 'Peer-reviewed studies.'"

Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Ed said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don't have a 76-inch HDTV, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a talismanic peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection. "If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it," insisted Ed. "Don't get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph.D. after their names. 'Peer-reviewed studies' is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies."

Got it: Pier-reviewed studies. You stand on the pier, and you notice the tide seems to be coming in a little higher than it used to and you wonder if it's something to do with incandescent light bulbs killing the polar bears? Is that how it works? (Orange County Register)

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement. (Christopher Booker, TDT)

As legions of scientists, activists, journalists, bureaucrats and politicians prepare to embark for Copenhagen, a predictable barrage of climate horrors has been unleashed, to advance proposals to slash hydrocarbon use and carbon dioxide emissions, restrict economic growth, and implement global governance and taxation.

CO2 has reached a new high (0.0385% of the atmosphere), we’re told, because of cars and “coal-fired factories of death.” Rising seas are forcing families to “flee their homes.” Oceans are becoming “toxic.” Climate change is driving Philippine women into prostitution. Higher temperatures will “increase the likelihood of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” The Associated Press, BBC and other “mainstream” media dutifully regurgitate every press release.

However, the planet and science are not cooperating with the fear-mongering. There has been no statistically significant global warming for over a decade, despite steadily increasing CO2 levels – and for several years average annual global temperatures have actually declined.

Carbon dioxide plays only a minor role, many scientists now say, and our climate is still controlled by the same natural forces that caused previous climate changes: periodic shifts in ocean currents and jet streams, water vapor and cloud cover, evaporation and precipitation, planetary alignments and the shape of the Earth’s orbit, the tilt and wobble of Earth’s axis, cosmic ray levels and especially solar energy output.

Far worse for the Climate Armageddon movement, newly released emails from its leading scientists reveal a cesspool of intimidation, duplicity and fraud that could rock Copenhagen and the alarmist agenda to their core. The emails cast deepening suspicion over global warming data, science and models. ( Paul Driessen, Townhall)

Ric Werme has been tracking the Science Museum “Prove It!” poll since October 29th here:

Starting November 2 the “count-me-in” votes have substantially outnumbered the “count-me-out” votes, although the outs have remained ahead in the over-all tally. Since November 24th the daily count has begun to favor the “outs” again. It looks like Climategate is starting to have an effect.

For those who may not yet know the story behind the poll and the ups and downs, WUWT has a nice thread here: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full. (TDT)

The Times had an article yesterday reporting the old news that CRU did not have in its possession the original station data from some locations that comprise its global temperature index. I am quoted in the Times article as follows:

Penn State University has announced that it has begun an investigation of the work of Michael Mann, the director of its Earth System Science Center, following revelations contained in the Climategate documents that have emerged from East Anglia University in the UK. This decision follows close on the heels of a decision Saturday at East Anglia University to release climate change related data, a reversal of its previous stance. In addition, according to East Anglia’s press office, it will soon be announcing details of its own investigation.

The announcement of the chair of the East Anglia inquiry and its terms of reference are expected to be made Monday.

Professor Michael Mann is a highly regarded member of the Penn State faculty conducting research on climate change. Professor Mann’s research papers have been published in well respected peer-reviewed scientific journals. In November 2005, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) requested that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convene a panel of independent experts to investigate Professor Mann’s seminal 1999 reconstruction of the global surface temperature over the past 1,000 years. The resulting 2006 report of the NAS panel ( http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676 ) concluded that Mann’s results were sound and has been subsequently supported by an array of evidence that includes additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions.

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised. (Financial Post)

Leaked emails have revealed the unwillingness of climate change scientists to engage in a proper debate with the sceptics who doubt global warming (Jonathan Leake, Sunday Times)

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. (Jonathan Leake, Sunday Times)

Things are “starting to unravel at the AGW seams,” because, apparently, the “dog ate the homework” – more specifically the temperature data on which the whole global warming “can of worms” depends. Yes, three clichés in one sentence, yet somehow apropos for this unraveling fiasco that every day becomes more eye-rolling. Today’s unraveling – intentionally saved, I am assuming, for the weekend – comes from the Timesonline:

Not to worry. Carol Browner – Obama’s climate czar – assures us that global warming science is “settled.” And Carol should know. She has a B. A. in English from the University of Florida, not to mention a law degree from the same institution. (Pop quiz, Carol. What’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics? How about Einstein’s Unified Field Theory? Oh, never mind.) (Roger L. Simon, PJM)

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It is no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime, grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line. (J.R. Dunn, American Thinker)

Imagine if a politician called “Jones” had been caught emailing a colleague saying “Delete all those files. Don’t tell anyone about that off-shore tax haven I have. Burn those receipts, ask Keith to burn his too and I’ll let Casper know. By the way, I’ve used that accounting trick Mike talked about to hide the money.”

Let Reuter-wash swing into gear and the “news” article would blandly say Jones’ emails were “seized upon by his opponents, showing he made snide comments, and talked about ways to present his accounts in the most favourable light”. In other words, Reuters wouldn’t mention that he’s been caught red-handed and implicated as a colluding fraud who squandered funds and mislead the public. What’s really newsworthy is that he’s been exposed being not-very-nice, and glossing up his reports. Would we sack those journalists? We couldn’t. But we could cancel our subscriptions and just go searching blogs for the real news. (JoNova)

The Economist magazine issue of November 29th has an article titled “ Mail-strom – Leaked e-mails do not show climate scientists at their best“ [subscription required] which is an example of a media outlet that is seeking to trivialize the importance of the leaked e-mails. Examples of their failure to understand the importance of these e-mails is given in their text, excerpts of which I present below:

“The result has been a field day for those sceptical of the idea of man-made climate change…”

“…..the scientists are looking tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps as proof of a conspiracy.”

The article fails to recognize that even scientists who accept a major role of humans within the climate system are disparaged by the authors in the e-mails (e.g. I was the scientist referred to in the Economist article as a “prat“), and have been excluded from presenting alternative perspectives on the climate issue (e.g. see).

Despite the attempt to trivialize by the Economist, the issue which has been exposed by the released e-mails are that there are three distinct fundamentally different perspectives on the role of humans in the climate system. (Climate Science)

ABC's George Stephanopoulos actually brought up the ClimateGate scandal as a topic for discussion during the Roundtable segment on Sunday's "This Week."

As NewsBusters has been reporting since this story broke more than a week ago, television news outlets have been quite disinterested in the controversy now growing with each passing day.

Breaking this trend, Stephanopoulos aggressively waded into this seemingly verboten subject by mentioning how it complicates President Obama's trip to "Copenhagen to deal with climate change."

George Will of course agreed saying that the release of these e-mail messages raises a serious question about why America should "wager trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven."

Not surprisingly, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found "not a single smoking gun" in those e-mail messages (video in two parts embedded below the fold with transcript and commentary by myself and others involved in this debate): (Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters)

A French scientist’s temperature data show results different from the official climate science. Why was he stonewalled? Climate Research Unit emails detail efforts to deny access to global temperature data

The global average temperature is calculated by climatologists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The temperature graph the CRU produces from its monthly averages is the main indicator of global temperature change used by the International Panel on Climate Change, and it shows a steady increase in global lower atmospheric temperature over the 20th century. Similar graphs for regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, show the same trend. This is consistent with increasing industrialization, growing use of fossil fuels, and rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

It took the CRU workers decades to assemble millions of temperature measurements from around the globe. The earliest measurements they gathered came from the mid 19th century, when mariners threw buckets over the side of their square riggers and hauled them up to measure water temperature. Meteorologists increasingly started recording regular temperature on land around the same time. Today they collect measurements electronically from national meteorological services and ocean-going ships. (Phil Green, Financial Post)

For the benefit of new readers, we discussed some aspects of the “trick” at Climate Audit in the past. Obviously, the Climategate Letters clarify many things that were murky in the past. On the left is a blowup of IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing where the Briffa reconstruction (green) ends. More on this below.

Figure 1 below is the original graphic showing the MBH98-99, Jones et al 1998 and Briffa 2000 temperature reconstructions. I think that it’s fair to say that this graphic gives a strong rhetorical impression of the proxy reconstructions all going up throughout the 20th century, lending credibility to the idea that the “proxy” reconstructions would also be responsive to past warm periods – and obviously not giving any “fodder to the skeptics” by revealing the divergence between the Briffa reconstruction and temperatures. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

“WHAT is truth?” That was Pontius Pilate’s answer to Jesus’s assertion that “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It sounds suspiciously like the modern argument over climate change.

A majority of the world’s climate scientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth’s climate is changing; that the change, from humanity’s point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. A minority, though, are sceptical. Some think that recent, well-grounded data suggesting the Earth’s average temperature is rising are explained by natural variations in solar radiation, and that this trend may be coming to an end. Others argue that longer-term evidence that modern temperatures are higher than they have been for hundreds or thousands of years is actually too flaky to be meaningful.

Such disagreements are commonplace in science. They are eventually settled by the collection of more data and the invention of more refined (or entirely new) theories. Arguments may persist for decades; academics may—and often do—sling insults at each other; but it does not matter a great deal because the stakes are normally rather low.

The stakes in the global-warming debate, however, could scarcely be higher. (The Economist)

With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.

Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.

The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change. (Financial Times)

Details of a university inquiry into e-mails stolen from scientists at one of the UK's leading climate research units are likely to be made public next week.

Announcement of a chair of the inquiry and terms of reference will probably be made on Monday, a source says.

The University of East Anglia's (UEA) press office did not confirm the date. ( Roger Harrabin, BBC)

Methods used to tabulate the number of experts who are skeptical of climate change leave something to be desired

There you go,” concluded Anna Maria Tremonti of CBC’s morning radio show, The Current. “According to Jim Prull’s database, of the 615 scientists who published papers on climate change, the skeptics are outnumbered 601 to 14.”

Case closed, she was saying, after Prull, a computer network manager, explained how anyone can use a spreadsheet and Google Scholar searches to separate the real climate experts from the phony ones. Just key someone’s name into Google Scholar if you think he’s a scientist and see how often he has been cited. Those who aren’t cited much have little scientific credibility, CBC’s national audience was told, and those who are cited a lot have lots. Not once during her interview of Prull did Tremonti question Prull’s methodology or his premises or his results.

Copenhagen (pop. 1.7 million) is the capital of Denmark (pop. 5.3 million). Unless you are from Mars, you also know that Copenhagen is about to be transmogrified from being a dullish euro capital with a cute mermaid in the harbour into a grand global symbol of climate change with dead policies in the harbour. Just as Kyoto used to be a city in Japan before it became the brand name of a failed global warming protocol, the same fate appears to await Copenhagen.

The two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference doesn’t begin in Copenhagen until Dec. 7, but the meeting is already dominating international news agendas and driving political strategists and corporate schemers all over the world.

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.

Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

For years, the left has spun the debate over global warming in the starkest Manichean terms. Those who disagree with the scientific and policy orthodoxy have been maligned as greedy capitalists bent on raping the earth of its natural resources for cheap material gain; they have been cast as the benighted enemies of reason itself. Efforts to publicly challenge the science behind global warming have too often resulted in professional and political character assassination. To be skeptical about the fashionable scientific and policy platform aggressively advocated by the mainstream media and self-indulgently championed by the Hollywood elite is nothing less than an “assault on reason,” to borrow Al Gore’s hyperbolic rhetoric. In predictably technocratic fashion, the left has claimed its own peculiar position as the only scientifically legitimate one—everything else reduces to craven interest, manifest dishonesty, or antiquarian faith.

However, maintaining this self-serving narrative just got a lot harder. In the last few days, the cause of climate alarmism took a big hit when more than a thousand e-mails exchanged by scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) suddenly surfaced online. These e-mails were published by the computer hackers who apparently stole them, a crime that should be investigated and prosecuted. But notwithstanding the e-mails’ route to publication, their actual content is extraordinary. These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity. There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity, and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement. Especially in anticipation of the major climate summit taking place in Copenhagen next month, the significance of this explosive disclosure is hard to underestimate. According to climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

The evidence of scientific dishonesty supplied by these communications is so copious it’s hard to know where to begin an attempt to describe them. Many of the e-mails brazenly discuss the manipulation of scientific data either to provide the appearance of greater support for global warming science or to undermine the claims of skeptics. For example, CRU scholar Timothy J. Osborn explicitly describes how data can be reconfigured so that evidence of an apparent cooling period disappears. His colleague Tom Wigley discusses recasting the data on sea-surface temperatures so that the results seem considerably warmer but also scientifically plausible. The director of CRU, Phil Jones, brags about his use of eminent climatologist Michael Mann’s “Nature trick” which deliberately confuses scientific data to “hide the decline” in current temperatures. (New Atlantic)

From his web page: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process

Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.

A longer answer: My voice is not very important. I belong to the climate-research infantry, publishing a few papers per year, reviewing a few manuscript per year and participating in a few research projects. I do not form part of important committees, nor I pursue a public awareness of my activities. My very minor task in the public arena was to participate as a contributing author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. My area of research happens to be the climate of the past millennia, where I think I am appreciated by other climate-research ’soldiers’. And it happens that some of my mail exchange with Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn can be found in the CRU-files made public recently on the internet. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

This is a surprise. Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia suggests that the “I.P.C.C. has run its course”. I agree with him. We really need to remove a wholly political organization, the United Nations, from science.

[Upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen] “is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. [...] It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science. It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Lord Christopher Monckton went further than ever before in his vehement opposition to the elitists running the climate change scam, calling for the UN to be shut down and for fraudulent peddlers of global warming propaganda like Al Gore to be arrested and criminally prosecuted.

Monckton said that those who are threatening to shut down economies, bankrupt nations, and deepen the problems of the third world by implementing draconian policies in the name of global warming should be indicted, prosecuted and imprisoned “for a very long time”.

“The fraudsters and racketeers from Al Gore to the people at the University of East Anglia who have been making their fortune at the expense of taxpayers and the little guy,” should be criminally charged, said Monckton, in response to the climategate scandal.

“We the people have got to rise up worldwide, found a party in every country which stands for freedom and make sure we fight this bureaucratic communistic world government monster to a standstill – they shall not pass,” he added. (Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com)

Just over a week ago, violent storm clouds swept over scientists working in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The ‘Warmergate Scandal’ had broken.

On a Russian web site there appeared a decade of their personal e-mails sent to colleagues around the world. It seemed that a malevolent hacker had broken into one of their computer servers and stolen a vast amount of data. One can imagine what they must have felt. How many of us, I wonder, would like to have our e-mails out there in the Cloud for all to read?

But this was worse, because the people involved were leading climate scientists, some of the key players in establishing ‘global warming’, the controversial thesis that it is our greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide, that are the main driving force behind present-day climate change. They knew they had critics desperate to prove them wrong, who would be only too delighted to finger through their dirty linen now hanging in the public domain. (Clamour of the Times)

There’s an essay by Dr. James Hansen in the Guardian, the header of which is shown below. Next time people accuse of “big oil” connections for skeptics, point out that the most pro-agw newspaper on the planet is pushing Shell Oil ads.

That distraction aside, Dr. Hansen has some stunning things to say, excerpts below. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Writing in today’s The Times (‘I’m with Blaise Pascal when it comes to betting on climate change’, Saturday Review, p.4), Antonia Senior interrogates the question: Is it a better ‘bet’ to believe in ‘global warming’ [she really means ‘global warming’, and not climate change, in which everybody must believe] than not to do so? Can we apply the game theory of Pascal’s gambit, or logic, to ‘global warming’?

I am often challenged publicly with the same questions. Accordingly, I thought it might be of value to examine these propositions in more depth here, especially as I would argue that Antonia, in her thoughtful piece, has not got it quite right. (Clamour of the Times)

The ‘carbon market’ – trading in an invisible gas which cannot be used – has involved the redistribution of resources to unproductive green pursuits and the creation of a vast bureaucracy. Let’s bring it down before it gets any bigger. (Josie Appleton, sp!ked)

Market could be worth $3tn a year but enthusiasm to place it at heart of Copenhagen is matched by growing criticism of concept (Terry Macalister, The Guardian)

Ten thousand years from now, an archeologist will mount the platform at an academic conference to reveal the findings of his research team's latest dig -except, of course, he won't be at a physical gathering of other academics. (How 21st Century!) He'll be on a virtual platform and his team won't actually have had to dig anything up; they will merely have sent nanobots underground to analyze what's buried.

After much clearing of throat, our future PhD will announce he has discovered beneath Alberta a vast labyrinth of pipes and pumps, relays and reservoirs designed to store millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide underground.

The first reaction of his audience will be stunned silence. But after a few seconds' hush, they will break into gales of laughter.

Our earnest professor will attempt to continue, but someone will rise up from the back of the electronic hall and call out, "Hey, you mean they pumped air into the dirt?Oh, please. Who's going to believe that!"

Still, that is what the Alberta government intends to do, spend billions over the next 15 years to capture carbon emissions from industrial plants and pump it into holes in the ground. (Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal)

SISTERS, Ore. — A patch of ponderosa pines here in the Deschutes National Forest has been carefully pruned over the last few years to demonstrate the United States Forest Service’s priorities in the changing West: improving forest health and protecting against devastating wildfire while still supporting the timber economy.

Yet occasionally, when tour groups come through, someone will ask what role the trees might play as the nation addresses global warming. After all, forests soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.

“We’ve always said that’s outside the scope of this project,” said Michael Keown, the environmental coordinator for the Sisters Ranger District, which includes more than 300,000 acres in the Deschutes forest in central Oregon. “But those days have come and gone.”

The giant evergreens of the West have long been proclaimed essential, whether the cause was saving salmon and spotted owls or small towns and their sawmills. Now, with evidence showing that American forests store 15 percent or more of the carbon gases produced in the nation, expectations are growing for them to do even more.

Over the next 50 years or so, experts say, some forests could be cultivated to grow bigger, more resilient trees, potentially increasing their carbon storage by 50 percent and providing an important “bridge” to a time when the nation will theoretically have shifted away from greenhouse-gas producing fossil fuels. (NYT)

The United Nations Food Population Fund recently issued a new report warning that climate change pushes women into prostitution.

Although this is a tragic tale, and one with a clear-cut solution (stop climate change! Cut emissions now!) it's not really true. The world's poor are stuck in their permanent underclass status because they don't have better opportunities available, and have a limited number of (sometimes unsavory) professions to choose from.

Mine Your Own Business, a great movie by filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McIlhenney, documents how environmentalists - bent on preserving the environment and what they perceive to be an indigenous way of life - have actually prevented economic development that would provide the world's poor with real, sustainable options. In trying to maintain the "quaintness" of rural areas, they deprive the poor of the choice to improve their lot. Nobody wants to be poor - but in many cases, they don't have the chance to become anything else. Of course, this creates a big market for development professionals to distribute aid to needy people... but I digress.

What do poor women really need? They need infrastructure to get goods to market. They need microloans to give them the seed capital to start their own businesses. They need education. They don't need the UN lecturing them about slowing population growth rates and bureaucratic reports on population dynamics.

The controversial Bjorn Lomborg doesn't deny global warming. But he believes it's ‘an incredibly bad deal' to spend so much money on cutting carbon emissions, he tells John Allemang (Globe and Mail)

One reason it is so hard to slash carbon emissions is that climate change occurs globally. The countries that produce the most greenhouse gas all need to take action to fix the problem. That raises a classic economic dilemma called the tragedy of the commons. ( David Kestenbaum, NPR)

As it happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now.

From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then.

I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton.

To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew.

If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do.

So it’s no use trying to dismiss me as some kind of petrolhead polluter who wants to cover the planet with runways and motorways, nor to allege I’m in the pay of Big Oil, when I say that I doubt the existence of man-made global warming.

I just doubt it because I am not convinced it’s true. Actually, now that Big Oil has bought into the man-made warming scare itself, I generally get even cruder abuse, being called a ‘denier’ as if I were some kind of Nazi.

And if I mention my doubts at public occasions, I can feel the swelling wrath of the unreasoning mob gathering against me.

There’s seldom time to make more than a few points before you are howled down by righteous zealots.

And that is why I, and anyone seriously interested in this subject, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused. (Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail)

MORE than 70 Australian marine scientists have called for immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after the release of the first report card on the impact of climate change on the marine environment.

Oceans around the continent have warmed and become more acidic and the East Australian Current has strengthened, bringing hotter, saltier water 350 kilometres further south than 60 years ago.

This has caused coral bleaching and is the likely cause of a 10 per cent reduction in growth rates of corals on the Great Barrier Reef, according to the report, Marine Climate Change in Australia, 2009 Report Card. (SMH)

WINNIPEG — One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice which can't support the weight of the bears. (Canadian Press)

Scientists say shrinking Arctic sea ice may be forcing some polar bears into cannibalizing young cubs.

"When (bears) are very hungry, they go looking for something to eat," biologist Ian Stirling said yesterday. "There's nothing much to eat along the Hudson Bay coast in the fall other than other bears."

So far this fall, tour operators and scientists have reported at least four and perhaps up to eight cases of mature males eating cubs and other bears in the population around Churchill, Man. Four cases were reported to Manitoba Conservation; four to Environment Canada.

"That's a very big number," said Stirling, a retired Environment Canada scientist, who has studied the Churchill population for 35 years.

"I worked there well over 30 years and never saw a single case of cannibalism."

Bears lose up to 30% of their body mass as they spend the summer and autumn on land waiting for the sea ice to refreeze so they can use it as a platform to hunt seals. (Canadian Press)

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.” (Tim Blair)

In Greenland, global warming fuels dreams of uncovering untapped riches as ice retreats (Associated Press)

MOST of the world's population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK's most senior climate scientists has warned. (Scotland on Sunday)

The buffering effect of El Niño helped shield South Florida from hurricanes this year, but a study suggests climate change might weaken its protective power. (Miami Herald)

OSLO - An Australian project tapping Aborigines' knowledge to avert devastating wildfires that stoke climate change is the world's best example of linking indigenous peoples to carbon markets, the U.N. University said on Sunday. (Reuters)

With the head of the IPCC saying that you can't have ice water in restaurants, the opponents to action on climate change can probably go on vacation. They just can't buy advocacy of this quality.

If the climate science community is going to reverse the perception that it is a highly politicized clique, then it will at some point be necessary to reign in the IPCC leadership from being overt political advocates. (Roger Pielke Jr)

* Commonwealth leaders see convergence for Copenhagen pact
* EU's Barroso says commitments not yet enough for deal
* Adequate funding, emissions cuts seen as crucial factors

PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 29 - Commonwealth states representing a third of the world's people said on Sunday momentum was growing towards a global climate deal, but nagging doubts remained over funding levels and degrees of commitment.

Seeking to successfully tip the outcome of U.N. climate talks on Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen, the group of more than 50 nations from across the world made the climate change issue the centerpiece of a three-day summit in Trinidad and Tobago.

They declared firm support for an "operationally binding" deal to be achieved in Copenhagen that would cover tougher greenhouse gas emissions targets, climate adaptation financing for poorer nations and transfer of clean-energy technology. (Reuters)

‘What you'll see is the President expressing a strong personal commitment ... but at the same time he's going to be deferential to Congress' (Globe and Mail)

There's an experiment going on in the redwood forests of northern California: people are trying to turn trees into "carbon banks."

The idea is to manage forests so they absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow down global warming. Carbon banking will be a hot topic at next month's big climate conference in Copenhagen, especially if negotiators can't agree on how to get industrialized countries to lower their own emissions. Carbon banking could be a way to cut those emissions by paying poor countries to save their forests and manage them better.

But to do this, climate scientists need to become climate accountants — to put hard numbers on how much carbon trees breathe in and out. That's what the California experiment is all about. (Christopher Joyce, NPR)

Consumer carbon offset schemes do not lead people to change their behaviour, the first holiday firm to run such a scheme has argued.

Responsible Travel said they were a "distraction" from climate change's real urgency and is ending its scheme.

Such schemes involve individuals paying a premium for the emissions generated by certain choices, such as flying.

The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance says offsetting has an impact, but governments must do more.

Carbon offset schemes also cover things like choosing to drive a car or choices around the way homes are heated. (BBC)

Global carbon markets may well have been hailed as the saviour of the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but in many ways they are doing more harm than good, according to new evidence.

In fact, two academics have compiled a book which argues that measures put in place to reduce carbon emissions following the Kyoto Protocol Treaty on climate change have only made matters worse. (ScienceDaily)

Nasa's James Hansen was the first to point out the perils of climate change to the US Congress. Here, he begins a heated debate with experts from around the world, from China to the threatened Maldives, and argues that our leaders must be shaken out of their complacency. But will they show enough courage at next week's Copenhagen summit to take the first steps to saving the planet? (James Hansen, The Observer)

WASHINGTON -- NASA's high-profile competitions to create moon landers, astronaut gloves, ribbon-climbing robots and other space technology have been so successful they are inspiring a copycat co-directed by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

Barrasso is pushing legislation that would launch a similar contest -- modeled after NASA's Centennial Challenges -- for technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. ( Hearst Newspapers)

China, the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gasses, announced Thursday that will set specific targets for reducing emissions at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. China will pledge to reduce "carbon intensity," the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic growth, by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The plan is an unusual one compared to most other countries, which pledge to reduce the specific tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions rather than pegging it to economic growth. (Atlantic Wire)

China has put some numbers on its carbon intensity pledge -- that is, its aim to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP. China has promised to reduced its carbon intensity of GDP by 40-45% by 2020. While a few folks have been fooled (or are trying to fool you) into thinking that it is meaningful, others including the Obama Administration are not fooled. The reality is a bit more subtle and complex than either of these perspectives.

The head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change , Yvo de Boer spun the announcement as a breakthrough:

President Bush also used a carbon intensity target with goals based on achieving business as usual, and his administration was skewered (and rightly so) for trying to couch business as usual 9BAU) as some sort of meaningful emissions reduction policy. The difference between the Bush Administration's carbon intensity goals and those promised by China are that the Bush Administration based its targets on historical BAU whereas China has its based on BAU inclusive of a set of very aggressive energy efficiency goals. I recently had a correspondence in Nature questioning China's BAU trajectory (more details here and here and here). While the IEA numbers suggest a less aggressive version of BAU than do China's domestic numbers, they still imply an annual average rate of decarbonization of China's economy of about 3.7% per year.

A focus on carbon intensity of economic activity is a step in the right direction. At the same time, policy makers and analysts should not be distracted by the details of China's promises in the context of various BAU reference scenarios. What matters is the actual annual rate of decarbonization in coming years, and to discern this will require good data on both emissions and economic activity. If China can sustain a rate of decarbonization of 3.7% per year or more that would be a very impressive achievement. However, if China is going to continue to grow its economy at 9% per year, it is obvious that much more would need to be done to address ever growing emissions.

Bottom line? China's decarbonization target is indeed very similar to some versions of BAU, suggesting a lack of ambition. At the same time these versions of BAU already have rapid rates of decarbonization built in, so much so that I am skeptical about their realism. Even so, discussions about climate these days are more focused on politics than policy, so the exact details of China's emissions policy probably matter less than how its promises are perceived and spun in the negotiating process. (Roger Pielke Jr.)

* China will only allow checks on foreign-funded projects
* No room for increase of emissions intensity target
* Rich nations must not shirk obligations, China says

BEIJING, Nov 27 - A top Chinese climate envoy said on Friday Beijing would only allow outside scrutiny of emissions reduction projects which had international financial support, probably only a "very small proportion" of its total cuts.

Yu Qingtai, China's climate change ambassador, also said the world should not expect China to push up a new target to curb growth in emissions of greenhouse gases -- described by some as modest -- because it represented the "very best of our efforts". (Reuters)

NEW DELHI — India's chief climate change negotiator has flatly rejected taking on emission reduction targets a day after Premier Manmohan Singh said the country would commit to cuts conditionally.

India, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters, has yet to offer figures on reining in its carbon output, with just over a week to go until UN climate talks start in Copenhagen.

Singh said on Saturday that India was "willing to sign on to an ambitious global target for emissions reductions or limiting temperature increase" provided developed countries shared in the burden of funding mitigation.

But in an interview broadcast Sunday, chief negotiator Shyam Saran told the NDTV news channel that India was under no pressure to join the United States and China -- the world's top two carbon sources -- in announcing firm numbers ahead of the summit.

"There cannot be any emission cuts," said Saran, adding that the developed world did not expect countries like India to adopt emission reduction targets but instead to accept "deviation from business as usual." (AFP)

Turnbull is sacrificing his leadership ambitions, ignoring his party members, brushing off thousands of emails, denying the devastating ClimateGate scandal and the evidence of fraud, and doing his utmost to force through legislation in a break-neck rush when the only reason for the hurry is to make Rudd (his opponent) look good in Copenhagen.

D-Day is tomorrow. If Turnbull can find six complicit senators they can pull the “guillotine” on questions, and force a vote. With their seven votes the ETS legislation could be passed, and from that instant, Australians will be poorer. Even if the scheme doesn’t start, from that moment on businesses and banks will ‘invest’ and demand compensation if it’s not carried through.

Turnbull will face almost certain wipeout the next day as leader in a spill he claims he can win, but has “deferred” from Monday until Tuesday. He is nothing but naked bluff. His determination to help the Labor Party at the expense of his own ambition defies logic and begs dark questions.

His party members have approached him offering to avoid a leadership spill if he just agrees to delay the ETS and allow a full inquiry into it. But what’s extraordinary is that this man who obviously had hoped to lead the country is so willing to give that up in order to pass legislation on a topic that is hardly that close to his heart (or so it would seem anyway).

It’s not like Turnbull has made it his moniker to save forests, spotted quolls, or rescue islands (that aren’t sinking). He hasn’t spent his life working with Greenpeace, or written books about saving whales. He’s an ambitious, aggressive investment banker. And that’s now looking like an ominous connection. I haven’t made a lot of his past work with Goldman Sachs, but there is an inexplicable undercurrent here.

He’s sacrificing his ambitions and going to extreme lengths to force through a piece of legislation that is so detested within his party that his front bench has mutinied en masse, and on what is widely tipped to be his last day as opposition leader. It’s one hell of a legacy to leave the country. He is going out of his way, and at considerable personal cost, to force this legislation through.

Maybe this is just blind determination. He’s a determined man. But it doesn’t add up. Wonder where his next job will be?

Turnbull has already used trickery to frustrate the majority in the party room who wanted to at least delay the Ration-N-Tax Scheme.

Now Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have devised a another tricky plan to get the CPRS Bill through the Senate on Monday 30th November, the day before the Liberal party meeting he has called for Tuesday, where he is expected to be blasted out of office.

The plan is to move the guillotine in the Senate on Monday where the ALP’s 32 senators will be supported by Turnbullite Liberal senators in sufficient numbers to pass the guillotine. Once that has been done the CPRS Bill will be immediately put to the vote, and the same coalition of ALP and Turnbullite senators will pass the Bill.

This is indeed a cunning plan and demonstrates the length of trickery to which Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are prepared to go together to impose this monstrous regime of command and control on Australia.

Intervals of regional warmth and cold in the past are linked to the El Nino phenomenon and the so-called 'North Atlantic Oscillation' in the Northern hemisphere's jet stream, according to a team of climate scientists. These linkages may be important in assessing the regional effects of future climate change.

'Studying the past can potentially inform our understanding of what the future may hold,' said Michael Mann, Professor of meteorology, Penn State.

Mann stresses that an understanding of how past natural changes have influenced phenomena such as El Nino, can perhaps help to resolve current disparities between state-of the-art climate models regarding how human-caused climate change may impact this key climate pattern.

Mann and his team used a network of diverse climate proxies such as tree ring samples, ice cores, coral and sediments to reconstruct spatial patterns of ocean and land surface temperature over the past 1500 years. They found that the patterns of temperature change show dynamic connections to natural phenomena such as El Nino. They report their findings in today's issue (Nov. 27) of Science.

Mann and his colleagues reproduced the relatively cool interval from the 1400s to the 1800s known as the 'Little Ice Age' and the relatively mild conditions of the 900s to 1300s sometimes termed the 'Medieval Warm Period.' (ScienceCentric)

I discussed that Phil Jones implied that the GISS and NCDC surface temperature data sets confirmed the robutness of the magnitude of the multi-decadal global average surface temperature trend, even if his CRU data was excluded, since GISS and NCDC provide independent assessments.

To present this issue further, I have reproduced below my question in 2005 on this issue and the CCSP response from

Question [by Roger A. Pielke Sr]:What is the overlap in the raw data that utilized by the three groups?

The best estimate that I am aware of has a 90-95% overlap. The analyses from the three groups are hardly independent assessments, and this should not be hidden in the report. The overlap is particularly important for the grid points analyzed in the analyses where only 1 or 2 observational data points exist. We have documented for the tropical land areas, for example (20N to 20S) about 70% of the grid points have had zero or less than one observation site! Thus to compute an average surface temperature trend over land in the tropics, which is the area where the report narrowly focuses, almost all of the raw data used on the three analyses is from the same source. Thus to present a Figure to purportedly illustrate uncertainty in the surface temperature trends is misleading. (Climate Science)

There is a new paper of relevance to the role of landscape change on the climate system (and thanks to Marcel Severijnen to alerting us to!). The paper is

“During the 1997/98 El Niño-induced drought peatland fires in Indonesia may have released 13–40% of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels. One major unknown in current peatland emission estimations is how much peat is combusted by fire. Using a light detection and ranging data set acquired in Central Kalimantan, Borneo, in 2007, one year after the severe peatland fires of 2006, we determined an average burn scar depth of 0.33 ± 0.18 m. Based on this result and the burned area determined from satellite imagery, we estimate that within the 2.79 million hectare study area 49.15 ± 26.81 megatons of carbon were released during the 2006 El Niño episode. This represents 10–33% of all carbon emissions from transport for the European Community in the year 2006. These emissions, originating from a comparatively small area (approximately 13% of the Indonesian peatland area), underline the importance of peat fires in the context of green house gas emissions and global warming. In the past decade severe peat fires occurred during El Niño-induced droughts in 1997, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2009. Currently, this important source of carbon emissions is not included in IPCC carbon accounting or in regional and global carbon emission models. Precise spatial measurements of peat combusted and potential avoided emissions in tropical peat swamp forests will also be required for future emission trading schemes in the framework of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in developing countries.”

“Currently, this important source of carbon emissions is not included in IPCC carbon accounting or in regional and global carbon emission models.”

This is in addition to the failure of the 2009 IPCC assessment to consider, as just two examples, the effect of this biomass burning on the generation of atmospheric aerosols and their effect on precipitation (e.g. see) and of the alteration of the surface fluxes of heat and moisture into the atmosphere with a resultant alteration of large scale atmospheric patterns (e.g. see). (Climate Science)

Now that ClimateGate has buried the fraudulent hockey stick for good, it is easily to prove that global warming is not man-made: just compare the timing of our carbon dioxide emissions with the timing of global warming.

Emissions of carbon dioxide by humans are easy to estimate from our consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas, and production of cement:

The vast bulk of human emissions occurred after 1945, during post-WWII industrialization. Half of all human consumption of fossil fuels and cement production has occurred since the mid 1970s.

Global temperature proxies (sediments, boreholes, pollen, oxygen-18, stalagmites, magnesium to calcium ratios, algae, cave formation, etc. over a wide geographical range) show a warming trend starting around 1700, with warming and cooling periods about the trend:

Figure 2: Mean global temperature reconstruction based on 18 non-tree-ring proxies, to 1935. Only 11 proxies cover the period after 1935, dotted line. Sources 1, 2, 3, 4: Dr Craig Loehle, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement.

Global thermometer records are more reliable and precise, but only go back to 1880. They confirm that the warming trend extends back to at least 1880, and show warming and cooling periods of about thirty years in each direction:

Figure 3: The global instrumental temperature record to 2000, in the yellow box. Simply draw a trend line through the data. In 2009 we are where the green arrow points. . Source: Dr Syun Akasofu, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

If human emissions of carbon dioxide caused global warming, then there would be massive and accelerating global warming after 1945 and almost no global warming before 1945. Obviously this is not the case.

What puzzled Karlen was that the data he was looking at for Nordic countries in fact showed no warming above what had been witnessed in the 1930s:

I asked Dr. Judith Curry if I could repost her letter which she originally sent to Climate Progress, here at WUWT. Here was her response:

Dr. Curry gets props from the skeptical community because she had the courage to invite Steve McIntyre to give a presentation at Georgia Tech, for which she took criticism. Her letter is insightful and addresses troubling issues. We can all learn something from it. – Anthony

An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research – By Dr. Judith A. Curry, Georgia Tech

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate and the contents of the hacked CRU emails. After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I wrote an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research. The essay is posted over at climateaudit.org (you can read it at http://camirror.wordpress.com/ 2009/ 11/ 22/ curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/ ).

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.

My motivation for communicating on this issue in the blogosphere comes from emails that I received from Georgia Tech graduate students and alums. As a result of my post on climateaudit, I started receiving emails from graduate students from other universities. I post the content of one of the emails here, without reference to the student’s name or institution: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

This comment was sent to me in case it was not posted at all or in it’s entirety over at Climate Progress. It wasn’t, so I’m repeating it here because I think it is relevant to the discussion that Dr. Judith Curry started. From my perspective, the best way to begin to foster understanding is to stop using labels that degrade, and that goes for both sides of the debate.

Judith Curry wrote “I reserve the word “deniers” for people that are explicitly associated with advocacy groups that are politicizing this issue…”

I reserve the word “deniers” for people that explicitly reject the history of Jewish extermination in wartime Germany. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Nothing in the climate debate which I’ve been paying sporadic attention to is more repulsive than the global warming advocates’ attempt to smear skeptics of their theories and models and predictions as “denialists.” As if they were some analog of holocaust deniers.

Not all those concerned about climate change use the term. (Some stick to a sneering use of “skeptics” as a stigmatizing word, as if science itself wasn’t an ongoing process of skepticism about received wisdom. Copernicus was a skeptic about the idea the sun revolved around the earth. He wasn’t a “solar denialist.”)

But nothing causes me more revulsion — and skepticism — than the warming advocates’ (I think the CRU scandal — and the shameful reaction to it — has revealed many of the most celebrated of them to be more p.r. advocates than scrupulous scientists) application of the opprobrious term “denialist” to anyone who questions the work they have so assiduously screened from scrutiny.

When I started paying attention again to the controversy after the release of the pathetic CRU e-mails, I noticed the most desperate of the last ditch defenders of the CRU charlatans — and indeed the CRU charlatans themselves — would resort to calling any of those who disagreed “denialists.” That the use of “denialist” had grown as the failure of their predictions (the discredited “hockey stick” chart) increased.

To me that shameful, trivializing word use alone is more exposure than any e-mail could be of their lack of critical intelligence of the sort that makes them unfit to call themselves scientists, or, in the case of many of their “green journalist” sycophants, ignorant of how actual science works. (Ron Rosenbaum, PJM)

An internal document circulating among members of an industry-environmental coalition that favors action on global warming provides a window into the oil industry’s fight to scale back mandates in Democratic climate-change bills.

The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), formed with a huge splash in early 2007, helped provide an early push for cap-and-trade legislation by uniting several big green groups, large utilities, and major oil companies Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP.

But the oil industry says current Capitol Hill plans would create costly burdens, and companies inside and outside the group are seeking major changes to requirements for refiners.

The document circulating within USCAP, obtained by The Hill, offers a different approach for addressing emissions from car and truck tailpipes.

Sources inside the group say the document has been circulated by ConocoPhillips and BP. (The Hill)

I noted with interest the outlandish comments made by Al Gore suggesting greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta's oil sands threaten our survival.

A realistic and reasonable discussion about oil-sands development must be based on fact. Sadly, Gore's doomsday assertions about an industry that makes up less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are neither realistic, reasonable nor factual. (Ed Stelmach, Premier of Alberta)

ScottishPower says it has reduced the energy requirement for carbon capture and storage (CCS) by around a third.

Following tests at its Longannet pilot, the firm says its prototype carbon capture unit has clocked up 2,000 hours, capturing 90 per cent of the carbon content from 1,000 cubic meters an hour of exhaust gas.

ScottishPower claims a combination of process engineering and low energy solvents are behind the breakthrough, which in turn will lower operating costs of future CCS plants.

"The ability to capture CO2 without it being cost prohibitive is key to the future of CCS," said chief executive, Nick Horler. He claims that the Longannet plant will be up and running at full scale (ie 300MW) using CCS and existing pipelines to store the carbon by 2014. (Utility Week)

WASHINGTON — Two years ago, Congress ordered the nation’s gasoline refiners to do something that is turning out to be mathematically impossible.

To please the farm lobby and to help wean the nation off oil, Congress mandated that refiners blend a rising volume of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline. They are supposed to use at least 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012, up from less than seven billion gallons in 2007.

But nobody at the time counted on fuel demand falling in the United States, which is what has happened during the recession. And that decline could well continue, as cars become more efficient under other recent government mandates.

At the maximum allowable blend, in which gasoline at the pump contains 10 percent ethanol, updated projections suggest that the country is unlikely to be able to use all the ethanol that Congress has ordered up. So something has to give.

“The market is full,” said Jeff Broin, chief executive of Poet, a company in Sioux Falls, S.D., that produces ethanol.

In theory, the Environmental Protection Agency has the power to solve this problem by tweaking the mandates imposed by Congress, and it may act as early as next week. (NYT)

THE ethanol industry, once the darling of corn growers, environmentalists and the auto industry, has fallen on hard times. Producers spent this year caught between falling ethanol prices and rising corn costs, causing many to go bankrupt. In response, they are pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to increase the amount of ethanol they can blend into gasoline to 15 percent, up from the current 10 percent. Allowing this, however, would only double down on a discredited environmental policy without solving the industry’s fundamental economic problem.

That problem is simple: Ethanol prices trend higher and lower along with the price of gasoline, yet the cost of producing ethanol tends to rise with demand, since higher ethanol production exerts upward pressure on the price of corn. In a free market, corn prices might be expected to eventually fall as the market adjusts to increased demand. But because the government heavily promotes ethanol use through subsidies and regulation, the market is continually strained.

The problem is magnified because corn is a water- and fertilizer-intensive crop that requires considerable investment. Worse, since fertilizer is often an oil-based product, the cost of growing corn tends to rise at the very moment ethanol prices, which rise with oil prices, might bring a good return. (NYT)

* Ethanol emissions 62 pct lower measuring all stages
* Skeptics say biofuel uses more fuel than it produces

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Nov 26 - Canadian ethanol emits 62 percent less greenhouse gas than conventional fuel, taking into consideration all stages of the fuel's production from planting a crop to burning the fuel, a new report prepared for Canada's biofuel industry said on Friday.

The results rebut a key argument against producing biofuels, that they use more energy than they can generate, said Gordon Quaiattini, president of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. (Reuters)

One of the biggest environmental stories in recent years is the sad saga of Chinese drywall. Upwards of 60,000 homes, and possibly as many as 300,000, are affected by the sulfide spewing gypsum board. In addition to the highly publicized corrosion of all sorts of metal parts, including air conditioning coils, and the obnoxious sulfide odors, nearly all residents of these homes are reporting health effects—usually upper respiratory complaints.

Moreover, there are dozens of reports of affected families who have left their homes, whose symptoms disappear completely in a few days. Absent actual medical tests, field confirmation of health effect etiology does not get a whole lot better than this. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

THREE Australian experts are making waves in the medical community with a report suggesting swine flu may have developed because of a lab error in making vaccines.

"It could have happened in a lab where somebody became affected and then travelled with it," virologist Dr Adrian Gibbs said yesterday.

Conjuring up a vision of Frankenstein's fictional monster fleeing the laboratory, he added: "Things do get out of labs and this has to be explored. There needs to be more research done in this area.

"At the moment there is no way of distinguishing where swine flu has come from." (Daily Telegraph)

ONE of the profound mysteries of medicine is why in the midst of an epidemic some people become severely ill and die while others remain unscathed.

During the great plagues of past centuries, like the Black Death, smallpox and yellow fever, the answer was often cast in religious terms: survival was a miracle and succumbing was a punishment. During this influenza pandemic of H1N1, doctors and health officials invoke “underlying conditions.” This phrase, now so ubiquitous in news reports, is rightly understood to mean concurrent medical problems like diabetes and lung disease. But such underlying conditions are only part of the mystery of why this flu is so mild for some and so serious for others. (NYT)

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.

One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

Another gimmick pushes much of the legislation’s costs off the federal budget and onto the private sector by requiring individuals and employers to purchase health insurance. When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending. That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan. And it hides maybe 60 percent of the legislation’s total costs. When I correct for that gimmick, it brings total costs to roughly $2.5 trillion (i.e., $1 trillion/0.4).

Here’s where things get really ugly. TPMDC’s Brian Beutler calls “the” $2.5-trillion cost estimate a “doozy” of a “hysterical Republican whopper.” Not only is he incorrect, he doesn’t seem to realize that Gregg and I are correcting for different budget gimmicks; it’s just a coincidence that we happened to reach the same number.

When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion. That’s not a precise estimate. It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.

Beutler and other supporters of ObamaCare can react to this news in two ways. They can continue to deny the enormous cost of the legislation they support. Or they can question how President Obama’s health plan came to be so blessedly expensive, and how (and by whom) they were duped into thinking it wasn’t. (Michael F. Cannon, Cato at liberty)

FIRST-TIME mothers feel they are leaving hospitals as failures because they are being pressured to breastfeed at all costs, with many saying breastfeeding was harder than giving birth.

In an exclusive The Daily Telegraph online survey, more than 500 new mothers shared their experiences and experts said the striking findings show how a fragmented and biased system is letting down NSW families.

One in two mums said they felt pressured to breastfeed, while 42 per cent said they were given no information about alternatives and 65 per cent of women said they were given contradictory advice by midwives.

Nearly one in two mums reported they hated breastfeeding and said they found it tougher than the actual labour, while a third of mothers surveyed said they moved to using formula after eight weeks.

The World Health Organisation recommends babies should be breastfed for at least 12 months. ( Daily Telegraph)

A NATIONAL children's activity program that has already snared more than $200 million of public money is proving an expensive flop, according to experts who say children who take part are doing barely more exercise overall than non-participants. (The Australian)

Only two months ago our piece on the CRU was entitled Beyond satire. At that time they were still comfortable within the protection of political and bureaucratic patronage. Now that their cover has been blown, probably by an anonymous whistle blower, the patrons are in a spin, hovering between brushing it all under the carpet and setting up one of their carefully primed enquiries. Even staunch allies, such as George Monbiot and the environmental editor of the Sunday Times, are shocked at the revelation of truths that many of us had long ago already inferred.

The truly shocking thing about it all, however, is the destructive effect that the environmental movement has had on science in general. It is bad enough that outfits such as CRU absorb such a large proportion of available funding, with their inflated staffing and inordinately costly super-computers. But as the Cat in the Hat would say, that is not all. It has been an enduring and bitter joke in these pages and throughout the scientific community that to secure your research grant you have to add to your application title “and the effect of global warming”. The line of sensor research that your bending author bequeathed only continues because it was linkable to “sustainability”. The heavy hints that such was the only path to funding were among the many reasons for deciding that it was time to leave the stage. Younger academic scientists do not have that choice. For two decades now, British universities have been closing down physics and chemistry departments. That this should happen in a nation that fought well above its weight in these fields (just look at the Nobel Prize lists) is a tragedy for humanity. Physics is dead, long live environmental science.

In parenthesis, the memory of a lovely summer afternoon spent sitting by a richer neighbour’s swimming pool leaves an indelible image that now seems so relevant. A pair of pied wagtails were desperately trying to satisfy the hunger of a cuckoo chick that had been foisted on them. It was so large that they had to stand on its back to reach its insatiable gape.

In Britain, the wiser political heads of yore created the University Grants Committee, which was designed, among other things, to insulate academia from the instant demands of political and administrative exigency. For that very reason it met its demise in 1989. Yet again a Thatcherite tactic, designed to constrain the occupation of much of academia by the destructive left, was a strategic error that enabled Tony Blair to drive his wrecking ball through the university system (though one must not forget the contribution of the woeful Major Government that demolished the economically vital polytechnics by turning them into Mickey Mouse universities). Worse, that and related policies turned universities into quasi-industrial bodies, in which harassed chief executives and centralised administrations made poor decisions based on inadequate information and undue financial pressure. Back in 2004 Number Watch made the ironic comment that Britain was planning to achieve world dominance in media studies. Well that has come to pass and we can add other essential areas, such as golf course design and surfing. Experimental sciences are expensive luxuries when government polices are based on a drive to get bums on seats. This is especially so when their potential research funds are being diverted to more politically correct activities.

One of the delusions of the new political class is that you can create institutions instantaneously (schools for example): just add water. This is a gross and destructive fallacy. Such institutions build up a corporate knowledge that cannot be written down and takes generations to accumulate, though they can be destroyed overnight. The demolition of the grammar schools in Britain was an economic as well as a cultural disaster, which virtually put an end to social mobility.

Likewise, you cannot recreate physics departments overnight. You can retrieve the condensed information from published work, but you cannot recreate the know-how of technicians that made the work possible. The political class do not understand the role of technicians, so they have simply ended their production.

These facts, however ruinous, are side issues. The monopolising of precious resources by any academic discipline, even if it were one less fatuous than the theology of modern, politically-correct environmentalism, would always be a downward step in the path of human progress. (Number Watch)

JENNIE SUNSHINE doesn’t need horror movies. She has witnessed numerous chain-saw massacres right on Ravencrest Road, her sleepy suburban block in this upper Westchester town.

“It seems like every time someone moves onto the block, they begin cutting down trees,” said Ms. Sunshine, 38, a stay-at-home mother of a 2-year-old girl. Three neighbors have deforested parts of their yards in the past two years, she said.

“I’m not a nosy neighbor, but every time I hear the saws, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, there it is again,’ ” she said. “These trees were not sick or a safety hazard; these people just wanted to rearrange the landscape. I thought, ‘If this continues, what’s Yorktown going to look like in 30 years, the Lower East Side?’ ”

Ms. Sunshine never confronted her neighbors, but she joined a group of like-minded residents who are pushing for a town ordinance requiring property owners to get approval before removing certain trees on their property.

Protecting trees on public land and parkland, and on property under development, is standard in municipalities in the New York area. But more local governments — Larchmont and Rye in Westchester County, and Chatham, Madison and Rutherford in New Jersey, to name a few — have considered or are debating more controversial restrictions on what homeowners can do with the trees on their own property. (NYT)

Motorway lights should be turned off at night to protect the environment, experts have said.

Light pollution stops us enjoying the beauty of the night sky and could be disrupting the delicate life cycles of birds, bats and other wildlife, according to the Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution.

They say that motorway lights, other than those at junctions, do little to prevent accidents, and that the benefits are likely to be too small to justify the costs. (Daily Mail)

The longest and least uplifting chapter in my new Cato book Mad about Trade is Chapter 9, where I describe all the remaining duties and restrictions our government imposes on our freedom to trade with people in other countries. We are certainly not “the most open market in the world,” as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet asserted in China last week. In fact, by one measure we rank a lowly 28th.

After mentioning this fact in speeches lately, I’ve been asked more than once to name the markets that ARE the most open in the world. Here, according to the latest 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Report, are the top ten most open economies:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Chile
4. Ireland
5. Panama
6. Netherlands
7. United Arab Emirates
8. Slovak Republic
9. Hungary
10. Luxembourg

(The list is a bit different from the one I cite in the book, which was based on the 2008 EFW report.)

One of the most remarkable members on the list is Chile. Decades ago, it was one of the most closed, protectionist economies in Latin America. Today it is the most open. In fact, when you consider that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, and Singapore is a tiny city state, Chile is the most open full-sized country in the world. (I hope our free-trade friends in Singapore won’t take offense at that!)

Will our own president and Congress learn from Chile’s example? (Daniel Griswold, Cato at liberty)

Bill C-300 would put Canadian firms at a competitive disadvantage and damage their reputations

The committee hearings on Bill C-300, designed to hobble Canadian mining and oil and gas companies operating overseas, heard further hysterical and bizarre testimony this week. At times accounts were reminiscent of scenes from Syriana, or a Michael Moore movie, at others like something manufactured on a psychiatrist’s couch.

The highest-profile testimony alleging Canadian corporate skullduggery came from Romina Picolotti. The former secretary for the Environment and Sustainable Development of Argentina. Testifying by video link, Ms. Picolotti, who is also the founder and president of an environmental NGO, the Centre for Human Rights and the Environment, made astounding claims that Toronto-based Barrick, the world’s largest gold miner, was responsible for physically threatening not merely her and her staff, but also her children.

The Financial Times have humiliated themselves by printing an article by two crackpots, Blood and Gore (no kidding), called

DALI, China — Justin Franchi Solondz, an environmental activist from New Jersey who spent years evading charges of ecoterrorism in the United States by hiding out in China, was sentenced to three years in prison by a local court on Friday on charges of manufacturing drugs in this backpacker haven.

After serving his time, Mr. Solondz, 30, who is on the F.B.I.’s wanted list, will be deported to the United States, where he faces charges stemming from what the authorities say was his role in an arson rampage that destroyed buildings in three western states as a member of a group related to the environmental extremist organization Earth Liberation Front. He was indicted in absentia in 2006. (NYT)

A climate change expert endorsed Tesco’s position on reducing plastic bag use after his institute received a £25million donation from the supermarket, it has been revealed.

Professor Mohan Munasinghe said the retailer’s policy of rewarding customers who reuse the bags with ClubCard points was ‘more effective’ than charging.

His comments appeared in the Consumers, Business and Climate Change report, which was published amid much fanfare at the Royal Society last month.

The professor, one of Britain’s leading experts on climate change, is head of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at Manchester University, set up with the aid of a £25million donation from Tesco in 2007.

The retailer’s employees were also involved in compiling the report, it has emerged. They were mentioned by name, but their connection to the store was not disclosed. (Daily Mail)

OTTAWA -- Brock Fenton shudders when he thinks of a world without bats.

For more than 40 years, Fenton - a professor at the University of Western Ontario and Canada's foremost bat expert - has been visiting an abandoned mine 75 kilometres west of Ottawa near Renfrew, Ont., where bats hibernate by the thousands.

Fenton knows that one day soon they may all be gone, killed by a lethal fungus that is destroying the bats of eastern North America. ( Blair Crawford , Ottawa Citizen)

One of the released emails has the preeminent U.S. junk science critic renaming his allies: "We are no longer The Skeptics. We are The Vindicated." (See full PJM/PJTV coverage of Climategate here.)

What’s the real smoking gun among the emails allegedly “hacked” from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit? We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s first address the alarmists’ first line of defense — that the emails were stolen, and more than likely by some dastardly skeptic.

Since news of embarrassing, if not incriminating emails broke last Friday, it has become clear that the CRU computer system was not “hacked” and the emails were not stolen. In fact, the file containing the emails had been assembled by CRU staff in preparation for compliance with a Freedom of Information request. The file was then stored in a publicly accessible portion of the CRU computer network — making it just a matter of time before someone discovered it. Why the file was so stored may never be known, but that’s not really what’s important.

Nothing illegal or unethical was done to affect the file’s release.

Moving on. (Steve Milloy, PJM)

LONDON - The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming.

Climate change skeptics have seized on a series of e-mails written by specialists in the field, accusing them of colluding to suppress data which might have undermined their arguments.

The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen from a British university by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet.

But Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel's 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). "This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings," he told Reuters in an email exchange. (Reuters)

You can’t put honesty in a test tube.

“Science” doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

Those are a couple of the illuminating conclusions we can draw from the global warming e-mail scandal.

“You mean science is not objective?” No, unless the scientists are, and too often they are not. I don’t want to impugn all scientists, but it is true that some of them are less than honest. Sometimes they lie to get or keep their jobs. Sometimes they lie to get grant money. Sometimes they lie to further their political beliefs. Sometimes they don’t intentionally lie, but they draw bad scientific conclusions because they only look for what they hope to find. ( Frank Turek, Townhall)

How to Forge a Consensus - The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.

The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)

But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start. (WSJE)

A respected British scientist has admitted that emails taken from his inbox, calling into question many of the accepted truths of global warming, were genuine. The documents appear to show scientists are holding back, or ignoring, evidence. One even suggested using a "trick" to hide a trend of falling temperatures. (Russia Today)

What keeps scientists honest is knowing our colleagues are looking over our shoulders. A theory with hidden data is never to be believed.

As readers are now aware, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the main climate research center in Britain, has had 128 megabytes of secret emails and other data placed online by someone calling himself “FOIA.” A number of scientists have been trying for years to get the raw data possessed by CRU placed online, filing requests under the British Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although required by law to release this information, CRU has not done so, or has claimed that the data were accidentally erased. We now have proof in the emails that the illegal withholding of information was intentional, and that the erasure of data was also intentional.

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy. (Frank J. Tipler, PJM)

Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer of the UEA, quoted yesterday by Willis Eschenbach in a comment to his “Freedom of information, my okole…“:

Kenneth Lay answering an analyst’s question on August 14, 2001, as quoted in Wikipedia:

Dr. Ross McKitrick is a professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph and is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. His work with Stephen McIntyre — another Canadian — provides much of the basis for skepticism of the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change. The “Hockey Stick” graph authored by Mann, Bradley and Hughes and published by Nature has come under renewed controversy after emails and data from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit were hacked and leaked revealing smoothing, manipulation, clumsy patching and omission of data used to construct climate models based on direct and indirect temperate readings. The hockey stick graph provided basis for the 2001 IPCC report, and a significant foundation for the modern mainstream view on climate change. The emails also revealed a tightly controlled and collaborative peer-review process which appeared to be designed to suppress skepticism and debate.

Leaders from industrialized and non-industrialized nations will meet in Copenhagen in just over a week to discuss a new agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol and seeks to transfer GDP from richer nations to poorer ones under the guise of aiding the implementation of CO2 emission reduction capacity around the world. I emailed Dr. McKitrick to ask him about the CRU hack/leak, the news of a pending US Congressional probe into the revelations that came from it, his opinion if such a move is necessary in Canada and whether this will affect the “scientific consensus” and political track as we move towards Copenhagen and beyond. (Stephen Taylor)

A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which "human-induced global warming" claims have been advanced over the years.

By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia -- in some respects the international clearing house for climate change "science" -- he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.

More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various "progressive" causes require a particular scientific result.

There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: "It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The e-mails extracted ... could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them." (David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen)

This social graph of CRU emails shows how miniscule is this IPCC “power group” if you ponder how many active climatologists there must be globally. Sent in by The Iconoclast. The software counts the To and CC lines but does not count the embedded emails, many of which are duplicates. The 300kb graphic is over 3000 pixels wide, best downloaded – it prints OK in A4 but A3 would be better. (Warwick Hughes)

Hackers broke into thousands of emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University last week and uncovered the global warming conspiracy.

Stuart Varney interviews scientist Pat Michaels, with the CATO institute, who was the target of physical threat from Climate Scientist Ben Sanders. He also DESTROYS Ben Weiss, from the Center for American Progress.

Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed "Climategate" are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.

Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, tells NRO that the leaked correspondence from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia could potentially be a bigger scandal than the release of undercover videos exposing ACORN earlier this year. “If you use financial criteria and evaluate the costs involved, then this is certainly more expensive,” says Inhofe. “It’s a wake-up call for America.”

Inhofe says that the e-mails, which reveal climate scientists working together to present a united front on anthropogenic global warming, are the “final redemption” for climate-change skeptics.

“The notion that these scientists tried to declare the science settled for personal reasons is disgraceful,” says Inhofe. “They were purposefully misrepresenting the facts. They tried to make America believe and it worked, for a time. Even my grandkids came home filled with this stuff, saying that ‘anthropogenic gases cause global warming.’ I reminded them that these things go in cycles. We’ve had warming then cooling, then warming and cooling again. I’m delighted that people are discovering that the science has been cooked for a long period of time.”

Inhofe points out that the CRU data were used in the 2007 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was subsequently used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as it prepared its guidelines on carbon emissions. These connections, he says, are very worrisome for the American taxpayer.

“There are tremendous economic ramifications to what these guys were trying to do,” says Inhofe. “The IPCC, for years, has been costing the government so much money, and now, wasted time in trying to pass faulty legislation based on bad data.” (Robert Costa, NRO)

Ed Begley, Jr., the enviro-wacko actor gets into a shoutfest and can't stop pointing his finger at Stuart Varney of Fox News: "You're spewing your nonsense again ..." says Begley. We're talking about Climategate, the recent discovery of e-mails by global warming 'scientists' that suggest a cover up..thousands of e-mails and documents (verified by the New York Times) have been released showing scientists trying to cover up the recent decline in temperatures and 'trick' the public.

Video Owned By Fox News Network

In 2005 Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, of Real Climate and CRU email fame, carefully explained that the process of peer review is a messy, incremental way to advance knowledge in fits and starts:

So Schmidt suggests that in order to short circuit the ability of their political opponents to cherry pick and blow out of proportion studies that the activists scientists did not agree with, they saw a convenient short cut: Simply reshape the peer review system such that those papers don't ever appear or go unmentioned in scientific assessments.

The problem with this strategy, of course, is that many climate scientists (and presumably others inside and outside of the scientific establishment) are unwilling to cede ownership of the "truth" to a small clique of scientists. In fact, peer review exists in the first place because there are no short cuts to the truth, and any such short cut will inevitably fail. Consider that the efforts revealed in the CRU emails to manage the peer reviewed literature went well beyond efforts to prevent so-called "skeptical" papers from being published, but included a focus on papers that fully accepted a human influence on climate, but which offered views that differed in some degree (e.g., here) from those preferred by the activist scientists. The emails reveal activist scientists busy extolling the virtues of peer review to journalists and the public, while at the same time they were busy behind the scenes working to corrupt the peer review process in a way that favored their views on the science and politics of climate change. Here we have a case study in the politicization of climate science by climate scientists.

The clique of activist scientists sees absolutely nothing wrong in what they are doing -- they are after all justifying their actions in terms of "truth" in support of the greater good. And the issue is made even more complex because those who share the political agenda of the activist scientists are ready to join their peer review coup whereas those opposed to that political agenda are happy to try to exploit for political gain the scientists' ethical lapses and failure to appreciate their role in politicizing climate science. So much of the discussion gets wrapped up in these distractions, rather than the issue of the integrity of climate science.

The sustainability of climate science depends upon our ability to distinguish the health of the scientific enterprise from the politics of climate change. The need to respond to climate change (which I support) does not justify sacrificing standards of scientific integrity for political ends. In fact, as the events of the past week show, when standards of scientific integrity are compromised, the political consequences can be double edged. (Roger Pielke Jr.)

Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.

This is what all the fuss is about, but the reader who sent it thinks perhaps it may be a storm in a teacup. Still, it is strange that one would want to put an adjustment like this through a temperature series.

Climate scientists are like an exotic tribe – fascinating, sometimes hard to understand and rarely visited. The editor of a science journal warned me that I would find little to interest mainstream readers – the boffins would agree on pretty much everything. The debate, she implied, was over. She was wrong.

While climate scientists agree the world is warming due to man’s activities, there are still large areas of conflict, notably over how certain we can be about the predictions. (Financial Times)

“When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.” [David Hume (1711 - 1776), Scottish philosopher and economist.

Since Lord Lawson called on Monday for an independent inquiry into the claims, following publication of hundreds of hacked or leaked e-mails, that leading British climate-change scientists from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had manipulated data, evaded freedom of information requests, and traduced other critical scientists and journals in order to strengthen their case for human-induced global warming, the demands for such an inquiry have been growing by the hour. The call has now even reached the BBC and Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire:

“Momentum does seem to be growing, from people on both sides of the argument, behind calls for a full independent enquiry that can once and for all get to the bottom of the many issues that have been raised. A recent survey showed that climate scepticism in this country is growing, and this episode may increase it further. Some would say that an enquiry is the only way to bring clarity to the science of global warming and climate change that has enormous implications for all of us.” (Clamour of the Times)

An agency of the New Zealand government has been cooking the books to create a warming trend where none exists, according to a joint research project by global warming skeptics at the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. The chief cook? Dr. Jim Salinger, considered one of the country's top scientists, who began the graph in the 1980s when he was at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. CRU, of course, has become ground zero of Climategate at Dr. Salinger has maintained close relations with CRU since, as seen in the Climategate emails.

What do the uncooked books show? Rather than warming over the last hundred years, New Zealand's temperature has been steady.

For the full story, visit the site of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, here. (Financial Post)

Liz Hunt is repelled by the behaviour of both sides of the climate change argument, and hopes that Lord Lawson's review can inject some sense. (TDT)

'Cap and Trade Is Dead' - The recently disclosed emails and documents from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit compromise the integrity of the United Nations' global warming reports.

So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in."

If any politician might be qualified to offer last rites, it would be Mr. Inhofe. The top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee has spent the past decade in the thick of Washington's climate fight. He's seen the back of three cap-and-trade bills, rode herd on an overweening Environmental Protection Agency, and steadfastly insisted that global researchers were "cooking" the science behind man-made global warming.

This week he's looking prescient. The more than 3,000 emails and documents from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have found their way to the Internet have blown the lid off the "science" of manmade global warming. CRU is a nerve center for many of those researchers who have authored the United Nations' global warming reports and fueled the political movement to regulate carbon.

Their correspondence show a claque of scientists massaging data to make it fit their theories, squelching scientists who disagreed, punishing academic journals that didn't toe the apocalyptic line, and hiding their work from public view. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," glumly wrote George Monbiot, a U.K. writer who has been among the fiercest warming alarmists. The documents "could scarcely be more damaging." And that's from a believer. (Kimberley A Strassel, WSJ)

After some uncertainty, President Obama will go to Copenhagen for the UN climate conference on December 9 after all. He'll deliver a speech on the third day of the week-and-a-half-long conference on his way to Oslo, where he'll accept his Nobel Peace Prize the next day.

While the president is making a rather quick stop at the beginning of the conference--whereas most of the substantive negotiating will probably happen toward the end--the White House is dispatching a cadre of its top environmental officials to showcase the Obama climate resume during the summit. (The Atlantic)

Australia is leading the revolt against Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy – just as the Aussie geologist and AGW sceptic Professor Ian Plimer predicted it would.

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it. ( James Delingpole, TDT)

JUST look at this astonishing farce in Canberra, is what I should have said.

You see, I was talking to a class of year 11 students this week and found - to my horror - that few of that Harry Potter generation had even heard of the children's story that best explains this madness.

You know, the madness of Kevin Rudd's colossal tax on everything, which couldn't stop global warming even if that warming were real.

I mean, too, the madness of the Liberals' collapse under Malcolm Turnbull, and the startling rise of Kevin Andrews, the man they said was crazy.

Anyway, there I was in this classroom, talking of daring to speak the truth. Who, I asked, knew Hans Christian Andersen's tale of The Emperor's New Clothes?

Not one hand went up. How we've failed today's children. (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

This is a joint statement from the Met Office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society on the state of the science of climate change ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. (The Guardian)

China said Wednesday it will not sacrifice growth to cut gas emissions, illustrating the difficulty in reaching a global climate deal at a major summit next month despite US moves to boost the talks. (AFP)

BEIJING - China is preparing to unveil a target to curb carbon emissions ahead of a major climate summit in Copenhagen next month, but experts and negotiators worry Beijing's much-anticipated figure may disappoint. (Reuters)

While agriculture and food production have long been considered untouchable in international climate talks, calls to make the sector contribute to greenhouse gas mitigation efforts have been growing louder.

Food is strategic and agricultural production is a vital sector of many national economies. Yet, discussions are shifting from how to adapt farming to climate change to how to make agriculture contribute to climate change mitigation.

In a recent interview with EurActiv, outgoing EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel even backed the possibility of an emissions trading scheme for agriculture. While the EU has reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from its farming sector by 21% compared to 1990, according to the European Commission, agricultural emissions from other parts of the world have soared by nearly 17%, mainly due to increases in developing countries. (EurActiv)

LONDON - Covering an extra four percent of the nation in forests, or planting some 30,000 football pitches' worth of trees per year, could cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2050, a new report said on Wednesday.

Three million hectares or 12 percent of Britain is currently covered in forests, but upping this by one third to 16 percent could reduce forecast emissions levels in 40 years, according to the report tasked by the Forestry Commission.

"Forestry can make a significant and cost-effective contribution to meeting the UK's challenging emissions reduction targets," said professor David Read, former vice-president of the Royal Society and chairman of the panel of scientists that authored the report.

"By using more wood for fuel and construction materials we can make savings by using less gas, oil and coal, and by substituting sustainably produced timber for less climate-friendly materials." (Reuters)

(BRUSSELS) - Global warming could cost the European Union as a whole up to 65 billion euros per year, but paradoxically northern nations could end up in profit, according to a study released Wednesday.

The report, published by the EU's Joint Research Centre, says that if the projected 2080 climate existed today, an average rise of more than 2.5 degrees Celsius, the bloc would face an annual bill of 20-65 billion euros (30-97.5 billion dollars) a year just to deal with the consequences. (EUbusiness)

Estimates vary widely on the costs of damage from climate change, easing these impacts and taming the carbon gas stoking the problem, but economists agree the bill is likely to be in the trillions of dollars.

Figures depend on different forecasts for greenhouse-gas emissions and the timeline for reaching them. In addition, key variables remain sketchy. (AFP)

A number of groups are planning to hold demonstrations and protests in Copenhagen during next month's climate summit.

Is global warming the new globalization? Environmental activists are hoping that demonstrations at next month's climate summit in Denmark can forge a protest movement like the anti-globalization movement seen after the WTO riots in 1999. But the Danish authorities have other ideas.

If you missed Seattle, you won't want to miss Copenhagen. That, at least, is what Tadzio Müller, a political scientist and climate activist with Climate Justice Action -- a global network of activists and non-governmental organizations committed to combating climate change -- is telling people. The mass protest movement, he hopes, is turning green. (Der Spiegel)

Prisons prepare for an influx of detainees during the UN Climate Change Conference happening in two weeks

Overcrowding in the country’s prisons means protestors arrested during the climate conference will be held in uncomfortable conditions.

Climate activists are gearing up for the UN Climate Change Conference in two weeks, but face harsh jail conditions if arrested.

Legislation was recently tightened to allow police to hold protestors for up to 40 days if they hinder police work and the already overstretched prison service is gearing up for new arrivals. (Copenhagen Post)

Even if the world's policymakers all agree to dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and everything were in place by the middle of the century, the world still could not meet the goals of the climate change meetings in Copenhagen, Dec. 8-18, of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm), say Cornell researchers.

If everyone were on board, maybe we could contain CO2 in the atmosphere to about 400 ppm by 2050, said Cornell climate expert Charles Greene, who has published numerous papers on climate change and global ocean ecosystems.

There is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world is just too dependent on fossil fuels and such obstacles as the United States' poor climate record and skyrocketing emissions from India and China make lower levels unrealistic, he said. (Chronicle Online)

BRUSSELS - Europe's biofuels industry said on Thursday it would lodge a complaint with EU trade authorities against companies they say are evading duties slapped on U.S. biodiesel imports.

The European Commission, which oversees trade policy for the 27-nation bloc, imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties of up to five years on imports of biodiesel from the United States in May.

But the Brussels-based European Biodiesel Board (EBB) said it had strong indications subsidized and dumped U.S. biodiesel continues to enter the EU market, either via third countries based on fraudulent declarations of origin, or through blends. (Reuters)

Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and carbon dioxide emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. In a new paper published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, Kevin Hall and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases calculate the energy content of nationwide food waste from the difference between the US food supply and the food eaten by the population. The latter was estimated using a validated mathematical model of human metabolism relating body weight to the amount of food eaten. (Public Library of Science)

VANCOUVER — An independent panel of scientists is embarking on a comprehensive report of the health of Canada's oceans, with special emphasis on climate change and marine biodiversity.

Panel chairman Jeff Hutchings, a Dalhousie University biology professor, said in an interview that Canada has a moral and geographic responsibility to care for its oceans, given that it has the longest coastline in the world.

"People tend not to focus on the oceans, but on the land-based issues," he said of the climate-change debate. "Things in the oceans belong to all Canadians, not specific groups or companies, and that lends a sense of stewardship to what happens in the oceans." ( Larry Pynn , Vancouver Sun)

If you are as vehemently opposed to whaling as most Australians, here's a potentially inconvenient truth to consider: some species of whale might not be endangered. But don't expect to hear much about that in coming weeks, as the Japanese whaling fleet sets off on its annual voyage to the Southern Ocean.

Look out, instead, for impassioned cries from environmentalists and politicians about how barbaric whaling is, and for images of high-seas battles involving good guys (brazen activists in rubber dinghies) taking on bad guy foreigners (Japanese whalers), harpoons piercing thrashing whales and bleeding carcasses being hauled on to boats.

It is understandable for people to react with revulsion to such images. There is no doubt that harpoons inflict a painful death on an animal that, in recent years, has assumed an almost sacred status in popular human consciousness. No one wants to see whales suffer or die - except, perhaps, a few media professionals who, a bit like whalers, might see some commercial value in it.

But when it comes to letting a good story and an almost universally popular cause get in the way of facts, the whale phenomenon takes some beating. (Tony Ormonde, SMH)

Concern is growing about the huge number of seabirds being killed by fisheries in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said yesterday.

Although conservationists' fears have so far focused on seabirds in the Southern Ocean, especially albatrosses, there is mounting alarm over the numbers of northern species, such as shearwaters and petrels, falling victim to large-scale industrialised fishing methods.

The most deadly of these is longlining, which involves hooks set with bait on lines which stream out for great distances behind fishing vessels. Seabirds swoop on the bait when it is on the surface, before being hooked themselves as a so-called "bycatch".

It is estimated that 200,000 seabirds are being killed in fisheries in European waters every year, the RSPB said, with one species, the great shearwater, suffering an exceptionally high annual bycatch rate of 50,000 birds in the Spanish longline hake fishery to the west of Ireland. (The Independent)

Supermarkets could improve seafood ranges and give shoppers more information to help Britain’s dwindling fish stocks, according to a Marine Conservation Society (MCS) report. (TDT)

SINGAPORE-- The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) launched Wednesday a campaign to raise 300 million US dollars to boost regional long-term production of the crucial staple and promote food security.

IRRI, based in the Philippines and regarded as the world's leading authority on rice, got off to a strong start with 60 million dollars in donations, including over 50 million dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The organisation is calling for donations ranging from 1,000 dollars from individuals to larger amounts from corporate donors in its largest ever fundraising exercise.

IRRI's development director Duncan Macintosh said there was another 20 million to 25 million dollars' worth of donations in the pipeline, and the institute hopes to reach its goal in three years' time.

"The target is 2012," Macintosh said at a media briefing. (Agence France-Presse)

LONDON - The conversion of all UK farmland to organic farming would achieve the equivalent carbon savings to taking nearly one million cars off the road, the Soil Association said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Abandon the HMS Global Warming? Never! Obama will head to Copenhagen for the UN climate change summit.

Nearly a century ago, nobody blamed global warming, since the notion had not yet been invented. Nor for that matter had Al Gore gotten around to being born, much less to taking “the initiative in creating the Internet.” It was therefore an ignorant and uninformed age. Now, of course, nearly every social and economic ill, from terrorism down to and including prostitution, has been shown to be caused by global warming. Indeed, global warming may be even worse than the terrorism and prostitution which it breeds, and second only to global nuclear war.

It might be possible to draw an analogy between the Titanic and the United States, or even Western society in general. However, this article merely deals with anthropogenic global warming. Despite the dubious science and the tip of an iceberg of emails and other documents not intended for the public eye which the Good Ship Global Warming has now struck, the band plays on. The almost deafening chorus of affirmers continues to sing; a bit off-key at the moment, but loudly nonetheless. (Dan Miller, PJM)

Nine’s A Current Affair just ran a piece dismissive of global warming, featuring Terry McCrann and David Bellamy, among others. Online video later.

Two points: this is further evidence of a shift in media attitudes (only a few years ago, the same network was running pieces on the proof of warming). And while several lines in the ACA item will be familiar to those who’ve followed this issue online, many watching will be hearing them for the first time.

UPDATE. Video via Andrew Bolt, who notes the change: ”A Current Affair interviews three people about global warming and the emissions trading scheme, all of whom agree the public is being duped without the reporter or presenter suggesting these people are speaking anything other than plain sense.”

UPDATE II. US networks are a little slow waking up to this recent “global warming is a complete crock” story.

UPDATE III. Credit where it’s due. CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh does an excellent job summarising the CRU email scandal, particularly on the CRU’s importance:

But its concern is not principally about the scares emanating from the assumption-driven (Malthus in/Malthus out) studies regarding man-made climate change. The EU’s leaders fear that the Old Continent’s self-declared “leadership” in the “world war against climate change” might not be joined–and thus will be rendered ineffective in the global context. And the politicians know that all-pain/no-gain climate policy will increasingly trouble the voters, who must be placated.

This is a bitter pill given that the U.S. presidential elections brought into office the environmentally oriented Barack Obama and the alarmist dream team (Carol Browner, John Holdren, etc.). Europe felt like its efforts to curb emissions would enter a new phase, where the rest of the world would have progressively joined forces and leveled the playing field on pricing carbon emissions. For Europe, that would have meant shrinking the competitiveness gap that is created by its higher energy prices, as well as gaining a competitive advantage in the newly formed carbon markets. (The EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which has been active since January 2005, is the largest functioning carbon market in the world). (MasterResource)

The implicated scientists' strategy is to brazen it out and rely on the global warming alarmist establishment and the mainstream media to circle the wagons.

It is clear that the tip-top scientists implicated in the burgeoning Climategate scandal have no honor, but it is also becoming apparent that they have no sense of shame either. Their strategy is to brazen it out and rely on the great global warming alarmist establishment and the mainstream media to circle the wagons. They have got their talking point and the environmental pressure groups are already repeating it over and over: “The ‘global warming deniers’ are cherry-picking a few unfortunately worded emails and then taking them out of context.” Well, they are some pretty big, juicy cherries and there are a lots of them. (Myron Ebell, PJM)

White House energy and environment czar Carol Browner tried Wednesday to shrug off the swirling controversy over purloined British emails suggesting collusion on the part of climate scientists trying to stoke up fears of global warming. She hadn’t read them, she said, and besides, only a few have come to light - second hand. (Washington Wire)

One event, seen by two environmental activists called George, produces two, contradicting stories in the Guardian.

George Marshall, suggests that CRU email hacking was ‘orchestrated smear campaign’, but one which yielded no evidence of anything questionable, but that ‘an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning’ seeks to undermine the upcoming Copenhagen conference. Innocent scientists, who know little about communication, have unwittingly handled the affair badly, causing a PR disaster for themselves.

George Monbiot, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically reflective, and ‘dismayed and deeply shaken by’ the emails. ‘There are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad’, he says.

Monbiot then calls for head of the CRU, Phil Jones, to resign. Nonetheless, this doesn’t support the conspiracy-theories about the hockey stick and widespread scientific fraud, he concludes, before giving a ‘satirical’ example of what it would take to convince him that such a conspiracy did exist. Most notably, however, he answers a commenter to the site:

The point here is that the two Georges seem to have very different takes on what the CRU hacking has revealed. Marshall believes that the attempt to prove a conspiracy reveals a conspiracy. Monbiot says that the hacking has not substantiated the conspiracy-theory, but that certain scientists are culpable. It’s worth pointing out that, although Marshall and Monbiot accuse sceptics of conspiracy-theorising, their own arguments about ‘deniers’ and ‘well funded denial machines’ are also conspiracy theories. (Climate Resistance)

We all know something is gravely wrong, but what exactly are the crimes implicated? This insight comes from Richard S. Courtney, who has been an expert witness for the UK Parliament, and House of Lords, the IPCC and was one of 15 scientists invited to speak for the US congress in 2000.

They deliberately falsified data then used the results of the falsification to obtain additional research funding. This is criminal fraud under English Law.

2. Deliberate attempt to prevent disclosure of information that was requested under the FOI Act

They colluded to destroy information that was the subject of an FOI request. This is a criminal offence under English Law.

These two offences will do for starters, but there are others, too. Indeed, both of the above offences can be doubled by charging the alleged miscreants with conspiracy in each case. Jones, Briffa and Mann should be prosecuted as a warning to others who would pervert science as a method to promote a political agenda. However, there is little probability that the Crown Prosecution Service will charge the alleged miscreants. It is more likely that they will be awarded Knighthoods.

And those like Monbiot who colluded in all of this will say, “We did not know”.

Monbiot has repeatedly vilified those of us who have been championing the cause of science against the unfounded climate scare. He is not alone in such behaviour.

Climate realists and our work have been vilified and smeared. Entire web sites have been established to tell lies about us. Publication of our scientific work has been inhibited, and personal attacks have been the norm: for example, I have had computer systems damaged by concerted attacks, Lomborg has had a pie pushed in his face, some (e.g. Tenekes, Michaels, etc.) have had their employment terminated, and Tim Ball has had death threats.

Monbiot seems to be covering himself now what has been happening is plain for all to see as a result of the stolen (?) CRU files having been released.

In a side meeting organised by Fred Singer at an IPCC Meeting in London in 2001 I said; “When the ‘chickens come home to roost’ – as they surely will with efluxion of time – the journalists and politicians won’t say, “It was our fault”. They will say, “it was the scientists’ fault“, and that’s me, and I object!

Any experts of the UK legal system out there? Can we expand on his thoughts. Who could bring these charges forward? What would it take to make sure that these men face justice? Not only would this remind other scientists of their scientific and legal obligations, it would also make it harder for those in power to find scientists they could exploit. This is critical if we are to stop ambitious greedy people wielding science as a weapon against us.

These crimes appear to have been going on for ten years. The system has failed all of us, including Jones, Mann and Briffa. They would be far better off now if they had been picked up for something minor right at the start. Ideally it would be best if scientists themselves had a system to deal with this form of transgression before it became a question of criminal proceedings, but all forms of auditing have failed. The peer review system became corrupted due to monopolistic money distorting the incentives; science journals failed; scientific associations failed too (death by committee?), and poorly trained science journalists were oblivious (ignoring whistle-blowers, and logic, while they parroted press releases). Ultimately the only “net” left to catch any crimes in science were the bloggers, and a few individual scientists. (JoNova)

Like many of you I've been watching the story at the University of East Anglia develop with interest. I first became aware of the news late last week, but because of my weather and filming commitments couldn't deal with it myself and so passed the news on to some of my colleagues in the BBC's environment and science team, including our environment analyst Roger Harrabin who wrote about it on Saturday morning, and Newsnight, who covered the story last night.

As you may know, some of the e-mails that were released last week directly involved me and one of my previous blogs, 'Whatever happened to global warming ?'

These took the form of complaints about its content, and I was copied in to them at the time. Complaints and criticisms of output are an every day part of life, and as such were nothing out of the ordinary. However I felt that seeing there was an ongoing debate as to the authenticity of the hacked e-mails, I was duty bound to point out that as I had read the original e-mails, then at least these were authentic, although of course I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the others. (Paul Hudson, BBC)

President Obama today unveiled key details of the U.S. negotiation position headed into next month's global warming talks in Copenhagen, including a provisional greenhouse gas emissions target for 2020 "in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels" and a new itinerary that includes a personal appearance during the opening days of the U.N. conference.

The White House said Obama will put the 2020 target on the bargaining table "in the context of an overall deal in Copenhagen that includes robust mitigation contributions from China and the other emerging economies." Obama's emission goals closely parallel action on Capitol Hill, including the House-passed climate bill and a Senate measure that Democratic leaders hope can reach the floor with enough votes by next spring.

"This provisional target is in line with current legislation in both chambers of Congress and demonstrates a significant contribution to a problem that the U.S. has neglected for too long," the White House said in a press release, adding that Obama was "working closely with Congress to pass energy and climate legislation as soon as possible." (ClimateWire)

The nation’s corporations have long been bracing for the day when they would be required to carry out sharp cuts in the emissions that cause global warming. That day seemed to move a bit closer on Wednesday, when President Obama outlined a national target for such reductions.

Much of corporate America has already been thinking about how to comply. Many businesses concluded years ago that such limits were inevitable, and they have been calling on Congress to define the exact rules they will need to follow. (NYT)

Anyone who was ever in the Scouts knows what Snipe hunting is all about. For those of you less fortunate to have not had that experience, you go out at dark and with a flashlight and a paper bag you squat on the ground and shine your light straight ahead and call for the Snipes. Of course the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by your Scout leader to prove once and for all that you will believe any lie told to you enough times as truth.

Al Gore is the master of Snipe hunting tales only his is disguised as global warming. The idea that carbon emissions are turning the earth into a hothouse is a hoax that Al Gore has painstakingly drilled the gullible into believing is truth. Carbon dioxide was formerly present in the Earth's atmosphere at 20 times today's concentrations with no dire consequences yet Al Gore has orchestrated intellectual hysteria over purely imaginary dangers. (Hernando Today)

Three leading scientists who on Tuesday released a report documenting the accelerating pace of climate change said the scandal that erupted last week over hacked emails from climate scientists is nothing more than a "smear campaign" aimed at sabotaging December climate talks in Copenhagen.

"We're facing an effort by special interests who are trying to confuse the public," said Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a lead author of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Dissenters see action to slow global warming as "a threat," he said.

The comments were made in a conference call for reporters.

The scientists-Somerville, Michael Mann of Penn State and Eric Steig of University of Washington-were supposed to be discussing their new report, the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a dismal update of the UN IPCC's 2007 climate data by 26 scientists from eight nations.

Instead they spent much of the time diffusing the hacker controversy, known in the media as "Climate Gate." ( Stacy Feldman, SolveClimate)

"I'm in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measur[e]ments here in the UK -- looking promising," wrote Andrew Manning, a climate-science research fellow at the University of East Anglia, "so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases."

Manning's e-mail, written in October to a colleague at East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit, was one of the thousands of private communiques exposed to public view by a whistleblower or a hacker. The note and others like it reveal the intriguing relationship between industry giants like Siemens and the scientists driving climate change fears. More importantly, though, Manning's e-mail shows the incentives of climate scientists: Convince people there is a climate disaster coming, get more money. ( Timothy P. Carney, Examiner)

In the news today, there is an erroneous statement by Phil Jones regarding the surface temperature data sets that are used to diagnose global warming

“Professor Andrew Watson, a long-term colleague of the researchers at the CRU, said the unit should have nothing to fear from an inquiry, as the CRU temperature data set at the heart of many of the e-mails is almost identical to the two other authoritative data sets, both in the US.”

“….Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for Nasa and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.”

These claims of that the surface temperature series are “completely independent” is false and Phil Jones knows that. (Climate Science)

E-mail Documentation Of The Successful Attempt By Thomas Karl Director Of the U.S. National Climate Data Center To Suppress Biases and Uncertainties In the Assessment Surface Temperature Trends

The release of the e-mails from Phil Jones further confirmed the attempts to suppress viewpoints of climate change issues, which conflict with the IPCC viewpoint.

In the example I present below, the issue is the robustness of the surface temperature trend record. The three main groups that compile and analyze this information are NCDC (directed by Tom Karl), GISS (directed by Jim Hansen) and CRU (directed by Phil Jones). (Climate Science)

Jones et al 1986 looked at 86 Australian stations and rejected 46 (25 Short term – 21 long term). Of the 40 they used 27 were short term and 13 long term. Of the long term there were 5 large cities.

The 27 short term stations were mostly only quoted from 1951 onward – regardless of what data was available. It just so happens that the years just post WWII were not prominently warm in Australia so an “automatic” warming trend was reinforced into the CRU Australian component.

Here are 11 examples where Jones et al systematically truncated pre-1951 data or ignored more rural data around many small town Australian stations. These graphics and text have been extracted from a 1992 vintage Word doc that somehow survived the decades and how many HDD’s.

Read the rest of this entry » (Warwick Hughes)

You’ve got to feel almost sorry for Elizabeth May and George Monbiot. The leader of the Green Party and the prominent columnist and promoter of catastrophic climate change from Britain’s Guardian are due, next Tuesday, to debate Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg and former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson in Toronto on climate change. In the latest Munk Debate, Messrs May and Monbiot will support the motion “Be it resolved climate change is mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response.”

They have to take the stage in the wake of the devastating hack/leak from Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia, which indicates extensive scientific chicanery to support the warmist cause.

A decorated scientist and author of the most influential book debunking global warming joins Viscount Monckton in calling the CRU behavior criminal. (Also read Roger L. Simon: Climategate and the "T" Word)

Humans have adapted to live on ice sheets, deserts, mountains, tropics, and sea level. History shows that humans and other organisms have thrived in warm times and suffered in cold times.

In the 600-year long Roman Warming, it was 4ºC warmer than now. Sea level did not rise and ice sheets did not disappear. The Dark Ages followed, and starvation, disease, and depopulation occurred. The Medieval Warming followed the Dark Ages, and for 400 years it was 5ºC warmer. Sea level did not rise and the ice sheets remained. The Medieval Warming was followed by the Little Ice Age, which finished in 1850. It is absolutely no surprise that temperature increased after a cold period. (Ian Plimer, PJM)

With the perspective exposed in the publication of the e-mails from the research group of Phil Jones this past week, the goal of a small group of scientists to control the information communicated to policymakers and the public is clearly illustrated in my post. I documented my experience with respect to an attempt by a few scientists to introduce a broader examination of the role of humans and natural climate forcings beyond carbon dioxide that was being discussed at a December 8 2008 meeting at the National Research Council in Washington D.C.

This attempt was aborted as a result of who attended the National Research Council planning meeting. This included individuals mentioned in the e-mails involving Phil Jones. Despite claims that there are thousands who are driving the focus on CO2 as the primary human climate forcing, the reality is that only a relatively small number of individuals are actually directing this effort. (Climate Science)

Last week, someone (probably a whistle-blower at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England) released e-mails and other documents written by Phil Jones, Michael Mann and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify data and suppress academic debate in order to exaggerate the possible threat of man-made global warming.

The misconduct exposed by the e-mails is so apparent that one scientist, Tim Ball, said it marked "the death blow to climate science." Another, Patrick Michaels, told the New York Times: "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud."

Although I am not a scientist, I know something about global warming, having written about the subject since 1993 and recently edited an 880-page comprehensive survey of the science and economics of global warming, titled "Climate Change Reconsidered," written by a team of nearly 40 scientists for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

The content of the e-mails doesn't surprise me or other skeptics in the warming debate. We have been saying for many years that the leading alarmists have engaged in academic fraud, do not speak for the larger scientific community, and are exaggerating the scientific certainty of their claims. (Joseph Bast, IBD)

Here's a dirty little secret about the New York Times: It likes to leak things. Important things. Things that change the course of the public conversation. From the Pentagon Papers to the ruined terrorist-surveillance programs of the Bush era, the Times has routinely found that secrecy is a danger and sunlight is a disinfectant.

Until now. A troublesome hacker recently released e-mails going to and from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, e-mails that exposed how the "scientific experts" cited so often by the media on global warming are guilty of crude political talk, attempts at censoring opponents and twisting scientific data to support their policy agenda.

The e-mails prove just how dishonest this left-wing global warming agenda truly is. (L. Brent Bozell III, IBD)

A leading light of climate change inadvertently exposes AGW’s crumbling foundation.

Predictably, while pretending to give the incident and its fallout reasonable coverage, the establishment media has generally ignored the most damning email of them all. Authored by Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, it addresses what has been happening with temperature changes in recent years, i.e., not a lot, with a slight cooling trend. (Tom Blumer, PJM)

This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers.

Here are three things everyone should know about the Climategate Papers. Links are provided so that the full context of every quote can be seen by anyone interested. (Iain Murray, PJM)

All the evidence we've heard regarding global warming never constituted, in any manner, actual evidence that it was taking place.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding — shared by nearly everybody about the nature of anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) — over exactly what constitutes evidence for that theory and what does not.

Remember when we heard that the icebergs were melting, that polar bears were decreasing in number, that some places were drier than usual and that others were wetter, that the ocean was growing saltier here and fresher there, and that hurricanes were becoming more terrifying? Remember the hundreds of reports on what happens when it gets hot outside?

All of those observations might have been true, but absolutely none of them were evidence of AGW.

Diminishing glaciers did not prove AGW; they were instead a verification that ice melts when it gets hot. Fewer polar bears did not count in favor of AGW; it instead perhaps meant that maybe adult bears prefer a chill to get in the mood. People sidling up to microphones and trumpeting “It’s bad out there, worse than we thought!” was not evidence of AGW; it was evidence of how easily certain people could work themselves into a lather.

No observation of what happened to any particular thing when the air was warm was direct evidence of AGW. None of it.

Every breathless report you heard did nothing more than state the obvious: Some creatures and some geophysical processes act or behave differently when it is hot than when it is cold. Only this, and nothing more. (William M. Briggs, PJM)

AMS Headquarters has received several inquiries asking if the material made public following the hacking of e-mails and other files from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has any impact on the AMS Statement on Climate Change, which was approved by the AMS Council in 2007 and represents the official position of the Society. (WUWT)

There is a good chance that next year will be the hottest year recorded for the world, according to new forecasts from the Met Office's climate prediction and research branch, the Hadley Centre.

A new forecast for the decade from 2009 onwards suggests that "at least half" of the years up to 2019 will be hotter than the hottest year so far, which was 1998. And it indicates that the first of the years to break the current record will actually be 2010. (The Independent)

WUWT blogging ally Ecotretas writes in to say that he has made a compendium of programming code segments that show comments by the programmer that suggest places where data may be corrected, modified, adjusted, or busted. Some the HARRY_READ_ME comments are quite revealing. For those that don’t understand computer programming, don’t fret, the comments by the programmer tell the story quite well even if the code itself makes no sense to you.

To say that the CRU code might be “buggy” would be…well I’ll just let CRU’s programmer tell you in his own words.

(A paper collated by Richard Treadgold, of the Climate Conversation Group, from a combined research project undertaken by members of the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition)

There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years.

But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on?

New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is responsible for New Zealand’s National Climate Database. This database, available online, holds all New Zealand’s climate data, including temperature readings, since the 1850s. Anybody can go and get the data for free. That’s what we did, and we made our own graph.

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

From NIWA’s web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

OVER THE CHUKCHI SEA, Alaska, Nov 24 - North of the Bering Strait, a film of new ice is filling gaps between bigger ice chunks. The sea surface is only now starting to freeze up, even though it's late in the year and the winter sun slips beneath the horizon at about noon.

The freeze is overdue, experts say. "A couple of weeks ago, there was no ice at all," U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Chris Colvin, head of the agency's Alaska operations, said over the roar of the C-130 aircraft lumbering over the coastline.

That's why the Coast Guard is here, far north of its usual territory where it patrols commercial fishing grounds and the daily traffic of cruise ships, cargo ships and oil tankers. (Reuters)

Climate researchers use some of the most powerful computers in the world to run their models. Still, the sheer amount of data that must be crunched mandates that many details are simply left out. How accurate are the results?

"Give me ten parameters, and I'll simulate an elephant for you. Give me one more, and he'll wag his tail." The saying sums up the problem with many models. Models allow you demonstrate anything and everything, as long as there are enough knobs to turn. The real test of how good a model really is comes when you compare it to reality.

But when it comes to climate change, researchers are faced with a practically insoluble problem: We won't know for sure until the end of the century whether climate predictions for the year 2100 are correct or not. But with climate scientists around the world warning of the dangerous consequences of climate change, it becomes apparent that we can hardly afford to wait that long. (Holger Dambeck, Der Spiegel)

Nor have we heard the last about President Obama's Afghanistan policy. Or about financial regulatory reform that could pit Main Street against Wall Street.

But you can tell that the next issue on the horizon, after the smoke has cleared from the current debates, is global warming.

The barrage of Republican attacks on climate change legislation appears to be having an impact: the GOP rank and file is more skeptical that global warming is real.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this afternoon said that the belief that climate change is happening has plummeted among Republicans to 54 percent now from the 76 percent peak in 2006.

Along with more skepticism among independents, that is driving an overall drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in global warming to 72 percent from 80 in the past year, the poll found.

A majority of all respondents still support a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions, the key piece of the sweeping climate change legislation that Democrats are trying to push through Congress. And 55 percent of respondents believe the United States should curb its carbon output even if major developing nations such as China and India do less.

Republicans say the legislation would dramatically raise energy costs, threatening to stall the economic recovery. (Boston Globe)

The Round-Up comes a day early because tomorrow is Thanksgiving for my US readers and no-one wants snark with their turkey and football.

It’s been a bad week for AGW alarmists following the CRU emails hack/leak. Their script called for pre-Hopenchangen scaremonger stories of planetary doom, instead they are up to their armpits denying that the leading scientists behind global warming have manipulated data, bullied skeptics and avoided FOI requests.

All that, and now they have another weekly round-up to worry about. And it has a special CRU section. (Cue maniacal evil laugh) (Daily Bayonet)

World leaders will soon gather in Copenhagen in the hopes of coming up with a binding agreement aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. But what if we're not successful? Kirsty Lewis of the Met Office Hadley Centre, a leading climate research group, introduces a new Flash map which shows what might happen should temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius. (Der Spiegel)

WASHINGTON — California has taken a major step toward creating a broad-based trading system to limit emissions of pollutants blamed for harmful climate change.

The California Air Resources Board, often a trailblazer in environmental regulation, released a draft rule on Tuesday establishing a cap-and-trade program that sets a declining ceiling on emissions of greenhouse gases and allows companies to buy and sell permits to meet it.

California’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The proposed system would begin in 2012 with 600 major sources of global warming pollutants, including power plants, refineries and concrete factories.

Similar proposals to reduce emissions are stalled in Congress with little hope of moving through this year. And next month, world governments will assemble in Copenhagen to discuss the issue but are not expected to produce any binding agreements on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. (NYT)

In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions -- the major cause of global warming -- cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

"It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett's study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online the week of November 23. (ScienceDaily)

Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some of the world’s top climate scientists.

In a special report called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’, the 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports, conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.

The report also notes that global warming continues to track early IPCC projections based on greenhouse gas increases. Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100. (Cires)

In advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, NASA has released a new multimedia climate change "resource reel" showcasing free downloadable videos, data visualizations, animations, and still images that illustrate key climate change concepts and discoveries. (PR Newswire)

Reducing carbon dioxide to safe levels may require extracting carbon from the air, says Cornell climate researcher.

Even if the world's policymakers all agree to dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and everything were in place by the middle of the century, the world still could not meet the goals of the climate change meetings in Copenhagen, Dec. 8-18, of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm), say Cornell researchers. (PhysOrg.com)

The march of climate change could make civil wars much more likely, research suggests, with models predicting nearly 400,000 extra deaths in African conflicts by 2030. (Tom Chivers, TDT)

This brief echoed many of the points The Heritage Foundation has made in its reports, WebMemos, blogs and our responses to a request from Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

A. The CBO correctly notes that efficiency mandates (standards) don’t lower the cost of cap and trade. Here’s how they say it:

“However, standards would tend to increase the costs of a cap-and-trade program if they supplanted the effective reliance on market forces—even though they would also tend to reduce the allowance price in the program by reducing emissions covered under the program.” [Emphasis added] [CBO, page 5]

Here is what Heritage said in response to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s criticism of our analysis for not including (what NRDC misunderstands to be beneficial) impacts of such mandates: Continue reading… (The Foundry)

WASHINGTON, Nov 24 - Any threat by the United States to slap fees on imports from countries it perceives as weak on cutting carbon emissions could hamper trade relations and delay international efforts to combat global warming.

Lawmakers in states that produce cement, chemicals, steel and other energy-intensive products have called for such tariffs in climate legislation. They fear those industries looking to cut regulation costs could pull up stakes and move to countries that don't have strong climate plans.

But experts say the tariffs may do more harm than good. (Reuters)

Climate Change: Major U.S. corporations have set up a Web site calling for a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen. Considering recent evidence of massive climate fraud, perhaps they should reconsider. (IBD)

Japan's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions could cost households ¥130,000 to ¥765,000 a year, a task force said Tuesday.

The financial burden will come in the form of estimated declines in disposable income. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has pledged a goal of slashing emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 without purchasing emissions credits from foreign countries.

The previous administration estimated that a 25 percent cut would cost each household at least ¥360,000 a year. (Kyodo News)

The political high drama of the Coalition's internal battle is a microcosm of how the climate change issue is playing out in the real world. (Miranda Devine, SMH)

As news races around the blog world and the tip of the iceberg breaks into the mainstream media, people are waking up to the scam. Australia is in the extraordinary position of passing legislation that is known to be based on fraudulent science. True, it’s only been days since the news broke, but our politicians have Blackberries. It only takes seconds for the information to reach the palm of their hands, but it may take years for the meaning to filter through flawed neural software.

The implications are extraordinary. The unfolding ClimateGate scandal shows criminal behaviour from “leading scientists”. It damns the integrity of the IPCC process — which based its reputation on these men and their work. Legal attacks are starting. This is just the beginning. Even the big-name believers in the theory (such as Monbiot) are asking questions they have never asked before. Blogs are coming alive with anger, with disgust, mockery and now the real war begins. Smart well educated (but busy) people like surgeons, lawyers, professors and CEOs are getting motivated. As this top layer of brains and energy coalesces into action, the scandalous neglect of many politicians will be exposed for public consumption.

How will the public feel knowing that each household will pay at least $1,100 per year more in Australia for a scheme that profits bankers and third world mafiosi, but achieves nothing for the environment or their children’s future?

Voters will learn to detest the fake scheme and will deplore those who were so gullible that they could not see the scam.

The realization that the CO2 theory is fraudulent is spreading across the political spectrum, from right to left. Hard nosed realists first, ideologues last. In Australia, the Nationals are aware, and now the Liberals are waking up to it. The ALP will be next. Some Greens may never see it.

It’s clear that people on the conservative side of politics woke up first as the science changed and the evidence shifted. The turning point for the Republicans in the US was 2007. The turning point for Independents, 2008. Maybe 2010 for the Democrats?

The Australian Labor Party feel strong and superior right now looking at the Liberal disarray, but the rising tide of awareness will sweep through them soon too. The majority of the public will realize that the Labor Government has wrecked the economy over a fraud driven by status-seeking zealots and profit-seeking corporations, and Labor will be very unpopular. Then in the Labor Party the pragmatists will battle the politically correct (who will never concede). Climate change could tear the Labor Party apart sometime in the next few years.

CANBERRA, Nov 24 - Australia's government gained bipartisan backing on Tuesday for its revised carbon-trade plan, avoiding an early election and boosting compensation to big carbon emitters, coal companies and electricity generators.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull said conservative senators will back the scheme in a parliamentary vote later this week, ending a deadlock that threatened the carbon-trade plan, a central part of the government's efforts to fight climate change.

However, divisions over the scheme run deep in the opposition and some members are threatening to vote against it or try to have the Senate vote, expected on Thursday, delayed until February 2010.

The centre-left government needs seven extra votes in the 76-seat Senate to pass the scheme, which aims to put a price on every tonne of carbon produced and give industry an incentive to become more efficient.

"Some of the Senators have said regardless of the party decision they will cross the floor (and vote against the legislation). I am confident enough Senators will comply with the shadow cabinet and that the legislation will pass," Turnbull told reporters after a heated, eight-hour party room meeting. (Reuters)

“The ‘deal’ includes an ‘automatic statutory review of CPRS legislation, including EITE policy, as soon as practicable after Australia signs a new multilateral agreement on climate change which imposes obligations to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’.”

“This reinforces why we should wait till after Copenhagen as the whole thing will have to be looked at again in light of international agreements and obligations. There is no certainty,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell today.

“The CPRS ‘deal’ does not address several of the principal issues which the Coalition said in July must be addressed in Labor’s scheme. (Senator Ron Boswell)

Kevin Rudd’s huge new tax on your gases at least makes The New Lawyer happy:

Alan Wood says that’s just the start of feeding frenzy that will actually do nothing for the climate, but plenty for scammers:

OSLO, Nov 24 - Norway, Costa Rica and the Maldives are struggling with high costs and technological hurdles to stay in the world's most exclusive club for fighting climate change -- seeking to cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero.

The United Nations is praising their "carbon neutrality" targets before a U.N. summit on Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen meant to agree a new pact to combat global warming. But the model is hard to imitate with its demand for a drastic shift to clean energy.

"What they're trying to do is fundamentally change the direction of their economic growth," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. "It's a way of getting ahead of the game."

Yet all three of the small nations face big problems.

Greenhouse gas emissions in Norway are 7 percent above its 2012 target under the Kyoto Protocol, while emissions are rising in Costa Rica, especially in the transport sector.

And the Maldives' plan to be a tropical showcase for solar and wind power in the Indian Ocean, shifting from dependence on costly diesel, will need an estimated $1.1 billion in investments over a decade for its 310,000 people.

The Maldives is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2020, Costa Rica by 2021 and Norway by 2030.

But New Zealand and Iceland have dropped past aims of carbon neutrality because of high costs amid recession. And the Maldives failed at a meeting this month to win new recruits to the club among poor nations such as Bangladesh and Barbados.

Carbon neutrality means a nation can use fossil fuels -- in power plants, factories or cars -- only if the greenhouse gas emissions are either captured and buried or offset elsewhere, for instance by planting carbon-absorbing forests or by investing in wind turbines or solar panels abroad.

"Norway's not on track," said Knut Alfsen from the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo. (Reuters)

Large sums promised to developing countries to help them tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, a BBC investigation has found.

Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration - but it is now unclear whether the money was paid.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise.

The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it. (BBC)

EDMONTON — Alberta will spend up to $495 million over 15 years to support the world’s largest pipeline system for collecting and storing carbon dioxide, the Edmonton Journal has learned.

A letter of intent between the province and Enhance Energy will be signed at a ceremony Tuesday, and follows previous announcements for Shell’s Quest project at Scotford and TransAlta’s Pioneer Project at the under-construction Keephills 3 coal-fired turbine near Wabamun.

The three projects together will receive $2 billion from the province’s carbon capture and storage fund. ( Dave Cooper, Edmonton Journal)

Almost a quarter of the global population, or 1.5 billion people, lives without electricity, 80 percent of them in the least developed countries (LDCs) of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, a new UN report showed Monday.

The report was produced in partnership by the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), with support from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

According to the report, to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015 -- the first of eight, internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -- 1.2 billion more people will need access to electricity and two billion more people will need access to modern fuels like natural gas or Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), also called propane.

Two million people die every year from causes associated with exposure to smoke from cooking with biomass and coal -- and 99 percent of those deaths occur in developing countries. (Xinhua)

NEW YORK, New York, November 24, 2009 – Energy poverty is an issue that must be addressed at the upcoming climate change summit in Copenhagen say top United Nations experts on public health and development.

"Almost half of humanity is completely disconnected from the debate on how to drive human progress with less emissions and greener energy because their reality is much more basic than that," said Olav Kjorven. As director of the United Nations Development Programme's Bureau for Development Policy, Kjorven is tasked with carrying out the UN's development priorities.
Olav Kjorven of the UN Development Programme (Photo by Eskinder Debebe courtesy UN)

"They carry heavy loads of food and water on their backs because they don't have transport. They cook with wood fires that damage their health," Kjorven told reporters at the launch of a new UN study, entitled, "The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries."

The study, jointly carried out by the UN Development Programme and the World Health Organization, points out that currently over one billion people in world have no access to electricity and that 80 percent of them live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. (ENS)

The number of deaths during the coldest three months of the year were up almost 50 per cent on the previous year to 36,700, sending an extra 10,000 pensioners to early graves, new figures showed yesterday.

The rise in "excess winter mortality" for England and Wales for the three months to February was the biggest for years and the highest total in a decade, sparking fresh calls for ministers to combat high energy prices. (The Independent)

As the world’s leaders, including Barack Obama, prepare for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen promises to cut carbon emissions by shifting away from fossil fuels have been heard from around the globe. [Read More] (Seth Myers, Energy Tribune)

Extracting oil from Alberta's tar sands jeopardizes the survival of our species, says Al Gore.

"Gas from the tar sands gives a Prius the same carbon footprint as a Hummer," the former U.S. vice-president told the Star in an interview prior to a Toronto speaking engagement scheduled for Tuesday evening. (Toronto Star)

Extra funding and better market conditions must be created for clean coal if it is ever to progress "beyond the blueprint" of trial plants, Dr Paul Golby, chief executive of E.ON UK, has warned. (TDT)

Richard Budge, the mining entrepreneur dubbed "King Coal" when he bought the rump of England's coal mining industry in 1994, has come a step closer to capping a remarkable business comeback by building the UK's first "clean coal" power station.

The European Commission has pledged €180m (*162m) towards a proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at Hatfield colliery in South Yorkshire, a site owned by Mr Budge's Power fuel company. A deadline for European legislators to object to the plan passed at the weekend.

Mr Budge aims to build the 900MW plant next to the colliery and pump the carbon captured into depleted gas fields under the North Sea. The *2.4bn plant will require more funding if it is to be built by 2015 and further technical research. (Financial Times)

LCG, November 25, 2009--Duke Energy Indiana (Duke) yesterday announced that design modifications and growth in the scope of its coal-fired, Edwardsport integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) project are expected to add approximately $150 million to the prior cost estimate of $2.35 billion.

Duke submitted the new cost estimate with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) as part of its semi-annual update and is requesting the IURC to schedule a separate proceeding by next March, following additional engineering efforts and a revised cost estimate, together with associated rate impacts. The IRUC must approve any cost increase for the project. (Energy Online)

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency is continuing its crackdown on coal pollution with a new plan to cut sulfur dioxide - a move that would clean up the air for millions of Americans and bring some relief to people who suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The new rule, which was proposed this month, would be the first time since 1971 that the EPA has tightened controls on sulfur dioxide to protect the public health.

"This would be an important step to ensure the health of the American public," said Dr. Alan H. Lockwood, a professor of neurology and nuclear medicine at the University of Buffalo. "Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from inhaling pollutants from coal burning."

By targeting coal pollutants, the EPA is cleaning up the fuel that generates half the electricity generated in the U.S. Earlier, after a series of court orders, the EPA said it would require power plants to eliminate mercury pollutants. Now, the public and industry officials will be able to comment on the sulfur dioxide proposal. A public hearing is set for Atlanta in January. (McClatchy Newspapers)

Gas will be at the heart of Royal Dutch Shell's production strategy ahead of oil as the world attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, according to the energy group's new chief executive, Peter Voser. (TDT)

Royal Dutch Shell is hopeful that it will gain an equity stake in a giant Russian gas field that could supply all of the world’s needs for a decade. (The Times)

LONDON, Nov 25 - Royal Dutch Shell's chief executive has called on governments to intervene in carbon markets, the Guardian reported in its Wednesday editions.

Peter Voser told the Guardian that action needed to be taken to make expensive green projects like carbon capture and storage (CCS) economically viable. (Reuters)

Taxis queue up to fill their tanks on an overpass in Chongqing, China, Wednesday, November 18, 2009. Central and eastern Chinese provinces faced the worst natural gas shortage in years as supplies were diverted to snowstorm-hit northern China, while producers lacked incentives to expand output because of poor margins. Photo by Imaginechina: AP

China has a new energy headache: natural gas shortages and price spikes. And those shortages are likely to persist for the foreseeable future.

Unseasonably cold weather, including heavy snow in northern China, has resulted in natural gas shortfalls of as much as 40 percent. Industrial facilities, office buildings, and even hotels have been closed to save gas and those closures have occurred in cities in the south -- Changsha, Nanjing, Hefei -- as well as in northern cities like Beijing, Harbin and Xian. Rather than close, some industrial users have begun using diesel fuel to keep their factories running. (Energy Tribune)

LONDON - Britain's power market must be radically redesigned to spur hundreds of billions of pounds of investment in low-carbon technologies needed to fight climate change and keep the lights on, the heads of two UK utilities said on Wednesday.

Energy regulator Ofgem estimated in October that at least 200 billion pounds of investment is needed over the next 15 years to meet electricity demand and climate change targets and some analysts say the final bill could be much bigger.

Most of the investment will be needed to replace Britain's ancient coal- and oil-fired power plants, expected to close by 2015, with plants able to backup an expected boom in wind power capacity in the UK North Sea over the next few decades. (Reuters)

July 17, 1955, was the first time electricity generated by a U.S. nuclear power plant flowed into a utility grid. In what then was an experiment, Utah Power & Light plugged in the Argonne National Laboratory experimental boiler water reactor, BORAX-III.

The plant produced merely 2 megawatts for more than an hour, as planned. Since then, the U.S. nuclear industry has steadily improved their ability to effectively manage the operations and maintenance of nuclear power plants. Now, more than 50 years after that first nuclear power supply, America lags far behind even developing nations in new construction. New roadblocks threaten to further erode progress in the U.S. Whether this is good or not I will leave to the reader, but here is a snap-shot of the situation facing the U.S. (MasterResource)

ATLANTA - There's no evidence that the swine flu vaccine is causing any serious side effects, U.S. health officials said Wednesday, in their first report on the safety of the new vaccine.

Since vaccinations began in early October, the government has been tracking the safety of the swine flu vaccine. By mid-November, about 22 million Americans had gotten the vaccine and there were about 3,200 reports of possible side effects, the vast majority for minor things like soreness or swelling from the shot.

Health officials didn't expect to see any serious problems - the swine flu vaccine is basically the same as the regular winter flu vaccine. And there weren't any signs of trouble in the tests done in thousands to find the right dose. (Associated Press)

In the midst of a downturn, it’s easy to lose perspective. It feels at the moment like America’s position in the world is slipping and Asia is taking our place. Permanently. On a longer view, that turns out to be only half-right: Asia is rising but America is not falling. With sound policies, the U.S. will be by far the world’s most important economy for a long time. One of those sound policies is strengthening our ties with Asia.

To get a better sense of the current situation, go back to the last time American leadership was supposedly headed for extinction. That was the oil crisis, with its stagflation, in the mid 1970’s. Starting with the Reagan Administration in 1980, the U.S. was considered by the entire globe to have recovered and cemented its place at the top. It turns out that, except for a blip in the late 1990’s, the American share of the world economy has been almost the same for 35 years. The U.S. accounts for more than a quarter of the world economy by itself and continues to hold that level even in these tougher times. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

Australian scientists have confirmed what many chocoholics already know, that "comfort food" can reduce stress.

Eating foods rich in fat and sugar can alter the chemical composition of the brain and reduce anxiety, says Professor of Pharmacology Margaret Morris.

Prof Morris, from the University of NSW School of Medical Sciences, conducted a study of rats which showed the effects of past trauma could be erased through "unlimited access to yummy food". (AAP)

LOS ANGELES – Environmentalists and green businesses are targeting foam food trays used to sell vegetables, fruits and meat in grocery stores.

The ubiquitous trays, which are made from polystyrene, have a long shelf life in landfills, much like plastic bags which the green brigade also took aim at in recent years.

"The developers of expanded polystyrene made the perfect material. They brought the costs down. Functionally it works great. There are no complaints ... But it never goes away," said Richard Feldman, chief executive of G4 Packaging.

The Los Angeles-based company makes trays primarily from sugar cane pulp that can be composted in 90 days or recycled. (Reuters Life!)

Multi-year study points the way to sustainable salmon production, and debunks food sustainability myths along the way; mode matters more than miles

Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems. Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything – how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits. (Ecotrust)

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies' refusal - for nearly three years - to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding "ClimateGate" scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries' freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK's East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, "cap-and-trade" legislation and the EPA's threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door. (Chris Horner, American Spectator)

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are investigating e-mails stolen from a British climate change research center that they say show scientists attempting to suppress data that does not support man-made global warming.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a global warming skeptic, sent letters Tuesday to the inspectors general of several agencies and to scientists asking them to retain records related to the e-mails.

House Republicans want to know how much the scientists contributed to a widely cited U.N. report on climate change. The report has served as the basis for action in Congress and by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gases.

One of those scientists, Kevin Trenberth, said the e-mails do not show scientists colluding but arguing vigorously about the science. ( Associated Press)

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Establish an Independent Inquiry into the leaking of emails and documents from Hadley/CRU.

An inquiry to establish whether the scientists involved have (a) been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals. (petitions.number10.gov.uk)

Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change. (Washington Times)

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CRU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball. “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.

“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge. Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.” (Tim Ball and Judi McLeod, CFP)

A coordinated campaign to hide scientific information about climate change appears unprecedented. Could it wind up costing us trillions? (John Lott, FOXNews.com)

On Friday, news broke that a hacker had broken in to the computer systems used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain, obtaining more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents. The material, which covers a period of more than a decade, has led many to conclude that climate scientists associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government agencies have been cooking the books to make the case for man-made global warming.

Rising uncertainty over science existed long before the CRU emails surfaced

In the run-up to next month’s increasingly shaky Copenhagen global warming policy negotiations, the official advice from the world’s climatists is that the politicians and the rest of us should just pay no attention to the science of climate change. It is settled, they say, and all we have to do — as the Financial Times editorialized recently — is “follow the science” and get on with the business of reconstruction and redistributing world economic production. We must, in the words of Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker’s resident climatist, maintain our “faith in science.”

Foreword: Willis asked me to carry this post here. What follows is a long and detailed series of email exchanges that outline the difficult task of getting data so that scientific replication/reproduction can be done by people external to the tight knit group of scientists that make up climate science today.

CRU’s decision to withhold data and code from public inspection is not only against the scientific method, given the impact their work has on governmental policies and taxpayer funded programs, it is, in my opinion, unethical. – Anthony Watts

People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

THREE weeks ago Prime Minister Kevin Rudd named me as part of an international conspiracy to spread lies about global warming.

How I laughed.

But I’m not laughing now. Emails leaked at the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world - and Rudd has fallen for it.

This conspiracy comprises a group of warming scientists who have been central in spreading the false claim that the world has never been hotter and man’s gases are to blame. (Andrew Bolt)

Real Climate.Org is chief defender of ”consensus” climatology on the Internet. One of its enduring missions has been to defend the dubious, indeed discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of Northern hemisphere temperature history. The Hockey Stick was the basis for the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 report that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the past millennium.

That Real Climate (RC) should feel special solicitude for the Hockey Stick is no accident, comrade. Two of the five principals at RC — Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley — were among the three researchers (Mann, Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) who authored the Hockey Stick.

All of the RC principals (Gavin Schmidt, Caspar Ammann, Rasmus Benestad, Mann, and Bradley) are frequent senders and recipients of the thousands of emails and other documents, now posted on many Web sites, that were hacked or leaked last week from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The Wall Street Journal today published a selection of the leaked emails and an editorial concluding that the emails ”give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.” (Marlo Lewis, Cooler Heads)

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked. (WSJ)

Now for the explanations… The University of East Anglia has released statements from Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit, and from the CRU, from which the leaked emails of the warming conspiracy were stolen. And they are a disgrace. (Andrew Bolt)

Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia denies emails provide evidence of collusion by climatologists to fix data (The Guardian)

For heaven’s sake, somebody is claiming that humans can have effects over a planet-wide phenomenon. Those same humans that can’t predict earthquakes, can’t switch off a volcano, can’t change the course of ocean currents, can’t stop hurricanes, can’t make sustainable quantities of rain, can’t even generate nor control wind (of the non-intestinal variety). We have no idea of entire major waterflows in the North Atlantic, and yet somebody thinks to be able to cause (and to tell) a few degrees difference in the Earth’s climate over 50 or 100 years?

Vague threats and doom-and-gloom scenarios make little sense. Give me a break. Or give me evidence that the climate is really changing because of humans. For example by showing what is the difference between the current temperature changes and those that happened over 3 or 4 years at the end of the “little ice age” in the mid-1800s (surely those were not man-made)? Or by showing how the amount of emissions by humans can compare to the natural ones?

Or by comparing the energy used and release by humans to that involved in the Earth’s working on a daily basis? To understand the situation, I did some quick computations last year to find out that all energy ever generated by humans would rise the ocean temperature by hundredths if not thousandth (0.01 to 0.001) of a degree…ours is still a big planet indeed, tampering with it requires enormous quantities of energy and I am aware of little work done in planetary engineering.

My mind is open to explanations, and I can definitely talk to people saying “Beware the climate beast“. But I won’t listen to those that panic to claim that the world is ending tomorrow (or this century, or this millennium). (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

A number of computer scientists and engineers are analysing computer code contained in the files leaked anonymously to the Internet last week, and it will more than likely produce more controversy than the emails that have been the subject of intense discussion so far.

In fact, if the documentation (notes written by authors and fixers of the computer code) is any indication, what we have seen so far is only prelude.

But before the storm breaks, I think we should summarise what's important in the emails.

First, prominent climate scientists, including a lead author of IPCC report sections, were willing to discuss withholding or deleting information to frustrate legitimate requests made under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK. They apparently chose who could not receive information based on the requester's identity, which may have been unlawful. They threatened to delete data--data which in fact has since disappeared. They advised each other to delete emails.

Second, these same scientists worked closely together to control channels of communication regarding climate science and global warming. They banded together to minimise or eliminate skeptical discussion. While telling the world that only peer-reviewed science should be considered legitimate, they fiercely fought to prevent skeptic writings from being peer-reviewed at all. They wrote openly about replacing an uncooperative journal editor (who was later replaced), and boycotting journals that published skeptical papers. They organised peer review so that they reviewed each others' papers.

Third, they were willing to change data so that their presentations of the state of climate looked worse. At the end of the day, this is most damning--most of the rest, even apparently illegal FOI actions, is just politics and a playground media strategy. But while world governments were imposing taxes, changing energy policies, preparing energy-based conflict policies, planning to deal with warming-based immigration, these people were content to display figures that were wrongly exaggerated to show the warming they had previously predicted but could not find in actual measurements.

I am willing to speculate that further analysis of the computer code will contribute to discussions on why they were unable to show the warming they so desperately needed to find to justify their assertions that the IPCC was too consevative, but time will certainly tell.

In the meantime, while we're waiting for the next release, it's clear that different institutions should take control of several aspects of climate research. In the UK, there are a number of bodies that might be able to sort out what's been going on. Archiving and verification, proper evaluation of previous studies--the UK has a government department called The National Archive that does this for a living, and they have recently undertaken to completely modernise how they go about things. We might ask them for assistance.

Because the way we've done things so far is not getting us to where we need to be. We know there's a problem--global warming is real, and CO2 is a contributor. But we can no longer trust the numbers we have grown accustomed to using, nor the people who generated those numbers. Time for a shake-up. (Thomas Fuller, Examiner)

Today's report about political developments surrounding the global warming issue is brought to you by the letter "C." (Paul Chesser, American Spectator)

Hydrological engineering is my scientific field and it is closely related to climate. In the last decade, I have been concerned about the state of research in climate and its detrimental influence on hydrology. Also, I should note up front that I try to be a skeptic; for a Greek, this is a positive quality (skeptic is etymologized from skepsis = thought). In recent years, I have tried to publish a few papers related to climate. Some of them were initially rejected, but eventually published elsewhere—usually in journals without a specific focus on climate. From the experience I gained through the review process of the rejected papers, I became more confident about the analyses I’d performed and the significance of the results I’d presented. I have not been surprised, therefore, to see that these once-rejected papers have become the most cited among my papers. (Climate Science)

OSLO - Global warming is happening faster than expected and at worst could raise sea levels by up to 2 meters (6-1/2 ft) by 2100, a group of scientists said on Tuesday in a warning to next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

In what they called a "Copenhagen Diagnosis," updating findings in a broader 2007 U.N. climate report, 26 experts urged action to cap rising world greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 or 2020 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. (Reuters)

How much would you pay to save the world from the threat of global warming? We might find out soon.

"Everything we do is tied to energy and climate," says climate economist Graciela Chichilnisky of Columbia University. "Not just the electric bill – that's a minuscule part of it. Not just the food bill. Everything."

Come Dec. 7-18, representatives of 192 nations are set to meet in Copenhagen at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. It's by far the most significant attempt at changing the course of global warming since world leaders met in 1997 in Japan to craft the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed 37 industrialized nations at cutting emissions of six greenhouse gases (such as the carbon dioxide emitted from burning coal, oil and natural gas, aka fossil fuels) by 5.2% from 1990 levels. It was never ratified by the U.S. Senate and expires in 2012.

But despite predictions that time is running out to corral greenhouse gases, expectations already have been dashed that the Copenhagen sessions will produce a successful replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. ( Dan Vergano, USA TODAY)

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 768 individual scientists from 454 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Outer Hebrides, Scotland. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Norway Spruce (Hall et al., 2009), Ponderosa Pine (Phillips et al., 2009), Reedgrass (Zhao et al., 2009), and Soybean (Matsunami et al., 2009).

On Friday the New York Times‘ house global warming author Andy Revkin, reporting on the breaking (Revkin would prefer it be braking) global Climategate scandal, said repercussions “continue to unfold” and that “there’s much more to explore, of course.”

Mr. Hoyt,

Shouldn't Andrew Revkin haved recused himself from his Nov. 21 front-page article, "Hacked E-mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute"?

First, as Revkin briefly acknowledges in the article, he is part of the story. Isn't it a breach of journalistic ethics for a reporter to report on a story of which he is part?

Moreover, his story to a great extent defended his sources. It's one thing to rely on sources; it is quite another to defend them at the expense of unbiased and accurate reporting about them.

This is not an innocent faux pas either.

Revkin tried to whitewash the significance of the story -- including distracting readers away from the embarrassing/incriminating contents of the files and, instead, focusing them on the alleged hacking.

Finally, as we will report tomorrow, there seems to have been no "hack" at all.

The files appear to have been accumulat[ed] in preparation of a possible court-ordered FOIA release on a server to which the public had access. It is not "hacking" to access files that are publicly available. It may have been unwise/improper to store the file on a public server, but that is a different matter. There is no evidence that anything illegal occurred in the release of the files.

The hacking allegation, of course, was a terrific distraction device.

Perhaps a journalist more interested in unbiased reporting and less interested in defending his personal relationships with the subjects in the e-mails and his personal pro-climate alarmist agenda would have investigated and caught this. But then Andrew Revkin was the wrong man for the job.

Steve Milloy
Publisher, JunkScience.com

We are not the only ones to notice these are complete e-mail threads and collated data:

With the blogosphere all atwitter about the emails and data “stolen” from the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia, two theories have become dominant describing the origin of the incident.

The title of this video speaks for itself. Hacked E-Mails prove collusion and conspiracy.

The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails — and says why you should be, too.

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century. (PJM)

The publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails that climate change skeptics say proves the threat is exaggerated has prompted one key Republican senator to call for an investigation into their research.

In an interview with The Washington Times on Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced he would probe whether the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not." (Tony Romm, The Hill)

Link to 2005 Inhofe Senate Floor Speech: "Today, I will discuss something else – scientific integrity and how to improve it. Specifically, I will discuss the systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by an international body that claims it provides the most complete and objective scientific assessment in the world on the subject of climate change – the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. I will conclude with a series of recommendations as to the minimum changes the IPCC must make if it is to restore its credibility."

Sure, Monbiot claims the fudging of what he extremely optimistically puts as just “three or four” scientists doesn’t knock over the whole global warming edifice, yet…

If even Monbiot, an extremist, can say that much, why cannot the Liberals say far more? And will now the legion of warmist journalists in our own media dare say as Monbiot has so belatedly:

Scepticism is the essential disposition of our craft, yet too many journalists have abandoned it. Remember: the opposite of sceptical is gullible. (Andrew Bolt)

The last place cable news network is following the same tack it took on the ACORN scandal, which is, ignore the story that is not only overturning the cart and its apples, but is also crushing them into a pulp fit for a Mott’s jar. Climategate was absent from CNN Sucks‘ weekend discussions (at least as far as the transcripts identify), and now this morning on its home page the network highlights a report on catastrophic sea level rise predictions from children of the same discredited bunch!

1,000 emails and more than 3,000 other documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom publicly revealed by a hacker, or allegedly an inside whistleblower, are rekindling the flame to the global warming debate just weeks before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference where the United States will propose an emissions reduction target. A sample of what the emails exposed, which date back 13 years, includes:

A group of 12 Mississippi Gulf Coast homeowners is using a novel legal strategy to try to recoup losses suffered during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The lawsuit seeks damages from a group of 33 energy companies, including ExxonMobil and coal giant Peabody Energy, electric utilities, and other conglomerates for allegedly emitting greenhouse gases that the litigants say contributed to global warming.

That, the litigants claim, caused a rise in sea levels and increased air and water temperatures fueling the Category 5 hurricane that destroyed their homes.

The lawsuit, considered a long shot by legal experts, cleared a hurdle last month when a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said it could continue, overruling a circuit court judge who had agreed with arguments from the companies that global warming is a political, not legal, issue.

The key to the appeal was in the legal strategy, said Robert Percival, director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland. Rather than asking the court to force the companies to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the lawsuit asks for a ruling on whether damage suffered by the homeowners can be traced back to those emissions, he said.

"Just because climate change is difficult, courts aren't going to shy away from their traditional role in weighing issues of harm," Percival said. ( Chris Joyner, USA TODAY)

The full weight of the radical environmental movement and its media arm, the CBC, is being brought down upon a small Calgary-based organization called Friends of Science, which has suggested that climate change should be the subject of debate. So it must be a front for “Big Oil.”

Friends has dared to produce a couple of radio ads that note that there has been no warming for 10 years, suggesting that the main cause of climate change is the sun, and recommending that it’s “time to get the facts and start thinking.”

Leading the charge against Friends is James Hoggan, a PR man who is also chairman of the David Suzuki Foundation. Mr. Hoggan has just co-authored a book called Climate Cover-Up, which suggests a massive industry-based programme of climate disinformation.

Lawrence Solomon, National Post columnist and author of The Deniers, appeared on CBC's The Current on Thursday morning, to comment on a book by James Hoggan, a public relations executive, that claims corporations are running a "denial machine" on global warming. Solomon argues that Hoggan has it backwards: The big money to be made lies in gaming the system, leading corporations to lobby for global warming legislation. Hear Anna Maria Tremonti's interview of Solomon here. (Financial Post)

CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti had tough questions for me this week, but none for a global warming propagandist

You probably missed my heated on-air debate Thursday morning with Anna Maria Tremonti, host of CBC’s The Current. You certainly missed my superheated off-air debate in her studio immediately afterwards, when Tremonti lit into me for my skepticism of global warming orthodoxy. I don’t recall being berated after an interview by a broadcaster before, certainly not by a consummate professional like Tremonti. But Tremonti was visibly upset, so much so that she ended the second debate by turning away from me without the courtesy of a goodbye (she did properly thank me on air at the conclusion of our broadcast debate). (Financial Post)

I’ve had requests from around the world for larger artwork for The Unskeptical Scientist. And Ralph from Kane-TV has helped out again by producing files that can be scaled up to billboard size. (Thanks!) So here are version for Shirts, Badges and Powerpoint.

So here, you can click on the images and get larger art versions. The Illustrator files are infinitely expandable, but for a 15cm image (like a sticker) the Tif files are perfect for printers. The Powerpoint files are the right size for slides.

Greenhouse gas emissions have kept increasing, reaching a record level since the pre-industrial era, the UN climate agency warned, just weeks before a crucial climate change summit.

"Levels of most greenhouse gases continue to increase," said the World Meteorological Organisation in a statement.

"In 2008, global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are the main long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, have reached the highest levels recorded since pre-industrial times," it said. (AFP)

[Editor’s note: J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green, first time guest posters, are leading researchers in the field of forecasting. Scott Armstrong is a Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Kesten Green is a Senior Research Fellow at the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit at Monash University]

We have recently proposed a model that provides forecasts that are over seven times more accurate than forecasts from the procedures used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This important finding, which we report in an article titled “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making” in the latest issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, is the result of a collaboration between climate scientist Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and ourselves.

In an earlier paper, we found that the IPCC’s approach to forecasting climate violated 72 principles of forecasting. To put this in context, would you put your children on a trans-Atlantic flight if you knew that the plane had failed engineering checks for 72 out of 127 relevant items on the checklist?

The IPCC violations of forecasting principles were partly due to their use of models that were too complex for the situation. Contrary to everyday thinking, complex models provide forecasts that are less accurate than forecasts from simple models when the situation is complex and uncertain.

Confident that a forecasting model that followed scientific forecasting principles would provide forecasts that were more accurate than those provided by the IPCC, we asked Willie Soon to join us in developing a model that was more consistent with forecasting principles and knowledge about climate.

The forecasting model we chose was the so-called “naïve” model. The naïve model assumes that things will remain the same. It is such a simple model that people are generally not aware of its power. In contrast to the IPCC’s central forecast that global mean temperatures will rise by 3˚C over a century, our naïve model simply forecasts that temperatures next year and for each of 100 years into the future would remain the same as the last years’.

The naïve model approach is confusing to non-forecasters who are aware that temperatures have always varied. Moreover, much has been made of the observation that the temperature series that the IPCC use shows a broadly upward trend since 1850 and that this is coincident with increasing industrialization and associated increases in manmade carbon dioxide gas emissions.

In order to test the naïve model, we simulated making annual forecasts from one to 100 years in the future starting with 1850’s global average temperature as our forecast for the years 1851 to 1950. Then we repeated this process updating for each year up through 2007. This produced 10,750 annual average temperature forecasts for all horizons. It was the first time that the IPCC’s forecasting procedures had been subject to a large-scale test of the accuracy of the forecasts that they produce.

Over all the forecasts, the IPCC error was 7.7 times larger than the error from the naïve model. [Read more →] (MasterResource)

“Global Warming” is, and always was, a policy for genocidal reduction of the world’s population. The preposterous claim that human-produced carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life, came out of a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, organized by the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1974.

Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of mancaused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development. Mead’s leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of Malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.

Read entire article (PDF) (Marjorie Mazel Hecht, Infowars)

It now appears that this year's Copenhagen climate conference will not produce a binding global pact to reduce emissions, but rather a political agreement on certain key elements, with hopes for a deal in 2010. Who's to blame for this, and what sort of key questions are likely to get resolved in Copenhagen? To what extent does it represent a setback for the global push to combat climate change?
Posted by Washington Post Editor

FROM THE PANEL

Copenhagen is one step in a long journey

Progress on greenhouse gas emissions can't and won't hinge on one conference or one agreement. The issue is too complex and needs to move ahead on multiple fronts. There is no "one size fits all." For those reasons, the likelihood...

Posted by Pam Faggert, on November 20, 2009 6:08 PM

The beginning of a new treaty

I believe most observers will agree that the Danes made a good decision to use the UN climate change conference to focus on the two principal issues at play: how big will the emissions reductions be, and what will be...

Posted by Ned Helme, on November 20, 2009 9:00 AM

Delay could - and should - kill problematic global warming treaty

The December Copenhagen conference is shaping up to be something less than the history-making event its organizers intended. Gone is the expectation that participants will extend and expand the provisions of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, it is looking more...

Posted by Ben Lieberman, on November 19, 2009 2:59 PM

Blame reality

Currently, things are in a sad state of affairs, where politicians are frantically trying to find some way that they can pretend that a political agreement is a 'success' - but are also looking around for others to blame for...

Posted by Bjorn Lomborg, on November 19, 2009 9:00 AM

Plenty of blame to go around

Who's to blame? Probably all of us. The biggest stumbling block to a general consensus one way or the other about human influenced climate change is that most of us have a preconceived opinion one way or the other. We...

Posted by Rick Edmund, on November 19, 2009 8:52 AM

Yesterday is not the issue; tomorrow is.

It makes no difference who is to blame for yesterday; the issue is who will accept responsibility for tomorrow. Even if there were a practical purpose to "fixing blame" there would be very few not on the list. There are...

Posted by David F. Hales, on November 18, 2009 8:51 PM

America won't go to Copenhagen empty handed

While the slow-down going into Copenhagen isn't good news, it will represent a major set-back only if there is further backsliding. So long as we continue making progress towards emissions limits in the United States while working toward locking in...

Posted by Richard L. Revesz, on November 18, 2009 1:31 PM

Ball is in our court

As reported in the Post, the joint declaration between President Obama and Chinese President Hu yesterday included a hopeful clause that the Obama administration is likely to offer emission-reduction targets in Copenhagen if the Chinese offer its proposal as well....

Posted by Donald F. Boesch, on November 18, 2009 9:45 AM

An end to blame-and-shame

Trying to assign blame for the shortcomings of the global negotiations is exactly the wrong approach. The process has for years now been focused on questions of shame and blame, and this is one of the major reasons that progress...

Posted by Lars G. Josefsson, on November 18, 2009 7:58 AM

Success is still possible

In the final weeks leading to Copenhagen, an ambitious and successful outcome is absolutely on the table, and is something that attendees at the conference can and must strive for. Of course we would have preferred Copenhagen to agree on...

Posted by Nigel Sheinwald, on November 17, 2009 2:59 PM

America is preventing progress

President Obama wasn't willing to expend the political capital to move the Senate -- the body from which he came, and which he must have known would be as dysfunctional as it has so far proven. As usual America is...

Posted by Bill McKibben, on November 17, 2009 1:40 PM

Worth the wait

When all is said and done, Copenhagen will almost certainly represent a landmark in the progressive shift to a global low-carbon economy. Whether the final agreement is reached there or 6 to 12 months later is of little consequence, provided...

Posted by David Hone, on November 17, 2009 8:54 AM

The consequences of ignoring realities

The politicians who have been pushing for an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a global agreement mandating drastic emission reductions by 2050 -- up to 83 percent -- are the responsible parties, although they will never admit it....

Posted by William O'Keefe, on November 16, 2009 7:30 PM

Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions (Nigel Lawson, The Times)

WASHINGTON — The United States will propose a near-term target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before the United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen next month, a senior administration official said Monday. President Obama, the official said, will announce the specific target “in coming days.”

The announcement of a target will take the current legislative stalemate over a climate bill into account, the senior official said, and thus might present a range of possible reductions rather than a single figure.

The lack of consensus in Congress puts Mr. Obama in a tricky domestic and diplomatic bind. He cannot promise more than Congress may eventually deliver when it takes up climate change legislation next year. But if he does not offer some concrete pledge, the United States will bear the brunt of the blame for the lack of an international agreement. (NYT)

A green technology body with powers to direct a worldwide transition away from a high-carbon economy is needed to combat climate change, according to the world's developing nations. While most negotiations ahead of the UN's climate change summit in Copenhagen next month have been concerned with which nations should slash greenhouse gas emissions and by how much, the method in which these cuts will be achieved has received far less attention. Yet the importance of green technology – from wind turbines to electric cars to zero-carbon buildings – is enormous.

Developing nations argue that the costs should be paid by the rich nations, and that a new global body is required, perhaps working as part of the UN, to direct the world's low-carbon transformation in sectors as diverse as power, transport and heavy industry. (The Guardian)

Central American nations will demand 105 billion dollars from industrialized countries for damages caused by global warming, the region's representatives said on Friday.

Central American environment ministers gathered in Guatemala to discuss the so-called "ecological debt" owed to them and to set out a common position ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen next month. (AFP)

The BBC is sending 35 people to next month's climate change talks in Copenhagen - creating as much carbon dioxide as an African village does in a whole year.

The corporation said its delegation of 12 presenters, along with a backup team of researchers, producers and camera crews, will spend up to two weeks in the Danish capital on expenses to cover the global summit.

Critics said the numbers were 'absolutely staggering' and accused the BBC of playing fast and loose with licence payers' money.

If all 35 BBC staff go by plane, they will generate around six or seven tons of carbon dioxide.

Conservative MP Philip Davies said: 'It's absolutely staggering. It's yet another example of how wasteful the BBC is.

It begs the question what all of these people will be doing when they are there. (Daily Mail)

MORE than 50 per cent of Australians want to delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme until after global climate change talks in Copenhagen, a new survey suggests.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is using the figures to urge the Government and the Coalition to hold back on legislation presently before Parliament.

Negotiations are underway to get an amended form of the government's carbon pollution reduction scheme through the Senate before parliament rises for the year on Thursday.

But 54 per cent of Australians would rather wait, according to the survey.

The public had various concerns about the government's scheme, with 71 per cent believing it will result in higher electricity prices.

Almost every second person believes it will cost jobs, should Australia be one of the few countries to move on the climate change issue.

And 82 per cent felt the Government had not given them enough information about the scheme to allow them to make an informed decision. (AAP)

FAMILY First senator Steve Fielding is seeking to delay a vote on emissions trading until next year - and he says he has the numbers to do it.

With debate heating up on the Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme, the senator believes there is not enough time to properly assess the controversial legislation.

He will move a motion in the Senate on Monday to delay until the next sitting week - in February 2010 - and he's banking on coalition disunity to help it pass.

He believes there are enough disgruntled Liberal senators to vote with him, along with the Nationals, the Australian Greens and fellow crossbench senator Nick Xenophon.

"Given there are significant amendments being announced tomorrow its dangerous to spend just a few hours debating and agreeing to an emissions trading scheme," he said.

"The Rudd government is reckless and irresponsible trying to ram through this multi-billion dollar tax in only a few hours right at the end of the year.

"No one knows what the ETS is going to look like because of the deals being done behind closed doors, so how on earth can we have a proper debate if we don't even know what were really talking about." (AAP)

We are about to see an advanced case of ''agreementism'' between world leaders at the Copenhagen climate change meeting. It is a painful and embarrassing disorder with familiar results.

Every case begins the same way. Leaders gather in summits. They confer. They reach earnest consensus that they need to solve a common problem. They commission studies and agree to meet again. Next time, they tell reporters, they will make real decisions.

This looks terrifically statesmanlike and carries lots of photo opportunities. But then they realise it will be unpopular and difficult to implement necessary reforms. Troubled, the weaker among the leaders gaze into their quivering souls and choose self-preservation over problem-solving. At this instant, the fire of activism departs.

But their huffing and puffing self-promotion has built a peak of expectation. They can't just walk away and admit failure. The conditions are now ripe - the next time the leaders gather, agreementism sets in. (Peter Hartcher, SMH)

Away from Climategate and back to science, here’s something interesting fingering land use as an issue. This is from the Max Planck Society.

A new calculation of Europe’s greenhouse gas balance shows that emissions of methane and nitrous oxide tip the balance and eliminate Europe’s terrestrial sink of greenhouse-gases.

Of all global carbon dioxide emissions, less than half accumulate in the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. The remainder is hidden away in oceans and terrestrial ecosystems such as forests, grasslands and peat-lands. Stimulating this “free service” of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems is considered one of the main, immediately available ways of reducing climate change. However, new greenhouse gas bookkeeping has revealed that for the European continent this service isn’t free after all. These findings are presented in the most recent edition of Nature Geoscience (Advanced Online Publication, November 22, 2009). Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

GENEVA - Ice volume around the Arctic region hit the lowest level ever recorded this year as climate extremes brought death and devastation to many parts of the world, the U.N. weather agency WMO said on Tuesday.

Although the world's average temperature in 2008 was, at 14.3 degrees Celsius (57.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by a fraction of a degree the coolest so far this century, the direction toward a warmer climate remained steady, it reported.

"What is happening in the Arctic is one of the key indicators of global warming," Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said. "The overall trend is still upwards."

A report presented by Jarraud at a news conference showed Arctic ice cover dropping to its second lowest extent during this year's melt season since satellite measuring began in 1979.

However, the Geneva-based agency said, "because ice was thinner in 2008, overall ice volume was less than in any other year." It added: "The season strongly reinforced the 30-year downward trend in the extent of Arctic Sea ice."

Tough decisions about how to protect Scotland from worsening floods must be taken by politicians, a climate change expert has warned.

Dumfries and Galloway has just seen some of its worst ever flooding, and much of the country has been on the alert after record rainfalls.

Professor James Curran of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) fears flooding is going to increase.

He told BBC Scotland it is impossible to protect everywhere from flooding.

Prof Curran said the problem was simply down to climate change.

He said: "Globally the temperature has risen by almost one degree celsius over the past century so that actually means there is no natural weather left". (BBC Scotland) [em added]

Berlin, 23rd November 2009 – The world’s diverse regions and ecosystems are close to reaching temperature thresholds – or “tipping points” – that can unleash devastating environmental, social and economic changes, according to a new report by WWF and Allianz.

Often global warming is seen as a process similar to a steady flow of water in our bathrooms and kitchens, where temperature goes up gradually, controlled by a turn of the tap.

But the report ‘Major Tipping Points in the Earth’s Climate System and Consequences for the Insurance Sector’ documents that changes related to global warming are likely to be much more abrupt and unpredictable – and they could create huge social and environmental problems and cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars. (WWF)

WASHINGTON – Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before. (AP)

Tired of having to drive safe, affordable vehicles? Can’t make a decision at the car lot and want the government to narrow down the decisions for you? Well then you’re in luck. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a great new regulation in store for you.

The agency is intending to use the Clean Air Act to improve the fuel efficiency to 35.5 miles per gallon fleetwide by 2016 - four years ahead of schedule when President Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

Vienna, Austria (TML) - Saudi Arabia is gaining support from the Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for its appeals to secure compensation for oil producing countries, as developed countries move away from oil towards greener energy sources. (The Media Line)

COAL will continue to squeeze out renewables as an efficient, cheap source of energy, even with a cost of carbon many times higher than currently envisaged in the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme.

According to a secret independent report commissioned by the NSW Labor government, the abundance and efficiency of coal, along with new technologies for cutting emissions, mean coal will undercut the price of electricity produced by wind or solar for "many years".

The report, prepared by energy consultant Richard Hunwick, was commissioned by the state's Department of Primary Industries but has been withheld from cabinet out of concerns that it would antagonise officials in the NSW Department of Climate Change, Environment and Water.

According to Mr Hunwick's report, even a carbon price of $100 a tonne, about four times what is currently proposed, would leave coal well ahead of rivals such as wind, solar and gas.

His report urges the Rees government to proceed with a new coal-fired baseload power station or risk losing its aluminium smelting industry, which will move offshore unless a reliable power supply is guaranteed. (Imre Salusinszky, The Australian)

There’s no question that people love the idea of compressed-air cars, which have long been under development by the French company Motor Development International and, according to a company spokesman, could be on American roads (after many delays) by 2012.

“It sounds ideal, like we could be free from the constraints of petroleum dependence,” said Andrew Papson, a transportation engineer and associate at the consulting firm ICF International.

But as much as the idea is attractive, Mr. Papson is skeptical about air cars. He finished graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, last year and was part of a team at the school that published a paper this week that was critical of air-car claims. (Wheels, NYT)

WHISTLER, B.C. — As the world’s largest fleet of hydrogen-powered buses is set to roll in Whistler, B.C., a leading environmental group is questioning the economic sense of the project.

“It is fine to scope out potential technologies of the future, but the reality is B.C.’s public transit services are on life support as far as the financial needs go,” said Ian Bruce, climate-change campaigner for the David Suzuki Foundation.

“B.C. government should re-evaluate and come out with a financial plan to make the B.C. transit plan become a reality.”

The 20 hydrogen-bus project is funded with $45 million from the federal government and $44.5 million from the province and BC Transit, the Crown agency responsible for co-ordinating the delivery of public transportation within B.C. outside of Metro Vancouver. The money covers both capital and operating costs until 2014.

Each of the hydrogen buses costs $2.1 million — four times the cost of a diesel bus, said Bruce. ( Clare Ogilvie , Vancouver Province)

When you hear from regulatory agencies all around the world that BPA is safe, you have to wonder what keeps the hysteria going. Here are four big factors:

You might like the takedown of Consumer Reports, an otherwise reliable publication, that has somehow let the incredibly biased Dr. Urvashi Rangan hijack their good name as their "technical policy director." Rangan's story is that right out of school, as a young Ph.D., she was hired by an evil pharm company, that fired her when she raised safety issues about a drug.

Excuse me if I don't believe this tale. She became a fringe chemophobe because a big bad pharm company fired her? Maybe she quit, or maybe there were other reasons. Given the FDA process, researchers are supposed to try to find issues with drugs, right?

Or maybe, riffing on my pal Bob Golden, she got religion after being in the pharmaceutical business: If the linear no-threshold model were actually true, then there would be no pharmacology, so in that sense, I suppose she had to leave the industry!

To top things off, she is likely the impetus behind Consumer Reports' absurd support of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

MOBILE phones appear to be "very safe", says an expert who points out that people were initially suspicious about mains power and microwaves.

Professor Rodney Croft, executive director of The Australian Centre for Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research (ACRBR), says concerns over the location of mobile phone base stations should similarly dissipate over time.

"There really isn't a great deal of difference between your basic FM radio antenna and your base station's antennas," Prof Croft says.

"Radio transmissions have been around for a long, long time and people don't seem to mind being exposed to that."

Prof Croft, who is Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Wollongong, says humans have "a tendency to be suspicious of all new things".

"When microwave ovens first came out there was a great deal of suspicion about them, when mains power came out there was a great deal of suspicion about it," he says.

"People do move on . . . providing, of course, no science comes out showing it is more dangerous. And certainly the centre's view is that's not likely to happen." (Herald Sun)

SOME of the world's most prestigious cosmetic houses have been accused by an environmental group of using Australian women as guinea pigs.

The cosmetic industry says the controversial use of nanoparticles is not widespread. But an independent analysis by Friends of the Earth, which has described nanoparticle cosmetics as the 21st-century equivalent of lead and arsenic face powders, found nanomaterials in all 10 randomly selected foundations. (SMH)

BUDAPEST - Santa Claus should avoid kissing children and shaking their hands to prevent spreading the flu and should get vaccinated against the illness, Hungary's state health authority said. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - The pandemic of swine flu may be hitting a peak in the Northern Hemisphere, global health officials said on Friday, but they cautioned it was far from over.

Officials also said they were investigating several troubling outbreaks of drug-resistant H1N1 but noted they were limited so far and that there were no indications yet the virus was mutating in a sustained way.

The World Health Organization said H1N1 flu was moving eastward across Europe and Asia after appearing to peak in parts of Western Europe and the United States. (Reuters)

LONDON - The number of H1N1 swine flu deaths in Europe has doubled almost every two weeks since the middle of October and 169 people died of the virus in the past week, disease surveillance experts said on Monday.

The Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said 670 deaths have been reported in Europe from H1N1 flu since they began monitoring it in April and all 31 European Union and European free trade area (EFTA) countries now have cases of the virus.

"The numbers of deaths...has shown a steady increase - almost doubling every fortnight over the last six weeks," it said in its daily update. "While the most deaths have to date been in Western Europe there are increasing numbers of deaths being reported from central and eastern Europe." (Reuters)

Steve Chapman has another terrific column — this one about gun regulations and the tendency of politicians to exempt themselves from such regulations — for the public good, of course. Here’s an excerpt:

The Supreme Court will soon be hearing an important case about Chicago’s firearm regulations and the right to keep and bear arms. Cato just filed an amicus brief (pdf) in that case.

Also, persons interested in this subject should know that Cato associate policy analyst David Kopel has a new book just out.

To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.

President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.

The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.

Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May. (NYT)

Imagine if the government got to pick your pocket every time you engaged in a financial transaction? That nightmare scenario is a distinct possibility now that senior Democrats have joined with European politicians and urged that such a tax be applied on a worldwide based. Reuters has the disturbing details: ( Daniel J. Mitchell, Cato at liberty)

It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn’s sewage is treated.

A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool’s worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates.

That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn’s sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.

“It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways. (NYT)

Chirp chirp. Cluck cluck. Moo moo. It’s time, boys and girls, to put on our galoshes and take another stroll through the Canadian farm marketing annual fall fair.

It’s been a while since we toured the supply management system, and so make sure you put on those big, heavy galoshes. The doodoo is still spread around pretty thick after all these years. In fact, there’s a fresh dump out there, just dropped off yesterday by the Commons Standing Committee on International Trade.

After a couple of flash meetings in October and early November, the committee — chaired by Conservative urban cowboy Lee Richardson of Calgary Centre — issued a 3½-page “report” with a sole recommendation: “That the government of Canada affirm its unequivocal support of, and commitment to defend, Canada’s supply management system.”

Are there many dairy farms in Calgary Centre? I’ve never noticed them before.

The Oklo uranium mine in Gabon contains well known evidence of natural nuclear reactors, but how widespread were they? A team of researchers has proposed a scenario to account for the disappearance of a radioactive mineral from the geological record. Part of their hypothesis is that a surge of oxygen billions of years ago caused the creation of millions of tiny nuclear reactors. If true, this primordial nuclear age could have played a role in the evolution of early life forms.

Appearing in the Geological Society of America's GSA Today, Laurence A. Coogan and Jay T. Cullen, both from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, have put forth a radical idea about natural nuclear reactors and the evolution of early life on Earth. In their article, entitled “Did natural reactors form as a consequence of the emergence of oxygenic photosynthesis during the Archean?,” they conjecture that once oxygen producing photosynthesis evolved, it produced local oxygen enrichment in surface water. This helped carry uranium into solution, which was redeposited at the margins of oxygen oases. These uranium deposits, they claim, would have the potential to form natural reactors due to the high concentration of ²³⁵U during the Archean Eon (3.8 – 2.5 billion years ago). How this happened is shown in the figure below, taken from the article.

At the time all of this was taking place Earth's atmosphere was very oxygen poor, compared with modern levels. An oxygenated atmosphere is generally considered prerequisite for the evolution of complex life. On Earth, atmospheric oxygen is produced through photosynthesis. It is widely, although not unanimously, accepted that oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere were very low throughout the first ~2 billion years of Earth’s history. According to the article, “[e]vidence from paleosols for soil development under reducing conditions and the occurrence of clastic sediments containing minerals that are highly soluble under oxic conditions, such as pyrite and uraninite, suggest low atmospheric oxygen before ca. 2.3 Ga.”

At about the same time, a volcanically produced mineral known as uraninite began to disappear. It is known that oxygenated water dissolves uraninite and, because most of Earth's early oxygen was present in the seas, Coogan and Cullen think the two events are linked. According to them, when the uraninite dissolved, grains of radioactive uranium-235 (²³⁵U) broke free and were eventually deposited on banks and shorelines. When enough ²³⁵U accumulated—a mass about the size of a basketball—nuclear fission occurred. Coogan and Cullen calculated that enough ²³⁵U existed at the time to have started millions of these reactors.

In 1956, while at the University of Arkansas, Dr. Paul Kuroda described the conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could occur and there is at least one location where natural fission is known to have occurred. That is in the well known Oklo region of Gabon. When the Oklo reactors were discovered, the conditions found there were very similar to Kuroda's predictions. Concentrations of uranium in the Oklo geological formations show chemical evidence that 17 ancient reactors once operated there for more than a million years during the Proterozoic Eon (~1.8 Ga). James Lovelock, in The Ages of Gaia, put it this way:

The newly proposed millions of ancient reactors would have emitted neutrons irradiating anything near by, and it is difficult to determine the impact of near-surface natural reactors on the Archean biosphere. There is a ubiquitous bacterial strain, Deinococcus radiodurans, which is naturally resistant to otherwise lethal doses of radiation. So far, scientists have been at a loss as to how that resistance evolved. Coogan and Cullen suggest, “Investigation of the evolution of radiation tolerance in some bacteria (e.g., Deinococcus radiodurans and members of the cyanobacteria), for which there is no other obvious terrestrial selective pressure, may prove fruitful.”

The nuclear reactor hypothesis is “plausible,” says geophysicist Norman Sleep of Stanford University, commenting in Science. But if the reactors were widespread, scientists should see more variation in Earth's current ratio of ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U, the two radioactive isotopes that make up uraninite. Aside from measurements taken at Oklo, this ratio is consistent everywhere on Earth, Sleep says. For more information regarding the Oklo site see page 347 in Chapter 18 of The Resilient Earth.

The paper is “not only fascinating reading, but it also generates ideas for testable hypotheses,” says health physicist and radiological specialist P. Andrew Karam of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in Science (see “Did Ancient Earth Go Nuclear?”). If it bears fruit, he adds, “the fact that ancient Earth may have hosted scores of natural nuclear reactors is certainly relevant to today's debates over nuclear energy, radioactive waste disposal, and the putative health effects of exposure to low levels of radiation.”

The widespread ancient nuclear reactor hypothesis remains controversial, and the link between such reactors and the evolution of life on our planet even more so. Still, it is interesting to note that nuclear energy, the favorite boogeyman of eco-activists everywhere prior to the advent of the global warming hysteria, has proven to be just another natural phenomenon. Most rational scientists know this, which is why the AAAS Pew poll found that 70% of scientists favor the expanded use of nuclear energy. Still, atavistic eco-activists go into meltdown at the mere mention of building new nuclear power plants. But the world's energy needs continue to rise and, whether you believe that CO₂ emissions will turn Earth into a living hell or just that being an energy independent nation is a good thing, something must be done. Instead of raising forests of twirling wind turbines, which slaughter birds, bats and the occasional skydiver, or slathering every available surface with costly and intermittent solar cells, I say we go nuclear—what could be more natural?

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

Rather obviously the CRU hacking and release of potentially damaging and certainly embarrassing documents are going to occupy a significant slab of topical climate news:

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), usually working together with the Hadley center (recall HadCRUT3 global temperatures), has been hacked.

Speculations thrive that the data were actually obtained and posted by an insider - a whistleblower - rather than a generic Russian hacker.

If you want to download an interesting 62-megabyte file, which unpacks to 156 megabytes or so, here are some links:

As the world and her mouse now know, a server used by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has been hacked into, and many files, including personal e-mail messages, published on a Russian web site on Thursday [see: here; and here;; and here; and here; and here; and here; and here; and here; among many other media outlets and blogs]. The story, and some of the key details, have travelled around the world’s blogosphere quicker than Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ("I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes"), leading to much febrile, and often ill-judged, hysteria from both sides of the more puerile end of the ‘global warming’ debate. (Clamour of the Times)

It appears that a large number of files has been hacked or, more likely, released by a disgruntled insider at the world centre of Global Warming Alarmism, namely the CRU at the University of East Anglia. Links to comment may be found at http://www.climatedepot.com/ . Early indications confirm not only the scientific fraud that many of us deduced must be happening, but also dubious financial transactions.

CRU was created by the Thatcher Government as an arm in its war against the coal miners and the oil sheiks. This was a case (unfortunately not isolated) in which the smart tactical manoeuvre became a grand strategic error, for it bequeathed a powerful tool to the new authoritarian left when they reins of power changed hands.

A quasi-scientific institute that is founded for political purposes is a misbegotten creature. It is conceived in cynicism and born to corruption. When the remit of such an institution is to manufacture evidence to support one particular hypothesis it is condemned not to produce just bad science but anti-science. The basis of modern scientific method is the principle of falsification. We do not call upon it directly for every scientific investigation, just as we do not rush to the courts of law every time we sign a contract, but it is always there to provide the rigorous framework essential to progress. To pay someone to collect data that support one hypothesis is like, to adapt the classical analogy, paying someone to count white swans to “prove” the hypothesis that all swans are white. Furthermore, once that someone’s living depends upon that payment, he will be sorely tempted to cover up any evidence of black swans and, being human, he will try to salve his own conscience by creating a justification for ignoring inconvenient observations.

That said, however, this is a phenomenon of group psychology. One of the best treatments of it in fiction is the spy novel by John le Carré, The looking glass war, in which an isolated intelligence outfit develops a fantasy world of its own, which is disrupted when its ambitions collide with reality. Such groups tend to become exclusive brethren, who avoid interaction with others who might threaten their beliefs. They develop a group paranoia and feel the need to defend themselves against what they see as hostile interest from outside. In this case, however, the “opposition” have acted to preserve the niceties of scientific discourse. Steve McIntyre, in particular, has gone to great lengths to maintain polite debate. Yet he has been foisted with the role of “devil incarnate” and subjected to outrageous ad hominem attacks and vilification. These groups lose their moral compass and excite each other to forms of behaviour that they might not have adopted as individuals. The formation of “peer review rings”, designed to deny a hearing for alternative opinions is a notorious case in point, which was comprehensively exposed in the Wegman report. As in the days of absolute monarchy, protection offered by the powerful is an incentive towards the abuse of position. In history, favourites of the king tended to have their days in the sun ended in ignominy or worse.

If, however, sceptics think that global warming is now simply going to fade away they are very much mistaken. It is now a political theory with a life of its own, independent of any support from junk science. Governments depend on it as an excuse for onerous taxation and the erosion of human liberties. Billion dollar industries are set up to exploit it. Hundreds of the new type of journalists who call themselves environmental editors need it to pay their mortgages. The first reaction will be to ignore this development and, with complete control of the establishment press, it is a viable one. It can already be seen in the silence of the press at these startling revelations. If that fails then expect a vicious counter-attack.

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday's Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming. (Christopher Booker, Daily Mail)

Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you. If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number. (Bishop Hill)

LONDON — A leading climate change scientist whose private e-mails are included in thousands of documents that were stolen by hackers and posted online said Sunday the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month's global climate summit in Denmark.

Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, said he believes the hackers who stole a decade's worth of correspondence from a British university's computer server deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by skeptics to undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. (AP)

A fascinating, hot-off-the-presses story emerges from the emails that were hacked yesterday from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre. It is one of many exchanges that shed light on the priority that the global warming alarmists give to politics and career advancement over science. (John Hinderaker, Power Line Blog)

The scientific community is buzzing over the thousands of emails and documents, posted on the Internet late last week after being hacked from the computer of a prominent climate-change research center, which some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend that humans are responsible for global warming.

...

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who was attacked in the emails, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested -- but rather orchestrated." (WSJ)

Lucia Liljegren at the Blackboard has a post Enemies caught in action! with an image depicting several individuals including me [thanks to Lucia for her post!]. The source of this juvenile presentation was in a an e-mail from Tom Peterson to Phil Jones in 2007. (Climate Science)

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a reference to a plan to "hide the decline" in temperatures.

The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the theft of 61MB of confidential data.

Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a "smoking gun," evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The authors of some of the e-mails, however, accuse the skeptics of taking the messages out of context, adding that the evidence still clearly shows a warming trend.

The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself "FOIA." (FNC)

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle. (Andrew Bolt)

The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. It will take some time before we know whether any illegal activity has been uncovered (e.g. hiding or destruction of data to avoid Freedom of Information Act inquiries).

Some commentators even think this is the beginning of the end for the IPCC. I doubt it. (Roy W. Spencer)

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change. (Andrew C. Revkin, NYT)

That's The Amazing Revkin for you -- the New York Times' DotEarth blogger/environmental reporter attempts some M*A*S*H-style meatball surgery this morning on the badly hemorrhaging climate alarmoscientists' scandal that has erupted in East Anglia, UK. First he acknowledges that some of the most prominent climate fictionalizers in the world said some very naughty things about global warming skeptics, but then he promptly cues the violins: ( Paul Chesser, Spectator)

It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.

Amid the thousands of files apparently lifted from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief P.D. Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.

But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of "energy agencies" they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust -- are U.K.-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting "new energy" technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest. (Marc Sheppard, American Thinker)

In the case of the apparently scandalous leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in England, it’s all a matter of getting the context right. That’s what Professor Michael E Mann, the fabricator of the celebrated hockey stick graph, told the Washington Post. Here’s what he said in Juliet Eilperin’s story today:

I agree with Professor Mann that the context in which something is written or said or done is always critical. So let’s look at the context of a couple of these e-mails. Here’s one that looks pretty bad until you understand the context: (Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads)

Global Warming is often called a hoax. I disagree because a hoax has a humorous intent to puncture pomposity. In science, such as with the Piltdown Man hoax, it was done to expose those with fervent but blind belief. The argument that global warming is due to humans, known as the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) is a deliberate fraud. I can now make that statement without fear of contradiction because of a remarkable hacking of files that provided not just a smoking gun, but an entire battery of machine guns. (Tim Ball, CFP)

Retired climatologist Dr. Tim Ball joins us to discuss the significance of the recently leaked emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University which expose deceit, duplicity and collusion between climate researchers to maintain the fraud of the manmade global warming theory. These emails reveal stunning behind-the-scenes details about how this fraud has been developed and perpetuated, and Dr. Ball shares his insights on what they show. (Corbett Report)

Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has been an outspoken critic of the science behind global warming and the push for climate legislation for decades. As Congress continues to move forward with cap-and-trade legislation, Blankenship says an emissions plan will send jobs overseas and hurt the economy. During today's OnPoint, he gives his take on the Senate's climate debate and explains why he believes the world has entered a period of global cooling. Blankenship, who is also on the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, discusses recent controversy surrounding the chamber's stance on climate legislation and explains why efforts to develop carbon capture and storage technology should be stopped.

watch video -- read transcript (OnPoint, 11/18/2009)

Sometimes the best offense is a good defense and sometimes the best action is inaction. With unemployment surpassing 10 percent (go here to watch unemployment grow), Midwestern Congressmen want to ensure that Congress will protect three key areas of their respective state’s economy: agriculture, manufacturing and small business. One sure way to protect these jobs is not to implement climate change legislation.

Congressman Bob Latta (R-OH) and 31 more Midwestern Members of Congress sent a letter to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House Energy and Commerce, Agriculture, and Small Business Committees requesting a joint hearing to how climate change would affect these important industries, not only in the Midwest, but all across the United States. Let us give you a preview, and the news is not good.

A moment of fun here for Senator James Inhofe, who declared victory over the global-warming hysterics this week in a speech covered by the Tulsa World. Inhofe got a few laughs from a nearly-empty room by telling Barbara Boxer that the failure of the dire predictions of disaster from last decade to come to pass showed that he had been right all along, and that they could now “stick a fork” in the effort to hobble American productivity through the restriction of carbon emissions:

What has Inhofe feeling vindicated? He points to the collapse of the Copenhagen conference, which was widely expected to produce a Kyoto-style agreement among Western nations to commit economic seppuku by restricting energy production. However, Inhofe could just as easily point to an event closer to home — Harry Reid’s rescheduling of Boxer’s bill to the spring, where Democrats will undoubtedly run as fast as possible from it in an election year.

Inhofe may have won a battle, but the hysterics aren’t done yet. We need to ensure that they don’t get another chance to impose a government-run energy rationing system in the future. (Ed Morrissey, Hot Air)

The news that world leaders have abandoned hope for a comprehensive, legally binding climate change treaty in Copenhagen next month inspired no end of finger-pointing. Environmentalists blamed eight years of inaction under George W. Bush. The Europeans noted that the Chinese and several other big developing nations had done little to move the ball forward.

Our own candidate for criticism is the United States Senate. We cannot rewrite the Bush years any more than we can persuade the Chinese of the merits of a binding treaty to control greenhouse gases. What the United States can do is assume responsibility for its own emissions, and this the Senate has manifestly failed to do. (NYT)

President Barack Obama is considering setting a provisional target for cutting America's huge greenhouse gas emissions, removing the greatest single obstacle to a landmark global agreement to fight climate change.

The Observer has learnt that administration officials have been consulting international negotiators and key players on Capitol Hill about signing up to a provisional target at the UN global warming summit in Copenhagen, now less than three weeks away. ( Suzanne Goldenberg, The Observer)

The $1,000 bill has President Grover Cleveland’s face on it. The $100,000 bill has the dour image of President Woodrow Wilson.

We’ve already seen President Barack Obama attach his name and face to the $787 billion stimulus bill. And if the left has its way, the face on the $6 trillion “climate justice” bill will also be Obama’s. Or maybe it will belong to Al Gore.

December’s global warming conference in Copenhagen looms like a dark cloud on the horizon – just a few weeks away. The greedy left (and that’s pretty much all of them) is calling for “climate reparations.” A recent Rolling Stone article made it clear where lefties stand on American money going overseas. Writer Naomi Klein, who gained notoriety bashing ‘disaster capitalism,” said, “shifting to renewable energy, according to a team of United Nations researchers, will raise the cost far more: to as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade.” ( Dan Gainor, Townhall)

Emerging science is providing important new under-standing on this issue. Yet, politics is preventing this information from getting to Congress and the American people. Worse, our children are being taught incorrect information in our schools.

Global Warming, Emerging Science and Under-standing brings balance and perspective to the global warming debate. Dozens of respected scientists from all over the world explain new and emerging science about global warming. This DVD and its accompanying resources provides a clear and refreshing under-standing for ages 12 and up of this important issue. It can be viewed in the middle/high school classroom or any adult wanting to understand what emerging science is revealing. You will learn that:

During his Inauguration speech, President Obama famously said, "We will restore science to its rightful place." Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's "change" memo must not have reached the Environmental Protection Agency.

News recently broke of EPA's efforts to effectively censor two agency attorneys who used a YouTube video to lay out some of the flaws with the cap-and-tax energy regulations that are working their way through Congress. This must have been just a bit too transparent for the EPA officials who threatened them with disciplinary actions.

This is not the first time Mr. Obama's EPA has tried to silence critics. A joint investigation by Republican staff with the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently found that the EPA suppressed sound science to avoid delaying a finding that will allow for sweeping climate-change regulations.

The question before the EPA was not whether climate change exists, but rather how the EPA should treat the science of climate change under the Clean Air Act. ( Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Washington Times)

In 2007 Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. I always thought this was strange. What’s the connection between Gore’s climate activism and the Peace Prize? How could a man with no science background write a book and make a movie about how mankind is screwing up the climate and then get a prize for promoting peace? Well it’s beginning to make sense. The Nobel was not a peace prize, it was a war prize. (Art Horn, Icecap)

My ‘Left’ friends are mad at me now that the climate debate/ discussion has shifted, at least temporarily, from Save the World to Why Did We Fail? Here is what a former Enron executive (his name will remain confidential) emailed me a few days ago:

Now, there are a lot of people who would love to take credit for helping to derail any piece of all pain-no gain legislation. But Waxman-Markey probably would not pass the House today if a re-vote were taken, and even some Democratic Senators know that being Democrat includes not needlessly increasing energy prices for their constituents.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UNEP's belief in manmade warming in the late 1970's led to a stage-managed conference in Villach in 1985, which in turn led to the political decision to form the IPCC. (John McLean)

PORTLAND, Ore. — Supercomputers can do more to reverse the global warming trend, according to former vice president Al Gore who gave a keynote at the Supercomputer 2009 conference held here this week.

Supercomputer simulations showed how a hole in our ozone layer had created a worldwide planetary emergency and forced us to switch from chlorofluorocarbons to other gases that do not damage the ozone layer.

Visualization tools, according to Gore, clinched the case by showing people just how big the hole was already and how it could be shrunk by switching away from chlorofluorocarbons. (R. Colin Johnson, EE Times)

Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world's chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the government has said.

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the department for environment and rural affairs, said a decade of inaction on climate change meant it was now virtually impossible to limit global temperature rise to 2C. He said the delay meant the world would now do well to stabilise warming between 3C and 4C. ( David Adam, The Guardian)

A climate crisis of worldwide proportions is unfolding right before our eyes, and not even the most powerful world leaders can do anything to stop it. It looks like 2009 may very well turn out to be the fourth straight year of declining global temperatures at a time when carbon dioxide levels continue to rise - the opposite of what was predicted by vaunted climate models.

Something must be done immediately to either (1) rework the temperature data so it vindicates esteemed climate visionaries, (2) come up with some scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo as to why long-term weather doesn't conform to authoritative proclamations or (3) simply ignore or downplay the reality hoping people don't finally catch on that they've been had. Perhaps it could at least be claimed that Mother Nature is giving us a reprieve to get our collective global act together before she really lowers the boom. After all, it has worked so well in the past to say that disaster is just around the corner.

Our guess is that the crafty climate chieftains will likely use a combination of the three smoke-and-mirror strategies listed (with a smattering of "denier" bashing thrown in just for fun).

But we wonder, when will ostensibly superintelligent people learn a simple fact that even a forecast is simply a guess at the future based on past and present information? Putting a lot of sincere confidence in your prognostication does not improve its predictive power. ( Anthony J. Sadar and Susan T. Cammarata, Washington Times)

LONDON, Nov 22 - East Antarctica's ice started to melt faster from 2006, which could cause sea levels to rise sooner than anticipated, according to a study by scientists at the University of Texas.

In the study published in Nature's Geoscience journal, scientists estimated that East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009, but the rate speeded up from 2006.

The melt rate after 2006 could be even higher, the scientists said.

"The key result is that [we] appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions (in Wilkes Land and Victoria Land), since 2006," Jianli Chen at the university's centre for space research and one of the study's authors, told Reuters.

"This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future," Chen said.

Previous estimates for East Antarctica projected anywhere between a 4 gigatonne per year loss and a 22 gigatonne per year gain, according to the report.

The full study is available at www.nature.com/ngeo. (Reuters)

Finally, Part II in the Skeptics Handbook series – the bluster and bluff, the deceit, and the money. Enjoy & Share.

It’s unthinkable. Big Government has spent $79 billion on the climate industry, 3000 times more than Big Oil. Leading climate scientists won’t debate in public and won’t provide their data. What do they hide? When faced with freedom-of-information requests they say they’ve “lost” the original global temperature records. Thousands of scientists are rising in protest against the scare campaign. Meanwhile $126 billion turned over in carbon markets in 2008 and bankers get set to make billions.

“Bullying is their root strength. Take it away from them and they will crumble.”

Full color copies are being printed right now so that all Australian Senators and crucial people in the Australian Government can have this in their hands next week. They will be hand delivered by former politician, who is flying to Canberra specially to get the booklet into the hands of our decision makers. The Australian Senate is considering the legislation starting on Monday next week. It’s line-ball. The Leader of the Opposition wants to pass it, most of his party do not. Only seven members of the opposition need to vote for it for it to pass — and condemn Australia to decades of an unnecessary tax and an impost that will achieve nothing but banking profits.

Thousands of copies will be printed in the next two weeks in Australia, and be distributed to journalists and other leaders.

I welcome your feedback and ideas, especially this weekend before it goes to the printers.

Jyoti Parikh & Kirit Parikh: Deal-making at Copenhagen - India should accept equal per capita emission quotas

Minister for Environment Jairam Ramesh wants India to be a deal maker at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. We propose here a deal that India can offer that addresses the objectives of the ‘deal makers’ and the concerns of those who oppose any deal inconsistent with India’s past stand. Our proposal is consistent with it and the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) accepted at Rio.

The most critical issue in climate change is allocation of emission rights or quotas. Any accord implies an allocation. For example, the Kyoto Protocol is a cap and trade arrangement, where caps were provided on industrialised countries, called annex 1 countries (A1C), and they were permitted to trade among themselves as well as with non-annex 1 countries (NA1C), on whom there were no caps. Thus emission rights were allocated based on past emissions to A1Cs and unlimited to NA1Cs who needed to grow. However, NA1Cs have grown at varied rates and poverty is not pressing for some of them. The A1Cs want them to act too.

There is no economic principle that suggests just and equitable allocation. Inter-personal comparison of welfare across countries with different economic, political and social environment and inequity across nations is difficult if not impossible. One needs to rely on ethical principles. (Business Standard)

A global emergency funding scheme to drastically reduce the destruction of tropical rainforests over the next five years was announced by the Prince of Wales today, with the US pledging $275m (£165m) towards rainforest protection.

The plan relies on developed countries paying rainforest nations such as Brazil and Indonesia to reduce rates of deforestation and thereby cut carbon emissions.

Currently, the lucrative trade in logging, cattle grazing and palm oil, means tropical forests are worth substantially more dead than alive to developing countries. The plan, agreed by 35 governments of the Informal Working Group (IWG) and published at a meeting at St James's Palace, aims to make trees worth more alive. The group hopes to achieve a 25% reduction in annual deforestation rates by 2015. The felling of forests causes almost a fifth of global carbon emissions. (The Guardian)

A climate lobby-group founded by Prince Charles to influence opinion in the world’s largest insurance market has tried – and failed – to stifle scientific debate on “global warming” in one of the industry’s foremost academic journals, says SPPI.

ClimateWise, known to skeptical brokers at Lloyds of London as Climate Foolish, was launched by the Prince of Wales in 2007 with the words, “Time is a luxury we do not have and I urge companies both at home and internationally to sign the ClimateWise principles and take the necessary action.”

The ClimateWise principles are “To lead in risk analysis, inform public policymaking, support climate awareness amongst customers, incorporate climate change into investment strategies, reduce businesses’ environmental impact, report and be accountable”.

SPPI’s Lord Monckton and a leading insurance broker, Paul Maynard, jointly wrote a learned paper for the respected Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute, reviewing the science in detail and concluding that the climate scare is bogus and scientifically unfounded; and that CO2 is harmless and beneficial.

Before the paper was published in the Journal, members of ClimateWise first of all attempted to prevent it from appearing. Then they tried to censor it by removing the central scientific and mathematical argument that the effect of CO2 on temperature is now known to be around one-third to one-seventh of what the UN – and the Prince of Wales – would like us to believe. The co-authors stood firm, however, and successfully insisted that their article be printed in full as originally agreed. Next, ClimateWise supporters successfully lobbied the Journal not to reveal to its readers that the letters to the Editor about the paper had been overwhelming supportive of it.

Lord Monckton expressed concern to ClimateWise about “the engagement of the Prince of Wales in a lobby-group with an avowedly political purpose when the future Monarch is constitutionally constrained to be above politics.” The pressure-group has not responded. (TransWorldNews)

Today, Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, will launch a new, high-powered, all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which he hopes, as he writes in this morning’s Times, “may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy.” And so do I; we have long-needed such a body to fight for common sense about climate change in the UK. At last, as the Times headline reads, there is a senior politician in the UK brave enough to state that “Copenhagen will fail - and quite right too. Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions.”

The aims of the GWPF are simple. The “main purpose is to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.” Further:

“The GWPF's primary purpose is to help restore balance and trust in the climate debate that is frequently distorted by prejudice and exaggeration.

Our main focus is to analyse global warming policies and its economic and other implications. Our aim is to provide the most robust and reliable economic analysis and advice.

We intend to develop alternative policy options and to foster a proper debate (which at present scarcely exists) on the likely cost and consequences of current policies.”

Bravo, Nigel Lawson! May I thus encourage you to join the GWPF today. This could well be the moment when sanity returns to the UK over climate-change politics. (Clamour of the Times)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute this week launched a new video campaign to persuade Al Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge for a debate on climate change. CEI is offering Mr. Gore big bucks to debate!

The Cornwall Alliance and the Heritage Foundation are holding a joint event, “Leading Evangelical Scholars Warn That…

As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.

It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria.

The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill, the Senate's version of Waxman-Markey, until the spring thaw has led Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the leading Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, to declare victory over Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the triumph of observable fact over junk science.

"I proudly declare 2009 as the 'Year of the Skeptic,' the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard," Inhofe said to Boxer in a Senate speech. "Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked."

Inhofe added: "Today I have been vindicated." (IBD)

At the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, some 300 scientists investigate the causes and consequences of climate change. It's not an easy task.

Climatologist Werner von Bloh nearly has to yell to make himself heard at work.

"This is the heart of the institute," he said, standing in front of six large cabinets, each the height of a man, at of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Inside are 2,000 linked processors that make up the institute's mainframe computer, one of the fastest such computers in the world. Fast computing speeds are essential to climate researchers, whose main tools are highly complex computer models.

"We couldn't very well change the earth in order to test our assumptions," said Bloh.

But the models, no matter how much computing power they have behind them, still have their limits.

"There aren't really exact climate predictions," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, the institute's assistant director. "A climate model is an if-then machine, meaning that it makes certain assumptions, which can change over time, and then comes to a certain result."

Climate researchers can develop different possible scenarios, but then again, who can say how the world economy, political conditions or environmental technology will develop over the next ten or even 100 years?

And, no one can predict the levels of future CO2 emissions, the amount of global warming and its negative consequences. (Deutsche Welle)

With the Copenhagen climate change conference just over two weeks away, President Obama and other heads of government have now publicly accepted what has been clear for some time: COP15 will not result in a new post-Kyoto treaty, binding signatories to agreed emissions reduction targets. Whatever political statement is agreed to by the 12,000 plus delegates from 192 countries (plus numerous NGOs) expected to be in the Danish capital for the conference from December 7 to 18, it is impossible for this to have any meaningful effect on global emissions for several years. (Scientific Alliance)

NEW DELHI -- As countries around the world prepare to flex their negotiating muscles at next month's climate-change summit in Copenhagen, India has begun to question the Western model of computing global warming statistics.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a report last week that says there is no conclusive evidence that climate change has caused the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. The report says that not all of the glaciers are receding at alarming rates and that a few are even advancing.

The report, an analysis of data from the past four decades, is part of India's efforts to produce a body of indigenous research assessments on the subject.

"So far, we have been depending on research conducted by the West on what is happening to our glaciers and environment," he said after releasing the report, which was prepared by a former scientist with the Geological Survey of India and included a disclaimer that it did not necessarily reflect the government's view.

"There is an urgent need to have our own studies by our scientists," he said. (Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post)

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations. (Der Spiegel)

As the critical global warming conference looms, Michael McCarthy detects a new atmosphere which suggests that a significant agreement can still be achieved (The Independent)

BERLIN – World leaders cannot afford to leave a U.N. summit in Copenhagen next month without a robust agreement to fight climate change, German government climate adviser Hans Joachim Schellnhuber said Friday.

Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said he was convinced the 200 world leaders going to Copenhagen for the summit would be able to thrash out a deal — possibly with the help of alcohol. (Reuters)

The 192 countries flocking to Copenhagen next month won't reach consensus on climate change. That won't stop them from acting alone. ( Sharon Begley, NEWSWEEK)

Sure, this talk of the warmists at Copenhagen planning a new “world government” is crazy. I just wish the warmists wouldn’t talk of it themselves. Take the new and first president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy:

Imagine for a minute that global warming is not changing our planet's biosphere and the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

Imagine that climate change abetted by rising human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases does not threaten freshwater supplies, agriculture, marine ecosystems, human health, coastal settlements and the very existence of small island states.

Imagine climate changes are not likely to trigger mass migrations and state conflicts, as growing populations of landless, hungry and thirsty people scramble to grab portions of the shrinking global pie. (Stephen Hesse, Japan Times)

Unless they end in promises, and a treaty within months, Ed Miliband believes the Copenhagen talks will be a disaster. But can the British energy secretary, in Denmark for a frantic round of pre-summit diplomacy, win the argument? ( John Harris, The Guardian)

IT was a weekend of extremes. Melbourne copped a month's worth of rain in just 17 hours, NSW grappled with "catastrophic" bushfire conditions and record November temperatures -- and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong linked the unpredictable weather patterns to the effects of global warming. (The Australian)

MELBOURNE--Australian Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said Sunday the government plans to make a formal offer to the opposition on potential amendments to its carbon pollution reduction plan on Tuesday morning.

Wong has been in talks with the opposition Liberal and National coalition's head negotiator, said Climate Change spokesman Ian Macfarlane, on possible amendments in an attempt to win support to pass the bill through the Senate.

"We certainly are inching forward and we anticipate we will be in a position to put a very clear offer to the opposition on Tuesday morning," Wong told Nine Network television.

Wong said the center-left Labor government will provide details of the offer to the opposition ahead of publicly releasing it to allow them to discuss it. The government wants to pass the legislation ahead of global climate change talks in Copenhagen in December, but a formal offer of amendments on Tuesday leaves little time, with Australia's parliament entering its last sitting week of the year Monday.

This puts pressure on opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull to reach an agreement with the government and then convince his coalition members, some of whom have voiced stern opposition to the bill, to vote in favour of the amended scheme. (Dow Jones)

OPPOSITION Leader Malcolm Turnbull has been warned to stop championing an emissions trading scheme to avoid a damaging rift in the Liberal Party.

Senior MPs say the party must unite and can do so only if support for the scheme is scrapped.

''Unity trumps policy,'' one frontbencher told The Sun-Herald.

The Government needs to reclaim the terms of the debate from the sceptics.

BRITAIN'S new high commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, is somewhat perplexed about where she has found herself on her new posting.

Earlier this month the Baroness gave her first interview in which she politely expressed her concern about the lack of sophistication in the debate about the emissions trading scheme.

Not because Australians are not across the scheme's details but because the debate seems to have backflipped to one of whether or not climate change is even happening.

Baroness Amos told The Sydney Morning Herald she was surprised the science was being questioned.

"These are things where there have been debates over a long period of time in other countries and where we have reached conclusions and moved on." (Stephanie Peatling, The Age)

COAL-FIRED power companies are warning of price volatility, threats to future power supply, a collapse in the electricity market and even a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the government unless they win a big increase in compensation under the emissions trading scheme -- one of the final sticking points in negotiations between the Rudd government and Malcolm Turnbull's divided Coalition.

With Climate Change Minister Penny Wong saying the final deal will not be unveiled until tomorrow and Coalition hostility to any form of ETS intensifying, the generators are mounting a last-ditch lobbying campaign to convince parliament to more than double the $3.5 billion compensation scheme proposed by the government. (The Australian)

HOUSEHOLDS and businesses will know tomorrow whether the country will have an emissions trading system locked in, as negotiations between Government and Opposition representatives go down to the wire.

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, yesterday said she would not make a formal offer on amendments to the trading scheme until tomorrow morning - the same day the Coalition party room will try to decide whether to accept or reject it. (SMH)

ANGER has deepened within the Opposition over emissions trading, with internal criticisms that chief Liberal negotiator Ian Macfarlane has become too close to the Rudd Government.

Opposition figures were shocked and infuriated when the Government revealed it would not announce its compromise offer on emissions trading until tomorrow - only to discover that Mr Macfarlane had asked for the delay. Mr Macfarlane admitted he and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull decided last Monday - when it was clear negotiations would go into the weekend - that the Opposition party room should consider the outcome tomorrow and the plan should not be unveiled by Labor until then.

The move gives opponents of the scheme less time to mobilise against it. Mr Macfarlane said he had not wanted the Government to pre-empt the party room discussion with an announcement. ''My goal is that the MPs and senators hear the outcome of the negotiations from me - not from the press, not from the Government.''

But he neglected to tell the manager of Opposition business in the House, Christopher Pyne, who was taken by surprise when Climate Change Minister Penny Wong outlined the timetable on television yesterday morning. (The Age)

KONSTANTINOVKA, Ukraine – Vladimir Gapor is a plumber by trade, but now he's a scavenger, prying bits of scrap steel from the ruins of his old factory and selling them for a pittance.

For others beyond this manufacturing graveyard, however, Ukraine's economic collapse has produced a potential multibillion-dollar bonanza. In an era of climate change regulation and carbon trading, Ukraine, ironically, is profiting from the smokeless smokestacks of its industrial shutdown.

How well and how long it will profit is an under-the-radar issue complicating negotiations for a worldwide climate accord being sought at a 192-nation conference in Copenhagen next month. ( Associated Press)

Bloody deaths of CGI polar bears in Plane Stupid ad designed to highlight carbon impact of air travel

Airline pollution activists Plane Stupid are on a collision course with the advertising regulator after launching a graphic cinema campaign that sees CGI polar bears falling to bloody deaths to highlight the impact of carbon emissions.

Plane Stupid's ad, which breaks in cinemas and online today, features dozens of animated polar bears falling from the sky onto a city centre, bouncing off skyscrapers and landing in the street and on the roof of a car, accompanied by blood-spurting special effects.

The only sound, apart from the bone-crunching thump of the impacts, is the steadily increasing whine of a jet airliner's engines.

Plane Stupid's campaign, developed by the ad agency Mother, aims to show the impact that global warming is having on polar ice caps.

The group is aiming to point out that even short flights to the continent have a major impact on carbon emissions. Plane Stupid said that the ad was inspired by the fact that an average European flight produces 400kg of carbon, which it claims is the same weight as an average female polar bear.

"We wanted to confront people with the impact that short-haul flights have on the climate," said Robert Saville, a director at Mother. "We used polar bears because they are a well understood symbol of the effect that climate change is having on the natural world."

The polar bears were created by special effects company MPC using its proprietary fur software, "Furtility", to look as realistic as possible.

The ad breaks across UK cinemas today, through the film media company DCM. It will only show in movies with a 15 certificate or above.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". (The Guardian)

TARUNA JAYA, INDONESIA -- Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick -- and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle.

The lopsided struggle is part of a battle against one of the biggest, and most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

Unlike the noxious gases pumped into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in the United States and smoke-belching factories in China, danger here in the heart of Borneo rises from the ground itself.

Peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed trees, grass and scrub, contains gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide, which used to stay locked in the ground. It is now drying and disintegrating, as once-soggy swamps are shorn of trees and drained by canals, and when it burns, carbon dioxide gushes into the atmosphere. ( Andrew Higgins, Washington Post)

Australian Wool Innovation's newly formed Wool Carbon Alliance has welcomed the Federal Government’s recognition of the positive role that farming and wool growing can play in the carbon cycle, and has brought forward new figures showing wool's important role in the carbon cycle.

WCA chair Chick Olsson said the Federal Government and Opposition had taken the right stance in excluding agriculture from the emissions trading scheme, while retaining the opportunity for woolgrowers to access "on-farm carbon credits in our future carbon economy". (Farm Weekly)

No, no, no! Bury Our Carbon at Sea - Here's an innovative business model that may be one way to afford the clean coal chimera.

There is an article in the November 3 2009 issue of EOS titled “Science Organizations Remind Senators of the Consensus on Climate Change” by K. Chell [subscription required]. The letter is signed by the leadership of American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Biological Sciences, American Meteorological Society, American Society of Agronomy, American Society of Plant Biologists, American Statistical Association, Association of Ecosystem Research Centers, Botanical Society of America, Crop Science Society of America, Ecological Society of America, Natural Science Collections Alliance, Organization of Biological Field Stations, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Society of Systematic Biologists, Soil Science Society of America, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. (Climate Science)

In the New York Times editorial page’s latest excursion into shrill climate alarmism, foreign affairs correspondent Thomas Friedman accuses those opposing the current cap-and-tax bill as wanting a few people, say 2.5 billion to die off. And us bad guys are just grasping at straws. “. . . you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims,” he says. “One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.”

So, Tom, you claim that cap and tax opponents are calling forth a mass plague–a modern Black Death–that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. (Well, I guess this simply extrapolates what John Holdren is postulating by 2020–a possible billion deaths!) In your world that is an inevitable result of modern living using hydrocarbon fuels.

Unlike his imaginative colleague Maureen Dowd, what Tom Friedman writes actually matters. Many people believe that he is proficient about energy and climate. So I must again call this charlatan to task. [Read more →] (Donald Hertzmark, MasterResource)

WASHINGTON -- What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism? London, seat of parliamentary democracy and center of finance? Or perhaps Titusville, Pa.

Oil seeping from the ground there was collected for medicinal purposes -- until Edwin Drake drilled and 150 years ago -- Aug. 27, 1859 -- found the basis of our world, 69 feet below the surface of Pennsylvania, which oil historian Daniel Yergin calls "the Saudi Arabia of 19th-century oil."

For many years, most oil was used for lighting and lubrication, and the amounts extracted were modest. Then in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more per day than all other U.S. wells combined.

Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies. Repeatedly.

In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world had 13 years worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought and the postwar boom was fueled, and in 1951 Interior reported that the world had ... 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, Scold in Chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.

But surely now America can quickly wean itself from hydrocarbons, adopting alternative energies -- wind, solar, nuclear? No. (George Will, Townhall)

LONDON - Action to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius is beyond simply inventing new, low-carbon technologies and depends on wider changes to behavior and the way communities are built, said a Royal Dutch Shell executive.

Oil major Shell was among nine firms which signed on Friday a letter addressed to head of the European Union's executive Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, calling for a "strong deal" on climate at a global U.N. meeting next month in Copenhagen.

Climate scientists say that the world must limit average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius to avoid dangerous climate change. "I think that (it) is extremely demanding," said Graeme Sweeney, Shell's executive vice-president of future fuels and CO2, of that target.

"It is more than the (energy) supply-side, more than the technology, it will require a clear approach to the demand-side including behavior," he told Reuters on Friday. (Reuters)

Energy adviser and former Honeywell executive Maxine Savitz says there are enormous energy savings available through increased efficiency, as much as 30 percent by 2030.

The easiest way to reduce U.S. consumption of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels may not involve changing the way it is generated, but rather simply using less of it, an energy expert said. (PhysOrg.com)

King Coal is dead, long live King Coal.

For all the talk of a clean-energy, low-carbon future, U.S coal producers might not have such a black future. That’s the take from a new HSBC report, “The Green Side of Black.”

The argument? Coal is and will remain a huge part of the electricity mix in the U.S., despite—or perhaps because of—congressional action on energy and the climate.

The only difference is that coal will probably get cleaner, if the economics of carbon capture and storage ever work out. And since coal plants that capture carbon emissions need more coal to produce the same amount of energy–because the technology that traps emissions uses up some of the energy–coal miners stand to come out ahead. (Keith Johnson, WSJ)

OSLO - Shipping is slowing climate change by spewing out sunlight-dimming pollution but a clean-up needed to safeguard human health will stoke global warming, experts said Friday.

"So far shipping has caused a cooling effect that has slowed down global warming," Jan Fuglestvedt, of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo (CICERO), told Reuters.

"After some decades the net climate effect of shipping will shift from cooling to warming" because of cleaner fuels, he and colleagues in Germany, Britain and Norway wrote in this week's edition of the journal Environmental Science and Technology. (Reuters)

Households will pay extra on their fuel bills to pay for a new generation of "clean" coal power stations under plans to make Britain's electricity green. (TDT)

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger spent most of their careers working for environmental groups as political strategists. Frustrated by the movement’s focus on pollution regulations rather than public investment in technology, they broke from the pack by writing a manifesto in 2004 called “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.” [Read More] (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

BBC sells the wind farm scam to farmers - The BBC loves to talk about wind farms, but not about the glaring matter of their costly inefficiency, says Christopher Booker.

When the BBC runs one of its propaganda campaigns in favour of windfarms, as Farming Today was again doing recently, the only point of interest is how many of the basic facts they leave out. One thing they invariably try to conceal is how derisory is the amount of electricity these windmills produce.

Although Farming Today interviewed one of the sternest technical critics of wind turbines, Dr John Etherington, a retired environmental academic who has just published an excellent book on the nuts and bolts of wind power, they asked him with seemingly wide-eyed disbelief how he could justify his claim that turbines generate less than 30 per cent of their capacity.

Yet, as any half-way competent journalist should know, this information is freely available on the climate change department's website. The very last thing the BBC ever wants to admit – though the information is available from the same source – is that the total amount of power produced by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain amounts on average to a mere 900 megawatts, barely the output of a single medium-size conventional power station.

The other point the BBC is always careful to conceal is how much money the developers make from these windmills, thanks to the near 100 per cent hidden subsidy we all pay them through our electricity bills. Farming Today was quite happy to encourage farmers to lease their land by telling them that they could hope to make up to £20,000 a year from each 2 megawatt turbine. What they did not explain was that the same turbine will yield its developer around £400,000 a year –a cool £10 million over its 25-year life. Something else Farming Today neglected to mention was the title of Dr Etherington's book, The Wind Farm Scam. (TDT)

Park Falls, Wis. — Forests are a treasure trove of limbs and bark that can be made into alternative fuels and some worry the increasing trend of using that logging debris will make those materials too scarce, harming the woodlands.

For centuries, forests have provided lumber to build cities, pulp for paper mills and a refuge for hunters, fishers and hikers. A flurry of new, green ventures is fueling demand for trees and the debris leftover when they are harvested, which is called waste wood or woody biomass.

"There simply is nowhere near enough waste wood for all of these biomass projects that are popping up all over the place," said Marvin Roberson, a forest policy specialist with the Sierra Club in Michigan.

Waste wood has become a sought-after commodity, prompting concerns that the demand might overwhelm supply and damage the ecosystem. But government officials say there's plenty available and they point to guidelines that are aimed at maintaining tree debris to give the soil nutrients. (AP)

Biofuels advocates on Friday tried to debunk a widely reported Science magazine study that found that corn-based ethanol production in the U.S. actually worsens global warming.

The Renewable Fuels Association publicized a paper published by biomass experts at the Argonne National Laboratory's Transportation Technology R&D Center, in which researchers poked holes in the Science study that was published last Friday.

The original study published in Science found that most models that measure the greenhouse gas impact of biofuels do not take into account land use.

The researchers calculated the effect of emissions from converting existing farmland to energy crops and from clearing formerly uncultivated land, such as forests or grasslands, for biofuels. (Green Tech)

Although federal health officials decline to use the word “peaked,” the current wave of swine flu appears to have done so in the United States.

Flu activity is coming down in all regions of the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, though it is still rising in Hawaii, Maine and some isolated areas.

The World Health Organization said Friday that there were “early signs of a peak” in much of the United States. (NYT)

WASHINGTON - As U.S. health officials struggle to vaccinate tens of millions of Americans against the pandemic of swine flu, some are looking regretfully at one easy way to instantly double or triple the number of doses available -- by using an immune booster called an adjuvant.

These additives, often as simple as an oil and water mixture, broaden the body's response to a vaccine, reducing the amount of active ingredient called antigen needed.

They are widely used in European flu vaccines as well as in Canada. But not in the United States -- even though the federal government has spent nearly $700 million buying them.

The reason -- people might not trust them.

"If we really do want pregnant women to trust this vaccine or even parents, we have to think about what is acceptable to them," Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an interview.

"We have so much vaccine hesitancy in this country," agreed Jeff Levi of the non-profit Trust For America's Health. "To add ... a new element could well have undermined the efficacy of this campaign," Levi told a hearing this week before a Congressional subcommittee.

This frustrates the World Health Organization, which says the global capacity to make influenza vaccines is about 3 billion doses a year -- not enough to cover the population of 6.8 billion people. WHO has hoped rich countries would donate leftover H1N1 vaccine to others.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department was ready to try adjuvants had the pandemic been worse. H1N1 swine flu has infected an estimated 22 million Americans and killed 3,900, but it so far does not appear to be any deadlier than seasonal influenza.

The worry is that it is affecting younger adults and children instead of the elderly usually targeted by flu, and has the potential to mutate into something more deadly.

"If things had been worse and this would have been a more severe pandemic, we may well have needed to go that way anyway," Levi said. (Reuters)

LONDON - A severe H1N1 flu pandemic could cost the UK economy 72 billion pounds ($121 billion), British scientists said on Friday, but advised against closing schools even if the current mild pandemic takes a turn for the worse.

Researchers from the London School of Economics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Edinburgh University said a "high fatality" pandemic would cut gross domestic product by 3.3 to 4.3 percent, or 55.5 billion to 72.3 billion pounds.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, said several factors could exacerbate that impact -- the extra strain on an economy already in recession, the closure of schools and the absence of large numbers of people from work.

"School closures and...absenteeism, whether imposed by government or the result of fear of infection in the population, could greatly increase the economic impact of a pandemic while providing questionable health gains," the researchers wrote. (Reuters)

OSLO - Norwegian health authorities said on Friday they have discovered a potentially significant mutation in the H1N1 influenza strain that could be responsible for causing the severest symptoms among those infected.

"The mutation could be affecting the virus' ability to go deeper into the respiratory system, thus causing more serious illness," the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said in a statement. (Reuters)

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.” (NYT)

CHICAGO - Making drastic changes to U.S. breast cancer screening guidelines will take much stronger evidence than that offered by a federal advisory panel this week, U.S. doctors said on Friday.

They said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation advising against routine mammograms for women in their 40s was a gamble many doctors are not willing to take.

The recommendations to scale back breast cancer screening touched off a fierce backlash from physicians and an outcry from women, forcing U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to renounce the guidelines and assure women they did not reflect U.S. policy.

Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, rejects the notion offered by some Republican politicians that the guidelines are motivated by a push to ration healthcare.

But he said such decisions need to be based on strong evidence, especially when evidence is conflicting. (Reuters)

THE United States Preventive Services Task Force’s recommendation this week that women begin regular breast cancer screening at age 50 rather than 40 is really nothing new. It’s almost identical to the position the group held in the 1990s.

Nor is the controversy that has flared since the announcement something new. It’s the same debate that’s gone on in medicine since 1971, when the very first large-scale, randomized trial of screening mammography found that it saved the lives only of women aged 50 or older. Despite the evidence, doctors continued to screen women in their 40s. (NYT)

The federal Preventive Services Task Force, the group that created a political firestorm this week with its recommendation that women get less-frequent mammograms, was created to be insulated from politics.

Yet, some observers say, its apolitical nature may have made it naïve about just how strongly Congress; some professionals, like radiologists; advocacy groups, like the American Cancer Society; and members of the public would react.

As soon as the task force’s guidelines were released on Monday, recommending against routine mammograms for most women in their 40s and saying women should consider having the screening test every other year instead of annually, the maelstrom erupted.

Republicans and some groups, like the American College of Radiology, said the guidelines were made in response to the Obama administration’s wish to save health care dollars. (Gina Kolata, NYT)

This week, the science of medicine bumped up against the foundations of American medical consumerism: that more is better, that saving a life is worth any sacrifice, that health care is a birthright.

Two new recommendations, calling for delaying the start and reducing the frequency of screening for breast and cervical cancer, have been met with anger and confusion from some corners, not to mention a measure of political posturing.

The backers of science-driven medicine, with its dual focus on risks and benefits, have cheered the elevation of data in the setting of standards. But many patients — and organizations of doctors and disease specialists — find themselves unready to accept the counterintuitive notion that more testing can be bad for your health.

“People are being asked to think differently about risk,” said Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of public health at Columbia University. “The public state of mind right now is that they’re frightened that evidence-based medicine is going to be equated with rationing. They don’t see it in a scientific perspective.” (NYT)

LOS ANGELES - Moviegoers who tuck into a medium popcorn and a soft drink could be eating the equivalent of three McDonald's quarter-pounder burgers topped with a dozen scoops of butter, according to a U.S. study.

A laboratory analysis of snacks sold at U.S. cinemas and commissioned by the Center for Science and Public Interest (CSPI) found a medium popcorn and soft drink contained 1,160 calories and three days' worth -- 60 grams -- of saturated fat.

"Who expects about 1,500 calories and three days' worth of heart-stopping fat in a popcorn and soda combo? That's the saturated fat of a stick of butter and the calories of two sticks of butter," said CSPI senior nutritionist Jayne Hurley in a statement.

"You might think you're getting Bambi, but you're really getting Godzilla."

She said even sharing a small portion of popcorn between two people would mean consuming a day's worth of saturated fat, the kind that clogs arteries and is linked to heart disease.

Hurley said every tablespoon of "buttery" oil topping adds another 130 calories according to the study published in Nutrition Action Healthletter.

"Asking for topping is like asking for oil on French fries or potato chips," she added. (Reuters Life!)

NASA's rocket scientists have been debunking on their official website the current "end of the world" hysteria generated by the latest Hollywood Armageddon movie -- 2012.

In an alternately serious and mocking entry titled "No, The World Isn't Going to End in 2012" at www.nasa.gov, they explain that no, come Dec. 21, 2012, the supposed end of the Mayan calendar, the world isn't going to be destroyed by (a) unusual solar activity, the theory in 2012, or (b) getting clobbered by another planet -- another popular scenario.

Now, if only NASA's space cadets could get their own doomsday climatologist -- James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- to stop preaching end-of-the-world hysteria about man-made global warming, they might do some good.

Because as long as Hansen, one of Al Gore's senior scientific advisers on An Inconvenient Truth (enough said) and the first climatologist to start banging the Armageddon drum on global warming 20 years ago, keeps racing around the world hysterically preaching we only have a few years left to save the Earth -- his latest number is four, according to a recent interview with the Sunday Observer -- NASA will remain a maze of contradictions, hypocrisy and unintentional irony. (Lorrie Goldstein, Winnipeg Sun)

Since 200 AD, scaremongers have been describing human beings as ‘burdensome to the world’. They were wrong then, and they’re still wrong today. (Brendan O’Neill, sp!ked)

In the late summer of 1965 a disorganized storm system formed over the warm, tropical waters of the mid Atlantic. Soon the storm grew into a high-powered cyclone—a twisting mass of wind and water that would torment the Gulf Coast in the coming days. The National Hurricane Center gave it a hauntingly innocuous name: Hurricane Betsy.

Storm prediction was still in its infancy then and researchers could not get a read on Betsy’s erratic path. She zigzagged north from Puerto Rico and first seemed to be heading straight toward the Carolinas. At the last moment, however, Betsy swerved toward the Bahamas, then again toward Florida, finally veering west of the peninsula and straight toward Louisiana.

On September 9 Betsy hit the southern tip of the state. Almost every building in the small coastal town of Grand Isle was quickly destroyed. With 150 mph (240 km/h) winds, Betsy barreled up the Barataria Basin toward New Orleans. Lake Pontchartrain—which is just north of the city and is connected to the Gulf of Mexico—swelled with raging waters. Easterly winds pounded the high waters, in some areas easily topping the levees meant to protect the city. In streets in the eastern part of town water reached the eaves of houses.

Betsy finally calmed near Little Rock, Arkansas. She had dropped only 4 in. (100 mm) of rain on New Orleans and had claimed 81 lives and caused more than $1 billion in damage. Unlike any storm before it, Betsy made clear that the city was all too vulnerable to hurricanes. Cradled in a wide southern meander of the Mississippi River just north of the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is surrounded by Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Borgne to the east, and lakes Cataouatche and Salvador to the south. This ring of freshwater is also surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico. To make matters worse, most of the city is below sea level.

Soon after the damage from Betsy was assessed, Congress made a historic decision to appropriate federal funds to build a system of levees to protect the city from a similar storm in the future. Its cultural significance aside, New Orleans was fast becoming the most important port in the nation—feeding commodities up the Mississippi to all of the Midwest and serving as an important base for the burgeoning oil and gas industry. Congress was not about to let it wash away.

Today New Orleans rests within a bowl formed by 16 ft (4.9 m) tall levees, locks, floodgates, and seawalls, the edge of the bowl extending for hundreds of miles. It is bisected from west to east by the Mississippi River, which is also contained within massive engineered embankments. Water flows through and all around the city while its residents go about their daily routines. A system of levees forming a ring around the northern half of the city to protect it from surging waters in Lake Pontchartrain is set to be completed within the next decade. Construction of a similar system around the southern half of the city will probably take several years longer than that.

But almost 40 years after beginning these projects, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the midst of reassessing them on the basis of an ominous question: Are the protective barriers high enough? (Civil engineering Magazine, June 2003)

Environmentalists across the world are to be enlisted as armchair detectives to monitor satellite images of rainforests and report any illegal logging.

The images will be frequently updated and anyone with internet access will be able to make instant comparisons with historical images and spot destruction of rainforest almost as soon as it happens. (The Times)

How did fur, once taboo, become so acceptable – desirable even – again? Elizabeth Day investigates an ethical dilemma that goes to the heart of the fashion industry – and meets the animal rights campaigner who refuses to be defeated ( Elizabeth Day, The Observer)

There are two different stories coming from the same political party on global warming, leading to only one conclusion: President Obama is about to (or has) ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to mandate some type of cap on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Harry Reid and other democratic leaders in the Senate have clearly indicated that cap-and-trade legislation will be put off at least, until what they call “spring”, which is long after the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen next month. At the same time, President Obama has said that the U.S., along with China, will announce some type of emissions cap in Copenhagen. Obviously this cannot refer to legislation that has yet to be voted on in the Senate.

President Obama keeps using the language “operationally significant” when referring to what the U.S. will agree to in Copenhagen. The only way that he can get around the Senate and still have a credible position in Copenhagen is for the EPA to announce specific regulations for carbon dioxide emissions between now and the conclusion of the Copenhagen meeting in mid-December. (Patrick J. Michaels, Cato at liberty)

LONDON, Nov 18 - Emissions trading stands at a crossroads -- a future as a $2 trillion market if the United States bolsters it, or as a modest sideline to energy and commodities trade if a new climate treaty is not agreed.

Some players have bet on the growth of the $126 billion global carbon market after 2012 but regulatory uncertainty will be drawn out for another year as a deadline for a binding treaty on greenhouse gas emissions was pushed back to 2010 this week.

That uncertainty about the future form of emissions trading after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 could put off new entrants and discourage banks, brokers, funds and commodity traders from expanding their operations.

"It looks like carbon trading will remain a small backwater in commodities markets," said David Metcalfe, chief executive of UK-based research group Verdantix. (Reuters)

Maurice Strong's authoritarian saviour - "Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions."

Hollywood isn't alone in its anticipation of Armageddon. Writing in the summer issue of World Policy Journal, Maurice Strong - Canada's very own prophet of doom - unequivocally embraces the apocalypse. Straight-forwardly entitled "Facing Down Armageddon: Environment at a Crossroads," Mr. Strong's essay ends with a dire warning. "Human existence is at risk," he says. "We face an Armageddon that is both real and imminent." Yet he implicitly grasps for hope - choosing at any rate not to specify (as the new film 2012 does) the precise day, month and year of the catastrophe.

More so than most people who assert that The End Is Near, however, Mr. Strong gives humanity a provisional way out. Reform democracy, he says, by - more or less - getting rid of it. Although he doesn't say this as candidly as he could have, his exact words leave little doubt: "Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions." This is not a new argument. In one historic usage, it was deployed to celebrate fascism - because ballot-box democracy couldn't make trains run on time. (Neil Reynolds, Globe and Mail)

I find it strange that liberal environmentalists, who believe human beings need to conform to nature and natural processes, say that we need to interrupt global warming to avoid mass dislocation and disaster. That seems contradictory, but they make the argument on the basis of their belief that we humans have interfered with nature and need to undo our misdeeds.

The evidence says otherwise. (Annuit Coeptis)

Revenge of the Climate Laymen - Global warming's most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science.

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang's Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts. (Anne Jolis, WSJ)

In “What They Really Believe” (NYT, Nov 17), Tom Friedman states (before the usual tirade against “willfully blind” non-believers in global warming):

“If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress“, and what has already come out of it in the House of Representatives, you will not find anything remotely like the “serious energy/climate bill” global warming advocates such as Mr Friedman are opining for.

Surely not even “green hawks” believe that the pork-laden 1,400-pages of the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009″ (aka “Waxman-Markey”) will bring anything practical about climate change? Unless, that is, one is talking about “green hawks” that are “willfully blind“, and (literally) “hurting America’s future to boot“. (OmniClimate)

Back in the make-believe realm: Climate model sets tough targets - International group outlines steps needed to reach 'safe' levels of carbon dioxide.

A new model suggests that emissions will have to near zero by 2100.Ingram Publishing

Carbon dioxide emissions will have to be all but eliminated by the end of this century if the world is to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2 ºC, scientists warned yesterday. And it might even be necessary to start sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

The findings are the culmination of five years work by Ensembles, a major European research consortium led by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and involving 65 other research institutes worldwide. In the first study of its kind, scientists in the project used a variety of the latest global climate models to determine the reductions needed to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases, termed CO2 equivalents, at 450 parts per million. That level, which offers a reasonable chance of keeping the temperature rise under 2ºC, is the goal of European climate policy.

The results suggest that to achieve that target, emissions would have to drop to near zero by 2100. One of Ensemble's models predicted that by 2050, it might also be necessary to introduce new techniques that can actually pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. (Olive Heffernan, Nature News)

The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.

I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Fear is as infectious as any virus, and gives many Americans a warped view of the dangers posed by vaccines, genetically engineered crops and other beneficial technologies, New Yorker writer Michael Specter said in Seattle Tuesday.

Touting his new book "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives," Specter took aim at the kind of anti-science sentiment he says is hijacking public discourse and policy.

"We need to step back and look at the other side of every issue - and we never do," Specter said at a lecture at the University of Washington sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

He was particularly critical of parents, like many who live on Vashon Island, who refuse to vaccinate their children. "This is insane," he said. "Vaccines are the most effective public health measure in the history of the world, except for clean water."

Study after study has shown no evidence that vaccines cause autism, yet people ignore a mountain of data and instead focus on unproven horror stories from neighbors or things they read on the Web, he said. "People jump to conclusions. They decide what makes sense to them intuitively." (Seattle Times)

Why, one might start considering the possibility that a lot of the climate debate is as relevant and as important today as a discussion about the relaxation of costumes, the good old days and the decline in University exam standards (=something more or less in the news since the times of Cato the Censor some 23 centuries ago).

But of course…no, now it is different! Now “we have satellites monitoring high-latitude snow cover, thinning sea ice and deep-layered atmospheric temperature increases, coupled with ground observations revealing the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (85 percent ice loss since 1912) and many other glaciers“.

With less than three weeks remaining before negotiators gather in Copenhagen to hammer out a global response to climate change, a rapid-fire succession of countries are unveiling national plans that serve as opening bids for reining in heat-trapping emissions.

“The list of what is on the table is rather long,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting, which runs from Dec. 7 to 18 in Copenhagen.

But, speaking at the United Nations headquarters on Thursday, he seized on the latest pledges to take aim at the United States, which has not yet played its hand.

“We now have offers of targets from all industrialized countries except the United States,” Mr. de Boer said. He emphasized that he was looking to the United States for “a numerical midterm target and commitment to financial support.”

“This is essential, and I believe this can be done,” he said. (NYT)

CLIMATE CHANGE was at the top of President Obama's agenda in China Tuesday, just three weeks before representatives from 192 countries meet in Copenhagen for a much-anticipated international climate conference. And he came tantalizingly close to saying what the rest of the world has been waiting years to hear: that next month the United States, the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, will finally come to the table with a specific carbon reduction target. (Washington Post)

Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have been working overtime to craft a climate bill that can attract significant GOP support. But they aren’t exactly scoring points with their mutual best friend in the Senate, John McCain.

“Their start has been horrendous,” McCain said Thursday. “Obviously, they’re going nowhere.”

McCain has emerged as a vocal opponent of the climate bill — a major reversal for the self-proclaimed maverick who once made defying his party on global warming a signature issue of his career. (Politico)

Europe needs to take the lead and face down Barack Obama's 'no we can't' attitude on agreeing a climate change deal (Joss Garman, The Guardian)

AUSTRALIA will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, a leading global warming sceptic says.

Adelaide University professor of mining geology, Ian Plimer, said he feared Australia would become an economic backwater if due diligence was not part of developing climate change policy.
"My greatest fear is this country's lights will go out and the rest of the world will think no one is home - and they will be right," Professor Plimer said today.

"Australia will go broke and will become the laughing stock of the world if our political leaders keep making decisions on climate change based on ideology rather than on science. (AAP)

After four days of emissions trading negotiations behind closed doors and still no deal in sight, the shadow boxing on climate change in the Senate has become personal.

Coalition climate change sceptics have accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of "bloated moral vanity" and "arrogance" in driving the debate.

Liberal MP Dennis Jensen has predicted 30 MPs and Senators will cross the floor to vote against the emissions trading scheme should the majority of Liberals decide to support the legislation at next Tuesday's party-room meeting.

After the Government ramped up personal attacks on Opposition MPs who are committed to voting against the scheme, Coalition Senators hit back.

Liberal Senator Brett Mason accused Mr Rudd of being led by his ego in pushing a scheme before next month's global climate change talks in Copenhagen.

"There's only one reason, just one reason, to rush in before the rest of the world acts, and that is Kevin Rudd's bloated moral vanity," he said.

"We have seen in this debate the ugly devolution of Kevin Rudd.

"Kevin Rudd, the nerd from Nambour, wants to transform himself into Kevin Rudd the cool kid from Copenhagen, and for that ugly transformation, thousands of Australians will be losing their jobs.

"It's not about a healthy planet, it's about Kevin Rudd's unhealthy ego. And though they might be about both of a similar size, they are not the same.

"Because what's good for Kevin Rudd is not good for Australia."

Liberal leader in the Senate Nick Minchin took a similar line, saying an emissions trading scheme was not in the national interest.

"Mr Rudd's arrogance and vanity in wanting to lead the world in cutting C02 emissions is really sickening," he said.

"He's happy for every Australian to pay a huge price to satisfy his ego. The Senate overwhelmingly rejected this abomination in August; it should do so again." (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

MALCOLM Turnbull is facing growing shadow cabinet pressure to vote down the government's emissions trading bills, with former minister Tony Abbott abandoning his earlier support for the Opposition Leader's strategy to try to amend and pass the scheme.

Mr Abbott's shift, and Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin's strong advocacy of the "vote no" view within the Coalition, will make it harder for Mr Turnbull to persuade his shadow cabinet to support the deal expected to be finalised between the government and the opposition by early next week. (The Australian)

MORE than half the Coalition's 37 senators have formally declared their opposition to Malcolm Turnbull's desire to cut a deal with Labor on the emissions trading scheme, setting up a showdown next week that many fear could tear the Opposition apart.

As the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, linked the heatwave savaging southern Australia to global warming, the Coalition senators split into two camps - those backing Mr Turnbull and those backing the Opposition Senate leader and climate change sceptic, Nick Minchin.

In the most open show of defiance to date, 12 Liberals and all five Nationals sat in solidarity behind Senator Minchin as he slammed the emissions trading scheme and Mr Rudd's desire to pass it before the Copenhagen conference next month.

''Mr Rudd is prepared to sacrifice Australia's national interest on the altar of his vanity,'' Senator Minchin said. (SMH)

The weekend news reports suggested that Climate Change Minister Penny Wong “backflipped” by opening up the possibility of excluding agriculture from Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

My impression is that Senator Wong is not a woman who does backflips, even in the privacy of her own home. Agriculture might not be “in”, but by no means is it “out”, either.

Many people, including yours truly, can’t see how agriculture can operate within an emissions trading scheme, particularly if our international trading partners are not on board at the same time.

But sitting outside the CPRS will be no offsets gravy train; at worst, being “out” could squeeze farmers even harder between rising input costs and inadequate returns on outputs. (Stock and Land)

In the New Scientist magazine, the writers argue that your personal carbon footprint should be made public because knowledge of your misdeeds might change your ways. They ask: "Would you want your neighbors, friends or colleagues to think of you as a free rider, harming the environment while benefiting from the restraint of others?"

This is an excellent question, for it exposes the real motivation behind most climate change apostles: to allow these gasbags the superior pleasure of shaming you.

It's all about denigrating your reputation in order to elevate theirs; a self-satisfied reward for their sheep-like devotion to climate change hysteria. ( Greg Gutfeld)

Carbon emission: smoke rises from a devastated peatland forest in Indonesia’s Riau province

One does not have to venture off the beaten track to discover why south-east Asia’s biggest economy is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

For mile after mile on Sumatra and Borneo, the country’s once ubiquitous tropical rainforests, and crucially those growing on the especially carbon-rich peat swamps, are being systematically felled and the peat drained, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The perpetrators range from wealthy paper and palm oil companies to poor farmers.

In many areas the degraded remains of the jungle are then set alight to accelerate what would otherwise be a costly land clearing process. This results in more emissions as well as areas of up to thousands of square kilometres being blanketed in a choking smog that forces schools to close, cripples regional air traffic and sees hospital admissions soar. (Financial Times)

This week the round-up finds political hackery, partisan shenanigans and something called climate justice. Some Germans wonder how to get America’s attention (which might make Poland nervous) and Hopenchangen in Copenhagen is even more doomed than the planet. (Daily Bayonet)

Land Use as Climate Change Mitigation by Brian Stone [Associate Professor Center for City and Regional Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology].

One of the earliest journalistic accounts of climate change in the American media appears in a 1950’s edition of Popular Mechanics. While only a single paragraph in length, the piece is remarkable in at least two respects. First, the description of the basic workings of the global greenhouse effect is entirely consistent with our understanding of this phenomenon today, anticipating by more than half a century what has become the most significant policy challenge of our time. Second, and perhaps more telling in this regard, is the placement of the article. Appearing on the final pages of the magazine and following a piece titled, “Dutch entertainer rides tiny bike,” the editor’s positioning of the piece reflects accurately the light in which global warming would be viewed throughout much of the intervening period: more as a meteorological curiosity than as a problem worthy of a serious policy response.

Today, one could argue that the phenomenon of the urban heat island effect is generally regarded in the climate change literature in a similar light: as a meteorological anomaly occurring over a relatively small percentage of the Earth’s land surface, with few implications for larger scale climate phenomena. However, as I argue in a forthcoming article in ES&T (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es902150g), the urban heat island effect can be understood to be only the most acute manifestation of a more geographically expansive mechanism through which land use change is altering climate at the regional to sub-continental scales. Consistent with an established and growing body of evidence linking land use to regional scale climate changes, an analysis of temperature trends in the most populous U.S. cities since the 1950s suggests land use to be playing a role in urban climate change comparable in magnitude to that of greenhouse gas emissions.

In light of this body of work, focused on the climate forcing effects of land use change within both urban and rural contexts, there is a need for national and international climate change management frameworks to employ land use mitigation strategies. Such strategies would complement well existing frameworks for emissions mitigation and, within the U.S. context at least, capitalize on as of yet unharnessed governing capacities at the local and state levels of government. With the potential for the upcoming Copenhagen talks to produce new binding agreements now greatly diminished, treaty negotiators should focus on augmenting established mitigation strategies with new approaches that can provide signatory nations with greater flexibility in meeting binding targets and facilitate more robust participation amongst developing economies. Land use mitigation can advance both objectives. (Climate Science)

OAKLAND, Calif., Nov. 18 // -- (http://www.myprgenie.com) -- Humanity now requires the resources it would take almost one and a half planets to sustainably produce, according to figures to be released Tuesday by Global Footprint Network. The data show that humanity is demanding nature's resources and producing CO2 at a rate 44 percent faster than what nature can regenerate and reabsorb, meaning it now takes 18 months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in one year. (See www.footprintnetwork.org/factsheet2009 for key findings.) (PRNewswire)

HONG KONG - Melting of the Arctic sea ice due to global warming is diluting surface waters and this is endangering some species of shellfish which need minerals in the water to form their shells and skeletons, scientists have found.

In a paper published in Science, they warned that this has serious implications for ecosystems in the Arctic.

"Organisms that are likely to be affected are from the family of pteropods, also mussels and clams on the sea floor," said Fiona McLaughlin, research scientist at Canada's Institute of Ocean Sciences's department of fisheries and oceans.

Pteropods are minute swimming sea snails. (Reuters)

The US navy has issued its Arctic roadmap, outlining the potential for competition, conflict and climate change in the waters of the icy north.

The scientific consensus is that future Arctic summers will have less and less sea ice, and that has massive implications for the surrounding nations. (ABC News)

Soot, also known as black carbon, is the second-leading cause of global warming after carbon dioxide, and it's totally preventable. We already have the technology to avoid producing it; it's just a matter of using it.

For more information, go to StopSoot.org.

While politicians debate the best ways to cut global carbon dioxide emissions, researchers at Idaho National Laboratory's Center for Advanced Energy Studies are charging ahead on a strategy to defuse the CO2 the world already produces. They want to inject the greenhouse gas deep underground, where it would react with rocks and remain, entombed, for thousands of years.

CAES scientists have been studying this novel approach — called mineral sequestration — for years. They have characterized promising injection sites and run many computer simulations to understand how the process works. But they will soon ramp up their efforts dramatically, thanks to collaborations with international research groups, newly installed lab equipment and a recently awarded $750,000 grant. The CAES team will play a key role in determining if mineral sequestration is a viable strategy for mitigating the impact of climate change — or just a pipe dream.
Fighting climate change by turning CO2 to stone

INL scientists Rob Podgorney (left) and Travis McLing are studying how mineral sequestration works and if it can be harnessed to help blunt the impact of climate change.

"The next year ought to be pretty exciting for us," says geochemist Travis McLing, INL's technical lead for carbon capture and sequestration. "The rubber should really hit the road." (R&D)

Al Gore’s new book had a problem – no big hurricanes since Katrina to put in the book to look “threatening” to the USA. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

The cover opens and closes half and half — so you only see one hurricane…as in the press release photo or the one on Amazon.

But this is the real picture sequence from the book which I looked at Borders today and took cell-phone pictures, original (before the retouching by some “artist”) Note all of the Arctic ice and the size of the Florida Peninsula…

and the final product: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

AccuWeather.com Professional's Joe Bastardi [BIO] asked me to post his thoughts on the recent court ruling faulting the Army Corps of Engineers for the flooding at New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Because all of Joe's blogs are on our subscription Pro site he was unable to post this publicly without doing it here. I haven't researched this topic enough to have an opinion myself, though if you post a (rational) Comment I will forward all Comments to Joe, and, should he respond, I will post responses here.

DISCLAIMER: (Just like when I rant...) These are the opinions of Joe Bastardi and may not reflect those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com.

GOVERNMENT TO BLAME FOR KATRINA FLOODING? HOW ABOUT BUILDING MUCH OF CITY NEAR OR BELOW SEA LEVEL SURROUNDED BY 86-DEGREE WATER?

The ruling that shoddy management by the Army Corp of engineers of a navigation channel seems to me to be a classic case of simply trying to find one cause for something that has multiple causes.

Here, look at this article.

Now let me, since it was on national TV on Friday p.m. before Katrina that I told people to get out of New Orleans, weigh in on this.

1) Katrina was not because of global warming. If you want to play that card, then explain why it weakened from a 5 to a 3 before landfall, something that may have happened multiple times in seasons like 1915-1916 as we didn't have constant recon then. So no global warming finger.

2) The city is lucky to be alive in the first place. Someone has got to say it, and out of respect for what happened there, I have kept my mouth shut except in talks I give, but face it, you build a city near or under sea level, and surround it with water that can support Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricanes, what do you expect to happen? The dirty little secret that no one wants to address but I will, is New Orleans was lucky. The attack by Katrina was not a full frontal assault, but a pincer movement that spared the city the prime devastation. Push water back west to the north of the city, then have the northwest wind blast it back in. However, if you get the track of the 1947 hurricane and it's as strong as Katrina, then the city would be devastated probably beyond repair. I don't know if people understand that. The track from the east-southeast hitting NORTH of the mouth of the Mississippi and moving right over the town would push the 20- to 30-foot surge, not 9-12 feet like Katrina, back through lakes Bourne and Pontchartrain with the full fury of the storm passing directly over the city.

Last week Senator Max Baucus joined several mainstream environmentalists in adding pine beetle outbreaks to a long list of things that can be blamed on climate change. As Baucus said in a Congress Quarterly report,

A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day.

The findings, reported this week by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.

Previous analysis of ice cores has shown that the climate consists of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods roughly every 100,000 years. This new investigation shows temperature 'spikes' within some of the interglacial periods over the last 340,000 years. This suggests Antarctic temperature shows a high level of sensitivity to greenhouse gases at levels similar to those found today.

Lead author Louise Sime of British Antarctic Survey said,

"We didn't expect to see such warm temperatures, and we don't yet know in detail what caused them. But they indicate that Antarctica's climate may have undergone rapid shifts during past periods of high CO2." (PhysOrg.com)

While this article makes a strong case, looking at SST and CO2 can also be revealing:

The oceans play a key role in regulating climate, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air. Now, the first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era suggests the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions—a finding with potentially wide implications for future climate. The study appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, and is expanded upon in a separate website.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

A new study by University of Newcastle researchers is questioning widespread claims that the drought experienced in Australia's Murray Darling Basin is a result of CO2 emissions.

The analysis, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that the cause of elevated temperatures in the Murray Darling Basin was a combination of natural factors. (Science Alert)

Bill Illis and Bob Tisdale will likely make use of this. h/t to WUWT reader Chris D.

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

The 2009 database, updated from the 2005 edition, is significantly larger providing approximately 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports. The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

WASHINGTON - Executives from two major oil companies told Congress on Thursday that the U.S. government should open more offshore areas to oil and natural gas drilling so America can rely less on foreign suppliers.

"There is some hypocrisy in locking these resources away while relying on resources produced in other countries," said Marvin Odum, the President of Shell Oil Co., the U.S. unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

"Instead, we should embrace policies that provide access to our own oil and gas resources," Odum told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at hearing on offshore energy production.

The U.S. Interior Department is considering a five-year plan that might open new offshore areas to drilling.

But many environmental groups oppose expanded offshore drilling, fearing oil spills could result, especially when energy companies move into the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico where platforms are susceptible to hurricanes. (Reuters)

The 1999 Michael Mann movie The Insider remains one of my favorites. The story of Jeffrey Wigand’s “outing” of Big Tobacco’s lying to Congress over the real science behind cigarette addiction is inspiring. But it seems to me, we may be in danger of running away with a romantic notion of the modern phenomena of “whistle-blowing,” especially in light of the claims by an un-named insider at the International Energy Agency that the agency deliberately overstated available oil reserves.

As a highly opinionated journalist and analyst, I have a long history of engaging in public debate on numerous issues and have always been publicly accountable for my public utterances. I have long despised who believe they have the public interest at heart while cloaking themselves in personal anonymity. The chief reason is that it now becomes impossible to question the facts and motives of those who have publicly impugned the integrity of work colleagues while themselves avoiding such scrutiny.

Take how the story of the IEA’s latest energy report has gained less headlines than those garnered by an anonymous IEA whistle-blowing ‘insider’ which was was broken in the UK by The Guardian newspaper. It headlined: “Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower.” In fact, it transpires from the article itself, that this “US pressure” was more felt than applied. But then a strongly anti-American paper would not worry about such a trifle. The core of the paper’s story rests on the whistle-blowing “senior official” who ascribes “an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves”. (Peter C Glover, Energy Tribune)

As people wonder if the Copenhagen conference will lead to any significant outcomes, the dramatic expansion of carbon-intensive infrastructure continues with little apparent worry about the effects of climate policies. From a quick tour of news from Asia over the past day or so:

From India:

The Queen's Speech has outlined an Energy Bill, which is expected to give the regulator Ofgem more power to intervene on behalf of consumers.

The intention is to provide more support for energy consumers and to tackle fuel poverty.

The bill also introduces a financial incentive for carbon capture and storage (CCS) which stops greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere. (BBC)

With Copenhagen just days away the ragtag bill in the Queen's speech failed to send the message the green sector needs (James Randerson, The Guardian)

Green energy investments are coming from every direction. Whether it is the stimulus package or the cap and trade bills proposed in Congress, the government is eager to invest taxpayer dollars in renewable energy technology. As Americans become desensitized to the copious amounts of money the government is spending, clean energy investments are growing from millions to billions. And companies are chomping at the bit:

Solar power has one major advantage over its more ubiquitous cousin wind power: electricity that is generated during peak demand hours (hot, sunny, air conditioned afternoons). Such makes solar attractive to utilities that value such capacity for peak shaving, cost aside.

The problem of wind is shown by this example. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) leads the nation with more than 8,000 MW of installed wind capacity, yet their resource planning–tasked with keeping the lights on–“counts 8.7 percent of wind nameplate capacity as dependable capacity at peak.”

The limited usefulness of wind and solar is reflected by their low system capacity factors. For example, the capacity factor of a typical utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) or concentrating solar project (CSP) is still limited to about 25% compared to the average for U.S. nuclear power plants of 91.5% in 2008, with many nuclear plants operating at or above 100%.

Also, given the lower capacity factors, the amortized cost of transmission per unit of energy carried is almost four times as high given the wide difference in capacity factors. We explored this systematic problem earlier.

The physics of solar energy production, without subsidy, will continue to conspire to keep the first cost and operating costs of the solar option higher than conventional approaches to producing electricity, especially when the cost of transmission is included in the equation. The capital cost of all the solar technologies are about $6,000/kW and higher (sharp-eyed readers will note that I’ve increased this number from the $5,000/kW estimate provided in earlier posts—the reason is discussed shortly) and projects are moving forward only in particular regions within the U.S. with tough RPS requirements and large subsidies from states and the federal government.

In Part I, we reviewed the enormous scale and capital cost considerations of PV projects and then introduced the standard taxonomy of central solar power generating plants. By far the favored technology for utility-scale projects is the CSP option that either produces thermal energy used to produce electricity in the familiar steam turbine process or by concentrating the sun’s thermal energy on an air heat exchanger to produce electricity via an air turbine. In Part II, we reviewed a sampling of recent solar projects.

This final post explores the latest cost solar project cost data and then rising interest in hybrid projects that combines these two solar energy conversion technologies with conventional fossil-fueled technologies. Hybrid projects offer the opportunity for utilities to reduce fuel costs, while simultaneously helping utilities cope with onerous renewable portfolio mandates.

Renewable energy does generate a larger portion of the world’s electricity each year but the reported numbers are misleading. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA, a trade organization that promotes solar energy technologies) recently released its 2008 Year in Review report wherein the organization estimated the solar industry growth over the past year. According to SEIA’s number, the total capacity of the solar industry grew by 1,265 MW in 2008, up from 1,159 MW installed in 2007, a modest increase. However, since my first post in early October where I first referenced this report, a closer look at the numbers reveal much creative accounting in SEIA’s numbers. Their mistake, and it’s a doozie, is they sum the electrical production of a photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) systems that produce electricity with the thermal energy production of solar water heating. No can do. [Read more →] (Robert Peltier, MasterResource)

A report out from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting, which was held in Barcelona, identifies peaty wetlands as a major source of CO₂. Marshes, swamps and bogs emit about 1.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year as a result of human activity that drains them. If those dried out former swamps catch fire that amount can double and large amounts of aerosols can be emitted as well. With governments offering subsidies for growing biofuel crops the question is, how do we stop people from draining the world's remaining wetlands?

According to Hans Joosten of the University of Greifswald, Germany, one of the report’s authors, drained peatlands emit a disproportionate amount of carbon dioxide. Although drained peat occupies a only 0.3% of the world’s land surface, it is responsible for 6% of man-made CO₂ emissions. The report identifies the nations most involved with this swamp draining activity. Topping the list is Indonesia, with emissions of 500 million tons of CO₂ a year, not including additional emissions due to fire. Though Indonesia is by far the largest offender, a number of developed countries are guilty as well. Next on the list is Russia, followed by China, America and Finland (see chart).

Much of the swamp draining in Indonesia can be attributed to replacing moisture-loving rubber trees with oil palms, used to make biofuels for import to Europe and China. According to Indonesia’s own figures, 9.4 million acres of forest have been planted with oil palm since 1996, an area larger than the American states of New Hampshire and Connecticut combined. That works out to 2,000 acres a day, or about a football field a minute. Indonesia is second in palm oil only to nearby Malaysia. “This isn’t mowing your lawn or putting up a factory on the outskirts of town,” said Stephen Brend, a zoologist and field conservationist with the London-based Orangutan Foundation. “It’s changing everything as far as the eye can see.”

More than 10 years after the massive fires of 1997-98 grabbed international headlines, the problem is still far from solved. A recent report for the Indonesian government by McKinsey, a consulting firm, outlined steps to be taken to reduce the damage. The report proposed reducing CO₂ emissions from the country’s peatlands by 900 million tons a year through a combination of halting further marsh deforestation, better water management, and fire control.

Guido van der Werf and a team of researchers has analyzed the density of smog during Indonesian forest fires. The analysis showed that the intensity of the forest fires is directly linked to population density and land use. Nature Geoscience published the results of this research on February 22, 2009. In addition to the major human influences, the researchers also analyzed the influence of two meteorological phenomena. The influence of El Niño on the amount of rainfall was already known, but the Indian Ocean Dipole, which exerts a major influence on water surface temperature, was identified as an equally important factor.

Although severe drought provides conditions conducive to forest fires, it is often humans who are actually responsible. Many fires are deliberately started to free up land for agriculture. The sustained burning of biomass not only releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane but also large quantities of carbon monoxide and particulate matter. Consequently, during major fire years the air quality in Indonesia is many times worse than that in the worlds' most polluted cities. Given the new found importance of aerosols on atmospheric warming the problem has become even more pressing (see “African Dust The New CO₂?,” “Arctic Aerosols Indicate Melting Ice Not Caused By CO₂” and “Warming Caused by Soot, Not CO₂”).

Even so, while forest destruction still causes “high emissions,” the “perspective has changed,” contends van der Werf. The study reflected a lower deforestation rate than the IPCC due to more detailed satellite imagery showing tree coverage. “Carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion have increased substantially” the article in Nature Geoscience said. That makes “the relative contribution from deforestation and forest degradation even smaller.” It seems that climate scientists can not even agree on the importance of not draining and burning the world's remaining swamplands.

One thing that scientists and people all over the world are beginning to understand is that water is becoming a scarce commodity. Though I have reported on the link between biofuels and extreme water use (see “Watering Down Biofuels”) a new article in Science has reiterated the magnitude of the problem. In a a news focus article by Robert F. Service entitled “Another Biofuels Drawback: The Demand for Irrigation” the problem is outlined:

Converting biological feedstocks into biofuel has been found to be an inefficient process (see “Better To Burn Than To Brew Ethanol”). Now it seems that other requirements of biofuel manufacture can place an even greater strain on limited water supplies. Agriculture already consumes 70% of all global freshwater withdrawn worldwide, depleting soil nutrients, draining underground aquifers and promoting desertification. More and more, the amount of water needed to produce a given amount of energy must be factored into the true cost of a power source.

A report from Argonne National Laboratory by Deborah Elcock, an energy and environmental policy analyst, predicts that water consumption for energy production in the US will jump two-thirds between 2005 and 2030—from about 6 billion gallons of water per day to roughly 10 billion gallons per day. Though the increase is driven primarily by population growth, about half of that increase will go toward growing biofuels. Nor is this strictly an American problem.

According to the UN, the world faces a bleak future over its dwindling water supplies. The warning from the UN is based on a comprehensive assessment of the state of the world's fresh water, which involved some 24 UN agencies. “Today, water management crises are developing in most of the world,” says the 3rd World Water Development Report. The demand for water is increasing rapidly because of industrialization, rising living standards and changing diets that include more foods—primarily meat—that require larger amounts of water to produce.

Deepak Divan and Frank Kreikebaum from Georgia Tech, writing in the November 2009 IEEE Spectrum, put the issue into perspective: “organic biofuels can't possibly fuel a growing world economy in a sustainable manner.” By their calculations running the world on biofuels would require crop land equivalent to 193% of Earth's surface and 173% of annual global precipitation to keep the plants watered—an obvious impossibility (see “Biofuels Aren't Really Green”). Yet in both the US and the EU government mandates have been passed requiring the use of biofuels as a way of reducing CO₂ emissions and, to a lesser degree, attaining energy independence.

It is a captivating idea, growing your own fuel supply in the same way food is produced, while at the same time eliminating carbon emissions said to cause global warming. This is particularly attractive to the United States, already an agricultural powerhouse with excess arable land. The ineffectiveness of biofuels—ethanol and biodiesel—has been widely noted, with reports from the EPA, California's CARB and the EU's joint Research Council claiming that biofuels pollute more than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace. Still, this has not prevented the biofuels industry from receiving big government subsidies. Congress's “Cap and Trade” legislation will not fix biofuel's problems either. According to a reassessment of greenhouse gas reduction goals by Timothy D. Searchinger et al., “carbon cap accounting ignores land-use emissions altogether, creating its own large, perverse incentives.”

In 2007, the perceived benefits of biofuels helped spur the US Congress to pass the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), which mandated a nearly fivefold increase in U.S. ethanol production, to 117 billion liters, by 2022. Of this amount, nearly half is slated to come from corn ethanol by 2015. If this goal is pursued it will cause food prices to rise, fresh water to become scarcer, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to expand and overall air pollution to increase. This is not good economic policy. This is not good environmental policy. This is not good energy policy. It is special interest politics at its worst. Biofuels are the last thing the world needs.

THE Government is being warned not to play with fire by promoting the use of an invasive weed to produce biofuel.

Biologist and project officer with the invasive species council, Tim Low, will warn of the potential dangers of cultivating the species Giant Reed (Arundo donax) in a speech to a biosecurity conference in Canberra today.

The giant reed is a member of the grass family and looks similar to sugar cane or bamboo.

The reed is one of the fastest growing plants on earth and during peak conditions is capable of growing as much as 10cm per day.

The speed at which it grows allows it to overcome native plants very quickly and has led to it being declared a noxious weed in a number of countries including some parts of Australia.

"The state of California spends many millions of dollars controlling giant reed, but in Australia, taxpayers' money is being used to promote it as biofuel," Mr Low will tell the conference.

The reed is just one of the candidates for what is known as a second-generation biofuel, where the whole plant is used to produce fuel rather than just the seeds.

The traits that make the reed attractive as a second-generation biofuel crop, being fast growing and low maintenance, also make it an incredibly invasive weed. (AAP)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Perhaps it's merely a sign of the times, when a billion is the new million and firms in many industries have found it easier to get capital from the government than from bankers, bondholders and shareholders, but the price tag implicit in the recommendations of a new cross-industry group formed to promote electric vehicles is startling even in this context. Although I couldn't find the total anywhere in the lengthy report from the Electrification Coalition, the Washington Post tallied the combined cost of their proposals at $124 billion in new government incentives, over and above the billions already being spent under the stimulus bill and other programs to support the R&D, manufacturing, and infrastructure for plug-in electric cars, and to subsidize consumer purchases of them. The frustrating part of this is that I'm in general agreement that electric vehicles probably represent the long-term future of cars. However, I don't believe anyone can know this with sufficient certainty, any more than they knew a few years ago that fuel cell cars were the answer, or in the late 1990s that diesel hybrids were the answer. The report also raises basic questions about how new industries should be built, and at whose expense. (Energy Tribune)

GENEVA - About 40 people have died after being inoculated against H1N1 pandemic flu, but investigations so far show the fatalities were not caused by the vaccine, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday.

The U.N. agency reaffirmed that the pandemic vaccine was safe and voiced concern that some pregnant women and others at risk were shunning it because of a fear of side effects.

"No new safety issue has been identified from reports issued to date ... Reporting so far reconfirms that the pandemic flu vaccine is as safe as the seasonal flu vaccine," Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO's top vaccine expert, told a telephone conference.

Governments have so far reported that 65 million vaccine doses have been administered against H1N1, known as swine flu, in 16 countries, but the true figure is probably higher since immunisation campaigns are under way in 40 countries, she said. (Reuters)

LONDON - The average British woman "hosts" 515 chemicals on her body every day, according to a new study.

The poll of 2,016 women by deodorant-maker Bionsen said most of the pollutants are self-inflicted by women who sprayed on deodorant, slapped on body moisturiser and applied lipstick each morning.

Today's average British woman uses body and facial moisturisers, perfumes, deodorants and various other make-up products, which leave them unknowingly carrying hundreds of chemicals on their bodies throughout the day, Bionsen said.

Moisturiser can contain over 30 different chemicals and perfume up to 400, it added.

More than a third of the women who took part in the study were unaware of the key ingredients in their toiletries, with only nine percent aware of most of the ingredients in the cosmetics they put on each day.

More than 70 percent of the women polled said they were not concerned about the number of chemicals they put on their skin and only one in 10 opted for chemical-free toiletries when shopping. (Reuters Life!)

NEW YORK - Low-carb and high-carb diets work equally well for maintaining weight loss, Australian researchers report.

People had the same success in keeping off the weight they'd lost after sharply cutting their calorie intake for 3 months if they followed a low-carb (also called high-protein) diet or a high-carbohydrate regimen for the following year, Dr. Elizabeth A. Delbridge of the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Victoria and her colleagues found.

Some studies have suggested that high protein diets may be a more effective way to lose weight short-term than high carbohydrate diets, Delbridge and her team note in their report. But there's less evidence on which approach might be better for helping people to keep off weight they've lost, and whether the two diets have different effects on heart health. (Reuters Health)

LONDON - Spanish research appearing to show that very heavy drinking can reduce men's risk of heart disease has come under fire from scientists who say the study is flawed and should not encourage anyone to drink more.

The controversial study found that men who drank moderate, high and very high levels of alcohol had a lower risk of coronary heart disease.

Many previous studies have suggested that moderate drinking -- usually defined as a drink or two per day -- can be a healthy habit, particularly when it comes to heart disease risk. But experts have warned that heavy drinking can damage organs and lead to early death. (Reuters)

With the takeover of health care and frenzied government growth front and center, many are wondering when we will - if we haven’t already - reached a tipping point that fundamentally alters America. Much of what’s been done is described as a temporary fix. However, as President Reagan noted, “There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.”

With this reinvigorated discussion of how big is too big, it is worthwhile to remind Americans of just how massive the Federal government already was before our current woes began. There are few more striking measures of the government’s size than the land mass of the Federal estate. The vast majority of federal lands fall within one of four agencies: the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture’s US Forest Service. At over 258 million acres, the Bureau of Land Management alone is bigger than France and Germany combined. When combined with the other aforementioned agencies, the land area is equal that of ten European nations as shown in the accompanying graph (click it to see a larger version). (The Foundry)

GM crops have a role to play in preventing mass starvation across the world caused by a combination of climate change and rapid population growth, a senior government scientist said yesterday.

Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), called for UK trials of GM foods, arguing that the Government needs to be more open with the public about the risks and benefits of genetically modified foods.

"Over the next 20 to 50 years, the population is going to increase from 6.5 to 9 billion. There will be more extreme weather, more demand for food, meat, and water, a changing climate: it is a very challenging situation, which, if we don't deal with it, could become a nightmare scenario," said Professor Watson. "We have to look at all the technologies, policies and practices, all forms of bio-tech, including GM." (The Independent)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, perhaps Congress’ most vocal skeptic of man-made global warming, essentially declared victory Wednesday in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor.

“I proudly declare 2009 as the ‘Year of the Skeptic,’ the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard,’’ the Oklahoma Republican said.

“Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked.’’

Inhofe recalled his own 2003 remarks in which he said much of the debate over global warming was predicated on fear rather than science.

Alarmists warned of a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, economic dislocations, droughts and mosquito-borne diseases, he said.

Inhofe also recalled his most famous comment in which he suggested that man-made global warming would turn out to be “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

“Today, I have been vindicated,’’ he said.

Inhofe pointed to the upcoming international conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, which previously was viewed as a chance for nations to make some kind of a binding agreement on greenhouse gases.

White House aides said Sunday that a fully binding legal agreement would be put off until a December 2010 meeting in Mexico City, The Associated Press reported.

Inhofe said Wednesday that “the reality, of course, is that Copenhagen will be a disaster.’’

Inhofe is the top Republican on the Senate Environment and
Public Works Committee. He recently helped lead a Republican boycott of that panel’s efforts to act on a major climate change bill.

Democrats were forced to vote the measure out of committee without amendments, and an effort already is under way to come up with a different bill.

That measure now is not expected to be taken up in the Senate until next year. (Tulsa World)

Next month, thousands of UN delegates from over 190 nations, members of the press, and eco-activists from around the world will descend upon Copenhagen, Denmark as part of the United Nations Conference on Global Warming. Yet, even before it begins, the UN conference is being called a "disaster." Just this morning, the Telegraph, a UK newspaper, noted, "The worst kept secret in the world is finally out - the climate change summit in Copenhagen is going to be little more than a photo opportunity for world leaders."

Not too long ago, however, the Copenhagen meeting was hailed as the time when an international agreement with binding limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would finally be agreed to. Eco-activists believed a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress would finally push through mandatory cap and trade legislation and that the United States would finally be ready to succumb to the demands of the United Nations.

The reality, of course, is that Copenhagen will be a disaster. The failure comes at a high cost. Despite the millions of dollars spent by Al Gore, the Hollywood Elites, and the United Nations, climate alarmism has failed. ... (Senator James Inhofe)

Carbon cap-and-trade legislation appears to be Dead Policy Walking in Washington. The devaluation of the Copenhagen climate summit – now the goal is a “politically binding” rather than a “legally binding” agreement — reflects the emerging political reality in the United States. Yes, a bill did pass the House of Representatives in June. Also, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee passed a version earlier this month. So President Barack Obama won’t go to the talks in Denmark with empty pockets next month.

Publicly, Senate Democratic leaders say they are only pushing off debate and consideration of a comprehensive climate change bill until spring. But it is hard to get a major bill passed in a Democrat-controlled Senate when the Democratic majority leader of the Senate wants the bill to go away. And have no doubt that Senator Harry Reid would like to see cap-and-trade go away — or at least disappear until after 2010.

This explains why six different Senate committees will consider the bill, the same recipe for legislative inaction that bogged down healthcare reform. It’s pure politics. The 2010 midterm elections are shaping up to be tough contests for many Democrats thanks to the anti-incumbent mood of a recession-weary electorate. And most signs point to a sustained level of high unemployment. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a recent speech, “The best thing we can say about the labor market right now is that it may be getting worse more slowly.” (James Pethokoukis, Reuters)

This weekend, world leaders announced that they would not reach a legally binding deal on climate change at next month's Copenhagen summit. With the planet in the balance, who's the world's top culprit? (Foreign Policy)

Senator Gillibrand’ wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal last month that understates the gains a cap-and-trade climate policy could yield New York city. She does mention the massive increase in future trading that would result from rationing carbon fuel use. She also correctly points out that forcing carbon constraint contracts into the Procrustean Bed of exchange trades would limit the creativity the gnomes of Wall Street could bring this market socialist enterprise. Were Enron’s Ken Lay still with us, he couldn’t have made the case better. Those aimed at reducing Americans to 1890 energy levels will themselves greatly profit from energy poverty.

However, Senator Gillibrand might have made several additional points. Now that Enron has gone away, New York City is the center of financial wizards who’ve done much to mystify and confuse markets and regulations. It is also the home of some of the most affluent individuals in the world along, of course, with some of the poorest urban dwellers in the world. Thus, there will be great future market potential for NYC as energy rationing is extended from firms to individuals. I raised this point with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, one of the creative capitalists championing energy rationing, at Wall Street Journal’s ECOnomics conference in Santa Barbara a few years ago.

I noted that my wife and I - for ecological reasons - had elected not to have children. As a middle class American, our carbon footprint is a heavy one, undoubtedly that of our children would have been even heavier. Thus, I believed we merited a reasonable allotment of carbon credits. Immelt dodged the question but the logic is unassailable. But, in NYC terms, Fran and I are light-footed indeed. We don’t jet around the world as frequently, our homes are in the relatively less energy intensive areas south of the Mason Dixon line, we don’t watch television and have only one car. Our allotments would thus be minimal compared to the affluent of New York.
The poor in NYC would not be entitled to such credits. They have unfortunately less environmental conscious parenting practices and already experience to a degree the energy poverty that would be exacerbated by cap-and-trade. But, this shortfall could readily be addressed by further taxes on the rich to fund the vital social services needed to offset this problem.

Thus, one can only urge Senator Gillebrand and her fellow social engineers. As the late Peter Bauer noted, there’s lots of money in poverty programs - and even more in energy poverty programs. Two Cheers for the Senator! (Fred L Smith, Cooler Heads)

Watch the video above if you have 10 minutes. It knocks cap and trade, which is good, but argues for “carbon fees and rebates,” which is code for a giant new tax.

Democrats may like the idea because it is undoubtedly an economically superior method of addressing a top-priority item for a key constituency, but it forgets the basic premise of cap and trade: don’t dare admit you’re trying to raise taxes on everyone’s gas and electric bill.

Republicans would be well advised to learn the lesson of Rep. Mark Kirk. Support a giant new tax and you can expect a broad, deep, and vocal constituency to show and ask why a massive new government tax is the solution to what many on the American right see as an unimportant problem (or, in some cases, a non-existent issue).

This is the fundamental structural weakness of every “solution” we see: we live in a country driven by innovation and less government, and yet every proposal comes in the form of a tax or regulation. Find a policy that spurs innovation with the tip of a carrot rather than the tip of a spear and the entire world would be better off.

LONDON - A U.N. summit in Copenhagen next month is unlikely to agree on a new global climate treaty, but carbon market players are urging delegates to seize the opportunity to agree reforms to the $33 billion trade in carbon offsets.

There is a growing global consensus that talks in the Danish capital to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol will lead to only a political agreement including emissions cuts by rich countries, with agreement on a full binding treaty in 2010.

As Kyoto is due to expire in 2012, next year is later than the December 2009 deadline some had hoped for. But market players say this presents delegates with a chance to address some key issues surrounding the carbon offset market.

"If everyone is pragmatic and asks 'what can we fix while we're here?', this could be a golden opportunity for addressing all the institutional and architectural reforms which don't require any targets to be undertaken by the U.S.," said Miles Austin of clean energy project developers EcoSecurities.

"This could be a very clear win for Copenhagen." (Reuters)

Uncertainty over investing in green technologies more dangerous than lack of Copenhagen treaty says Achim Steiner, the head of the UN environment programme (The Guardian)

IN less than three weeks, world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to begin hammering out an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming.

But many clean-energy companies, which make and use the technologies that in theory will help wean the world off polluting fossil fuels, are reacting with a shrug — and not merely because expectations for Copenhagen have plunged.

What matters far more in the near term, the companies say, are national governments’ efforts to provide incentives for developing technologies like wind and solar power or cellulosic ethanol.

Copenhagen “is a very important backdrop,” said Tom Carnahan, the founder and president of Wind Capital Group, a wind developer in St. Louis. “But the real battle for what our energy future is going to be is Washington.” (NYT)

Nov. 18 -- The U.S. Senate won’t try to pass a bill limiting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions for months, clouding the prospects for final legislation as the Obama administration focuses on health care and the economy.

“We’re going to try to do that sometime in the spring,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said of climate-change legislation in remarks to reporters yesterday. He didn’t cite a reason for the delay.

President Barack Obama had sought Senate action on a measure, already passed by the House, in time for talks in Copenhagen next month on a new global climate treaty. The Senate slowdown further jeopardizes the measure’s chances of passage, Whitney Stanco, an analyst in Washington for Concept Capital, said in a report today.

“The spring timeline would push the debate closer to the 2010 mid-term elections, potentially setting lawmakers up for a difficult vote before they face their constituents in the ballot box,” said Stanco, whose company advises investors. (Bloomberg)

STOCKHOLM, Nov 18 - Russia toughened its plans to curb harmful greenhouse gas emissions on Wednesday in a rare encouraging development before United Nations climate talks next month. (Reuters)

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from the University of Adelaide, has already been in the UK to address an audience of more than one hundred. He will return to speak alongside Lord Monckton of Brencheley at a 'climate change lunch' in London in early December.

Today a conference in Brussels will ask Have Humans Changed the Climate? Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph in Ontario and Professor Tom Segalstad from the University of Oslo, who both question the conventional science, will address the issue of global warming.

The lead speaker is an American atmospheric physicist Professor Fred Singer from the University of Virginia.

Speaking before the conference, he said there was no evidence that the increases in carbon dioxide produced by humans causes global warming. He said the temperature of the planet has always varied and even if temperatures do go up, that will be good for humankind.

"We are certainly putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However there is no evidence that this high CO2 is making a detectable difference. It should in principle, however the atmosphere is very complicated and one cannot simply argue that just because CO2 is a greenhouse gas is causes warming," he said. (TDT)

Why anyone other than pro-death, Marxist radicals give any favorable attention to anything that comes out of the United Nations — whether research, policy or anything else — is a mystery to me. Nevertheless because they have the attention of the major media, they must be watched.

Obviously those interested in the Cooler Heads Coalition are focused on the pro-government, anti-freedom and anti-energy agenda-driven UN IPCC. The U.N. Population Fund, which today released a report titled “The State of the World Population 2009,” is another you should be wary of. This political body finds that “women bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, but have so far been largely overlooked in the debate about how to address problems of rising seas, droughts, melting glaciers and extreme weather.”

More promotion of a culture that promotes the eradication of humans for a phony cause. About as far as you can get from “be fruitful and multiply.” (Paul Chesser, Cooler Heads)

November 16, 2009 - The latest morally monstrous proposal out of the environmentalist cult comes from Lord Smith of Finsbury. He suggests that each British citizen be given a government “carbon allowance.”

For any transaction that increases a person’s “carbon footprint” such as using gasoline or taking an airline flight, they would have to “spend” part of their allowance. Once their allowance reaches zero, they would have to pay out of pocket to purchase more credits, assuming that they are available. It is “cap and trade” for the individual.

Appallingly anti-human

The appallingly anti-human nature of this proposal is only surpassed by the appalling ignorance and intellectual laziness of a public that is not appalled by the fact that their politicians are literally leading them to suicide.

An essential aspect of our lives as humans is to employ the materials in our environment for our survival and well-being: converting plants into food; trees into houses; oil into energy; metals into medical equipment, automobiles, and aircraft.

It is often too costly for us to employ carbon dioxide, one of the “outputs” of our act of living, efficiently for our use. We produce CO2 in some of our industrial activities and, indeed, every time we exhale. (As do all animals!) Plants, of course, breathe in our CO2.

The carbon allowance scheme dehumanizes us by teaching us to view ourselves merely as carbon output units, and the less output the better. The implication of this view is that every single human activity—indeed, the very act of living—a sinful indulgence, like some criminal urge for which we should be ashamed and which we should strive to suppress. ( Edward Hudgins, Atlas Society)

The climate debate has plenty of signs of complete inanity, but these signs are increasingly coming from groups that should probably know better. Take the case of the UN Population Fund, which is arguing that free condoms can help to slow greenhouse gas emissions:

What effect will free condoms have on emissions and, ultimately, on climate change?

The idea that family planning should be justified in terms of reducing emissions is, in my view, utter nonsense. Family planning policies are important in their own right, and to justify them in terms of climate change cheapens both the climate change agenda and the family planning agenda. Fortunately, this perspective is widely shared:

The dynamics going here have been well-chronicled by Mike Hulme, who has suggested that much of the debate about climate change is not really about what we can do about climate change, but what climate change can do for us. Helping to sell family planning is probably not among those things.

UPDATE: A reader writes in noting this from The Economist a few weeks ago:

Thomas L. Friedman’s op-ed in the NYT today could have been written by Paul Krugman. And that’s not a compliment.

Friedman, like Krugman, waxes hysterical about those who are opposing the cap-and-trade energy bill - those “deniers.” And, also like Krugman, he sets up those opponents as straw men that he can readily knock down. In today’s article, Friedman worries about U.S. dependence on foreign oil supplied by ”petro-dictators” and he fears ever-rising prices for increasingly scarce fossil fuels.

Friedman’s terror about world population growth, especially growth in developing countries, is Malthusian. (See Julian Simon on population and natural resources in “The Ultimate Resource II.”) . And Friedman doesn’t seem to want those people to use energy to improve their standard of living. Here’s what he says about that dream for a better life:

Such horror one can’t imagine for a person living at a subsistence level in India or China.

In his article, Friedman says that “clean energy” is the answer to the world’s energy problems. He embraces “E.T.” (no, not that visitor from another planet), but “energy technology” that is carbon-less and efficient.

His solution then is to tax conventional energy and subsidize alternative energy sources. Right. That’s clearly an innovative solution that nobody has thought of. And how would this affect the population bomb he fears? Undoubtedly, raising the price of fossil fuels could indeed have an effect on developing countries’ populations. While waiting for those alternative energy sources to develop, they’ll continue to face poverty and resultant devastating diseases. Not surprisingly, Friedman doesn’t address that problem. (Fran Smith, Cooler Heads)

Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem. Continue reading… (The foundry)

A climate scare in Trafalgar Square - Ghost Forest, a new art installation, wants to frighten us into changing our greedy, planet-wrecking ways.

A twenty-first century tribute to the Royal Family? A satirical swipe at the Labour government? A mistaken delivery address? At first, it’s difficult to know what to make of the large hunks of dead wood currently cutting a dash in London’s Trafalgar Square.

That is, until you read the info-boards positioned around the installation or encounter the press-released promotional material. At which point Ghost Forest’s meaning, or better still, its message, will become all too clear: all this modern stuff, this industrial development, has come at an environmental cost we’ve been able to ignore for too long. Why? Because it’s always been over there, in Africa, in South America. But not any more. In the form of huge tree stumps it’s been brought close, dumped in our figurative backyard. To quote its creator, the journalist-cum-artist Angela Palmer, it is an awareness-raising, visual expression of the ‘connection between deforestation and climate change’. (Tim Black, sp!ked)

COP15 is three weeks away, and as expected things are getting hotter by the minute in AGW media outlets such as the BBC.

Then incredibly in the “Scotland” pages an article and a video, part of a “three part special” filmed…in Thailand! Including what is likely to be the silliest ever report ending: “Fiona Walker, reporting Scotland, in the Gulf of Thailand“

(alas, they could kid themselves only up to a point: the “three part special” is classified under “Scotland politics” and Ms Walker clearly introduced as “BBC Scotland’s social affairs reporter“).

NEVER WAS a global conference so hyped up as a make-or-break event as the UN climate summit due to take place next month in Copenhagen. As 15,000 participants, plus many more observers, made their travel arrangements, the stage seemed set for a historic agreement that would start the recovery for a world staring into the abyss of dangerous climate change.

Responsible groups throughout all 192 countries participating in the event had done their bit to sensitise those in authority as to the severity of the situation.

Put simply, if we are to avoid the world warming more than three degrees above pre-industrial levels we need to see global greenhouse gas emissions start to decline seriously in the next decade and fall by at least 50 per cent by mid-century. It is a big ask, but not beyond human ingenuity if the political will and leadership were present.

In Ireland, we were well sensitised to the magnitude of the climate problem and were ready to sign up to whatever the EU countries would agree as part of a global deal. (John Sweeney, Irish Times)

The New York Times reports the now famous example of mass hysteria by proxy following the broadcast of the radio drama, ‘The War of the Worlds’, on October 30, 1938. Many listeners were convinced that a real Martian invasion was in progress.

Will the so-called make-or-break U.N. Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [COP 15], opening in Copenhagen on December 7, follow the now well-established pattern of manic-depression that has predictably characterised nearly all such previous mass climate meetings, including those in The Hague (2000), in Marrakesh, Morocco (2001), in Edinburgh around the G8 Summit (2005), in Montreal (2005), in Nairobi, Kenya (2006), in Bali (2007), and in Poznań, Poland (2008). Copenhagen is already presenting with all the hallmark symptoms, including, and especially so in the UK, hyperbolic mass hysteria by proxy. (Clamour of the Times)

Unfortunately Washington DC is lagging far behind the private sector when it comes to acknowledging just how fraudulent carbon offsets are. The Waxman-Markey cap and trade Continue reading… (The Foundry)

How is the city going to pay the costs of sending its delegation to Copenhagen? By using proceeds from the Boulder's carbon tax.

Whatever you think about Boulder's ambitions to reduce emissions, the real lesson from this episode is that policy makers easily fall prey to engaging in all sorts of activities under so-called "emissions reductions policies" that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing emissions. And whatever the merits of going to Copenhagen are, the trip will do nothing to help Boulder meet its Kyoto goals, which is why the carbon tax exists in the first place. If the city values demonstrating its global leadership and vision (and why not?), it should probably earmark some funds for exactly that purpose. A more politically savvy Council would have taken the funds from elsewhere in the City budget, or better yet, secured external sponsorship of some sort.

On a more positive note, a letter-writer in the Camera today notes that since its passage in 1985, Boulder's non-nuclear policy has thus far prevented a nuclear attack on the city, so perhaps Boulder's delegation to Copenhagen can return with similar success. (Roger Pielke Jr)

<Guffaw!> Reuters can't seriously view the misanthropic nitwits collectively known as the "Climate Institute" as "an independent research organization", surely: Fiscal/Political Risk In Australia ETS Debate: Report

SYDNEY - The Australian government's carbon trading plan would reduce more CO2, create more jobs and produce a budget surplus, compared to opposition plans which carry billions of dollars in fiscal and political risk, according to an independent report issued Thursday.

The Climate Institute released the report on the government's planned Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the world's most comprehensive, and amendments the opposition is seeking before it will support the proposal in a Senate vote expected next week.

"Under both scenarios...the economy will continue to expand strongly even while shifting onto a low carbon footing," Institute, an independent research organization, said in its costings report. (Reuters)

BARACK Obama will attend climate-change talks in Copenhagen next month with no domestic US laws in place to back his position, after Senate leaders confirmed yesterday that debate on legislation would be delayed until next year.

The decision to put off debate on a climate-change bill that has already passed the US House of Representatives reflects a lack of time after congress has been sidetracked for weeks on far-reaching health reforms.

But the delay until March - a blow to the US President's domestic agenda - is also an indication of the lack of support among US politicians for pushing hard to curb carbon emissions at a time of economic uncertainty and high unemployment.

The US postponement is likely to be used by the federal opposition in Australia to argue against the Rudd government going it alone with a climate-change bill when US intentions remain unclear. (The Australian)

“Instead of exposing extreme green elements for what they are, Labor has got into bed with them to secure preferences and votes. That has led to a corresponding opposing reaction in the right. In fact, it is boiling in the bush,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell today during Senate debate on the CPRS bills.

“The last time that level of unhappiness and frustration happened we saw the rise of One Nation. It is up to us, especially The Nationals, to keep the debate on the rails, to prevent it becoming extreme. If we are not their voice, whether by absence or timidity, then they will look to the charlatan extreme right for a lead and for political representation.”

“One view is that the Coalition can get away with supporting the CPRS because the right has nowhere to go. But recent history has shown that when there is disenchantment on the right, Labor stays in power thanks to renegade and rogue elements that hijack and split the conservative vote.”

“The Senate can prevent that move to the extreme by giving rural and regional Australians a fair hearing on the ETS. To ignore or belittle their views would be a grave mistake. They are the ones who would have to wear the ETS, far more than leafy suburb professionals.”

“So this is a warning that we must not forget these people. Regional Australia will be the hardest hit by this ETS. Therefore they should be the first to be considered. And don’t insult them with promises of green jobs. They are seldom in the places where the non-green jobs have been destroyed. Nor do they pay as well as miners’ rates.”

“Australia is embarking on a solo voyage to a new frontier. Of all the countries in the world, none has established a scheme that threatens the competitiveness of their key industries like Rudd’s ETS.” (Senator Ron Boswell)

The museum's patronising poll against global warming ahead of Copenhagen has played right into the sceptics' hands (The Guardian)

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is holding its annual Plenary meeting in Washington on 17-18 November to assess and promote progress towards making information about global environmental change readily available to policy-makers, managers and anyone else who needs it.

"GEO is on track to make critical information about global changes widely and easily available. By making petabytes of data accessible on-line, we will dramatically improve decision-making for the benefit of society," said Jose Achache, Director of the GEO Secretariat.

Some 80 nations, the European Commission and 56 international organizations are coordinating their Earth observation assets and strategies through GEO. They are sharing and interlinking their systems for tracking global trends in carbon levels, climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water resources, ocean temperatures and other critical indicators of planetary health and human well-being. (Press Release)

A self-amplifying effect presently sustains monsoon winds, but it could also disrupt the circulation over land and sea. The periodical rainfall could stop from one season to another or for months within seasons. High air pollution could lead to the disruption, researchers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Online Early Edition. Global warming increases the risk of abrupt monsoon transitions from high-precipitation to dry periods.

"The agricultural food supply for around two billion people in Asia and Africa depends on the eponymous regularity of monsoon rainfall," says the lead author Anders Levermann. The name "monsoon" stems from the Arabic word "mausim" for "season." However, months with extremely scarce precipitation have been observed within monsoon seasons, as in India in 2002, causing economic and humanitarian problems in the affected regions. During the past 11,000 years rainfall in monsoon regions has undergone strong and abrupt changes repeatedly. (ScienceDaily)

Two Greek Earth scientists, Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis, have written down a couple of pages about the climate on their new server:

FEW would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that “within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,” that “a change in our climate ... is taking place very sensibly” and that “men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts”?

That these comments were actually tossed around back in the late 18th century by the Pennsylvania doctor Hugh Williamson, Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster reminds us that history has a tendency to repeat itself. (One can imagine what television talk shows would have been like then. Would Jefferson have promoted “An Inconvenient Treatise” only to be acrimoniously contradicted by Webster on “Hard Quoits,” assuming either could get a word in amid the jabbering of the host?)

In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his “Notes on Virginia” that “both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,” expressing views articulated as early as 1721 by Cotton Mather: “Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground.”

The weather historian James R. Fleming has noted that the vexing scientific challenge in the climate debate has always been “the response of a large, complex, potentially chaotic system to small changes in forcing factors.” Benjamin Franklin understood climatic forcing factors better than anyone, surmising in a 1763 letter to Ezra Stiles that “cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker.” Franklin, our meteorologist emeritus for his seminal work on everything from lightning to northeasters, later surmised (correctly) that a prevailing haze over parts of North America and northern Europe was associated with the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783, and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the new United States. ( Ben Gelber, NYT)

AIR-Worldwide has released an interesting top-10 list of the largest U.S. insured hurricane losses if each historical hurricane had occurred with 2009 exposures. Here are those values:

And here is a similar list of top-10 total damaging storms in the Pielke et al. 2008 (PDF) database as updated to 2009 values in the ICAT Damage Estimator:

There are 8 storms that overlap in the two lists, which we should expect to be different for several reasons. First the AIR-Worldwide list is insured damage and ours is total damage. Second, their list includes business interruption and demand surge and ours does not. This being the case, the AIR-Worldwide list has prompted us to take a second look at the 1947 Fort Lauderdale storm, which has losses that may be underestimated in the NHC database. It appears as 22nd in our 2009 list with an adjusted $16.4B in total losses.

Soon I'll take a look at the AIR-Worldwide earthquake list and see how that compares to our normalized earthquake losses (here in PDF). (Roger Pielke Jr)

The argument over whether or not temperature data reveals global warming or global cooling... or neither... has been raging since the IPCC issued its opinion that the earth was experiencing global warming. The problem is not one of truth versus lies, but a very simple issue of “on what part of the truth are we focusing?”

Global temperature data are notoriously suspect, inconsistent, and discontinuous. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that during the past 30-40 years, there has been a period of moderate warming. From this evidence, a whole body of scientific and political endeavor has arisen to project the environmental and political risks associated with this warming.

Most recently, a study by The National Center for Atmospheric Research [NCAR] has examined daily maximum and minimum record temperatures and concluded that the U.S. is likely to experience a rapid increase in the ratio of maximum to minimum record temperatures. This was based on approximately 55 years of data.

This does not show actual temperatures but variation from a 1901-2000 average. The maximum negative variation is approximately -0.35 to -0.37°C while the maximum positive variation is approximately 0.55 to 0.57°C. Total variation is approximately 0.8°C.

There are two questions that must be asked regarding these data:

Two weeks ago the Climate Change Examiner reported about an online lesson from NOAA’s National Weather Service discussing climate change that questioned CO2’s effect on the climate. The page was removed within 48 hours but has recently been restored – without the controversial comments.

The original lesson, titled “It’s a Gas Man”, was part of a series of lessons on the atmosphere. In it, the lesson stated, that, “there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.” It further went on to say, “The behavior of the atmosphere is extremely complex. Therefore, discovering the validity of global warming is complex as well. How much effect will [sic] the increase in carbon dioxide will have is unclear or even if we recognize the effects of any increase.”

Two days later, on November 4th, the entire lesson was removed from the National Weather Service’s website and returned a ‘page not found’ error message. Email inquiries to the page’s webmaster questioning the page’s removal were not returned.

Now, the page has been restored however it is missing virtually the entire discussion section that had in depth analysis regarding the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere. The time stamp at the bottom of the page maintains the same modified date - September 1, 2009 - however the content has been changed considerably. (Examiner)

A very prominent climate scientist, who writes from a .gov address, sends this to my father after my father simply responded to a scientific query from another climate scientist who put the .gov guy (his colleague) on the distro list (along with a bunch of others, including me):

There is an interesting and quite informative survey of weathercasters that is published in the October 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It is by Kris Wilson and is titled

“Almost two-thirds of this sample disagreed that “global climate models are reliable in their projections for a warming of the planet”

“Two-thirds of this sample also disagreed with the statement that “global climate models are reliable in their projections for local weather patterns”

“……this sample of AMS weathercasters repeatedly expressed their desire to have access to “independent,” “unbiased,” and “reputable” sources of data and information that present “both sides” of the issue.”

I have also been informed of this new survey which is being distributed by the American Meteorological Society.

UPDATE: I have been e-mailed and informed that the two surveys are actually different surveys. The first one is open to all broadcast meteorologists, while the second were selected on known climate change work] (Climate Science)

In 2005 I wrote that it was just a matter of time before air capture -- the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- was going to move to the center of climate policy debates. Since that time I have been following the issue closely and even doing a bit of research on it (PDF). Today, Nature reports on the final results of a major European research project called Ensembles:

Any bets on whether or not people will "stop building new CO₂-emitting devices within the next decade"? As I have often said, no one really knows the possibilities of air capture (chemical, biological, geological) and sequestration at scale, and we won't until a greater effort is devoted to it. But whether you like it or not, the slow pace of mitigation policies to meaningfully deflect trajectories from business-as-usual means that air capture is gaining traction as a policy option, and will continue to do so. It is not at the center of debates over climate -- yet -- but it is moving closer. (Roger Pielke Jr)

Carbon nanotech has been applied to everything from boat construction to windshields and now, with a licensing agreement from Livermore Lab, a Hayward, Calif., company will apply it to water desalination and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has licensed a new carbon nanotube technology to its spinoff company Porifera. The company will develop permeable membranes for CO2 sequestration, water desalination, and other liquid-based separations based on discoveries made at Livermore.

The technology integrates carbon nanotubes into polymer membranes, increasing the flux of carbon dioxide capture by two orders of magnitude thanks to the material's unique "nanofluidic" properties. This technique could enable a less expensive method of capturing carbon from coal plants, according to the Livermore. Sequestering CO2, a greenhouse gas emission, is one strategy for curbing global warming, although this particular process has yet to prove out on a industrial scale.

"The technology is very exciting," said Olgica Bakajin, former Livermore scientist and now chief technology officer at Porifera. "The reason it makes sense to do it is because of the unique nanofluidic properties of carbon nanotube pores. It's at the right place to take it to the marketplace." ( Mark Rutherford, Military Tech)

AMSTERDAM - A project to capture and store carbon dioxide underground near the Dutch town of Barendrecht will go ahead in phases, the Dutch Economy and Environment ministers said on Wednesday, despite local opposition to the plan. Initially a small storage test site will be constructed, and will be followed by a larger site as long as no complications emerge in the test phase, the ministers said in a statement.

The concerns of locals had been taken into account but the ministers argued that capture and storage of CO2 is a necessary transition technology to help cut emissions. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON — National forests can be used as a carbon "sink" with vast numbers of trees absorbing carbon dioxide to help slow global warming, the Forest Service chief said Wednesday, but that goal must be balanced.

He's also concerned about the risk of catastrophic wildfires that produce massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said his agency is trying to manage forests to combat climate change while still easing the risk of wildfires that have increased in frequency and intensity, in part because of global warming.

Forests now store enough carbon to offset about 16 percent of the nation's fossil fuel emissions, but that number could be reduced or even reversed if wildfires and insect infestation continue to increase, Tidwell said. (AP)

Power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators Wednesday adopted a first-in-the-nation mandate to reduce electricity demand.

On a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission required all new televisions up to 58 inches to be more energy efficient, beginning in 2011. The requirement will be tougher in 2013, with only a quarter of all TVs currently on the market meeting that standard.

The commission estimates that TVs account for about 10 percent of a home's electricity use. The concern is that the energy draw will rise by as much as 8 percent a year as consumers buy larger televisions, add more to their homes and watch them longer.

Commissioners say energy efficiency standards are the cheapest and easiest way to save electricity. (Associated Press)

Energy saving light bulbs get dimmer over time - Energy saving light bulbs, never the brightest way of lighting a room, become significantly dimmer during their lifetime, a report has discovered.

Traditional incandescent bulbs, which are being phased out of British shops, lose just a fraction of their brightness by the time they stop working, but energy-saving ones lose 22 per cent of brightness.

The figures come from an in-depth report from E&T, the leading trade magazine published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

It concludes that consumers are being routinely misled about the efficacy of low energy light bulbs, or compact fluorescent bulbs as they are technically known. "There is a big difference between what most bulbs' packaging promises and what the reality is. It's no wonder so many consumers are dissatisfied with the bulbs," said Dickon Ross, the editor of E&T. (TDT)

Jim Rogers (Duke Energy), Aubrey McClendon (Chesapeake Energy), John Rowe (Exelon), T. Boone Pickens, Matt Simmons… The list goes on of the political capitalists (aka “rent seekers”) who, in the tradition of Ken Lay and Enron, are politicizing the energy market for momentary advantage–but all in the name of saving the planet.

Try to name some counterweights, some prominent free-market capitalists. I can think of one in the energy sector who does not want the publicity (Charles Koch, Koch Industries) and one in banking (John Allison, BB&T). Any others of note (please add a comment if so)? They are few and far between.

Rent-seeking political capitalists are hardly new. The New Deal featured a variety of business leaders wanting special government favors at the expense of taxpayers, consumers, and/or competitors. And in the decades before FDR’s power grab, leading voices from the public utility industries championed entry-and-rate regulation by government, fearing market “raiders” more than mandated rate maximums (this story comes later in the series).

The history of the U.S. energy industry is replete with examples of government intervention originating within the industry. As documented in Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (1996), there is government intervention sponsored by “Big Oil” and many more instances of intervention stemming from “little oil”–or nonintegrated independents who were particularly vulnerable to shifts in the marketplace.

Mom-and-pops with good political connections or working through trade associations could and did wield the political ax against bigger competitors and/or unorganized consumers, I found in my study.

One of the most interesting examples of the industry at political work concerns the first state motor fuel tax, passed in Oregon in 1919 at, you guessed it, $0.01 cents per gallon.

Was this tax the work of a far sighted reformer? Or was it a confluence of private and public interests creating a demand for and supply of government favor? It was the latter.

Specifically, “Big Oil” was behind the Oregon gas tax. The major oil companies via their trade association calculated that the demand for gasoline and thus the price of gasoline would rise more from tax-financed new road construction than demand for the same would fall from the tax.

Oregon’s beginning led to road taxes in all 48 states within a decade to fund road construction.

Problem was that gas tax revenue started to be diverted to other uses to the chagrin of the American Petroleum Institute (API). “Phantom roads” became an issue. Government intervention giveth and taketh away.

Here is the story of the first motor fuel tax reproduced from Oil, Gas, and Government (pp. 1375–76). [Read more →] (Robert Bradley Jr., MasterResource)

WASHINGTON, DC, November 17, 2009 - For the first time in nearly 40 years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to strengthen the nation's sulfur dioxide air quality standard to protect public health.

Power plants and other industrial facilities emit sulfur dioxide, SO2, directly into the air where it forms fine particles and acid rain. Exposure to SO2 can aggravate asthma, cause respiratory difficulties, and result in emergency room visits and hospitalization. People with asthma, children, and the elderly are especially vulnerable to exposure to this gas.

"Short-term exposures to peak SO2 levels can have significant health effects – especially for children and the elderly - and leave our families and taxpayers saddled with high health care costs," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "We're strengthening clean air standards, stepping up monitoring and reporting in communities most in need, and providing the American people with protections they rightly deserve."

EPA is taking public comment on a proposal to establish a new national one-hour SO2 standard, between 50 and 100 parts per billion may be present in the air during in any one hour period.

This standard is designed to protect against short-term exposures ranging from five minutes to 24 hours.

The existing standards are 140 parts per billion measured over 24 hours, and 30 ppb measured over an entire year.

Because the revised standards would be more protective, EPA is proposing to revoke the current 24-hour and annual SO2 health standards. (ENS)

WASHINGTON, DC, November 18, 2009 - Coal pollutants affect all major body organ systems and contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases, concludes a scathing report issued today by Physicians for Social Responsibility.

"Each step of the coal lifecycle - mining, transportation, washing, combustion, and disposing of postcombustion wastes - impacts human health," warns the report, entitled "Coal's Assault on Human Health."

In addition, the report states, "the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere associated with burning coal is a major contributor to global warming and its adverse effects on health worldwide." (ENS)

Britain’s coal mountain has soared to its highest level in nearly 15 years as power station operators stock up on cheap supplies of the fuel.

Drax power station in North Yorkshire, E.ON’s plants at Kingsnorth, Kent, and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, as well as Scottish & Southern Energy’s plants at Fiddlers Ferry in Cheshire and Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire are among those that have been taking advantage of the collapse in coal prices from a peak of $224.30 a tonne in July 2008 to $69 yesterday.

One industry insider said you “could ski down” the coal pile at one plant in the Midlands.

Coal plants usually hold about 30 days’ worth of supplies on site, but many stations are understood to be holding much more. Latest government figures show that coal stocks stood at 23.9 million tonnes in August, up from 15.9 million a year earlier and the highest level since January 1995.
Related Links

* Every home to get new bill for carbon-neutral coal

* Coal: the fuel of the future?

The surge in British coal stocks, news of which comes days before the start of the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen, raises questions about the effectiveness of government efforts to cut emissions and switch to low-carbon alternatives, such as wind and nuclear energy. (The Times)

FRANKFURT - Germany faces higher electricity prices and power supply shortfalls if the economic downturn prevents enough new power plants being built.

Power generators looking to expand must also grapple with public opposition to coal over its carbon emissions, and delays to a defined future for nuclear energy's as the new government starts to work out its energy policy.

The problem has been put off in the short term as big companies like E.ON and RWE are not eager to spend money in the face of slumping demand. Industrial consumer purchases of power in the year to September slumped by seven percent in Europe's biggest economy.

But as signs of a German recovery appear, so too are projections for rising power demand and fears there could be supply gaps and crippling prices, if the slowdown in investments is not halted.

"We could easily risk running into power capacity bottlenecks in the coming years when the economy recovers and electricity demand rises again," said Florian Haslauer of the A.T. Kearney consultancy. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS, Nov 19 -- A European Commission official said the low carbon emission savings calculation for palm oil, was the best figure known at the time the EU Renewable Energy Directive was put together.

Paul Hodson, the European Commission Directorate-General for Transport and Energy (TREN) said this in explaining to dissatisfied Malaysian officials, how its scientists had derived the 19 percent level for palm oil compared to rapeseed (38 per cent), sunflower (51 per cent) and soya (31 per cent).

"If this figure is changed, then the EU will have problems in also changing the numbers to the directive," he explained. (Bernama)

WASHINGTON — Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, says he is not sure he is ready to help a Democratic health care proposal clear even the most preliminary hurdle: gaining the 60 votes his party’s leaders need to open debate on the measure later this week.

Two of his fellow Democrats, Senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, are proving tough sells as well, raising the prospect that one or perhaps all three of them could scuttle the bill before the fight over it even begins on the Senate floor.

“I think what is most important for me is to take a look at what is presented on behalf of Arkansans and figure out whether it is something that really makes sense,” Mrs. Lincoln said Tuesday. “I am responsible to the people of Arkansas, and that is where I will take my direction.”

Typically routine, the procedural approval needed to begin consideration of a bill looms as anything but routine in this instance. Instead, the vote is fast becoming a test of the leadership abilities of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. It will also decide at least the near-term prospects of President Obama’s top domestic priority. And it is providing a case study of the Democrats’ difficulties in managing high expectations fueled by large Congressional majorities. (NYT)

Most international comparisons conclude that America’s health care sector under-performs those of other advanced nations. Aside from other serious flaws, those studies typically ignore each nation’s contribution to medical innovation — the discovery of new knowledge and practices that improve health in all nations. Today, the Cato Institute releases a new study — the most comprehensive study of its kind — that helps fill that void.

In “Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation,” economist Glen Whitman and physician Raymond Raad conclude that the United States far and away outperforms other nations on medical innovation, but that the legislation moving through Congress threatens America’s ability to innovate. From the executive summary:

My mobile phone rang. Another nephew was down with malaria, a friend told me. Lying in his hospital bed, quinine running through his veins, Emmanuel felt the pain wracking his body. I knew it was bad, because every time I get malaria I endure the same agony and treatments.

Emma was lucky. A week earlier, he had arranged goat exports to Saudi Arabia. Although his meagre earnings would now pay hospital bills, instead of buying things he and his family desperately needed, at least he would still have his weakened body, his life and another chance.

Every day, a million Africans are stricken by this horrible disease. The possibility of sudden death is so real that all other considerations are minor, and people just find any available money for medical bills.

Malaria has been with us for thousands of years, yet ignorance about it is still rampant. Some rural Africans still resort to ancient techniques and even associate it with witchcraft practiced against them by their neighbours. They treat victims with drum sounds, herbal mixtures and restrictions against certain foods. Naturally, many die under such care, generating vicious hostility between victims’ families and suspected “spell casters,” with disputes sometimes erupting in violence.

And so, one by one by a million, malaria exacts its toll. Meanwhile, too many people who could make a difference simply attend conferences, talk, write reports, and distribute educational materials and bed nets. Environmentalists rant about the supposed risks of insecticides, but never mention their obvious benefits: preventing disease and saving lives. Businessmen worry about Europeans blocking exports if Africans use DDT or other insecticides.

It’s the Western equivalent to drums and not eating too many mangoes. And our children keep dying. (Fiona Kobusingye, Townhall)

Yesterday I described the brief Alan Gura filed on behalf of the petitioners challenging Chicago’s gun ban in the Supreme Court — asking the Court to apply the individual right to keep and bear arms to the states.

Late last night, Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy sketched out his predictions of whether the individual justices would go for Gura’s main argument: that the indefensible Slaughter-House Cases should be overturned and thus that the Court should “incorporate” the rights at issue via the Privileges or Immunities Clause. (Cato supports this argument, as we’ll show in the brief we’ll be filing next week.) He concludes that Justice Thomas is the only vote available for this claim. According to Orin, the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Alito are too enamored with stare decisis to overturn an 1873 precedent, Justice Kennedy isn’t an originalist and likes substantive due process too much, and the other four are too afraid of Lochner and Institute for Justice-style economic liberty arguments to go there.

As George Will would say: Well. Orin could turn out to be right, but I think his analysis is too simplistic. I was just about to write my response when I saw that Josh Blackman, with whom I have a law review article forthcoming on these issues, already said it best in the comments to Orin’s post:

Finally, fellow Volokh conspirator Randy Barnett (and Cato senior fellow) also disagrees with Orin, offering this perspective:

In short, Orin’s legal realism/conventional wisdom may turn out prescient — and all the rest of us are engaged in a quixotic originalist/libertarian crusade – but I’ll put my money elsewhere. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

A former soldier in England has been arrested and convicted (and may even go to jail for five years) because he found a gun in his yard and he turned it over to the police. I presume this is in part a reflection of the anti-gun ideology embedded in UK law, but don’t prosecutors and judges have even a shred of discretion to avoid foolish prosecutions and/or protect innocent people from absurd charges? Here is the news report:

CHICAGO - Heart patients in Norway -- where unlike many countries foods are not enriched with folic acid -- were more likely to die from cancer if they took folic acid and vitamin B12 supplements compared with those who did not take them, Norwegian researchers said on Tuesday.

The team found lung cancer rates were 25 percent higher among those who took the supplements compared with the general population, but overall cancer deaths and deaths from other causes were also higher in the supplement group.

They said folic acid given over a period of more than three years may feed the growth of cancers that were too small to be detected otherwise, and raises new questions about the benefits of fortifying foods with folic acid.

"Our results need confirmation in other populations and underline the call for safety monitoring following the widespread consumption of folic acid from dietary supplements and fortified foods," Dr. Marta Ebbing of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Folic acid, a B vitamin, helps the body make healthy new cells, and getting enough of it is crucial for women before pregnancy to prevent serious birth defects like spina bifida. (Reuters)

CHICAGO, IL, October 28, 2009 --//-- Twenty years ago, back when Frank Young, M.D. was Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he received a report from Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. entitled "Potential Public Health Hazards of Biosynthetic Milk Hormones," warning of the public health dangers of consuming milk from hormone-treated cows.

Injection of cows with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), the genetically engineered, potent variant of the natural growth hormone produced by cows, sharply elevates levels of insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) in milk, Dr. Epstein warned the commissioner. (WORLD-WIRE)

TALLAHASSEE, Florida, November 17, 2009 - In a decision with national relevance, a federal judge in Tallahassee Monday approved a consent decree that requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set legal limits on excess nutrients that trigger harmful algae blooms in Florida waters.

The EPA agreed to establish numeric water quality criteria for Florida' lakes and flowing waters by January 14, 2010. The agency has until January 14, 2011, to establish numeric water quality criteria for Florida's coastal and estuarine waters. The consent decree allows the state to set numeric criteria before these dates as long as they are approved by the EPA.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by five environmental groups seeking to compel the federal government to set water quality standards for nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in public waters. (ENS)

CHICAGO, IL, November 13, 2009 --//-- The Cancer Prevention Coalition is pleased to announce that the Governing Council of the American Public Health Association has voted to oppose the continued sale and use of genetically engineered hormonal rBGH milk, and also meat adulterated with sex hormones. This decision is based on long-standing scientific and public policy information developed and published by the Cancer Prevention Coalition over the last two decades, as summarized below. (WORLD-WIRE)

CHICAGO, IL, November 17, 2009 --//-- The Cancer Prevention Coalition commends the UK's largest nationwide chain of health food shops, Holland & Barrett, for its recently announced ban on beauty products containing some toxic ingredients, but warns that products containing a wide range other toxic ingredients remain on the shelves. (WORLD-WIRE)

CHICAGO, IL, October 14, 2009 --//-- The Cancer Prevention Coalition is criticizing a widely publicized recent report, "Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin" (rBST) which claims that milk from cows injected with this genetically engineered hormone is safe. (WORLD-WIRE)

CHICAGO, IL, October 21, 2009 --//-- Beef produced in the United States is heavily contaminated with natural or synthetic sex hormones, which are associated with an increased risk of reproductive and childhood cancers, warns Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. (WORLD-WIRE)

CHICAGO, IL, October 8, 2009 --//-- Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, Dr. Samuel Epstein, is warning women that toxic ingredients in Avon Products put users at risk of cancer and hormonal changes. (WORLD-WIRE)

CHICAGO, IL, October 6, 2009 --//-- Anti-aging skin products are known as cosmeceuticals, as they overlap the distinction between cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. These products are the fastest growing sales sector of the entire cosmetics industry, and are widely marketed as being safe. But Cancer Prevention Coalition Chairman Dr. Samuel S. Epstein warns that altering the physical structure of skin with chemicals to look more youthful comes at a hidden price to the skin, and even more so to overall health. (WORLD-WIRE)

BEIJING, Nov 17 - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that climate talks in Copenhagen next month should fix a new deal which has "immediate operational effect", even if an original goal of a legally binding pact is out of reach. (Reuters)

MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 17 -- President Obama's plan for an international cap-and-trade agreement negotiated at the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference to go into "immediate effect" may violate the Unites States Constitution, claim representatives of the No Cap-and-Trade Coalition (see www.NoCapAndTrade.com).

Quoted in a Reuters news story today, Obama said, "Our aim is not a partial accord or a political declaration but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations and one that has immediate operational effect."

"Today President Obama exhibited the arrogance commonly associated with dictators and tyrants," said Jeff Davis, executive director of NoCapAndTrade.com. "It's hard to believe that a former constitutional law professor could forget that treaties require Senate ratification."

President Obama made the remarks amid heavy criticism from Europe about the lack of progress in the U.S. toward cap-and-trade legislation and the expected failure of the imminent Copenhagen negotiations.

But such "immediate operational effect" is impossible, said Davis.

"Article II of the Constitution requires that treaties are approved by two-thirds of the Senate, so President Obama can't just sign up the U.S. and then start enforcing treaty provisions," observed Davis. "Additionally, the cap-and-trade bill now in the Senate isn't anywhere close to having the 60 votes necessary to avoid filibuster -- trying to get 67 votes for a climate treaty looks pretty unlikely right now," Davis added.

President Obama might have been thinking of using the EPA to regulate carbon when he made his statement. The EPA has proposed to designate carbon dioxide as a hazard to the public welfare and to regulate it under the Clean Air Act.

"If President Obama signed an agreement in Copenhagen and then tried to implement it through the EPA and Clean Air Act," observed JunkScience.com's Steve Milloy, "the President would immediately be at war with Congress, including almost a two dozen Democratic Senators who are concerned about the harm cap-and-trade would do to the economy."

The German magazine Der Spiegel criticized President Obama this week, asserting he'd been "lying to" and "betraying" Europe in failing to advance cap-and-trade in the U.S.

"President Obama is Europe's last hope for ensnaring and crippling the U.S. with cap-and-trade," said Milloy. "His desperate statement today indicates he's feeling that pressure." (PRNewswire-USNewswire)

The upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, is supposed to produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a treaty signed by the Clinton Administration but never sent to the U.S. Senate for advice and consent.[1] The proposed "Kyoto II" successor agreement, if crafted along the lines of the current 181-page negotiating text, poses a clear threat to American sovereignty. This threat is primarily due to the nature of the proposed treaty--a complex, comprehensive, legally binding multilateral convention. ( Steven Groves, Heritage)

The chances of a binding agreement being reached at the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen seem slimmer than ever. But environmentalists still see a small chance of progress at the December meeting.

A few short months ago, it seemed almost inconceivable that the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen would end with anything less than a binding, legal agreement. The political pressure on the industrial states was too great, the expectations of their inhabitants too high.

"There is no Plan B," was the Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard's mantra -- and the rest of the world seemed to signal its agreement, even if only in a murmur. And when world powers attending the G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, in July agreed on ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions, it seemed to indicate that a positive outcome from the international climate change negotiations was actually a realistic option.

However, in the meantime, something else has become clear: Success is measured by the goals one sets. And that goal was re-defined on Sunday. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore, 17 heads of states and government -- including ones from China, Russia and the US -- destroyed all hopes of setting internationally binding climate targets in Copenhagen. Even the agreement to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 that was agreed upon in L'Aquila has been sidelined. Now, the only possible result of the Copenhagen talks will be a "politically binding agreement." According to the latest plan for the summit, a formal, legal agreement would then be reached at a later stage. (Der Spiegel)

World leaders have publicly shot down hopes of any binding action on global warming at the Copenhagen talks next month. Pundits and global warming activists alike are predictably frustrated. But the wheels of optimism are already turning to find the upside in the climate change delay. A handful of green commentators think that lowered expectations could allow President Obama to attend the Copenhagen summit, and that extra time could allow America time to pass domestic legislation. So is the definite lack of agreement ahead in Copenhagen actually a good thing? (Heather Horn, Atlantic Wire)

Clear differences have emerged among the Democratic chairmen of the six Senate committees with jurisdiction over climate change legislation.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, who both represent states with significant coal industries, would like to proceed cautiously.

“Most of the country doesn’t know what cap-and-trade is. They have no idea. I would say half the Senate have no idea what cap-and-trade is and could not explain it,” Rockefeller told The Hill on Tuesday.

He said climate legislation should not reach the floor before July of next year, putting the controversial bill on the schedule only months before Election Day.

“You have to get this stuff out to the American people before you change their lives, and we are not paying any attention to that,” Rockefeller said.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) would like to pass the bill as soon as possible.

“I’d love to get it done tomorrow,” said Boxer, who acknowledged others are less intent on moving that quickly. (The Hill)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 -- Several U.S. senators have a message for their chamber's leaders: The road to a climate change rumbles through their coal-rich states.

Last week in a letter, a group of 14 coal-state members told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid the climate change bill needs to include more protections for coal-dependent utilities, Politico reported Tuesday.

"They don't have a deal until they get the coal-state senators, and they are a long way from doing it," Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said. "They're going to need us to pass a bill."

Coal is a driver for economic activity in 34 states, government data indicate. Department of Energy studies in 2007 indicated coal supplied about half of all U.S. power and employed more than 80,000 people. Each of those mining jobs spiders into 3 1/2 more jobs in associated industries, the National Mining Association said.

If Democratic senators want a climate change bill, "they are going to have to accept concessions to the coal industry," Peter Gray, chairman of the environmental law practice at McKenna Long and Aldridge, told the Washington publication.

Even Senate liberals concede coal state senators constitute a voting bloc. (UPI)

Last year's presidential election was the first in which both major-party candidates acknowledged carbon's role in global warming. In June, the House passed far-reaching climate change legislation. Since then, climate legislation has been introduced in the Senate, and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., and John Kerry, D-Mass., are currently hashing out a possible bipartisan alternative.

But for all the movement toward some kind of action on global climate change, efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions aren't universally beloved in Congress. These five lawmakers are among the most outspoken opponents of legislation to combat climate change. ( Emily Vaughan, National Journal)

COPENHAGEN, Nov 17 - Environment ministers made progress on Tuesday towards a scaled-down climate deal in Copenhagen next month, with Washington facing pressure to promise deep cuts by 2020 in greenhouse gas emissions.

"We still need more movement," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference at the end of two days of talks among 40 ministers from around the world on a deal meant to be agreed at the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Denmark.

"Industrialised countries must raise their targets and financial commitments further...I look to the United States for a numerical mid-term target and a clear commitment on finance," he told a news conference. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON -- A United Nations summit on climate change scheduled for next month is likely to yield a financial commitment by rich countries to help poor countries fight the effects of warmer temperatures, President Barack Obama's top adviser on energy and climate change said Tuesday.

The official, Carol Browner, stopped short of saying how much the U.S. would commit to help developing countries adapt to and mitigate rising greenhouse-gas emissions. Nevertheless, she said the summit in Copenhagen is "an important step" toward forging a global treaty to cap countries' emissions of heat-trapping gases. She added the Obama administration hopes to forge such a deal within six to 12 months.

"There will be some commitment to some kind of financing" for developing countries, Ms. Browner told an audience at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington.

Ms. Browner didn't specify how much she thought the U.S. government would contribute and suggested it would be difficult for the administration to commit to specific amounts because Congress has yet to pass legislation that would raise such funds, by requiring companies to pay the government for the right to emit greenhouse gases. (WSJ)

There is life yet in next month's climate talks, despite the doomsayers' doubts. But, says Geoffrey Lean, time is running out for Barack Obama to secure Senate backing for his offer of emission cuts. (TDT)

ADDIS ABABA - African leaders agreed on Tuesday on how much cash to demand from the rich world to compensate for the impact of climate change on the continent but kept the figure secret ahead of next month's Copenhagen talks.

The United Nations summit in Denmark will try to agree on how to counter climate change and come up with a post-Kyoto treaty protocol to curb emissions.

"We have set a minimum beyond which we will not go," Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who will represent Africa at the talks, told reporters. "But I am not in a position to tell you what that minimum figure will be." (Reuters)

The strongest evidence yet that the rise in atmospheric CO2 emissions continues to outstrip the ability of the world's natural 'sinks' to absorb carbon is published November 17 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

An international team of researchers under the umbrella of the Global Carbon Project reports that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent -- the rest was absorbed by the Earth's carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. During this time this fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease in the efficiency of the natural sinks. The team brings evidence that the sinks are responding to climate change and variability. (ScienceDaily)

Most comprehensive CO2 study to date is expected to give greater urgency to diplomatic maneuvering before Copenhagen (The Guardian)

Fast-rising carbon emissions mean that worst-case predictions for climate change are coming true (The Independent)

World temperatures are on course to rise 6C by the end of the century because of global warming, a major British study has forecast. (TDT)

That was just a warning rumble. Now the avalanche of pre-Copenhagen orchestrated hysteria is upon us. Louise Gray, the Telegraph’s chief hysteria correspondent, recounts the terrible future that awaits us if we fail to return to a Stone Age lifestyle. It is all in a report produced by (no, don’t laugh) the Met Office under the Aegis of the EU. What a combination!

It is all produced by computer models with feedback. An engineering model is invalidated by just one guessed parameter or coefficient. In climate science they are all guessed. Would you fly in a plane designed with the aid of a model in which all the parameters are guessed?

But that is not all. We now have the benefit of a computer game, featuring genuine CELEBRITIES.

In the dying throes of our democracy, the divide between rulers and ruled appears to be as wide as during the worst excesses of absolute monarchy.

For those of us in the infidel majority who would appreciate some good news for a change, here it is. (Number Watch)

We can expect climate hysteria to reach fever pitch as the Global Warming Industry’s Global Governance Conference in Copenhagen on December 11th draws closer. Today we have a double helping of computer modelled garbage based on absurdly high climate sensitivity to CO2. First up were the combined twin taxpayer funded bureaucracies of the UK’s ‘Mystic’ Met Office and the Soviet-style EU’s European Commission, which threatened that ‘global warming will bring killer heat, floods and storms to Britain’ as reported in The Telegraph. Apparently, if we don’t give up evils such as heating/lighting our homes, travelling to real jobs that don’t involve sponging off the taxpayer, then Italy’s pasta ‘gets it’ and temperatures could rise by up to 10C in the next 50 years. Nothing less than reducing CO2 emissions to zero by 2100 will do. I guess that rules out breathing too. Perhaps they didn’t read the 2009 European Commission paper showing that there is no greenhouse gas signal in normalized European flood losses for 1970 to 2006.

“Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis. Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project. All of that growth came in developing countries; but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations.”

Several points to comment on here. First, the 29% rise in CO2 emissions since 2000 has seen a zero rise in global average temperature, as illustrated by the graphs of CO2 emissions, and the 10-year temperature stagnation below:

Secondly, what’s the point of the Nature Geoscience authors complaining goods produced in developing countries being exported to developed countries. Are manufactured goods and exports to be banned?

Thirdly, the claim that: “The team believes that carbon sinks – the oceans and plants – are probably absorbing a slightly lower proportion of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions than they were 50 years ago, although researchers admit that uncertainty about the behaviour of sinks remains high” contrasts with recently published real world data showing “that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now. This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.”

So, against a background of a decade of non-warming, despite rapidly rising CO2 emissions from developing countries, 20,000 CO2 emitting climate circus performers head for Copenhagen, leaving a wake of unfounded climate alarmism behind them. 12C anyone? (CRN)

In his quest to find how to ‘change any minds‘ about the need for a ‘climate fix‘, Tom Zeller Jr repeats the tired mantras of climate campaigners such as former US Vice president Al Gore (‘Sheer will is needed for climate fix‘, NYT, Nov 16, 2009), including an alleged lack of ‘capacity to respond quickly‘ to dangers that are not ‘tangible in the here and now‘, and the general inability to pass laws anywhere on a carbon tax.

Precisely because ‘virtually every Pavlovian trigger discovered in the human brain is now pulled by advertisers‘ (in the words of Mr Gore), people have grown smarter and more skeptical to concocted gimmicks such as those incredibly mentioned by Mr Zeller, i.e. the cat video with fake subtitles and the Maldives Government’s antics scuba-diving in the latest gear to submerged desks (one hopes they found a way for the manufacturers to pay for the publicity).

The cause for a serious analysis and management of climate change is further undermined by the constant barrage of absurdly bad news, once again taking up a prominent space in Mr Zeller’s article: climate change causing mental health problems, women faring worse than men, golf participation plummeting. Who in their right mind could ever believe that everything and anything will be negatively affected by climate change?

The desire of too many to rhetorically batter the general public into climate submission by including evermore far-fetched and scary statements however flimsy the evidence and surreal the claim, can only harden the public’s resistance to do anything at all, not just about purported disasters of the year 2100 but also concerning those of 2010.

Unless and until the likes of Mr Zeller, let alone the average climate crusader, get such a simple point, I am afraid it is going to be plenty of fruitless talking, grand posturing and ridiculous feline videos for a long long time. And minds will keep changing, yes, but in the sense of turning away from climate action. (OmniClimate)

I BLAME the fear merchants and hysterics. Or thank them, rather, which is why they deserve today’s prizes.

I’m sure it’s not the fact that the world hasn’t actually warmed since 2001 that’s making so many people tell pollsters they now think this new warming faith is a scam.

No, I suspect that what’s really turning people off are the characters who have scrambled on to this colossal green bandwagon. Thousands of alarmists, cranks, totalitarians, carpetbaggers, hypocrites and salvation seekers are now wailing that we’re doomed, unless you pray to Gaia and hand over a little something. Like your savings.

And, boy, haven’t you seen a lot of such folk bob up in these last weeks before next month’s United Nations Copenhagen summit on global warming - the summit the European Union says is our “last chance” to save the world.

Alert and alarmed readers have over the past two weeks scoured news items to submit the names of the most unbelievable of all these bandwagon warmists - the ones who have done best to make us doubt their cause most.

With pleasure I’ve gone through these dozens of nominations, and can today name the winners of November’s “Alarmist of the month” awards. (Andrew Bolt)

A survey of weathercasters’ feelings on global warming was published in this month’s edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It had some interesting findings. There were 121 respondents. 94% of the respondents had at least one of the three major seals.

Television meteorologists are the official scientists for most television stations. The overwhelming majority felt comfortable in that role for their stations. The majority agreed that the role of discussing climate change did fall to them.

The offices of London's carbon trading companies are a little quieter than usual.

The firms - many based in the City - buy and sell one of the world's newest commodities: carbon dioxide.

The trade in such permits allows polluters to pay for emissions reductions made elsewhere.

The market could be huge, but its future is now uncertain. It depends on how governments decide to tackle climate change beyond 2012.

The trade was first created by the Kyoto protocol in 1997.

Abyd Karmali was then an energy and climate change officer with the United Nations Environment Programme.

He now heads up the Carbon Markets & Investors Association, and is the global head of carbon markets at Bank of America Merryl Lynch. (BBC)

In the April/May 2009 Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, Paul Maynard and I published an article entitled Let Cool Heads Prevail, expressing grave scientific doubt about the supposed magnitude of the anthropogenic effect on global temperature, and providing substantial evidence from the published data and from the peer-reviewed literature.

Our article caught the insurance industry by surprise. Lloyds of London had publicly issued blood-curdling warnings of the climatic terrors allegedly to come. The Prince of Wales had established Climate Wise, a group of leading figures in the insurance market committed, in effect, to peddling and promulgating the scare, and to silencing all dissent. The market was sewn up. How, then, could no less an organ of academic opinion than the Journal have allowed two heretics – one of them a very senior and widely-respected 4 figure in the insurance world – to publish a substantial and well-referenced paper demonstrating that the scare was scientifically baseless? (SPPI)

Global warming is a problem that spans the entire world, but when it comes to figuring out how to stop it, the burden will largely fall on two countries: the U.S. and China. The U.S. is the world's largest historic carbon emitter, responsible for putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the past century and a half than any other nation. China recently surpassed the U.S. as the top emitter and will be responsible for more greenhouse gases in the future than any other country. "These two countries hold the key to sustainability or catastrophe," says Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

If that's the case, it might seem as if the world is headed toward catastrophe. Over the weekend, world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit made explicit what had long been expected — that a legal, global treaty to reduce carbon emissions was no longer possible at next month's U.N. summit in Copenhagen. The deadlock between the U.S. and China is a big reason: Beijing expects Washington to take the lead on cutting carbon, but the U.S. won't sign on to a deal that doesn't including measurable action from the Chinese. From that perspective, climate change is one more competition between the world's reigning superpower and its No. 1 challenger. (Brian Walsh, Time)

There now seems to be a growing disconnection between the message that scientists are sending out about climate change and the corresponding reaction of politicians and the public. As the experts issue increasingly dire warnings about what could happen to the world's climate system if we don't do something about carbon dioxide emissions, politicians prevaricate, the public becomes more sceptical and we all continue to burn more fossil fuels.

The latest assessment by a team of 31 leading scientists from seven countries presents a bleak vision of the path upon which we are now firmly set. It is the worst-case scenario laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggesting average global temperature will rise by 5C or 6C by the end of the century. (The Independent)

NAIROBI — Climate change is the leading cause of new challenges for the humanitarian community, a survey of G20 governments commissioned by the Red Cross revealed Tuesday.

As the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement gathered in Nairobi for their first ever global meeting in Africa, the "Believe in Humanity" survey warned that the humanitarian landscape was changing fast.

"World powers expect humanitarian actors to face continuing or increasing humanitarian needs driven by climate change-related natural disasters," said the survey, released days ahead of key climate talks in Copenhagen. (AFP)

You may have heard that the stupidity of the people has no limits but you may have thought that the statement was exaggerated.

That's because you haven't heard Al Gore's opinions about the temperature of the Earth's core.

He's told by the host that the geothermal energy looks like a plan to defeat Superman. Gore's defense of this ludicrous source of energy is striking.

He says that two kilometers under the surface, there are incredibly hot rocks because the interior of the Earth is extre-hehehe-mely hot: several million degrees.

And the crust is therefore hot, too. So they have just invented drills that don't melt in these several million degrees, Gore tells us. ;-)

What a breathtaking imbecile. It's very clear that he can't possibly have the slightest clue about physics, geology, and energy flows on the Earth. It's sad that many politicians lack the basic science education.

A new study indicates that major chemicals most often cited as leading causes of climate change, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are outclassed in their warming potential by compounds receiving less attention.

Purdue University and NASA examined more than a dozen chemicals, most of which are generated by humans, and have developed a blueprint for the underlying molecular machinery of global warming. The results appear in a special edition of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical Chemistry A, released Nov. 12.

The compounds, which contain fluorine atoms, are far more efficient at blocking radiation in the "atmospheric window," said Purdue Professor Joseph Francisco, who helped author the study. The atmospheric window is the frequency in the infrared region through which radiation from Earth is released into space, helping to cool the planet. When that radiation is trapped instead of being released, a "greenhouse effect" results, warming the globe. Most of the chemicals in question are used industrially, he said.

NASA scientist Timothy Lee, lead author of the study with Francisco and NASA postdoctoral fellow Partha Bera, characterized the fluorinated compounds as having the potential to quickly slam the atmospheric window shut, as opposed to gradually easing it shut like carbon dioxide. (ScienceDaily)

Last week I summarized the economics literature on the impact of climate change on human well-being. Or more accurately, Richard Tol reviewed the economics literature for the Spring 2009 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspectives. I simply told you about it and tossed in a few observations that I thought relevant.

In short, I reported that the peer-reviewed literature suggests that worries about some climate-induced Armageddon are probably misplaced. We will likely gain or lose a year of economic growth sometime in the latter half of this century from forecasted changes in the world’s physical climate. More than that cannot be said with much confidence.

Then, by coincidence, a study crosses my desk from the “Institute for Policy Integrity” at the NYU Law School. The study, titled “Economists and Climate Change; Consensus and Open Questions,” reports the findings of a survey of 289 of those economists the institute considers to be “the world’s top economists with expertise in climate change.” 144 of those individuals returned their questionnaire. Michael Livermore, the executive director of the institute, characterized the findings this way:

What should we make of this? Again, Michael Livermore: [Read more →] (Jerry Taylor, MasterResource)

It is time to accept that the choices of China and India, not the United States, will determine the world’s future carbon emissions.

America’s environmental actions will achieve their biggest returns if they influence the future carbon emissions of the billion-plus-person polities of Asia. (Edward L. Glaeser, NYT)

Gerald A. Meehl, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling, and Larry McDaniel, 2009: The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S. Geophysical Research Letters. In press

My post is to point out that the Meehl et al paper did not investigate and question the spatial representativeness of their results, as well as possible non-climatic effects on the data they have used. We raised a number of issues of these bias and uncertainties in our paper

which need to be resolved before the Meehl et al study should be assumed to be a robust conclusion. Why was our multi-authored peer-reviewed study not consulted in preparing their paper? Even if they reject our findings, they should not have ignored the issues we raised, but presented reasons for their rejection. Since I have considerable professional respect for the lead author, Jerry Meehl, I can only assume he (and the other co-authors) were not aware of our paper. ... (Climate Science)

Wouldn't be a CoP without a smoking treemometer :-) Tree growth spurt 'is climate change smoking gun' - A growth surge seen in the world's oldest trees has given scientists a new ''smoking gun'' pointing to late 20th century climate change.

Temperature rises after 1950 are thought to be responsible for the unprecedented growth of bristlecone pines on high mountain slopes in the western US.

Bristlecones are the longest living trees in the world, the record being held by one pine in California's White Mountains that is almost 5,000 years old.

Their enormous lifespans, combined with well-preserved trunks from even older dead trees, make them ideal for investigating regional climate change over long periods.

Trees preserve the story of environmental change in their growth rings, the concentric dark and light bands that appear in the face of cut trunk. Wider rings indicate episodes of time when growth was unusually fast. (TDT)

Anyone who has ever cut down a tree is familiar with the rings radiating out from the center of a tree trunk marking the tree's age. Careful study of tree rings can offer much more: a rich record of history and indications of concerns for the future. Researchers Matthew Salzer and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and their colleagues have analyzed tree-rings from bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, looking for the reasons behind an extraordinary surge in growth over the past 50 years. Their findings appear in the Nov. 16 early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers studied bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) at three sites in California and Nevada, close to the upper elevation limit of tree growth. The tree-ring record showed wider rings in recent decades, indicating a surge in growth in the second half of the 20th century that was greater than at any time in the last 3,700 years.

"We've got a pretty strong pointer that temperature plays a part in this," said Malcolm Hughes in describing the work. "So the puzzle is, why does it play a part in it for the trees near the treeline and not for those only 300, 400 feet lower down the mountain than them?" (US News)

Editorial:
Ocean Acidification and the Sagittal Otoliths of Marine Fish: A new study reveals how the former affects the latter in white sea bass, while we relay what the results imply about the ocean "acidification crisis," which is being pushed to the forefront of the suite of environmental catastrophes that are currently being promoted in the absence of the global warming that was once the centerpiece of Al Gore's "climate crisis."

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 765 individual scientists from 453 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Bragança Peninsula, Eastern Amazon Region, Brazil. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Dimethylsulfide: What is it? ... where does it come from? ... and what does it do?

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Alligator Weed (Xu et al., 2009), Chinese Broccoli (La et al., 2009), Quaking Aspen (Cseke et al., 2009), and Soybean (Matsunami et al., 2009).

A species of sea star has figured out a novel way of keeping cool on rocky shorelines. The animal literally soaks up chilly water during high tides to protect itself from the blazing temperatures that persist when the tide goes out, scientists announce today.

Sea stars live at the ocean edge on rocky shorelines, and so they endure rapid changes in temperature as the tide comes in, covering them with chilly water, and then recedes to leave them bare to the sun's rays.

"Sea stars were assumed to be at the mercy of the sun during low tide," said the lead study researcher Sylvain Pincebourde of François Rabelais University in Tours, France. "This work shows that some sea stars have an unexpected back-up strategy." (LiveScience)

A divided Senate is struggling to put together a cap-and-trade climate-change bill. One reason why the effort remains alive despite numerous obstacles is "clean coal."

Also know as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the process traps and stores the emissions from coal-fired power plants.

One Senate bill includes at least $10 billion in federal funding for CCS over the next decade. That would be on top of the $4 billion already being spent on it by the Energy Department.

The bill would also give away as much as $200 billion in carbon allowances to the coal-fired power plants should a cap-and-trade program be enacted.

Green groups had previously mocked clean coal as a "myth." Even fans say CCS is years from being perfected.

But it's very popular with the energy industry and lawmakers from coal-reliant states. Green groups back it too despite their earlier criticism. (IBD)

NEW HAVEN, West Va., Nov 18 - A looming government clampdown on CO2 emissions is about to confront an already embattled U.S. coal power industry with two stark options: capture carbon or die. (Reuters)

For months, the shale gas hype has been spreading across Europe, with newspapers blasting headlines over how new supplies will help the continent cut its dependence of Russian gas, fight climate change, and reclaim its security of supply. But here’s the reality: shale gas is unlikely to change Europe’s energy equation of falling indigenous gas production and rising demand. And if it does cause changes, those changes are unlikely to occur for at least a decade, if at all.

“There’s a lot of potential, but we are not quite at the point where this is going to change landscape on European gas,” said Nikos Tsafos, head European gas analyst with PFC Energy, the Washington-based energy consultancy. “People recognize that this is big, but they don’t recognize what it will take to get there. People are talking about unconventional gas as a panacea for Europe without necessarily understating what needs to happen. And the gap between reality and expectations worries me.”

While only in the early exploratory phase, companies are racing to secure acreage in Sweden, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, France, and the UK to determine whether North America’s success in developing unconventional gas resources can be replicated. (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)

The solicitations have been flooding people’s mailboxes lately: pay a bit more on your electricity bill for 100 percent clean wind power. Or, the fliers say, buy “green power certificates” to offset your global warming emissions.

Close to a million electricity customers have signed up for such payments voluntarily, and the amount of electricity sold in this way has nearly tripled since 2005, amid rising concern about climate change and energy security. But the participants are in a distinct minority, with a sign-up rate of only about 2 percent in programs run by utilities.

The low sign-up rate raises a question: If large majorities of Americans favor increased government support for clean energy, as polls suggest, why are so many people reluctant to back such programs when it comes to paying extra themselves?

One reason might be that they think the added expense is too high. Solar and wind power generally cost more than power generated with fossil fuels. While many people support alternative energy in principle, they personally may not want to spend hundreds of dollars more for electricity, especially in the current economic environment. (NYT)

Speaking recently at the Lisbon International Ocean Power Conference, Peter Fraenkel, Technical Director and co-founder of Marine Current Turbines (MCT), the UK-based company that designed and developed SeaGen, the world's only commercial scale tidal stream turbine, told delegates that "We are delighted with SeaGen's performance. It is running reliably and delivering more energy than originally expected in an extremely aggressive environment."

The turbines are powered by a consistent tidal current that surges back and forth with every tide through the Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour.

The twin generators typically produce an average of 5MWh of electricity during the 6.25 hours of each ebb and each flood tide, enough energy to meet the average electricity needs for 1500 UK homes. SeaGen has already delivered over 350MWh of power into the electricity grid of Northern Ireland.

"We are getting more energy than expected mainly because the resource is more energetic than originally predicted during earlier surveys," added Fraenkel.

Martin Wright, Managing Director of Marine Current Turbines, commented: "...this is a practical method of generation that really does do exactly what it says on the label. It is a hugely significant milestone for the company to be selling electricity consistently and earning revenue."

Although SeaGen has been operational for most of this year, it was not until September that consent was given to operate without needing to have marine mammal observers on board and onshore. According to MCT, extensive data collected so far suggests the seals and porpoises are "not at any significant risk" and as a result SeaGen is now permitted to operate unattended and by remote control, as was originally intended.

Martin Wright added: "The expectation is that this radical new technology can be developed within five to ten years to make a significant contribution to our future energy needs. Given suitable market incentives, SeaGen demonstrates that marine renewable energy is at the cusp of forming the basis for a new UK industry with considerable world-wide export potential." (Reuters)

Wind turbines standing as high as 15 metres (50ft) will be allowed on farmland and industrial estates without planning permission, under proposals to boost renewable energy.

The turbines will be approved across large areas of the countryside, provided they meet noise and impact restrictions.

John Healey, the housing minister, also announced plans to fast-track applications for solar panels on stadiums, schools, railway stations and offices, as part of proposals to achieve national commitments on climate change.

The new rules would also allow councils and those with electric cars to install charging points on streets and in car parks without a planning application. Other renewable sources of energy, including ground and water-source heat pumps and biomass boilers, will be approved without planning permission where appropriate. (The Times)

Alan Gura, who successfully defended the individual right to keep and bear arms under Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller has now filed his brief in the case that seeks to apply that right to the states, McDonald v. City of Chicago. (Cato earlier filed a brief supporting Alan’s cert petition, the background to which you can read about here.)

The question presented in this case is: Whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is incorporated as against the States by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities or Due Process Clauses. Remarkably, only 7 of the brief’s 73 pages are devoted to the Due Process Clause, which is the constitutional provision by which almost all the the Bill of Rights has been “incorporated” against the states. Indeed, the brief argues that the Due Process Clause “has incorporated virtually all other enumerated rights” and so there is no reason to make the Second Amendment an exception.

The rest of the brief is far more interesting, arguing for overturning the ill-fated Slaughter-House Cases, which eviscerated the Priviliges or Immunities Clause in 1873. Slaughter-House forced the Court to start protecting natural rights and fundamental liberties under the oddly named “substantive due process” doctrine — and it remains a bugaboo for legal scholars of all ideological stripes. Overturning it would potentially open the door to challenges against legislation that violates a host of unenumerated rights, such as the right to enter into contract or to earn an honest living.

Understandably, libertarians are excited at the prospect of Privileges or Immunities’ revival. But so too are liberals, at the thought of potentially filling an empty constitutional vessel with positive rights (to health care, education, pensions, etc.). I believe this to be an overstated threat from the perspective of constitutional interpretation — as opposed to legislation – and have an article coming out with Josh Blackman in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy in January making this point. (The article, titled “Opening Pandora’s Box? Privileges or Immunities, The Constitution in 2020, and Properly Incorporating the Second Amendment,” will shortly be up on SSRN, but for now you can read the abstract/introduction here.)

In any event, P or I (as it’s known) is a vastly superior way of giving people in the states the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. But it’s ambitious to argue this way rather than settle for the traditional jurisprudence. As Orin Kerr says at the Volokh Conspiracy, “It’s certainly an attention-getting way to brief the case. It’s not just arguing for a win: It’s arguing for a revolution.”

For further discussion of Alan’s McDonald brief — which Cato will be supporting with an amicus brief next week – see Lyle Deniston’s write-up at SCOTUSblog. (Ilya Shapiro. Cato at liberty)

Lady Rai, nursemaid to Queen Amrose Nefertari, suffered from hardening of the arteries, as did other ancient Egyptians, even though they ate unprocessed food, got exercise and didn’t smoke, according to a study.

Five of 16 mummies of priests, priestesses and members of various pharoahs’ courts showed “definite” atherosclerosis, detected by medical scans in a study by doctors from the U.S. and Egypt. Another four showed “probable” signs of the disease that can lead to heart attacks and stroke.

Atherosclerosis, a condition in which fatty substances build up in the lining of the arteries, can be caused by smoking, high cholesterol diets and lack of exercise, according to the Dallas-based heart association Web site. The findings challenge the notion that atherosclerosis is a disease of modern humans brought on by modern bad habits, researchers said.

“Heart disease is as old as Moses,” said Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at the Mid America Heart Institute of Saint Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri and one of the study’s researchers, in an interview. “Even though their lifestyles were healthier -- no processed foods, no smoking and they got more exercise -- many still contracted the disease showing a certain genetic susceptibility.” (Bloomberg)

Nov. 17 -- Two decades of improved treatments haven’t made a dent in the threat of heart disease in the U.S. because too many adults are obese, according to researchers from the University of Texas.

As the nation’s average body mass index, a measure of excess weight, surged between 1988 and 2006, the number of people with healthy blood pressure and blood sugar levels -- important measures of cardiovascular risks -- declined, according to a study presented today at the American Heart Association conference in Orlando, Florida.

The number of people who are obese has more than doubled in the past 30 years to 72 million people, or 30 percent of U.S. adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The obesity surge has undermined advances such as the introduction of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins in the late 1980s and public health programs that the CDC says have cut smoking rates to 21 percent, from 37 percent in 1970.

“We are getting fat just as fast as we are improving other factors,” said lead study investigator Kami Banks, a cardiology research fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, in an interview. “We as physicians have to address obesity like it’s a medical problem. We have to prescribe things to our patients that help them manage their weight.” (Bloomberg)

Most women should start regular breast cancer screening at age 50, not 40, according to new guidelines released Monday by an influential group that provides guidance to doctors, insurance companies and policy makers.

The new recommendations, which do not apply to a small group of women with unusual risk factors for breast cancer, reverse longstanding guidelines and are aimed at reducing harm from overtreatment, the group says. It also says women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms less frequently — every two years, rather than every year. And it said doctors should stop teaching women to examine their breasts on a regular basis. (Gina Kolata, NYT)

NEW YORK - Think that a drink or two a day help keep your mind sharp into older age? Researchers from the United Kingdom may have poked a hole into that idea.

Dr. Claudia Cooper, at University College London, and colleagues note in a study that moderate drinkers - generally that's two drinks a day for men and one for women - tend to have less forgetfulness and better mental skills as they age.

However, moderate drinkers also tend to have social, economic, and educational advantages that help them amass greater thinking skills over time.

A report by Cooper's team in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, suggests that it's these advantages - and not moderate drinking itself - that are responsible for the benefits. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - Schools that serve more fruits, vegetables and whole grains to pupils should see higher federal support rates than those serving less-healthier meals loaded with high fats and sugar, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Tuesday.

Child nutrition programs, which include school lunch and breakfast, are due for an overhaul but Congress is not expected to act before 2010. The government has targeted improving the nutritional quality and access to school meals amid rising child obesity rates.

"It is important for us to reward top performers," Vilsack told the Senate Agriculture Committee. "We would encourage this committee and the Congress to take a look at reimbursement rates that would be linked directly to increased nutritional values." (Reuters)

The Herald’s Richard Hinds argues that the Crawford Report has got it right on the future of sport.

It remains to be seen if the Crawford Report will be successful in its laudable intentions: to ensure government spending leads to increased grassroots participation, greater inclusiveness, the restoration of physical education in schools, a positive impact on public health and to improve and empower poorly administered sports.

However, David Crawford and his panel should be hailed for one thing: attempting to unshackle the government-funded sports sector from the limited, stifling and self-serving influence of the Olympic movement and its costly, self-aggrandising gold-medal obsession. (SMH)

Writing in Environmental Health Perspectives (2005), Booth and Zeller [hereafter BZ05] embark on the highly ambitious task of applying ecosystem modeling to the difficult problem of tracing the flow of methylmercury (MeHg) - the biologically active, potentially toxic form of mercury - in the Faroe Island marine ecosystem as changing functions of both fish mortality (commercial catch rates) and climate. The paper further attempts to estimate weekly MeHg intake by the Faroese from consumption of mainly pilot whale meat and cod fish - two key sources of MeHg exposures in Faroese diets. BZ05 displays the risk inherent in favoring computer modeling results over real world data. Such an exercise, increasingly common and problematic in climate science, often produces tenuous outcomes. More specifically, Booth and Zeller, with their minimal “what if” modeling efforts, cobble together a grab-bag of speculative assertions, problematic statements, harm attributions and over-reaching conclusions. (SPPI)

HONG KONG - Man-made ponds and rice fields irrigated using groundwater may be responsible for arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh, a study has found.

Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical poisonous to humans and is known to cause skin lesions and cancers of the bladder, kidney, lung and skin.

While it is known that organic carbon triggers the release of arsenic from sediments into groundwater, the source of this carbon has been unclear.

In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, researchers said they used chemical tests and models to examine the flow of groundwater in a typical agricultural area in Bangladesh and found that man-made ponds were a key source of organic carbon.

"The chemical signature of high-arsenic groundwater points toward ponds as the source of the contaminated water," wrote the scientists, led by Charles Harvey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

They warned against the building of artificial ponds above existing tube wells.

"The development of artificial ponds above wells should be avoided if it is possible, and drinking-water wells should not be placed downstream of recharge from existing ponds, wetlands, rivers or other permanently saturated water bodies potentially elevated in organic carbon," they wrote.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh suffer from skin lesions and experts have warned for years that Bangladesh can expect more cases of cancer if its people continue drinking arsenic-contaminated water from millions of small tube wells spread across the countryside.

Ironically, the tube wells were installed from the 1970s with the help of international agencies like the United Nations Children's Fund to provide "clean water" and as an answer to dirty surface water and widespread gastrointestinal diseases. (Reuters)

The Nationals Senator Ron Boswell said that the Labor government has declared a green war on fishing with their successful declaration of Coral Sea Conservation Zone.

“With the vote tied at 31 to 31 on the disallowance, the motion was defeated meaning the proclamation of the Coral Sea Conservation Zone will stand,” Senator Boswell said.

“The employees of the fishing, charter boat, marine and tourism industries should be shuddering in their boots over this decision,” Senator Boswell said.

“This proclamation is a disgraceful abuse of power by the Minister for Environment who has unilaterally declared an area of nearly a million square kilometres of ocean as a conservation zone without any consultation with industry representatives at all.”

“The Minister today has over-ridden the planning process put in place by the Howard Government to profile the entire Eastern Bio-region.”

Speaking today on the motion Senator Boswell revealed there was no consultation with any industry stakeholder by either the Minister or his Department before the proclamation of the Coral Sea Conservation Zone on 19 May 2009.

“A response by the Minister to a Question on Notice (2122) revealed that only two meetings were held by the Department prior to the proclamation, one with the Australian Conservation Foundation (19/03/09) and the other with Pew Charitable Trust (14/04/09) only a month before the proclamation.” ( Senator Ron Boswell)

KANSAS CITY - The rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods, according to a report issued Tuesday by health and environmental protection groups.

The groups said research showed that herbicide use grew by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008, with 46 percent of the total increase occurring in 2007 and 2008.

The report was released by nonprofits The Organic Center (TOC), the Union for Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Center for Food Safety (CFS).

The groups said that while herbicide use has climbed, insecticide use has dropped because of biotech crops. They said adoption of genetically engineered corn and cotton that carry traits resistant to insects has led to a reduction in insecticide use by 64 million pounds since 1996.

Still, that leaves a net overall increase on U.S. farm fields of 318 million pounds of pesticides, which includes insecticides and herbicides, over the first 13 years of commercial use.

The rise in herbicide use comes as U.S. farmers increasingly adopt corn, soy and cotton that have been engineered with traits that allow them to tolerate dousings of weed killer. The most popular of these are known as "Roundup Ready" for their ability to sustain treatments with Roundup herbicide and are developed and marketed by world seed industry leader Monsanto Co. (Reuters)

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have found that using alternative types of fertilizers can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, at least in one part of the country. They are currently examining whether the alternatives offer similar benefits nationwide.

Nitrogen fertilizers are often a necessity for ensuring sufficient crop yields, but their use leads to release of nitrous oxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Fertilizer use is one reason an estimated 78 percent of the nation's nitrous oxide emissions come from agriculture, according to Ardell Halvorson, a soil scientist at the ARS Soil Plant Nutrient Research Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo.

Halvorson compared nitrous oxide emissions from corn fields treated with either a conventional nitrogen fertilizer (urea) or either of two specially formulated urea fertilizers—one with "controlled release" polymer-coated pellets, and the other with inhibitors added to "stabilize" the urea to keep more of it in the soil as ammonium for a longer period. ( Dennis O'Brien, Ag Research Service)

SAO SEBASTIAO DE CUIEIRAS - The task of harvesting the secrets of Brazil's vast Amazon rain forest that could help in the battle against cancer largely falls to Osmar Barbosa Ferreira and a big pair of clippers.

In jungle so dense it all but blocks out the sun, the lithe 46-year-old shimmies up a thin tree helped by a harness, a strap between his feet, and the expertise gained from a lifetime laboring in the forest.

A few well-placed snips later, branches cascade to a small band of researchers and a doctor who faithfully make a long monthly trip to the Cuieiras river in Amazonas state in the belief that the forest's staggeringly rich plant life can unlock new treatments for cancer.

They may be right.

About 70 percent of current cancer drugs are either natural products or derived from natural compounds, and the world's largest rain forest is a great cauldron of biodiversity that has already produced medicine for diseases such as malaria.

But finding the right material is no easy task in a forest that can have up to 400 species of trees and many more plants in a 2.5-acre (1-hectare) area, and in a country where suspicion of outside involvement in the Amazon runs strong.

"If we had very clear rules, we could attract scientists from all over the world," said the doctor, Drauzio Varella, with a mix of enthusiasm and frustration. "We could transform a big part of the Amazon into an enormous laboratory."

As it stands, though, foreigners are barred from helping oncologist Varella and the researchers from Sao Paulo's Paulista University, who are among a tiny handful of Brazilian groups licensed to study samples from the Amazon.

Varella, 66, believes his high profile has helped. He is a well-known writer and television personality who shot to fame in 1999 with a book and subsequent hit movie based on his work as a doctor in a brutal Sao Paulo prison called Carandiru.

But a move by his team in the 1990s to partner with the U.S. National Cancer Institute produced a storm of accusations of "bio-piracy" and for years it has been blocked from the international cooperation and funding that could increase the chances of finding the Holy Grail of a cancer cure. (Reuters)

FRONT ROYAL (PRI) - Buoyed by the new money flowing into its coffers from the Obama administration, the overpopulation movement is once again lecturing us on the need to have fewer children. But all the paid propaganda in the world can’t hide the fact that birthrates have already fallen to historically low levels throughout the world.

Like aging sixties radicals seeking to relive their glory days, the fear mongers at the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) are still trying to scare us with the specter of overpopulation. The trouble is, the world has moved on, even if they haven’t. The latest move by the British group--a major move to push contraception as the solution to global warming—has received a less than warm welcome from the global community.

This couldn’t have been what OPT expected when it tried to capitalize on the obsession of leftist politicians with global warming. But their press release, put out in September of this year, struck many as more than a little self-serving. Perhaps it was that it hailed contraception as, of all things, “the latest in green technology.” Or perhaps it was that OPT funded the very study that it later hyped in its press release. Then there was the study itself, by a couple of academics at the London School of Economics, that made the rather strange claim that, “considered purely as a method of reducing future CO2 emissions, family planning is more cost-effective than leading low-carbon technologies.”

The report concluded by claiming that “the population issue must now be added into the negotiations for the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.” Although the authors stopped short of asserting, as Al Gore did, that babies cause global warming, they came close. Readers are left with the impression that fewer breathing humans equal a greener, healthier planet. We’ve never heard that one before. ( Steven W. Mosher, Population Research Institute)

New Video Challenge to Gore Offers $500, Plus Proceeds Of Worldwide Pledge-a-Dollar Campaign

Washington, D.C., November 16, 2009—For years, Al Gore has steadfastly refused to debate the global warming issue. Most recently, he ignored a put-up-or-shut-up challenge on the Glenn Beck Show from climate policy expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a former British government adviser. Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute hopes to change all that with the release of a new video campaign. In it, CEI offers Mr. Gore a $500 check, together with the proceeds of a world-wide email pledge-a-dollar drive, all aimed at persuading Mr. Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Gore hasn’t been in a debate since he ran for president,” said Sam Kazman, CEI General Counsel. “But given that he and his allies are seeking the biggest tax increase in history in the form of new energy taxes and rationing, he ought to at least have to courage to engage in a face-to-face defense of his position,” Kazman stated.

CEI’s video debate challenge comes several weeks before a major United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, which begins on December 7. Representatives from 192 countries are expected to attend that conference. Global warming alarmists hope to reach a new agreement to ratchet up international restrictions on energy use. The previous agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012.

At the same time, the US Congress is deliberating over major climate change legislation to set up a cap-and-tax carbon trading scheme.

Video of Lord Monckton Warning of Copenhagen Climate Treaty Exceeds 3.5 Million Views in a Single Month

Minneapolis – A video of Lord Christopher Monckton warning of the impending Copenhagen climate treaty has received over 3.5 million views in 30 days, according to Minnesota Majority, the organization responsible for posting the original 4-minute excerpt of Monckton’s speech. The organization says that its original clip, together with the 100+ cloned versions that now exist on YouTube, in total exceeded 3.5 million views as of November 15, 2009. The video clip made Minnesota Majority the #1 most viewed Non-Profit & Activism channel in the month of October on YouTube.

[ Note: Also I have a link to the draft Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty here Monckton’s Powerpoint presentation used at that speech is available in PDF format here (warning large download 17.5 MB) - Anthony]

This is mind blowing ignorance on the part of Al Gore. Gore in an 11/12/09 interview on NBC’s tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, speaking on geothermal energy, champion of slide show science, can’t even get the temperature of earth’s mantle right. Oh, and the “crust of the earth is hot” too.

Temperature of the Earths mantle, more than “2 kilometers or so down”: between 500 °C to 900 °C (773 to 1173 kelvin)

Watching Gore make a complete scientific idiot of himself on national TV: priceless

While you have pseudo-Republicans (RINOs) offering political cover to national energy taxes, one Democrat in America’s senior legislative chamber is pulling the covers back. Politico reported today that Virginia’s “Jim Webb bails on cap-and-trade”:

It is a key loss for cap and trade in the Senate, but the far-Green fringe will continue to push economically troubling climate legislation.

Still, one wonders how South Carolina residents will feel knowing that their Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is supporting costly, destructive government interference that a Democrat from Virginia does not. (Chilling Effect)

All around the world, politicians favor introducing cap-and-trade systems to cap carbon emissions, because these introduce an indirect tax that disguises the true cost. With a tax, it is obvious who pays, and how much. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around.

Lawmakers have vast opportunities to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners. In other words, cap-and-trade schemes promote pork-barrel politics. We have already seen this with legislation in Europe and the United States, where existing industries are being paid off with massive amounts of public money.

The privileged, big businesses that will make a fortune from exploiting this rigged market are loudly cheering on the politicians. Their personal gain is no reason to support a system that will be bad for everyone else.

The costs of cap and trade -- financially and in terms of jobs, household consumption, and growth -- will be large. The Copenhagen Consensus Center recently commissioned research from economists -- available at www.fixtheclimate.com -- looking at the costs and benefits of many different policy responses to global warming.

Groundbreaking research by renowned climate economist Professor Richard Tol showed that a high, global CO2 tax starting at $68 a ton could reduce world gross domestic product by a staggering 12.9 percent in 2100. The equivalent of $40 trillion a year, this would cost tens of times the expected damage of global warming. (Examiner)

The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday that it had uncovered yet another Ponzi scheme, this time with a company that purported to invest in environmentally friendly, or “green,” projects. The agency has been focusing attention on such fraud cases ever since Bernard L. Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme went undetected for years and years.

In the latest scheme, the commission said it had filed civil charges against four individuals and two companies, accusing them of perpetrating the $30 million fraud that bilked 300 investors nationwide.

The S.E.C. contends that Wayde and Donna McKelvy, who were previously married and living in the Denver area, promised investors returns ranging from 17 percent to “hundreds of percent” annually by helping to finance “green” initiatives through a company called Mantria.

The company was supposedly developing projects like a “carbon negative” housing community in rural Tennessee and produced “biochar,” a charcoal-like material used to capture and store excess carbon dioxide, which would supposedly help fight global warming.

With the help of two other promoters, Troy Wragg and Amanda Knorr of Philadelphia, the McKelvys went after elderly investors and persons approaching retirement age, the S.E.C. said. It said the promoters tried to get these investors to attend seminars or participate in Internet “webinars” that urged them to liquidate their traditional investments to invest in the supposed “green” initiative. (NYT)

WASHINGTON, Nov 16 - U.S. Senate Democrats will attempt to pass a climate-change bill in "early spring" of 2010, Senator John Kerry told reporters on Monday, further complicating prospects for an international summit on global warming next month. (Reuters)

World leaders have finally accepted that it will be impossible to come to a deal on climate change this year and have moved their attention to setting new deadlines for a global agreement. (TDT)

The world cannot achieve food security without first tackling global warming, the United Nations secretary-general said yesterday, warning that failure at next month's international climate change negotiations would result in a further rise in hunger.

The warning by Ban Ki-Moon at the start of a three-day UN world food summit in Rome came one day after Barack Obama, US president, backed European and UN views that the Copenhagen summit would not produce a legally binding agreement to tackle global warming.

"There cannot be food security without climate security," Mr Ban said. "Today's event is critical," he added, referring to the food summit, "so is Copenhagen". (Financial Times)

Proponents of reducing greenhouse gas emissions view the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen as the point of no return. Gordon Brown has famously said that if an agreement is not made in December it will be “irretrievably too late, so we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.” Similarly, COP15’s President, Connie Hedegaard, said that failure in Copenhagen is “not an option” and that the “the sooner we deal with the challenge of climate change, the smaller the risk of chaos and catastrophe.”

But people become increasingly less concerned about the issue. In a recent poll, Americans ranked the economy as the top priority while climate change ranks dead last. It is not just Americans who are showing a lack of concern; British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has recently lamented that people worldwide are failing to understand the eminent global catastrophe:

The problem with painting doomsday scenarios is that one cannot claim that climate change legislation will prevent hurricanes or natural disasters; furthermore one cannot even claim that cap and trade policies will reduce world-wide emissions. According to Ben Lieberman, Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation,

So climate change legislation will not reduce world-wide emissions—thereby doing nothing to prevent catastrophic weather conditions, but it is very clear that it will cause great economic havoc. In his speech to the UN on climate change, Obama was right to say that “our generation’s response to this challenge will be judged by history” but these polls show that more and more people are do not want their children to find themselves in an America with higher energy prices, higher taxes, and fewer jobs in return for policies that will do nothing to prevent changes in the climate. That could be the real catastrophe. (The Foundry)

In the run up to Copenhagen, global warming alarmists are spreading the word that climate change is progressing even faster than the IPCC has projected. But contradictory data from skeptics and open minded scientists continues to indicate that global warming has gone on hiatus and may not return for decades. This has sparked a noticeable drop in public concern over climate change and has led some climate change true believers to bemoan increasing public “Climate Fatigue.”

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously,” ecologist and IPCC author Christopher Field of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In March, a meeting of 2000 climate scientists in Copenhagen prompted the headline “Projections of Climate Change Go From Bad to Worse, Scientists Report.”

A news focus article in the November 13 issue of Science, written by Richard A. Kerr, starts off the IPCC propagandist party line by outlining the usual cornucopia of climate induced afflictions:

Never mind that most of these “facts” have been contradicted in the reviewed scientific literature and the press, the climate change Cassandra's are turning up the volume on their doomsday pronouncements. Why? They know that they are loosing the argument scientifically and the battle for the hearts and minds of the public. The response among the climate change true believers has been to claim the IPCC's predictions are coming true even faster than expected and that mankind is hurtling towards disaster. In an attempt to bolster the IPCC claims, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued an IPCC-like report that tries to inflate the potential for ecological damage.

The UNEP report entitled Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 presents the UN's latest case for heightened climate concerns. By its own admission, this is not an exhaustively peer-reviewed consensus assessment, but UNEP did compile its report “in association with scientists around the world.” Naturally, the UNEP update finds more sobering, even scarier, climate changes under way than IPCC did. To document its findings a new “burning embers diagram” was issued by 15 climate scientists, including some of the 2001 IPCC authors, in a March 2009 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The prime driver of global warming, emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, surged between 2000 and 2006, the report notes. That spurt has already contributed to a host of sooner-than-expected climate impacts, it continues, including “faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting of Arctic sea-ice cover, warming of polar land masses, freshening in ocean currents, and shifts in circulation patterns in the atmosphere and the oceans.”

But even Kerr admits that this view is not universally held within the climate change community. Other scientists say the picture since the IPCC report is more complicated than that. “Things are looking much worse than was thought in the 1970s and '80s,” says Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. “But ‘much worse than IPCC 2007’ is only true for a few things.” Oh really? Still others add that some anticipated climate changes are actually behind schedule while a few are trying to stay the course. According to Vicky Pope, the UK Meteorological Office's head of climate change advice “It's at least as bad as expected,” she says. “I don't think it's worse.”

The Met Office Hadley Centre, perhaps in an attempt to atone for having to report the past decade's halt in temperature rise, has recently announced a new “tipping point.” The Met Office has declared that the world has only ten years to control global warming or a whole litany of woes will afflict the peoples of Earth. Perhaps an indication of how desperate the climate change crowd is becoming is the warming that certain countries would lose their national dishes. According to the Met study's models, a low durum wheat yield in Italy could make pasta more expensive while in Poland potato crops are under threat. That's right, scare people into cutting CO₂ emissions by threatening their favorite food—real science at work.

“Whether or not the public is hearing the right tone of voice from the right places, it doesn't seem to be getting the message anymore,” opines Kerr. Recent polls suggest that US citizens are notably less concerned about global warming than they were a few years ago. In a poll conducted at the end of September by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the proportion of Americans who “think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades” dropped to 57% from 71% in April 2008. The proportion of the American public that views global warming as a very serious or somewhat serious problem dropped from 73% to 65%. And in a Gallup poll released in March, the proportion of Americans who believe that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated hit 41%, a record high in the 12 years Gallup has asked that question.

Nor is this trend limited to America. According to The Economist, public opinion in Europe, where attitudes are generally greener than in America, has also soured on climate change. A poll published in July by the European Commission showed that early in 2009, the number of European Union residents who saw climate change as the world’s gravest problem had dropped to 50% from 62% in spring of 2008. That was partly because the numbers citing global recession as the main worry had surged from 24% to 52%.

In Australia, a more fundamental shift towards skepticism seems to be occurring, despite the Labor government’s efforts to push the country in a greener direction. A poll in July by the Lowy Institute showed the number of Australians willing to shoulder “significant costs” to tackle global warming had fallen to 48%. This is down from 60% last year and 68% in 2006. In both America and Australia the public seems to be growing more doubtful, even in the face of ever shriller warnings from the IPCC and its minions.

“Where do you go after ‘unequivocal’?” asks Roger Pielke Jr., a science policy scholar at the University of Colorado, a reference to the measure of certainty the IPCC applied to its core findings in its 2007 report. By sounding the alarm too loudly, Pielke and others say, climate change campaigners could be causing the public to tune them out or could even provoke a backlash. Indeed, where do you go? Like a compulsive gambler doubling down on a bad hand, the climate change extremists continue to bet on their visions of pending disaster. It looks like the IPCC, the UN agency that cried “wolf” over climate change, is about to discover the consequences trying to deceive the world.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have an interesting article up at Yale360 on public opinion and climate change. Here is an excerpt:

The likely delays in sealing a global deal to fight climate change would have a "human cost", and increase the risks of great harm to the planet and the economic costs of dealing with it, the head of the UN environment programme said today.

Achim Steiner also said there was an "extremely high" risk that the UN-hosted talks would drift into deadlock if the summit in Copenhagen next month failed to deliver a meaningful agreement. "The world has been focused on this moment for years," he told the Guardian.

"There have been hundreds of meetings and summits and workshops. If you then take that momentum out you run the risk of entering into an open-ended process and before you know if it you are in the same situation as the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation talks. (The Guardian)

Barack Obama's admission that next month's crucial climate talks in Copenhagen will not provide a legally binding treaty is the best thing – and the worst thing – the world needed to hear.

On the positive side, the leader of the country with one of the poorest track records on climate change, in terms of emissions and the political response to the problem, is underlining the importance of the negotiations and the hoped-for deal. The US is finally taking the problem seriously, which is why it is pushing for a postponement of the final outcome. Better to wait a few months and do the deal properly, it says, than rush into something that is too weak or, perhaps worse, so hopelessly ambitious that it brings the Copenhagen talks crashing down.

On the negative side, any kind of ambition, hopeless or otherwise, has been rare on the ground when it comes to global efforts to curb climate change. Obama has confirmed we can expect more of the same. Despite the rhetoric about Copenhagen being a moment in history, a crucial last chance to deliver, it will likely revert to type – talks about talks, as Greenpeace put it today. (The Guardian)

SINGAPORE - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned on Monday that climate change posed a "catastrophic" threat in some of the sharpest comments yet on a subject the Kremlin has often seemed reluctant to confront.

Although the United States said that the consensus amongst the 19 leaders at the weekend Asia Pacific summit in Singapore was that a climate change deal this December was unlikely, Medvedev made clear he felt it was a top priority.

"If we don't take joint action, the consequences for the planet may be very distressing to the point that the Arctic and Antarctic ice can melt and change ocean levels," he said shortly before leaving Singapore.

"All of this will have catastrophic consequences." (Reuters)

ROME, Nov 16 - The United Nations said on Monday that agreeing a climate change deal in Copenhagen next month is crucial to fighting global hunger, which Brazil's president described as "the most devastating weapon of mass destruction".

Government leaders and officials met in Rome for a three-day U.N. summit on how to help developing countries feed themselves, but anti-poverty campaigners and even some participants were already writing off the event as a missed opportunity.

The sense of scepticism deepened at the weekend, when U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, though European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.

"There can be no food security without climate security," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the summit. (Reuters)

India and China have come under pressure from the U.N. to accept emissions targets in advance of the Copenhagen talks. But India's lead negotiator says economic development must not be stifled. (LA Times)

If there's good news from Saturday's APEC summit, it's Asia's ninja blow to a global climate pact in Copenhagen. The dynamic region recognized the economy-killer for what it was and refused to commit suicide.

Global summits galore have paid obeisance to the holy grail of a global pact binding nations to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. President Obama, who is calling for a United Nations treaty in Copenhagen this December, said, "We're out of time" shortly before leaving for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

So that's why Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, who leads the U.N.'s Copenhagen group, was flown out to Singapore in a last-ditch bid to convince 19 leaders of the 21-nation APEC summit to support the pact. All he got for his trouble was egg on his face as Asian nations flatly rejected his pleas.

He's now trying to recover from that embarrassment by saying that the climate pact would be merely delayed, with the Copenhagen summit to be used to achieve a "political" commitment and next year's meeting serving as an occasion to impose emission quotas.

"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," Rasmussen said.

But in reality, the dubious treaty is dead, and it's Asia that put it out of its misery. (IBD)

COPENHAGEN - A binding international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions will slip to mid-2010 or beyond and a summit in Copenhagen next month will fall short of its ambitions, the United Nations and Denmark said on Monday.

The United Nations' top climate official said a treaty could be wrapped up at talks in Bonn by mid-2010. Denmark, host of next month's meeting, said it might take longer - until Mexico in December. Negotiations on a deal, initially due to be reached at the December 7-18 summit in Copenhagen, have stalled. (Reuters)

CANBERRA, Nov 17 - Australia's opposition expressed confidence on Tuesday that it would reach a deal with the government to pass laws for a domestic carbon trade scheme, with a final government offer on negotiations due next week.

The opposition's climate change negotiator, Ian Macfarlane, told Australian media he was optimistic he would secure a deal despite divisions within his own party on the issue.

"I remain confident that we'll get an outcome that I can take to the party room, and that the party room can consider," Australian Associated Press quoted Macfarlane as telling reporters.

"On that basis, I'd be optimistic that the party room would support it," he said, adding a final decision would be made by opposition lawmakers next Monday or Tuesday. (Reuters)

Australia’s upper house of parliament is due to start debating draft carbon-reduction laws for a second time as expectations fade for a binding global accord on climate change at next month’s Copenhagen summit.

The government needs support from seven opposition or minor party Senators to pass the proposals, approved yesterday in the lower House of Representatives, where the ruling Labor Party holds a majority. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants a vote on the legislation by the end of November, when parliament’s final sitting for the year concludes. (Bloomberg)

“The downgrading of Copenhagen’s Climate Change Conference from a 200 page treaty to a non-binding fifteen page political statement ends the argument that the CPRS should be passed beforehand,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell today.

“In that environment, what use will Rudd be standing there waving around a dozen CPRS Acts and hundreds of draft regulations?”

“Copenhagen ultra-lite is dangerous for Australian jobs and industry because there is no certainty as to what our trading competitors will do. That makes it even more unwise to pass such a detailed ETS beforehand.”

“Rudd’s ETS and the Treasury modelling are totally dependent on other countries having their own ETS and accepting a carbon price. If the rest of the world is not ready for that step then Australia will be foolhardy in the extreme to venture out alone with a carbon price.” (Senator Ron Boswell)

LONDON - A United Nations plan to protect the world's tropical forests to fight climate change could threaten more animals and plants with extinction, scientists said on Monday.

The U.N. scheme, to be discussed at climate talks in Copenhagen next month, could save some species, while inadvertently endangering many others, according to the team of international researchers.

Under the plan, called REDD, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, poor countries will be paid to protect their trees to try to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. (Reuters)

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced he will begin bombarding not Colombia, but the clouds so as to trigger much needed precipitations to help fill up dams and reservoirs, at record low levels, and which have forced water and power rationing. (MercoPress)

Willie Soon and David Legates, both respected members of the American Geophysical Union, tell the story of how their planned session to discuss scientific papers that consider the many contributing factors to climate variability was a "go," until suddenly it wasn't:

What about the independent lines of evidence of no global warming the last ten years, which the vast body could not see below their extended gut? (Paul Chesser, American Spectator)

I’ve done it, I’ve finally solved the dilemma of how to refer to scientists who actively promote a crisis due to carbon, but can’t provide the evidence that carbon causes major warming. Not Team-AGW, not alarmist, A far better one has come to me.

Once upon a time, a scientist and a skeptic used to be one and the same thing. Actually, it still is. The motto of The Royal Society — the longest lived scientific association in the world, is Nullius in Verba — “On no one’s word” (take no one’s word for it). The Climate Industry marketing has tried to turn “skeptic” into a dirty word. So in perfect symmetry, if we are Skeptical Scientists, they are obviously:

It covers all bases; is true to its form, and if you think being a skeptic is so unattractive, it’s flattering —right? I can see them queuing up now to print the badges proclaiming themselves as the proud people who are not skeptics. So in the spirit of helpfulness I’ve done them up their very own T-Shirt and Badge —copyright free.

It’s time to reclaim the term skeptic. It is, after all, just what a scientist is. It’s time to rescue the brand of the word skeptic, and rebadge those who are not… skeptical.

These images are available for anyone to use. Just ask if you’d like a larger size.

Link: The Royal Society. For all their faults, even though they harassed Exxon for no good reason, they were the ones who insisted Briffa post his data. (JoNova)

“When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.” Anonymous

Finger pointing rarely includes facts, especially in the climate debate. The first finger said we were global warming skeptics, but was turned back when it was explained all scientists are skeptics.

The second finger claimed we were climate change deniers. It was turned back because the opposite is true; we’re telling the public about the extent and speed of natural climate change. As Copenhagen nears, it’s evident no agreement is possible so rhetoric, and alarmism abound. Finger pointing has a new form, being a denier is now a disease. They never consider the failure is due to facts proving the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis wrong. With the left it is always someone else’s fault. (Tim Ball, Canada Free Press)

Sustained drops in the energy output of the Sun could be more common than modern experience suggests, according to an international team of astronomers that has studied the activity of a number of Sun-like stars. The results could mean that past changes in global temperatures are more likely to be related to variations in solar activity than previously thought, and could allow us to predict similar changes in future.

Our Sun has a well documented cycle of magnetic activity with a period of about 11 years. This cycle can be observed as a rise and a fall in the number of sunspots and a variation of about 0.15% in the power output of the Sun. Direct observations of sunspot numbers stretch back about 400 years, but the amount of carbon-14 taken up by living things drops during periods of high activity and this can be used to chart solar activity back several thousand years.

...

The low activity levels cannot be so easily explained and might represent a typical feature in the activity of a Sun-like star. One well documented example of such a period of unusual solar quiescence was the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century, when a significant drop in sunspot numbers coincided with a recorded drop in global temperatures. If Giampapa's research rings true, it could mean that the Sun spends a significant amount of its time in a Maunder Minimum-like state – and it might reveal how likely we are to experience such periods of cooling in the future.

"This interpretation of the Sun is also supported by the terrestrial carbon-14 record showing that the abundance of this isotope is consistent with lower solar activity," Giampapa.

CLOUD experimental chamber. More photos.
Click the picture to zoom it in.

The newest article at cern.ch says:

From: “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.” Authors: Gerald A. Meehl, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling, and Larry McDaniel Publication: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)

The answer: those decades are inconvenient to the conclusion Meehl makes from a cherrypicked portion of the US data. There were many many temperature records during this period. For example, Richard Alan Keen writes in email:

Arneth, Almut , Nadine Unger, Markku Kulmala, Meinrat O. Andreae, 2009: Clean the Air, Heat the Planet? Science 30 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5953, pp. 672 - 673 DOI: 10.1126/science.1181568

“Like many others in the climate debate, we have focused on surface temperature, but other aspects of climate change especially the amount, distribution, and intensity of rainfall—are at least as important to human well-being. Changing aerosol burdens may alter local and regional cloud cover and precipitation, change the intensity or timing of the monsoon circulation, and even shift precipitation across national borders… Changes in cloud cover and precipitation will also feed back on the photochemistry and rainout of short-lived species … These issues must be considered if aerosol emissions are to become part of climate policy.”

While land use change is conspicuously absent in this statement, the need to broaden out beyond a focus on carbon dioxide as a human climate forcing, as we have urged in the Arneth et al 2009 article further supports the perpsective in our new contribution

Pielke Sr., Roger, Keith Beven, Guy Brasseur, Jack Calvert, Moustafa Chahine, Russ Dickerson, Dara Entekhabi, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Hoshin Gupta, Vijay Gupta, Witold Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, William K. M. Lau, Jeff McDonnell, William Rossow, John Schaake, James Smith, Soroosh Sorooshian, and Eric Wood: 2009: “Climate Change: The Need to Consider Human Forcings Besides Greenhouse Gases“. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, page 413. (Climate Science)

Kansas State University's Joseph Craine, research assistant professor in the Division of Biology, and KC Olson, associate professor in animal sciences and industry, have teamed up with some other scientists from across the United States to look into the possible effects of climate change on cattle nutrition.

Comparing grasslands and pastureland in different regions in the U.S., the study, published in Global Change Biology, discusses data from more than 21,000 different fecal samples collected during a 14-year period and analyzed at the Texas A&M University Grazingland Animal Nutrition Lab for nutritional content.

"Owing to the complex interactions among climate, plants, cattle grazing and land management practices, the impacts of climate change on cattle have been hard to predict," said Craine, principal investigator for the project.

The lab measured the amount of crude protein and digestible organic matter retained by cattle in the different regions. The pattern of forage quality observed across regions suggests that a warmer climate would limit protein availability to grazing animals, Craine said. (ScienceDaily)

THE Great Barrier Reef has only a 50 per cent chance of survival if global CO2 emissions are not reduced at least 25 per cent by 2020, a coalition of Australia's top reef and climate scientists said today.

The 13 scientists said even deeper cuts of up to 90 per cent by 2050 would necessary if the reef was to survive future coral bleaching and coral death caused by rising ocean temperatures.

"We've seen the evidence with our own eyes. Climate change is already impacting the Great Barrier Reef," Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a briefing to MPs. (Courier-Mail)

A federal judge said Monday that Tim DeChristopher won't be allowed to argue that global warming posed an imminent threat that justified placing bogus bids to derail a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction last year.

"The court finds that DeChristopher's necessity defense fails because there were reasonable, legal alternatives open to DeChristopher other than his alleged criminal acts," U.S. District Judge Dee Benson wrote in his nine-page ruling.

DeChristopher has not disputed that he placed the bids, but had hoped to argue his actions were justified to stave off climate change -- a line of argument that prosecutors successfully sought to have excluded from the trial. ( Salt Lake Tribune)

WASHINGTON - Two U.S. Senators on Monday unveiled bipartisan legislation aimed at doubling nuclear power in 20 years and increasing funding for research into low carbon sources of energy.

Sponsored by Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander and Virginia Democrat Jim Webb, the bill would provide $100 billion in loan guarantees for carbon-free electricity projects, adding to the existing $47 billion loan guarantee program.

Although the additional loan guarantees would not be limited to nuclear power, the nuclear industry would likely be the major recipient of the extra money because it is one of the most established low carbon energy sources.

The legislation comes as Senate Democrats work to draw more support for controversial climate legislation by crafting measures that would increase support for nuclear power and offshore drilling. (Reuters)

As the Congress considers historic climate change legislation and diplomats prepare for December's U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it is time that the domestic airline industry stops trying to fly above the debate over how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (David Cush and Mindy Lubber, SF Chronicle)

This post provides some background, a base case and the results of taking necessary additional considerations into account. The base case has two scenarios.

The first is that every MWh of wind production directly reduces the full fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions for every MWh of the “displaced” fossil fuel plant, which is a very simplistic view. The second takes some limited considerations into account, which can show that as much of 85 percent of the simplistic-view savings are still achieved. Calculator runs illustrate how similar results can be produced.

A major consideration is the need for fast-responding gas generation plants to mirror or shadow wind’s highly volatile output, especially during periods of high wind production. Figure 1 illustrates the concept. The gas production is shown in black and is necessary to render wind’s output useful. As the gas production is the complement of that for wind, the vertical axis has to be read in reverse for gas. While operating in a wind-shadowing/wind-mirroring backup role, the gas turbine plants consume more gas and produce more CO2 emissions per MWh than in their normal mode of operation.

The calculator treats these two considerations separately. The first, fossil fuel consumption (gas) per MWh, is increased by an efficiency loss factor, or heat rate penalty. The second, CO2 emissions per MWh, is increased by another efficiency loss factor, which is greater than the heat rate penalty and non-linear. This second factor is derived from a paper by White and is not in addition to the heat rate penalty.

The calculator credits wind with the full electricity production contribution as measured over a year, regardless of its short term volatile nature. The question is: what is the effect on gas consumption and CO2 emissions for the combination of wind and gas? As indicated, it is often claimed that industrial wind plants reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by an amount obtained by multiplying wind’s electricity production (in some measure of watt-hours) times: [Read more →] (Kent Hawkins, MasterResource)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Until now I've avoided the debate over a proposed wind project in Texas involving Chinese investors, federal renewable energy stimulus grants and wind turbines from China, mainly because I didn't think I had anything salient to add to the unpleasant mix of protectionism and second-guessing that was unfolding. This morning I read a posting on the subject from the Breakthrough Institute that, while offering a coherent explanation of how we got to this point, convinced me that the real problem still hasn't been addressed. Although the inconsistency of past and present US energy policy is readily apparent, the current concerns arise from general confusion over the benefits of renewable energy, exacerbated by the recent effort to spin these projects and technologies in terms of "green jobs." When we don't really understand why we are doing something, it's easy to make any outcome look like a failure--and there is no shortage of elements from which to craft such a view in the situation at hand.

The chief complaint about the project in question is that it might be eligible to take advantage of a key energy provision of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009--this year's stimulus bill--that allows the developers of a qualifying renewable energy project to collect an up-front cash grant from the US Treasury equal to 30% of the cost of the project. In this case much of that money, along with the funds provided by the US and Chinese partners, would go to pay for wind turbines imported from China. As a result, most of the jobs this project would create would be in China, not the US. On the face of it, this looks like a colossal loophole that some high-profile legislators--who incidentally voted for the stimulus bill including this feature--are rushing to plug. However, this only looks like a nasty unintended consequence of a hastily-crafted law if you misunderstand the mechanics and purpose of the Treasury renewable energy grant program. (Geoffrey Styles, Energy Tribune)

Waste of perfectly good CO₂: Using CO2 to Extract Geothermal Energy - Carbon dioxide captured from power plants could make geothermal energy more practical.

Carbon dioxide generated by power plants may find a second life as a working fluid to help recover geothermal heat from kilometers underground. Such a system would not only capture the carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, it would also be a cost-effective way to use the greenhouse gas to generate new power. (Tech Review)

Medicaid is a means-tested welfare program created in 1965 to provide health care for low income families. Despite the fact that it is one of the most poorly performing of all the federal welfare programs it has become the cornerstone of how health insurance is expanded under Obamacare. The Health care “reform” bills advancing in the House and Senate would expand Medicaid by making this government-run health plan available to all adults with incomes at or below 150% of the poverty line. The change would dramatically multiply eligible recipients, with 46 states seeing increases of at least 20%, including 16 posting jumps of 50% or more. Almost 21% of the entire U.S. population would be eligible for Medicaid and seven states and the District of Columbia would have eligibility rates of at least 25%.

A new study suggests that in utero exposure to certain plastics may change behaviour in boys, making them less masculine.

Researchers at the University of Rochester examined the play habits of children aged 4 to 7 years old.

The mothers of 145 youngsters had previously volunteered to be tested during pregnancy. Those boys born to women with higher levels of exposure to phthalates were less likely to play with toys like guns or trucks, or exhibit play behaviour typical of their gender, such as roughhousing or participating in sports.

"(The results) say to me that these phthalates have the ability to alter brain development in utero," said Dr. Shanna Swan, the lead researcher.

The affected boys did not display feminine qualities, such as increased play with dolls. Instead, they acted in ways less typically masculine than peers whose mothers were not exposed to high levels of phthalates during pregnancy. (Toronto Star)

October was a good month for Stephen Tillery.

The prolific Metro-East plaintiff's lawyer finally had his motion heard in Madison County Court to expand an already huge list of class members to a class action suit against makers of the herbicide atrazine.

In fact, October was a good month for any trial lawyer looking to secure his retirement by shielding people from atrazine.

The Obama Administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it was beginning "a new scientific evaluation of atrazine" so it could determine whether or not the popular herbicide, regularly used by corn growers, is associated with causing cancer, birth defects, low birth weight, or premature birth.

Such intent sounds appropriate until one considers the peculiar timing of the study, the results of which are scheduled to be released next fall.

The EPA has already studied this issue and cleared atrazine as safe at least twice before, most recently in 2006. The chemical poses "no harm that would result to the general U.S. population, infants, children or other...consumers," the agency said.

So why study atrazine again?

EPA leaders surely have some answer. But one wonders whether the influence of trial lawyers such as Mr. Tillery had something to do with it. (The Record)

Ever since the energy crisis of 1973, far too much attention has been paid to those who believe that saving energy is the holy grail. A such, ventilation rates in many new homes have dropped well below the levels required to maintain healthy air.

Thus, we began to hear about sick building syndrome, and radon and mold contamination. Radon and mold, of course, have always been around, but when you seal up your homes so tightly, contaminants can and do build up—presenting problems previously unknown. It is hardly an accident that so many more people are reporting allergic reactions than before 1973.

My latest HND piece shows how the Chinese drywall mess is forcing people—and that even includes feckless regulators—to re-examine their assumptions on saving energy. We look at some disturbing findings from indoor air quality gurus Linda Kincaid and Bud Offerman, who are calling for much more outside air to be ventilated into homes—especially new homes.

Read the complete article. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

ORLANDO, Florida - The battery of tests given to a patient having a heart attack in a U.S. hospital adds up to a dose of radiation equivalent to 725 chest X-rays, researchers reported on Monday.

One problem is that each procedure is viewed separately, and a patient's total cumulative dose is not usually considered by doctors ordering the test, the researchers told a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando.

On average, a patient admitted to an academic hospital with a heart attack had a cumulative effective radiation dose of 14.5 millisieverts -- about a third the annual maximum accumulation permitted for workers in nuclear power plants.

The average American can expect to receive about 3 millisieverts a year from ground radon or flying in an airplane.

"The risk at an individual level is small with one test, but with multiple tests the risk likely increases," said Dr. Prashant Kaul of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, who led the study.

"We think physicians should not only have a greater awareness of dose accumulation from the tests they are ordering, but also understand the testing patterns they use for common diagnoses."

About a third of the billions of diagnostic imaging scans done around the world every year involve some aspect of heart disease. The American Heart Association estimates patients' collective doses received annually from radiation-based medical tests jumped 700 percent between 1980 and 2006. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Children who don't show normal fear responses to loud, unpleasant sounds at the age of 3 may be more likely to commit crimes as adults, according to a new study.

Yu Gao and colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom compared results from a study of almost 1,800 children born in 1969 and 1970 on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to criminal records of group members 20 years later.

At age 3, the children were tested to gauge their level of "fear conditioning," or fear of consequences. The idea is that children who associate unpleasant sounds or other unpleasant experiences with fear will be less likely to commit antisocial acts because they will link such experiences with punishments for those acts.

Researchers tested the 3-year-olds' responses to unpleasant noises using a lie detector. When they looked at any criminal records among the participants 20 years later, 137 of them (131 male, 6 female) had at least one criminal conviction.

Compared to almost 300 participants with no criminal records, those 137 participants had a much lower response to the noises at the age of 3.

The findings could link previous studies suggesting that psychopaths and children with behavioral problems at the age of 11 have similar abnormalities in a part of the brain called the amygdala. That structure is largely responsible for directing fear of consequences. (Reuters Health)

American imperialism remains an issue but Hugo Chávez has identified a new threat to Venezuela's socialist revolution: obesity.

The president has sounded the alarm about his compatriots' expanding waistlines and called on them to wage battle against the bulge, saying the revolution needed them fit and strong. (The Guardian)

WASHINGTON - One in seven Americans struggles to get enough to eat, the government reported on Monday, and more than a third go hungry from time to time - the highest levels since the "food security" report began in 1995.

The new report covers 2008, when the United States was in economic recession and financial markets plunged. The jobless rate has surged past 10 percent.

The number of households with trouble providing enough food for all family members rose sharply in 2008 from the preceding year, said the Agriculture Department (USDA), which produces the annual report. It is based on a survey conducted each December. (Reuters)

President Obama’s trip to Asia this week comes at a critical economic time for American workers. With unemployment eclipsing 10 percent, it’s clear that the stimulus package passed by Congress has so far proven ineffective in getting Americans back to work.

Free trade, a pillar of economic recovery that has been overlooked, plays a pivotal role in growing our economy and creating American jobs. Opening new markets to trade is a proven stimulus and job creator that comes without a several hundred billion dollar bill for taxpayers.

Among the many stops on his trip this week, President Obama will visit South Korea, a critical trading partner for the U.S. and one with whom we’ve had a free trade agreement pending congressional approval for more than two years. This visit presents the President the perfect opportunity to convey to the world that the U.S. remains open to global trade, and to assure American workers we will continue to support them and pursue every opportunity to create jobs and spur innovation. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

The clever folks at the Taxpayers Alliance in the United Kingdom have a new video documenting some of the wasteful European Union programs that are imposing a heavy burden on average people.

MARENGO, Illinois - Brothers Steve and Ron Pierce spent most of an hour in a chilly northern Illinois field last week clearing a clog of soybean chaff from the guts of their combine, using a mix of tools and their bare hands.

"The beans get tough when they pick up moisture," Steve Pierce said.

The clog had idled the $260,000 harvester, another delay in what has been the harvest from hell across the U.S. Midwest corn and soybean belt.

The clock is ticking on farmers like the Pierce brothers all across the Midwest as they scramble to bring in the largest U.S. soybean crop on record and the second-largest corn crop before winter arrives.

Late-maturing crops and persistent rain throughout October halted fieldwork, making this the slowest start for the U.S. harvest since the 1970s. The delays -- and questions about crop quality -- have kept Chicago Board of Trade grain markets on the boil.

"Just look at the price of corn from October to now. The delayed harvest has had a bullish impact on prices," said Terry Reilly, an agricultural analyst with Citigroup. (Reuters)

MIAMI,- Rain from Tropical Storm Ida further slowed the cotton, soybean and sweet potato harvest in Mississippi, where crop losses were devastating even before the storm hit, a state agriculture official said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Iowa’s rural private drinking water wells “have several contaminant problems, some long-standing and some emerging,” according to the results of a two-year study released last week.

The study, Iowa Statewide Rural Water Well Survey Phase 2, was led by the University of Iowa Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination. It followed up on the results of a similar study conducted in 1988 and 1989 and concluded that many of the problems of 20 years ago remain today. (Iowa Independent)

Behind the persistent global warming scare is the hypothesis and assertion that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are causing Earth to warm dangerously. The thesis is espoused most prominently by Al Gore, James Hansen, modelers and other alarmists. It is the fundamental assumption behind the computer models that consistently conjure up headline-grabbing climate change disaster scenarios.

A basic principle of geology and other sciences is that the same natural processes we observe today – erosion, plant growth, species adaptation and so on – occurred in a similar manner throughout Earth’s history. Therefore, if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing global warming today, they must have done so in the past, and certainly in the recent historic past.

The challenge, then, is to discover the sources of those climate villains throughout history. This brief summary of key events is intended to aid in that quest, and explain how the Gore-Hansen thesis worked through the ages. (Paul Driessen, Townhall)

The temptation is all too strong. How many bureaucrats would work just as hard to show that their department was less important, less necessary, and less deserving of funding? It’s the fatal trap of socialist management. The incentives are wrong.

When governments are faced with poor reports, but they write their own report cards, they have many options to upgrade their “score”. It’s insane to think that people might not take every opportunity they can to improve their mark. They are human.

Big problems like inflation, unemployment, national growth, or global temperatures can be “improved” two ways –one way takes tough decisions and years of work, and the other way takes a quiet statistical summit, a white paper and an in-house training weekend. It’s easier to “solve” big problems by changing the way you measure them. By changing definitions, methods of interpreting the data, or through sheer statistical chicanery it’s possible to issue press releases with the words “improvement”, “better than expected” or at least “figures have plateaued”.

For example, the inflation of the 1970s was partly “cured” by defining inflation as the consumer price index (CPI), then changing the way that CPI is measured in ways that lower the CPI. Today, the US CPI is about 3 percentage points lower than it would be if the method of 1980 was used. Another example is unemployment, where governments continually refine what counts as “unemployed” so as to lower the unemployment number. (David Evans and Joanne Nova)

Carbon dioxide is the primary perpetrator of climate change and most efforts to slow global warming go into preventing CO2 production and aiding CO2 absorption. But a new study suggests that the more CO2 we make, the more nature absorbs. So do we really need all those rainforests?

Many scientists now look to carbon capture-and-storage technology as a way to ward off the worst effects of climate change. With its help, CO2 can be captured before it reaches the atmosphere -- at a coal-fired power station, for example. The gases can then be stored in depleted natural gas reservoirs or in porous, subterranean rock. They can be locked away for thousands of years deep under the Earth's surface, sparing the atmosphere.

While this ingenious sounding technology is a popular subject for discussion, the fact that nature has already mastered that exact task is often forgotten: Plants, soil and the oceans -- so-called "carbon sinks" -- all excel at absorbing greenhouse gases. "Almost 60 percent of our emissions are stored in the oceans or in the ground," Susan Trumbore of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

"Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" under cap-and-trade," President Obama has admitted. "Industry will have to retrofit its operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that cost on to consumers." Cap-and-trade, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) eagerly observed, is "the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time."

Not one congressman even read the numbingly complex 1427-page Waxman-Markey global warming bill, before the House of Representatives voted on it. A new version of the Kerry-Boxer Senate bill provides no details about how carbon allowances would be allocated under a mandatory emissions reduction program.

The process recalls Churchill's description of Russia: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Here we are dealing with estimates wrapped in assumptions inside speculation - based on assertions that Earth faces a manmade climate disaster. ( Paul Driessen, Post Chronicle)

Al Gore sat down with The Tennessean last week after the release of his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Rodale Books, $26.99), and talked about energy independence, climate change and the unfolding politics of it all.

The Nashvillian — former vice president, Nobel Peace Prize winner and citizen of the world — has shifted his major focus from spreading the word on global warming to solutions. Here is an edited transcript of his conversation with reporter Anne Paine and editorial page editor Dwight Lewis.

Are you preaching to the choir about global warming or are you getting converts?

There has definitely been a shift in opinions worldwide, including in the United States, toward ever-stronger support for tackling this crisis and solving it. (The Tennessean)

Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.

The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Tory voters are more likely to doubt the scientific evidence that man is to blame. Only 38 per cent accept it, compared with 45 per cent of Labour supporters and 47 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters.

The high level of scepticism underlines the difficulty the Government will have in persuading the public to accept higher green taxes to help to meet Britain’s legally binding targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

The recession appears to have made tackling climate change less of a priority for many people. Only just over a quarter (28 per cent) think that it is happening and is “far and away the most serious problem we face as a country and internationally”, while just over half (51 per cent) think it is “a serious problem, but other problems are more serious”.

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said that growing awareness of the scale of the problem appeared to be resulting in people taking refuge in denial. (Ben Webster and Peter Riddell, The Times)

“I have been asked ever since: and the answer is, I did. The Aga stands stone cold in my kitchen as a monument to carbon storage. As long as it clutters up my kitchen, no one else can use it to produce carbon. The beyond-parody Guardianista, Madeleine Bunting, on ‘My Aga Saga’.

As we approach the dreaded December climate-change summit in Copenhagen, the emissions of carbon claptrap spewing forth from our media make the Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO₂ look like a flat pancake. I hope to report on some of the more hilarious outpourings as we jog along towards the 20,000-folk beanfeast.

Today, for starters, we must, somewhat inevitably, I fear, turn to The Guardian, and above all to Our Lady of the Sorrows, Guardianista par excellence, Madeleine Bunting. I have rarely read more solipsist, self-indulgent pieces of middle-class journalistic carbon claptrap than her two pieces on My Aga Saga, ‘’Part 2’ of which was published on November 12 [‘Part 1’ of the saga is here, if you can bear to read it]. All one can say is: “Aagaaaaa!” This nonsense is surely worthy of one of those more fragrant air port novels in which we wallow in the dilemmas of a sensitive country lass struggling to save herself and the planet. My wife just guffawed. Yet, it appears that the carbon complexities have finally floored our poor heroine:

“But now I'm retreating, shocked at how widespread is the ignorance and lack of confidence - the ‘I'd like to do something but what?’ conversations - wary of how shambolic are the services offering to help and how woefully inadequate both the state and corporate response to the householder's predicament is. After a rather bruising five months trying to find my way through this byzantine subject, I'm taking a sabbatical [my italic].”

Oh Madeleine! We really do hope so. You are so worn down by it all, aren’t you? Do take as long as you want.

And then, secondly, there is dear old John Vidal, Environment Editor of The Guardian, and another true-green Guardianista, writer “of many a green-hearted article about the calamitous consequences of air travel”. The latest Private Eye [‘Street of Shame’, p. 6] has immense pleasure in informing us that John has so many foreign trips planned that he has actually been issued with a second passport to help with “all the simultaneous visa applications”. Of course, he is so important, and not at all plane hypocritical, is he?

The whole ‘global warming’ scene really is becoming a laugh-out-loud Feydeau farce. (Clamour of the Times)

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln

One of the depressing features of the decline of the West in general and Britain in particular is the fading of great institutions. One such is The Times. In its grandeur, it had the front broadsheet page covered in small ads, a demonstration of its indifference to sensationalism. Known as the Thunderer, because of its trenchant editorials, it was sometimes proved wrong, but it was always acknowledged to be honest. Now it is a tacky over-stuffed tabloid, pandering to the celebrity cult and establishment politics. Your bending author only maintains a subscription of the basis of the principle of know thine enemy. It has reached a nadir with the editorial of 14^th November. Like The Englishman and his correspondents many of us were outraged by the sheer perverse mendacity of this diatribe. There is scarcely a single incontestable claim in the whole display of galimatias. As for calling the majority of your potential readerships “idiots”, though this was a quotation from LORD Rees, the most persistent scaremonger among the greenies who have seized control of the scientific establishment, it is not a recognisable tenet of How to make friends and influence people.

The saving grace is that ordinary people are not the mindless dupes that modern politicians like to think they are. Why else would the EU bureaucracy need to go to such lengths to deprive Europeans of a vote on their new constitution?

The Sunday Times has one or two reasonable columnists, but on environmental matters it takes its cherry-picking one-sidedness to absurd lengths. Typical is a whole page allocated to its environmental editor. It includes the gem Global warming threatens to rob Italy of pasta. Just how dumb do they think their readers are? When your have been bombarded for twenty years by doom-laden prophecies, which did not come to pass, even the dumbest subscriber begins to detect an odour of Ratus ratus. They do love their clichés, don’t they? The piece begins with the immortal words “Scientists will this week warn…” Why are they bothering to warn, when it has already been published in the Sunday Times? The real punch line, however, is that the “scientists” turn out to be none other than The Met Office, a running joke among the ordinary population and yet another valued institution brought to absurd ignominy by a greenie takeover. They cannot tell us what the weather will do next week, but they can tell us we will have to do without our macaroni. Still, this one must be right, because it was predicted by a super-computer. Anyway it is one more for our little list. (Number Watch)

The ‘global warming’ loony tunes continue. Today, The Sunday Times tells us that climate change is threatening the production of pasta in Italy. Now that really could wipe the sedanini rigati right off Signor Berlusconi’s grinning face:

“Scientists will this week warn that Italy may be forced to import the basic ingredients for pasta, its national food, because climate change will make it impossible to grow durum wheat.

In a report to be released by the Met Office [our UK Met Office, by the way] tomorrow, scientists predict that Italy’s durum yields will start to decline from 2020 and the crop will almost disappear from the country later this century.

The report will say: ‘Projected climate changes in this region, in particular rising temperature and decreasing rainfall, may seriously compromise wheat yields.’”

Oh dear! Have the Met Office never heard of breeding new crop strains, or of genetic modification, and what is wrong with imports? All things that farmers have been doing for over 7,000 years to cope with climate change. (Clamour of the Times)

“Severe mental health problems are likely to surge, in the U.S. and elsewhere, unless Congress exerts dramatic leadership to help slow climate change — and soon,” began an e-mail message that found its way into my in-box last week.

It came from a group called Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

(I get a lot of e-mail messages.)

“Many Americans are already anxious about what climate change portends,” the group wrote in a letter it had apparently sent to Congress. “The greater risk is that millions of people will develop severe and persistent anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, aggression, and other troubled behavior if the U.S. does not quickly lead the way to dramatically reduce carbon emissions.”

I tread lightly here, as I would not want to belittle the ravages of depression and anxiety, but the question did occur to me: What possible impact could it have on the debate over climate change and what to do about it?

My suspicion: none — or at least no more or less an impact than, say, studies that show women are likely to fare worse in a changing climate than men. Or a 2006 study that examined “the impact of climate change on golf participation in the Greater Toronto Area.” Or even a study earlier this year out of the Czech Republic, which found a reduction, as a result of warming trends, of the compound in Saaz hops responsible for the signature taste of a fine pilsner beer.

“If the sinking Maldives aren’t enough to galvanize action on climate change,” wrote New Scientist magazine in an account of the hops study, “could losing a classic beer do it?”

Even as a lover of a good pilsner, I would guess the answer is no. And as for the Maldives, one might reasonably question whether the country’s “underwater cabinet meeting” last month — a stunt designed to highlight the plight of coastal and island nations threatened by rising seas — changed any minds either. (Green Inc.)

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. – Ayn Rand

Industrial civilization has been a dirty affair. While it helped give rise to the wealth we see in the Industrialized core nations—typically associated with the United States and Europe—it has also led to an unprecedented centralization of power and left the people of the world dependent on its industrial infrastructure; and so for example, 75% of humans today live in the city, away from farms and the soil. To be sure, the city has allowed us much opportunity, not among the least of which is a tight knit framework in which to trade ideas, materials and useful stuff. All of this stuff, though, had to come from somewhere, and to meet that need importation from ghostly elsewheres has kept cities the world over running. And now, monumental problems face all of us as individuals and communities today, and the challenges and associated tasks ahead threaten the fairness strived for and achieved by concerned ancestors similar to ourselves. The gains of these people’s are encapsulated in such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights. A history of arts, also, reminds of our sometimes vibrant past. However, plans by political, financial and industrial elites to forge new institutions unaccountable to the people represent new monopolies on force and favors which threaten the very social fabric of civilization. (Justin O'Connell, Dissident Voice)

If the United Nations has its way, Jesus won’t be found in church anymore. With the approval of pious priests and ministers, Jesus is being squeezed out of the House of God to make way for global warming/climate change proselytizing.

Church bells around the world, which call Christians worldwide into church on Sundays, will join the din of drums and gongs to sound a UN ordered message 350 times on December 13 during the Copenhagen climate change summit. The church bells are a call to action on global warming.

“The leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches also invited places of worship for other faiths to join a symbolic “chain of chimes and prayers” stretching around the world from the international date line in the South Pacific.” (Breitbart, Nov. 12, 2009).

“By sounding their bells or other instruments 350 times, participating churches will symbolise the 350 parts per million that mark the safe upper limit for C02 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere according to many scientists.”

The bell-ringing at worldwide churches makes about as much sense as Hanne Strong, who used constant drumbeats to hold the “energy pattern” when her aging UN Poster Boy husband Maurice Strong led the 1992 Rio de Janeiro United Nations Earth Conference. (Judi McLeod, CFP)

Give the Environmental Protection Agency credit: At least it practices equal opportunity censorship of its employees.

Dr. Alan Carlin, a 37-year agency veteran, was muzzled earlier this spring. Dr. Carlin offered a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. His superior, Al McGartland, complained the paper did "not help the legal or policy case" for Team Obama's decision to regulate carbon, told him to "move on to other issues," and forbade him from discussing it outside the office.

Now come Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, married, and each with more than 20 years tenure at the EPA. They too are dismayed by Democrats' approach to climate, though for different reasons. Dedicated environmentalists, they created a 10-minute YouTube video arguing Congress's convoluted cap-and-trade bill was a "big lie" that is too weak. They instead propose imposing taxes, lots of them, on fossil fuels. (Kim Strassel, WSJ)

A recent news article by Judy Fahys entitled "Scientists Scold Lawmakers" ( Tribune, Nov. 6) reported on a letter recently sent by 18 Brigham Young University scientists to the Utah Legislature expressing displeasure with my recent global warming testimony in Utah. On the subject of legislative policy relating to global warming, the BYU scientists correctly observed that "whatever action is taken, it should be informed by the best available scientific evidence."

But I assume that "best available scientific evidence" would also include the latest scientific findings. I would wager that none of the 18 BYU scientists who signed that letter understands the issues addressed in my testimony...if they even read it. I am one of only a handful of scientists in the world who is addressing the big picture of how clouds in the climate system not only limit the effect of humanity on climate, but can themselves cause global warming or cooling. The prestigious American Geophysical Union has invited me to speak on the subject in December at its fall meeting.

It is ironic that the BYU Gang of 18 objected to the supposed politicization of global warming science by the Utah Legislature, when it is the scientists themselves who have fallen into the trap of appealing to "official" U.N. views on the subject, views which are outdated and highly politicized. The reports of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are indeed recognized by world governments
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as authoritative, but they are not rigorously peer-reviewed in the usual sense.

I predict that it is only a matter of time before the U.N.'s agenda on the subject of global warming is finally exposed for its blind obedience to desired policy outcomes. Those few of us who are questioning the status quo -- and receive no energy industry funding in return -- should be welcomed, rather than maligned, for trying to keep the rest of the research community honest.

Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. , is a climatologist living in Huntsville, Ala. (Salt Lake Tribune)

The comments in this Politico story on the climate bill may hint at what's to come, jobs, jobs, jobs and an inevitable focus on "climate light":

China and Japan's strategy of reducing emissions by increasing efficiency should serve as a model for a global climate deal, international experts say.

The United Nations wants the December 7-18 Copenhagen meeting to yield a legally binding agreement by all nations to fight climate change, but negotiations have stalled.

Copenhagen "is dead on arrival," said Professor Gwyn Prins, of the London School of Economics, at a meeting of the Hong Kong-based debating forum Intelligence Squared Asia yesterday.

"There will be no agreement on legally enforceable targets," said Prins, who has been following climate politics since 1976.

Co-author of the much-read Nature scientific journal article Time to Ditch Kyoto, Prins said the diplomatic negotiation approach used for Kyoto has made no "discernible difference" in emissions reduction.

After the meeting Prins said he believed the Asian approach of focusing on reducing emissions by improving efficiency is "a win-win situation."

"Japan is the world's second largest economy (but) it is the most energy- efficient economy. It is the only one which has produced a real plan for reducing emissions that could work, without at the same time, doing damage to its economy," he said.

Prins said the Chinese government was using the same strategy to make a real difference. (The Standard)

Oh dear! Staunch trade proponent Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute is in bed with radical trade opponent Lori Wallach of Public Citizen in a joint op-ed in the Washington Post today. It seems Bergsten thinks there’s no chance of a legislative cap on CO2 emissions unless the U.S. does something to address the competitiveness issues, and he’s against “border tax adjustments” because of its potentially devastating effect on the world trading system.

That’s the good part. The bad part is that both he and Wallach want to combine the two issues - global warming and trade - and deal with them together. That was a recommendation that the Peterson Institute for International Economics made in a study earlier this year. What that would mean still seems a bit vague. According to the op-ed, this synthesis would involve –

The synthesis would seem to involve countries agreeing to a “code” that would address restrictions on CO2 emissions and be generally consistent with WTO rules even if some technical rules would be violated. Countries signing up for the code would agree not to bring those technical issues to the WTO for dispute resolution (the “peace clause”). (Fran Smith, Cooler Heads)

The Chamber of Commerce recently bowed to pressure from big member companies which have crafted schemes to pick your pocket under cap-and-trade, and cravenly pleaded for some form of global warming legislation. It defended this with the argument distilled as “we merely restated our position. A different way.” So it is with Congress, in a fashion, with its controversial Sec. 707 identically stuck in both the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer bills.

Some on Team Liberty insist there’s nothing to see here, because you’ll notice that the language says the President “shall” exercise “existing statutory authority”. QED. My former CEI colleague Jonathan Adler adopts Ed Morrissey’s position posted on Hot Air, phrasing it on Volokh:

That first part is true. It says use all existing authority. All of these tools. But, um, a (often radically) different way, that is, for a (often radically) different purpose. That “shall” thing is big, too. Leaning too heavily on “existing authority” to say there’s nothing new here has several perils, including that it ignores that this phrase is read by the courts as meaning existing laws, not existing applications of these laws. Jonathan is correct. Existing tools. This provision mandates using them in new ways. (Chris Horner, Cooler Heads)

A new environmental award will be launched tomorrow with some of the biggest corporations and lobbying outfits in the world in contention for the top prize. But the winner will have nothing to celebrate.

The inaugural Angry Mermaid award, inspired by Denmark's famous Little Mermaid statue, will go to the organisation "doing the most to sabotage effective action on climate change" in the run-up to climate change talks in Copenhagen next month. (The Independent)

The federal government says its alarming new report on rising sea levels underlines the need to have an emissions trading scheme agreed to without delay.

The Climate Change Risks to Australia's Coasts report says up to 250,000 Australian homes are at risk of inundation by the turn of the century.

The findings are based on a sea level rise of up to 1.1 metres by 2100, and more extreme weather events.

As a result, the report says, more than $60 billion worth of residential property faces flooding.

In addition 120 ports, 1,800 bridges, power stations, water treatment plants and airports close to the coastline are also under threat.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the findings can't be ignored.

"The science tells us our climate is changing faster than first projected and the impacts are likely to be more severe," she told reporters in Sydney. (AAP)

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has denied claims she is mounting a fear campaign to pressure the Opposition into a carbon trading deal.

The Federal Government has released a "worst-case scenario" warning that rising sea levels could flood more than 250,000 homes and key infrastructure.

Senator Wong says the report shows the Coalition can not ignore the science on climate change.

She says the prediction is essential to preparing a national strategy on rising sea levels. (Australian Broadcasting Corp)

Australia is likely to have an emissions trading scheme locked in by the end of next week, with the Government caving in to a key Coalition demand to permanently exclude the farming sector.

In a significant concession, and a huge win for the powerful farming lobby, a senior Government source revealed Labor will this week agree to exclude agriculture from the scheme ''indefinitely'' - knocking out a key sticking point in negotiations with the Opposition.

In a further concession, the Government will also examine giving farmers the opportunity to earn cash by selling carbon offsetting credits on the open market, including Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's favoured ''biochar'' method of storing carbon in soil.

''This is all about us showing how serious we are in getting the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme through the Parliament this fortnight and is obviously the biggest move we have made in the negotiations,'' the source said.

Labor had previously signalled the farm sector would likely be included in the scheme in 2015, after a review in 2013. (The Age)

The Federal Government has agreed to exempt farmers from an emissions cap in its carbon trading scheme, in a backflip aimed at winning the support of the Opposition.

It has agreed to exclude agriculture from the costs of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) to try to get the legislation passed in the next fortnight.

A spokeswoman for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says farmers will be allowed to generate carbon credits.

Negotiations are continuing between the Government and Coalition for amendments to the legislation as Parliament resumes on Monday and the Government pushes for a vote in late November.

Both sides say the talks are progressing but Senator Wong says an agreement will be "difficult".

The Opposition are pushing for several changes but are likely to have some knocked back due to budget restraints.

"What I've made clear is we're not able to accept the entirety of what they've put forward - it would be fiscally unsustainable," Senator Wong said.

The Government had wanted to include farmers in the scheme from 2015.

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner told Channel Ten negotiations are continuing to secure the Coalition's support.

"We've prepared to accede to the Coalition's request on this front," he said. "I wouldn't necessarily say now it's a done deal."

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull welcomed the concession, but he says the Coalition will keep pushing for further changes before it decides if it will support the emissions trading scheme. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

“The Rudd government’s offer to exclude agriculture emissions from the ETS hasn’t cost the government anything since those emissions were not even in the CPRS to start with,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell.

“If this is all the government’s got to offer after weeks of negotiating then it bodes ill for the other eight specific issues laid down by the Coalition that must be addressed.”

“Agriculture emissions were not locked into the government’s CPRS, they were just a possibility after 2015. This is not a big concession from the government at all.”

“Farmers are concentrating now on the cost rises that will come from an ETS regardless of whether their emissions are counted or not. The issue of paying for emissions is not their immediate concern.”

Senator Boswell said that farmers were really worried about the higher costs of electricity, fuel, chemicals, fertiliser and processing that would accompany an ETS, squeezing business margins by thousands of dollars.

“The Joint Party room is expecting a full report on Tuesday on the negotiated amendments on the nine specific issues that were laid down on 24 July.”

“Agriculture emissions is just one of those. Without a negotiated outcome that delivers general increases in electricity prices no greater than comparable countries, then there is no chance that the Coalition’s longstanding concerns will be met.”

Senator Boswell said that the Coalition’s position was that Australian industry be offered no less protection than the US. “At this stage, we don’t even know what level of protection will be offered in the US, so it will be very difficult to meet that provision.”

“That is one of the reasons why it is Coalition policy to not pass any CPRS legislation before Copenhagen.”

“The best way to give farmers the certainty they need and the relief from high electricity prices is to not pass the CPRS.”

“This does not mean that Australia does not lower its emissions but it means we avoid a tremendously costly restructuring that serves only to make the government and money brokers rich while doing nothing for global warming.”

Senator Boswell said that he expected the CPRS cheerleaders like the BCA and other rentseekers and campfollowers to lay on the pressure this week to pass the ETS.

“But it will take more than a hollow gesture over agriculture emissions to win the confidence of the Joint Party room.” (Media Release, Office of Senator Ron Boswell)

The Federal Government's concession to the Opposition to exclude agriculture from an emissions trading scheme (ETS) has failed to win over the Liberal and National parties.

The Government is determined to see the scheme pass Parliament this year, but there is continued tension in the Coalition as goes to the Senate for the final sitting fortnight of the year.

Negotiations are continuing and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says the Coalition Party room will decide whether to support the scheme when those talks are finalised.

But Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi has pre-empted the party room decision by vowing to cross the floor.

"If we want to ensure that the Coalition is unified in this, we will make a decision to vote against it," he said. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

In the near future, some 20,000 people are going to descend on Copenhagen to negotiate the terms of surrender of the industrialised west to the United Nations. Obviously no treaty is going to be “negotiated” by 20,000 people. Most are sightseers. Any negotiations will take place in secret meetings. Every day it becomes more obvious that the PM and the Opposition Leader either do not know what is in the drafts already agreed, or they are concealing it from the parliament and the people.

The current Copenhagen draft, on which both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are willing to “negotiate”, gives complete power over the Australian economy to a committee of unelected UN carbon regulators controlled by those claiming “climate compensation” from us.

This group will export our wealth (at $7 billion per year), our jobs and our industries until Australia’s emissions per capita are equal to those in places like India, China and Brazil. There will be no reduction in global emissions or pollution, and no climate benefits.

If we are unable to pauperise our economy quickly enough, and our usage of energy exceeds their nominated per capita carbon cap, they will impose draconian carbon taxes on the excess. “Cap-n-Tax” will become a stark reality for our children.

It is unbelievable that any Australian government or opposition could consider signing such a treaty without full disclosure of the surrender terms and the tax tribute obligations it will impose on the Australian people.

If our leaders are concerned about carbon emissions, they should insist on reducing our Copenhagen Footprint by sending just four observers - two from the Senate, two from the House of Representatives, all from different parties. Their brief would be to report in full to the Parliament, the States and the public on what is proposed - no signing anything.

The likely long term consequences of this Trojan Horse being built in Copenhagen are so enormous that Australia should then hold a referendum on whether or not to surrender to the United Nations.

At the very least, the Senate MUST reject any Wong/Macfarlane compromise and insist on full disclosure of all draft treaties before Kevin Rudd seeks standing ovations at our expense in Copenhagen.

Viv Forbes

PDF version: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/terms-of-surrender.pdf [PDF, 7KB] (Carbon Sense Coalition)

LABOR will offer concessions for big polluters in a push to secure Coalition support for its emissions trading scheme, on top of its backdown to include agriculture.

The Rudd government is expected to put a package to the Coalition this week, with the shadow cabinet and the partyroom then set to debate the issue.

But there is pressure on Climate Change Minister Penny Wong to contain the cost of concessions, with Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner signalling that finding billions of dollars to give polluters a better deal would be tough.

Outstanding issues to resolve on the Coalition's wish list include excluding emissions generated by coalmining, boosting assistance for emissions-intensive industries, excluding food processing and introducing an intensity-based cap-and-trade model for electricity generators to keep power bill rises in check. (The Australian)

Too late, with an 'e', they've already pulled the pin on the foolish thing: The way to climate change success - Lord Browne, the former BP chief executive and one of Britain's most prominent business leaders, sets out five requirements for world leaders to agree on at next month's Copenhagen summit.

Global political leadership will be tested to its limit at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. Key players must negotiate and agree a new climate accord before the end of the conference or else face some very searching questions about their commitment to the future integrity of our environment. ( Lord Browne, TDT)

Ooh! Bad timing... What British business wants from Copenhagen - The Sunday Times convened a panel of captains of industry to discover their opinions on the climate change summit

Three weeks from now the world’s eyes will be on Copenhagen. Ministers from 192 countries — and 20,000 hangers-on — will converge on the Danish capital for what is billed as the most important event yet in the drive to fight climate change.

They aim to produce a successor to the 1997 Kyoto treaty. If all goes well, the new agreement should create a consensus on how to tackle global warming, set concrete targets on curbing greenhouse gas emissions for rich and poor nations, and deliver a mechanism to raise and distribute the billions needed to develop alternatives to fossil fuels.

The political obstacles to progress are daunting. No matter what the outcome, however, the Copenhagen event will have serious repercussions for business. Kyoto set the climate-change ball rolling. Next month’s summit will accelerate the pace of change, placing greater burdens on British companies but also creating new opportunities.

To take stock ahead of the summit, The Sunday Times brought together 11 top business people, including the chief executives of some of Britain’s biggest companies. (Sunday Times)

SINGAPORE — President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. “I don’t think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact.”

With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it has, for several months, appeared increasingly unlikely that the climate change negotiations in Denmark would produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming, as its organizers had intended.

The agreement on Sunday codifies what negotiators had already accepted as all but inevitable: that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks would not resolve the outstanding issues in time. The gulf between rich and poor countries, and even among the wealthiest nations, was just too wide.

Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen was Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges. (NYT)

In a few weeks some 20,000 United Nations bureaucrats, representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), world leaders and accompanying experts from 192 nations will descend on Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They aim to devise a substitute for the expiring Kyoto Protocol, the agreement among several nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global warming — and at the same time redistribute some of the world’s wealth from richer to poorer nations, a UN goal long before anyone ever heard of climate change.

“Human survival itself is at risk,” contends scientist/activist James Lovelock, expressing a belief so strongly held that British courts this month gave some greens all the rights the law contains for practitioners of any religion. (Sunday Times)

WASHINGTON — President Obama came into office pledging to end eight years of American inaction on climate change under President George W. Bush, and all year he has promised that the United States would lead the way toward a global agreement in Copenhagen next month to address the warming planet.

But this weekend in Singapore, Mr. Obama was forced to acknowledge that a comprehensive climate deal was beyond reach this year. Instead, he and other world leaders agreed that they would work toward a more modest interim agreement with a promise to renew work toward a binding treaty next year.

The admission places Mr. Obama in the awkward position of being, at least for now, as unlikely to spearhead an international effort to combat global warming as his predecessor — if for different reasons. (NYT)

France and Brazil adopted a common policy Saturday ahead of key UN global warming talks and vowed to launch a worldwide push to convince other powers to back their "climate bible".

A joint text was unveiled after talks between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, which gave an outline of an agreement they want at the December 7-18 Copenhagen summit.

"We are making public... a French-Brazilian text because Brazil and France, we want Copenhagen to be a success, not a cut-price agreement," Sarkozy told reporters in Paris.

"We are fighting for the world to live up to its historic responsibility," the president added.

Lula hailed the text a "climate bible" and a "historic document".

The text stresses the final objective of a "global reduction of at least 50 percent by 2050 compared with 1990" of damaging greenhouse gases worldwide. (AFP)

SINGAPORE, Nov 15 - U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, but European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action. (Reuters)

WORLD leaders have agreed to a political compromise deal on climate change aimed at salvaging next month's international UN conference in Copenhagen, which scraps the 200-page draft agreement.

The leaders have begun work, instead, on a plan B document of no more than 15 pages that would not be legally binding in which nations would agree to embrace emissions reductions conditional upon other nations adopting and meeting their own targets. (The Australian)

Obama and other leaders acknowledge the U.N. conference next month will not produce a final agreement. But that could accelerate progress in the U.S. -- and beyond. (LA Times)

In total defiance of the world opinion and concerns of the international community, world leaders have decided to put off the task of clinching a globally binding agreement on climate change at next month’s summit in Copenhagen.

US President Barack Obama and other world leaders have agreed instead to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement in Copenhagen that would postpone the thorny and real issues to a distant and uncertain future. The decision came at a breakfast meeting of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit) leaders in Singapore yesterday. The meeting was also attended by Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who is going to host and preside over the much-awaited global environment summit in the Danish capital.

However, now that the world leaders have decided not to decide anything at the Copenhagen summit, we are not sure what Prime Minister Rasmussen is going to preside over! By postponing the urgently needed steps on climate change to the uncertainty of the future, the US has virtually derailed the Copenhagen conference
and its agenda. That this should happen under President Barack Obama is most unfortunate and disturbing. After years of denial in Washington of the clear and present danger the global warming poses to our world, Obama had signalled a positive shift in the US stance.

However, just as on many other issues Obama has ostensibly softened his original and principled stand under pressure from politicians on either side of the divide and various vested interests and lobby groups, the president appears to have watered down his policy on the climate change as well. This turnaround in Washington is most disappointing and deals a severe blow to international efforts to put a far more stringent and reasonable protocol on carbon emissions in place. As we have argued in this space before, cutting carbon emissions and lowering global temperatures is absolutely essential and vital to the future of this planet and the very survival of human race. (Khaleej Times)

DUBAI — The Dubai Airshow opened on a reassuring note on Sunday, with Airbus, Rolls-Royce and other aviation companies trumpeting combined orders worth several billion dollars.

The announcements set an uplifting tone for a show that takes place amid a severe downturn in demand for the airlines and for the firms that supply them with aircraft and equipment.

As stunt planes dived and thundered in an ear-punishing aerial display above the Dubai Airport Expo, the hard business of selling during a recession unfolded in the exhibition halls and corporate chalets below.

Some industry executives fretted that business at the show, which runs for four more days, won’t be nearly as good as it was the last time around in 2007. Middle Eastern airlines went on a buying spree that year, propelling the event to new prominence compared to similar shows held in Paris and at Farnborough in the UK.

But other participants at the event were refreshingly optimistic, stressing that the Middle East is the only region, aside from East Asia, that continues to grow with vigor in an otherwise stagnant industry. (Khaleej Times)

Cut carbon emissions or our only hope to cool the planet will be relying on unproven geo-engineering ideas. This was the warning delivered to US House of Representatives by Professor John Shepherd of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK.

Professor Shepherd warned, "None of the geo-engineering technologies so far suggested is a magic bullet, and all have risks and uncertainties associated with them. It is essential that we strive to cut emissions now, but we must also face the very real possibility that we will fail." (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK))

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is one of the most important large-scale ocean current systems controlling the Earth's climate. But just how stable will it remain as climate changes and how well do models represent its stability? That's what a team of scientists from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has been investigating.

"Since the 1980s, scientists have been discussing and studying the possibility of instabilities in this major ocean circulation," Matthias Hofmann told environmentalresearchweb. "Such instabilities were very likely the cause of at least twenty abrupt climate shifts during the last Ice Age, recorded for example in the Greenland ice cores." (ERW)

MSNBC and others run a story about the asymmetry between the number of daily hot records and the number of daily cold records in the U.S.

Note that in the 1960s and 1970s, the cold records beat the warm records approximately by a 1.3 to 1 ratio.

The latest ratio of warm vs cold records is 2 to 1.
If there were no trend anywhere and whatsoever, you would statistically expect a 1 to 1 ratio, of course.

But what the media don't seem to convey is the sensitivity encoding how much the ratio depends on the number of years on the record and on the ratio between the trend and the annual random fluctuations. Clearly, these are the only two parameters that determine the ratios.

This is a critique of the October 2009 NCAR publication regarding increasing ratio of new daily maximum temperatures to new daily minimum temperatures. (Hall of Records)

A new paper that is soon to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that across the U.S. daily record high temperatures are being set at about twice the frequency of daily record low temperatures and that this ratio—number of record highs to the number of record lows, has been growing larger over the past 50 years.

The popular press seems to be particularly taken with this finding, although headline proclamations fail to disclose important details of the actual findings reported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Gerald Meehl and colleagues.

Although you can hardly blame the press, because the NCAR press release did much to lead them down this muddy path.

Meehl et al. find that the reason more daily maximum temperature records are being set than daily minimum temperatures records is because there are fewer than expected daily lows records being set, not because there are more daily high records than expected.

In other words, our days are not becoming extremely hotter, but our nights are becoming less extremely cold. This fact is buried in the press release and consequently in most of the coverage—likely, because this finding has pretty benign, if not beneficial, implications.

Instead of highlighting this, the NCAR press release not only tries to confuse it with all sorts of graphs and numbers (presented without a proper reference frame of the expectations), but by also suggesting that this observation—nights warming more than days—is what is expected because of a rising greenhouse effect, and they have a model to prove it.

While it is true that an enhanced greenhouse effect should warm nights more than days, so too does the processes of urbanization—something which has not been accounted for in the results of Meehl et al. (because it is virtually impossible to do so at a daily level), but something that is widely known to be occurring.

A report just published earlier this week estimates that urbanization and other land use changes are responsible for half of the observed temperature rise in recent decades in the U.S. This is similar to what Ross McKitrick and WCR editor Pat Michaels found for global land-based temperatures in a paper published two years ago.

Further, despite the contention that climate models show the nights-warming-more-than-days expectation from an enhancing greenhouse effect, the model results depicted in Meehl et al.’s paper don’t show this at all. In fact, the model in the paper—the NCAR climate model—shows that it expects daily high records should be being increasing (above expectations of no climate change) at about the same frequency that daily minimum temperature records should be decreasing. This model expectation is shown by observations to be wrong. (WCR)

Below is a cross section of height/temperature anomalies for the Polar Regions (65-90N). Note each time the warming reached into the mid Troposphere, the AO Index tanked. The negative AO was why October was 3rd coldest in 115 years for the United States (below, enlarged here)

It has retreated to higher levels and the AO has recovered for the time being. That is why the US turned warmer this month. See that warming spread into the arctic high atmosphere (30mb) from the Pacific side (below, enlarged here).

See animation from early October for 30 mb here. See the i month animation at 50 mb here.

See in the following charts how the temperature has exceeded long term maximum for those levels.

See here how this developed in 2005 in this cross section. Note the big mid tropospheric warming in late November and December with a collapse of the AO.
No guarantee that this will repeat but shows you what happens when it reaches significant levels.

See what the best matches for an El Nino, low solar, east QBO winter would suggest for upper levels (below, enlarged here).

Amazingly similar to winters when the warmest waters were located in central Tropical Pacific and cold eastern areas (below and enlarged here).

Note the tendency in both for a negative NAO (positive heights to the north in the Atlantic and lower height south). The negative NAO correlates to cold in the eastern half of the US (and western Europe) (below, enlarged here).

What could go wrong? A false alarm with the warming for one. A stronger El Nino with more warming in the east would change the story (currently we expect it to peak early late November or early December and indeed the strong westerly wind bursts causing this second surge has turned back to tropical easterlies which should enhance upwelling and mix the warm water up and see the Kelvin wave return west as a Rossby wave which will elevate the thermocline and dissipate the El Nino by mid-winter it like it did in 2002/03 and other low solar east QBO years with a cold PDO). If it is the real thing and does increase, look for major cooling starting around or just after Thanksgiving. Time will tell.

The Little Ice age thermometers project is an attempt to compile instrumental readings from 1660 that predate the era of modern ‘global temperatures’ as recorded by Hadley (1850) and Giss (1880). These datasets are accessed from a graphic through this link;

http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/

The project will examine the reliability of these historic datasets as a means for climate researchers to gaze into our past to see if there are any lessons for the present. In this respect many of those individual stations found to date will have been included in the Cru datasets that are not readily accessible to those outside selected members of the scientific community. In order to examine these records and place them into context with Hadley/Cru and Giss, the author has produced three separate but interlinked articles as follows;

A steady hand used to be a prerequisite for palaeoclimate researchers. Climate records need to be sliced thinly in order to analyse their contents and reveal their climate story. But now shaky hands are not such a problem. A robot that can be programmed to slice samples is set to revolutionize palaeoclimate studies, shaving off ultrathin slices that represent less than one day of weather.

...

To date, Patterson and his colleagues have sampled molluscs ranging in age from modern-day to 400 million years old. Their new samples – which can be as thin as 0.05 µm – are providing the highest resolution of ancient climate to date, and reveal that Earth's past climate was much more variable than we thought. "We see very rapid and crazy changes in climate that happen all the time. These changes are just a natural part of the system," said Patterson, who presented the research at the BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, at the end of last month.

Studying one-thousand-year-old clam shells from Iceland, Patterson and colleagues have confirmed that the so-called "Medieval Warm period" had some very chilly spells too. In particular, oxygen isotopes from the clam shells reveal a sharp dip in temperatures during the 900s in Iceland. The years 975 and 976 were especially cold. This is backed up by diaries by Icelandic settlers of the time who describe the hardship caused by the cold weather, writing that "Men ate ravens and foxes and other abominable things that ought not to be eaten."

Swings in climate from hot to cold, and wet to dry, are much more common than we thought, according to Patterson and his team. Previous palaeoclimate records haven't shown the full extent of these changes because the resolution of the record has not been high enough, and the extremes have been averaged out. However, Patterson believes the robot sampler could revolutionize our view of the past. "We should be able to get you mid-July temperatures from 400 million years ago, for example, if the material is well preserved," he said.

Comparing the last 200 years of global warming to some of the new high-resolution records, Patterson suggests that the Earth's recent global warming may not be quite as exceptional as we think, and could still be within the bounds of natural variability. But that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels. One of Patterson's climate records shows that natural swings in climate can be catastrophic. (ERW)

According to a flurry of recent reports by the BBC and other mass media, the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are melting at a furious pace. Of course this is taken as proof that climate change is still taking place at an ever accelerating rate, despite the fact the global temperatures have remained flat for the past decade. What, then, explains the rapidly retreating Himalayan glaciers? Nothing, because the glaciers are not shrinking. A new report by a senior Indian glaciologist states that the glaciers remain frozen and quite intact, thank you.

The report by Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct widely spread reports that India's 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. It's not true, Raina says. The rumors may have originated in the Asia chapter of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) 2007 Working Group II report, which claims that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” Evidently, the bogus reporting was based on measurements from only a handful of glaciers.

Raina's report draws on published studies and unpublished findings from half a dozen Indian groups who have analyzed remote-sensing satellite data or conducted on-site surveys at remote locations often higher than 5000 meters. While the report surveyed of a number of glaciers, two particularly iconic ones stand out. The first is the 30-kilometer-long Gangotri glacier, source of the Ganges River. Between 1934 and 2003, the glacier retreated an average of 70 feet (22 meters) a year and shed a total of 5% of its length. But in 2004 and 2005, the retreat slowed to about 12 meters a year, and since September 2007 Gangotri has been “practically at a standstill,” according to Raina's report.

The second glacier, the Siachin glacier in Kashmir, is even more stable. Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Raina, whose report notes that the glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” These conclusions were based in part on field measurements by ecologist Kireet Kumar of the G. B. Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development in Almora. Much like the hysteria about Greenland's ice cap, it seems reports of the glaciers' demise is a bit premature.

According to a report in the journal Science, “several Western experts who have conducted studies in the region agree with Raina's nuanced analysis—even if it clashes with IPCC's take on the Himalayas.” The “extremely provocative” findings “are consistent with what I have learned independently,” says Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Many glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains, on the border of India and Pakistan, have “stabilized or undergone an aggressive advance,” he says, citing new evidence gathered by a team led by Michael Bishop, a mountain geomorphologist at the University of Nebraska.

Having recently returned from an expedition to K2, one of the highest peaks in the world, Canadian glaciologist Kenneth Hewitt says he observed five advancing glaciers and only a single one in retreat. Such evidence “challenges the view that the upper Indus glaciers are ‘disappearing’ quickly and will be gone in 30 years,” said Hewitt. “There is no evidence to support this view and, indeed, rates of retreat have been less in the past 30 years than the previous 60 years.”

Other researchers and noted experts have raised their voices in support of Raina's conclusions. According to Himalayan glacier specialist John “Jack” Shroder, the only possible conclusion is that IPCC's Himalaya assessment got it “horribly wrong.” The University of Nebraska researcher adds, “They were too quick to jump to conclusions on too little data.”

The IPCC also erred in its forecast of the impact of glacier melting on water supply, claims Donald Alford, a Montana-based hydrologist who recently completed a water study for the World Bank. One of the dire predictions that the IPCC report made was for water shortages in the region. “Our data indicate the Ganges results primarily from monsoon rainfall, and until the monsoon fails completely, there will be a Ganges river, very similar to the present river.” Glacier melt contributes only 3% to 4% of the Ganges's annual flow, says Kireet Kumar. Another piece of climate catastrophist propaganda debunked.

Even when faced with data showing the errors in their work, the IPCC seems incapable of admitting they were wrong. Typically, Murari Lal, chair of the Climate, Energy and Sustainable Development Analysis Centre in New Delhi and coordinating lead author of the 2007 IPCC report's Asia chapter, rejects the notion that IPCC was off the mark on Himalayan glaciers. Even more petulantly, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri accused the Indian environment ministry of “arrogance” for its report claiming there is no evidence that climate change has shrunk the Himalayan glaciers. Unfortunately for the climate change alarmists the truth is out, the glaciers of the Himalayas remain safely frozen and won't be disappearing anytime soon.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

The last Ice Age razed all of the coniferous forests in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere–like the Scots Pine–gradually colonized the vacant niches. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of California. We can learn a thing or two about climate history from Alpine dendrology.

Round Top Lake, at 9340 feet elevation in the Northern Sierra near Carson Pass, is my favorite place for informal climate history research. Whitebark Pine trees grow in tight clumps around the North half of the lake.

Other high altitude conifers–like Lodgepole Pine, Mountain Hemlock, and Red Fir–also grow in the Carson Pass area. But Whitebark Pines can grow at slightly high elevations than these other trees.

At Round Top Lake, the Whitebark Pines in any given group are nearly identical genetically, since they reproduce asexually. New tree trunks grow outward from an existing root system. This is called suckering. The seeds that do sprout can’t endure the harsh Winters at that altitude. Walking 100 yards downhill from the lake on the main trail, one can see Whitebark Pines that have grown in a more normal way.

KAILUA, Hawaii | Jenn Boneza remembers when the white sandy beach near the boat ramp in her hometown was wide enough for people to build sand castles.

“It really used to be a beautiful beach,” said the 35-year-old mother of two.

“And now when you look at it, it’s gone.”

What’s happening to portions of the beach in Kailua — a sunny coastal suburb of Honolulu where President Barack Obama spent his last two family vacations in the islands — is being repeated around the Hawaiian Islands.

Geologists say that more than 70 percent of the island of Kauai’s beaches are eroding and that Oahu has lost a quarter of its sandy shoreline. They warn the problem is likely to get significantly worse in coming decades as global warming causes sea levels to rise more rapidly. ( Associated Press)

In a recent UK Telegraph piece, Dr. Ian Plimer, author of the best seller Heaven and Earth argues CO₂ is not causing global warming. The Telegraph title is correct but not one of the central themes - that volcanoes are the primary source of CO₂ increases.

The Pinatubo eruption was estimated to have emitted only a modest 42 megatons CO₂ (Gerlach 1996), a small fraction of the total natural and anthropogenic annual emissions. Major volcanism causes global CO₂ level rise to actually decrease significantly for a year following. This can be seen after Agung in 1964, after El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1992.

Alan Robock in “Introduction: Mount Pinatubo as a Test of Climate Feedback Mechanisms” (2003) showed a decrease in CO₂ rate after Pinatubo, El Chichon and Agung.

He noted “enhanced vegetation growth from more diffuse and less direct solar radiation took more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than normal, temporarily reducing the observed long-term increase in carbon dioxide.”

Angert et.a; (2004) looked at whether the “Enhanced CO₂ Sink Following the Mt. Pinatubo Eruption Driven by an Increase in Diffuse Radiation?” They noted in their abstract that “following the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991, there was a sharp decrease in the atmospheric CO₂ growth rate. It is believed that this decrease was caused by an anomalous strong terrestrial sink in the northern hemisphere. This strong sink is hard to explain, since the global low temperatures that followed the eruption (as a result of the injecting of volcanic aerosols to the stratosphere) were expected to reduce photosynthesis rate. There are currently two competing explanations for the enhanced sink. The first is that soil respiration rate declined more than photosynthesis rate, while the second suggests that the increase in the fraction of diffused radiation, as a result of the aerosol loading, caused an increase in photosynthesis.”

In their study they found that “the enhanced sink cannot be explained by decreased respiration alone, and thus can be only explained by several land and ocean sink mechanisms acting in concert.”

By going further and separating the years by El Nino state and volcanism, we see the importance of the tropical ocean in the CO₂ increases. The primary source in the oceans comes from the tropical waters while the cold high latitude waters are sinks for CO₂. This is the well known fizz effect from carbonated beverage. When you open a cold beverage it has a lot of fizz (pumped in CO₂), let out to sit and warm on the counter and the gas escapes, eventually leaving the beverage flat. Whether a water body is a net absorber or emitter of CO₂ is determined by Henry’s Law. Equilibrium is established between air and water or the atmosphere and ocean rapidly when CO₂ levels change or when water and or air temperatures vary. We see that in both annual and interannual changes.

See large image here.

On average the greatest increases occur in El Nino years, when the tropical oceans are warmest (averaging 1.80ppm/year or 0.54%), much lower rates in La Ninas (1.05ppm/year or 0.31%) and very low rates of increase (0.61ppm or 0.14%) in years of the three major volcanoes. This suggests the major role tropical OCEANS play in CO₂ production.

It also suggests that long term changes in the ocean temperatures (the warming since the last little ice age) may be responsible for much of the increase in CO₂ observed just as it has in the past. Man after all is directly responsible for only 3-4% of the annual CO₂ production (and given the 0.038% trace gas content for CO₂, man’s annual contribution represents just 0.0001% of the atmosphere).

And importantly the lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere contrary to Robock and the IPCC has been definitively shown to be the order of 5 to 6 years (Segalstad 1998) not 100-200 years or as Solomon has speculated 1000 years.

Segalstad (1992; 1993; 1996) further concluded from 13-C/12-C isotope mass balance calculations, in accordance with the 14-C data, that at least 96% of the current atmospheric CO₂ is isotopically indistinguishable from non-fossil-fuel sources, i.e. natural marine and juvenile sources from the Earth’s interior. Hence, for the atmospheric CO₂ budget, marine equilibration and degassing, and juvenile degassing from e.g. volcanic sources, must be much more important; and the sum of burning of fossil-fuel and biogenic releases (4%) much less important, than assumed (21% of atmospheric CO₂) by the authors of the IPCC model (Houghton et al., 1990).

Read much more about CO₂ versus temperatures and how volcano aerosols are an important factor in climate changes on the short term (2 to 4 years) and when they cluster on longer time frames (most of the 1960s) here. (Icecap)

Most studies examining the link between climate and species ranges to date have used average climate data. But now a team from Switzerland, Norway, the US and France has found that adding information about climate extremes into the mix improves the prediction of where particular tree species occur.

"Measures of climatic extremes statistically significantly add to explain species distribution patterns, and modify the shape of these patterns, meaning that they are important in understanding where a species occurs, and where the climate with its mean and extremes is unsuitable," Nick Zimmermann of the Swiss Federal Research Institute told environmentalresearchweb. "Understanding this relationship should improve our ability to forecast plant responses to climate – in short, where plants are likely to thrive under projected climate change scenarios." (ERW)

In a letter to the New York Times, atmospheric scientist Dr Martin Hertzberg accuses that newspaper of "continuously regurgitating fear-mongering, anecdotal claptrap of global warming propagandists".

An article reprinted from the UK Telegraph last week in the Herald's Green Pages, "Global warming: The nine most affected areas" might be a candidate for similar criticism. I am grateful to the Herald for this opportunity to set the record straight. ( Chris de Freitas, NZ Herald)

In news that will surprise, well, almost everyone, researchers from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research say that it's possible to feed the world sustainably by 2050, when the planet's population is expected to balloon to more than 9 billion people. Perhaps most surprising of all, we can all still eat meat three times a week in good conscience. And according to the researchers, we can do all this and abandon the environmentally damaging intensive farming practices of Big Agriculture. Of course, there are number of "buts" in this scenario. (Ariel Schwartz, Fast Company)

Is it too late to stop climate catastrophe?

Humanity and the biosphere are acutely threatened by man-made global warming but ignorant or corporate-funded climate denialism, the effective climate denialism of political inaction and the growing enormity of what needs to be done lead scientists to say that it is probably too late to stop climate catastrophe.

The progression towards climate catastrophe can be illustrated by my own example. I am a scientist with a 5 decade research career in biological chemistry, a discipline intimately related to the acute problem of man-made global warming. I was first made aware of our impact on the biosphere (the world of living things) when I read Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” on the effects of man-made pollution back in the early 1960s. As a biology and chemistry student in the beautiful island state of Tasmania, these environmentalist attitudes were reinforced by the utter beauty of the threatened Tasmanian rain forest, the exposure of the heavy metal pollution of our beautiful Derwent River by my Chemistry Professor Harry Bloom and the example of the likely extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger (the striped dog-like marsupial Thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus) (the subject of a sustained but fruitless search by my Zoology lecturer Dr Eric Guiler). Working as a research fellow in America exposed me to the realities of big-scale industrial pollution and on my return to Australia I was introduced in the early 1970s to the “The Limits to Growth” in which the Club of Rome modelled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies. ( Gideon Polya, MWCNews)

Will the FX be enough to overcome the lame script. and lead this one into profit? Probably so, since many of the top critics were overly kind, and it IS entertaining.

My review discusses the Mayan predictions, and catalogs just a few dumb things from the picture. It was fun seeing George Segal again, and Woody Harrelson delivers a good performance. The pic, though, is nowhere near as good as it could have been. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Desperate climate times call for oddball measures - As global warming concerns grow, scientists are taking seriously some of the seemingly crazy proposals of geo-engineering. One suggestion: Launch a million tiny mirrors into space. Every minute.

If there were some kind of panic button to stop global warming, what would it look like?

How about billions of tiny mirrors, launched into orbit to deflect solar rays away from Earth? Or big, fluffy clouds, artificially whitened so they reflect more sunlight back into space? Or maybe mechanical trees, ugly but effective at sucking carbon dioxide from the air along busy highways?

Outlandish as some of these proposals may seem, scientists and engineers are paying increasing attention to such ideas amid mounting evidence that human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc in some parts of the world.

The proposals belong to a field known as geo-engineering, or manipulation of the environment on a grand scale. (Henry Chu, LA Times)

The EEF said the country faces major obstacles to becoming a leading centre for so-called "cleantech" products and services, "most notably question marks over the long-term supply of core skills".

The manufacturing lobby group criticised the UK's tax system, claiming that it "discourages the capital investment that manufacturing depends on". It said the Government's low-carbon industrial strategy also lacks sufficient focus.

Roger Salomone, the EEF's energy adviser, said: "Whilst the UK now has a low-carbon industrial strategy that has laid the foundations, we cannot ignore the fact the UK is behind the curve and playing catch-up in this area."

On the positive side, the EEF cited the UK's good pool of science, technology, engineering and maths graduates, and clusters of essential skills, such as offshore and automotive engineering.

The EEF estimates that the low-carbon economy will be worth £4.5 trillion globally by 2015, from £3 trillion in 2008. (TDT)

A recent article: ”Government impose ‘carbon capture levy’ to fund coal-fired power plants”, discusses the UK government imposing a tax on electricity to potentially fund carbon capture and storage (CCS) development on up to four coal plants over the course of 10-15 years. A quote from the article sums up the discussion:

“The Department for Energy and Climate Change said yesterday that uncertainty over the commercial viability of CCS meant that public support might have to continue beyond 2030.”

Of course CCS is not commercially viable. The only way to make it commercially viable is to internalize the cost of CO2 emissions to such a degree that the cost of investing in the infrastructure for capturing the CO2 justifies the investment. The price of CO2 is not there yet for the UK, and is nonexistent within the United States. So the commercial viability question is not even applicable except for potentially using captured CO2 to extract more oil out of mature reservoirs. Still, given that there are natural sources of CO2 that only require major investments in pipelines while avoiding interacting with the electricity industry, a sufficient CO2 price may not exist for a couple of decades that induces investment in CO2 capture on coal plants.

But the real “commercial viability” conundrum rests on the fact that a large portion of society believes that we (well, the industrialized world) should place a value on reducing CO2 emissions. Capturing CO2 from coal plants will lower their net electricity output by 20%-35%. In terms of the normal vernacular of economics, this is going to something less efficient. In this case, the efficiency is less electricity output per unit of fuel input. This is a fundamentally different concept than has occurred since the dawn of the industrial revolution. (Carey King, ERW blog)

Will carbon dioxide give Miliband the slip? The minister is backing his nuclear play with a side bet on storing CO2. But Mark Leftly wonders if the untried technology will work

For once, Miliband the younger grabbed the headlines. Brother and cabinet colleague David had for weeks dominated the news pages over speculation that he would snaffl e the position of the European Union's first foreign secretary. But last week it was the turn of Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, who took centre stage after drafting one of the most comprehensive energy statements by this or any modern government.

The son of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament co-founder and Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband told the Commons on Monday he was fast-tracking the construction of 10 nuclear power stations to produce 16GW of power. "We need nuclear power, which is a proven, reliable source of low-carbon energy," he gushed.

That emotive word "nuclear" got everyone chattering, but Miliband's strategy was far from one-planked. He also detailed plans to raise up to £9.5bn through a levy on electricity bills to develop four carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects by 2020.

Capturing carbon dioxide and then burying it could end up cutting coal plant emissions by 90 per cent. "Our aim is clear," said Miliband, "for carbon capture and storage to be ready to be deployed 100 per cent on all new coal-fired power stations by 2020."

However, there is a growing consensus that British business cannot meet Miliband's target, that its cost may be too high and, say some, that the technology may not even be safe.

CCS is a massive undertaking, potentially expanding the size of a coal station by a half. The process has two stages: pre- and post-combustion. Technology for the former is far more advanced. As a result, demonstration projects for post-combustion are not expected to be completed until 2025. (The Independent)

Toshiba’s new facility in Oomuta, on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, looks like any other chemical plant – a confusing jumble of pipes and tanks – but its purpose is exceptional: to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by a coal-fired power station next door.

The plant is a pilot. There is nowhere to store the CO2, which is extracted only to be pumped straight back up the chimney.

But as a symbol of the new strategic direction at Toshiba and rivals such as Panasonic and Hitachi, the Oomuta plant is apt.

Energy technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions, not flashy consumer gadgets, is now the target. (Financial Times)

A Calgary scientist is looking for links between oil and gas activity and earthquakes in Alberta.

Alberta isn't known for its tremors, but small ones do happen and can be missed because of a lack of monitoring equipment in the province.

Dave Eaton, a geophysics professor, is leading a project that will see a decommissioned station near Priddis upgraded and eight more set up across the province. The equipment will be able to detect earthquakes that humans can't.

Eaton wants to know whether blasting liquids underground to extract natural gas or storing carbon in the earth to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can cause an earthquake.

"Earthquakes have been produced that are just on [the] threshold of causing damage to homes and infrastructure and are felt over a large region. So we would really like to understand the nature of those earthquakes better and really make a more solid connection between the types of fluids being injected and earthquake activity," he said.
No clear link between carbon capture, quakes

The study could have a big impact on the emerging carbon-capture industry in the province. Alberta has set aside $2 billion to fund such projects.

"There's no proof right now of any causal link between CO2 injection and earthquakes, but that's one of the reasons we would like to investigate it more," Eaton said. "We need to be very careful and aware of all the earthquake risks, especially when we are contemplating these sorts of really long-term storage of materials inside the earth." (CBC News)

Fluctuations in global economic activity are clearly imprinted on the carbon emissions timeseries.

It is interesting to see the delay between major events and the consequent troughs in the annual rate of change. The second oil shock and the 1987 stock market crash both took five years to produce the maximum dip in the rate of slowing in annual emissions. It seems likely that the 2007-2008 market crashes and GFC will cause another minimum in the % rate of annual change – a few years in the future – and it could well be off the bottom of this chart.

This article in the UK Telegraph says; “Carbon dioxide emissions ‘cut by recession’”

Global greenhouse gas emissions will be 9 per cent below what they were expected to be in 2012 as a result of the recession, researchers said today.

Data from CDIAC, and for recent years, this Netherlands site (Warwick Hughes)

On Tuesday, shortly after the International Energy Agency released its World Energy Outlook for 2009, the mainstream media went into overdrive with stories about the agency’s outlook for oil demand and oil prices. Lots of attention was paid to the claims by an unnamed source within the IEA who told the Guardian that the agency was downplaying the risk of declining oil supplies and that, in the words of the Guardian, the “world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit.”

While the peak oil debate will surely rage on for years to come, perhaps the more important finding in the IEA report was completely ignored. In the executive summary, the IEA concludes that “The long-term global recoverable gas resource base is estimated at more than 850 tcm (850 trillion cubic meters.” That translates to just over 30,000 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s more than double the 2008 estimate put forward by the IEA, when it said that “Ultimately recoverable remaining resources of conventional natural gas, including remaining proven reserves, reserves growth and undiscovered resources, could amount to well over 400 tcm.”

But in 2008, the agency didn’t include unconventional gas – that is, gas from shale, tight sands, and coalbed methane -- in its estimate of recoverable gas resources. The IEA’s latest report provides further proof that the shale gas revolution necessitates a re-thinking of our approach to natural gas, and therefore, energy policy. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

The world's newest carbon citadel rises up between the blasted deserts of Inner Mongolia and the coal-black lands of Shaanxi province.

Ordos is a city that few outside China know. But the future of global emissions, and global warming looks increasingly more likely to be set in industrial powerhouses like this than in the negotiating halls of Copenhagen.

While the world's countries struggle to reach a treaty to defeat climate change, Chinese miners and scientists here are ramping up production and finding new ways to burn and bury carbon that will shape the policies of the world's biggest polluting nation.

Ordos is the new face of coal in China. It is home to the world's biggest coal company and an industrial-scale experiment to turn coal into diesel that could create a major new source of greenhouse gases. At the same time, it hosts the planet's most efficient mine and one of China's biggest carbon capture and storage projects, which buries the gases blamed for global warming. (The Guardian)

Italian Wind Fraud Investigation Extends to the Netherlands, UK, Ireland, US and Spain. Subsidies Questioned.

For some carbon millionaires, lining their pockets legally through taxpayer subsidies and hand outs is not enough. They choose to cheat even though they’re playing a game that’s already rigged.

FT reports that these saviors of our planet were building wind farms that were “built with public subsidies but had never functioned.”

Vigorito had ties to the controversial “Cape Wind” project planned for Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound which has been criticized as a poor investment for taxpayers for the energy it will produce.

Wind power remains an interesting and potentially useful technology. However, if taxpayers are forced to pay for it they must receive a viable return on their investment. Conservationists should not be forced to endure wind farms spoiling undeveloped places of natural beauty. We should not allow wind farms to ruin the habitats of birds and other wildlife in ways we would never permit to established efficient methods of power generation.

It’s time politicians require the “green” business people who will reap fortunes from wind power to bear the financial costs and risks. It’s time government zoning and environmental regulators ban wind turbines where they threaten wildlife and spoil human enjoyment of natural beauty.

Wind yes, but only when economically viable and only with respect for the quality of life both human and wild. (CFACT Europe)

Integrating random, highly variable wind energy into an electricity system presents substantial problems that subvert wind technology’s ability to offset the use of fossil fuels–and avoid air emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO2). Measuring this accurately is important because many believe that wind projects significantly reduce such emissions.

This analysis finds that natural gas used as wind back-up in place of baseload or intermediate gas (in the absence of wind) results in approximately the same gas burn and an increase in related emissions, including CO2. Extrapolating from this example to the whole, the working hypothesis is that intermittent wind (and solar) are not effective CO2 mitigation strategies because of inefficiencies introduced by fast-ramping (inefficient) operation of gas turbines for firming otherwise intermittent and thus non-usable power.

In the absence of extensive real-time load dispatch analyses at finely grained time intervals capable of accurately and sufficiently assessing all the variables affecting electricity system behavior as wind energy penetration increases, I propose a method – a calculator – that captures a wide range of considerations. I am unaware of any previous attempt that is as inclusive as what I present here and welcome reader comments for improvements on the present framework or alternative approaches.

This model, or calculator, provides a framework for the considerations involved and an interim assessment of their effects until sufficiently comprehensive studies can be performed in the areas indicated. It shows the impact on fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions compared to typical claims by wind proponents and other bodies, including some government policy makers. As it is parameter driven, the calculator allows examination of the sensitivity of these considerations. The result is that the typical claims are not supported, except by ignoring most of the following considerations:

The framework used is similar to that of Warren Katzenstein and Jay Apt (see citations below). It focuses on the wind/gas plant combination and has general applicability. Additional considerations involving wind’s impact on other electricity system elements particular to a specific jurisdiction, such as baseload capacity as analyzed by Campbell, will have to be assessed separately and could have implications that further offset wind’s claimed benefits. [Read more →] (Kent Hawkins, Master Resource)

The historic Hall of Flags in the rotunda of the state capitol in Augusta, Maine, was the setting for a November 6th press conference announcing the formation of the Citizens Task Force on Wind Power. The group is a coalition of citizens from around the state drawn together in the common purpose of advocating for responsible, science based, economically and environmentally sound approaches to Maine’s energy policy, according to co-chair Steve Thurston. Thurston highlighted the key concerns of the group in the release that is posted here. Co-chair Monique Aniel, M.D., set the tone for the press conference by recounting how the arrogance of the developer of Record Hill Wind in Roxbury, Maine, ignited her concern over the siting of utility scale wind projects in Maine

Other speakers included economist J. Dwight who addressed economic problems of wind energy; Gary Steinberg of Friends of Lincoln Lakes who spoke of denial of citizens rights relating to permitting processes; Carolyn Dodge who spoke of wind developers’ violation of Native Americans’ respect for natural resources; Jon Carter of Forest Ecology Network who spoke of the devastating impact of wind development on the vast forests of the northern two-thirds of Maine. Bringing the Press Conference to a close, Brad Blake of Friends of Lincoln Lakes used the scale of the Rollins Project proposed by First Wind to demonstrate the huge impact of the state’s goals for utility scale wind power for 2020.

Citizens Task Force on Wind Power is concerned that the state government under the leadership of Governor John Baldacci has committed the state to public policy that aggressively promotes development of utility scale wind projects without adequate citizen input to public policy and denial of citizen involvement in permitting processes. [Read more →] (Brad Blake, Master Resource)

This is a video version of a radio advertisement being used to oppose the health care 'reform' bill that is currently making its way through Congress. The ad features excerpts from Ronald Reagan's 1961 program called Operation Coffee Cup. Then private citizen Ronald Reagan was hired by the American Medical Association to speak-out against socialized medicine. Reagan's message is as relevant today as it was then. While this ad is currently sponsored by Minnesota Majority, it can be rebranded and used by any other organization that is interested in opposing ObamaCare. (Minnesota Majority)

Many Americans do not think twice about taking medicines to prevent heart disease and stroke. But cancer is different. Much of what Americans do in the name of warding off cancer has not been shown to matter, and some things are actually harmful. Yet the few medicines proved to deter cancer are widely ignored.

Take prostate cancer, the second-most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, surpassed only by easily treated skin cancers. More than 192,000 cases of it will be diagnosed this year, and more than 27,000 men will die from it.

And, it turns out, there is a way to prevent many cases of prostate cancer. A large and rigorous study found that a generic drug, finasteride, costing about $2 a day, could prevent as many as 50,000 cases each year. Another study found that finasteride’s close cousin, dutasteride, about $3.50 a day, has the same effect.

Nevertheless, researchers say, the drugs that work are largely ignored. And supplements that have been shown to be not just ineffective but possibly harmful are taken by men hoping to protect themselves from prostate cancer.

As the nation’s war on cancer continues, with little change in the overall cancer mortality rate, many experts on cancer and public health say more attention should be paid to prevention. (Gina Kolata, NYT)

Clueless ... the mock crime scene at Bondi Beach yesterday. Photo: Steven Siewert

IT LOOKS like a crime scene, with police tape, a crowd gathered - even a Channel Ten reporter doing a ''live'' cross.

But the killer is known and the scene is part of an advertisement for National Skin Cancer Action Week.

The campaign was launched on Bondi Beach yesterday, with 1700 beach towels laid out to represent the 1700 Australians who die of skin cancer each year. A white outline was drawn on each of the towels, like the chalk outlines police use to mark out the position of a body.

The campaign is not as graphic as similar advertisements for lung cancer, but it is hoped it will reach young people who think tanning is healthy.

''More needs to be done to educate younger Australians about the dangers of getting sunburnt,'' the chief executive of the Cancer Council, Ian Olver, said yesterday. ''We hope this campaign will help get the message to sink in that a tan just isn't worth the risk.'' (SMH)

ELVS is an initiative created by automakers to deal with legacy product issues that could be a threat to public safety or the environment, or both. The issue here is not that post-bankruptcy GM tried to disassociate itself from ELVS, but that Green groups considered the danger of mercury disposal enough of a problem to pressure GM to live up to its commitment.

As the Green lobby insists mercury from old switches is dangerous enough to require special handling, the governments of the UK, the European Union, Canada, The USA, Australia and New Zealand and more bowed to Green pressure to legislate the end of incandescent light bulbs in favor of mercury-laden compact flourescent lamps (CFL’s).

In the near future, hundreds of millions of people will have no choice but to use CFL’s to illuminate their homes. Every CFL contains mercury, and a broken bulb needs special clean-up care:

The Federal trade Commission has decided the lamps need a special label, in part to warn consumers of the dangerous mercury content.

In the US, Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa , Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Utah and Maryland require vehicle manufacturers to pay for proper mercury recovery and disposal. Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington have state-funded programs to achieve the same. It is incongruous that these states will soon have their environmental stewardship efforts undone by the unintended consequences of environmentalists CFL agenda.

A single broken CFL in your home is certainly inconvenient, but it is nothing compared with the environmental impact that sending millions of dead CFL’s to landfills will have. Civic authorities suggest consumers must dispose of used CFL’s properly, but people will do what they’ve always done with old light bulbs, they’ll throw them in the trash. Greens spent $300 million to persuade Americans that global warming is a problem, only to see the issue decline in the public’s awareness. What chance is there that ordinary people can be persuaded to care about how to throw out a broken light bulb?

On one hand we have greens lobbying effectively for automakers to pay for mercury switch disposal, and on the other we have greens lobbying effectively to force people to use mercury-containing CFL’s.

Greens claim the reduction in electricity demand is enough for them to support mercury-laden CFL’s. It would be safer, and in the end cheaper, to build more power plants to keep our incandescents burning rather than deal with the future deadly effects of mercury in our groundwater.

Americans entering their 70s today are experiencing more disabilities in old age than did the previous generation, researchers announced Thursday. The shift in health fortunes comes as a surprise and predicts future high disability rates for the baby boomers as well.

The study is the first to foretell the end of a two-decade trend in which people appeared to be functioning better in old age than those who came before, said lead author Teresa E. Seeman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.

The oldest people in the survey had grown up with better nutrition and had better medical treatments, resulting in less disability, Seeman said. "The hope was, this was a portent of good things to come as this population got larger. But ours is the first data to suggest disability rates may be going up. If it's true, it certainly suggests the baby boomers, whatever health benefits they've enjoyed up until now, may not enjoy such a rosy older age." (LA Times)

FOR decades dieters have been counting calories to try to lose weight.

But scientists now say long-established standards of how many calories adults should be consuming each day could be wrong.

For the past 18 years the recommended daily intake of calories has been 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men. But a new report suggests people could increase the number of calories they eat by up to 16 per cent.

The finding in the draft report by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition means some adults could safely eat an extra 400 calories a day, equivalent to a cheeseburger.

The committee, whose members include some of Britain's leading nutritional experts, said its report provides a much more accurate assessment of how energy can be burnt off through physical activity.

But health campaigners warned that the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency could seek to "sweep this report under the carpet" in a bid to avoid sending out mixed messages in the middle of an obesity epidemic.

And Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said: "This is not a green light to eat yourself silly." ( Fiona MacLeod, Scotland on Sunday)

The link has not been proven, but the theory is compelling. It suggests that America is doomed to lead the world’s obesity rankings as long as the process by which it elects its presidents starts in Iowa — a state known for its cornfields and corn subsidies.

With a minimum price of $1.90 per bushel of corn guaranteed by the 2007 Farm Bill, activists say that the crop is a guaranteed winner for the farmers of the Midwest — and one of the results is something called super-abundant high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Known to its detractors as “liquid Satan”, HFCS is the sweetener of choice in the vast bulk of fizzy drinks and packaged cakes and biscuits consumed in the US. Its producers have long enjoyed the solid support of the US Senate and most presidential candidates, who gravitate every four years to Iowa to pledge their allegiance to its voters. “Farm subsidies are a third rail of Iowa politics,” a former staffer on Senator John Edwards’s presidential campaign said yesterday. “You don’t touch them.”

President Obama certainly didn’t. As an Illinois Senator and presidential candidate, he consistently backed corn subsidies, on the grounds that they promoted the production of corn-based ethanol and thereby enhanced US energy security. (The Times)

Sugary soft drinks should be taxed to raise money for hospitals and to tackle obesity, a leading doctor has urged. Dr Kailash Chand, who chairs an NHS trust in the north-west, said a small charge on fattening drinks would reduce consumption while raising billions for the health service over the next decade. He also called for tax breaks for healthy behaviour, while warning that the cost of tackling obesity could "cripple" the NHS.

Chand said drinks that contained up to 17 teaspoons of sugar were fuelling the UK's obesity epidemic: "The amount of sugar that goes into some of these drinks is staggering and it has a double whammy, increasing obesity and rotting teeth. They are often very cheap and promote expensive and debilitating diseases, which in turn run up health care costs at all levels of government." (The Observer)

New research suggests lazing in bed at the end of a busy week is just what children need to ward off obesity.

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems.

They believe the weekend snooze is crucial for school-age children to catch up on the sleep they miss out on during a busy week.

In the process, it helps to regulate calorie intake by reducing snacking during waking hours. (TDT)

We’ve made so much progress in the USA. 75 years ago, we may have witnessed some scenes like this in today’s China. Unfortunately, the de-industrialization of the west just moved the western problems of the past to a country that doesn’t seem to care much about pollution control.

At the junction of Ningxia province and Inner Mongolia province, I saw a tall chimney puffing out golden smoke covering the blue sky, large tracts of the grassland have become industrial waste dumps; unbearable foul smell made people want to cough; Surging industrial sewage flowed into the Yellow River…”

It seems that Monbiot is against consumer democracy because it seems to rob us of our power as citizens, and requires government intervention in order to make it work. (Climate Resistance)

Well, here’s an interesting pair. Today’s Washington Post contains an op-ed on climate change and trade, written jointly by Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, and Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch at Public Citizen.

The authors readily admit, quite early in the piece, that they are usually on opposing sides of the trade debate. The Peterson Institute scholars are well-known and well-respected advocates of freer international trade. Global Trade Watch, and Wallach in particular? Not so much. She has called NAFTA a “disastrous experiment” and has a special section on her website calling on people to Take Action! on trade (example: by hosting a house party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of ” the historic 1999 Seattle protest victory of people power over corporate rule.”)

Yet here they are, claiming to agree on “a surprising number of aspects of the climate change debate and on the related need to overhaul global trade negotiations.” I am still trying to make sense of the op-ed, because it lurches around a bit, and to work out exactly how deep the agreement of these strange bedfellows really is. But for now, let me comment briefly on what I think is the main thrust of their op-ed: a proposal for launching a new round of trade talks.

The authors point out that a new treaty on global warming would “require new trade rules in intellectual property, services, government procurement and product standards.” So, hey, why not combine that into trade talks? The Obama Round (as if Obama-worship has not gone far enough) “would include, as a centerpiece, addressing these potential commercial and climate trade-offs and updating the negotiating agenda.”

That, quite frankly, would be fatal for the World Trade Organization. Developing countries, now in the majority in the WTO, are in general very resistant to the idea of bringing extraneous issues into its agenda (witness constant struggles over linking trade to labor and environment issues, to name just two). More to the point, we already have a round in progress. The Doha round has been struggling over old-fashioned trade concerns like tariffs and subsidies (remember them?) since launching in 2001. The risks of overburdening the WTO agenda are, in my opinion, far greater than the possible benefits. It’s fairly clear to me why Wallach would advocate a new round full of poison pills, but not so clear why Bergsten would put his name to such a suggestion.

It’s not even clear to me that such an approach would “help the environment.” Why the optimism about the possibility of agreement under the auspices of the WTO when negotiations in forums designed explicitly and solely for the purpose of halting climate change have been unsuccessful?

( Speaking of which, expectations for a breakthrough at the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change are being rapidly scaled back, with talk of an “interim” agreement — likely some anodyne political statement — rather than the final deal that environmental groups had hoped for. The international diplomacy circus rolls on, though: conferences are planned for Mexico and South Africa — talk about a carbon footprint! — next year.)

For my take on the climate change and trade debate, the solution to which does not involve launching an Obama Round, see here. (Sallie James, Cato at liberty)

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue: (Bjørn Lomborg, WSJ)

Speaking at a food security conference in Milan, Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe today criticized “well-fed activists” whose protests and lobbying activities have, in his opinion, held back the adoption of food technologies that could help the starving poor:

Nestlé has been subject to intense criticism in recent years, primarily over its strategies to sell infant formula in developing countries, but I think Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe is spot-on here.

Penn & Teller made a similar, if more forcefully put, point in the last few seconds of this excellent video (warning: language may be offensive to some). (Sallie James, Cato at liberty)

Contrary to claims made by some proponents of organic farming, natural fertilizers are often no better than chemical fertilizers at defending crops against insects--and sometimes they're worse. That's what British researchers found over the course of a 2-year trial. The results suggest that farmers should tailor fertilizing to individual plant varieties.

Organic farming has gained popularity in recent decades because of its use of natural ingredients. Proponents say that cow manure, for example, is far less harmful to the environment than petrochemical-based products. Some advocates have also claimed that organic fertilizers help plants resist insect pests better than synthetic varieties do. That's because plants absorb the nitrogen and other nutrients from organic fertilizers more slowly, and the pest larvae that rely on those nutrients have a tougher time gobbling them up. (ScienceNOW Daily News)

The Cascade Policy Institute, Portland's free-market think tank, had an interesting take today on Nike and Apple's disagreement with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's positions on climate change issues. An excerpt:

"As it happens, Al Gore is a member of the board of Apple, and Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook sits on the board of Nike. So it should be fairly obvious why Nike and Apple are supporting cap-and-trade. Nike's and Apple's manufacturing bases also lie mostly outside the United States and would be unaffected by a cap-and-trade program. Thus, both Nike and Apple can project a "green" image for their young, environmentally conscious consumers and gain a market advantage by supporting a program that could hinder their U.S.-based competitors."

Apple quit the Chamber because of its climate change position. Nike resigned from the Chamber's board but remains a member, saying it would advocate for a more aggressive climate-change strategy internally.

In a recent letter, the Chamber said it supports Congress addressing climate change in a way that recognizes "the compelling need for a solution that minimizes the overall economic impact." (Scott Learn, The Oregonian)

WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has been censured by local Republican officials in his home state.

The executive committee of the Charleston County Republican Party, in a voice vote on Monday, rebuked Mr. Graham “for many of the positions he has taken that do not represent the wishes of the people of South Carolina, such as: passing a ‘cap and trade’ energy bill, bailing out banks and granting amnesty for illegal aliens,” according to the censure resolution.

Lin Bennett, the chairwoman of the local party, said in an interview with The Post and Courier of Charleston, “The feeling is if you’re not going to uphold the platform, then why bother to run as a Republican?”

Ms. Bennett said about 50 members of the executive committee had voted on the censure, according to The Post and Courier.

In a statement, Mr. Graham’s office pointed out that he was ranked the 15th-most conservative senator in 2008 by The National Journal.

Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Mr. Graham, said: “Working to solve problems and being conservative are not mutually exclusive. You can do both, and that’s what people in South Carolina elected him to do.” (NYT)

Illustration by KAL

AMERICA will not pass a cap-and-trade law in time for the global climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. To understand why, it helps to ask a farmer. Take Bruce Wright, for example, who grows wheat and other crops on a couple of thousand acres near Bozeman, Montana. His family has tilled these fields for four generations. His great-grandfather built the local church. He loves his job and the rural way of life. But he fears that higher energy prices will endanger both.

To grow his crops, Mr Wright needs fertiliser, fuel and pesticides—all of which are derived from oil. When the price of oil hit the sky last year, Mr Wright’s operating costs nearly trebled. He survived because the oil-price surge also forced up the price of grain. But such wild swings make him nervous. If he has to invest three times as much in his crop and the crop fails, he says, he will be buried in debt. ( The Economist)

The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. (IBD)

Why are people not more aware of the greatest threat to human freedom and prosperity since the collapse of Communism?

I refer not to the 2008 financial crisis, or man-made climate change, but to that eminent Canadian Maurice Strong. He is, after all, more than any other person responsible for sending the nations of the world down the path to Copenhagen.

It seems that Mr. Strong too may be fed up with his lack of profile. He has set up a website, www.mauricestrong.net, where you will find the bald — but accurate — statement that “Maurice Strong is the world’s leading environmentalist.” From heading the first UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1972 to masterminding the 1992 Rio summit, “Maurice Strong,” says Maurice Strong’s website, “has played a unique and critical role in globalizing the environmental movement.”

Mr. Strong is now 80 years old and thus out of the running for the title of CEO of “Earth Inc.,” but it is his environmental nightmares and dreams of global governance that will dominate Copenhagen. This is a man, we might remember, who welcomes the collapse of industrial civilization, and has described the prospect of billions of environmental deaths as a “glimmer of hope.” My editor didn’t believe me when I wrote this, so here’s what Mr. Strong actually said, in his autobiography, in a section described as a report to the shareholders, Earth Inc, dated 2031: “And experts have predicted that the reduction of the human population may well continue to the point that those who survive may not number more than the 1.61 billion people who inhabited the Earth at the beginning of the 20th century. A consequence, yes, of death and destruction — but in the end a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.”

The site raises questions about just what Mr. Strong’s role and status might be at Copenhagen. A cloud fell over his UN career when he was implicated in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, but Mr. Strong never abandoned his crusade. He just moved to Beijing.

Mr. Strong will join with the likes of Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson to harass governments and cheer on NGOs at Copenhagen through something called the Global Observatory, but whatever his reception in December, he has done a brilliant job of promoting climatism. ( Financial Post)

The climate conference will witness a new maturity for the movement that ignited a decade ago. But that does not mean playing it safe ( Naomi Klein, The Guardian)

Bad news which is however hardly surprising.

The APS has prepared a negative response to the letter by 160 physicists including Ivar Giaever and Will Happer who wanted the society to return to its scientific roots when it comes to the topic of climate change and who proposed a new climate policy statement.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger continue their sequence of excellent analyses of what has gone wrong in the climate debate with a post focused on the hyper-partisan nature of the climate debate. The piece is worth reading in full, but the ending is especially on target:

What "left-wing bullies" (like Joe Romm) have done is turn the tactics that they have used on the "hyper-partisan it's-all-a-hoax! Republicans" onto anyone and everyone that they see any disagreement with. This has the metaphorical effect of painting themselves into a very small political corner. Nordhaus and Shellenberger do a nice job of explaining how Romm and his fellow travelers work to establish "the partisan identity of any given thing, whether it be a new technology, policy, or analysis." And guess what? If you try really hard to distinguish yourself from reasonable folks who share most of your views and might appeal to the "vast, moderate middle," you just might succeed!

The strong reaction by hyper-partisans to a New York Times article by Andy Revkin a few years ago exemplifies this behavior. Revkin wrote:

The now familiar pre-junkfest hysteria is swelling up all over the media in the build-up to Copenhagen. Those with strong constitutions can follow the ever-expanding detail at Junk-science.com and Tom Nelson. Every now and then someone lets the cat out of the bag and admits that it is all little to do with climate. It is about such matters as Global Governance, excuses for taxation and authoritarian control, wealth transfer (i.e. taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich politicians in poor countries – and, of course Al Gore) and all sorts of carpetbaggers hoping to steer a few million dollars their way.

The encouraging sign is that polls from all over the world show that you really cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Almost everywhere there is evidence that people are turning away from belief and interest in climate scares. (Number Watch)

Al Gore wants to send President Obama to Copenhagen for Hopenchangen, Global Warming speaks English and supports the war on terror, and Aussie PM Kevin Rudd doubles down on stupid. Again. (Daily Bayonet)

Cap-and-trade, even in a watered down beginning, isn’t good for Houston. But the Houston Chronicle has been at the forefront of advocating for such open-ended regulation–even rejecting a sober cost-benefit analysis of the issue. And even not having second thoughts about alarmist science that its own science writer Eric Berger (see below) has grown to have.

Looking for an answer, I stumbled upon a piece on the web by former Houston Chronicle environmental writer Bill Dawson. Dawson now teaches at Rice University on media issues and the environment.

His post fills in some gaps about why Houston’s paper (the Houston Post folded and merged into the Chronicle in 1995) became such an organ for climate alarmism–even tramping to the Left of the New York Times at times. It also explains the large circulation declines, given that the Houston audience is more free market, conservative, libertarian, and non-alarmist than the Chronicle’s editorial writers and reporters. And the Houston energy industry, as Brett Clayton reported in a front page article in Sunday’s Chronicle, will be a big loser under cap-and-trade.

The latest circulation news for the Houston Chronicle is rather grim–a year-to-year decline of 13%. One comment on the circulation report said much about the alienated audience:

Mr. Dawson’s blog brings some very interesting things to light. [Read more →] (Robert Bradley Jr., Master Resource)

The analysis of past changes of Antarctic temperature and the concentration of greenhouse gases alone cannot reveal causal relationships in the climate system. A recent modeling study shows that several climate processes need to be taken into account to discern causes and consequences. In the journal “Quaternary Science Reviews” researchers provide an explanation for observed Antarctic temperature lead over carbon dioxide concentration for several recent glacial-interglacial transitions.

“Antarctic ice core data tell us that during glacial-interglacial transitions Antarctic temperature rose some thousand years before the concentration of carbon dioxide did,” says lead author Andrey Ganopolski of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. This fact apparently contradicts the concept of carbon dioxide (CO2) as the primary driver of climate change and has been used to challenge the leading role of CO2 in past and future climate changes. “But our results demonstrate clearly that the Antarctic temperature lead over CO2 observed during past glacial cycles does not challenge the major role of greenhouse gases in driving climate change,” says Ganopolski. (Press release by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK))

Less than a month before negotiators will meet in Copenhagen with the lofty goal of crafting a deal to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama administration is considering endorsing a limited short-term climate pact and deferring more ambitious action until next year.

The scaled-back strategy is driven largely by the realities of domestic politics: The administration is hampered in making an international deal because Congress has not passed climate legislation. So any global pact would be postponed until next year when it would be constrained by whatever domestic climate legislation Congress enacts.

Supporting an interim agreement -- which would fall far short of what many European and developing nations envisioned when President Obama took office -- would be an attempt to keep the U.N.-sponsored talks from being viewed a failure, say administration and congressional officials. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

Next month’s United Nations climate change conference is doomed to failure. The pre-emptive recriminations are already under way weeks before any delegates are due to arrive in Copenhagen. The finger of blame is being pointed firmly at Washington. It hardly seems worth the carbon to fly in all those officials, environmentalists, scientists and lobbyists, not to say presidents and prime ministers.

A word or two of definition is needed. When the UN negotiators met in Bali in December 2007, they set a two-year deadline for an agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol. The remit called for a new accord to cut global carbon emissions at once tougher and more inclusive than its predecessor.

There are three essential elements to such a bargain: deep cuts in the CO2 emissions of rich countries alongside curbs on the carbon-intensity of growth in rising economies; a financial transfer arrangement to mitigate the cost to poorer nations of a shift to a low-carbon economy; and a commitment to embed national targets in a binding international treaty.

By this measure, failure at Copenhagen is indeed pre-ordained. It is also easy enough to see why the US will get the blame. For all the US president’s rhetorical commitment to combat global warming, Barack Obama’s administration is not yet ready to sign up to any of these three vital ingredients. ( Philip Stephens, Financial Times)

UK government plans to make carbon emission cuts of 80% by 2050 are physically impossible to achieve, according to a new analysis.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says there is not enough time or capacity to build the wind turbines and extra nuclear power stations required.

Under current plans, the targets will not be met until 2100, it argues. (BBC News)

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in the UK has released a hard-hitting report on the state of the UK Climate Change Act. IMechE says:

The coalition is expected to present a united front and vote down emissions trading legislation when it is brought before parliament next week.

But Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull denies the show of unity will disrespect the good faith negotiations still being nutted out between the government and the coalition.

"We've made it very clear that we do not support the bill in its current form," he told reporters in Albury. ( AAP)

LONDON - The world will face a finance shortfall of 32 billion euros ($47.99 billion) in 2020 to combat climate change, analysts at Societe Generale/orbeo said on Thursday.

The private sector will have to be mobilized to finance national measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions to bridge that gap, analysts said in a report.

Financing mechanisms to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being negotiated by world leaders in the lead up to a U.N. climate summit next month in Copenhagen. (Reuters)

SINGAPORE - Six provincial governors from Indonesia, Laos and the Philippines on Thursday backed an expanded U.N. scheme aimed at protecting and conserving forests in return for carbon credits. (Reuters)

Would anybody now please stand up and tell the world they believe it will be any easier to extract billions of dollars from “Developed countries” in 2020 than it is now? (OmniClimate)

SINGAPORE , Nov. 12 -- China is willing to work with other participants at the U.N.-sponsored climate change summit to be held in Copenhagen next month to reach a "fair and reasonable" outcome, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said here Thursday.

Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Ministerial Meeting, Yang said China hopes to see balanced and positive results on climate change mitigation, adaptation, financing and technology support, four aspects of coordinated efforts outlined by the 2007 U.N. Climate Change Conference held in Bali, Indonesia.

Yang said China hopes the Copenhagen conference will push for the comprehensive, effective and sustainable implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, according to sources of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. (Xinhua)

CANBERRA, Nov 13 - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd marks two years in office this month with his centrepiece carbon trade plan in jeopardy, parliament facing a log-jam of bills and government support slipping over asylum seekers.

Parliament resumes on Monday for this year's hectic final two weeks that could change Australia's political outlook, giving clues to whether Rudd will want an early election in 2010 and exposing the deep divisions within an opposition struggling for poll support. (Reuters)

As the world prepares for the Copenhagen climate negotiations next month, it is worth checking out the greenwash that has followed the promises made 12 years ago when the Kyoto protocol was signed.

A surprising number of countries have succeeded in raising their emissions from 1990 levels despite signing up to reduce them. They include a bundle of countries in the European Union, which collectively agreed to let some nations increase their emissions while others (mainly Britain and Germany) cut theirs. Step forward Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece — all with emissions up by more than a quarter.

Then there are the US and Australia, which both reneged on the protocol after signing it. And Canada, which never reneged but still has emissions up by a quarter (worse than the US) and shows no sign of contrition or of being called to account by the other signatories.

But my prize for the most shameless two fingers to the global community goes to New Zealand, a country that sells itself round the world as "clean and green".

New Zealand secured a generous Kyoto target, which simply required it not to increase its emissions between 1990 and 2010. But the latest UN statistics show its emissions of greenhouse gases up by 22%, or a whopping 39% if you look at emissions from fuel burning alone.

Some countries with big emissions growth started from a low figure in 1990. Arguably, they were playing catchup. There is no such excuse for New Zealand. Its emissions started high and went higher.

They are today 60% higher than those of Britain, per head of population. Among industrialised nations, they are only exceeded by Canada, the US, Australia and Luxembourg. In recent years a lot of Brits have headed for Christchurch and Wellington in the hope of a green life in a country where they filmed the Lord of the Rings. But it's a green mirage. (Fred Pearce, The Guardian)

At little noticed talks last week in Port Ghalib, Egypt, climate advocates were hoping to seal a global agreement for the phase down of super greenhouse gases and give next month's Copenhagen climate talks a can-do running start. But the annual meeting of the 198 nations of the Montreal Protocol began on a note of contention that five days of discussions could not overcome.

The 22-year-old Montreal Protocol has delivered an unbroken string of successes in the battle against ozone depletion, accomplished with comity and cooperation, but now observers say it has caught the climate virus. Rhetoric trumped getting down to business, as an agreement to rid the world of HFCs, enormously potent global warming gases, was postponed for at least another year. (Reuters)

Senators John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, and Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, have joined in introducing a bill that would establish awards for researchers who develop technologies that can economically extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stash it away. In doing so, they are potentially upping the ante offered in 2007 by Richard Branson, the aviation and music magnate, for such an advance.

Various researchers studying the interface of climate and energy policy have said that such technology is well worth pursuing, particularly given that oil and other liquid fossil fuels are almost surely going to be burned — particularly in vehicles or other dispersed sources — for many years to come, according to many assessments. The only way to retrieve the carbon dioxide produced this way is from the air, not tailpipes or smokestacks. (NYT)

LONDON – Warnings that time is running out for the fight against global warming raises the question: Is frightening the public into changing their behavior really the world’s last hope?

In Britain, a costly government television advertisement has fallen foul of regulators investigating complaints that it is misleading and too “scary” for children.

But it’s not just hundreds of parents who are unhappy with the commercial, which aims to make adults feel guilty about the impact their carbon emissions are having on their children’s future. Environmentalists and green PR experts say scare tactics just don’t work.

“Bedtime Stories,” a minute-long, £6 million ($10 million) production, features a father telling his daughter a story about “a very, very strange” world with “horrible consequences” for children. Cutting to cartoon scenes of streets and houses underwater, it shows animals and people drowning and a looming monster representing global warming.

However, consultants who helped the British government draw up climate change communication strategies in the past warn that engendering guilt merely “shuts down” people. Criticizing home and family is also unproductive.

“They both lead to what’s called psychological reactance … especially when the messenger is an unpopular government,” according to Henry Hicks, a consultant at the green PR firm, Futerra. ( Ben Quinn, CSM)

WASHINGTON - In another sign of a warming planet, there were twice as many record-high temperatures in the United States as record lows over the last decade, climate scientists reported on Thursday.

This does not mean there are no record lows, just that there are fewer of them, said Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A parallel study of temperatures in Australia showed about the same results over the same period, Meehl said in a telephone interview. (Reuters)

I believe this study is hopelessly flawed due to the fact that the authors take the data from the weather stations at face value without considering bias due to measurement error or siting error, both of which are rampant in the US surface station network.

While not all situations with poorly sited weather stations affect trends, a weather station like this one at the University of Arizona’s parking lot in front of the atmospheric science department is representative of the kinds of problems that would lead to an increased number of new high temperature records set

So take this NCAR study with a grain of salt, since the authors did not address any of these issues.

BOULDER—Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

I have just seen this BoM media release trumpeting “Warmest month on record in Darwin”. Darwin has just experienced its warmest month on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Darwin Airport mean monthly max for October 09 was 34.8.

Perhaps the BoM is too obsessed with making weather news fit in with media puff re the IPCC global warming hysteria. Too busy to have time to check their own historic data. – Darwin Post Office 14016 had a rash of hotter daytime Octobers in the 19th Century.

1882 35.3
1883 34.9
1886 35.2
1888 35.3
1889 35.7
1891 35.2
1892 35.5
1893 35.3
1901 34.9

Many BoM utterances need “checking with a fine tooth comb.” (Warwick Hughes)

OSLO - Greenland's ice losses are accelerating and nudging up sea levels, according to a study showing that icebergs breaking away and meltwater runoff are equally to blame for the shrinking ice sheet.

The report, using computer models to confirm satellite readings, indicated that ice losses quickened in 2006-08 to the equivalent of 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) of world sea level rise per year from an average 0.46 mm a year for 2000-08. (Reuters)

As the world climate summit closes in, scientists monitoring the impact of global warming in the far north have grown frustrated by public apathy and disbelief about the extent of the problem. ( The Independent)

OTTAWA - The world needs to do more to protect boreal forests and peatlands, which store more carbon than any other ecosystem and help mitigate the effects of climate change, a Canadian report issued Thursday said.

Boreal forests, found in northern areas like Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and parts of the United States, cover 11 percent of the earth and store 22 percent of all carbon on the land surface in soil, permafrost, peatlands and wetlands.

"Action is needed to conserve a region that contains 'The carbon the world forgot'," said the 36-page report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative, an environmental group (here). (Reuters)

We would like to thank Tony Lovell for providing these photos! For further information, see www.soilcarbon.com.au.

It is clear from these photos that very large differences in the surface fluxes of heat, momentum, water and carbon dioxide, as well as surface albedo will result. It is these changes over local and regional areas that result in landscape changes being a first order climate forcing.

In a presentation dated 22^nd September, 2009, Dr Svalgaard produced a graphic which can be interpreted to predict the timing of the Solar Cycle 24 maximum.

Dr Svalgaard annotated Altrock’s orgininal figure with the red and aqua arrows. What is significant is that the Solar Cycle 24 arrow is 15 years after the Solar Cycle 23 arrow. With the maximum of Solar Cycle 23 in March 2000, that line suggests that the Solar Cycle 24 maximum will be in 2015. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The Appalachian mountains are seldom mentioned among the world's great mountain ranges. Consisting mostly of low gentle ridges, when compared with the snow-capped peaks of the Himalaya, Andes, or Alps many would hesitate to call them mountains at all. But they are a large and ancient range, stretching over 1500 miles along the eastern portion of North America. The time of their formation has been dated back to the Paleozoic, with major uprisings occurring 650 million years ago. Then, about 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, they were the site of one of the most violent volcanic outbursts in Earth's history. New research reveals that, following that bout of vulcanism, weathering of Appalachian rock may have triggered one of Earth's major ice ages—a relatively brief frigid period that ultimately killed two-thirds of all species on the planet.

As the eastern edge of what became the North American continental plate overrode the basin of an ancient ocean, volcanoes sprang up in what are today the Taconic Mountains of New York state and New England. These volcanoes produced enough lava to form mountains as high as the Alps and also emitted a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂), perhaps more than at any time in Earth's past. This outgassing created greenhouse-gas levels 20 times higher than they are today.

That much CO₂ should have kept the climate warm for eons, but a short 10 million years later atmospheric levels of the gas began to plummet. 5 million years after that, Earth entered a severe ice age. Seth A. Young et al., writing in the October issue of Geology, have proposed that weathering of rock in the Appalachian chain triggered the dramatic climate change. Their hypothesis is based on studying three sedimentary rock formations in Nevada, where sediments had washed down from the Appalachians 460 million years ago.

Previous research based on oxygen isotope excursions indicate that the end-Ordovician event lasted only about 500,000 years. The rapid drop in sea levels is an indication of how quickly continental ice-sheets formed, ushering in the End-Ordovician Ice Age. This caused a worldwide reduction in sea level of approximately 260 feet (80 meters), which dried up and exposed the extensive shallow-water continental shelves that existed throughout the world at that time. This led to the extinction of large numbers of species who depended on this shallow water environment. Scientists count the extinction at the end of the Ordovician as the second worst in terms of lost marine species after the great Permian-Triassic extinction 251 mya.

In the new study, the major clue as to what happened came from analyzing isotopes of the element strontium. Most sediments sport traces of seven parts strontium-87 (⁸⁷Sr) to 10 parts strontium-86 (⁸⁶Sr), a ratio of 0.7. But the Nevada limestone showed a ratio of 0.6, the biggest disparity ever recorded. According to the researchers, the most likely reason the sampled basalt is rich in ⁸⁶Sr is heavy limestone runoff from the Appalachians. As described in the paper's abstract:

Young and colleagues propose the following scenario: As CO₂ induced acid rain fell on the rocks, it formed limestone that washed into the Nevada sea, locking away huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Then, as the volcanism ended about 450 million years ago, the sequestering continued, thinning CO₂ levels significantly. Back then the Sun was dimmer and could not keep the atmosphere warm without the high levels of CO₂. Plummeting CO₂ levels hastened the eventual onset of the ice age. All this took place 350 million years before the Rocky Mountains began to form.

“Our model shows that these Atlantic volcanoes were spewing carbon into the atmosphere at the same time the Appalachians were removing it,” explains study co-author Mathew Saltzman. “For nearly 10 million years, the climate was at a stalemate. Then the eruptions abruptly stopped, and atmospheric carbon levels fell well below what they were in the time before volcanism. That kicked off the ice age,” he said.

Bear in mind that, when it is reported that CO₂ levels plummeted, it was from levels not seen since that age. Estimates are that roughly half of the CO₂ in the atmosphere was sequestered, leaving levels only 10 times today's. In more recent times, the only spike in atmospheric CO₂ that compares was the Pliocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 mya. That event only elevated CO₂ levels to 4 or 5 times modern levels.

Geologist Curtis R. Congreve of the University of Kansas, has called the End- Ordovician an ice age in the middle of a greenhouse. CO₂ levels did not dip to modern levels until the formation of the great Carboniferous coal swamps around 300 million years ago, 150 million years after the End-Ordovician Ice Age (see my article “The Grand View: 4 Billion Years Of Climate Change”).

“What is really neat” about the current study, says University College London geochemist Graham Shields in the journal Science, is that it solves the long-standing mystery about the timing of the ice age and the end of the Ordovician (see “The Mountains That Froze the World”). One idea was that the Appalachian volcanoes themselves sparked the big chill by spewing sun-blocking ash into the air. But that didn't jibe with the fact that the ice age started 5 million years after the eruptions stopped. The new study shows, Shields says, how the cooling effect “really kicks in” when the volcanism ends.

By the time humans first walked their slopes, the Appalachian mountains had worn down from prehistoric peaks over 16,000 ft (5,000 m) high to 6,500 ft (2,000 m) today. Today, the plant and animal life of the Northern Appalachians is still recovering from the last glacial period, which ended 10,000 years ago. The Southern Appalachians were never buried beneath the great ice-sheets of that frigid time, providing refuge for native species. Often spreading a couple hundred miles wide, the chain's north-south alignment allowed easy migration of animals fleeing the glaciers. Had these mountains been aligned east-west, like the European Alps, they would have presented a barrier to migration, a trap that would have ensured mass extinctions.

The Appalachian Mountains are a long system of mountains, stretching from Newfoundland in Canada all the way to Alabama in the southern United States. In my youth I hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail, a popular destination for nature lovers. Many make hiking the entire length of the trail a lifetime goal, which is a significant undertaking as the full trail in the United States is 2,174 miles long.

What lessons can be learned about climate change from events nearly a half billion years ago, when life on our planet was much different than it is today? To start with, the dramatic swings in global temperature during the last half of the Ordovician required massive amounts of CO₂, some 20 times the amount in our atmosphere today. To generate that much CO₂, our planet had to undergo one of the greatest volcanic outbreaks in the history of life on Earth. Mountain ranges were raised and then eroded, with their remains forming sediments at the bottom of the sea. Yet life carried on.

Granted, it would not have been pleasant to live through the events of 450 million years ago. But they should serve as a reminder of the gigantic forces that are required to cause dramatic changes in the world's climate. Some have claimed that this study reinforces the notion that CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are a major driver of Earth's climate. But only at levels 10-20 times today's. Anyone who thinks that man's puny efforts can push Earth's climate system into irreversible and unprecedented change does not understand the history of our planet. Anyone who thinks that anthropogenic global warming caused by human CO₂ emissions is a big deal need only gaze upon the worn down bones of the Appalachians, a mountain range once as tall and as rugged as the Alps, to understand mankind's insignificance.

Be Safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study by UC Davis doctoral student Jessica Oster and geology professor Isabel Montañez.

The finding, which comes from analyzing stalagmites from Moaning Cavern in the central Sierra Nevada, was published online Nov. 5 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The sometimes spectacular mineral formations in caves such as Moaning Cavern and Black Chasm build up over centuries as water drips from the cave roof. Those drops of water pick up trace chemicals in their path through air, soil and rocks, and deposit the chemicals in the stalagmite.

"They're like tree rings made out of rock," Montañez said. "These are the only climate records of this type for California for this period when past global warming was occurring."

At the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago, climate records from Greenland show a warm period called the Bolling-Allerod period. Oster and Montanez's results show that at the same time, California became much drier. Episodes of relative cooling in the Arctic records, including the Younger Dryas period 13,000 years ago, were accompanied by wetter periods in California.

The researchers don't know exactly what connects Arctic temperatures to precipitation over California. However, climate models developed by others suggest that when Arctic sea ice disappears, the jet stream—high-altitude winds with a profound influence on climate—shifts north, moving precipitation away from California. (NSF)

WINNIPEG - Canada's biofuels industry will ask the government early in 2010 to expand fuel blending mandates and production incentives, even as plants rapidly boost capacity to meet incoming targets, the president of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association said on Thursday. (Reuters)

We remarked back in February 2006 that “It is extraordinary how really stupid ideas resurface every few years.” That was the introduction to three consecutive pieces relating to the subject of power from flying windmills. Well, as a contribution the general hysteria The Times has raised the subject again under the heading The quest for alternative energy is taking to the skies. What is this “is”? They have been at it for at least a decade and have nothing to show for it.

The moral is – if you don’t have to provide numbers you can keep any silly story in the air.

As we said in the last of those three pieces (The enginasters), if someone claims that they can deliver 20 MW from a flying generator you only need ask them one question – how much does the cable weigh? Of course, there is always the alternative of firing a 20 MW death ray at the earth from an unstable platform, but you would fry more than just a few birds.

They have been selling this idea for a decade now and still no sign of a working device. (Number Watch)

Householders face painful levies on their energy bills to subsidise a fleet of power stations that will stand idle for much of the year, senior industry sources say.

Energy giants reckon a system of 'capacity payments' may have to be introduced to pay for the gas-fired generation that will be needed to back up unreliable wind farms.

The government is pushing for energy firms to install at least 25 gigawatts of wind power by 2020, equivalent to a third of the UK's current electricity supply.

Industry estimates suggest that 22.5 gigawatts of standby fossil fuel power will be needed to support these installations. This is because the turbines only operate on windy days.

Building a gas-fired backup fleet of that scale from scratch would cost £8.6bn in today's prices. Although some existing capacity will already be in place, utilities say they cannot make the costs of new plants stack up under the UK's current power market.

This is because electricity firms are only paid when their stations are up and running, and selling electricity onto the grid. (Daily Mail)

A few posts back we mentioned the Battle of Ideas debate festival organised by the Institute of Ideas.

Audio podcasts of the many debates are now available on-line. There’s something there for everyone.

However, we highlighted the series of debates that will be of most interest to our readers .

Ben spoke at one of the debates, part of the “Battle for Energy” strand, called “Solving the Energy Crisis: all about lightbulbs and lifestyle?” You can read more about the debate and hear the audio by following this link, or here

If you like your debates a bit more upfront, however… Abundant, Cheap, Clean… Contentious? Why is energy a battlefield today? provided some entertaining and very insightful discussion from James Woudhuysen, co-author of Energise! – a fantastic book for anyone interested in the climate and energy debates. [Click here to read more and listen to the debate]

Art Berman didn't set out to become the Cassandra of shale gas.

That's simply been the result as the Sugar Land petroleum geologist and consultant has persisted in raising doubts about the hottest play in the domestic energy industry.

Natural gas extracted from shale formations has transformed the U.S. energy outlook, leading to predictions that it could produce as much as half of our natural gas by the end of the next decade. Shale gas, though, requires more expensive drilling techniques to produce than conventional gas. That made shale gas attractive last year, when natural gas was selling for $13.58 per million British thermal units, but it can be a money-loser at today's prices of less than $4.50.

In a boom-prone industry known for greeting new discoveries with wide-eyed hype, shale gas has unleashed a gusher of zeal, sparking a drilling craze and soaring lease rates across millions of acres from Texas to New York.

Berman isn't saying that the major shale players — companies such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy and Houston-based Petrohawk Energy — are wrong, but he's skeptical that shale gas will be the domestic energy boon that the companies claim. ( Houston Chronicle)

So often in enhanced greenhouse discussions we still hear how carbon dioxide emissions risk Earth suffering "runaway greenhouse" "just like Venus". The question is, does Venus really suffer from extraordinary greenhouse effect?

In recent months we have been showing you calculations (and scripted calculators) for Earth's expected temperature given solar output and our distance from the Sun. To compare Venus then, all we need is the planet's atmospheric pressure/temperature profile and we see that at an altitude of about 50Km the "morning star" has an atmospheric pressure similar to Earth's and a temperature of about 300 K (about 27 °C), slightly warmer than Earth's 288 K (15 °C).

Venus is closer to the Sun at 0.723332 AU (1 Astronomical Unit = Earth's average distance from the Sun) which means a simple blackbody calculation (for that altitude) would be higher due to an insolation of ~2615 W/m² compared with Earth's 1367 W/m² resolving to an equilibrium temperature of 328 K (55 °C). Taking into account the higher albedo of the bright little planet (about 75% compared with Earth's ~30%) drops that to 232 K (-41 °C) and requires a feedback (greenhouse effect) of 65% to yield the observed ~300 K (27 °C). Of course, some or all of this albedo could come from below 50 Km, in which case our greenhouse feedback is anything from a little to a lot too high -- we'll just assume it's sourced at or above 50 Km for the sake of these calculations.

Told you! Say the enhanced greenhouse fraternity, it's hotter due to greenhouse.

Actually, we wouldn't get just too excited about that. Venus has an atmosphere somewhat different from Earth's with 96.5% CO₂ (965,000 ppmv) rather than our 0.039% (385 ppmv). This suggests 2500 times the CO₂ concentration delivers at most a trivial 1.6 times the greenhouse effect (Earth's feedback from GHE is thought to be about 40% or about six-tenths that of Venus).

So why has Venus got a surface temperature of about 735 K? Pressure. Venus has a massively dense atmosphere and a surface pressure a little over 90 times that of Earth. Its listed adiabatic lapse rate, dry, is 10.468 K/Km, so 50 Km deeper into the atmosphere delivers an expected warming of 50 x 10.468 = ~525 K, meaning it is actually about 100 K cooler than expected at the surface. In fact Earth's environmental lapse rate is about 6.5 K/Km rather than the listed dry rate of 9.76 too, so the probe-measured rate of ~8 K/Km for Venus down to 10 Km altitude makes more sense.

Because Earthlings are somewhat ethnocentric, let's look at what would happen if we added 50 Km to Earth's atmosphere:

50 x 6.5 = 325 + 288 = 613 K (340 °C). Always provided the lower environmental lapse rate held in a massively increased atmosphere that's a little cooler than Venus but allowing for the difference in solar irradiation not by much. Of course, if the lapse rates of similarly massive atmospheres aligned then there'd be just the difference accounted for by solar proximity, meaning Venus is not experiencing any enhanced greenhouse effect from all that CO₂ at all.

Where does that leave us? For one thing it means we are certain Earth is not like Venus and humans cannot make it so by tweaking trace atmospheric constituents. To make Earth another Venus we'd need to add another 90 atmospheres (all CO₂) and get rid of all the water on the planet. Venus is not Earth's "evil twin" and does not appear to be significantly warmed by enhanced greenhouse effect. In fact there's the possibility (probability?) some or all of the morning star's albedo is sourced below 50 Km, making its greenhouse effect even smaller than calculated above.

WASHINGTON - U.S. health officials are due to release new estimates of deaths from swine flu on Thursday, but the numbers will be just that -- a rough estimate.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization stopped trying to count actual cases months ago, once it became clear that H1N1 was a pandemic that would infect millions. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Swine flu is causing the worst flu season in the United States since 1997, when current measurements started, and has killed at least 1,200 people, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - The chemical acrylamide, which is classified as a probable cancer-causing agent, does not appear to increase overall risk for mouth, throat, voice box, or thyroid cancers, with one possible exception, study findings hint.

Besides a possible link to an increased risk of mouth cancer among non-smoking women, Dr. Leo J. Schouten at Maastricht University, and colleagues observed no link between low to high levels of dietary acrylamide and other head-neck or thyroid cancers among 120,852 Dutch people followed for more than 16 years.

However, the small number of mouth cancer cases in the group calls for further investigation to determine "whether there is a real association or just a chance finding," Schouten noted in an email to Reuters Health.

Acrylamide is found in some starchy foods cooked at high temperatures such as French fries and potato chips, baked goods and coffee. Animal studies have indicated acrylamide may cause cancer, and in 2005 the World Health Organization called for lower levels of acrylamide in food. However, studies of any link to human cancers have produced variable results. (Reuters Health)

From the middle of 2010, the European Union will ban several food additives.

Recall that in order to regulate these compounds that are being added to food and beverages with the goal to improve their taste or color, and in order to inform the consumers, the European countries have established the "E xxx" number system which was later adopted internationally.

The code "E xxx" really means that it has been tested, included in the database, and at least at some point, it was labeled safe in reasonable amounts. Of course, the consumers tend to view "E xxx" negatively - as a proof that something is wrong with the food. And of course, the scientific evaluation of each compound keeps on evolving.

The E's that will be banned since mid 2010 include

NEW YORK - The common perception that fresh fruits and vegetables are more expensive than packaged snack foods may not be correct after all, a new study finds.

A number of studies have suggested that chips, cookies and other high-calorie snack foods are generally cheaper than fresh produce, and the alleged price gap has taken some blame for Americans' less-than-ideal diets and bulging waistlines.

But the new study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that the inverse relationship researchers have found between calories and price -- higher-calorie foods being cheaper -- is mainly a matter of algebra.

"When you consider the prices that people actually see at the store -- total price and unit price -- fruits and vegetables are actually cheaper," said researcher Leah M. Lipsky, a Ph.D. candidate in nutritional sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The problem, she explained in an interview, is a matter of math.

Researchers have looked at the question by comparing the number of calories per gram in a given food with its price per calorie. This creates a comparison where the two variables share a common component -- calories, in this case. And the simple properties of math mean that high-calorie foods will appear cheaper.

"Algebra has been creating the inverse association between (calorie) density and price," Lipsky said.

For the study, Lipsky collected price information on various snack items and fresh produce from one U.S. supermarket chain. When she looked at the question in terms of calories per gram and price per calorie, fruits and vegetables did appear to be more expensive.

However, when it came to the prices that consumers see -- the actual price and the unit price, which gives the product's cost per gram of food -- fresh produce was generally cheaper than snack food.

Lipsky pointed out that people probably take many things into consideration when choosing whether to buy fresh produce -- the time it takes to prepare, whether they have the storage for it and whether it might go bad before they eat it, for instance.

But the current findings, she said, suggest that consumers should not be deterred by the popular notion that fruits and vegetables are too expensive. (Reuters Health)

BURIED in the nearly 2,000 pages of the health reform bill passed by the House on Saturday is a provision requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus. Given the worsening problem of obesity in the United States, and the superiority of disease prevention over treatment, calorie posting seems like a great idea. However, research by us and others suggests that it is unlikely to have much, if any, impact on eating or obesity.

There have now been three studies of New York City’s menu-labeling legislation, which took effect last year and serves as a model for the national legislation. One relatively small study conducted by researchers at New York University and Yale and published in the journal Health Affairs found no impact of labels on healthier eating, although the sample wasn’t large enough to detect modest changes.

We conducted a somewhat different study, supported by the United States Department of Agriculture and published in American Economic Review earlier this year, that examined purchases by 1,479 McDonald’s customers in New York City in 2007 and 2008, both before and after menu labeling went into effect.

Beyond simply measuring the impact of labeling, we gave some diners information about how many calories one is recommended to consume per day or per meal, anticipating that this information would help diners to make use of the posted calorie information. However, we found that this did not help diners use menu labels, and we saw no impact on calorie consumption.

Supporters of menu labeling, however, have been talking up a third study, conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which included more than 20,000 customers at 13 restaurant chains. It studied eating habits in 2007, before the labeling law took effect, and again this year. The full data from 2009 have not been published, but news reports indicate that the researchers found significant reductions in consumption at just four of the chains. (The only specific reduction cited was 23 calories per patron at Starbucks, a pretty modest improvement.)

Unfortunately, the press got carried away. The Reuters article on the study carried the headline, “New York Study Says Menu Labeling Affects Behavior.” The National Post of Canada added a photograph with the caption reading: “A study of chain restaurants in New York City, where it is mandatory to list calorie content on the menu, found that consumers were consuming on average 106 calories less per visit.” But that’s not what the study found. (Julie S. Downs, George Loewenstein And Jessica Wisdom, NYT)

NEW YORK - Fasting every other day can help obese people lose weight, a small study hints.

Even though the study participants ate whatever they wanted on their non-fasting days, they lost an average of 5.6 kilograms (about 12 pounds) after eight weeks, Dr. Krista A. Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago and her colleagues found.

What's more, their total and "bad" LDL cholesterol levels dropped, and their blood pressure fell.

"People lost anywhere from about 7 pounds to about 30 pounds and that was in a very short amount of time," Varady said. And, she added, the program was pretty easy for the study participants to follow.

People typically try to lose weight by cutting their calorie intake every day, Varady and her team note in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. A much rarer approach, they add, is to have people alternate "feed days" with "fast days." Studies in normal and overweight people have shown that this strategy can indeed help people lose weight and improve their cholesterol levels. (Reuters Health)

CHICAGO - America's baby boomers are likely to have far more trouble moving around as they get older than their parents had, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

They studied disabilities among several age groups and found that people in their 60s were less able to do daily activities like walking up a flight of stairs or using a vacuum cleaner than people in their 70s.

Rising rates of obesity -- two-thirds of American adults are either obese or overweight -- may be to blame. (Reuters)

A police worker who was sacked because he believed psychics can help solve criminal investigations is to go to court today to defend his right to legal protection from religious discrimination.

In the first case of its kind Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction.

In an unpublished judgement in Mr Power's favour seen by The Independent, the employment specialist Judge Peter Russell said that psychic beliefs are capable of being religious beliefs for the purpose of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003. This is the same law which was used by the environmental campaigner Tim Nicholson when he successfully argued that green beliefs were the same as religious beliefs in a case decided last week.

In Mr Power's case Judge Peter Russell, sitting at Manchester Employment Tribunal, said: "I am satisfied that the claimant's beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society and have sufficient cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance to fall into the category of a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Regulations." ( The Independent)

GREENPORT, N.Y. — Bone-tired but grinning, Peter Wenczel and his son Ben eased their 26-foot work boat toward the dock here one recent afternoon, its deck piled high with bags of scallops.

“We got limit!” Ben Wenczel, 22, shouted, referring to the state’s daily limit of 10 bushels per person for commercial scallop fishing.

For the baymen of Long Island’s eastern shore, out in force this month in their orange waterproof jumpsuits and knee-high galoshes, the November opening of the scallop season has not always been so rewarding.

Beginning in 1985, multiple surges in toxic marine algae known as brown tide have decimated Peconic Bay’s scallop population, resulting in years of dismal, economically devastating harvests.

But last year, the baymen realized that the scallops might finally be making a comeback. The yield was more than three times that of 2007, and this year’s harvest is expected to be at least as good if not better, scientists working in the area say.

The recovery resulted partly from dedicated efforts by scientists to rebuild the scallop population, said Stephen Tettelbach, a professor of biology at Long Island University. (NYT)

ROME - A U.N. world food summit next week is not likely to make more than token headway in the fight against hunger, with leaders merely pledging to boost aid to poor countries but setting no targets or deadlines for action.

With more than one billion people going hungry, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization had called the November 16-18 summit in Rome hoping to win a clear pledge by world leaders to spend $44 billion a year to help poor nations feed themselves.

But a final draft declaration seen by Reuters includes only a general commitment to pump more money into agricultural development, and makes no mention of a proposal to eliminate hunger by 2025. (Reuters)

Senators David Vitter (R-Louisiana) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) today called attention to a remarkably broad delegation of authority to the President in the Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bills that would require shutting down the U. S. economy beginning in 2015. Section 705 of Kerry-Boxer, S. 1733, requires that the EPA Administrator must submit a report to Congress every four years beginning in 2013 including a determination of whether the legislation and other policies in place are sufficient to avoid greenhouse gas concentrations above 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2-e). Since concentrations are already at 430 ppm CO2-e and rising every year, there is no way that the policies in Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer can keep them below 450. The U. S. economy could shut down completely, and emissions from other countries would soon push atmospheric levels past 450.

That’s where section 707 of Kerry-Boxer is triggered. Section 707 directs the President to use existing authority to keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450 ppm CO2-e. Senators Vitter and Barrasso repeatedly asked EPA about this target beginning last summer. A few days ago they finally got answers to their questions from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. PNNL’s modeling shows that 450 ppm CO-e will be reached in 2010. Therefore section 707 will inevitably be triggered on July 1, 2015 if these provisions in Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey are enacted.

What does that mean? Well, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was not willing to speculate when asked by the Senators. But it’s easy to see that the complex mechanisms of the cap-and-trade program in Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey will have to be scrapped as of 2015. All those free ration coupons that big companies like Duke Energy and Exelon and P G and E are hoping to get won’t be worth anything because the President will be obligated to use whatever statutory authority exists to reduce emissions and get greenhouse gases back down to below 450 ppm CO2-e. All the command-and-control tools of the the Clean Air Act will have to be used to require emissions reductions.

The kicker is that Senator Vitter also sent letters today to the heads of the big corporations that support Kerry-Boxer warning them that: “beginning July 1, 2015, the President would be mandated to deny discretionary permit requests for any activity that results in greenhouse gas emissions if the global greenhouse gas concentration of 450 ppm has been reached. Under this mandate, environmental groups will seek to block all new economic activities that require discretionary permits. Any allocated carbon credits (that is, ration coupons) …would be useless if discretionary permits are required.”

Then Senator Vitter’s letter plays the Sarbanes-Oxley card: “I wanted to ensure that you were aware of the impact sections 705 and 707 would have on your company’s operations and investments. Given your fiduciary duties, I know that you will advise your shareholders and others of the impairment of your financial condition and the value of any credit allocation that these sections’ enormous mandates and restrictions would create.” I hope James Rogers, CEO and Chairman of Duke Energy and the biggest corporate promoter of cap-and-trade legislation, has a hard time sleeping tonight. Ditto Peter Darbee of P G and E, John Rowe of Exelon, Jeff Sturba of PNM Resources, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, Jeff Immelt of General Electric, and all the other members of the U. S. Climate Action Partnership. (Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads)

WASHINGTON -- Key Senate Democrats Tuesday said it is unlikely there will be any more major committee action on climate-change legislation this year, the strongest indication yet that a comprehensive bill to cut greenhouse-gas emissions won't be voted on until at least next year.

Although the Senate Environment Committee last week approved a version of the bill, the proposal will face strong revisions from moderate Democrats, particularly from senators on the Finance and Agriculture committees.

"It's common understanding that climate-change legislation will not be brought up on the Senate floor and pass the Senate this year," Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus said on the sidelines of a caucus lunch.

Mr. Baucus, a Montana Democrat, said he planned to hold a number of hearings on climate legislation and eventually mark up a bill in his panel. "But I don't know that I can get a bill put together by this year, as important as climate-change legislation is," he said. (WSJ)

The debate over health care legislation will push the Senate's work on a climate change bill into next year, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) said Tuesday. Harkin is one of several farm state Democrats trying to improve a climate change bill recently passed by The Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.

The committee chairman, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), recently got a bill out of her committee over a Republican boycott, by not allowing any amendments.

Harkin and five other Democrats have introduced the Clean Energy Partnership Act that, among other changers, would put USDA in charge of trading carbon credits to farmers and rancher, instead of EPA. (Successful Farming)

Last spring Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn asked Al Gore during a House hearing if his investments in green energy meant he would benefit personally from cap and trade.

"If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don't know me," Mr. Gore responded (and, yes, according to two reporters present, he sighed).

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He's wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?

Ms. Blackburn's challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was "no dispute worthy of recognition" about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument. (Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., WSJ)

Czech president Václav Klaus did another tour to the U.S. He has been to many places but here is the interview with Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge (National Review Online):

WASHINGTON — Calling it a mission behind enemy lines might be an overstatement. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel didn't actually crawl beneath barbed wire or observe radio silence as he made his way from his office to the imposing limestone structure directly across Lafayette Square.

But when the president's top aide sat down last week with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce board of directors, it marked a meeting of political combatants in a relationship that in recent weeks had grown increasingly adversarial.

Emanuel's appearance came after several rocky weeks for the chamber. The business lobby endured the defection of high-profile members such as Apple over its opposition to proposed climate-change legislation, was punked by a left-wing group that staged a phony press conference in its name and even saw the president publicly brand one of its ads "completely false."

Suddenly, the nation's largest business group found itself in the political cross hairs as it has on few occasions in its 97-year history. And the stakes could scarcely be higher. As the economy leaves behind its once-in-a-century emergency and grinds into recovery, the federal government is more deeply engaged in the market than at any other time since World War II.

"My job is to represent the broad-based business community. ... We know who we are, and we know what we're doing," says Tom Donohue, the chamber's pugnacious president. (David J. Lynch, USA TODAY)

HUNTSVILLE, AL - Science doesn't support current global warming alarms and, even if it did, current proposals to fix things won't work and might make life worse.

That's the well-known view of Dr. John Christy, a University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist, and Christy spelled out the "whys" and "why nots" of his perspective Tuesday to the Huntsville Rotary Club. ( The Huntsville Times)

People should go vegetarian for at least two days a week in order to save the planet, according to a new report. (TDT)

LIVESTOCK tread more lightly in terms of their carbon and water usage footprints than they have been given credit for, a study has found.

Research funded by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) suggests that the water and emissions footprints of red meat production may be a fraction of earlier assumptions.

For instance, the water footprint of beef has been widely quoted as ranging from 15,000 to 105,000 litres per kilogram of beef produced.

But a life cycle analysis by the University of NSW (UNSW) undertaken for MLA, found that under revised assumptions, the water footprint of beef production systems in southern Australia ranges from 27 to 540 l/kg, and 18 to 214 l/kg for lamb. (Stock and Land)

There is a remarkable news article claim on November 11 2009 with respect to weather modification. It is titled “Playing with weather stirs debate in China“.

“Chinese scientists artificially induced the second major snowstorm to wreak havoc in Beijing this season, state media said, reigniting debate over the practice of tinkering with Mother Nature.

After the earliest snow to hit the capital in 22 years fell on November 1, the capital was again shrouded in white Tuesday with more snow expected in the coming three days, the National Meteorological Centre said.

The China Daily, citing an unnamed official, said the Beijing Weather Modification Office had artificially induced both storms by seeding clouds with chemicals, a practice that can increase precipitation by up to 20 percent.

The office refused to comment on the report when contacted by AFP. On Tuesday, an official had said the storm was “natural”.

City weather officials have previously said that such methods are aimed at alleviating a drought over much of north China, including Beijing, that has lingered for more than a decade.”

Bill Cotton and I discussed the scientific basis of such claims in Part I [The Rise and Fall of the Science of Weather Modification] in our book

While, the claim in the article illustrates the developing recognition that the human role in the climate system is much more than just the effects from added carbon dioxide, the conclusion that these snowstorms are a result of their weather modification program over China is not scientifically supported. (Climate Science)

…And It Will Be Exploited By Those Who Fail To Understand The Reasons For The Rise

For some visitors to this blog, this post will be a merging and rehashing of a few of my earlier posts. But this post is different in a very important way. I have attempted to simplify the discussion of El Nino-caused step changes for those with less technical backgrounds.

The following narrated video “Visualizing El Nino” from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio provides an excellent overview of the 1997/98 E; Nino, one of the El Nino events that created the aftereffects illustrated in this post.

I have provided links to the referenced studies and to the posts that provide more detailed explanations at the end of the following. They do not appear within the general discussion of this post.

Many of the illustrations in the following are .gif animations, with 5- to 10-second pauses between cells. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

A few days ago, Indian government climatologists have released a 60-page paper about the

During the four decades since its inception, Sesame Street has introduced some pretty challenging subjects to its young audience – death, AIDS, adoption. It has even recently talked about the impact of the ongoing recession on family life.

But there's one topic that will not be raised, according to Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of research and education at Sesame Workshop, the New York-based charity that produces Sesame Street – and that's global warming. It's just "too scary" for kids, apparently. (Leo Hickman, The Guardian)

Western eco-feminism that blames men for environmental destruction and women for overpopulation is misguided (Elizabeth Kirkwood, The Guardian)

A presentation by Richard S Courtney at York University October 27, 2009, in a debate organized by the Freedom Association.

SINGAPORE, Nov 11 - With little prospect of any new climate change initiatives emerging at an APEC meeting in Singapore this weekend, the climate agenda might instead focus on liberalising trade in green goods and services.

Keeping the fragile global economic recovery on track will dominate the talks at the 21-member Pacific rim group meeting, but climate change is also expected to feature prominently with just weeks to go before a major U.N. climate gathering.

Analysts, however, say the leaders will offer no major initiatives to give the Copenhagen talks a much needed push. (Reuters)

Speaking at a symposium organized by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on Tuesday, Atul Arya, the chief adviser for energy and climate policy for BP, the British oil company, said the odds of achieving a broad, global agreement at climate talks in Copenhagen next month were “very, very low.”
Photo

The sentiment was shared by his fellow panelists — climate change experts and other stakeholders from Brazil, China, the United States and elsewhere — who discussed the politics and practicalities of reaching consensus on climate policy.

And the divisions that were reflected at the forum — between poor nations and rich ones; industry-heavy nations and service-oriented ones; eastern and western European countries; Democrats and Republicans, and perhaps most pointedly, China and the United States — mirrored those that are likely to animate, and perhaps stall efforts next month to hammer out a successor to the so-called Kyoto Protocol.

Frank E. Loy, the chief United States negotiator on climate change under President Clinton, said that, short of a binding treaty, devising the architecture for some future agreement on climate change should be considered a successful outcome of the Copenhagen meeting. (Green Inc)

Everyone in Britain should have an annual carbon ration and be penalised if they use too much fuel, the head of the Environment Agency will say. (TDT)

If people used up their yearly ration early, they would have to buy extra from those who had not used their full allowance (The Times)

Today yet more “the polluter should pay” rhetoric is buzzing around the British policy domain. Everyone is waiting for Lord Smith, the Environment Agency’s chairman to suggest that individuals should be given an annual carbon ration and face financial penalties if they exceed it.

The rationing scheme will be based around individuals being allocated a carbon account with a unique code which will have to be quoted when buying products such as petrol, electricity or airline tickets. Lord Smith thinks that rationing is fairer than taxing carbon because increasing taxes could make activities more expensive.

This is true and obviously the Taxpayers’ Alliance would oppose any form of higher tax on carbon. However this scheme’s fundamental flaw is that it forgets how much Britons pay for carbon already, which is consistently higher than the social cost of carbon. (Taxpayers Alliance)

The Minister for the Environment John Gormley faced strong opposition criticism today for not having climate change legislation ready in time for the key UN Conference in Copenhagen next month.

Mr Gormley appeared before the Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security where he briefed committee members on the position of the EU and of the Irish Government in the run-up to the conference. (Irish Times)

Illustration: Edd Aragon

Kevin Rudd went over the top last week in a speech to the Lowy institute, declaring it was "time to remove any polite veneer" from the climate change debate, which he claims is the "moral challenge of our generation".

Then he launched an extraordinary tirade against "the climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers" who he claims are "powerful", "too dangerous to be ignored", "driven by vested interests … quite literally holding the world to ransom … Our children's fate - and our grandchildren's fate - will lie entirely with them."

If he had any shame, the Prime Minister would be mortified to be associated with such a hysterical, undergraduate piece of ad hominem hyperbole. History will record his embarrassment and the debasing of his office. But the speech shows Rudd's desperation in the week before his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Emissions Trading Scheme) is debated in Parliament and less than a month before the Copenhagen climate summit at which he wants to parade a signed-off scheme. As the public cools towards this new energy tax, politicians, green groups and other alarmists with the real "vested interest" in this debate are stooping ever lower in their attempts to shun dissenters.

One of the few public figures with the courage not to conform, the Liberal senator Nick Minchin, was smeared by anonymous sources in his own party this week as "crazy" for expressing scepticism about the extent of man-made climate change.

As the impacts of the global warming scare already are being felt at home in rising food and energy costs, taxpayers will be demanding credible evidence of the necessity of an ETS. It is unlikely the one-party state Rudd is attempting to fashion will be popular.

Rudd claimed in his speech there would be only "modest cost rises" associated with his scheme. The facts tell a different story. (Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald)

Professor Ian Plimer - in London for the debate that warmist George Monbiot chickened out of - joins this fast growing list below. So do engineers, scientists, academics and one of the candidates in the Higgins by-election (signature 600 or so - and no, it’s not the Liberal). So does Jo Nova, the science communicator who wrote the excellent Skeptics Handbook. Pass this letter on to your friends. Sign them up!

I explain to Alan Jones the absurdities in Rudd’s speech which prompted this request that he supply the conspiracy’s address. (Link fixed. Go to highlights panel.)

As I was just informed by Marc Morano, The Heritage Foundation and other sources inform about new, highly enhanced competences of the U.S. president that will be activated according to the Boxer-Kerry or Waxman-Markey bills as soon as the concentration of "Kyoto" greenhouse gases - CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, but not H2O - in the atmosphere exceeds 450 ppm. (I am sure that most lawmakers don't even know the list of the gases.)

That's very troubling politically, especially because according to some widespread ways to calculate the figure, the current value of the combined concentration is around 448 ppm and it could reach 450 ppm in 2010.

However, this whole story reminded me of a story due to Feynman,

LONDON - The European carbon market is bracing itself for a storm as another wave of selling by industrial companies is anticipated at the end of December or early January.

"Concerns over industrial surplus are so huge that all financial institutions are nervous," an emissions trader said.

The outcome of U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen this December will have little effect on prices for permits under the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) as world leaders are not expected to agree to a new global climate pact. (Reuters)

If you could capture the carbon that thousands of power stations would otherwise pump into the atmosphere, where would you put it?

According to the International Energy Agency, the world needs to fit 3,400 coal-fired power stations with technology to capture carbon dioxide by 2050.

So-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) is often labelled as expensive and unproven, though most of the problems are with the capture part of the process. Energy-hungry scrubbers are needed to soak the greenhouse gas from the exhaust gases, which drain the clean coal's power output and reduce its efficiency. (The Guardian)

The Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N) has announced the results of two important studies examining the potential of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to make significant contributions to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One study, by the Delphi Group, is an update to a report they undertook in December 2007, and was commissioned by ICO2N. It looks at the potential supply, timing and cost of GHG reductions in Canada from a variety of alternatives, and concludes that CCS has the most significant potential for annual reductions, closely followed by nuclear, wind power and vehicle fuel efficiency improvements.

The ICO2N study involves an integrated analysis of what an entire CCS system could look like, and is one of the most detailed studies of large-scale, multiple project CCS deployment anywhere in the world.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not about a single tool that will solve climate change issues - there will be many tools and we need to move quickly to grow new technologies like CCS to achieve its potential for 2020," stated Eric Beynon, ICO2N director of Strategy & Policy. (New Technology)

Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.

“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone. “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change. As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”

According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Prof Wolfgang Knorr of Bristol has found out that the ability of natural sinks - mainly oceans and forests - to absorb the CO2 emissions hasn't changed by more than 10% or so since 1850. It means that the airborne fraction of CO2 - the fraction of emissions that stays in the air for a very long time - remains constant within the margin of error, near 45%.

Sources:

There is a new paper on long term trends of evaporation from land areas [thanks to Steve Short and Benny Pesier for alerting us to it].

“Pan evaporation is just that – it is the evaporation rate of water from a small dish located at the ground-surface. Pan evaporation is a measure of the evaporative demand over terrestrial surfaces. Declines in pan evaporation have now been reported in many regions of the world. The trends vary from one pan to the next, but when averaged over many pans, they are typically in the range of −1 to −4 mm a−2 (mm per annum per annum). In energetic terms, a trend of −2 mm a−2 is equivalent to −0.16 W m−2 a−1 and over 30 years this is a change of −4.8 W m−2. For comparison, the top-of-atmosphere forcing due to doubled CO2 is estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be ~3.7 W m−2. Hence, the magnitude of the pan evaporation trend is large. What is of even greater interest is the direction – a decline – given the well-established warming of the last 30–50 years.

In this article, the first in a two part series, we describe the underlying principles in using and interpreting pan evaporation data and then summarise the reported observations from different countries. In the second article, we describe the interpretation of the trends in terms of changes in the terrestrial water balance.”

“Analyses of the pan evaporation data averaged over many pans from many different countries has revealed declines that are typically in the range of −1 to −4 mm a−2 (Table 1). In energetic terms, a trend of say −2 mm a−2 is equivalent to −0.16 W m−2 a−1. For comparison, estimates of the top of the atmosphere radiative forcing over the last 40 years are an order of magnitude lower at about 0.02 W m−2 a−1 (Hansen et al. 2005). Clearly, the pan evaporation trend is large, and combined with the fact that it has, on average, declined, warrants further and detailed investigation.”

This very interesting paper suggests that water fluxes from the land surface into the atmosphere have decreased despite reports of an increase in near surface air temperatures. It also further highlights the need to consider water vapor trends as well as dry bulb air temperature trends when using land surface observations as part of the diagnosis of T’ as discussed on page 21 in NRC (2005),

where H is the heat content in Joules of the climate system, f is the radiative forcing at the top of the tropopause, T´ is the change in surface temperature in response to a change in heat content, and λ is the climate feedback parameter [which more accurately should be called the “temperature feedback parameter”. T´ is determined from land and ocean observations of surface air dry bulb temperature trends.

However, if T´based only on the dry bulb temperature is used in this equation, than an important aspect of diagnosing λ and calculating dH/dt in response to the radiative forcing is missing, since trends in water vapor will affect the magnitude of T´.

where h is the moist enthalpy, Cp is the specific heat at constant pressure, T is temperature, L is the latent heat of vaporization and q is the specific humidity. The units of h can be expressed as Joules per kilogram of air.

The radiative forcing in equation (1) affects both T and q. Thus, both T´ and q´need to be evaluated in order in order to ascertain if some of the radiative forcing (i.e. the term “f” in equation 1) has gone into evaporation of water (i.e. latent heat) rather than into T´ (the sensible heat). If q´< 0, than T´ will overstate the actual warming in equation 1, while if q´> 0, than T´will understate the warming.

From the Roderick et al 2009 paper, q´could be positive if the reduction of the evaporation is due to a moister atmosphere (i.e. higher average dew point temperatures) within the surface boundary layer (thus reducing the turbulent vertical flux divergence of water vapor), or q´ could be negative if the actual absolute humidities (i.e. the dew point temperatures) have decreased over time. The answer to this question is needed. (Climate Science)

“Smart appliances” are officially on their way to American households.

This month, General Electric began distributing a type of hot water heater that can link into the smart electric meters being doled out around the country — the first such “smart appliance” sold commercially in the United States, industry experts believe.

Whirlpool, meanwhile, plans to make one million smart dryers by 2011.

What constitutes smart? According to Kevin Nolan, a vice president for technology at G.E.’s consumer and industrial division, the water heater — which is very efficient in its own right — contains a port resembling an Ethernet port that can, in theory, plug into a converter box that, in turn, connects to the utility’s meter.

At times of high electricity use, such as the late afternoons, the consumer or the utility will be able to switch to a different, electricity-saving mode.

But there is a catch. Right now, smartness has virtually no benefit to average Americans — or to their utilities. “Smart meters” — which help control these devices — are not present in most households, though millions are on their way.

“It’s kind of the chicken or egg,” said Mr. Nolan. “The first thing that’s rolling out is these meters, but we’re going to have to follow very quickly with appliances.” (Green Inc)

New market dynamics created by climate change, geological and geopolitical pressures will transform our hydrocarbon economies, write John Elkington and Gary Kendall. From ChinaDialogue, part of the Guardian Environment Network

The latest peak oil news is simply astounding: a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency (IEA) claiming that “the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.”

The fact that this report appeared in the Guardian, which has published questionable articles on peak oil, is suggestive.

First and foremost, one is tempted to conclude that this story represents poor reporting, bringing to mind an earlier Guardian story claiming that Fatih Birol, the IEA official in charge of the World Energy Outlook, acknowledged peak oil. It turns out that Fatih was misquoted. And while I might be biased, considering Fatih a friend, the nature of the present story is close to ridiculous, rather than misleading. (Sadly for him, Birol is often a lightning rod for any disagreement about energy forecasts.)

This is a long-standing problem with peak oil advocates, many of whom misrepresent comments as agreeing with them. [Read more →] (Michael Lynch, Master Resource)

It’s time for a quick fact check. Amid the ongoing maelstrom of rhetoric about how the US should quit using hydrocarbons and immediately move to renewable sources like wind and solar, there’s a widespread tendency to forget the enormous scale of America’s hydrocarbon production, consumption, and reserves.

Here are the facts: the US produces and consumes more energy than any other country. And as the Congressional Research Service reported late last month, the US also has the world’s largest reserves of hydrocarbons.

The US ranks first in the world in energy consumption (ahead of China.) In 2008, America’s energy consumption averaged about 46 million barrels of oil equivalent per day with 89% of that total coming from hydrocarbons.

The US ranks first in the production of electricity from nuclear reactors (ahead of France). It ranks second in coal production (behind China), second in natural gas production (behind Russia) and third in oil production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia). All that energy production – combined with significant imports of oil – allows the US to produce gargantuan quantities of power. And it’s that power availability that has made America the envy of the world.

On October 28, the Congressional Research Service reported that the proved hydrocarbon reserves of the US total nearly 970 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The vast majority of that total (about 906 billion barrels of oil equivalent) is in the form of coal. Running second behind the US in total hydrocarbon reserves is Russia, which has about 955 billion barrels of oil equivalent, followed by China, which runs a distant third, with 466 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

America’s enormous energy production and gargantuan energy reserves, why, then, are so many Americans willing to believe that we should trade reliable sources like nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas -- all of which have high power density -- for unreliable, low-power-density sources like the sun and the wind? The answer, unfortunately, is that too many Americans are willing to believe the hype. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

A new 240,000 barrel-per-day refinery in China’s Fujian Province is essentially on line, starting this week. And it is coming on line at the same time that car sales in China are heading toward the stratosphere.

The deal that led to the refinery construction was signed in February 2007 and it was a landmark event, the first ever of its kind, as it joined a major Chinese oil company (Sinopec), the biggest multinational (Exxon Mobil) and the world’s biggest supplier of crude (Saudi Aramco). It was supposed to usher a new era in transnational oil cooperation.

The refinery is in Quanzhou, in Fujian Province in the south of China. The partners were a diverse threesome but one made in oil heaven. The Chinese were getting a modern refinery they needed badly. Many of their other refineries, technologically obsolete and inefficient, were running at over 90 percent capacity. Exxon Mobil, shut out of Russia and Venezuela, was eager to enter into a high-visibility project in a high-impact market and Aramco was all too eager to play the godfather role. The deal clearly could not have been consummated had it not been for Saudi oil.

In the manner that has been all too characteristic of major Chinese projects, the refinery was completed pretty much on schedule and slightly over budget. In 2007 it was announced that it would cost $3.5 billion. Eventually it cost $4.5 billion. The joke among China hands goes like this: If the Americans and the Chinese start talking about a major project today, in two years the Chinese will be done and the Americans will still be talking and applying for permits. It should not be surprising that Exxon Mobil, a premier company in its field like few others in their respective fields, vilified in the green-house-gases-solar-and-wind-obsessed United States will find a lot of work in energy hungry China.

The Fujian refinery will not be the last of its kind. Expansion is already under way to double its capacity within a few years.

The need for new refineries in China is compelling. Only this week it was announced that its oil demand increased by 12.5 percent in September from last year. This is the sixth month that oil demand has increased since last year and September’s rate of increase is the fastest since June 2006. Energy demand becomes obvious since the Chinese are again inching towards double digit economic growth.

Even more telling is that also this week it was announced that China’s October auto sales increased by 72 percent (!!!) from a year ago, selling 1.2 million cars. By comparison US auto sales in October totaled 838,000. Thus, Chinese auto sales out-paced those of the US by 50 percent. Even for those of us that work in China and have first-hand knowledge of its energy picture, these are stunning figures. (Michael J. Economides, Energy Tribune)

Electric cars, which emit no carbon dioxide from their tailpipe, are not the answer some people think they are to environmental transport problems, a new report claims today.

The idea that a wholesale switch to electric transport would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is a myth, says the analysis prepared for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

In fact, says the report, a loophole in EU vehicle emissions regulations means the more electric cars produced, the more auto manufacturers can produce gas-guzzling vehicles such as SUVs while still hitting their overall emissions targets. Ultimately, this would lead to an increase in the amount of oil used and the amount of CO2 generated by the car fleet as a whole. ( The Independent)

Ten nuclear power stations are to be built in Britain at a cost of up to £50 billion as the Government tries to prevent the threat of regular power cuts by the middle of the coming decade.

The nuclear industry welcomed the plans, but critics said that ministers had acted too late to avoid an energy crunch caused by the closure of ageing coal-fired stations. (The Times)

WHETHER you are primarily concerned about climate change, or energy security, the British Government's choice to build 10 new large nuclear power stations by 2025 should come as welcome news.

Nuclear power is the only proven electricity generation technology that can simultaneously meet reliable baseload demand, anywhere, and yet emit no carbon dioxide when operating.

Along with hydropower from dams, it is the only clean energy technology that has been shown to be scalable. France, for instance, derives nearly 80 percent of its electricity from 59 nuclear plants.

Nuclear-powered France is the world's biggest electricity exporter, has the cheapest power rates in Europe, and has the lowest carbon footprint per person.

On this basis, it is easy to understand the UK government's decision to pursue nuclear power in a big way. A resolution, I might add, that has bipartisan political support. Australia, take heed. (The Advertiser)

Man’s search for renewable power is about to take to the skies. Companies and inventors are casting their hopes — and millions of dollars — upwards as they seek to exploit the strong, steady winds circling the planet at higher altitudes.

High-altitude wind power — essentially putting wind turbines in the air — received a recent boost when half a dozen companies and other entrepreneurs met at a conference in northern California to discuss how to get their businesses off the ground.

Wind power is accepted as an important part of the planet’s search to replace energy from fossil fuels. Recent research into high-altitude winds has shown that jet-stream winds can be far more powerful and reliable than winds closer to Earth’s surface, providing an immense source of energy if companies can find a way to tap into it at a reasonable cost.

Analysts estimate that more than $50 million (£30 million) in investment is being put into high-altitude wind power. A host of start-ups and established companies are jostling for position, each with unique proposals for capturing the force of the wind. (The Times)

THE CSIRO has sought to secretly close a loophole that allows scientists to publish research and comment in their private capacity about politically sensitive issues.

Earlier this year, senior scientists used the loophole to give evidence to a Senate inquiry criticising the Rudd government's emissions targets. While the CSIRO has denied it has reviewed or changed its public comment policy, a confidential memo leaked to The Australian reveals the policy has been reviewed at the highest levels.

It is understood the memo was sent by three staff members on June 9, after they learned CSIRO chief executive Megan Clark and head of communications John Curran were reviewing the policy.

Sent to Dr Curran, the memo evaluated options for change, including the "risks" of preventing scientists from speaking out in their personal capacity. The memo warned CSIRO would receive "negative feedback" and leaks to the media if it tried to eliminate the "pressure valve" option of allowing scientists to speak out on contentious issues in their personal capacity.

Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.

Calling for consultation with those "at the coal face", it also warned that if the policy were changed so soon after the Senate inquiry, "CSIRO could be perceived internally and externally as trying to shut down dissent".

The CSIRO began rolling out a new publications policy three weeks ago without warning scientists. The policy, which the CSIRO has refused to release, effectively gags scientists from speaking out in their private capacity, by insisting they use their agency affiliation on all publications or commentaries arising from their CSIRO research.

It also states that if scientists intend to comment on matters in their area of expertise, they must first discuss the "risks" with their manager, including where "public confidence in CSIRO as a trusted adviser" might be compromised. ( The Australian)

Last week, a judge in the United Kingdom ruled that a "belief" in global warming constitutes a philosophical position that is, basically, equivalent to religion. Uh-oh. ( Ecopolitology)

Employment experts have urged the profession not to panic following a ruling that employees' philosophical beliefs should be legally protected.

Tim Nicholson, head of sustainability at property firm Grainger, last week discovered he could bring a tribunal claim against his employer after he claimed his environmental beliefs were the reason behind a decision to make him redundant from his firm.

The judge ruled that the eco-friendly views of Nicholson were philosophical beliefs and should be protected under equality law.

The case raised fears that with no definitive list of protected beliefs, employers were unaware of what could be covered by the legislation, leaving the system open to abuse.

However, Jo Stubbs, XpertHR employment law editor, told Personnel Today that such claims would have to be vigorously tested and cross-examined in court to establish a philosophical belief. The judge in the case set out guidelines for determining what a 'philosophical belief' amounted to, she said. (Helen Gilbert, Personnel Today)

The recent ruling that a belief in climate change could be within the scope of religious or belief discrimination regulations could have major implications. Jonathan Exten-Wright analyses the possible effects of the EAT's judgment. (Jonathan Exten-Wright, Personnel Today)

The case of fired British “sustainability official” Tim Nicholson has attracted much interest. That’s because Mr. Nicholson is pursuing redress from his former employer, home developer Grainger plc, under the UK’s Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations of 2003. He claims he was fired for his convictions about catastrophic man-made climate change.

Horrified commentators on both left and right have suggested that environmentalism will now be established as a religion. Environmentalists are none too keen on this notion, true though it may be, because it undermines their assertion that their case is based on pure science (which is Mr. Nicholson’s position). Business supporters suggest that a victory by Mr. Nicholson will force the cost of quasi-religious green irrationality onto the bottom line.

Mr. Nicholson seems to have been one of those souls who had a personal environmental epiphany (just like Al Gore) after which he started to lay off meat and travel by fold-up bicycle. He is certainly not outside the green mainstream in eco-renovating his house, trying to buy local produce, and composting his food waste. Above all he fears for “the future of the human race given the failure to reduce carbon emissions on a global scale.” He sought, inevitably, to carry his crusade into the company, but claims that Grainger didn’t like the extent of this commitment, refused to give him the information he needed to do his job, and treated his concerns with “contempt.”

I hope everybody is sitting down, because I’m on Mr. Nicholson’s side.

The overlooked issue here is not irrational Gaian convictions and whether they should be considered as tantamount to religion. They should. The issue is why companies would employ individuals whose job titles specifically indicate that they are agents of a subversive concept.

Sustainable Development, which sprung fully-armed from the fretful socialist head of the UN’s Brundtland Commission, is indeed a religion, and it has a devil: capitalism. It thus seems suicidal for any company to accommodate it, let alone embrace it. It has no workable definition except for the feel good notion of “looking after the future.” It explicitly rejects free markets as leading to resource exhaustion and environmental destruction. As such it is not based on science, much less economics, but on primitive pre-market assumptions, which just happen to be very useful to prospective “global governors.” ( Financial Post)

WASHINGTON - The brown pelican, listed as an endangered species even before the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act existed, is officially back from the brink of extinction, the Interior Department said on Wednesday.

There are now more than 650,000 brown pelicans in Florida, the U.S. Gulf states and along the Pacific coast, as well as in the Caribbean and Latin America, up from as few as 10,000, Interior officials said.

"It has taken 36 years, the banning of (pesticide) DDT and a lot of work ... but today we can say that the brown pelican is back," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a telephone briefing.

The brown pelican was first declared endangered in 1970 under the Endangered Species Preservation Act, a precursor to the current law.

Once hunted for their feathers for use in women's hats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, brown pelicans faced further pressure from the general use of the pesticide DDT, which caused pelican eggshells to become so thin that it interfered with reproduction. (Reuters)

Nov. 11, 2009 -- Switching from a low-fat, plant-based diet to one high in fat and sugar alters the collection of microbes living in the gut in less than a day, with obesity-linked microbes suddenly thriving, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The study was based on transplants of human intestinal microbes into germ-free mice.

Over time, humanized mice on the junk food diet became obese. Their weight gain was in lock step with dramatic shifts in the types of intestinal bacteria present compared to mice on a low-fat diet. Using the latest DNA sequencing technology, the researchers found that mice on the high-fat, high-sugar diet had more microbes and microbial genes devoted to extracting calories from their "western" diet. These microbial genes were turned on when the mice were switched to the diet high in fat and sugar.

The new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, documents the intimate relationship between diet and the dynamic variations in the community of intestinal microbes that can influence metabolism and weight. The research also paves the way for using humanized mouse models to tease apart the contributions of human intestinal microbes and human diets to obesity and its converse, malnutrition. (WUSTL)

As I listened to the presentations at last week's American Institute for Cancer Research Annual Research Conference in Washington, it became clear to me that obesity has become our No. 1 public-health enemy.

Maintaining a healthy weight through adulthood is key to preventing Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and – according to a growing body of evidence – cancer.

That's not to say excess sodium, refined sugar and trans fats don't wreak havoc. Or that a diet lacking fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes doesn't increase one's risk for certain diseases.

The quality of your diet is an important predictor of health. But a steady surplus of calories can also dramatically increase the risk of many types of cancer by packing on the pounds.

Indeed, the majority of sessions during the two-day conference focused on the role of obesity in cancer risk. (Leslie Beck, Globe and Mail)

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 -- U.S. researchers say regular physical education helps curb obesity in teens from low-income homes.

The study, published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, links regular participation in physical education class to greater cardiovascular fitness and lower body weight and suggests physical education may be an underutilized tool for reducing childhood obesity.

"Physical education was by far the most significant predictor of students' fitness and was the only variable associated with improved weight status," first author Dr. Kristine Madsen of the University of California, San Francisco, says in a statement. (UPI)

A GENETICALLY engineered corn authorised by the Australian food regulator as safe for human consumption has been withdrawn from Europe because of safety concerns.

Monsanto has pulled its commercial development application for high lysine LY038 corn, originally intended only as feed for animals, after the European Food Safety Authority questioned the safety studies already conducted by the company and used by Food Standards Australia New Zealand to approve the GE corn in 2006.

Rather than conduct additional research as the European authority requested, Monsanto decided to abandon its bid to introduce the corn to the European market.

FSANZ has subsequently come under attack for its approval of the corn by the University of Canterbury's centre for integrated research in biosafety in New Zealand. The research's leader, Professor Jack Heinemann, a prominent anti-GE campaigner, said FSANZ ignored the centre's detailed scientific analysis conducted over two years by 10 biosafety researchers and instead ''shopped around'' for alternative opinions which would cast a more favourable light on the corn's safety. Other countries which have approved LY038 include Canada, South Korea, the Philippines and Japan. (SMH)

Steve Milloy has a great one over at Green Hell Blog. His conclusion: “The WWF and its elitist supporters may think — or may want you to think — that the world is coming to an end because of carbon dioxide, but they plan on savoring every emission they can while denying yours.”

BEIJING -- Rising temperatures over the next few decades will unleash storms, floods and drought across China's Yangtze River Basin, a new report says, raising the prospect of catastrophe for a region that is home to nearly a third of the country's population.

While ecosystems along China's longest river are threatened by climate change, it's not too late to save them if proper mitigation measures are taken, said the report issued Tuesday by the environmental group WWF. (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON — Senator John Kerry has pledged to complete a framework of an elusive US climate change deal in time for next month's high-stakes summit in Copenhagen, vowing not to let the world down.

President Barack Obama's election returned the United States to active global efforts to fight climate change, but a year later Congress has yet to make good on promises to set the first-ever US caps on carbon emissions.

After a lobbying mission in the US Capitol by UN chief Ban Ki-moon, Kerry said Tuesday the Senate, while unlikely to complete legislation, would give US negotiators an outline before the December 7-18 talks in the Danish capital.

"We are engaged in the process that will hopefully put us in a position to go to Copenhagen with a sort of framework, or outline, or where the Senate will be heading in its legislation," Kerry told a joint news conference. (AFP)

WASHINGTON — Economists told a Senate panel on Tuesday that legislation to combat global warming could kill jobs in refining, manufacturing and other industries, even as union and energy company leaders hailed the promise of a new “green” workforce trained in renewable power.

The comments came in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, which was examining how proposed caps on greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming could bring major changes to the U.S. energy workforce by shifting jobs away from dirtier oil and natural gas toward wind, solar and nuclear power.

At the same time, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with senators to push for action against climate change. International leaders are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen next month to come up with a plan to tackle global warming.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Finance Committee, said he was “committed to passing meaningful, balanced climate change legislation,” but added that Congress must “work to minimize any job losses.” ( Houston Chronicle)

On Friday, November 6^th, the Cooler Heads Coalition hosted Matthew Sinclair, research director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Mr. Sinclair presented his new study, “The Expensive Failure of the European Union’s Cap-and-Trade Scheme.” The study shows that the EU’s experience with energy rationing climate policies is a warning rather than a model.

Video of Mr Sinclair’s presentation, “The Expensive Failure of the EU’s Cap-and-Trade Scheme”

Power point Presentation of “The Expensive Failure of the EU’s Cap-and-Trade Scheme” (Cooler Heads)

Uh-oh. Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) is raising the stakes on a U.S. climate bill by endorsing the idea of some sort of tariff on goods from countries that haven’t taken steps to suppress fossil fuel use. According to Reuters, Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, yesterday said:

Currently the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, has rushed through its own bill without minority input to try to catch up with the House, which passed its cap-and-trade bill - H.R. 2454 — on June 26, 2009. The House bill contains a border tax adjustment measure, while the Senate bill does not. At least, yet. But Baucus’ comments are a strong signal that the Senate bill will also include tariffs or border “adjustments,” i.e., taxes.

This unfortunate idea is gaining greater traction among global warming advocates as a way to maintain U.S. competitiveness for industries, such as steel and cement, that would be facing higher costs if an energy suppression bill to address global warming is passed. Proponents of “border measures” also see this as a way to curtail so-called leakage of carbon-intensive industries and related jobs to other countries without similar constraints. Of course, the common justification for those who want to hobble their competition is the refrain: “Level the playing field.” In Washington politics, that usually means bringing your competitors down to your level. Check out this article for some possible consequences.

These endorsements could portend a carbon tariff push in Copenhagen when world climate pukkas gather on December 7, 2009. Luckily for people in the U.S., it’s not likely that a newly minted global warming bill will be in their pockets. (Cooler Heads)

There is no chance, none, that China will play along with any mandatory carbon dioxide reduction targets when world leaders meet in Copenhagen. Indeed, any substantive action in Copenhagen looks increasingly like Emission Impossible and not just because of the Chinese.

Last month, China’s top climate representative walked out of a meeting with Western leaders in Bangkok over the Kyoto Protocol. The Chinese are perfectly willing to be Gored (even without bothering to perform any independent scientific research of their own) and are ready to go along with slogans that the internal combustion engine and carbon emissions are the “biggest threat to humankind,” as long as whatever needs to be done is done by the “rich countries.”

China’s position is viewed with glee by a large swath of Americans and Europeans who view much of the carbon tax movement with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Their thinking: If China does not play along, the entire effort to cut carbon emissions is doomed.

That said, China, the world’s manufacturing behemoth and the ever careful superpower, does not want to take any chances. The threat of carbon tariffs proposed by countries such as France, Germany, and the US worries the Chinese enough that two major reports, one by the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s highest authority, were released on how to cope with the situation. Both reports suggested that China may begin imposing a carbon tax in the next five years.

While on the surface such a tax may appear ludicrous, increasing the cost of energy and products in China itself is a masterstroke. (Energy Tribune)

The global community is supposed to be negotiating an agreement to contain greenhouse gas emissions to manageable levels. But with less than two months to the Copenhagen climate change conference, the big players are stuck in an elaborate game of chicken. (Green Left)

Next month, 192 countries will meet to set targets on carbon emissions. The summit will pit the developed world against the developing world in a last-ditch bid to limit warming to 2C ( David Adam, The Guardian)

The Maldives and Britain are united in the face of environment crisis – and we take inspiration from underwater politics ( Douglas Alexander and Mohamed Nasheed, The Guardian)

In Gabura global warming is a bleak reality as villagers face rising sea levels, failed crops and devastating cyclones (Barbara Stocking, The Guardian)

Brazil will take proposals for voluntary reductions of 38-42% by 2020 to the Copenhagen climate change conference next month, chief of staff says ( Tom Phillips, The Guardian)

The world is considering a new financial market larger than any commodity, it’s “based on science”, but if you ask for evidence, you’re called names—“Denier”, and by our Prime Minister, no less. This is supposed to pass for reasoned debate?

In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions—that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.

It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible.

Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutche Bank, and HSBC. (JoNova)

AN escalating political row over the views of outspoken Coalition climate change sceptics is threatening ongoing negotiations between the government and opposition over Labor's emissions trading legislation.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday accused Malcolm Turnbull of a failure of leadership after Coalition Senate leader Nick Minchin claimed a majority of opposition party members did not believe in man-made global warming, which he called the new "religion" of the Left after the demise of communism. Senator Wong said the Opposition Leader had to repudiate Senator Minchin if he were to live up to his declaration that he would not lead a party less committed to action on climate change than he was.

"The question is whether or not he can match the talk with action," Senator Wong said. "Unfortunately for him, many members of his party have directly attacked his authority." (Lenore Taylor, The Australian)

DORKING - The pickers working their way along the hillside, clipping bunches of small, dark purple grapes from the rows of vines and dropping them into plastic buckets are harbingers of a warmer planet.

In recent years, aided by milder springs and autumns, a few British wineries have revived a red winemaking tradition which died around 600 years ago.

Wine aficionados are mixed about the results so far, but say the finest red wines may in future come from north of the English channel if a 190-nation conference in Copenhagen next month fails to agree a strong new U.N. climate change pact.

"We've benefited from global warming," said Chris White, General Manager of Denbies Vineyard, 24 miles south of London, watching plastic trays of Pinot Noir grapes being emptied into a stainless steel wine press in his winery.

"Climate determines the grape varieties you can grow." (Reuters)

BARENDRECHT, Netherlands — The people of this small Dutch town are not against pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ground to fight global warming.

They just wish it wasn't right beneath their houses.

"Who wants to live in Barendrecht if one of these CO2 things is built?" said retiree Marianne van Heugten.

The carbon dioxide storage experiment by Royal Dutch Shell and the Dutch government is only one of a dozen such projects across Europe to test a technology that could potentially slash emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by storing it underground.

That would allow countries that have lots of coal, such as China and the United States, to cut emissions while using the cheap, but polluting fossil fuel. Carbon dioxide from the burning of such fuels is considered the chief cause of global warming.

But questions remain about the technology and its costs and risks even as the EU prepares to spend billions on it. (CP)

NEW YORK - Canada may soon fund carbon capture and storage (CCS) in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, expanding its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt told Reuters on Tuesday.

Canada's central government in Ottawa, which has committed about half of the C$1 billion it set aside earlier for CCS projects, is in talks with natural gas producing companies in the two western provinces regarding new projects, Raitt said in an interview. (Reuters)

The new deniers keep trying to repair the infamous climate hockey stick. They focus on the blade but it was not the major issue originally. The bulwark claim of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis and the objective of the stick are that current global annual average temperatures are the warmest ever. This meant the upturn of the blade in the 20th century was only relevant if it was higher and steeper than any previous record.

Earlier warm periods were not a threat in the first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their mandate required they only look at human causes, which they interpreted to mean the industrial period. However, as experts who were denied participation in the IPCC process began to examine what was said they identified earlier warmer periods, especially the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and more rapid temperature increases. (Tim Ball, CFP)

The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society's 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming.

The Council's vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members. The petition had requested that APS remove and replace the Society's current statement. The committee recommended that the Council reject the petition.

The committee also recommended that the current APS statement be allowed to stand, but it requested that the Society's Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone. POPA regularly reviews all APS statements to ensure that they are relevant and up-to-date regarding new scientific findings. (American Physical Society)

On the day that the world remembered and celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in The Times reflecting on the magnitude of the event. Dwelling on the historical crossroads we faced before the fall of the wall, he claimed in the that “climate change is the new wall that divides us from our future”, insisting that a paradigm shift is needed to deal with it.

Gorbachev’s enthusiasm for targeted worldwide action isn’t based purely on his fear of melting icecaps. He claims that “world citizens are demanding that action is taken to tackle climate change and redress the deep injustices that surround it”, and that a “breakthrough in our values and priorities is needed”. Once more, the concept of global warming has been hijacked by those with an ulterior motive. For Gorbachev, addressing climate change is a convenient vehicle for the politics of social equality and communitarian values. It is sad to see Gorbachev using the fall of the wall – a symbol of economic and political freedom – to encourage increased government regulation and restriction. ( Charlotte Bowyer, AdamSmith.org)

A couple of months back, there was a discussion taking place over at Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress blog concerning a report that the earth’s ability to take-up atmospheric carbon dioxide was declining. A declining CO2 sink, of course, meant that things climatological were going to be even worse than expected, because a growing proportion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were going to remain in the atmosphere, thus pushing the rise of CO2 concentrations and the degree of climate change higher.

At the time, an alert reader pointed out to Joe Romm that there was in fact, no indication from data and observations that a larger percentage of human CO2 emissions were ending up in the atmosphere. In fact, the data showed that the fraction of CO2 emitted into the atmospheric by human activities has remained constant for the past 40 years.

This fact runs directly counter to the idea that the earth’s natural CO2 sinks are weakening—instead it indicates that natural sinks have been expanding as anthropogenic CO2 emissions have increased. After all, in order to keep the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions constant over time, increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be countered by an increasing CO2 sink.

The Earth has developed stores to absorb excessive levels of carbon dioxide, according to a study that challenges the conventional thinking on climate change. ( Louise Gray, TDT)

The video showing the climate research work of Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT and Steven McIntyre of Climate Audit is now up on YouTube. One of the most compelling portions of the program has to do with the erroneous reversal of the Tiljander sediments, and Dr. Michael Mann’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge his error, even though other authors of peer reviewed papers have done so. In my opinion, salvation of the hockey stick seems to trump the salvation of good science practice.

The investigative journalism here is refreshing, and well done. It’s the sort of thing CBS 60 minutes used to do.

A previous post at MasterResource described the findings and implications of a new scientific study published by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, “On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Lindzen and Choi’s concluded that climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is six times less than generally accepted—a conclusion that potentially overturns the current paradigm of scientific thinking.

Now some of the early results are starting to come in. [Read more →] (Chip Knappenberger, Master Resource)

Editorial:
The Progressive Nitrogen Limitation Hypothesis is Refuted by the Palaeorecord of the Late Quaternary: Inferred ecosystem changes throughout the Late Quaternary cannot be adequately explained without invoking the demonstrable effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on earth's vegetation, one of which is the inability of low soil nitrogen concentrations to limit the strength of carbon dioxide's aerial fertilization effect.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 762 individual scientists from 451 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Laguna Aculeo, Central Chile. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Lambsquarters (Borjigidai et al., 2009), Loblolly Pine (Logan et al., 2009), Quaking Aspen (Cseke et al., 2009), and Soybean (Matsunami et al., 2009).

Effects of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment on Early Root Growth of Tomato Plants: There's nothing like a substantial increase in the air's CO2 content to get a plant off to a good start at life, and to truly excel in the never-ending struggle to extract from the soil what it needs to fulfill its true genetic potential. (co2science.org)

We have a Forum article that appeared today in the American Geophysical Union publication EOS. It is

With the most classical of globalwarmist sleight-of-hand, a Nov 6 press release by NASA titled “A Tale of Planetary Woe” surreptitiously changed the focus of MAVEN, a whole new mission to Mars scheduled to reach the planet in 2014.

My first reaction was a “Wow!” followed by “Finally a CO2 mission by NASA!” (yes, the greenhouse effect has so far been singularly of absolute disinterest for planetary scientists, for some reason).

Alas, the feeling didn’t survive a quick investigation about MAVEN… (OmniClimate)

He has offered to make this report available to all of us in order to document his view of the climate system in 1996.

“Over the last quarter century the global circulation has behaved in a number of distinctive ways from its general characteristics in the prior quarter century (mid-1940s to late 1960s). In comparison with the earlier period or with long-term climatology, the period since 1970 has seen:

2. stronger middle latitude westerlies over the Pacific and Atlantic and less North Atlantic blocking action,

These recent quarter century changes appear to be of natural origin. The author hypothesizes that they are a consequence of the abrupt slowdown in the Atlantic thermohaline (or conveyor) circulation which occurred in the late 1960s. This oceanic circulation slowdown was a consequence of the sharp decrease in North Atlantic salinity at this time (The Great Salinity Anomaly). But more recent observations show that Atlantic salinity has been increasing in recent years. It is likely that we are presently seeing a change to a stronger thermohaline circulation. This will likely cause a reversal of the above listed conditions. Back and forth shifts in the strength of the thermohaline circulation on multi-decadal time scales have been documented or inferred from a variety of observational sources going back centuries and thousands of years to the last ice age.

If a return to global circulation conditions more typical of the period 25-50 years ago does occur in the next few years then we should see a general reversal of the above listed global circulation characteristics including a small decrease in average global surface temperature.

Many meteorologists have interpreted the increase in global surface temperature since the late 1960s, and the overall global surface temperature increases since 1900 as an indication that global warming from man induced greenhouse gases. But there are likely other more plausible explanations for such global temperature changes. It is more likely that the surface temperature changes of the last century are a response to naturally occurring temperature changes which are not or very little related to man-induced greenhouse gas increases. Surface temperature changes appear to have resulted from variations in the global ocean conveyor belt circulation.”

“We expect that these changing Atlantic SST patterns will lead to enhanced intense (or major) hurricane activity in coming years and to a small global surface temperature cooling. It is likely that the mean global surface temperature change in the next 20-30 years will be more driven by nature than by anthropogenic influences and be one of weak cooling, not warm.” (Climate Science)

The world needs Canada's so-called dirty oil, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday even as it called on leaders to make decisive moves to slash greenhouse gas emissions at a United Nations-sponsored negotiating session next month.

"World leaders gathering in Copenhagen next month for the UN Climate Summit have a historic opportunity to avert the worst effects of climate change," IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka said in a statement after releasing the agency's annual World Energy Outlook analysis. (Peter O’Neil, Canwest News)

The International Energy Agency (IEA) holds some remarkably radical views for a government-backed multinational organisation, particularly one which has been accused of being in thrall to the US.

Launching its World Energy Outlook - heavily trailed in the FT - on Tuesday, the IEA called for a revolution in the industry to tackle the threat of climate change.

Above all, it stressed the need for a significantly higher price of carbon credits than is currently effective in the European Union, or initially envisaged in the US.

As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, put it to the FT, two numbers will shape the future of the world’s energy supplies: 450 and 147.

450 parts per million is the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere compatible with giving the world a 50/50 chance of keeping the global temperature increase below 2°C: the level agreed by leading economies’ governments as the acceptable limit for climate change. (Financial Times)

LONDON - World energy consumption will rise rapidly over the next 20 years, pushing up costs and increasing greenhouse gases, unless a deal is reached to curb carbon dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Tuesday.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, the IEA said global energy demand would increase by an average of 2.5 percent per year over the next five years if governments made no changes to their existing policies and measures.

Under these circumstances, which the IEA called its reference scenario, world primary energy demand would rise by an average of 1.5 percent per year over the next two decades.

Oil demand, excluding biofuels, would increase by 1 percent per year to 105 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030 from 85 million bpd in 2008.

The IEA argues strongly for a global deal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December to limit greenhouse gases and spells out how sharply use of fossil fuels will increase if policies remain unchanged.

"Fossil fuels remain the dominant sources of primary energy worldwide in the reference scenario, accounting for more than three-quarters of the overall increase in energy use between 2007 and 2030," the IEA said. (Reuters)

MOSCOW - Russian oil companies will face heavy fines for missing targets to reduce gas flaring by 2012, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at a meeting on Tuesday, reinforcing government plans to reduce the wasteful practice.

Russia, the world's largest energy producer, flares more gas than most other countries, sending the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere after burning gas from oilfields that is deemed too difficult or expensive to move to market.

Oil firms, including market leaders Rosneft, LUKOIL and TNK-BP, are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to meet the government's target of increasing associated gas utilization to 95 percent by 2012.

"Oil companies that do not meet this requirement will pay huge fines," Putin told executives at the industry meeting.

Russia flares around 20 billion cubic meters of associated gas every year, or approximately one-third of the total amount extracted at the country's oilfields. Trapping this gas can result in vast emission cuts, as well as increased gas sales. (Reuters)

<chuckle> There's no need for artificial restrictions and punitive taxes then, is there, since we're going to run out soon... Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower - Exclusive: Watchdog's estimates of reserves inflated says top official

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies. ( Terry Macalister, The Guardian)

The International Energy Agency has rejected reported allegations from a whistleblower that world oil reserves have been exaggerated to avoid panic buying in the oil market. (CNN)

MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?

For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.

“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.

But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.

Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.

In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.

Salvaged bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States — by comparison, hydropower generates about 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal together account for 3 percent.

Utilities have been loath to publicize the Russian bomb supply line for fear of spooking consumers: the fuel from missiles that may have once been aimed at your home may now be lighting it. (NYT)

Britain faces two urgent energy problems. First, we have simply not invested enough in infrastructure to meet future demand for heat and power. There is a yawning capacity gap that, in the next decade, will force prices up for consumers and industry. The second problem is how to mitigate climate change by cutting carbon emissions. The two problems will need more than £200 billion to fix in the next decade. (Dieter Helm, The Times)

Avoiding the most severe potentials of climate change will require global investment of $10.5tn (£6.3tr) over the next 20 years, with renewables accounting for 60 per cent of energy production, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

In its annual World Energy Outlook report, released on Tuesday, the organisation lays out various scenarios for how the energy industry and governments should respond to climate change and the part low-carbon technologies have to play in combating climate change up to 2030.

But some insiders at the agency claim the organisation is being deceptive in its estimates.

One of the scenarios from the IEA includes the actions that need to be taken to limit the long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million of CO2 and to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade.

The so-called 450 Scenario will require fossil-fuel demand to peak by 2020 and energy-related CO2 emissions to fall to 26.4 gigatonnes from 28.8 gigatonnes in 2007. (Andrew Donoghue, BusinessGreen)

What’s the life of a bird worth? If you’re Big Oil it can range from $7,000 to $20,000 per bird. If you’re wind energy it costs nothing. Here are some facts.

In July of this year Pacificorp agreed to pay $10.5 million in fines, restitution and equipment upgrade costs for the deaths of at least 232 golden eagles, 46 hawks, 50 owls and nearly 200 other birds that had been electrocuted in Wyoming since January 2007. The cost per bird computes to a little less than $20,000. (1)

“On August 13, ExxonMobil pled guilty in federal court to charges that it killed 85 birds—all of which were protected under the Migratory Bird Act (MBTA). The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees for the bird kills, which occurred after the animals came in contact with hydrocarbons in uncovered tanks and waste water facilities on company properties located in five western states,” reports Robert Bryce. (2) Each bird kill cost the company $7059.

Bryce adds that these are the latest of hundreds of cases that federal officials have brought against oil and gas companies over the last two decades for violations of the MBTA, a statute on the books since 1918. No question the cases were justified, but let’s look now at wind energy.

A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass in California estimated the farm’s turbines were killing 80 golden eagles per year. Those birds are protected by the Bald Eagle and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which was enacted in 1940. In addition to the eagles, the study estimated that about 10,000 other birds—nearly all of which are protected under the MBTA—are being killed every year at Altamont. (2)

Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that US wind turbines are killing between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Department of Justice won’t press charges. Fry told Robert Bryce, “Somebody has given the wind industry a get-out-of-jail-free card.” (2) ( Jack Dini, Hawaii Reporter)

The head of Britain's climate change watchdog predicted today that households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions. ( Larry Elliott, The Guardian)

Does anyone think that a huge new entitlement program will lead to lower budget deficits? Sounds implausible, yet proponents of government-run healthcare claim this is the case according to the official estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

To use a technical phrase, this is hogwash. This new 6-1/2 minute video, narrated by yours truly, gives 12 reasons why Obamacare will lead to higher deficits – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid are much more costly than originally projected.

By the way, this video doesn’t even touch on the mandate issue, which Michael Cannon explains is not being counted in order to make the cost of government-run healthcare less shocking. (Daniel J. Mitchell, Cato at liberty)

Over at the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney reports that Pfizer is abandoning its New London offices and deciding what to do with the property it gained in the infamous Kelo v. New London land-grab:

That this purported “public use” is now exposed as the façade for corporate welfare that it always was is, of course, little comfort to Suzette Kelo and the other homeowners whose land was seized. But hopefully this will be an object lesson for other companies considering eminent domain abuse as a route to acquire land on the cheap — and especially for state and local officials who acquiesce in this type of behavior.

You can read Cato’s amicus brief for the ill-fated case here. Cato also hosted a book forum for the story of Suzette’s struggle, Little Pink House, featuring the author, Jeff Benedict, the attorney who argued the case, the Institute for Justice’s Scott Bullock, and Ms. Kelo herself, here.

THE Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the bible of diagnosis in psychiatry, and is used not just by doctors around the world but also by health insurers.

Changing any such central document is complicated. It should therefore come as no surprise that a committee of experts charged with revising the manual has caused consternation by considering removing Asperger syndrome from the next edition, scheduled to appear in 2012. The committee argues that the syndrome should be deleted because there is no clear separation between it and its close neighbor, autism. ( Simon Baron-Cohen, NYT)

LONDON - Overuse of antibiotics in Europe is building widespread resistance and threatening to halt vital medical treatments such as hip replacements, intensive care for premature babies and cancer therapies, health experts say.

Dominique Monnet of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control's (ECDC) scientific advice unit said the "whole span of modern medicine" is under threat because bugs are become resistant to antibiotics, rendering the drugs useless.

"If this wave of antibiotic resistance gets over us, we will not be able to do organ transplants, hip replacements, cancer chemotherapy, intensive care and neonatal care for premature babies," he told reporters at a briefing.

Antibiotics are needed in all these treatments to prevent bacterial infection. But drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

Such infections kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and around 19,000 in the United States. (Reuters)

The Chinese drywall scandal is now nearly a year old. And while incidents of Chinese drywall being installed in homes have all but stopped, complaints of bloody noses, sinus infections and vomiting spells for pets and people, widespread corrosion and blackening of copper tubing and wiring and "rotten egg" smell continue to roll in. Last spring, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission conducted 44 investigations into consumer complaints about drywall. Few of the complainants provided evidence that their drywall came from China, but the report included no shortage of devastating medical reports, panicked letters written to government officials and photographs of corroded metal. Here are six surprising findings from the report. (Popular Mechanics)

LONDON - Three more members of Britain's drug advisory panel quit on Tuesday, media reported, as a row between scientists and the government deepened and threatened to cause ministers further embarrassment.

The three members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) resigned their posts shortly after a meeting with British Home Secretary Alan Johnson who had been trying to smooth over tensions with the panel.

The row broke out at the end of last month when Johnson sacked the country's chief drug adviser Professor David Nutt on the grounds he had overstepped his role and was too political.

Nutt had argued that ecstasy and cannabis were less harmful than alcohol, and also criticised Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government for ignoring scientific advice on those drugs, accusing ministers of misleading the public about their dangers for purely political reasons.

The Labour government downgraded cannabis's legal status on the advisory body's advice in 2004 but Brown reversed that decision last year, saying he wanted to send a strong message that the use of the drug was unacceptable.

Nutt's sacking angered many prominent members of Britain's scientific community, and two members of the ACMD quit in protest days later. Media reports said three more scientists had now also resigned. (Reuters)

“Wash your hands regularly.” “Cover your mouth when you sneeze.” “Throw away your used tissues.” These are some of the exhortations currently posted around London in an attempt to reduce the spread of flu. But one day, perhaps we’ll have public health campaigns of a different kind. “Be jolly: it’s catching.” Or, “Eat less: do it for your friends.”

Why? Because “traditional” infectious diseases — those, like flu and tuberculosis, that are caused by viruses or bacteria — are not the only aspects of health that can spread from one person to another. Taking up smoking is contagious; so is quitting. Obesity is contagious. So is happiness. (Olivia Judson, NYT)

DIETS low in carbohydrates that limit intake of foods like bread, pasta and potatoes produce good weight loss, but make people grumpy, a study has found.

The study compared a low-carbohydrate diet that was high in fat and protein with a low-fat diet rich in carbs. It found that while they produced similar weight loss, those eating more carbohydrates were much happier. (SMH)

The claim that French woman stay forever slim has been exposed as a myth after new statistics revealed that 15.1 per cent of France's women are classed as clinically obese. (TDT)

Aside from aging itself, obesity appears to be the most powerful predictor of left atrial enlargement (LAE), upping one's risk of atrial fibrillation (the most common type of arrhythmia), stroke and death, according to findings published in the November 17, 2009, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

This prospective study -- the first to evaluate factors affecting left atrial remodeling during aging over 10 years -- found obesity and hypertension to be independent predictors of LAE, both resulting in a variety of structural and functional changes in the heart. The highest measures of left atrial volume (iLA) were seen in obese patients with high blood pressure; this group also had the greatest increase in iLA (+6ml/m) and the highest incidence of LAE upon follow-up (31.6 percent compared to baseline prevalence of 10 percent among all participants). In linear regression models, the effect of obesity was almost twice that of hypertension. (ScienceDaily)

More than eight years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the House of Representatives has passed a bill to shore up security at this country’s chemical plants. The requirements are reasonable, vital and long overdue. If terrorists were to attack a chemical plant near an American city or large town, they could unleash a toxic cloud that could endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Environmental groups, most notably Greenpeace, and organized labor have been pushing Congress to enact tough chemical plant security legislation, but the chemical industry — concerned about the cost — has long resisted.

The House bill is a carefully written compromise that is more than accommodating to the concerns of industry. It focuses only on the highest-risk plants, and it would make them use safer chemicals or processes only when the Department of Homeland Security determines that they are feasible and cost-effective. (NYT)

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON/MILAN - At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it's suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop.

Oglio, a third generation farmer eschews modern farming techniques -- chemicals, fertilizers, heavy machinery -- in favor of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving regions of the globe.

Nearly 5,000 miles away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world's biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.

Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, spends about $2 million a day on scientific research that aims to improve on Mother Nature, and is positioning itself as a key player in the fight against hunger.

The Italian farmer and the U.S. multinational represent the two extremes in an increasingly acrimonious debate over the future of food.

Everybody wants to end hunger, but just how to do so is a divisive question that pits environmentalists against anti-poverty campaigners, big business against consumers and rich countries against poor.

The food fight takes place at a time when experts on both sides agree on one thing -- the number of empty bellies around the world will only grow unless there is major intervention now. (Reuters)

CHICAGO - Organized cultivation of food crops like wheat and barley began about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, what is now the Middle East.

Great strides in agriculture have been made since through innovation, technology and genetics to help feed the world's growing population. Despite this, however, more than 1 billion people went hungry in 2009, 100 million more than last year.

The increase is not a result of poor harvests, but due to high food prices, particularly in developing nations, and lower incomes and lost jobs due to the economic downturn.

Here are some landmark moments in world agriculture:

* 1701 - Briton Jethro Tull invented the seed drill, an improved plough that was drawn by a horse.

* 1798 - Thomas Malthus predicts impending famine as population growth outstrips food production.

* 1831 - American Cyrus McCormick introduced his mechanical reaper, which was mass produced by 1847 in a Chicago factory.

* 1863 - The U.S. Agriculture Department, which forecasts crop production for major countries across the globe, publishes its first monthly crop report.

* 1866 - Austrian Gregor Mendel laid the foundation of modern genetics by showing traits pass from parents to offspring.

* 1873 - American John Deere designed the first cast steel plough.

* 1881 - First generation of hybrid corn to increase production created.

* 1892 - First successful gasoline engine farm tractor built by American inventor John Froelich.

* 1923 - Commercial hybrid seed corn developed by Henry Wallace, who in 1926 founded the Hi-Bred Corn Co (now Pioneer Hi-Bred International).

* 1934 - Worst drought in U.S. history swept through the Great Plains and covered more than 75 percent of the country.

* 1944 - Normal Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution to increase food production, joins Rockefeller Foundation.

* 1945 - Beginning of the Green Revolution to increase food production through new cultivars, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides and mechanization.

* 1956 - Mexico becomes self-sufficient in wheat as a result of the Green Revolution.

* 1960 - Philippines government, Ford and Rockefeller foundations establish the International Rice Research Institute in Manila.

* 1968 - William Gaud, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, coins the term Green Revolution. "These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution."

* 1970 - Borlaug is awarded Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply. (Reuters)

I’m probably going to irritate some people with this post. I apologize in advance because that is not at all my intention. For those readers that don’t think climate change is a real problem, I respect the fact that there is uncertainty in that science, but if the majority position of climate scientists is true, the stakes in terms of human suffering among the poor are too high not to act. For those who think Organic farming is the answer, I’m not trying to argue the whole issue here - I just want to talk about the science associated with climate change and farming. I have spent months reading the scientific literature on this topic. That science points to some very specific changes in how we need to farm. If those changes were compatible with Organic I’d be a big promoter. The short answer is “Organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view.”

I know this sounds like heresy in the “Green Blogosphere,” but before you react, please read on. I agree in advance that the Organic/non-Organic discussion is much broader than climate change. In fairness, climate change was never something that “Organic” was designed to address either during its origins in the early 20th century or during the development of the USDA Organic rules between 1990 and 2000. I have no desire to get in the way of Organic growers making a living (including my good friends who grow Organic of the old school category) or get in the way of Organic customers getting what they want. I simply believe that it is critical that we, the declining subset of people who take climate change seriously, be accurately informed about this issue. If we believe we “have the answer” for farming when that answer is wrong, that keeps us from continuing to find the real answer. (Steve Savage, Sustainablog)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has sent its final proposal on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health and welfare to the White House for review, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Reuters on Monday. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Congress and federal regulators are poised to make a misguided and reckless decision that will stifle our economy recovery and spur long-term damage to plant and animal life on earth.

In the coming months, the Environmental Protection Agency will hold hearings to justify the movement to brand carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. Congress will also consider cap-and-trade legislation that, if enacted, could also regulate CO2 as pollution. Why is it such a catastrophic decision? Because there is not a single piece of evidence that CO2 is a pollutant. In fact, lower levels of carbon dioxide actually inhibit plant growth and food production. What we see happening in Washington right now is the replacement of politics for science in conversations about CO2.

For plants, CO2 is the greatest, naturally occurring air-borne fertilizer that exists. Even schoolchildren learn in elementary science class that plants need carbon dioxide to grow. During photosynthesis, plants use this CO2 fertilizer as their food and they “breathe out” oxygen into the air so humans can inhale it, and in turn exhale CO2. This mutually beneficial and reinforcing cycle is one of the most basic elements of life on earth. (The Hill)

You have to wonder a bit about the Environmental Protection Agency’s often-stated promise of transparency and openness to its employee’s opinions.

It appears that the rigidness that marked much of the Bush administration’s control of the EPA has returned, as the agency has threatened “disciplinary action” against two of its lawyers for comments they made in a video they posted on YouTube.

The video, entitled “The Huge Mistake,” was made by EPA enforcement lawyers Laurie Williams and her husband, Allan Zabel. The pair stressed their views were personal and did not represent the EPA.

Their video explains why the agency’s “cap & trade” will not accomplish its goals, let alone effectively curb climate change.

The proposed controversial “cap and trade” plan is part of the effort to reduce carbon emissions which are believed to be the leading cause of global warming.

The plan would set a limit, or cap, on nationwide carbon emissions, but companies could buy “pollution credits” if they wanted to exceed the cap.

You’ve got to wonder when the American Petroleum Institute and Greenpeace are both against the plan. However, I don’t want to debate the merits of the plan, but rather EPA’s efforts to stifle its experts from talking publically. (Cold Truth)

The Senate climate debate shifts into a higher gear this week as advocates look beyond the partisan gridlock that engulfed the Environment and Public Works Committee and onto the broader quest of finding 60 votes for floor passage.

Tomorrow, the Finance and Energy and Natural Resources committees dive into the issue with a pair of simultaneous hearings on climate policy.

On Finance, Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) will study the job implications of global warming legislation with testimony from a major labor union, economists, and the nuclear power and electric utility industry. Baucus has said he may hold a markup this year on the trade provisions of a climate bill and address how to distribute greenhouse gas emission allowances among regulated industries.

Up one floor in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) will lead a wide-ranging discussion on legislation options for tackling climate change. Bingaman already passed a bipartisan energy bill (S. 1462) out of his committee earlier this year but remains a key player as lawmakers study whether to take an even broader pass at setting a first-ever mandatory limit on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Both committees are moving forward just days after a bitter partisan battle concluded in the EPW Committee with Democrats voting 11-1 to pass a cap-and-trade bill (S. 1733) despite Republicans spending three days boycotting the markup (Greenwire, Nov. 5). (ClimateWire)

In his speech to the UN on climate change, President Obama warned that the “security and stability of each nation and all peoples—our prosperity, our health, our safety—are in jeopardy” and that “we must seize the opportunity to make Copenhagen a significant step forward in the global fight against climate change.”

This message of fighting climate change in order to ensure national security has become a major element of mainstream environmental rhetoric, so much so that many have likened the battle to a full-scale “war.” While examples of this are numerous, a few stand out: in a speech given at Oxford this summer, Al Gore said that the fight against climate change can be compared to the way in which “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.” Likewise, Britain’s Environment Agency Chief Executive, Lady Young, has said that the fight against climate change is “World War Three…We need the sorts of concerted, fast, integrated and above all huge efforts that went into many actions in times of war.”

It sure seems that America is out of touch with the rest of the world regarding global warming, and that the world is slapping us in the face to awaken us from our stupor.

Delegates at last week's Barcelona climate talks were frustrated that U.S. negotiators came to the table unable to commit to concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to our seized legislative engine. Since we only have a month until the U.N. global climate summit that starts December 7 in Copenhagen, Barcelona negotiators vented their frustration by setting high expectations that the U.S. would come to Copenhagen with a plan in hand. (Michael B. Mercier, Greener World Media)

WASHINGTON - While the United States is still far away from implementing a final climate change plan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday that America can show up at international global warming talks next month proud of what is has accomplished so far.

"My belief is that there is no one who can look at what we're doing and not think that the United States is engaged here," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Reuters in an interview.

Jackson pointed out that progress has been made in Congress advancing legislation to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The House of Representatives passed a climate bill in June to slash U.S. emissions 20 percent by 2020, but similar legislation has moved slowly in the Senate and last week cleared the Environment and Public Works Committee with no Republican support.

Five other Senate committees are reviewing the legislation and Senator John Kerry is spearheading an effort to craft a compromise bill that would expand domestic offshore oil and gas drilling and nuclear power generation to pickup support.

Lawmakers don't expect Congress to approve a final climate bill that President Barack Obama could sign into law until sometime next year. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON — Lack of action on the climate change bill bogged down in the US Senate will not stop Washington from seeking a framework to curb carbon emissions at next month's summit in Copenhagen, experts say.

"I don't think that anyone is expecting a legal pact at this point," Michael Levi, an expert on climate issues at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP.

But US President Barack Obama already hinted this week that the United States would seek to create a "framework for progress" at the summit, which he said would pave the way to stem a "potential ecological disaster."

No one expects the United States to arrive in Copenhagen with definitive targets for cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases or set numbers for helping developing nations combat climate change, two prerequisites for a deal, according to Levi. (AFP)

Remember those good ol’ conservatives supposedly standing up for South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s move to the far-Green fringe on cap and trade? And remember how it turned out they weren’t so good ol’ conservative?

Here’s our GoredEarth cartoon to commemorate the occasion. (The Chilling Effect)

Utility executives are stepping up calls for legislation to cap greenhouse-gas emissions, fearing that if Congress doesn't act, the EPA will establish rules that would be costlier and less effective.

The executives' desire for prompt action is colliding with Washington's focus on other issues and growing reluctance to tamper with power-industry costs during a weak economy.

Some executives said last week they think intervention by the Environmental Protection Agency would be doomed because, for the most part, all the agency can do is order firms to install "best available control technology." Most power companies don't think any effective, affordable technology exists to capture and store carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

Most power companies prefer so-called cap-and-trade legislation to EPA regulation because the former is expected to give them greater flexibility on how to comply and thus cost them less than EPA regulation, they say.

Still, plenty in the utility sector continue to oppose legislation to cap carbon emissions. (WSJ)

In a world obsessed with global warming and climate change, the rhetoric rose to a fever pitch with Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming that Manhattan Island would be under water if the ice on the poles melted. He claims the oceans would rise by seven metres, flooding coastal countries. Canadian climate studies in 2008 stated the ocean might rise up to half a metre.

Media embrace disaster. The reason for alarm was blamed on the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide gas released yearly into the atmosphere. Environmental scientists said the release of carbon dioxide into the air could be "one of the factors responsible for global warming." Newscasts responded with dire warnings that carbon emissions are responsible for every type of bad weather and natural disaster around the globe. From hurricanes to earthquakes, droughts to forest fires, even colder winters and lower world temperature are blamed on global warming.

In response to solving the problem of carbon in the atmosphere, the idea of "cap and trade" on carbon emissions was developed in Europe. European countries hailed the idea of putting a cap on industries that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and rewarding those that don't emit as much. The plan would allow large polluting industries unable to reduce emissions to buy credits from those industries that had reduced or were capturing and storing carbon dioxide gas. An enthusiastic Britain gave out free credits. Buying and trading credits was set up and credit for a tonne of carbon went from free to $50 a tonne.

But cap and trade hasn't worked out so well. Credits fell to a few cents per tonne and emissions in some European countries actually increased.

Recently, cap and trade was described this way: If I had to lose 10 pounds of weight, but was given the opportunity to pay someone else who wasn't overweight for the "credit," wouldn't there still be the same amount of weight in the world? (Bert Brown, Calgary Herald)

Climate Change Folly - Steve Forbes says our efforts to reduce climate change won't mean anything if China doesn't lower its emissions.

In December, several nations will meet in Denmark to discuss what can be done about climate change. The short answer for the U.S.--very little. Even if we lower our carbon emissions, we're not the only emitters. If China doesn't change its way, our efforts will be for naught. (Steve Forbes)

Tough economic times have a way of clarifying political priorities and forcing people to distinguish among needs, wishes—and fantasies. So you might think a politician as canny as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would know better than to blame his country's new-found skepticism about the risks of global warming on something other than an evil conspiracy.

In a speech in Sydney on Friday, Mr. Rudd claimed "climate-change skeptics, the climate-change deniers, the opponents of climate-change action are active in every country." The prime minister then linked this global conspiracy to "vested interests" bent on "slowing and if possible destroying the momentum towards a global deal on climate change."

Mr. Rudd went on to attack, by name, "the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus"; opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who has questioned the wisdom of taxing the most productive sectors of Australia's economy during the downturn; and "world government conspiracy theorists" who worry about devolving tax-and-spend powers to unaccountable United Nations bureaucrats.

Well, who's left? Inconveniently for Mr. Rudd, who based his election in 2007 on his environmental bona fides, the public. Electorates all over the world are starting to question the climate-change received wisdom. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute—where Mr. Rudd gave his speech Friday—showed climate-change had fallen to the seventh "most important" foreign-policy goal for the public—down from first two years ago. There is receding support in the U.S. and Europe too, which is why next month's Copenhagen confab is expected to be such a dud.

Like the U.S., Australia is ignoring this common sense and pushing ahead to impose an expensive cap-and-trade regime on its economy. At the very least, such a fundamental change deserves a lively debate, not a defensive denunciation of anyone who disagrees with Mr. Rudd. (WSJ)

Nov. 10 -- Political agreement on Australia’s carbon-reduction system will be difficult to achieve, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said, as talks continue with the opposition party on proposed changes to the draft laws.

Climate legislation is a “key priority” and in the interests of all Australians, Wong said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. today. Opposition Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull proposed a number of changes last month, including permanently excluding farming emissions.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party government wants lawmakers to vote on the legislation by the end of November as part of a push for carbon trading to start in 2011. The majority of Liberal Party representatives don’t accept that human beings are the cause of global warming, Liberal Senate Leader Nick Minchin said on ABC television’s Four Corners program last night.

“I think it will be particularly difficult given what happened last night on the television,” Wong said of negotiating an agreement on the climate proposals. “I think the issue there demonstrates that there are too many people in the Liberal Party who are not fair dinkum on climate change, who do think it is some sort of conspiracy.” (Bloomberg)

Today I have launched an online Petition designed to put maximum pressure on the Government to stop the Emissions Trading Scheme, (ETS).

I have included the wording below, I would urge you to please add your name here on my website (Australian readers only, please).

This is most important, we are fast approaching the 11th hour and we have just a few weeks left to try and stop this ridiculous scheme.

I urge you all to sign the petition as soon as you can.

“To the Honourable President and members of the Senate in Parliament assembled:
The petition of the undersigned shows that we object to Australia adopting an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and the Copenhagen Treaty as foreshadowed by the Rudd Government. Your petitioners ask that the Senate reject the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, (CPRS).” (Senator Barnaby Joyce)

Judith Layzer says there’s no easy way out when it comes to climate change — but that geo-engineering might be a last-ditch solution.

In the middle of a day filled with a stream of information-packed PowerPoint displays and alarming projections of what the future holds for our planet and our civilization, Judith Layzer’s talk was something of an anomaly.

Layzer, an assistant professor of environmental policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was among the speakers at last Friday’s daylong symposium on “Engineering a Cooler Earth.” She immediately changed the tone of the day’s presentations by dispensing with graphs and charts and speaking only with the aid of her quite expressive gestures.

The symposium was a detailed exploration of a subject that has long been nearly taboo even for polite discussion: that instead of, or in addition to, the emissions-reduction strategies usually looked at as a way to stave off the dangers of global climate change, there might be other ways of solving or at least reducing some of the effects faster, more inexpensively or both, through grand schemes collectively known as geo-engineering. These include two major approaches: pulling carbon dioxide right out of the air, or blocking some percentage of incoming sunlight to reduce temperatures. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

I'm not at all sure what to make of this report just out in the Guardian. Apparently, the Indian Environment Ministry has just issued a report (here in PDF) saying that they see no signal of a climate effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the retreat of Indian glaciers:

How do I make sense of this? Right now I don't. Given that my own personal experience with the IPCC is mixed at best, I'd rather hear more arguments about the evidence than the appeals to authority and credentials. So I guess for now I am reserving any judgments on what is going on here, though I have placed some inquiries. If I learn anything of interest I will report back. (Roger Pielke Jr)

Two years ago, in Scenes from the Climate Inquisition, my colleague Steve Hayward and I observed that climate alarmists were growing ever more incendiary in their criticism of people who disagree with them. And these disagreements were not simply about the science, but about the favored policy choices of leftist environmentalists, many of whom had no training in public policy or economics. As we wrote:

At the time, we naively hoped that there would be a moderation of such language, as some saner voices were beginning to push back against the whole slander-denier complex.

Alas, the venom-spitting of the the climatistas is increasing in direct proportion to the probability of failure in enacting their world-girdling eco-theocracy. And the leader of the pack, Joseph Romm of Climate Progress (Center for American Progress), turns out to be one of the least civil human beings to tread the planet. [Read more →] (Kenneth P. Green, Master Resource)

MOT: Climate catastrophe cancelled
Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.

Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen.

VO: The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil.

The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.

(Picture: The global warming hockey stick graph. Music: Electric organ sounds from an ice-hockey game)

VO: This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history. The stick’s handle stretches for almost a thousand years, creating an impression of a steady climate, and its’ rising blade in the late 1900’s is proof of sudden, strong warming, which is caused by man.

According to the older view, climate has naturally varied considerably over the past millennium, and in the middle ages it was clearly warmer than today. But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared. The hockey stick was promoted to honorary status in the IPCC’s third assessment report’s cover. It became the logo of catastrophic climate change. The stick was used to back up the claim that, 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

A new report on climate change by the World Bank urges nations to employ innovative market-based measures to make up for the huge shortfall of funds needed to combat global warming.

But Zhang Wencai, deputy director of the international cooperation department with the Ministry of Finance, said developing countries cannot solely rely on the private sector to make up for their lack of funds needed to adapt to climate change.

"The technology-sharing mechanism proposed by the report, in which rich countries work to develop new solutions, while developing countries pay for a research fund, is also inconsistent with the principle of the United Nations Framework of Climate Change Convention," Zhang said.

Zhang said that the report steers clear from the principle of China's policy of "common but differentiated responsibilities" and urged rich countries to be accountable for their carbon emissions. (China Daily)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Sea Surface Temperature (1 month - Aqua/MODIS) September 1, 2009-October 1, 2009. Photo by NASA.

A new term has entered our lexicon without much fanfare, but that is about to change. When the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meets next month in Copenhagen, we will hear a lot more about "carbon debt" and the obligation that developing countries believe the developed world owes them for having used the atmosphere as a sink for CO2 and other gases since the Industrial Revolution. From my perspective, this approach looks counterproductive and risks scuttling the principal process for coordinating the actions of independent nations in addressing the most global of problems. The issues of international and inter-generational environmental equity raised by the accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are serious and complex, but framing them in this way will make it much harder to find acceptable middle ground, unless the delegations show restraint and common sense about how far to reach back into history to assess blame for a warming earth. (Energy Tribune)

SINGAPORE - Targets and trust. These are at the heart of a tougher new global climate pact possibly just weeks away.

The bigger the pledged emissions cuts or reductions in growth in carbon dioxide pollution, the greater the need to prove nations meet those targets and curb the pace of climate change.

And proof of emissions reductions over time will help unlock billions of dollars in climate funds for poor nations.

The problem, though, is that it is not yet possible to independently monitor a country's greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels or deforestation. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday he would travel to Copenhagen next month if a climate summit is on the verge of a framework deal and his presence there will make a difference in clinching it.

It was Obama's strongest assertion yet he may go to Denmark in mid-December to help secure a new global compact in the fight against climate change, a process clouded by disputes between rich countries and big developing nations.

"If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over edge then certainly that's something that I will do," Obama told Reuters in an interview. (Reuters)

n the next few weeks we'll be relentlessly scrubbed with eyewash, brainwash and hogwash, all designed to cleanse us of any doubts that global warming is a proven menace to mother Earth.

First, there's the Democratic global warming legislation rushing through Congress with a denouement expected soon. Second, the rush to pass the legislation is fueled by the upcoming United Nations meeting on global warming next month in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama and Democrats want to be able to go there with a goody basket of economy-busting measures that will show the world that America is with it.

Too bad, because the alleged "scientific" evidence of a coming man-made apocalypse is incomplete at best and, more likely, manipulated for political reasons. Dennis Byrne(, Chicago Tribune)

For Mrs. Begum, the choice is simple. After global warming was explained to her, she said: "When my kids haven't got enough to eat, I don't think global warming will be an issue I will be thinking about." (Bjørn Lomborg, WSJ)

"Forecasting is difficult: particularly about the future” This piece of wisdom is attributed to Yogi Bear. But it does not apply to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since they do not make “forecasts” at all, only “projections”. As they make clear, “projections” are dependent on the correctness of the assumptions made by the computer models and the futures scenarios from which they are made.

This has not always been so. In the first IPCC Report (1990). on the first page of the “Executive Summary” there was nearly a whole page headed “ Based on current model results, we predict” with no less than ten actual “predictions”. They used the phrase “models predict” several times throughout, but they did, at least admit that there were “uncertainties”.

Chapter 4 was entitled “Validation of Climate Models”. Paragraph 4,12 “Methods and Problems of Model Validation” showed that such validation is quite a problem, and it seemed to show that, so far, no model has been truly validated. Chapter 8 “Detection of the Greenhouse Effect in the Observations” had the answer when it said (paragraph 8.4) “the fact that we have not yet detected the enhanced greenhouse effect leads to the question: when is this likely to occur”

The next Report (1995) had, in its first draft, another Chapter 4 “Validation of Climate Models”. I commented (with, perhaps, others), that since no model had ever been validated, according to their own opinions, the title was inappropriate. So in the next draft they changed the word “validation” to “evaluation” no less that fifty times, and that report and all subsequent ones have not used the terms “predict”, “forecast”, or “validate”. Also there has been no further discussion on how validation might be made. This is true of all of the four parts of the Fourth Report.

I frequently quote this example from their “Frequently Asked Question 1.2”: “A common confusion between weather and climate arises when scientists are asked how they can predict climate 50 years from now when they cannot predict the weather a few weeks from now. The chaotic nature of weather makes it unpredictable beyond a few days. Projecting changes in climate (i.e., long-term average weather) due to changes in atmospheric composition or other factors is a very different and much more manageable issue”.

Note that they insist that all they do is “project”. They are admitting that “scientists cannot “predict climate 50 years from now”. No wonder there is “A common confusion”, The claim that their “projections” are “very different” and “much more manageable” does not include a claim that they can provide successful predictions.

And yet, the politicians, activists and many ordinary people seem to be under the delusion that the IPCC “projections” actually can be regarded as “forecasts” to the extent of promoting all manner of economically damaging measures in the belief of countering them. The above statement seems also to agree that the only scientists capable of actually predicting are the weather forecasters and it might be worth while to examine how this has been achieved, however imperfect it may seem.

Despite all this, the public, the media and the politicians seem to think that the IPCC “projections” are “forecasts” even when the IPCC denies it. It is therefore useful to see whether these projections show any success as forecasts.

The following (enlarged here) table shows a comparison between the “projections” of the IPCC and the observed figures, extrapolated to 2010 from the latest available information. It shows that the IPCC are within range of prediction for population, coal production, CO2 emissions and CO2 concentrations, but they are completely wrong on methane concentrations, global temperature change and sea level change. It might be mentioned that the “projections” for global GDP are also all wrong, but I have been unable to find figures that make adequate allowance for the changes in the US dollar.

Early last January, when the final 2008 numbers were in for the U.S. annual average temperature, we ran an article titled “U.S. Temperatures 2008: Back to the Future?” in which we noted that “The temperature in 2008 dropped back down to the range that characterized most of the 20th century.”

The national average temperature had been elevated ever since the big 1998 El Niño, which was leading some folks to clamor that global warming was finally showing up in the U.S. temperature record. “Finally,” because prior to 1998, there was little sign that anything unusual was going on with U.S. average temperatures (Figure 1). The end of the record was hardly any different than any other portion of the record. The slight overall trend arose from a couple of cool decades at the start of the 20th century rather than any unusual warmth towards the end.

Then along came the 1998 El Niño, which raised both global and U.S. temperatures to record values, and our national temperatures remained elevated for 10 years thereafter (Figure 2). Instead of looking for some explanation of this unusual run of very warm years in the (naturally) changing patterns of atmospheric/ocean circulation in the Pacific Ocean, it was often chalked up to “global warming.”

But then something unexpected (by the global warming enthusiasts) happened in 2008—the U.S. annual average temperature returned to normal.

In reporting this in our World Climate Report article last January, we noted the drop in temperatures and wondered about the future:

Now, 10 months have passed and we are starting to get a good idea of how 2009 is shaping up temperature-wise for the U.S. We may be jumping the gun a little here, because there are still two months (17%) of data still outstanding, and November has started out pretty warm across the West, but, in any case, Figure 3 shows the national temperature history for the first 10 months of the year.

Figure 3. United States January-October average temperature, 1895-2009 (data source: National Climate Data Center).

Thus far, 2009 is looking like another normal year—further indication that the warm period from 1998-2007 was an anomaly, rather than a step change to a new climate across the U.S. (be sure to check back in two months to see how the final 2009 numbers pan out).

No wonder the U.S. Senate is slow to get behind the need for restricting our fossil fuel-related energy supply in the name of climate change. (WCR)

What follows is a general theory of natural climate variation supported by observation of the changing temperature of the atmosphere and the sea between 1948 and September 2009. This work suggests that strong warming after 1978 is an entirely natural phenomenon.

Imagine a small planet about the size of the Earth orbiting a sun just like our own. The planet has an atmosphere composed of nitrogen (76%), oxygen (23%) and trace gases (1%) of which argon makes up half of that one percent.

Let us further imagine that the sun bombards the Earth with radiation so energetic as to destroy the integrity of nitrogen and oxygen in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The region where this occurs may be called the ‘ionosphere’. When superheated at the highest elevations it can be known as the ‘thermosphere’. The electrically unbalanced particles of the ionosphere possess negative or a positive polarity. Like iron filings scattered across a piece of paper atop a magnetized iron bar, atmospheric ions orient themselves according to the lines of the planets magnetic field. Rotating with the planet, the ionosphere is a place of constant flux. Particles are energized on the dayside and dragged into a long tail on the night-side by the pressure of the solar wind, a highly magnetized stream of helium and hydrogen emanating from the sun. There is an exchange of energy between the wind and the ionosphere and particles are accelerated in one direction or the other and re-distributed according to the tension imposed by the constantly changing electromagnetic medium. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Two hundred years ago, Charles Lyell coined the phrase “The present is the key to the past.” In today’s highly contentious issues of global climate change, we might well add “The past is the key to the future, i.e., to forecast future geologic events, we must understand past climate changes. This paper documents past global climate changes in the geologic and historic past.

Recent laser imaging of the Earth’s surface provides new evidence for abrupt, fluctuating, warm and cool climatic episodes that could not have been caused by changes in atmospheric CO2. In a paper presented at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, OR, Professor Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presented new data from airborne laser imagery showing well-defined, previously unknown, multiple moraines deposited by glaciers 11,700 to 10,250 years ago.

At least 9 significant, abrupt periods of warming that resulted in retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet are documented by moraines from successive glacial retreats in the Fraser Lowland of NW Washington l (Fig. 1). In addition, smaller multiple glacier recessions are found within the more prominent episodes of glacier retreat. As indicated by the amount of glacier recession between each of the successive moraines, the warming events were of greater magnitude than those observed in recent centuries. (Don J. Easterbrook)

Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years.

Reporting recently in the journal Global Change Biology, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) estimate that this new natural 'sink' is taking an estimated 3.5 million tonnes* of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year.

Lead author, Professor Lloyd Peck from BAS says, "Although this is a small amount of carbon compared to global emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature's ability to thrive in the face of adversity. We need to factor this natural carbon-absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change. So far we don't know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica's coast but it's something we'll be keeping a close eye on." (ScienceDaily)

There have been numerous studies showing how climate change is impacting a variety of environments—from the Arctic to coral reefs to alpine—but how could a warmer world damage deserts, already the world's warmest and driest environments? New research shows that the key is nitrogren.

A new study in Science found that as deserts become hotter their soil releases nitrogen, a gas vital for life. Losses of nitrogen in these arid environments, scientists believe, will result in a loss of plant life, since nitrogen is second only to water in determining the amount of life in a desert.

"We're on a trajectory where plant life in arid ecosystems could cease to do well," says lead author Carmody McCalley, a graduate student at Cornell University. If plant life diminishes then animals and insects dependent on them for survival will also be negatively impacted. (Mongabay)

So many dead babies are, so to speak, an army on its way to Copenhagen to fight in the climate wars for a strong international agreement to mitigate climate change, as the campaign’s website reveals:

It is interesting to see how, in the debate about the future of the planet, it is children that have lost their lives that carry greater weight than the discussion about what those lives could have been. It is a curious thing that to argue for development - rather than climate change mitigation - is to be the baby-hater in opposition to Malthusians such as Save the Children.

Because, as we have pointed out previously, with similar statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Global Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the number of people who die from climate change is far, far, less than the number of people who die, or are affected by, poverty. (Climate Resistance)

Almost all 144 top economists surveyed for a New York University School of Law report agree that climate change threatens the United States economy and that carbon regulation — whether it’s a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system — will drive energy efficiency and innovation, reports the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog.

The report, Economists and Climate Change (PDF), finds that 84 percent of the economists agreed that environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions “presents a clear danger” to the United States and the global economy, despite uncertainties regarding the exact speed and severity of global warming. The study also finds that the majority of economists (86 percent) believe the agriculture sector will be hit the hardest, followed by fishing (71.3 percent) and forestry (66.9 percent).

Yet, Senators continue to debate whether climate change threatens the U.S. economy and U.S. agriculture, even while over 80 percent of expert economists believe that global warming will have negative impacts on each, according to researchers. (Environmental Leader)

Enviropath Bill McKibben ticks the boxes:

Demented end-of-species, end-of-world claims: tick
Non-blinking stare of the Holy Believer: tick
Three layers of clothing due to the, er, heat: tick

UPDATE II. Climate change starvation is already passé. The latest stunt? Running to raise awareness of climate change. (Tim Blair)

Hey, if the adults won’t buy global warming, why don’t we scare their kiddies instead?

Australian marine scientists have issued an urgent call for massive and rapid worldwide cuts in carbon emissions, deep enough to prevent atmospheric CO2 levels rising to 450 parts per million (ppm).

In the lead up to United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference Professors Charlie Veron (former Chief Scientist, Australian Institute of Marine Science) and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and The University of Queensland, have urged the world's leaders to adopt a maximum global emission target of 325 parts per million (ppm).

This will be essential, they say, to save coral reefs worldwide from a catastrophic decline which threatens the livelihoods of an estimated 500 million people globally. (PhysOrg.com)

One of the world’s top environmental organizations, the UN-affiliated International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has publicly stated that global warming is being overhyped. The Geneva-based organization made the surprising comments with regard to the often-heard claim that global warming is the chief threat to the extinction of species.

In fact, climate change is “far from the number-one threat” to the survival of most species, said Jean Christophe Vie, deputy head of the IUCN species program. Vie considers hunting, overfishing, and human destruction of habitat as more important, and more urgent, threats that should not take a back seat to climate change. “There are so many other immediate threats that, by the time climate change really kicks in, many species will not exist anymore.” The IUCN compiles the authoritative international Redlist of endangered species.

IUCN’s comments, reported Friday in Times Online, were made in defence of a paper in Science by two University of Oxford researchers that found climate change models yield invalid results because they don’t reflect the real world. “The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed,” concluded Professor Kathy Willis, the paper’s lead author who is also director of the Oxford Long-Term Ecology Laboratory.

IUCN, established in 1948 as the world’s first global environmental organization, is the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network. It is comprised of more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. IUCN has official observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. (Financial Post)

Eric Barron, Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Science in Boulder has published an informative editorial in Science titled Beyond Climate Science.

“In 2001, the United States Global Change Research Program’s report “Climate Change Impacts on the United States” described a new vision for climate-impacts research, with integrated regional and sector (e.g., water, health, ecosystems) analysis at its core. However, funding was short-lived. Currently, 40 years of intensive climate model development is being coupled to what amounts to a cottage industry of impact sciences. The result is that our understanding of how ecosystems, water, human health, agriculture, and energy will respond to climate change advances only slowly….”

“The nation needs a concerted effort to develop predictive models explicitly for adaptation and mitigation. Weather and climate models offer a powerful foundation for expanding the ability to predict a broader range of environmental factors. The potential is enormous. Consider, for example, that infectious diseases have strong relationships to the environment. Imagine the societal benefit of a partnership between the climate and human health communities in developing models to provide advance warning of adverse health outcomes. Although these communities are beginning to interact with positive results, a far more rapid pace is needed to develop predictive capabilities that will adequately serve society…..”

”Human vulnerability to climate change largely revolves around how climate change will influence high-impact “weather,” such as hurricanes. And regional climate model output with high spatial resolution is a frequently stated need of agencies that manage water, forest, and agricultural resources. Weather and climate prediction must become integrated. Climate information that is useful on a regional scale will only slowly become available without the concerted investments required to enable this new class of models.”

This view of vulnerability as a derivative of the multi-decadal global climate models downscaled to impacts at the regional and local scale, however, is distinctly different than the proposed focus on vulnerability that I am proposing. Eric’s view in the Editorial, based on predictive models will limit the spectrum of actual real world risks that society and the environment face in the coming decades. (i.e. this narrow view of vulnerability is limited to the response to these forecasts).

However, I have a question. In your view of vulnerability, is this a result of downscaling from the GCM multi-decadal predictions to determine impacts and risks (i.e. the vulnerability in response to these forecasts), or is it the bottom-up resource approach that I have proposed; see e.g.

“There are 5 broad areas that we can use to define the need for vulnerability assessments : water, food, energy, health and ecosystem function. Each area has societally critical resources. The vulnerability concept requires the determination of the major threats to these resources from climate, but also from other social and environmental issues. After these threats are identified for each resource, then the relative risk from natural- and human-caused climate change (estimated from the GCM projections, but also the historical, paleo-record and worst case sequences of events) can be compared with other risks in order to adopt the optimal mitigation/adaptation strategy.”

Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change – The IGBP Series, 566 pp.
http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences/meteorology/book/978-3-540-42400-0

Eric replied that he feels we should be working in both directions (but) unfortunately there has been very little resource going into these connections [I have requested permission to post the text of his e-mail reply but he has not responded further].

My view, as outlined in our papers, is that a vulnerability approach based on downscaling from global multi-decadal climate predictions, inappropriately and significantly, narrows the assessment of actual risk these five resource areas face in the future. The bottom-up resource focused vulnerability assessment is much more inclusive. (Climate Science)

On 23 October the BoM published this map of rain predictions for the 3 months November 2009 – January 2010.
Nv-Jan10 rain prediction Australia

Just 2 short weeks later, on the nights of 5th and 6th November, the NSW north coast was deluged, Coffs Harbour reporting up to 500mm over the two days and flood reports are all over our media.

How many $Million does the BoM cost us ? What can their models be worth to the nation if results collapse in a heap in 2 short weeks.

And this organisation will be advising our Prime Minister of climate changes to take place for the next CENTURY !!

And Kev747 can not understand why the public is getting more sceptical of his Govts. ETS scheme which relies for its justification on IPCC rubbish. (Warwick Hughes)

The California Air Resources Board boasts a proud history, but they're doing their best to destroy their once stellar reputation. The latest miscue is a poorly-conceived set of regulations supposedly intended to reduce carbon emissions, by making cars cooler, and thus cutting down on air conditioning use.

The only problem with this idea is that it was tried before, and has side effects such as ruining cell phone communications, hurting GPS signals, and best of all—interfering with ankle bracelets worn by parolees. That ankle bracelet bit is sort of important, considering that the formerly golden and now bankrupt state has paroled many dangerous offenders as a way to ease the budget.

Not surprisingly, there is superior technology available to do the same thing—by absorbing, rather than reflecting the sunlight. The absorption approach has none of the above-mentioned side effects, but the brain trusts at CARB ignored the input of industry on that score.

You'd think with the state already bankrupt, and losing jobs at a faster rate than any other in the union, they would concentrate on more pressing matters. But, you would be wrong.

As one who spent 42 years in California, and still has family there, it is with true sadness that I witness the downfall of what was once the best place in this country.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may not meet a December 1 deadline to decide whether to approve an industry request to boost the amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Reuters on Monday.

Growth Energy and 54 ethanol manufacturers petitioned the EPA last March to allow gasoline to contain up to 15 percent ethanol by volume, known as E15. U.S. gasoline is now approved to contain up to 10 percent of ethanol, which in the United States is made mostly from corn.

But the head of the EPA said the agency may have to work past the December 1 deadline because it is still reviewing test results on how the higher blend rate would affect engines "across the board," -- including cars, trucks, snow mobiles, motor boats and lawnmowers. (Reuters)

LONDON — The government named 10 sites where new nuclear power stations could be built Monday, while unveiling changes to planning rules aimed at speeding up approval for energy projects.

Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the move would help secure a new generation of low carbon energy for British homes in coming decades, as part of the fight against climate change.

The 10 nuclear sites -- many of which are near existing nuclear facilities -- include three in Cumbria near the Sellafield reprocessing plant.

A potential site in Dungeness, was ruled out because of the possible impact on the local ecosystem, which is noted for its birdlife and bleak beauty.

The new planning rules, which cover nuclear plants as well as renewable energy and fossil fuels, have raised fears that they could stifle the voice of local protestors opposed to new developments.

But Miliband played down this concern, saying the current system was a "barrier" to progress. (AFP)

It is already too late to begin building more nuclear power stations. Even if new sites could be identified, the planning laws short-circuited and construction authorised within months, it will take almost a decade before new power plants could begin producing electricity. By that time Britain will be critically short of energy. Older nuclear plants will have been decommissioned, the gas-fired generators will be dependent on costly imported fuel and the exaggerated hopes for renewable energy generation will be left, like the few completed wind farms, blowing in the wind.

Political leaders have been warning the country about the impending energy shortages for years. For far too long they have tiptoed around a commitment to build nuclear power stations, however, because of the fallout, political and radioactive, from Chernobyl and vociferous opposition from the green lobby. A field in which Britain once led the world has been abandoned to competitors, especially the French, who now have a virtual monopoly in Europe in expertise.

Two things have changed recently, however. First, the worries about safety and the long-term dangers of nuclear contamination have been offset by the even more pressing need for energy generation that does not spew carbon into the atmosphere. And second, the accelerating run-down of Britain’s own oil and gas reserves and the growing dependence on energy from Russia and other less than reliable suppliers have reinforced the urgency of developing energy resources that are not subject to political blackmail or economic uncertainty. (The Times)

Families will pay a new levy on electricity bills for at least the next 20 years to fund technology designed to capture the carbon from coal-fired power stations.

The Government is planning to raise £9.5 billion from the levy to subsidise up to four carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration plants. Details of the first plant will be announced early next year. The Department for Energy and Climate Change said yesterday that uncertainty over the commercial viability of CCS meant that public support might have to continue beyond 2030.

The Government is promoting CCS to justify approving new coal plants to replace the eight due to close by 2015 under European rules on air pollution. (The Times)

Families were last night warned that they face a £60 a year increase in energy bills to help pay for a new generation of nuclear power stations.

And foreign companies will effectively be handed a £5billion subsidy to fast-track the ten nuclear plants.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband yesterday cleared the decks for the power stations to be built by 2025, mostly on the sites of existing nuclear facilities. (Daily Mail)

"No government has sought to influence me in any way whatever," declared Sir Frank Layfield before giving the go ahead for the last nuclear power station to be built in Britain. His Sizewell B inquiry, which occupied Aldeburgh's Snape Maltings for much of the early 1980s, was tortuous and expensive. Its successor, Ed Miliband confirmed yesterday, will be swift and restricted, its scope directed by government to an almost Napoleonic extent.

Mr Miliband is a convert to the nuclear cause, arguing that the price of not building a new generation of plants, in the form of higher carbon emissions, trumps the environmental and financial cost of going ahead. Yesterday he issued the new Infrastructure Planning Commission with its orders. There will be no drawn-out public inquiry into each new nuclear site, windfarm or power line. The IPC will review specific applications, and consult, but its remit will not allow it to question whether such things should be built, only where. (The Guardian)

SCOTLAND'S chances of winning at least £1 billion in funding to capture emissions from power stations have been boosted after a key competitor pulled out of the contest.

ScottishPower has ambitions to win the huge sum of government funding to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at Longannet Power Station in Fife.

The firm had been competing against E.ON, which hopes to win the money to install CCS at a new power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, as well as RWE npower, for its power station in Tilbury, Essex.

However, RWE npower yesterday confirmed it had decided withdraw from the competition, blaming the current economic situation.

It has been highlighted that E.ON has admitted it is unable to meet the competition deadline – which has demanded a full-scale working demonstration plant built by 2014. This is due to a decision earlier this year that it would be postponing plans for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth – which was to have been its host site for the CCS project if it won the technology.

Although E.ON has been allowed to remain in the competition, some experts say this makes ScottishPower the front-runner for the cash.

Professor Stuart Haszeldine, an expert in CCS at Edinburgh University, said there was now just "one obvious winner". (The Scotsman)

The Federal Government has defended carbon capture and storage technology as a viable option for Australia to cut its emissions.

The Opposition's emissions trading spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, says clean coal technology has passed Australia by and will probably never work.

The Government is putting hundreds of millions of dollars towards championing the commercial use of carbon capture, regarded by many as a key to cutting greenhouse emissions from coal by storing the polluting gases deep below the surface.

The technology was kicked off by the previous government but Mr Macfarlane has gone cold on the idea and says there is mounting evidence to back his pessimism.

The leadership of the Government and the Opposition are pulling out all stops to find enough common ground for the Senate to pass Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme later this month.

Both want a deal and to remove the threat of a double dissolution election, but Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce is doing his best to scuttle the bill.

"Last night I launched an online petition," he said.

"In the first couple of hours I got 1,054 signatures on it. That is incredible. This fight will go down to the wire." (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

CANBERRA, Australia, Nov. 9 -- Even where coal is king -- for domestic energy and as a lucrative export industry -- the case is being made for Australia to wean itself off coal, reports The Age.

Australia's heavy reliance on coal -- providing about 80 percent of the country's electricity -- makes it the world's biggest per capita producer of emissions. First mined in Australia in 1798, coal is the country's oldest export industry, and now the biggest.

Australia mines 318 million tons of black coal annually. Just one-fifth of that amount is used domestically, with the remainder exported.

Nearly half of Australia's coal is exported to Japan. In the past year, exports to China increased ten-fold, totaling more than 20 million tons. And Australia is well positioned to meet India's growing demand as well.

The world's appetite for Australian coal will see the country's export industry double in the next 10 years, reports The Age. While the government talks about reducing the country's carbon dioxide pollution, the newspaper says, when it comes to coal exports, the focus is on how to increase the numbers.

''There's so much coal around, if we were to stop producing it, our buyers would just shift to perhaps lower quality ones from South Africa, or Indonesia, and tweak the technology to be able to use it,'' says Australian Coal Association chief Ralph Hillman. (UPI)

National policy statements sound cool. They sound like they might actually sort stuff out. Instead of scrabbling around doing little bits of policy here and there, like some sort of policy tapas, a NPS means you're going for the policy hog roast - go on, have a big national slab of policy sir, there you go.

Except, to continue the metaphor beyond its useful life, this hog appears to be have a half-life! And three eyes! And it's glowing! Ah, the nuclear jokes. Today isn't really the day for them, because no matter what you might have heard in the news, today's key announcement wasn't about nuclear, it was about coal.

If we're talking about climate change, we're talking about coal. Coal is responsible for over half the human-made carbon emissions in the atmosphere. If we, as a planet, carry on building new coal powered plants, we're all in a lot of trouble. That's why Greenpeace spend so much time campaigning against new dirty coal plants - or ‘unabated' coal plants as they're known. (GreenPeas)

2007 - We learn from Tim Flannery that geothermal power is the great green answer - but we don’t always hear Flannery declare, as he should have here, that he’s an investor with a vested interest:

2009 - We learn what Flannery means by “relatively straightforward” technology at this Geodynamics Innamincka plant, but it takes ASX releases (no link) to tell us:

Oh, and let’s hear again from Flannery about wicked vested interests distorting the global warming debate:

And here’s his complaint that the governments only listen to paid shills when splashing out these green grants:

(Thanks to reader Alison, who wonders how badly a project has to go before your governments decide not to hand over yet more cash.) (Andrew Bolt)

WASHINGTON - After a landmark win in the House of Representatives, President Barack Obama's push for healthcare reform faces a difficult path in the Senate amid divisions in his own Democratic Party on how to proceed.

On a 220-215 vote, including the support of one Republican and opposition from 39 Democrats, the House backed a bill late on Saturday that would expand coverage to nearly all Americans and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

The battle now shifts to the Senate, where work on Obama's top domestic priority has been stalled for weeks as Democratic leader Harry Reid searches for an approach that can win the 60 votes he needs to overcome Republican procedural hurdles.

"Take this baton and bring this effort to the finish line," Obama urged senators on Sunday in an appearance at the White House, saying passage of healthcare reform would represent "their finest moment in public service."

Democrats have no margin for error -- they control exactly 60 seats in the 100-member Senate. Some moderate Democrats have rebelled at Reid's plan to include a new government-run insurance program, known as the "public option," in the bill. (Reuters)

The narrow 220-215 victory in the House on Saturday night was a step forward on the road to a government takeover of the health care system. But as close and dramatic as that vote was, that was the easy part. The Senate must still pass its version of reform—which will not be the bill that just passed the House. Nancy Pelosi was, after all, able to lose the votes of 39 moderate Democrats. Harry Reid cannot afford to lose even one. A conference committee must reconcile the two vastly different versions. And then, Pelosi must hold together her 3 vote margin of victory (if it gets that far). Yet several House Democrats who voted for the bill on Saturday said they did so only to “advance the process.” Their vote is far from guaranteed on final passage. And, House liberals are almost certain to be disappointed by the more moderate bill that may emerge from the conference.

Individual Mandate: This should’ve been low-hanging fruit. Democrats agreed on a mandate early in the process. But it became increasingly plain that a mandate would hit those with insurance as well as the uninsured — forcing people who are happy with their plan to switch to a different, possibly more expensive plan. With this mandate now being seen as a middle-class tax hike, qualms have developed. The House bill contains a strict mandate, with penalties of 2.5 percent of income backed up by up to five years in jail. The Senate Finance Committee, on the other hand, watered down the mandate’s penalties and delayed the mandates implementation.

Employer Mandate: The House bill also contains an employer mandate, a requirement that all but the smallest employers provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty tax of up to 8 percent of payroll. The Senate, looking at unemployment rates over 10 percent, seems unlikely to include an employer mandate.

The Public Option: The House included, if not a “robust” public option, at least a semi-robust one. But moderate Democrats in the Senate are clearly not on board. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) says that he will join a Republican filibuster if the public option is included. Harry Reid is trying various permutations: a trigger, an opt-in, an opt-out. But as of now there is not 60 votes for any variation.

The Sheer Cost: Fiscal hawks like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) say they will not support a bill that adds to the deficit or spends too much. But the house bill cost a minimum of $1.2 trillion.

Taxes: The House plan to add a surtax on incomes of $500,000 or more a year has no support in the Senate. At the same time, the Senate plan to slap a 40 percent excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans is unacceptable to key Democratic constituencies like labor unions.

Abortion: Conservative Democrats insisted on a strict prohibition on the use of government funds for abortion. The bill could not have passed without the inclusion of that provision. House liberal swallowed hard and voted for the bill, despite what they called “a poison pill” anyway with the expectation that it will be removed later. If the final bill includes the prohibition at least a couple liberals could defect. If it doesn’t, conservative Democrats won’t be on board.

Immigration: The Senate Finance Committee included a provision barring illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance through the government-run Exchange. The House Hispanic Caucus says that if that provision is in the final bill, they will vote against it.

As if these disagreements among Democrats wasn’t bad enough, public opinion is now turning against the bill.

President Obama has called for a bill to be on his desk before Christmas—the latest in a series of deadline that are so far unmet. It is hard to see how Congress can meet this one either. The Senate has not yet received CBO scoring of its bill and is not prepared to even begin debate until next week at the earliest. That debate will last 3-4 weeks minimum, assuming there are 60 votes for cloture. That means, the bill cant’ go to conference committee until mid-December, even if everything breaks the way Harry Reid wants. Privately, Democrats are now suggesting late January, before the State of the Union address, is the best they can do.

The fat lady can go back to sleep—this isn’t over yet. (Michael D. Tanner, Cato at liberty)

STOCKHOLM - The H1N1 pandemic flu virus could kill up to 40,000 people across Europe and be followed by seasonal flu waves that could kill the same number, European health experts said on Friday.

The Sweden-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said epidemics of H1N1, known as swine flu, were now affecting almost all countries in the European Union but it could not predict how intense the peaks would be.

What was certain, it said, was that the pandemic would continue to kill thousands and put many patients into intensive care as the northern hemisphere's winter sets in. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Extreme temperatures and heavy air pollution boost heart attack risk, according to a major new study.

And on days when the air is extra dirty and the temperature is unusually hot or cold, the effects are likely to be particularly bad, given that temperature and pollution seem to harm the body in different ways, Dr. Krishnan Bhaskaran of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, the lead author of the research, told Reuters Health.

Several studies have linked changes in temperature to increases in deaths due to any cause, as well as heart disease mortality, Bhaskaran and his team note in their reports. But looking at heart attacks-not just deaths from heart disease-could offer a more accurate picture of the overall health risks of temperature changes and air pollution, they say, and might also offer clues to why they may trigger heart attack in high-risk people.

In two separate reports, the researchers reviewed 19 studies on temperature and heart attack and 26 examining air pollution and heart attack. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - People who live in volcanic areas may have an elevated risk of developing thyroid cancer, a new study suggests.

Italian researchers found that between 2002 and 2004, rates of papillary thyroid cancer -- the most common form of thyroid cancer -- were twice as high in Sicily's volcanic region compared with the rest of the island.

Among people living in Sicily's Catania province, home to the active Mt. Etna volcano, there were 32 cases of thyroid cancer per 100,000 women per year, and six cases per 100,000 men. Across the rest of Sicily, those rates were 14 and three per 100,000, respectively.

The large majority of cancers were papillary thyroid tumors, a slow- growing form of the disease that accounts for most cases of thyroid cancer.

"The increase of thyroid cancer is striking in the volcanic area of Sicily -- more than the double in respect to the rest of the island," senior researcher Dr. Riccardo Vigneri, of the University of Catania Medical School, told Reuters Health in an email.

Because all volcanoes are not the same, it's not clear whether people living near any volcano might have an elevated risk of thyroid cancer, Vigneri said. (Reuters Health)

Concentrations of several major pesticides mostly declined or stayed the same in “Corn Belt” rivers and streams from 1996 to 2006, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

The declines in pesticide concentrations closely followed declines in their annual applications, indicating that reducing pesticide use is an effective and reliable strategy for reducing pesticide contamination in streams.

Declines in concentrations of the agricultural herbicides cyanazine, alachlor and metolachlor show the effectiveness of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulatory actions as well as the influence of new pesticide products. In addition, declines from 2000 to 2006 in concentrations of the insecticide diazinon correspond to the EPA’s national phase-out of nonagricultural uses. The USGS works closely with the EPA, which uses USGS findings on pesticide trends to track the effectiveness of changes in pesticide regulations and use.

Scientists studied 11 herbicides and insecticides frequently detected in the Corn Belt region, which generally includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio, as well as parts of adjoining states. This area has among the highest pesticide use in the nation — mostly herbicides used for weed control in corn and soybeans. As a result, these pesticides are widespread in the region’s streams and rivers, largely resulting from runoff from cropland and urban areas. (U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey)

NEW YORK - Think that getting high school students involved in team sports will help keep them away from drugs, alcohol and other unhealthy behaviors?

It's not entirely true, according to research presented today at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Team sports participation appears to have both "protective and risk-enhancing" associations for high school students, Dr. Susan M. Connor of the Injury Prevention Center, Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio told Reuters Health.

"There is a lot of rhetoric," she said, "that promotes sports team participation as a complete positive -- something that has no negative effects. Sports participation is kind of almost rhetorically positioned as a panacea for social ills; it will stop crime and alcohol and drug use. But all the bits and pieces of evidence suggest that's not really true." (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Do you have an unchallenging job with little control over what you do? You may be more likely to be a couch potato in your leisure time, a new study shows.

"These characteristics of the job spill over into their non-working life," says Dr. David Gimeno of University College London, one of the researchers on the study. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Your mother's advice to slow down at meal time may have been wise after all: a new study suggests that shoveling down your food blocks the body's natural appetite-control process.

"Most of us have heard that eating fast can lead to food overconsumption and obesity, and in fact some...studies have supported this notion," Dr. Alexander Kokkinos, the lead researcher on the study, said in a written statement.

What has been missing, however, is biological evidence that a leisurely meal is better for appetite control, according to Kokkinos and his colleagues at Athens University Medical School in Greece and the Imperial College London in the UK. (Reuters Health)

Obesity: what a waist - Public health campaigns make a fetish of BMI – body mass index. In reality, it's a fat lot of good compared to a tape measure

Across Britain, pharmacists are being marshalled as the front line troops in the battle of the bulge. And to reinforce their role, battalions of them have been taking the opportunity to measure up their customers during National Obesity Week, given its theme, inspired by the National Obesity Forum, is to get people thinking about their Body Mass Index or BMI.

Pharmacists – including some of the big high street names – manage to flog many pills and potions without a thought for the extent to which they are complicit in misleading their customers. A lot of these products have no genuine scientific testing, but may soon be forced to come up with proof or drop the bogus claims.

Talking to a leading pharmacist recently, he was in no doubt that the pharmacists' profession needs to clean up its act in respect of the dud stuff masquerading as diet and weight control treatments on the shelves. When someone walks through the chemist's door to get a BMI check, they need a trusted professional hand to find out not only if they would genuinely benefit from a weight-loss regime, but to warn them that spending quite extravagant sums of money on these dubious alternatives is the quickest way to lose pounds – sterling, that is. (Neville Rigby, The Guardian)

NEW YORK - Parents may be setting their daughters up for weight problems simply by allowing them to drink two or more sweetened drinks daily while young, study findings hint.

Higher sweetened beverage intake, such as sodas and fruit and sport drinks, at age 5 years was linked to more body fat during the following 10 years, Dr. Laura Fiorito, at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Reuters Health in an email.

Higher body fat during the teen years has been tied to long-term overweight and other health problems such as diabetes and later heart disease, Fiorito and colleagues note in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. (Reuters Health)

Being obese as a teenager may be linked with an increased risk of multiple sclerosis as an adult, researchers say.

A 40-year study of 238,000 women found those who were obese at 18 had twice the risk of developing MS compared to women who were slimmer at that age.

Yet body size during childhood or adulthood was not found to be associated with MS risk, the US researchers report in Neurology.

But an MS charity warned more research was needed to confirm the findings. (BBC)

Exercise more. Avoid junk food. Such common-sense health advice has proved no match against the temptations of modern life, which have sent obesity rates around the world soaring. Now, government officials in a number of countries are pursing an aggressive new strategy: enlisting entire communities to insulate people from these temptations and make healthier choices easier. (WSJ)

A provision in health care reform legislation requires snack food purveyors to post nutritional information on vending machines, which the industry says will cost $56 million to implement.

Twinkies are not a health food.

In case that comes as news to you, the point will be hammered home, thanks to a provision in health care reform legislation that requires snack food purveyors to post nutritional information on vending machines.

The measure will require almost all vending machines in the country to display the caloric content of products so that munchies-driven consumers can see what they will do to their waistlines before they purchase the snacks.

The requirement is touted as a way to cut down on obesity. But critics say it's an absurd encroachment, and the snack food industry claims it will cost millions of dollars to implement. (Judson Berger, FOXNews.com)

MILWAUKEE — The creators of the "Got Milk?" campaign are getting ready to make a big push to keep chocolate milk on kids' minds and on school lunch menus, a plan that has some educators and obesity activists none too pleased.

The new ad campaign from the dairy industry, set to launch Monday, emphasizes that sugary flavorings are ways to get kids to drink milk. Without them, some youngsters won't drink regular milk and won't get its nutrients, the ads say.

The "Raise your hand for chocolate milk" campaign starts Monday with an ad in USA Today featuring chocolatey brown colors and the launch of a Web site that asks people to sign a petition declaring their support for chocolate milk in school.

But some educators and obesity experts say kids get enough calcium — essential for bone growth — and will drink white milk if it's the only milk offered. They say kids get too much sugar, which is heightening America's obesity problem, and schools shouldn't serve chocolate milk at all. (AP)

You don't have to spend much time with teenagers to know that the average adolescent would rather devote an afternoon to sitting in front of the TV, computer or video-game console than working out in a gym. And in recent years, as physical-education classes have been progressively cut from cash-strapped public-school curriculums, teens have had even more time to lounge, slouch, hang out or do anything but break a sweat.

It's no surprise, then, that obesity rates among U.S. youngsters have skyrocketed, tripling from 1976 to 2004. Public-health experts and obesity researchers attribute the trend in part to kids' increasingly sedentary lifestyles. As teens spend more and more time anchored before a screen — burning fewer and fewer calories each day — they're storing more of that unused energy as fat. Hence, the ballooning rates of obesity.
(See TIME's video "Obesity and Social Networks.")

That's precisely why the findings of a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health came as such a surprise. The report, published last week in the journal Obesity Reviews, finds that the amount of physical activity among U.S. teens has not in fact changed significantly over the past two decades, even while that population has gotten heavier. "On the one hand, we have seen the obesity-prevalence increase, but we don't see a decrease in physical activity," says Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Center for Human Nutrition at Hopkins and lead author of the study. "This suggests that physical activity is not a good explanation for the increase in prevalence of obesity." (Alice Park, Time)

HONG KONG - In a laboratory in China's southern city of Guangzhou, scientists are trying to enhance the rare sweet wormwood shrub, from which artemisinin - the best drug to fight malaria - is derived.

China hopes to improve and use the drug as a uniquely Chinese weapon to fight malaria not on its own soil, where the deadly disease has been sharply pruned back, but in Africa, where it still kills one child every 30 seconds.

Already, a Chinese-backed eradication programme on a small island off Africa has proven a huge success.

Away from its practical application, scientists back in the lab in Guangzhou are also achieving results. In one of the lab's refrigerators sit a dozen triangular test-tubes holding seedlings of the sweet wormwood shrub, also called Artemisia annua, which has only been found in the wild in China, Vietnam and border areas in Myanmar.

"There are about 0.6 parts of artemisinin in every 100 parts of the plant in the wild, but we have managed to increase the artemisinin content to between 1.2 and 1.8," said Feng Liling, assistant professor at the Tropical Medicine Institute in Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

China pledged to help Africa fight malaria at the triennial Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2006 and has since set up 30 anti-malaria and prevention units. The next FOCAC meeting is in Egypt on Nov. 8-9.

Helping developing countries eradicate malaria will help China project its influence and prestige as a global power, said politics professor Joseph Cheng at City University in Hong Kong.

"China is exploring cost effective ways to help the Third World and is interested in making distinct contributions," Cheng said, adding that Western interest was often lacking in a disease that seldom afflicts rich country citizens.

"Malaria suits these requirements. It is not that expensive. It is cheaper than fighting AIDS." (Reuters)

Some scientists are bemused that a British judge has decided that a strong belief in alarmist climate-change scenarios ought to be awarded the status of religious faith.

Following a judge’s decision at a UK employment tribunal that Tim Nicholson, a sustainability officer who was sacked from a property firm, was entitled to legal protection for his ‘philosophical belief’ in climate change, scientists have been expressing their shock. ‘As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming’, said Myles Allen, who heads the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford (1).

Allen’s concerns are entirely understandable. Since the rise of the modern era, science has prided itself on its capacity to explain the world on the basis of experimentation, research and, above all, hard evidence. Science emerged, self-consciously, as an alternative to worldviews based on faith, moral conviction and other forms of a priori thought. So it is natural that a genuine scientist would feel insulted by the judge Sir Michael Burton’s ruling that Nicholson’s concern with climate change qualified as a ‘philosophical belief’ under the Religion and Belief Regulations 2003.

One reason why Allen and some of his colleagues are concerned about this decision is that it actually serves to undermine the pre-eminent authority of science today. In the twenty-first century, science has a near monopoly on authorising claims about virtually every aspect of human experience. We are far more interested in what ‘science says’ than in what ‘God says’. Consequently, even those who are sceptical about science and the scientific method will nevertheless mobilise these things to support their arguments. Not long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, leading environmentalists insisted that science was undemocratic, that it was responsible for many of the problems facing the planet. Now, in public at least, their hostility towards science has given way to their embrace and endorsement of science. The global warming lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise.

However, if science is recast by a legal ruling as simply a moral or religious worldview, then its pre-eminent authority is likely to be compromised. What is to distinguish science from quacks with strongly held principles? (Frank Furedi, sp!ked)

Proponents of the $787 billion economic stimulus package said it would be quick and effective. It’s turning out to be neither. And the transformation to a new green revolution is off to a shaky start.

One of the largest chunks of money from the federal spending is the $25 billion allocated for energy-efficiency. The Washington Post’s Alec MacGillis wrote, “If the New Deal was focused on building new things — schools, courthouses, libraries — then the stimulus is to a great degree focused on retrofitting what’s already there. The $25 billion for energy efficiency, which is the same amount as is being spent on roads and bridges, is split roughly equally among programs for homes for low-income workers, federal buildings, public housing, military facilities and initiatives by local and state governments.”

Thus far, the effort to create or save jobs hasn’t been successful. MacGillis details several energy efficiency initiatives that have failed to create new jobs. In Baltimore, for instance, stimulus dollars have been spent to patch roads, install newer furnaces and painting rooftops white to conserve energy. According to MacGillis, none of these projects, as well as others, have created a single job. Another example is in the state of Indiana, where companies have “weatherized 82 homes out of its three-year goal of 25,000, and reported zero new jobs from the spending.” Maybe by the time they get to the other 24,918 homes a job will have been created.

When President Barack Obama was pitching his $787 billion economic stimulus package, the White House produced a report claiming their plan would keep unemployment under a peak of 8%.

Reality has not been kind to President Obama’s promises. On November 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their Employment Situation Summary showing that the nation’s unemployment rate had soared from 9.8% to 10.2% in October. You can see how President Obama’s promises compare to reality to the right.

Reading the BLS report more closely, Heritage fellows Rea Hederman and James Sherk note:

Congress will take up debate on the dreaded Death Tax once again in the coming weeks. It will do so because the Death Tax expires for one year starting January 1, 2010. But like the villain in a horror movie, it will rise from the dead with its full power in tact on January 1, 2011. The one-year expiration will likely incite Congressional debate because some would like to keep it from expiring this year all together.

The one year abolition of the tax is the end of a years-long process of reducing the tax that began as part of the 2001 tax cut. The 2001 cut reduced the rate of the Death Tax incrementally from 55 percent to 45 percent this year. During the same time the exemption, or amount of an estate that is not subject to taxation, increased from $1 million to $3.5 million. After a period of winding the tax down, the 2001 tax cut abolished the Death Tax for 2010. Because of the rules governing the cuts, the tax only disappears for one year before it comes back from the dead with a rate and exemption it had before the cuts (55 percent rate and $1 million exemption). Continue reading… (The Foundry)

Even though the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month is likely to yield very little, domestic shenanigans continue. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works passed a bill on Thursday amid controversy, and the farmers’ friends in the Senate (notably Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D. Mich) are looking to send goodies their way by filing an amendment that would pay farmers for not cutting down trees, not farming, and will likely see states such as — well, how about that! — Michigan “cashing in” (see here).

Meanwhile, those concerned about the cost of climate change regulations may have lost an ally. Often, but not always, one can depend on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend free enterprise, or at least free trade. On climate change, however, they are a little more ambiguous. If anything, they appear to be getting more sympathetic to climate change legislation. Nothing to do with membership defections, they assure us, just good business practice. Maybe it is. I’m not a member of the Chamber so their strategy is not really any of my business.

What concerns me is the apparent shift in their position toward so-called carbon tariffs (also called “border adjustment measures,” and often spoken of in terms of “international competitiveness,” “negotiating leverage” and other terms that should raise the alarm). My friend, and former Catoite, Scott Lincicome does an excellent job here of parsing through the Chamber’s recent public letter in support of the Kerry-Graham “framework” (outlined in this New York Times op-ed) and their strange silence on the framework’s inclusion of the need for carbon tariffs, so I won’t repeat his analysis here. Suffice to say, their non-comment on the issue of carbon tariffs is worrying. As Scott points out, they appear to endorse the concept, if in a coded manner.

Back in June, the Chamber explicitly opposed Waxman-Markey, in part because “It would also impose carbon tariffs on goods imported into the U.S., a move that would almost certainly spur retaliation from global trading partners.” (See here.) I would feel a lot more comfortable if a similarly explicit statement had been repeated in their letter. (Sallie James, Cato at liberty)

Following on from my earlier post, I was delighted to receive a call from Bradley Peck at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce just now, clarifying that they do not in fact endorse the idea of carbon tariffs. Here’s a blog entry, posted a few minutes ago on the Chamber’s blog, clarifying their position. (Sallie James, Cato at liberty)

Ahead of Copenhagen summit, former US vice-president says 'non-violent lawbreaking' is legitimate in persuading governments to cut emissions (The Guardian)

I almost fell off my chair a couple of mornings ago when I spotted a front-page story in the New York Times about Al Gore’s profiteering from the stimulus package and impending climate legislation. But I quickly regained my balance after figuring out what the article was really all about.

Perhaps it is news to Times’ readers that Al Gore has made a bundle off climate alarmism -- enough to put $35 million in a private equity fund that invests in a variety of green (i.e., government-dependent and taxpayer-subsidized) technology projects. But many of us clued in to Al Gore’s exploding fortune almost two years ago when Fast Money magazine first estimated Al Gore’s net worth at over $100 million -- up from about $2 million when he left the White House in 2001.

Is it sour grapes or worse, un-American, to begrudge Al Gore’s success -- after all, isn’t he a shining example of the entrepreneurial spirit and the free enterprise system?

But the Al Gore story may not be one rooted in the ideal of a hard-worker selling for a reasonable profit a product that adds value to peoples’ lives. Gore is an eminently well-connected, long-time Washington, DC apparatchik who exploited the political career he inherited from his father to scare ordinary citizens and legislators into passing laws that profit him. Al Gore is no Horatio Alger: more a P.T. Barnum. (Steven Milloy, Human Events)

Al Gore has had a busy week. First, the former vice president’s renewable energy investments received some serious backing from the taxpayer as $3.4 billion stimulus package would be allocated for smart grid investment. $560 million went to Silver Spring Networks, a company Gore’s venture capitalist firm invested in, that makes hardware and software to improve efficiency in the nation’s electricity grid. That’s not the only way Gore is profiting from the global warming debate. On November 3rd he published his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which details the need for more wind, solar and biofuels, improved energy efficiency and the use of offsets and trees to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere – among other things.

Gore stresses that the cost of doing nothing is much higher than any dire economic projections that would result from capping greenhouse gas emissions, or as Gore likes to call it, “global warming pollution.” To gain support, Gore paints pictures of rising sea levels that will swallow up islands and devastate the global economy. But this “opportunity cost” of doing nothing must be discounted by the actual effect the “doing something” will have. Doing something like cap-and-trade, does not mitigate climate change entirely, if at all, and therefore the (negative) opportunity foregone (i.e., the expected climate change) is not the full benefit. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

It seems difficult to figure out just what the Boxer-Kerry bill is these days. If nothing else, its a sloppy rush job, beyond that, is it climate, or something else? How much will it cost? Only the shadow knows.

Okay, so Sen. Barbara Boxer has moved the energy and climate bill out of the Environment and Public Works Committee and onto the Senate floor. That doesn’t get the bill any closer to garnering 60 votes, but as Sen. Boxer said, it can’t get 60 votes while stuck in committee, either.

The chairwoman of the environment committee defended her decision to pass the bill despite a Republican boycott; usually, Senate panels require at least a token presence of the minority party. Rules do allow for a simple majority vote, rules that “are there to be used when the Majority feels it is in the best interest of their states and of the nation to act,” Sen. Boxer said. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

From William O’Keefe, regarding the claim that cap and trade would cost Americans the equivalent of a “postage stamp a day”:

Last Friday, I attended a conference for a multinational bank in Oman.

It is an annual event to update the region’s clients about the bank’s latest views on local and global conditions and, of course, to tell us about its latest products.

For the first time, I heard about the Chicago Climate Exchange (http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/)

I had thought that “green derivatives” was just myth or bad idea, not something able to be sold. But I was shocked to learn that the volume of trades has reached to one trillion dollars!

It seems we are just creating another speculative industry, which will attract huge funds, the whole thing far removed from basic and essential social investments.

I am not against real green initiatives that reduce the pollution, make use of energy more efficient, offer cleaner/better water or improve the healthy environment that surrounds us. I am against the linkage between those useful things and “climate change”, which just seems to put restrictions and taxes on some industries just to fund something not real.

“Climate Change” is something universal. It will keep changing and is more powerful than any human actions. This is my own personal view.

The joke of the conference was this:

When one of the attendees asked the instructor: “What if the investment is lost, how I can justify that to my manager?”

The answer: “Tell him that your company was supporting the fight against global warming!”

I wonder if that answer would be enough to keep feed me in future, if I will lose my job, or will I blame the weather for my decision!

I wonder how the carbon taxes collected in past and future will be justified to the future generations, when they discover that they were used to fund unnecessary and non-productive expenditures like trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange?

R H, Our Middle East Correspondent (Carbon Sense Coalition)

Completely bass-ackwards, as usual: Climate change bill is in trouble - Political tactics tie up the Senate version, and efforts to salvage it may be too little too late.

If you think the partisan divide over healthcare reform is ugly, take a look at the animus in the Senate as debate continues on a key climate change bill. So wide is the gulf that long-held Senate traditions on decorum are breaking down. And as Washington fiddles, the Earth burns.

The Senate version of a House bill aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions was stalled last week by Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who boycotted the discussion, demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency agree to do a more thorough study of the bill's economic impact. It was an ugly and highly unusual tactic aimed at delaying a bill that has already been thoroughly vetted by the EPA, leaving Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chair, little choice but to resort to extremes herself. She put the bill, S. 1733, up for a vote Thursday without a single Republican present. That angered Republicans but was even more frustrating for Democrats -- several wanted to amend the bill, but with no one from the minority party present, no amendments were allowed. The bill passed, 11-1.

This doesn't bode well. Wiser heads are working to salvage the legislation, with John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) announcing plans to craft a bill that can attract the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. But Democrats from Southern and coal-producing states are reluctant to sign on, and attracting any GOP votes will be a challenge; many believe the chances are slim that the bill, which sets a cap on emissions while allowing polluters to trade carbon credits, will be approved this year.

Such a failure would be disastrous in more ways than one. With no commitment to cut greenhouse gases in the U.S., it would be next to impossible to get other big polluter nations on board in Copenhagen in December for a global agreement on fighting climate change. Another year's delay will make future efforts more expensive and less effective. With a third of all Senate seats up for election in 2010, it will become even harder to pass controversial legislation.

Climate skeptics would celebrate all this as a victory. They are not swayed by the dire forecasts of the International Panel on Climate Change, nor the endorsements of those findings by the national academies of science of the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and Brazil. Confronted by a crisis whose most terrible repercussions will come after they're dead, they'd rather stick their children with the bill. (Los Angeles Times)

ST. ANDREWS, Nov 7 - It has been a bad week for the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month. During the week the last meeting in the formal round of pre- Copenhagen talks collapsed in Barcelona. Then, meeting here on the weekend, the G20 finance ministers put the seal on that failure by failing to agree a financial package.

The G20 is clearly a platform, not a group. And inevitably, the developed nations as they are labelled, and the emerging economies, stuck to their positions, that have conflict and differences built into them.

It is in the nature of these summits that - after all this - everyone still announces an agreement.

"We committed to take action to tackle the threat of climate change and work towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen, within the objective, provisions and principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)," the G20 ministers declared.

"We discussed climate change financing options and recognised the need to increase significantly and urgently the scale and predictability of finance to implement an ambitious international agreement.

"To deliver this financing, coordinated equitable, transparent and effective institutional arrangements will be needed. Coordination of support for country-led plans and reporting of this support should be ensured across all financing channels, multilateral, regional and bilateral. We discussed a range of options and, recognising that finance will play an important role in the delivery of the outcome at Copenhagen, we commit to take forward further work on climate change finance, to define financing options and institutional arrangements," announced the ministers.

The bureaucracy attached to these things is clearly not new to the business of producing language to defy facts. (IPS)

FOR TWO YEARS, the Danish capital of Copenhagen has been a beacon for environmentalists seeking a breakthrough international treaty on climate change. But with the long-awaited Copenhagen conference now just weeks away, it has become clear that the talks will not produce a grand, new accord mandating global reductions in carbon emissions. The United Nations' envoy conceded as much last week in Barcelona, the site of the last formal talks before Copenhagen. (Washington Post)

The upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, officially and ponderously named “COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009″, is aimed at reducing the emissions of the developed world. The main players, of course, are the US and Western Europe. There is a widespread perception that if the US and Western Europe could only get our CO2 emissions under control, the problem would be solved. Nothing could be further from the truth.

To see the gaping hole in this idea, it is only necessary to look at the historical record of carbon emissions. Here is that graph:

In the blame game, the Obama administration isn’t about to stop with Fox News. Instead, it’s moving on to lowly scientists.

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end. (Patrick J. Michaels, NRO)

IF Kevin Rudd is trying to win Coalition support for his emissions trading scheme, he has a strange way of going about it. The opposition and government are ploughing on with "good faith" negotiations, but could it be the Prime Minister thinks it's all over bar the shouting? Or was he just keen to push the asylum-seekers off the front page after a bad week? (The Australian)

In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has given the most chilling speech (PDF here) with respect to open policy debate that I have ever heard from a leader of a democratic country. The focus of his speech is on "climate change deniers." Who are these people? They include people who are skeptical of climate change science, but remarkably, they also include people who believe that climate change is real and a problem, but disagree with the Prime Minister's preferred policy approach. Rudd states that "climate change deniers" fall into one of three categories:

Armchair climate scientist Kevin Rudd whose somewhat reduced ability to perceive the reality around him hasn't stopped him from becoming the Australian prime minister has decided that climate deniers are dangerous.

See Full Transcript, The Sydney Morning Herald, Bloomberg, Reuters, Radio Australia, Google News.

"As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate sceptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom," he told policy think-tank the Lowy Institute in Sydney. ;-) In fact, climate change skeptics are "reckless gamblers".

If you wonder what the three groups of deniers are, they're the people who

WHILE Penny Wong and Ian Macfarlane have been in a cone of silence on climate change as they engage in "good faith" emissions trading negotiations, the climate sceptics and opponents of an ETS have been trumpeting their arguments with a megaphone.

Broadcaster Alan Jones has even been pushing the views of Britain's Lord Monckton, who believes the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty could pave the way for one world government.

Kevin Rudd's no-holds-barred speech yesterday was aimed at quashing the resurgence of the sceptics' arguments and regaining control of the debate -- setting out why an ETS makes economic, environmental and scientific sense.

It was also designed to leave space for any ETS deal with Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to be debated rationally, and to re-insert reality into discussions about the international talks in Copenhagen next month.

But his shrill tone and personal attacks on Coalition opponents of an ETS risk backfiring, angering the Nationals and the anti-ETS Liberals and making it harder, not easier, for Mr Turnbull's political strategy to prevail in the Coalition partyroom. (Lenore Taylor, The Australian)

AUSTRALIA'S peak mining group has hit back at Kevin Rudd's attack on opponents of his emissions trading scheme and accused the government of "cooking" the numbers in Treasury revenue projections for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

In a commentary-page article in The Australian today, Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke says revenue projections in the mid-year economic review released last week, which cut $12 billion from the expected CPRS revenue take by 2020, "are as rubbery as a week-old calamari ring". (The Australian)

US writer Calvin Trillin once wrote that the most remarkable thing about his mother was that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal, he said, had never been found.

When it comes to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the Rudd government has been serving up the same inedible dish for 18 months. The odd garnish has been added, but the serving has not been altered. The flaws remain. The scheme, in its present form, is the gastronomic equivalent of three-day-old meatloaf .

A few weeks ago the Coalition suggested the addition of some new ingredients and the removal of others. The proposed dish was no gourmet offering, but at least it was palatable. (Mitch Hooke, The Australian)

I thought that it would be worth illustrating the sort of people that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd characterizes as climate deniers, people whose logic does not belong in any respons

ible government.

Lawrence Solomon: Numbers racket - Politicians the world over claim that 4,000 scientists believe in global warming. Depends on who’s counting

In a speech yesterday, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd explained why he is so certain that the science is settled on climate change. It stems from the number 4,000 — a number that the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used to publicize its last major report.

“This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world,” asserted Mr. Rudd, in making his case that the planet is in peril.

Unfortunately for Mr. Rudd, he has made a blunder in citing this number. As he can confirm by contacting the secretariat of the IPCC, the thousands of scientists upon whom he rests his case never endorsed the IPCC’s report. Rather, the secretariat will advise him — as the Secretariat advised me when I inquired in 2007 — that the great majority of those scientists were merely reviewers. Worse for Mr. Rudd, those scientists had reviewed only a fraction of the report. Worst of all, far from endorsing the IPCC’s conclusions, many of the reviewers turned thumbs down on the IPCC sections that they read and only a handful actually endorsed the IPCC’s claims that man-made global warming represents a threat to the planet.

The upshot? Australia has turned its economy inside out largely on the basis of imagined endorsements.

How could Rudd have made this mistake? He was tricked by the PR machine at the IPCC. Look at the accompanying illustration from a public relations flyer that the IPCC distributed and you can see how easy it is for an unsuspecting person to be tricked. The work of “2,500+ scientific expert reviewers, 800+ contributing authors, 450+ lead authors from 130+ countries” had culminated in one report, the flyer states. The not unreasonable implication that almost everyone drew was that those 3,750-plus experts and authors stood behind the IPCC’s views of impending doom.

The rest is history. A tricked press reported those figures, often rounding the 3,750-plus people to 4,000. And then the public and the politicians such as Rudd were tricked, too.

How many of those 3,750-plus people from 130-plus countries can the IPCC claim as true backers of its conclusions? An Australian analyst named John McLean scrutinized the lists that the IPCC used to arrive at its figures and found them to be riddled with duplications, such as the 383 authors who also acted as reviewers for the same sections in which their work appeared, and the authors and reviewers who were listed twice or thrice. Remove the duplications and the total number of authors plus reviewers drops from 3,750 to 2,890.

The reviewers, as might be expected, made suggestions. In about 25% of the cases, the editors rejected the suggestions – another indication that the verdict on the IPCC’s report was far from unanimous.

Most importantly, the great majority of the reviewers commented on chapters that dealt with historical or technical issues — matters that didn’t support the IPCC’s conclusions on man-made climate change. The exception was Chapter 9 — Understanding and Attributing Climate Change. An endorsement here would clearly be a bona fide endorsement of the IPCC’s conclusion.

Chapter 9 had 53 authors and it received comments from 55 individual reviewers. Of the 55 individuals, four commented favourably on the entire chapter and three on a portion of the chapter. (To give you the flavour of these endorsements, reviewer David Sexton stated that “section # 9.6 I think reads pretty well for the bits I understand” and reviewer Fons Baede’s endorsement was “Chapter 9 SOD has improved considerably and is very readable and informative.”)
The 53 authors and seven favourable reviewers represent a total of 60 people, leading McLean to conclude: “There is only evidence that about 60 people explicitly supported the claim” made by the IPCC that global warming represents a threat to the planet. Sixty scientists among the 130-plus countries that the IPCC cites amounts to one scientist for every two countries.

Prime Minister Rudd needs to do his sums, just as John McLean and others have. There is no scientific consensus on climate change. There is no basis to undertake the radical economic changes that he and other western leaders propose. There is, on the other hand, a good reason for the public in Australia to balk at his radical plans — they are no longer taken in by the IPCC’s public relations department. (Financial Post)

“Mr Rudd accuses opponents of his Ration-N-Tax Scheme of “bowing to vested interests”.

“That is the pot calling the kettle black.

“The biggest vested interest is the ALP itself, hoping to harvest Green preference votes from their green posturing.

“Supporting the alarmists are the gaggle of green industries already reaping dividends from the Rudd subsidies and market protection rackets.

“Mr Rudd also tells us that his big business mates want the “certainty” of Emissions Trading.

“A roll call of these people reveals domination by big firms of auditors and accountants, bankers and brokers, speculators and solicitors, touts and traders - all longing to get into the biggest trading lottery the world has ever seen - more snouts in the carbon trough.

“The rest of big business merely wants the “certainty” of free emission permits or other special exemptions denied to Joe the Plumber and Fred the Farmer.

“Sceptics on the other hand do not have a mercenary army of academics, bureaucrats and publicists who can be bribed or bullied to produce scary climate forecasts or doomsdays ads on demand.

“Nor do sceptics have the power to silence or sack dissidents in their ranks.

“Nor do they have the pulpits and power of the UN which, having failed at “peace keeping”, sees “climate control” as its new business model.

“The climate realists have only one big vested interest – the desire to live their lives free from the “certainty” of new taxes on everything they buy and new controls on everything they do.

“This is not about global pollution or global warming – it is about global energy taxes, global government and global redistribution.”

Viv Forbes (Carbon Sense Coalition)

CLIMATE change sceptics in the Liberal Party will not be silenced despite Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's contention there is ''overwhelming support … right across the board'' within party ranks for a carbon trading scheme.

The sceptics dominated debate on climate change in a meeting of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party yesterday.

One rank-and-file Liberal member was given rousing applause when he said global warming was a natural phenomenon and the theory that human activity had caused it was ''absolute rubbish''.

Another speaker said those proposing action on climate change were working towards creating a ''world government'', while a third said any engagement on the issue would signal that the Liberals had ''raised the white flag''.

The grassroots debate highlights the huge task Mr Turnbull faces as he tries to bring his party with him on amendments to the Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme. (The Age)

When we compare the climate alarmists to the religious bigots in the Middle Ages, we often exaggerate. At least we think so. I admit that whenever I make a similar analogy, it's partly meant as a joke, as a caricature of their behavior.

However, we may simply be wrong.

Andrew Brown, a blogger at The Guardian, wrote something that indicates that the comparison could be more than just a vague analogy: an exact equivalence:

Alarming predictions that climate change will lead to the extinction of hundreds of species may be exaggerated, according to Oxford scientists.

They say that many biodiversity forecasts have not taken into account the complexities of the landscape and frequently underestimate the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in their environment.

“The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the article.

Professor Willis warned that alarmist reports were leading to ill-founded biodiversity policies in government and some major conservation groups. She said that climate change has become a “buzz word” that is taking priority while, in practice, changes in human use of land have a greater impact on the survival of species. “I’m certainly not a climate change denier, far from it, but we have to have sound policies for managing our ecosystems,” she said. (The Times)

SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the NSW government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites.

The Rees government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects.

Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.

However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged.

According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991.

This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average. (Drew Warne-Smith and James Madden, The Australian)

The seriousness of current global warming is underlined by a reconstruction of climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula over approximately the last 14,000 years, which appears to show that the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice are unprecedented.

“At no time during the last 14 thousand years was there a period of climate warming and loss of ice as large and regionally synchronous as that we are now witnessing in the Antarctic Peninsula,” says team member Dr Steve Bohaty of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS), home of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES).”

The findings are based on a detailed analysis of the thickest Holocene sediment core yet drilled in the Antarctic Peninsula. “By studying the climate history of the past and identifying causes of these changes, we are better placed to evaluate current climate change and its impacts in the Antarctic,” says Dr Bohaty. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Reading the climate-change news in recent weeks, one might wonder who won the last election.

The Obama administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol (ensuring it will expire), adopted some of former President George W. Bush’s key positions in international climate negotiations, and demurred when asked about reports that the president has decided to skip the December climate summit in Copenhagen. United Nations climate negotiator Yvo de Boer has concluded that it is “unrealistic” to expect the conference to produce a new, comprehensive climate treaty—which also describes the once-fond hopes for passage of domestic climate legislation this year—or even in Obama’s first term.

This is not how it was supposed to be. (Samuel Thernstrom, The American)

JAKARTA - An Indonesia-based study shows carbon-rich tropical peat lands trap more greenhouse gases than first thought, driving up their potential value on the carbon market and strengthening a case for their protection.

Green groups on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in Barcelona said tropical deforestation accounted for a smaller portion of global carbon emissions than thought, reaching 15 percent including draining peat soils where rainforests grow.

Huge amounts of greenhouse gases are released when peat lands are logged or drained for agriculture, and even more when the dried bogs catch fire and release toxic haze into the air.

While scientists agree preserving peat is key to slowing global warming, a team of 11 of the world's best peat scientists have found it might be more important than first thought. (Reuters)

The US Congress is finally taking on the controversial idea of geoengineering — large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the climate system to counteract climate change.

The concept has slowly been creeping into public awareness, including a casual — and much overblown — mention by Obama's science advisor John Holdren in his first interview with the Associated Press.

Yesterday the House committee on science and technology heard testimony from ~~five scientists, including big-name geoengineering proponents~~ people who have called for government support of geoengineering research, including Lee Lane, codirector of the American Enterprise Institute's geoengineering project, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and John Shepherd of the University of Southampton. Shepherd recently chaired a Royal Society working group, which also included Caldeira and which released a report on geoengineering in September.

In his opening statement, committee chair Bart Gordon emphasized that there are many uncertainties about geoengineering, including the potential for catastrophic side-effects. But, he said, “the climate is changing”, so “we should accept the possibility that certain climate engineering proposals may merit consideration”. (Nature)

What is the best method to forecast the future global mean temperatures? You may construct complicated climate models based on your currently believed set of important physical mechanisms and train these models. You should still make sure that their behavior agrees with the previously measured temperatures.

An alternative route is phenomenological. Just construct the best model that predicts the future temperatures, based on the previous temperatures. Ideally, you want to imagine that the global climate is a Markov process. OK, you may be impatient and want to know how the monthly UAH global mean temperature anomalies will look like between now and 2109.

If you have a crystal ball or Mathematica 7.0.1, that's a very simple question.

YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 2 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 3 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 4 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 5 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 6 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 7 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 9 +0.422 +0.549 +0.294 +0.511
2009 10 +0.284 +0.271 +0.298 +0.328

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly in October 2009 fell from +0.42 deg. C in September to +0.28 deg. C in October. The tropical and Northern Hemisphere were responsible for this cooling.

The global-average sea surface temperature anomalies in October continued their fall from the peak in July, despite the irregular onset of El Nino conditions:

The daily running 3-day average SSTs through early November shows no let-up in this cooling:

As usual, the linear trend lines in the previous two figures should not be construed as having any predictive power whatsoever — they are for entertainment purposes only. (Roy W. Spencer)

David Archibald forwarded me this PowerPoint presentation from Jan Janssens which he presented on October 22nd. It has some very interesting slides and is a good summary of the current debate over solar cycle 24.

I’ve put the entire slide show online in the post below at 50% size, as the PDF download of the PowerPoint document is quite large. For those that want it, you’ll find it at the end of the post mirrored on WUWT’s file system so that better bandwidth can help out.

“In 2008, the global urban population exceeded the nonrural population for the first time in history, and it is estimated that by 2050, 70% of the world population will live in urban areas, with more than half of them concentrated in Asia. Although there are projections of future urban population growth, there is significantly less information about how these changes in demographics correspond with changes in urban extent. Urban land-use and land-cover changes have considerable impacts on climate. It has been well established that the urban heat island effect is more significant during the night than day and that it is affected by the shape, size, and geometry of buildings as well as the differences in urban and rural gradients. Recent research points to mounting evidence that urbanization also affects cycling of water, carbon, aerosols, and nitrogen in the climate system. This review highlights advances in the understanding of urban land-use trends and associated climate impacts, concentrating on peer-reviewed papers that have been published over the last two years.”

“Clearly, the footprint of urban land-use is apparent in Earth’s climate system and must be accounted for in emerging climate modeling systems…. Huge uncertainties remain about the rate and magnitude of urban expansion: which ecosystems are most at risk to urban development, what are the emerging patterns of urban land-use, and how will extensive and expansive urban land-use change drive affect regional and global climate? As area estimates and mapping of global urban land-use improve and converge with ever-increasing spatial resolution of climate models (i.e. as grid cells cover smaller surface areas), the aforementioned urban forcing on atmospheric thermodynamics, dynamics, energy balance, microphysics, and composition must be explicitly represented. Only then will the climate science community make the necessary progress to understand the integrated effects of urban land-use, urban land-use change, and associated aerosol processes on climate.” (Climate Science)

The USA’s expanding cities and suburbs are contributing more to global warming than previously thought, says a new study in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology.

“We found that most land-use changes, especially urbanization, result in warming,” said study co-author Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland.

Most scientists believe man-made climate change is primarily the result of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So, does this mean rising temperatures due to greenhouse gases are less significant? No, say study authors.

“I think that greenhouse warming is incredibly important, but land use should not be neglected,” Kalnay said. “It clearly contributes to warming, especially in urban and arid areas.”

As for how much it contributes, compared to greenhouse gases, “we cannot provide a specific percentage,” writes study co-author Roger Pielke, Sr., of the University of Colorado in an e-mail. “But our results suggest that land-use change can affect surface temperatures as much or more than what has been simulated by the global climate models as being due to added CO2 from human activities.”

The study recommends that the predicted land-use changes be incorporated into the computer models designed to forecast changes in climate conditions. This is key, according to study co-author Dev Niyogi of Purdue University. He said that even with aggressive green emission controls, warming will still continue unless how we use the land is considered.

“Continued temperature changes will occur as long as the landscape continues to be altered,” added Pielke. “The subject of the effect of future land use change on local and regional climate should be a major focus of upcoming climate assessments.”

– Land use conversion more often results in warming than cooling.
– Urbanization and conversion to bare soils have the largest warming impacts.
– Conversion to agriculture results in cooling, while conversion from agriculture generally results in warming.
– In general, the more the vegetation covers an area of land, the cooler its contribution to surface temperature.
– Deforestation generally results in warming, with the exception of a shift from forest to agriculture
– The temperature effect of planting a new forest is unclear.

An excellent photo to illustrate one of the types of landscape change that are occurring is in the news article. (Climate Science)

I, of course, appreciate the recognition given to our research team in the article!

The study was led by Purdue University researchers Souleymane Fall and Dev Niyogi and brought together two pioneers in the study of temperature effects of land-use change, Maryland’s Kalnay and Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado in Boulder. Pielke is widely recognized as the leader in understanding and accounting for the impact of regional land-use and land-use changes on climate change at regional and local levels. According to Kalnay she was inspired years ago to develop the OMR method by a “stimulating seminar given by Pielke.” (Climate Science)

Proponents of global warming legislation or an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions argue that climate change could affect the safety, not only in the United States, but in other countries as more natural disasters will lead to increased global conflict. But the claim that warming causes increased tension and causes wars is misleading according to recent testimony from Heritage analyst James Carafano:

Recently, President Barack Obama met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, marking their second official state visit and stirring up more protests against the importing of oil from Alberta's tar sands.

Back in February, President Obama made a public statement against continued development of the Canadian tar sands (also known as oil sands) which are expensive and difficult to refine and carry a significantly larger carbon footprint than other oils. In that visit Obama came out in support of green jobs and renewable energy as the solution to the energy crisis and the need for more independence from foreign oil.

Fast forward to the end of the year and it appears that Obama has begun to flip flop on the need to slow global warming pollution and push for renewable energy standards to meet growing energy demands. He recently approved a deal to allow a new pipeline to deliver synthetic crude produced from Canadian tar sands to U.S. refineries. The administration is apparently stuck between wanting to reduce the country's reliance on OPEC and cutting carbon emissions which are having negative effects on the environment. In defense of his change in directions, Obama has said he wants to pursue carbon capture programs with the Canadians-a solution that is likely to have only a small impact on emissions, and not any time in the near future. (Examiner)

The UK's carbon capture and storage (CCS) competition is "dead on its feet" with only one of the three projects in the running capable of delivering a full scale working demonstration plant by the 2014 deadline, a leading expert has warned.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Professor Stuart Hazeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh and leading expert in CCS technologies, said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) should close the competition and award the funding to Scottish Power to develop CCS at its Longannet plant in Fife in order to prevent any more time being wasted.

"Scottish Power are the only people who can deliver by 2014 now," he said. " The competition timescale has already slipped and to get it back on track the award needs to be made soon." (Tom Young, BusinessGreen)

Japan is the latest country to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store it in deep geological formations, oceans or as mineral carbonates. There is good reason. The Land of the Rising Sun is the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. It faces the weighty task of cutting them by 25% by 2020 against 1990 levels.

The Japanese project, at Mikawa power station near Fukuoka Prefecture, is a sign of the increasing credibility of CO2 capture and storage. It is the latest in a worldwide foursome: Sleipner field in the North Sea where the Norwegian oil and gas group Statoily captures CO2 and injects it beneath the seabed; The Weyburn-Midale project in Canada; and, Salah in Algeria. (Times of India)

With coal being too dirty and wind farms and nuclear power plants arriving late, it seems the world is left with a stark choice: keep on polluting or turn out the lights.

Unless, that is, someone comes up with an alternative.

Energy executive Rune Bjornson thinks he has the answer.

"Natural gas, more than any other fuel, is an option we have here and now," he tells the BBC in an interview.

And, he adds, there is plenty of it around - unlike scarcer resources such as oil and coal.

Given that Mr Bjornson heads up the gas division at the Norwegian energy giant Statoil, it comes as no surprise that he should hail the virtues of gas.

We look at shale gas as a potential game changer

But he is not alone in his predictions. (BBC News)

Among those hoping that global warming is real we should now count the EU. As winter approaches there is, quelle surprise, the initial hint of yet another gas supply crisis between Russia, Ukraine and Russia’s EU customers. The problem is that those pesky pipelines have to go through somewhere to reach the market and that somewhere happens to be the Ukraine (unless it’s Poland, more on that later).

All those red lines running Northeast-to-Southwest carry gas from Russia to the EU countries. There is just no getting around the Ukraine for most of the transits; it is big and (if you are Russian) in the wrong place. (Donald Hertzmark, Master Resource)

Big polluters are pulling no punches in shifting the cost of tackling carbon in the atmosphere onto others, write Marian Wilkinson, Ben Cubby and Flint Duxfield. (The Age)

AN AMBITIOUS bid by coal-fired power generators to take more control of Victoria's water resources has received a boost from within the cabinet ranks of the Brumby Government.

Resources Minister Peter Batchelor has thrown his support behind two of the suggestions put to the Government by Victoria's coal giants.

The support comes despite councils in the Latrobe Valley warning that water provision in the region has become unbalanced in favour of the power industry over community. (The Age)

This article, “Energy to Spare” by David Warren, published in the Ottawa Citizen on November 4, 2009, says much in few words. Energy reality is that the sun’s work over the ages has produced energy sources (oil, gas, and coal) that far exceed the dilute energy from the sun. The stock beats the flow–by a country mile. (Master Resource)

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9511/Binczewski-9511.fig.5.large.gif

The pyramid of aluminum shown in the photograph figures greatly in our nation’s history. This once rare metal was so prized that it was placed into a national monument by a grateful nation. Can you guess where? Now, aluminum is so common, thanks to an electrical refining process and plentiful, cheap electricity, that we throw it away in soda cans.

Two seemingly unrelated events on opposite sides of the globe occurred this past week.

One was the closure of an aluminum plant in Montana, and the other is the president of a European metals association threatened to move production overseas citing environmental rules and energy costs escalating due to emissions trading schemes.

Both stories are presented below. At the end, is the story of our “Aluminum Pyramid”, now in a national monument.

How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America’s industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.

America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?

Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.

But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville? Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

On Monday, Pavel Molchanov, a Houston-based analyst with Raymond James & Associates issued a report that should be required reading for every member of Congress. The first few lines of Molchanov’s report, “Corn Ethanol’s Slow-Motion Train Wreck: What Will Follow In Its Wake?” are classic examples of both sharp thinking and razor-sharp writing: “Finito. Kaputt. Sayonara. However you say it, we think there is no denying the fact that America’s corn ethanol industry is finished… the industry is finished in the sense of no longer being seen as a ‘game-changing,’ long-term solution to the structural imbalance between oil supply and demand.”

Molchanov goes on, saying that as other alternative fuels, like compressed natural gas get more political support, “it is likely that corn ethanol will be increasingly relegated to the big grain elevator in the sky.”

This kind of plain talking from a Wall Street analyst like Molchanov about the corn ethanol scam is long overdue. The ongoing robbery of US taxpayers via the corn ethanol mandates has achieved the one thing that the ethanol boosters promised. Specifically, it has not resulted in a reduction in US oil imports. For more on that, read Robert Rapier’s killer analysis which we published last month. Or, also see my piece, published in Slate, in November 2008 on the same subject. (Energy Tribune)

Plans to fast-track a new generation of nuclear power stations are set to be unveiled tomorrow by the Government.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband will announce a series of national policy statements which will include a list of sites deemed suitable for new nuclear developments.

Under changes to the planning laws, the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) will be able to speed through the proposals for new schemes if it decides they fit in with the policy statements.

That would contrast with examples such as the six-year struggle to steer the Sizewell B power station through the planning process, and is likely to encourage foreign firms such as E.ON, RWE npower and EDF to produce a new fleet of UK power stations that could be up and running by 2017. (Craig Woodhouse, Press Association)

Study condemning UK energy strategy set to embarrass government as it prepares to unveil new climate change initiative (Terry Macalister, The Observer)

Evergreen Solar Inc. reported a 21 percent sequential rise in revenue in the third quarter on brisk sales of its solar panels, but the company confirmed speculation that they will be moving the production of panels out of its Devens plant.

The Marlborough-based solar panel maker said that it would refocus the Devens plant, built in 2007, to production of the solar wafers but it would construct panels in China through a contract manufacturing agreement with Jaiwei Solarchina Co. Ltd.

A Boston Business Journal article in June indicated that company officials were considering such a move if solar panel prices fell sharply and the company was unable to cut labor costs fast enough. (Mass High tech)

DETROIT - Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid.

The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package. (Reuters)

A new study by Cato Adjunct Scholar Aaron Yelowitz concludes that the cost of President Obama’s health care plan would fall inordinately upon younger Americans, meaning they are in essence being asked to subsidize the care of their elders:

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it’s in our food. (NYT)

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994.

Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance. (Dennis & Alex Avery, CFP)

Childhood obesity in America has been described by many, including the U.S. Surgeon General, as an epidemic. Currently, more than 15 percent of 6- to 17-year-olds are overweight, an increase of 9 percent since the 1960s. And the problem doesn’t go away when these children grow up. Nearly three out of every four overweight teens will likely go on to become overweight adults at risk for a long list of serious and potentially fatal medical complications associated with excess weight. But there’s no question that the cost of obesity is not just a healthcare concern, but a financial one as well. But exactly how costly is obesity?

A recent study by researchers at RTI International, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published on the Health Affairs’ website, estimated that the nation spends $147 billion annually on obesity, a cost that rivals smoking. They also determined that, on average, each obese person costs the nation $1,429 per year in additional medical expenses. Costs for an obese Medicare recipient are even greater. The obese also suffer an increased likelihood of co-morbid conditions, such as diabetes, some forms of cancer, osteoarthritis, heart disease and stroke, with costs specific to each disease that increases the burden on the consumer with out-of-pocket costs of treatment. (Health News)

Marilyn Wann is an author and weight diversity speaker in Northern California who has a message for anyone making judgments about her health based on her large physique. “The only thing anyone can accurately diagnose by looking at a fat person is their own level of stereotype and prejudice about fat,” said Ms. Wann, a 43-year-old San Franciscan whose motto in life is also the title of her book: “Fat! So?”

Hers has been an oft-repeated message this summer and fall by members of the “fat pride” community, given that the nation is in the midst of a debate about health care. That debate has, sometimes awkwardly, focused its attention on the growing population of overweight and obese Americans with unambiguous overtones: fat people should lose weight, for the good of us all.

Heavier Americans are pushing back now with newfound vigor in the policy debate, lobbying legislators and trying to move public opinion to recognize their point of view: that thin does not necessarily equal fit, and that people can be healthy at any size. (NYT)

PEOPLE WHO are obese implicitly find unhealthy foods make them very hungry while people of normal weight are made hungry by the sight of healthy foods, a psychology conference has been told.

The annual conference in Wexford of the Psychological Society of Ireland was told that at an unconscious level, there is a difference between the food choices made by people of normal weight and by obese people. (Irish Times)

Now that public officials and health authorities have recognized the growing problem of obesity, the question is what to do about it. Today, over several hours, California legislators heard testimony about sugar-sweetened soft drinks as they consider possible legislation. It was, according to one of the country’s leading researchers on obesity, a “historic” hearing.

There is a “compelling case for taking public health action” to curb consumption of sweetened soft drinks, said the researcher, Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. He is among those who have proposed a tax on sodas.

The hearing, at Los Angeles City Hall, was called jointly by the state Senate Select Committee on Obesity and Diabetes and the Senate Health Committee.

“There is near unanimity that we are facing an obesity epidemic in America,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), chairman of the select committee, said to open the hearing. Sixteen million Californians are overweight or obese, and those rates have tripled among teenagers in the last three decades, he said. The annual cost – in healthcare, workers’ compensation and lost productivity -- runs in the billions of dollars, he added. (LA Times)

LOS ANGELES--In today`s landmark hearings called by State Senators Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) and Elaine Kontominas Alquist (D-San Jose), representatives from the soda industry failed to acquit themselves of a growing body of research implicating sugar-sweetened beverages as the leading culprit in the obesity epidemic.

"The science presented today was clear and conclusive: soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages are leading contributors to the nation`s runaway obesity epidemic," Dr. Harold Goldstein of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA) said immediately after the four-hour hearings. "The problem is we drink soda like it`s water, but it`s not - the average 20 ounce soda delivers a whopping 17 teaspoons of sugar. In light of all we heard today about the adverse health impact of soda, we simply cannot afford to raise another Pepsi generation!" (Business Wire)

To many people, it's a health food. To others, it's simply soda in disguise.

That virtuous glass of juice is feeling the squeeze as doctors, scientists and public health authorities step up their efforts to reduce the nation's girth.

It's an awkward issue for the schools that peddle fruit juice in their cafeterias and vending machines. It's uncomfortable for advocates of a junk-food tax who say they can't afford to target juice and alienate its legions of fans. It's confusing for consumers who think they're doing something good when they chug their morning OJ, sip 22-ounce smoothies or pack apple juice in their children's lunches.

The inconvenient truth, many experts say, is that 100% fruit juice poses the same obesity-related health risks as Coke, Pepsi and other widely vilified beverages. (LA Times)

On Friday November 6th at 2132 UT (16:32/ 4:32PM EST) asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet’s surface. For comparison, Earth’s diameter is 12,756.1 km. That near miss was well inside the “Clarke Belt” of geosynchronous satellites.(35,786 km/22,236 mi)

Friday’s (Nov 6) flyby of asteroid 2009 VA is the third closest on record. (That we know about.) Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Ace reporter Isaac Wolf, of Scripps Howard News Service, wrote an informative piece, that is starting to make the rounds, via the viral power of the Internet.

The article is entitled "Sulfur-generating bacteria may be the problem with Chinese drywall, scientists say," and it reflects an interview done at my office, along with comments by D. Douglas Hoffman, CEO of the National Organization of Remediators and Mold Inspectors.

We expect more data to be coming out soon, from our friends at ProLab and Sabre Environmental Services, as well as from Doug Hoffman. Keep checking this blog for updates. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Every year, the American Psychological Association gauges the emotional temperament of the nation with its report "Stress in America." If we're to believe the results of the study, it appears that Americans are increasingly freaking out.

The APA is the largest professional association of psychologists in the world, so I trust that the organization never would overstate a problem just to drum up a little business. (Its motto, by the way, is, "For a healthy mind and body, talk to a psychologist.")

Turns out that my fellow Denverites -- despite their active lifestyles, picturesque environs and high standard of living and the presence of 66 APA-approved psychologists -- are the most stressed-out population in the nation. More than 75 percent of residents report "significant" stress, says the organization. (David Harsanyi, Townhall)

In a recent post, I argued that while third-quarter GDP was positive, the underlying data revealed that U.S. private investment was still in the toilet. While government spending might be providing a short-term “sugar high” for the economy, U.S. business investment remains in recession. I speculated that Obama’s anti-business agenda is likely one cause of the problem.

Let me draw your attention to an article in the Washington Post today entitled “Corporate giants sit on piles of cash.” Nucor Steel is sitting on piles of cash that it is unwilling to invest. Nucor’s chief executive Daniel Dimicco explains:

The article explains how big businesses are “jittery” for various reasons, such as memories of last year’s credit crunch. It doesn’t mention President Obama’s policies, but at this point in the economic cycle when world growth is returning, the lack of excitement by U.S. businesses regarding domestic investment is very curious.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is giving them nothing to get excited about. The President is promising them higher health care costs, higher corporate taxes, more labor regulations, higher energy costs with cap-and-trade, and a lack of interest in further trade agreements.

The Post article says that some U.S. multinationals are using their hoards of cash to invest abroad, allowing them to avoid punitive treatment under the high-rate U.S. corporate income tax.

“Westerners want to save developing countries from the problems that they might encounter in the future, rather than help them to deal with the problems that they are actually facing today. There have actually been seat-belt campaigns in parts of Africa where the only vehicles for a hundred miles are aid-agency Land Rovers,” report Lorraine Mooney and Roger Bate. (1) In East Pakistan, one agency distributed heavy woolen blankets, apparently not realizing that this location was in the tropics with a median annual temperature in the high seventies. Another handed out cans of pork and beans to the hungry, unaware that the refugees had no way of opening the cans, no way of heating the cans, and that neither Muslins nor Hindus ate pork. (2)

J. Maarten Troost talks about his experiences on Tarawa, an atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, “To this day, I remain baffled by the UN. I could never figure out what they did. Every few months, Air Nauru would deposit another batch of fashionably dressed UN staffers, who would then spend most of their time on the atoll bitching about the I-Kiribati. ‘The people are so dirty,’ said a Nigerian woman, tossing a Hermes scarf around her shoulders. She was on Tarawa to improve the plight of women in Kiribati. ‘How could you possibly live here,’ asked the Frenchman with the tasseled loafers, after he was told that no, he could not have a club sandwich. He was in Kiribati to help the children.” (3)

He adds, “There was, it seemed to me, considerable dissonance between the health care concerns of westerners and the realities of the Pacific. Diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, for instance, killed nearly 10 percent of children under the age of five. But glamorous people don’t die of diarrhea. Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t hold fund-raisers for people with the runs. And so the money goes to AIDS, and not childhood diarrhea. Yet, diarrhea and malaria are by far the greater killers in the [under-]developed world.” (Jack Dini, Hawaii Reporter)

The OPT is a think tank and campaign group concerned with the impact of population growth on the environment. They believe that overpopulation causes many of today’s problems from climate change to resource depletion. Here Brian McGavin and Andrew Ferguson reveal the extent of overpopulation and suggest solutions that the New Generation should take in order to avoid crisis. (The Optimum Population Trust)

From the Christian scaremongers of 200 AD to contemporary Malthusians who talk about “fossil fuel depletion”, population reductionists have been wrong, wrong, wrong in their predictions of future doom. In his response to the Optimum Population Trust, Brendan O’Neill says it is time we exposed the prejudices that they disguise as “scientific fact”. (Brendan O’Neill, Spiked-online)

The Times newspaper says it won't be repeating an advertisement that contained a false and misleading piece of environmental alarmism. The advert, part of a series boasting its eco-credentials, claimed that the world's oceans would be free of fish by 2048. But the prediction was debunked when it was made three years ago, and the academic responsible has since joined forces with his critics to disown his earlier claim. (Andrew Orlowski, The Register)

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Canada will launch an investigation into why far fewer sockeye salmon than scientists had predicted returned to the Fraser River on the Pacific Coast this summer.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the judicial inquiry on Thursday, saying the federal government was concerned about the declining sockeye population.

Federal government scientists had predicted that as many as 13 million sockeye salmon would return to the river this year to breed, but it is now estimated that only about 1.4 million fish actually returned.

The collapse gutted the commercial Fraser sockeye fishing season, and prompted the government of the West Coast province of British Columbia and federal opposition parties to ask Ottawa to investigate whether federal officials have mismanaged salmon stocks.

Details of the inquiry were expected to be announced on Friday in Vancouver.

Salmon have long been at the center of diplomatic spats between Canada and the United States, with Canadian fishermen often accusing their U.S. rivals of taking too large a portion of the catch.

Division of the dwindling salmon catch is also the center of a bitter dispute within Canada involving aboriginal, recreational and non-aboriginal commercial fishermen.

Some environmentalists, who praised the announcement of the inquiry, have said that aquaculture farms along Canada's Pacific Coast endanger wild fish stocks -- a charge that the fish farm operators deny. (Reuters)

The Environmental Working Group, which has been critical of the agricultural offset programs being developed in Congress, says some continuing government research should raise concerns about using farms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A Department of Agriculture researcher in Minnesota is measuring emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide from fields, using conventional tillage and an alternative practice that might be expected to reduce carbon releases into the air. (Des Moines Register)

America's largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, remains polluted and sick despite decades of clean-up efforts that cost billions of dollars. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on a new plan to try yet again to save the bay. A draft of the plan is due out this week. (NPR)

KENTVILLE — Opposition to the use of biosolids on farmland in Kings County is continuing to grow.

Kings County council recently passed a resolution asking the province for a moratorium on its use and farm markets are adopting policies that would ban any vendors who use it.

And the Nova Scotia Environmental Network has asked for a plebiscite on the issue.

County council wants the moratorium on biosolids until more study is done or a plan devised, Warden Fred Whalen said in an interview Friday. (Chronicle Herald)

ICA, Peru — A small grove of huarango, the storied Peruvian tree that can live over a millennium, rests like a mirage amid the sand dunes on this city’s edge. The tree has provided the inhabitants of this desert with food and timber since before the Nazca civilization etched geoglyphs into the empty plain south of here about 2,000 years ago.

The huarango, a giant relative of the mesquite tree of the American Southwest, survived the rise and fall of Pre-Hispanic civilizations, and plunder by Spanish conquistadors, whose chroniclers were astounded by the abundance of huarango forests and the strange Andean camelids, like guanacos and llamas, that flourished there.

Today, though, Peruvians pose what might be a final challenge to the fragile ecosystem supported by the huarango near the southwestern coast of Peru. Villagers are cutting down the remnants of these once vast forests. They covet the tree as a source of charcoal and firewood.

The depletion of the huarango is raising alarm among ecologists and fostering a nascent effort to save it. (NYT)

Computer guru and philanthropist Bill Gates is taking his entrepreneurial spirit to the agriculture scene to help fight world hunger. According to the Microsoft founder, reducing hunger and poverty starts with helping small farmers in developing countries.

Gates announced at the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide $120 million through nine grants that will focus on improving agricultural methods and increasing agricultural knowledge in Africa.

According to the World Bank, the 750 million small farmers in developing countries face challenging conditions, including depleted soils, pests, drought, diseases and lack of water. Many of the grants will help combat these problems. In Sub-Saharan Africa, two-thirds of the population work in agriculture with only about 4 percent of federal budgets allocated to that industry, according to Gates Foundation research. (Hobby Farms)

According to the Politico, “Barbara Boxer plans to bypass Republicans on climate vote.” Committee Republicans have refused to a markup of the Kerry-Boxer (S.1733) global warming bill because EPA has not conducted a full analysis of the legislation. Committee rules prevent Boxer (D-CA), who chairs the committee, from moving forward with a markup if at least two minority Senators are present. Committee precedent also prevents her from reporting a bill out off committee.

At 8:30 this morning, the EPW website announced the committee would indeed meet this morning, which indicated Boxer may be ready to ignore decades of committee precedent and report out the Kerry-Boxer bill. The procedural gambit gets complicated though, because committee rules prevent amendments from being considered without minority participation. According to E&E News PM (subs. req’d.), Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) acknowledged this difficulty:

Democrats on a key Senate committee took a small step forward on a US climate change law today - but also inflamed Republicans to a degree that could ultimately defeat efforts to pass legislation to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions.

Barbara Boxer, chairman of the environment and public works committee, defied a Republican boycott to vote through a sweeping plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% over 2005 levels by 2020. Such a law is seen as vital for the ultimate success of a worldwide treaty to tackle global warming.

Republicans had boycotted the bill drafting sessions, demanding a more time for the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a detailed analysis of how much the bill will cost the economy and ordinary consumers.

Boxer defended her decision to go ahead with the vote despite the boycott.

"The committee and Senate rules that have been in place during Republican and Democratic majorities are there to be used when the majority feels it is in the best interest of their states and of the nation to act," she said in a statement. (The Guardian)

Despite the whipping they took in Tuesday's election, congressional Democrats are moving fast on cap-and-trade and health care. Are they politically tone-deaf, or is this some kind of desperate strategy?

Our guess is that Democratic leaders, having gotten a very negative message from the off-year balloting, are moving as fast as they can to pass the main big-spending items on their unpopular agenda. If they don't act now, the know their radical agenda is dead.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats hustled the cap-and-trade bill out of committee without so much as a hello-and-howdy to the Republicans — knowing full well the GOPers would oppose it.

All this haste, even though global participants in the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks planned for December agree that any CO2-cutting deal is probably a year away.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the House want a Saturday showdown for their $1.2 trillion health care takeover after trumpeting support from the AARP and American Medical Association.

As the publication The Hill noted, Democratic leaders are still scrambling to "placate party factions threatening to defeat the health care bill over hot-button issues such as spending, immigration and abortion." They need 218 votes in the House, and they don't seem to have them.

What's the big hurry for a bill that won't even go into effect until 2013? And why act with such haste to move the cap-and-trade bill out of committee? The only obvious answer is Democratic leaders are running scared. Yet there's an element of self-delusion to their strategy.

Just listen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after her party's shellacking at the polls: "From our standpoint, we won last night." (IBD)

ST. PAUL, Minn., Nov. 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Tuesday, November 3, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a press release in which it said it supports strong federal climate change legislation. In a letter to Senators Boxer and Inhofe, the Chamber called for a fresh approach that strikes the right balance between new and conventional sources of energy to smoothly transition to a low-carbon future.

Several prominent companies, including Apple Inc. and PG&E Corp., have recently left the Chamber in protest of its opposition to the climate bills in Congress. Tuesday's statement appeared to be a softening of the Chamber's position in response to pressure it has received from some members.

Proponents of climate change legislation were quick to capitalize on the Chamber's statement. Senator Boxer immediately issued a press release citing the letter from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in trying to break a Republican boycott that could prevent her committee from voting on a cap-and-trade.

Other organizations were disappointed by the Chamber's apparent change in position. "It appears the Chamber is willing to trade away the interests of American business and citizens in exchange for the appearance of being politically correct," said Jeff Davis, president of Minnesota Majority and member of the No Cap-and-Trade Coalition.

Climate change legislation is projected to have severe consequences for American businesses and jobs. Heritage Foundation has estimated that cap-and-trade legislation could result in the loss of over 2 million American jobs and a loss of over $160 billion in GDP by 2020. Heritage says that Americans will get almost nothing in exchange and that the legislation will provide nothing for future generations except more debt and less economic opportunity.

"It's ironic that at a time when the science is now discrediting the theory of man-made global warming that the Chamber would choose to buckle to pressure of the green extortionists," said Davis. "It seems to me that American businesses would be better served to find another organization to represent their interests." (NoCapAndTrade.com)

The ABC News headline this week said it all: “U.S. Must Lead Way in Clean Energy Technology, Agency Heads Say; Administration Officials Push for the Swift Passing of Kerry-Boxer Climate Change Legislation.”

It’s that second part—about the need for swift passage of global warming legislation—that tells the whole story.

Of course President Obama wants quick passage. For months the public has focused on the bruising health care fight taking place in Washington. Along with congressional allies like John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi, Obama would like nothing better than to rush global warming regulation through congress before the public can turn proper attention to a proposal under which, as the President himself has put it, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

But that’s just part of what proponents of a costly cap-and-trade system would rather the public not hear. The president’s advisers would like to ram through their climate proposals before the public catches wind of the overwrought rhetoric bubbling up from the fevered swamps of global warming alarmism. (Max Schulz, Townhall)

As Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., pushes global warming legislation forward, some Democrats were showing a hint of frustration with their party's agenda.

"I just don't think climate change is going to be on the floor this year," Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said. "Trying to restart our economic engine and trying to get this country back to work -- to me that is the most important issue." (Susan Ferrechio, Examiner)

Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races may make some congressional Democrats more leery of backing key elements of President Barack Obama’s agenda because of the political price they could pay, analysts said.

Democrats in competitive House districts, many of them already cautious about Obama’s push to overhaul the U.S. health- care system and curb emissions blamed for global warming, might be more resistant to move ahead on the measures and face attacks from a newly energized Republican Party, the analysts said. (Bloomberg)

WASHINGTON — Already-skittish moderate Democrats in Congress got fresh reasons Wednesday to worry about their votes on economic and health care legislation from the election results in Virginia and New Jersey.

Democrats from the left, right and center saw a warning in Tuesday's results, which saw independents — who'd backed Democrats in the 2006 congressional elections and President Barack Obama last year — switch their votes to help elect Republican governors in both states.

Democrats from swing states feel new pressure not to be perceived as too liberal. That may impede Democratic leaders' efforts to pass a sweeping health care overhaul, especially one that includes a new government-run insurance plan, or climate change emissions-control legislation.

"The House leadership needs to pay attention to what happened in Virginia," said Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., one of 52 Blue Dog conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives. (McClatchy Newspapers)

From the “Imagine if a Democrat did this” files – say, in the context of opposing President Obama’s effort to transform our health care insurance and delivery systems . It seems that a Republican Senator has been outed as hopping in the sack with an advocacy group from the other team, itself exposed as financing ads on his behalf in support of his abandoning what has become a marquee issue for his party.

Oh, and to top it off, his staff began by deceiving about it and end (for now) by telling a whopper in the struggle to avoid scrutiny over the mess.

That is, however, precisely what’s going on in the Palmetto State, at least according to this report about the latest twist in the long, strange saga of Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Without reciting the story ably summarized by a Gamecock writer, the whopper told in the scramble is this, offered by “Graham’s top South Carolina strategist, Richard Quinn” – as well as to others I have spoken to who have recently called the Senator’s office seeking to inquire about the oddity:

“‘Lindsey doesn’t support Cap & Trade and he will not support Cap & Trade,’ Quinn told us flatly.”

You see, this is all about an op-ed in the New York Times which Sen. Graham penned in recent weeks (noted in this space at the time with bemusement if, I humbly submit, amusingly) with Sen. John Kerry touting bipartisanship on climate legislation. The problem with deathless opinion pieces is one tends to offer a lot of detail, or at least specific statements. One of them in this case is that he was, inescapably, pushing cap-and-trade:

“First, we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security. That is why we are advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases that cause climate change. We will minimize the impact on major emitters through a market-based system that will provide both flexibility and time for big polluters to come into compliance without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas.”

Hmm. I’m just askin’, but which time is the senator’s office telling the truth or, alternately, is it the senator or his aide who is spreading the real story? If it isn’t cap-and-trade that he supports – and, after a dozen years on this issue, that’s the only thing even remotely meeting the above (oversold) description to which he affixed his name in our nation’s “Newspaper of Record” – then, ah, what is it precisely that he supports? (Christopher C. Horner, Big Government)

Move over Brian Ross, Fitsnews.com has done some impressive investigative journalism in uncovering who the “conservatives” are behind the ad campaign defending the embattled Lindsey Graham’s new support of cap and trade. FITS has the goods including documented emails, check copies and more…

Following major defeats at the ballot box on Tuesday, the left’s legislative agenda suffered another huge setback yesterday when once wavering Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Susan Collins (R-ME) all signed a letter supporting Sen. George Voinovich’s (R-OH) demand that the Environmental Protection Agency provide a thorough analysis of how the Kerry-Boxer cap and trade legislation will impact the U.S. economy. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had been pressing for swift passage of her cap and tax legislation, but conservatives on the Environment and Public Works Committee thwarted her efforts by boycotting a vote on the legislation Tuesday.

An EPA analysis on the economic costs of cap and trade is no small issue. If Tuesday’s elections proved anything, it is that jobs and economic growth are the top concern on Americans’ minds. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis has found that cap and tax legislation would cost the average family-of-four almost $3,000 per year, cause 2.5 million net job losses by 2035, and a produce a cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) loss of $9.4 trillion between 2012 and 2035. The EPA has issued preliminary reports reaching different conclusions; including an October 23 report on Kerry-Boxer that found it would only cost the average American family $80 to $111 dollars per year. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

Yesterday the Washington Times hosted a briefing, “Advancing the Global Debate over Climate Change Policy,” at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event featured four panels, one each for lobbyists, members of think tanks, Members of Congress, and foreign policy experts. This last panel included Czech President Václav Klaus, and his excellent remarks are below:

Last week, at the first Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on S. 1733, the Kerry-Boxer “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained the economic rationale for adopting a Kyoto-style cap-and-trade program.

There is so much silliness packed into Chu’s testimony that it’s hard to know where to begin. [Read more →] (Marlo Lewis, Master Resource)

This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the U.S. Congress that inaction on climate change amounted to a new “Berlin Wall” of “short- sighted self-interest.”

Ms. Merkel’s claim was upside down. There is indeed a new threat to freedom in the offing, but it is the Green Wall that she is recommending. It will span the globe, and there will be no escape.

What collapsed twenty years ago was Communism. What didn’t collapse was anti-capitalism, which remains the principle driver of most shades of politics. The new name for anti-capitalism is environmentalism. The most important political trajectory of the past two decades has been from the rubble of the Wall to the forthcoming climate conference in Copenhagen.

One of the very few politicians who has dared to speak out against the new threat is Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, who castigated Chancellor Merkel for her back-to-front analogy. President Klaus has declared that environmentalism is the 21st century’s “biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.” (Financial Post)

Climate change has slipped so far down on the agenda that at least one key committee chairman has suggested it might have to wait until after the 2010 elections.

A number of factors are conspiring against the Senate version of the bill: a Republican boycott on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a new EPA analysis that could take at least five weeks and wide-ranging disagreements among six competing Senate committee leaders who have jurisdiction.

“Some people are talking about not doing it until after the 2010 election,” Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday.

Rockefeller’s comments came as Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would run another comprehensive study of the final legislation after it is compiled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Rockefeller is one of the leading critics of Boxer’s bill, saying it doesn’t include enough incentives for the coal industry. (Politico)

Advocates for nations vulnerable to climate change are accusing the United States of trying to "kill" a prominent global warming provision that would create a massive insurance program for countries that face rising destruction from natural disasters.

The controversial measure -- which currently is part of the voluminous draft treaty text leading up to international climate talks in Copenhagen -- seeks financial payments for countries that might slip underwater sometime this century, as well as for those that increasingly suffer from drought, floods and cyclones.

The program could cost the United States and other developed nations billions every year, and perhaps amount to an admission that Americans are largely responsible for warming the world. That is considered a legal pitfall that might raise questions on the scale of slavery reparations for African-Americans or financial apologies to Native Americans, some observers say.

"It's really kind of a showdown between countries like the United States, the big, powerful ones that historically contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions, and the little ones, like these small island development states, 40 of which might disappear by 2050 with certain sea level rise scenarios," said Koko Warner, a climate insurance expert at the U.N. University in Bonn, Germany. "And it's really this kind of fight."

Under the proposal, rich countries would be expected to pay the premiums of poorer ones, which would receive payments from the facility during crushing cataclysms. (ClimateWire)

Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation at the UN climate talks in Barcelona, says China should cut its CO2 emissions 50% by 2050.

As discussed in previous posts, meeting the EU/UN/Al Gore CO2 “stabilization” goal — 450 parts per million by 2050 — would require heroic (suicidal?) sacrifices on the part of developing countries. Stabilization at 450 ppm would require, at a minimum, a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050. Because most of all the increase in global emissions over the next four decades (indeed, the next 90 years) is projected to come from developing countries, meeting the stabilization target would require developing countries to lower their emissions more than 60% below baseline projections even if industrial countries magically achieve zero net emissions by 2050!

Barring technological breakthroughs (in their nature unpredictable) that dramatically lower the cost and improve the performance of non-emitting energy technologies, the only way developing countries could comply is by restricting their use of energy. Yet developing countries are poor in no small part because they lack access to abundant, affordable energy. The 450 ppm goal is a recipe for “stabilizing” global poverty.

Don’t be fooled by Pershing’s remark that all China needs to do is keep repeating its “five-year” plan. Supposedly, China is already “well on the way” to reducing its energy intensity 20% by 2010. Based on the only data available, Roger Pielke, Jr. finds that China has cut intensity only 7.4% from 2005 to 2008, “meaning that it has a long way to go to reach a 20% target by 2010.” Besides, even if the first five-year emission intensity reduction plan succeeds, it represents the low-hanging fruit. Replicating that achievement every five years would become increasingly costly and difficult.

That a 450 ppm CO2 stabilization target cannot be met unless China slams the brakes on its economy has been clear from basic emissions arithmetic for some time. What’s new is that a U.S. Government official is quantifying, in the context of climate treaty negotiations, what “meaningful participation” by China actually means.

So far, India and China have escaped Kyoto-style energy rationing. This makes their products more competitive in global markets, and pulls capital and jobs away from CO2-regulated economies. But we’re only two years into the first (2008-2012) Kyoto compliance period. At some point, free riders have to pay up or get off the train.

The EU, Japan, and the United States (if it ratifies Kyoto II) will not accept a permanent arrangement under which they bear all the costs of energy rationing, fork over billions in technology transfers and climate assistance to developing countries, and export more jobs to India and China.

The longer the Kyoto project endures, the greater the pressure India and China will face — in the form of carbon tariffs, for example — to join the club of the carbon-constrained.

If India and China want to protect their right to grow and avert an economically-debilitating era of trade conflict, they should get off the global warming bandwagon as soon as possible. A balanced assessment of the science does not justify alarm. India and China already act on the premise that global warming policy is more dangerous than global warming itself. It’s time for their words to match their deeds. (Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org)

NEW DELHI: The Barcelona talks on climate change saw further fireworks with the chairperson of one of the two parallel tracks of the negotiations
coming under fire from G77 countries, including India, for directing the process away from the ambit of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Bali Action Plan, which differentiates between rich countries and the rest.

The Indian delegation warned that the proposals being made by the chairperson and industrialised countries did away with distinctions between developed and developing countries and imposed new commitments on developing countries.

India also strongly disagreed with US on the suggestion that areas of disagreement on crucial issues of a long-term agreement on climate change be sent to respective ministers to decide. India pointed out that it was not mere divergence of viewpoints but the fact that US and others were asking for a deal which fell out of the rules of the UN convention.

Even as the African countries on Tuesday night accepted a temporary truce on the Kyoto Protocol track of negotiations, the G77 and China grouping led a powerful counter offensive against the attempt to hoist a greenhouse gas emission reduction regime on developing countries similar to the one right now in place for industrialised countries. (Times of India)

Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring into Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar ice caps melt any further, Russia would be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil-fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.

To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997, during negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol (the international treaty on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions). Because Russia is the world's third largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emissions allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments.

As a U.N. official who participated in the talks put it, "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations — and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) — to get the country to ratify the deal.

How the world will persuade Russia to take an active part in the upcoming climate-change summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 2 remains to be seen. Scientists say this is the last real chance that global leaders have to deal with global warming before its effects become irreversible, and this time around there are few obvious carrots with which to bait the Kremlin. (Russia has since abandoned plans to join the WTO.) And Russia has already indicated that it is not putting a high priority on the talks. In June, President Dmitri Medvedev announced the country's emissions targets, which would effectively see Russia spew 30% more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020 than it does today. "We will not cut our development potential," Medvedev said at the time. (Time)

In 1970, the United Nations called on rich countries such as Australia to give 0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus handling fees for the UN, of course. This was necessary to ensure “human dignity”:

In 2002, the United Nations called on rich countries such as Australia to give 0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus handling fees for the UN, of course. This was necessary for “development” and to “conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem”:

In 2004, the United Nations called on rich countries such as Australia to give 0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus handling fees for the UN, of course. This was necessary to ensure “peace”, “collective security” and a “more secure world”:

In 2005, the United Nations called on rich countries such as Australia to give 0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus handling fees for the UN, of course. This was necessary to ensure “millennium development goals” and fight poverty:

In 2009, the United Nations in a draft treaty calls on rich countries such as Australia to give 0.7 per cent of their wealth to the Third World - minus handling fees for the UN, of course. This is necessary to ensure “serious adverse effects of climate change as well as threats to their future economic potential due to insufficient access to shared global atmospheric resources”:

The excuses change, and global warming is the most recent. But the hunger for 0.7 per cent of your cash is a constant.

BARCELONA, Spain — Negotiators and diplomats were working Thursday on a scaled-back version of a global climate change treaty that could be agreed by next month's deadline.

The idea of forging a political agreement, instead of a legally binding treaty, was becoming a more accepted possibility as negotiators acknowledged some nations, including the United States, would not be ready in time for the December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"People are more and more talking about a framework, a framework that you clarify further in the following months," said Artur Runge-Metzger, chief delegate from the EU Commission.

European officials said they envisioned a political accord emerging from Copenhagen enshrining plans by developed countries to cut carbon emissions and by emerging economies to trim back the growth of their emissions. It also would include specific numbers on how much money wealthy countries would channel to the poor to combat the effects of climate change.

The success of Copenhagen now "depends very much on President Obama himself, on ... whether he can put numbers on the table or not," Runge-Metzger said. (AP)

A global deal to stop catastrophic climate change won't be agreed for another year, officials have warned, as rich and poor nations wrangle over the sacrifices each will have to make. (TDT)

Political agreement rather than full treaty is now goal of the meeting, says energy secretary (The Guardian)

Acceptance appears to be growing among both rich and poor countries at the UN climate talks in Barcelona that no binding deal will be reached in Copenhagen next month (John Vidal, The Guardian)

World's key industrialised nations say they have abandoned hope of legally binding deal at Copenhagen summit. (The Guardian)

Officials say major powers too far apart for legal deal in Copenhagen next month (The Independent)

A US refusal to commit to carbon emission cuts and developing countries' demand for greater cuts by rich nations leaves a legally binding deal at Copenhagen looking unlikely. What's next? (David Adam, The Guardian)

With skepticism growing about the chances of reaching a climate agreement next month in Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says he is “cautiously optimistic” that a treaty can still be signed. But in an interview with Yale Environment 360, Pachauri says the global community may have to move ahead without any commitment from the United States.

Few people have as much stake in the outcome of the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet despite growing pessimism that a substantive treaty can be forged in Copenhagen, Pachauri believes a flurry of eleventh-hour negotiations may lead to an agreement, although the United States may not initially be a part of it.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Pachauri expressed disappointment that the U.S. has not yet committed itself to firm greenhouse gas reduction targets, saying “one expected a lot more to have happened in the U.S. by now.” During the eight years of the Bush administration there was a “complete absence of responsibility” in tackling global warming, Pachauri said, and while the Obama administration is moving swiftly to make up lost ground, climate legislation remains bogged down in Congress.

As a result, Pachauri explained, the world community may move ahead with a treaty without the U.S., creating a “small window of opportunity for the U.S. to take a little more time and come back and make its own commitments.” One reason the U.S. Congress may feel compelled to act, Pachauri suggested, is that American business — particularly in the renewable energy sector — may suffer if the U.S. is left out of a global climate treaty. (Yale Environment 360)

I don't know why I have the question mark in the title. Check out this embarrassing argument for action reported in the Guardian:

Jon Stewart makes the hippies enemy list, there is ennui in the Anglosphere and light bulbs are getting a warning label. Also, who is the biggest baddie, Al Gore or Auric Goldfinger?

All this and much more awaits you in this week’s round-up. (Daily Bayonet)

NEW DELHI - Climate-friendly policies not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bring environmental benefits, they also boost and diversify the economy, reveals a recent study analysing some 100 climate policies of G20 countries.

Carried out by think tanks Ecofys and Germanwatch for global NGOs WWF and E3G, the study evaluates climate policies of countries accounting for around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, identifying best and worst examples and lessons learned.

As G20 finance ministers prepare to meet in St. Andrews, Scotland, on Friday and Saturday, WWF has urged them to take the steps required now to ensure that the next major wave of infrastructure investment is green. (IANS)

Many of the technologies in place today that can help slow climate change are already in the public domain

One of the nagging issues in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit are demands that the US and Europe provide massive aid so poorer countries can buy expensive emissions-free technologies. Activist David E. Martin claims many of the patents for today's low-carbon technologies -- including some used in wind power and hybrid cars -- are already in the public domain.

When the host of a party predicts a flop, it rarely inspires much confidence in a good bash. With just over a month to go before international climate talks start in Copenhagen the Danish government has done exactly that: Don't hold your breath, it said, it's unlikely there will be a binding global deal. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had even stronger words earlier this week: "Of course we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty, Kyoto-type, by Copenhagen. There is not time for that."

Money is threatening the fight against climate change. Climate experts have priced emissions-cutting technologies needed by developing countries at €100 billion ($149 billion) a year starting in 2020, and they want to see about half of that investment burden shouldered by public funding from the United States, the European Union and Japan. The world's poorest countries warn that without a solid promise of funds, they will walk out of the Copenhagen summit. But €50 billion is more than the loose change European states, Washington and Tokyo are willing to dole out -- particularly after bailing out their banks. European leaders meeting in Brussels last week shirked concrete commitments, saying only they would contribute their "fair share" to upfront climate financing. (Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, Der Spiegel)

Ben (C-R editor) gave a presentation at York University last week, in a debate organised by the Freedom Association, alongside Professor David Bellamy and Richard S. Courtney, and opposite Stephen Hockman QC (who intends to establish an international climate change court), Simon Bowens from Friends of the Earth, and a couple of environmental science students.

Ben argues that the debate about the science divides on many axes, and predominantly following claims made about the consequences of climate change.

Listen to the audio and see the slides from the presentation with the widget below. (Requires flash) (Climate Resistance)

The question has been raised many times in the past few years: what makes some people so adamant about denying global warming and the resulting climate change, when the evidence is so overwhelming?

On July 24, 2009 the White House released a report on climate change and it determined that Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Forty of the world’s leading climate scientists, including former IPCC chair Sir John Houghton, have called for industrialized countries to make a commitment at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen to cut carbon emissions to at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 “to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that to reach even 450 ppm CO2eq (corresponding to approximately 400 ppm CO2), the emissions of the United States and other developed countries should be reduced by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.1 Thus, to reach 350 ppm CO2, the United States must achieve or exceed the upper end of this range.

So, why are there still so many skeptics and deniers willing to spit into the wind of a mountain of 40 years of scientific evidence? (Jean Williams, Examiner)

A recent poll shows that the proportion of Americans who are convinced that human activity is warming Earth's climate has dropped sharply since last year, to under 40 percent--even though scientists say the data is overwhelming, and continues to build rapidly. A concise new publication delves into what goes on in the human mind that causes this disconnect, and what communicators of climate science can do about it.

The new 43-page guide, The Psychology of Climate Change Communication, released today by Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, looks at how people process information and decide to take action, or not. Using research into groups as disparate as African farmers and conservative U.S. voters, it offers insights on how scientists, journalists and educators can convey evolving scientific knowledge, and increase chances that the public will understand them, and take action when appropriate. (The Earth Institute at Columbia University)

Yes, but... It isn't godly being green - It is an insult to science to rule that belief in man-made climate change is a religious conviction

A British judge has decided that belief in human influence on climate has the status of religious conviction. This is being celebrated as a success by some activists. As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming. Is Jeremy Clarkson similarly entitled to protection if he declares himself a conscientious objector and wants to keep his 4x4?

It is yet another symptom of general confusion over the status of science among the public, politicians, the judiciary and, indeed, just about anyone who is not a practising scientist. I don't ask anyone to believe in human influence on climate because I do, or because thousands of other scientists do. I ask them to look at the evidence. As Einstein is said to have reacted to an article entitled 100 scientists against Einstein: "If I'm wrong, one would be enough."

The scientific case for human influence on climate is not a political opinion, made stronger simply by lots of people signing up. Nor is it a religious conviction, made stronger, in Mr Justice Burton's phrase, if it is "genuinely held". It is based on evidence and understanding that has withstood some of the most intense scrutiny in the history of science. (Myles Allen, The Guardian)

A guest post by Mike Hulme (m.hulme@uea.ac.uk; www.mikehulme.org)

A recent case brought before a UK Employment Appeal Tribunal raises some interesting questions about what constitutes belief in anthropogenic climate change and the (claimed) moral imperative to live a low-carbon lifestyle and persuade others to do the same. Under UK employment law, the judge has ruled that the plaintiff – Tim Nicholson – is entitled to bring a claim of unfair dismissal (claimed to be because of his belief in anthropogenic climate change) against his former employers – Grainger plc – on the grounds that his belief amounted to ‘a philosophical belief similar in cogency and status to a religious belief’.

Let me summarise the case and the arguments first, before reflecting on what the case signifies for the relationship between science, belief and personal behaviour with regard to climate change. (Roger Pielke Jr)

I'm not the high priest of climate change. My environmental beliefs are rational, and courts were right to find in my favour (Tim Nicholson, The Guardian)

Climate change crusader Al Gore says campaigners need more than facts to encourage people to tackle climate change.

The Nobel Prize winner and former US vice president - praised for his film An Inconvenient Truth - has stated that to stop global warming, more needs to be done to ensure that facts are presented in ways that relate to a person's spiritual or moral compass.

Speaking with Newsweek to promote his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Gore explained that he is talking to religious leaders to create new ways to showcase the arguments over climate change. He added that a Christian version of his slideshow featuring scriptural references is "probably his favourite". (Sideways News)

At the moment, geo-engineering is not on the agenda for Copenhagan - but one can see why scientists are arguing that we use it to tackle climate change, writes Robert Colvile. (TDT)

Is the Kilimanjaro losing ice because of man-made global warming? Now, that would be a challenging thing to properly demonstrate (never mind it would run against the gist of the IPCC work for example, where no particular weather-related occurrence can be attributed to “Global Warming”, let alone of the anthropogenic variety).

Regardless…step forward lead author Lonnie G. Thompson, concluding “that the melting of recent years is unique” (in the sense of unseen for “over the last 11,700 years“). And how does he know that AGW got anything to do with it?

This quote from somebody that has just published an article containing the following texts:

Let’s have a look at how many logical fallacies can be found in statements like the below:

Lucia beat me to a post on this, so I’ll giver her the honor here. Interesting thing though, the delay of Hadley may have provided a better data presentation. – Anthony

Guess what? The much anticipated Hadley monthly surface temperature anomalies are now available. I always use the NH+SH simple average.

Guess what else? According to this metric, the global surface temperature anomaly September 2009 cooled relative to August 2009 dropping from0.548C to 0.457C. In contrast, GISSTemp, NOAA/NCDC, UAH and RSS all reported distinctly warmer anomalies in September relative to August. This divergence is a pit surprising– though I’d have to plough through numbers to see if this sort of mismatch is unprecedented in the record.

One of the interesting happenings this month was Hadley’s decision to delay processing because they considered the some data they received to be obviously wrong. We don’t have details on precisely what was wrong about it, but I noticed large blanked out areas on their map:

October, a time for great pumpkins, but not higher US temperatures this time around.

This month’s NOAA climate press release hasn’t been issued yet, but it will be interesting to see what they say about it.

In the meantime, using the NCDC database, you can come to your own conclusion about what October 2009 was like and if it matches what the upcoming October climate press release will say.

I’ve looked at the Ap Index on a regular basis, as it is an indicator of how active the solar dynamo is. When we had sunspot 1029 recently, the largest in months, it gave hope to many that Solar cycle 24 had finally started to ramp up.

From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) on November 2nd, you can see that October 2009 had little Ap magnetic activity. The value is now 3 for the month. Here’s my graph from October 2009 SWPC Ap data:

Leif Svalgaard points out to me another indicator of low solar magnetic activity. Bill Livingston was able to observe sunspot group 1029, and measure its magnetic field and contrast. Leif’s graph with my annotation for group 1029 is below. By itself, this one sunspot group isn’t significant, but it does fit into a prediction made by Livingston and Penn. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.

This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge. (WCR)

A new study in the journal Science has just shown that all of the climate modeling results of the past are erroneous. The IPCC's modeling cronies have just been told that the figures used for greenhouse gas forcings are incorrect, meaning none of the model results from prior IPCC reports can be considered valid. What has caused climate scientists' assumptions to go awry? Short lived aerosol particles in the atmosphere changing how greenhouse gases react in previously unsuspected ways. The result is another devastating blow to the climate catastrophists' computer generated apocalyptic fantasies.

In a stunning article entitled “Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions,” a group of researchers from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York, led by Drew T. Shindell, have called into question the values used to calculate the “forcing” due to various greenhouse gases. “We calculated atmospheric composition changes, historical radiative forcing, and forcing per unit of emission due to aerosol and tropospheric ozone precursor emissions in a coupled composition-climate model,” states the paper's abstract. “We found that gas-aerosol interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol.”

According to the study, emissions of NO_x, CO, and methane have substantial impacts on aerosols by altering the abundance of oxidants, especially hydroxyl, which convert SO₂ into sulfate. Global abundance of hydroxyl and sulfate changes by 18% and 13% for increased NO_x by significant amounts. By –13% and –9% for CO, and by –26% and –11% for methane. Coupling in the other direction is very weak because reactions of gases with aerosols only have a small effect on the amounts of radiatively active ozone and methane. For example, SO₂ emissions enhance the removal of NO_x through reactions on particulate surfaces, causing ozone to decrease, but the radiant forcing is only –0.004 W/m². Increased SO₂ leads to substantially reduced nitrate aerosol, however, owing to greater ammonium sulfate formation at the expense of ammonium nitrate.

This is not the first time that Shindell has published research on aerosols and their impact on climate change, but this study is a step beyond that previous work. The importance of this revelation is underlined by the two perspective articles that accompany the paper in the October 30, 2009, issue of Science. In one perspective, entitled “Clean Air for Megacities,” David D. Parrish and Tong Zhu, noting that over half of humanity now lives in cities, stress that reducing particulate emissions in major cities is essential to controlling climate change. Again there is an open admission of scientific ignorance:

The question of time scales becomes very important here. Most GHGs remain in the atmosphere for years, even decades, while aerosols are thought to be relatively short lived. This has led to speculation that climate change can be controlled (“mitigated”) by controlling aerosol emissions. This idea is expanded upon by Almut Arneth et al. in their perspective entitled “Clean the Air, Heat the Planet?” They state: “There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks. However, recent model studies have shown that changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional.” In short, there are non-linear response at work here.

Areneth et al. restate the assertion by Shindell et al. that current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases. In other words, current climate models are to simplistic, ignoring the importance of aerosols and their interactions with GHG. Even so, they are convinced that controlling particulate pollution could be the key to controlling climate change:

This would imply that if aerosols—black carbon in particular—were reduced we should see global cooling. And this is using the IPCC values for CO₂ sensitivity. So much for the potency of CO₂ as the major driver of climate change. But the researchers are not sure what effect a reduction in aerosols would have. Particulate pollution control could have the opposite effect, accelerating climate warming.

If reduction of short-lived pollutants with negative forcing—especially sulfate aerosols—outweighs the reduction of those with positive forcing things would heat up instead. Some climate sensitivity analyses suggest temperature increases well above IPCC estimates for all but the lowest estimates of net aerosol forcing. Changes in the atmospheric aerosol load may thus lead to a strong greenhouse gas warming response. Areneth et al. conclude by saying: “Direct and indirect interactions between climate change, land ecosystems, and chemistry can amplify or dampen the climate effects of air pollutants, but are poorly represented in models.” This should come as a shock to no one.

Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany, is co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again—a long-term trend based on human greenhouse gas emissions. He attributes the cooling to cyclical changes in the atmosphere and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO). Conditions in the Pacific will remain pretty much as they are. Of course, this prediction also relies on models. “There is a lot of room for improvement” in the models, says Latif. “You need to know what you can believe and can't believe from the models.” It seems that occasionally a model will come up with a prediction that actually happens. This is analogous to the old saying “even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn.” The problem is, no one knows ahead of time which acorn the pig will find or which model prediction might be right.

The final conclusion from Shindell et al. was this: “Finally, our results demonstrate that improving our knowledge of aerosol-climate interactions is important not only for better understanding the aerosol contribution to past and future climate change, but even for correctly evaluating the effects of long-lived greenhouse gas emissions from methane-oxidant-aerosol interactions.” Scientist speak for “we've got it wrong in the past and don't know what the right answers are.” This comes on the heels of previous reports about things science didn't know. Over just the past year there have been revelations about couplings between the lower and upper atmosphere (see “Atmospheric Solar Heat Amplifier Discovered”), the carbon cycle (see “New "Jelly Pump" Rewrites Carbon Cycle”), ocean circulation (see “Conveyor Belt Model Broken”), and the importance of water vapor (see “Climate Models Blown Away By Water Vapor” and “More Water Vapor Woes For Climate Modelers”). I have read scores of journal articles that say “the models need to be changed,” or words to that effect.

Models are only as good as the information they are built on. GCM consist of dozens of equations written to reflect how liquids and gases, driven by energy from the Sun, move about the planet. If the coefficients used in those equations to represent the impact of various GHG and aerosols are in error, then the equations are wrong—they do not represent physical reality. If the equations are wrong then the models can not be right. Furthermore, when climate modelers tweak their playthings to match previous periods of climate variation, a practice called backcasting, they are actually proving that even an incorrect model can be made to match an arbitrary set of test data.

Since the parameters contained in the models are incorrect they should not match the test data. Tuning models to do so means that the GCM used to predict future conditions are actually incorrect models, improperly tuned! Little wonder no model managed to predict the current halt in global warming. And even if they had it would have been a blind pig finding an acorn—an incorrect prediction that just happened to match what happened in the real world. The fundamental conclusion is simple, no climate model prediction from the past thirty years can be trusted.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

Two new reports say climate change will reduce agriculture production and raise food prices in the developing world. The studies were released during a round of U.N. sponsored climate talks in Bangkok. (VOA)

There's been a lot of talk about boosting agriculture to ensure food security in the coming years. But Thursday, at the Barcelona climate conference, a new report linked agriculture and climate change.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says while agriculture has been hurt by climate change for many areas, it also contributes 14 percent of global greenhouse gases. The report looks at ways of reducing those emissions while benefitting food production. (VOA)

Matei “Matt” Georgescu is a Post-doctoral Scholar in the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. His general research focuses on the use of mesoscale numerical modeling to study the interaction(s) between the land and overlying atmosphere. Human alteration of the earth’s surface has changed (and continues to change) the manner in which solar radiation is absorbed by the surface and in turn modifies the fluxes of energy and water back into the atmosphere, with significant implications for weather and climate. Specifically, he is interested in the regional climatic impact of changing landscapes, due to, for example, altered agricultural practices or urbanization. At Stanford, his main goal will be to quantify how local and regional climate responds to landscape change resulting from increased biofuel production.

Guest Post by Matei Georgescu “The Potential Impact Of US Biofuels On Regional Climate”

Recent work has examined both the direct and indirect effect of land-use change associated with bio-energy production. Chief among these effects are the resultant increases in long-lived greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide). Increased emphasis on bio-energy production has also revealed an influence on global food security. These impacts are of critical importance in light of securing future global energy demand at a reduced environmental and societal cost.

The direct climate effect associated with land-use change due to bio-energy production, such as the modulation of surface energy fluxes, with potential impact(s) on temperature and precipitation, is an additional matter that requires attention.

A recent manuscript addressing this issue, entitled “The Potential Impact of US Biofuels on Regional Climate”, has appeared In Press in Geophysical Research Letters: http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2009GL040477-pip.pdf

Georgescu, M., D. B. Lobell, and C. B. Field (2009), The Potential Impact of US biofuels on Regional Climate, Geophys. Res. Lett., In Press, doi: 10.1029/2009GL040477. (pdf)

In this work, using the latest version of the WRF modeling system, we present a suite of single-month (July) sensitivity experiments designed to isolate the maximum regional climate impact for the full range of realistic biophysical parameter limits appropriate to bio-energy crops (Miscanthus, switchgrass, maize, and soy), over the Corn Belt of the U.S. As an additional goal, we also aimed to diagnose the relevant importance of different biophysical parameters as a way of informing future representations of crops.

Using the latest version of the WRF modeling system we conducted twenty-four, midsummer, continental-wide, sensitivity experiments by imposing realistic biophysical parameter limits appropriate for bio-energy crops in the Corn Belt of the United States. In the absence of strain/crop-specific parameterizations, a primary goal of this work was to isolate the maximum regional climate impact, for a trio of individual July months, due to landuse change resulting from bio-energy crops and to identify the relative importance of each biophysical parameter in terms of its individual effect. Maximum, local changes in 2m temperature of the order of 1°C occur for the full breadth of albedo (ALB), minimum canopy resistance (RCMIN), and rooting depth (ROOT) specifications, while the regionally (105°W – 75°W and 35°N – 50°N) and monthly averaged response of 2m temperature was most pronounced for the ALB and RCMIN experiments, exceeding 0.2°C. The full range of albedo variability associated with biofuel crops may be sufficient to drive regional changes in summertime rainfall. Individual parameter effects on 2m temperature are additive, highlight the cooling contribution of higher leaf area index (LAI) and ROOT for perennial grasses (e.g., Miscanthus) versus annual crops (e.g., maize), and underscore the necessity of improving location- and vegetation-specific representation of RCMIN and ALB.

This work adds to a growing body of knowledge demonstrating the impact of land-use change on climate. Although only an initial step, we believe this is the first work addressing the potential climate impact (on metrics such as temperature and precipitation) of land-use change associated with the expansion of US biofuels. (Climate Science)

PARIS - Oil major BP may start construction next year of a cellulosic biofuel plant as part of a push toward commercial production of new types of biofuels from next year, the head of the group's biofuels division said.

BP is planning to develop commercial production of grass-based ethanol in the United States with partner Verenium, which already has a demonstration cellulosic ethanol facility, Philip New, Chief Executive of BP Biofuels, said on Tuesday.

BP is also planning to launch in 2012/13 commercial output of biobutanol at future biofuel plant in the UK, he said. (Reuters)

LONDON - An international pact and U.S. legislation to tackle climate change will hit oil refiners' profits and may force some to shut some capacity, Thomas O'Malley, chairman of Swiss refiner Petroplus, said on Thursday. (Reuters)

It seems as if Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers should be lobbying for increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Rogers is convinced — because his grandchildren told him so — that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet. So Rogers helped form the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of a few big businesses and environmental groups that lobbies for carbon caps.

Ironically, the very global cooling that Rogers seems to be for is actually hurting his company’s earnings.

According to Duke’s the third quarter earnings report, earnings-before-interest-and-tax (EBIT) for Duke’s electric and gas division decreased:

But for the three factors mentioned above, USFE&G’s Q3 EBIT would have increased by 11%.

Finally, Duke has spent about $10 million since 2008 lobbying for carbon caps. That’s a lot of lost earnings itself spent working against the interests of Duke shareholders and customers.

Hey Jim, there’s a reason children aren’t allowed to run the world. (Green Hell)

That's the sound of clean coal. Well, cleaner coal. A relatively small unit attached to the smokestack at the Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virginia is capturing some 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide the coal-fired plant would otherwise belch into the sky.

The loud thrum comes from the whirring of fans that cool the flue gas and the jostling of an agitator that keeps things moving in the tower where the reaction to actually capture the CO2 takes place. There’s also the chug of the compressor, which turns the odorless, colorless greenhouse gas into a milky liquid at 1,400 pounds per square inch (psi).

After that it's off to the storage wells where the fluid CO2 is further compressed to more than 2,000 psi and pumped a mile and a half underground where it's injected into the pores between grains of rock in a layer of sandstone laid down some 440 million years ago.

So far so good for the Mountaineer project, which cost American Electric Power more than $70 million to build. But questions remain. What can be done to clean up coal's other problems, like toxic ash residue or the removal of actual mountaintops? Can carbon capture and storage be scaled up to the size necessary to capture a significant fraction of the world's greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning? What will that cost? And will all that CO2 stay put? (SciAm)

UK ministers talk up the carbon capture research programme as if it were already an available technology (Fred Pearce, The Guardian)

As the City recovers from one disaster, the next is on its way – but carbon trading will damage the planet, not just the economy (Andy Atkins, The Guardian)

SAO PAULO - Brazil's huge offshore oil find, though an economic treasure chest, threatens to undermine the renewable energy industry the country has worked so hard to build.

A possible oversupply of oil products in the local market once expensive exploration, production and refining initiatives are up and running could make ethanol, biodiesel and hydroelectricity less competitive.

This possibility is feeding a vigorous debate about the country's relatively "green" energy matrix falling into a fossil fuel trap.

The government says it won't make the same mistakes that some oil-rich countries have made -- such as selling gasoline cheaply at home and neglecting other industrial sectors as oil cash flows in -- but market fundamentals can undermine the best of intentions.

"I think Brazil has to be very careful to not let the subsalt exploration take its energy matrix down a dirtier path," said Adriano Pires, director of Brazilian Infrastructure Center, a think tank and consultancy.

"The country cannot succumb to the populist temptation of subsidizing oil products, as some oil-rich countries did in the past," Pires said, echoing many comments in the local press.

Brazil's energy supply in 2008 was 36 percent renewable and 64 percent nonrenewable, according to statistics from oil producer BP. By comparison, energy supply for the combined 30-member OECD group of advanced industrial economies was 5.2 percent renewable and 94.8 percent nonrenewable.

Brazil is still in the early stages of exploring massive oil fields in the so-called subsalt layer off its coast, but analysts estimate the deposits range from 30 billion to 100 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

A big rise in oil output is still at least a decade away since the ultra-deep exploration involves tough technological challenges. But the government is earmarking enormous investments for oil extraction and refining, worrying proponents of renewable energy sources such as hydro, biofuels and biomass. (Reuters)

Global oil companies are finding it harder to resist the huge volume of crude in Iraq. But their change of heart could increase tensions in OPEC.

In June many of the world's biggest energy companies walked away from bidding on potentially rich oil fields in Iraq. While they liked the billions of barrels of reserves that were on offer, ENI, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and others balked at the tough terms the Iraqis were proposing.

Today they're coming back-and getting roughly the same deal that was on the table during the summer. On Nov. 2, ENI initialed a contract to boost production in the Zubair field near Basra, which it estimates has 6 billion barrels of reserves. Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips also are in talks that could help boost Iraq's oil production to more than 6 million barrels per day-behind only Saudi Arabia in OPEC. "This is the window in which if anything can happen it will happen," says Alex Munton, an Iraq specialist at Edinburgh-based energy consultants Wood Mackenzie.

The big oil companies are reconsidering Iraq because they realize this may be among their last opportunities to get large volumes of crude. Britain's BP, for instance, typically turns up its nose at anything below roughly 700 million barrels of reserves; Rumaila, about 30 miles west of Basra, may have 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil, BP estimates. Another field in the same class is West Qurna, located north of Basra, where a group including Exxon Mobil and Shell is competing against a partnership of ConocoPhillips and Russia's Lukoil for production rights. (Der Spiegel)

As Palin jousts with Biden on energy independence, the government reports that we lead the world in energy reserves. From oil to gas to coal, we are sitting on prosperity. So why are we importing anything?

One of the interesting sidelights of the NY-23 race was an exchange on energy independence between Vice President Joe Biden and the former governor of energy-rich Alaska, Sarah Palin. Biden, who came in to campaign for Democrat Bill Owens, was reminded of the issue of energy.

"The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'Drill, baby, drill,'" Biden said at an Owens fundraiser, referring to Palin's own campaign slogan last year. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'Drill, baby, drill.'"

Actually, it's not, according to a new report produced by the Congressional Research Service, hardly an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy or on the payroll of Big Oil. The report says that if all our energy resources are added up and converted to a barrels of oil equivalent (BOE), the U.S. has the largest reserves in the world.

According to the CRS, the U.S. has 1,321 billion barrels of oil (or barrels of oil equivalent for other sources of energy) if you combine its recoverable natural gas, oil and coal reserves. Russia is close behind with 1,248 billion barrels BOE. Other energy-producing nations, including many that export oil to the U.S., lag behind.

Of course, much of our world-leading reserves are off-limits by government edict. We recently commented on the federal government designation of 200,541 squares miles off the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for the abundant polar bear, effectively killing hopes to exploit the vast energy riches of the American Arctic.

Alaska's Chukchi Sea, part of the designated habitat, holds more oil and gas than anyone thought — 1,600 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world's supply and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of the estimated global resources.

The CRS report also notes the U.S. has 28% of the world's coal reserves, with Russia again coming in second with 19%. (IBD)

I loved the true story of the Nigerian energy worker who, having received a pay check for $900, amended the figure to read $9,000. As the reporter wittily put it, “The check fraud proved entirely successful ... right up to the point where he attempted to cash it.” That’s kind of how I feel about the renewable energy revolution. It will prove entirely successful in the eyes of the public and media -- right up to the point where the lights start going out. And those lights will soon start going out, according to a new report.

I fully understand the romantic attraction of the clean energy revolution and the rush to replace ‘dirty’ fossil fuels. In the light of the war on carbon it’s a no brainer, right? Which is precisely why, just as diminishing EU and UK subsidies are prompting an industry exodus westward, the British renewables industry may be about to be given an unexpected investment shot in the arm from some of the world’s biggest multinational companies in one of the biggest analogs to the adage “I gave at the church,” in this case the environmentalism church. Companies, it seems, in their rush to appear politically correct are oblivious to how that renewable revolution is ushering in a new dark age in Britain. (Peter C. Glover, Energy Tribune)

Germany is pinning its economic hopes on future-oriented industries such as solar panel manufacturing. But high-tech companies are facing shortages of essential metals as China, which dominates the world market in so-called rare earths, begins stockpiling the highly sought-after resources. (Der Spiegel)

High-voltage export from Canada - Our largest trading partner, Canada, wants to start shipping the U.S. a new product: green energy.

Canadian utilities are rapidly investing in renewable power, despite slumping demand for electricity in their country. The goal: to capture a share of the growing market for export of green electricity to the United States.

Canada's domestic electricity demand was flat from 2004 through 2008, while its electricity exports to the United States jumped 70 percent, with most of that growth met by higher renewable power generation. Hydroelectric power grew 10 percent and wind power nearly tripled, while fossil fuel generation fell 10 percent.

The growth of Canada's green power exports comes alongside the continued expansion of its much larger, more well-known export: petroleum, including heavy oil sands production responsible for high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. (Dow Jones News Service)

FRANKFURT - Germany's nuclear power policy of keeping old reactors open longer to bridge the gap to greener energy may also leave the door open to eventually break a major electoral taboo -- new atomic power plants.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's new center-right government last week kept nuclear energy alive but stressed that would only be until renewable energies are fully viable. Popular opposition to nuclear is strong and visceral.

A total of 17 reactors had faced closure in the coming decade but can now expect a new lease of life.

Analysts think this leaves room for opinions to change. (Reuters)

Nuclear energy is seen by some countries as an effective way to keep up electricity supplies while cutting emissions of climate warming gases from burning fossil fuels.

Lingering concerns over nuclear safety, waste and costs have limited the sector's growth in western Europe but several central and eastern European countries are keen to build them as a way of reducing their reliance on imported fuels.

Below are the nuclear plants being built or planned across Europe: (Reuters)

Most nuclear power plants have a nominal design lifetime of up to 40 years but many have been approved to operate for longer.

The possibility of component replacement and extending the lifetimes of existing plants are very attractive to utilities, given the high cost of constructing new nuclear plants and lingering public opposition to them, while some governments see them as a good way to limit carbon emissions.

But economic, regulatory and political considerations have led to the premature closure of some power reactors.

Below are details of those plants that have been granted life extensions in Europe: (Reuters)

PARIS - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said he had confidence in the management of Areva, the world's biggest nuclear reactor maker, which has been told by safety bodies to alter safety features on its new power plants.

Safety agencies in France, Britain and Finland this week ordered state-controlled Areva and EDF, the world's largest nuclear electricity operator, to modify safety features on new European Pressurised Reactors (EPR).

They said there was insufficient independence between the day-to-day systems and the emergency systems. (Reuters)

Unless you've been trapped in a cave or isolated yourself in a bomb shelter since the 1980s you've probably heard a great deal about and from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After four Assessment Reports and sundry Interim Reports we've got this climate thing pretty well sorted, right?

Sorry, we haven't exactly nailed that down yet -- in fact we haven't even agreed what we are trying to measure or just how to go about it, here's James Hansen in a NASA Q&A The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT):

Well, yes but... models are actually tuned to deliver that result if possible, that doesn't mean it is the correct figure. Irrespective of the model flavor used, from the most basic to the multipartite coupled models utilizing each other's output as dynamic input, all models are by necessity overly simplistic and inadequate to represent the chaotic, nonlinear coupled system we call climate. While the average of model representations of global climate suggests Earth's mean temperature is about 14 °C (287 K), the 16 most trusted and 'stable' models tested in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) (see original .pdf) are not well able to reproduce this result.

This graphic represents the unforced control runs for the "ensemble" (IPCC-speak for "haven't got a clue if any of these actually represent reality -- throw 'em all together and say the errors average out"). The range starts out guessing mean Earth surface temperature as anything from 11.5 to 16.5 °C (roughly 285-290 K) and ends -- without messing with carbon dioxide levels or anything else -- with the guesses even further apart. If they can't agree where they should start in a 5 °C range how are they supposed to figure out trends an order of magnitude smaller?

Note also that several of these models produce at least as much warming as we think we have measured over the entire Twentieth Century absent any additional forcing whatsoever. Seven of the sixteen controls even suggest the world should be a little (or a lot) warmer than we believe it to be at present (how's that for "consensus"?).

Precipitation results for the various models are similarly erratic, signifying a huge problem in the way models handle the most important greenhouse gas: water vapor. At this time they appear more a disarray of models and we will not be paying attention to model "guesstimations" any time soon.

Hmm... uh, no. The fact is sites have been urbanized, recording locations changed, instruments updated, records lost or destroyed... We are pretty sure there was a step change around 1976/77 (the Pacific Climate Shift) and satellite measures suggest there could have been a step warming in the new millennium, or not.

Well, probably not. Craig Loehle has published a reconstruction restoring the Medieval Warm and suggesting our thermometric records are based in the coldest period of the last 2,000 years. Having diverse subsets of proxies deliver similar results suggests the reconstruction to be quite robust.

But we know for sure it is going to get disastrously hot because of human activity?

No again. Actually current indications are the planet is likely to cool for at least a decade or two.

Well, we have to ration energy and reduce people's living standards to save the planet, right?

That's what they say, although we've never seen any real-world data to support that. Nor do we know of anyone who can honestly claim to have consistently predicted whether subsequent years would be warmer or cooler than preceding ones.

We don't know how much it has changed recently with a precision greater than the estimate of change.

One thing we do know -- we don't know enough to require radical alteration of the energy supply and suppression of people's living standards.

Are we really going to harm great numbers of people on the basis of no more than a few campfire ghost stories?

U.S. CAPITOL WEST STEPS - Last Thursday a call went out from talk radio to conservatives to gather today, at noon, for a press conference on Obamacare.

Over 10,000 people have shown up so far to raise their concerns about the health care discussions currently under way. We are halfway in the middle of the crowd and can barely see podium with all the signs, people, and flags. These protesters are fired up.

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) opened the event. Followed by an opening prayer, the pledge of allegiance and the anthem. Actors Jon Voight and John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers) have also spoke. Best selling author Mark Levin detailed the problems with the current health care bill, telling the crowd, “Freedom is only one generation from extinction.”

GENEVA - The H1N1 swine flu virus has picked up steam in the northern hemisphere and is expected to cause more serious infections and deaths as cold weather sets in, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.

But the virus is not known to have mutated, including in people infected in a large outbreak in Ukraine, meaning that antivirals continue to provide effective treatment, it said.

Mexico is reporting more H1N1 cases than early in the pandemic, which began in April, and the United States shows higher levels of flu-like illness than in past years, top WHO flu expert Keiji Fukuda said. Swine flu is also on the rise in Europe and Central Asia.

"We anticipate seeing continued or increased activity during the winter period in the northern hemisphere. This also means that we expect to see continued reports of serious cases and deaths," Fukuda told a news conference. "At WHO we remain quite concerned about the pattern that we are seeing."

Most people recover without specialised medical care for symptoms such as fever, cough and sore throat, but pregnant women and people with underlying chronic conditions like asthma are at higher risk of potentially fatal complications, he said. (Reuters)

People, desperate and looking for any answer to their problems with tainted drywall, are rejoicing over the mere announcement that Knauf Plasterboard (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. (KPT)—one of the Chinese drywall manufacturers involved in recent defective drywall complaints—has offered to accept service of process of an omnibus class action complaint. This will allow claimants with KPT drywall to consolidate their claims in one lawsuit against KPT.

All this means is that the litigation can proceed without worrying about going through the Hague Convention, which sets forth the method for the service of process abroad.

The Hague Convention for the Service of Process Abroad requires claimants to pay approximately $15,000 per lawsuit, which allows for the translation of legal documents into Chinese and to have them presented to the appropriate authorities in the Peoples Republic of China to obtain service on the Chinese drywall manufacturers.

The plaintiffs should understand that they have simply advanced to the stage whereby a would-be defendant says, "You don't like it, then sue me!" Real progress would be if KPT were to meet directly with affected homeowners, and offer to actually do something about their problems.

Nearly always, litigation is a substitute for doing the right thing, and this case is no exception.

The problem with any lawsuit against KPT is that the Chinese government will surely have something to say about it, and will likely delay any substantive settlement for a long time. Moreover, as the class increases in size, the recovery by the individual plaintiffs will be negligible. The lead attorneys will probably make some money, but even for them, nothing is assured in this type of action.

Clearly, the only answer is a government bailout, and fortunately for the homeowners, there is a very good precedent for this.

Utah senator Orrin Hatch created a lifetime seat for himself with the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA)—passed in 1990. RECA provides for money (typically $50,000) to be paid to victims of certain cancers, who simply have to prove that they lived in a list of counties during a particular time period. RECA was based on the completely fictitious notion that nuclear testing in the 1950s produced cancer in people who lived downwind of the blasts.

RECA has paid out over $1 billion so far, and has produced bountiful results for many Utah-based politicians. Few people know that since 1950, Utah has had one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the country. Moreover, Washington County—supposedly ground zero for the fallout—has one of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the state.

I cite RECA as being a good precedent for tainted drywall affected homeowners because the payout criteria are extremely loose. Many people who lived in the affected counties in the 1950s, and got leukemia 50 years later (which by all rational medical analysis could have nothing to do with exposure so long ago), were cheerfully handed the big checks.

Thus, given the difficulty of really proving health effects, a RECA type approach could have wide-open criteria. KPT and others could be encouraged to donate to the victims fund, and that would save time and effort otherwise spent with pointless litigation.

The affected homeowners should lobby their senators, and beware of lawyers bearing gifts. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Americans consume over $4 billion of soy foods each year because of their many health benefits. But new studies suggest that eating large amounts of soy's estrogen-mimicking compounds might reduce fertility in women, trigger early puberty and disrupt development of fetuses and children. 'We know that too much genistein is not a good thing for a developing mouse; it may not be a good thing for a developing child,' said Retha Newbold of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (Lindsey Konkel, Environmental Health News)

New research shows that ornamental plants can drastically reduce levels of stress and ill health and boost performance levels at work because they soak up harmful indoor air pollution.

Researchers have now identified five "super ornamental plants" which every workplace should have to clean up indoor air.

They include English ivy, waxy leaved plants and ferns.

According to a World Health Organisation report in 2002, harmful indoor pollutants represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year.

Indoor air is up to 12 times more polluted than outdoor air in some areas, with air quality affected by chemicals from paints, varnishes, adhesives, furnishings, clothing, solvents, building materials and even tap water.

These produce so-called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that have been shown to cause illnesses in people who are exposed to the compounds in indoor spaces.

Now horticulture experts in the US have tested a number of ornamental indoor plants for their ability to remove harmful VOCs from indoor air.

Stanley Kays, the lead researcher at University of Georgia, said some indoor plants have the ability to effectively remove harmful VOCs from the air and not only improve physical health, but also someone's wellbeing.

Adding these plants to indoor spaces can reduce stress, increase performance at work and reduce symptoms of ill health. (TDT)

Childhood obesity in the United States is reaching epidemic proportions. With more than one fourth of advertising on daytime and prime time television devoted to foods and beverages and continuing questions about the role television plays in obesity, a study in the November/December issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior examines how food advertising aimed at children might be a large contributor to the problem. (ScienceDaily)

The failure of the stimulus package to create jobs and generate economic growth becomes more apparent each day – despite preposterous claims from the White House about all the jobs they say it has created and saved. Counter intuitively (at least in the sane world outside of Washington), the stimulus’ failure increases the risk that Congress will try to pass another stimulus package based on their perceived need to “do something” to help the still-ailing economy.

Over the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth’s soils, waters, and atmosphere with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems.

A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet’s ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore — including our own bodies.

In 1908, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to make ammonia by capturing nitrogen gas from the air. In the process he invented a cheap new source of nitrogen fertilizer, ending our dependence on natural sources, whether biological or geological. Nitrogen fertilizer fixed from the air confounded the mid-century predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others that global famine loomed. Chemical fertilizer today feeds about three billion people.

But the environmental consequences of the massive amounts of nitrogen sent coursing through the planet’s ecosystems are growing fast. We have learned to fear carbon and the changes it can cause to our climate. But one day soon we may learn to fear the nitrogen fix even more. (Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360)

Guffaw! What do these guys use for physics? Forests in the desert: the answer to climate change? - Climate change could be cancelled out in a staggeringly ambitious plan to plant the Sahara desert and Australian outback with trees

One day, this could all be trees … a recent scientific paper claims that turning deserts into forests is the best way forward. Photograph: Guido Cozzi/Corbis

Some talk of hoisting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, while others want to cloud the high atmosphere with millions of tonnes of shiny sulphur dust. Now, scientists could have dreamed up the most ambitious geoengineering plan to deal with climate change yet: converting the parched Sahara desert to a lush forest. The scale of the ambition is matched only by the promised rewards – the scientists behind the plan say it could "end global warming".

The scheme has been thought up by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, together with Igor Aleinov and David Rind, climate modellers at Nasa. The trio have outlined their plan in a new paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change, and they modestly conclude it "probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming".

Under the scheme, planted fields of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus would cover the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback, watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. The new blanket of tree cover would bring its own weather system and rainfall, while soaking up carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere. The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. Sounds expensive? The researchers say it could be more economic than planned global investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). (David Adam, The Guardian)

Sen. Barbara Boxer went ahead with the markup hearing on her global warming bill this morning despite the absence of all but one Republican (George Voinovich). She sat alone during markup doing nothing for 15 minutes. Michelle Malkin obtained photos. See below.

Washington, DC, November 4, 2009 – The Competitive Enterprise Institute responded today to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce's announcement that it will now support energy-rationing legislation by calling on small businesses to drop their Chamber membership and join CEI in fighting this catastrophic legislation.

In a November 3 letter to Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R- Okla.), the Chairman and Ranking Member, respectively, of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the U. S. Chamber announced that it would now support legislation based on a recent New York Times op-ed by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

"It appears that the Chamber has caved under enormous pressure from some of its biggest member companies. They have reluctantly enlisted in the effort to reward these big special interests with gigantic windfall profits at the expense of consumers and small businesses," said Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy.

"We invite small businesses whose interests are no longer being well-represented by the Chamber on this critical issue to drop their membership in the U. S. Chamber and join us at CEI in fighting against all energy-rationing legislation, even so-called compromises that only partly wreck the economy. We welcome their support. We will not capitulate," said Ebell.

“In its letter, the Chamber repeatedly sites the Oct. 14 Kerry-Graham op-ed in the New York Times as the reason for cuddling up to cap-and-trade," noted CEI senior fellow Marlo Lewis. Dr. Lewis explains why it is a hopeless muddle here. (Press Release)

For the second day, Republican Senators boycotted the scheduled markup of the Kerry-Boxer (S.1733) cap-and-trade bill. Senator Inhofe (R-OK) appeared briefly to emphasize that the minority is holding firm to their demands that the Environmental Protection Agency complete a comprehensive economic analysis.

Rather than use a procedural gambit to trounce the rights of the minority, Senator Boxer announced the committee would receive a briefing from committee staff on the actual provisions of the latest version of the bill. That is certainly not objectionable, but common sense suggests a thorough understanding of the legislation would be a prerequisite for a markup.

In addition, just as Senators prepare to gain a better understanding about the legislation, Senator Rockefeller (D-WV) hinted, “some people are talking about not doing it [global warming] until after the 2010 election.” Senator Olympia Snow (R-ME) went as far to say, “Obviously, it’s not an issue we will be readily addressing this year.”

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two lawyers currently working at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spoke out against cap and trade in their Washington Post column. Zabel has first hand experience with cap and trade, overseeing California’s cap and trade and offsets programs. The article is full of good reasons why a cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a bad idea. They also highlight how it differs substantially from the acid rain cap and trade plan, which proponents tout as a reason to cap and trade CO2:

There's a rumor making the rounds among those whose goose is intended to be cooked by passage of the pending "cap-and-trade" energy rationing legislation. That rumor: "You can't just say 'no.'"

In the infinitesimal chance that this rumor was started by someone other than those pushing cap-and-trade, its author has been in Washington far too long or has a cruel sense of humor. Arsonists in our national parks have done less damage than this prank is set to unleash.

The idea that "you can't just say 'no'" is risible on its face: not only can you say no; sometimes you have no choice. For hydrocarbon producers, and for those among parties combusting hydrocarbons capable of taking a slightly longer view than a period of free emission "allowances," this is one of those times.

Notice, for example, how when cap-and-trade promoters are presented a list of provisions to ameliorate the harm they cause -- preemption of EPA "endangerment" or other authorities, of state mischief, of the Endangered Species Act, NEPA, nuisance, etc. -- they oddly feel bound by no such restriction. "No" is, in fact, the only thing that they can come up with.

The inanity does not stop there. The absurdity of this claim and the slow-witted acceptance of it had led me to give some thought to the phenomenon and to the entire, related rhetorical repertoire. So far as I can tell, they are the strongest proof yet that C.S. Lewis' Wormwood does indeed exist, and he is in our nation's capital, whispering in the ears of "the patient." He tells them, "this is how you sound smart in Washington. And, if 'Well, you can't just say no’ fails to persuade, fall back on ‘but, we have to do something.’”

Fear not that nothing ever proposed would actually do anything in terms of the climate. Facts are surely for losers in this matter. If your opponent persists, Wormwood advises, "dazzle them with your witty -- and, I assure you, insightful, no matter how it sounds -- 'If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.'" Then, "If all else fails, sigh, and say, 'well, we just need "certainty."'

By this point, some readers with in-house or retained advisors may begin to feel slightly warm around the collar. It sounds familiar and, let's face it, upon reflection it’s embarrassingly clear that these talking points were provided by the other team, eagerly lapped up by a lobbying class which is unique in its immunity from the economic harms that such schemes will bring. In fact after the "certainty" of cap-and-trade, those lawyers and lobbyists will be more in demand than ever. Odd, that. (Chris Horner, Energy Tribune)

Link to this Playlist at YouTube.com...

In the first part, Lindzen starts to talk about the propagandistic character of the climate change meme, contacts between climate institutes and politicians, and the explicitly stated desires of climatologists to abuse the topic.

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is currently the largest cap-and-trade scheme in the world. Covering 11,500 installations and countries with a combined population of around 500 million, the scope of the scheme is truly enormous. Before Americans adopt a cap-and-trade scheme of their own, it is vital that they take a serious look at how things have gone in Europe. I hope that my study, released at the end of last week, can demonstrate some of the huge risks that the United States will face if cap-and-trade advocates get their way.

The first thing to note is that the scheme has cost European consumers a fortune. There was a total bill of €93 ($123) billion between the introduction of the scheme in January 2005 and the end of 2008. That is €185 ($245) for every man, woman, and child across an area where average incomes are considerably lower than they are in the United States. That bill is expected to rise in the years to come.

And the people who pay the heaviest price are those least able to bear it. A large part of the bill to consumers will come through higher prices for electricity. When you combine the ETS with other policies, such as renewable energy mandates, which may well form part of a cap-and-trade bill, they amount to 14 per cent of household electricity bills in the U.K. That will be felt most by the poor and elderly.

[Read more →] (Matthew Sinclair, Master Resource)

No? Duh! Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading - An FoE reports says 'cap and trade' carbon markets have done little to reduce emissions but have been plagued by corruption and inefficiency

The government's reliance on carbon trading schemes is inefficient and could cause a financial crisis similar to that seen with sub-prime mortgages, says Friends of the Earth Link to this video

The world's carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.

In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose.

As the world heads towards the Copenhagen climate summit, Britain and other developed countries want to see carbon trading expanded worldwide. The carbon market, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126bn in 2008 and is predicted to mushroom to $3.1tn by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.

However, FoE fears that the area has been hijacked by speculators on the financial markets. Sarah-Jayne Clifton, the report's author, said: "The majority of the trade is carried out not between polluting industries and factories covered by carbon trading schemes, but by banks and investors who profit from speculation on the carbon markets – packaging carbon credits into increasingly complex financial products similar to the 'shadow finance' around sub-prime mortgages which triggered the recent economic crash." (Ashley Seager, The Guardian)

SAN FRANCISCO--Several big utilities and other companies that would benefit from pending U.S. climate-change legislation have formed a lobbying group to support action to limit greenhouse gases and counter the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been critical of some Congressional climate change proposals.

The new group, American Businesses for Clean Energy, includes utilities from across the U.S., such as New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., Florida's FPL Group Inc. and New Mexico's PNM Resources (PNM), as well as companies from other industries including retailer Gap Inc. and Colorado ski resort operator Aspen Skiing Co. (Dow Jones)

Economists’ responses to the statement: “The environmental effects of greenhouse-gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economy.”

A New York University School of Law survey found near unanimity among 144 top economists that global warming threatens the United States economy and that a cap-and-trade system of carbon regulation will spur energy efficiency and innovation.

“Outside academia the level of consensus among economists is unfortunately not common knowledge,” Richard Revesz, dean of the law school, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “The results are conclusive – there is broad agreement that reducing emissions is likely to have significant economic benefits.” (Green Inc)

The now postponed Senate debate over climate change offers an opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of climate change. While the physical science about natural and anthropogenic forcings is the place to start, the economics of climate change is highly relevant for the policy debate. In this regard, a perfectly timed literature review in the Spring 2009 The Journal of Economic Perspectives is worth studying.

There have been 13 – count them, 13 – studies published in the peer reviewed literature that have wrestled with the economic implications of a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GhGs) on a CO2-equivalent basis. Those 13 studies have yielded 14 estimates of what will subsequently happen to global GDP. For those who are curious, 10 of those studies assume a subsequent warming of 2.5 C; two assume that a 1 C warming would follow; and two assume a 3 C warming would follow.

Here are the estimated changes to GDP relative to a baseline scenario where no CO2e buildup occurs: +2.5%, +2.3%, +0.9%, +0.1%, no change, -0.1%. -0.4%, -0.9% -1.3%, -1.4%, -1.5% -1.7% -1.9% and -4.8%. In short, climate change will either add or subtract about one year of economic growth from the global economy in the second half of this century.

[Read more →] (Jerry Taylor, Master Resource)

The phrase 'the science is settled' is regularly used by politicians arguing for meaningful action on climate change. To the majority of the world's scientists, global warming is a clear and present danger and those who deny it, or argue that its effects will limited or benign, are dangerous lunatics. Nevertheless, an increasing numbers of voters, particularly in the US and the UK, have drifted into the sceptic camp in recent months and years. A Pew Research October survey in the US showed the percentage of people seriously concerned by the climate change issue down from 77% to 65% in two years. An international survey by HSBC showed a fall from 32% to 25% over the past year in the percentage of people saying that climate change was the biggest issue that respondents worried about.

A batch of highly successful books from journalists and maverick scientists has provided the intellectual covering fire for this decline. The result of the growing scepticism will be a weakening of national resolutions to take the difficult steps required to shift rich countries away from dependence on fossil fuels.

Why, when the tone of urgency from mainstream scientists is getting ever clearer and the research results more worrying by the week, is the sceptic case in ascendancy? I try to argue in this article that the reason is that the scientific arguments for dangerous man-made climate change are somewhat easier to attack casually than most climate scientists admit. Second, the sceptic case runs strongly with the grain of a fierce antagonism to big government and all its works. Many people I talk to have heard the arguments of the sceptics and the deniers, have noted the accompanying rhetoric against politicians and know-it-all scientists and thus feel an immediate kinship with the case against dangerous global warming. We could continue to disregard the opinions of this growing and sizeable minority but I think we need to start dealing with their concerns. To do so does not necessarily involve any step back from a full-hearted commitment to reducing global deforestation and fossil fuel use. (Carbon Commentary)

I wonder if this will open the door to other "science-based beliefs" such as having to do with GMOs, illegal drugs and so on receiving legal protection. This will be discussed in depth I am sure.

UPDATE: The ruling strikes Ben Hale as "strange". (Roger Pielke Jr)

Slowing climate change is neither inevitable nor impossible, former Vice President Al Gore said in a speech Tuesday night in New York City. Gore, who was launching his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, said that he has "absolute conviction that we have all the tools to solve [several] climate crises."

In that light, one climate in peril may not sound like such a tall order, the Nobel Peace Prize (and Oscar and Grammy) winner may hope. But with a myriad of gonzo geoengineering schemes in the air—and on the airwaves—and recent right-wing flack for touting solutions that he has financial interest in, Gore and his book may face a stiff challenge. The sold-out crowd at the American Museum of Natural History, however, applauded his work—tough topics and all—at length.

For instance, population growth, often an uncomfortable subject, should not be ignored, Gore said, noting that it "is certainly not a taboo" to bring it up in discussions about environmental issues. He noted that even though the global population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, demographic changes are already under way that would slow population growth—and presumably keep resource consumption and pollution production in check. "This is a success story in slow motion," he said, pointing out that global population is expected to eventually stabilize just above 9 billion within the next few decades.

Near-zero growth, however, could be attained with four basic societal acheivements, he said. The goals include: the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the spread of fertility management and a higher child survival rate. Regardless of climate change, he noted, these aims are "all things we should be doing for good and beneficial reasons otherwise." (SciAm)

He's baaack.

Al Gore, Ozone Al, the profit-pursuing Prophet of Global Warming Doom, has released his sequel to his fact-bereft, hype-filled "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Simply laying out the facts won't work," Mr. Gore says in "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis." Especially when the "facts" are liberally laced with innuendo, hyperbole, misrepresentations and outright perversions of the scientific process.

But now Gore is adding a new wrinkle to his global warming preaching -- proselytizing.

In a series of "training" programs specifically tailored to Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus, Gore seeks "to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet," reports The Guardian newspaper.

"I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references," he tells Newsweek.

It is the theology of climate change writ large. Or maybe a quest for a little divine intervention to protect Gore's investments. The former vice president advocates climate policies in testimony before Congress in which he holds a financial stake, reminds The New York Times.

"Profit" is not a four-letter word. But using religion to obfuscate the truth is an obscenity. (Pittsburgh Tribune)

Al Gore is back. That must mean the Obama administration has decided they have health care in the bag and they're now turning their attention to the climate change bill.

So, Gore is showing up all over the friendly confines of the Obama-adoring, health care reform-promoting, climate change-endorsing media outlets like MSNBC and ABC.

Unfortunately for Al, something happened on the way to carbon-trading bank. A scattered shower of journalism broke out on "Good Morning America" when Diane Sawyer surprised him with this: (Glenn Beck, FNC)

As yesterday's election outcomes are dissected, there was an interesting result here in Boulder, Colorado with respect to a request to expand its "ClimateSmart" program:

Houghton should know better than this: Climate change, justice and faith - The effects of climate change will fall hardest on the developing world. Our sense of justice demands we act now

There is compelling evidence that the world is warming and the climate changing – largely because of human activities in burning coal, oil and gas. Through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world scientific community has been able to give detailed information about what is likely to happen. (John Houghton, The Guardian)

This is where the ignorance of warmies is so frightening: Copenhagen is an opportunity for ethics to trump economics - Avoiding action on climate change because it might be too expensive is on a moral par with harming other people for money

How should humanity share the cost of action on climate change? Without an answer to this question, the world will not secure a strong and binding deal on the climate at Copenhagen next month, and we will continue on a path towards an increasingly inhospitable world. As many key players have warned, there is a real chance of failure. The Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, warns that negotiations are faltering because the west is unwilling to offer financing to emerging economies, and the developing world won't budge without the promise of cash.

US Senators on both sides of the aisle are doing all they can to block action with talk of danger to jobs and the US economy. Countries in eastern Europe say that contributing too much will wreck their fragile economies, and wealthier westerners are unwilling to fix numbers, hoping to translate silence into a stronger bargaining position with the US and Japan. No one wants to pay too much, and everyone wants someone else to pay more. This is only rational, isn't it, just part of getting a fair deal for all? It depends on how one counts the cost of climate change. (James Garvey, The Guardian)

When I asked a Chinese academic last December what the main themes of 2009 would be, he named two big problems – the economy and Copenhagen.

The economy was pretty obvious. At the time we spoke, there were dark warnings about millions of disgruntled workers roaming the countryside. On Copenhagen, his worry was that as the world’s largest emitter of carbon, China would become the lightning rod for global anxiety about climate change. If the December summit in Denmark collapsed without agreement, he pointed out, the inevitable demonisation of China could begin to threaten its development.

Almost a year later, both concerns have faded. China’s economy is growing faster than most, and some factories in the south are already complaining about a shortage of workers.

In the frantic round of talks ahead of Copenhagen, meanwhile, China’s negotiators can take comfort from the fact that the real pressure is being felt in other capitals. In truth, China has played its climate cards beautifully. (Financial Times)

The United States will not agree to targets cutting greenhouse gas emissions unless developing countries, particularly China, make similar moves, US climate envoy Todd Stern warned on Wednesday.

"No country holds the fate of the Earth in its hands more than China," Stern told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, weeks before a major climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Stern said new climate rules could include exemptions for developing countries to ensure that growth is not hampered but emerging giants like China, India and Brazil should pull their weight.

"What we do not agree with, though, is that we should commit to implement what we promise to do, while major developing countries make no commitment at all," he said.

His comments come as divisions between developed and developing countries threaten to scupper a Copenhagen climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (AFP)

BARCELONA, Spain — Negotiators at a U.N. climate conference in Spain further defined plans for reducing greenhouse emissions and continued work on a draft climate change treaty, with next month's deadline for a legal document increasingly in doubt.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose country holds the European Union presidency, said the holdup in the U.S. Senate of a climate bill made it impossible to meet a deadline next month for adopting a binding agreement regulating the world's emissions of gases that cause global warming.

A flurry of diplomatic activity reflected high tensions worldwide as two years of negotiations approach a climax at a major climate conference opening Dec. 7 in Copenhagen.

But expectations of a deal have been eroding for months as the ongoing negotiations have bogged down in the minutia of a vastly complex agreement that would alter economies around the globe.

Though a full treaty appeared out of reach, U.N. and European leaders have said it was critical to sign on to an agreement containing the essential elements, with the details to be filled in later. But Reinfeldt indicated even that might not be attainable. (Associated Press)

Rich countries today piled pressure on Africa not to derail climate talks after the poorest countries in the world shocked the UN by walking out of the official negotiations, demanding that their concerns be met.

The chair of the Africa group of nations, Kamel Djemouai, was recalled from Barcelona by the Algerian government and other African delegations reportedly received "strong" phone calls from their capitals urging them not to imperil the last negotiations before Copenhagen. Algeria admitted that its negotiator had been recalled but it was denied that this had anything to do with Africa's stand.

The African bloc complained that rich nations' carbon cuts were far too small to avoid catastrophic climate change, and refused to participate until more was done. The move forced the UN to abandon several sessions and reschedule others to give rich countries more time to debate emissions cuts. Countries have agreed to devote 60% of the remaining time to those discussions.

France has been supportive of Africa's position ahead of the climate change talks in Copenhagen. But French negotiators are known to have been angered and dismayed by the African move. "They are shooting themselves in the foot," said one French diplomat. (John Vidal, The Guardian)

The US has given up hope of reaching a global climate change treaty at Copenhagen and is working towards a deal late next year, the Obama administration said today. The decision ends hopes of a legally binding deal being sealed next month.

"We have to be honest in the process and deal with the realities that we don't have time in these four weeks to put the language together and flesh out every crossed t and dotted i of a treaty," said John Kerry, who chairs the Senate foreign relations committee.

Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, agreed. "It doesn't look like it's on the cards for December," he said. "We should make progress towards a political agreement that hits each of the main elements." (The Guardian)

In her speech to the US Congress, Angela Merkel called for a clear commitment by all nations to act on climate change -- a demand that plunged her into the heart of domestic political wrangling in America. But can foreign support help Barack Obama with the stalled climate change bill? (Der Spiegel)

WASHINGTON: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made an impassioned plea to the US and European nations to accept binding obligation on climate change to influence countries like China and India without whom no agreement was possible.

"There can be no agreement without India and China," she said in an historic address before both houses of the US Congress on Tuesday. "No doubt about it, in December, the world will look to us, to the Europeans and to the Americans. And it is true, there can be no agreement without China and India."

"But I'm convinced, once we in Europe and America show ourselves ready to adopt binding agreements; we will also be able to persuade China and India to join in," she said. (Economic Times)

Washington - Czech President Vaclav Klaus today criticised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for saying fight against global warming is a challenge similar to the pulling down of the Berlin Wall.

It is tragic to make such a comparison, Klaus told a conference on climate change, organised by The Washington Times daily.

In her address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, Merkel said symbolical walls of the 21st century should be pulled down.

Apart from terrorism and global economic instability, she mentioned climate protection among these walls ahead of the forthcoming Copenhagen conference that is to set goals in reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

U.S. President Barack Obama named fight against global warming among his priorities.

Klaus repeated today that he believed the problem is not the climate but new utopian visions of the world related to climate protection.

He said carbon credits were similar to communist central planning. He said carbon trading should not be considered a market instrument.

Klaus said this was a government intervention because without it the credits had not value. (ČTK)

Crunch time for an international agreement to tackle global warming is only weeks away. In December, the world will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new agreement on cutting global emissions of greenhouse gases, with prospects for a meeting of minds still far from certain. Developed countries' fears that the competitiveness of their industries will be undermined by weak emission-reduction pledges from developing countries are clouding hopes for progress. These fears have led to calls in some advanced countries, such as France and the US, for taxes on imports from countries that do not adopt stringent greenhouse gas targets.

Calls for border taxes on imports divert attention from the fundamental issue: the need for everyone to take action on greenhouse gas emissions. Developed countries acknowledge that they have a responsibility to lead action to combat climate change. But their calls for import tariffs are antagonising developing countries anxious to provide improved living conditions for their citizens. (Financial Times)

The SMOS satellite is flying, and it will provide data for around three years. A “probe tracking global warming impact on water“? Not by a long shot (what are three years for climate??).

Hadley CRU isn’t the only government agency that deletes web content related to climate. NOAA/NWS Southern Region Headquarters has gotten into the act. An interesting thing happened today. NOAA deleted an educational web page about an experiment you can do with CO2.

Ordinarily such a thing would go unnoticed, especially since it doesn’t impact anything particularly important like policy, or climate data. It’s just an experiment for kids in the classroom.

Fortunately, I still had the web page open in my browser. I had been looking at it yesterday, and I had been thinking I might try the experiment myself with a datalogging thermometer, just for fun.

The most viewed article in The Guardian right now was written by George Monbiot yesterday:

Appell has a recent piece in Scientific American that contends even now that the Hockey Stick is alive and well.

In an article this week, University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick argued that Canada is sleepwalking into some of the most disruptive and costly energy-policy misadventures since the National Energy Plan of the 1970s without the Conservatives having published a single estimate of the economic consequences.

The article attracted a large number of comments, some notably ill-informed. Below, Prof. McKitrick responds to one in particular. (Financial Post)

Michael Shellengerger and Ted Nordhaus have decided that the right thing to do is to stand up to a bully. Good for them. Here is an excerpt:

It is important to point out that this is not simply about Joe Romm the bully, but the tenor of discourse on a very important subject. Michael and Ted conclude:

LONDON - The general insurance industry may not be able to cope with the increased frequency and severity of floods and typhoons brought about by climate change, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) said on Wednesday.

ABI research, commissioned from Britain's Met Office and catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide, examined the implications of 2 Celsius, 4C and 6C increases in global mean temperature on inland flooding and windstorms in Great Britain, and typhoons in China.

The ABI says a 2C is rise inevitable and this will increase average annual insured losses in Britain from inland flooding by eight percent, or by 47 million pounds ($77 million), to 600 million pounds. This would indicate a 16 percent theoretical impact on insurance pricing (with an annual GDP growth of 2.25 percent assumed). (Reuters)

Policymakers need to know whether prediction is possible and, if so, whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantially more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. An inspection of global temperature data suggests that temperature is subject to irregular variations on all relevant time scales, and that variations during the late 1900s were not unusual. (Kesten C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong and Willie Soon, SPPI)

Solar wind generated by the sun is probably driven by a process involving powerful magnetic fields, according to a new study led by UCL researchers based on the latest observations from the Hinode satellite.

Scientists have long speculated on the source of solar winds. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS), on board the Japanese-UK-US Hinode satellite, is now generating unprecedented observations enabling scientists to provide a new perspective on the 50-year old question of how solar wind is driven. The collaborative study, published in this month’s issue of Astrophysical Journal, suggests that a process called slipping reconnection may drive these winds. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

the problem of correcting MSU (Micro Wave Sounding Unit) brightness temperature data for differences in the diurnal temperature variations between land and ocean was brought up. This is indeed an issue of considerable importance if the resulting data is to be used for determining temperature trends over time for climate change purposes. The reason is quite obvious. In a stable, non-changing thermal regime, due to orbital drift, the satellite will pass over any given latitude at different times of the day, thus causing a trend in the resulting temperatures, positive for crossovers starting at, say 7:00A:M to about 3:00P:M, and negative thereafter till the following morning. Thus, to obtain the true trend (zero trend in the previous illustration) it is important to correct for these diurnal variations.

it was shown quite conclusively that the diurnal variations were indeed due to the different time of day that the observations at any given location were taken. This was recognized by the 2 teams (RSS and UAH) that were producing temperatures from the measured brightness data, but nevertheless, differences existed between these 2 data sets.

In the Randall and Herman 2008, (the second author also being the author of this weblog), we examined these differences to see if we could locate their cause or causes. We noted that these difference were greater over land than over water, and greater in the LT (Lower Troposphere) channel than in the MT ( Middle Troposphere channel). Since the diurnal variations of temperature are greater over land than over water and in the lower troposphere as compared to the upper troposphere, this was strong evidence that the discrepancies were somehow related to diurnal variations as a result of orbital changes.

We also noted that the corrected data from RSS still showed a large oscillation, closely related to the time of passage over a given latitude. Upon examining the correction schemes of the two groups (UAH and RSS) we noted that the latter was using corrections based upon climate model calculations, while UAH was using slant path observations from the satellite. Since the slant path footprint is at a different time than the vertically viewed footprint, it gives a measure of the temperature at a different time. This can then be used as the correction factor. These corrections (from UAH) were shown to result in little or no oscillations that could be correlated with time of passage . It was our conclusion then, that the UAH data set was applying a better diurnal correction to the data sets. There are other corrections that also are being applied to this data which we will not discuss here. (Climate Science)

“This paper investigates surface and satellite temperature trends over the period from 1979 to 2008. Surface temperature data sets from the National Climate Data Center and the Hadley Center show larger trends over the 30-year period than the lower-tropospheric data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems data sets. The differences between trends observed in the surface and lower-tropospheric satellite data sets are statistically significant in most comparisons, with much greater differences over land areas than over ocean areas. These findings strongly suggest that there remain important inconsistencies between surface and satellite records.”

This paper quantitatively documents a major issue with the use of surface temperatures as a metric to diagnose climate system heat changes. See also the earlier posts on this paper; e.g.

I’ve stated here on several occasions that the ‘Recent’ Arctic ice thinning is more likely a current change issue rather than a temperature issue. Differences in flow change the transfer of vastly more energy than a couple of degrees of air temp, however changing air temperatures are a strong indicator of differences in regional water flow. This effect is very visible in the arctic ice videos posted here. Recently Dr. Arnd Bernaerts asked by email that I call attention to his paper on Arctic Warming for a period we don’t hear about enough. He has a shorter version link which he also gave here. I really enjoy the historic discussions of climate and the paper is quite readable so I’ve put the whole paper up instead.

The Arctic has a crucial role in the world’s climatic system, and global warming may have an amplifying effect. The recently observed thinning of the sea ice has alerted scientists and policy makers alike. That was quite different when a similar warming occurred 90 years ago, which is still regarded as one of the most puzzling climatic event during the last century. That needs not to be, if the situation is being viewed from on oceanic perspective, together with the fact that the winter air temperatures in the higher Northern Hemisphere are greatly influenced by the ocean, particularly in the North Atlantic, which is partly free of sea ice up to the Fram Strait. Here also ends the West Spitsbergen Current, a current which supplies the Arctic Ocean with warm and saline Atlantic water. Already back in 1920s air temperature observation showed a strong warming at Spitsbergen during the winter season. By analyzing the winter temperature profile of five coastal stations it can be demonstrated that the climatic shift at the end of the 1910s had been closest to Spitsbergen, allowing the conclusion that circumstances related to the West Spitsbergen Current have caused the early Arctic warming almost a century ago. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The arctic could potentially alter the Earth’s climate by becoming a possible source of global atmospheric carbon dioxide. The arctic now traps or absorbs up to 25 percent of this gas but climate change could alter that amount, according to a study published in the November issue of Ecological Monographs.

In their review paper, David McGuire of the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and his colleagues show that the Arctic has been a carbon sink since the end of the last Ice Age, which has recently accounted for between zero and 25 percent, or up to about 800 million metric tons, of the global carbon sink. On average, says McGuire, the Arctic accounts for 10-15 percent of the Earth’s carbon sink. But the rapid rate of climate change in the Arctic – about twice that of lower latitudes – could eliminate the sink and instead, possibly make the Arctic a source of carbon dioxide. (USGS)

In the Financial Times today there is an interesting article on China's efforts to lock down fossil fuel supplies around the world.

This is even more stark when compared with a news analysis in the same edition of the FT, titled, "Beijing has played climate cards beautifully," an argument that I have recently made as well. Things are shaping up whereby the US will again be branded the outlaw in international climate policy, while China quietly gobbles up more and more fossil fuel resources. (Roger Pielke Jr)

Across the prairies of Wyoming, past buffalo herds and miles from any town lies the world's biggest coal mine. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the North Antelope Rochelle Mine is at work. Using hulking trucks, workers strip off hundreds of feet of grass, soil and rock to get to the coal below.

They blast the coal face into chunks that are crushed and taken by train to 60 power plants on the US's busiest railway. Demand is so high for coal, which fuels 50 per cent of US electricity output, that the process never stops.

Dan Cartwright, the mine operations director, says: "Blizzards slow us down occasionally, but that's it."

Day after day, workers spend 12-hour shifts in their trucks, equipped with water tanks, refrigerators and microwaves to minimise interruptions, taking on load after load. Every day, 15,500 tons are loaded on up to 20 trains. There are more than a dozen mines in the area, the Powder River Basin, which supplies 40 per cent of the US's coal.

The industry estimates that the basin has 100-150 more years' worth of production, based on today's technology. Though most mines are much smaller, there are more than 1,000 of them in the US. The government estimates there are several hundred years' worth of coal to be recovered in the US - the Saudi Arabia of coal, with 27 per cent of the world's known coal reserves. It would take a massive effort to replace coal production. Peabody Energy, which owns North Antelope and is the world's largest private sector coal company, says replacing coal would be a gargantuan task. It would require 2,400 times more solar generation,40 times more wind power, 250 new nuclear plants, almost double the US production of natural gas, 500 hydro plants the size of the Hoover Dam or halving electricity consumption. Even then, the US would have to find a way to meet new demand, given growth forecasts.

Victor Der, principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy in the Obama administration, says: "It would be very difficult to move away from it. We believe coal will continue to be in the energy mix."

Yet coal-fired electricity is responsible for enormous carbon dioxide emissions. Coal is the most carbon- intensive of all fossil fuels and the most widely used to generate electricity in the US. Generating electricity is the country's largest source of CO 2 emissions - 41 per cent of the total. (Financial Times)

AUSTRALIA should not bank on being able to reduce its greenhouse emissions by storing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants, US climate advocate Al Gore has said. (The Age)

BEIJING - China is pushing to complete its first commercial-scale power plant that can capture and store emissions, but must do more research on how and where to lock away carbon dioxide if the technology is to get wide roll-out.

Pressure is building on the world's top emitter of greenhouse gas to curb the growth of its carbon dioxide (CO2) output. China itself is also worried about the impact of rising world temperatures on its climate and food output.

But coal is China's most plentiful domestic source of energy, and Beijing hopes for several more decades of rapid economic growth to lift millions from poverty.

That means capturing and storing carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming -- in underground reservoirs is likely to be crucial to containing emissions.

But officials worry about the expense and the environmental impact of the process. (Reuters)

BEIJING - China, the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases, is aiming for many more years of rapid growth fuelled by coal as its main energy source. Scientists are stepping up efforts to limit emissions by capturing and storing them.

But experts say the technology for carbon capture and storage (CCS), as the technology for confining emissions is usually known, is costly and parts of it are unproven.

Here are some key questions and answers about CCS in China: (Reuters)

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Julio Friedmann, in collaboration with the Center for American Progress, the Asia Society Center and with partner Monitor Group, today released the report, "A Roadmap for U.S.-China Collaboration on Carbon Capture and Sequestration."

The report provides a framework for long-term bilateral cooperation in the development and use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, and sets out the benefits of the job creation opportunities and consumer savings. In addition, CCS offers a potential pathway for helping achieve the scientifically required reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions that energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energies are unlikely to meet on their own.

CCS is a process that separates and captures carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial and power plant flue streams, then compresses the gas and stores it underground, most likely in geological formations. The process essentially captures the greenhouse gas emissions before they enter the atmosphere and stores them underground. The report identifies three areas of cooperation on CCS.

Cooperation on sequestration pure CO2 streams from existing Chinese industrial plants. Approximately 100 industrial facilities throughout China are producing pure streams of CO2 that are vented into the atmosphere unabated. The vast capacity of geological storage across China points to geological sequestration projects as an ideal focal point for near-term collaboration. This phase would consist of five jointly funded geological sequestration projects in China that can easily capture this source of carbon. Each project would cost $50 million to $100 million, with a U.S. share of $20 million to $40 million. These five sites could sequester 10 to 15 million tons of CO2 per year, equivalent to taking 1.7 to 2.5 million cars off the road. (DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Maybe he is paying attention to the cap and trade debate, and the role of coal in it (emphasis added):

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. -- U.S. utilities aren't convinced huge increases in U.S. natural gas output mean it's time to make bigger bets on the fuel.

A boom in natural gas production, primarily from rock formations known as shales, has boosted U.S. reserves and driven a sharp price drop over the last year. Using gas to fuel a power station has the added benefit of emitting only half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal, making it less costly under an expected federal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases.

Yet several utility executives said they're staying cautious about ramping up the use of gas to generate electricity. Utilities have been stung before by the fuel's volatile prices, and they remain reluctant to make long-term commitments to gas by building or expanding plants. Companies such as Duke Energy Corp., Xcel Energy Inc. and American Electric Power Co. see sizable risks to new supplies, including emerging environmental issues, possible global exports and uncertainties over production costs.

"The unanswered question is what is the long-term price of this newly discovered gas," said David Ratcliffe, chairman and chief executive of Southern Co., in an interview this week. (Dow Jones)

By Viv Forbes

Four energy sources power most of our world – oil, coal, uranium and gas. These are the earth energy sources that provide heat, light, transportation and power for most homes, factories, farms, vehicles, engines and appliances (for Australia and New Zealand, cross out uranium).

Australia has large buried resources of all of these fuels, and we lead the world in exploration, drilling and extraction technology.

So what could go wrong?

In just three words – stupid energy policies. Big Nanny must intervene in these markets with ever changing rules on tenure, investment policies, development conditions, restricted and no-go areas, market mandates, export embargos and discriminatory taxes and subsidies.

Complete article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/gas-wastrels.pdf [PDF, 111KB] (Carbon Sense Coalition)

The recent Houston Chronicle op-ed, ostensibly written to respond to my New York Times op-ed, is worthy of reading for a variety of reasons, but primarily entertainment. The reference to me as Stephen Lynch was apparently an editor’s error, but the analogy of oil fields and glasses of water was quite enlightening as to the state of the debate. The three gentlemen comment on the difference between a straw in a glass (a supergiant field) and a puddle of water on the table requires many straws.

In fact, I know of no supergiant fields that have not required many straws, since oil fields are not ‘pockets’ of oil but rather oil that is in rock, rather as water is in a sponge. Drawing all of the fluid from one spot doesn’t mean that all of the oil will flow freely and uniformly to the straw: to the contrary, a given well usually drains a very limited area, and supergiant fields typically have numerous wells, hundreds even thousands, depending on the geology and geography.
[The inappropriate use of analogy is reminiscent to the website of Colin Campbell, the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He points out that when you have finished half the glass in a beer, you only have half left. Given that he lived in Ireland, this prompted the rejoinder that his inability to find another glass of beer should raise questions about his understanding of resources.]

There is also the rather illuminating comment that not knowing much about Russian and Middle Eastern supergiants suggests that they could decline much faster than we expect. And yet, couldn’t they also decline much slower than we expect? This selective attention is what is known as ‘bias’. In fact, while it is not possible to download comprehensive information about oil fields in those areas, I have done work in the past by relying on such information as is available, including the piece, “The Economics of Petroleum in the Former Soviet Union,” in Gulf Energy and the World: Challenges and Threats (The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, Abu Dhabi, 1997) as well as “Crop Circles in the Desert” (on this website), which show what can be done, given a little effort.

[Read more →] (Michael Lynch, Master Resource)

I made The New York Times last week. It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.

Unfortunately, the story was critical. It said, "Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel's speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox."

Which "critics" had "leaped"? The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wouldn't think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life. He also quoted an "associate professor of journalism" who said my speeches were "'pretty shameful' by traditional journalistic standards." All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a "conservative advocacy group."

It is odd that this is a news story. In August, AFP hired me to do the very same thing. I give the money to charity. The Times didn't call that "shameful."

But in August, I worked for ABC News. Now, I work for Fox. Hmmm.

It reminds me of something that happened earlier in my career. (John Stossel, Townhall)

Washington, D.C. — Farm groups joined the manufacturer of the popular herbicide atrazine Tuesday in accusing the Obama administration of bowing to environmentalist pressure in initiating a review of the chemical's safety.

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration certified the weedkiller for continued use, but the agency said last month that it would take another look at possible health risks.

Agency officials told a six-member panel of scientific advisers Tuesday that they wanted to review new data from studies of the chemical's cancer-causing potential, including the results of research into the health of agricultural workers and pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina. Atrazine is used on about 60 percent of Iowa's corn acreage to control weeds other chemicals may miss.

The agency plans to use the data to decide whether to revise its safety assessment of the pesticide, said Tina Levine, director of the agency's health effects division.

The review will extend through 2010. (Des Moines Register)

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rolled out proposed guidance for new pesticide labeling to reduce off-target spray and dust drift. The new instructions, when implemented, will improve the clarity and consistency of pesticide labels and help prevent harm from spray drift. The agency is also requesting comment on a petition to evaluate children’s exposure to pesticide drift. (Press Release)

A cook at an Indiana restaurant suffered a job-related back injury, and a workers’ compensation board said the employer must pay for a medical procedure.

What makes this news?

The procedure was weight-loss surgery.

Also this summer, the Oregon Supreme Court said an employer must pay for surgery for an employee who suffered a workplace knee injury — not for knee replacement but for a weight-loss procedure.

Decisions like those are causing employment law attorneys and human resource consultants to send an alert:

Be careful about hiring obese people; they could cost you a lot more in workers’ comp or insurance.

As if extremely heavy people didn’t have enough cares already.

Now there could be another strike against them in the job market, according to an article in Workforce Magazine, a publication for human resource professionals. (KansasCity.com)

The lawyer for a Florida man who claims he's too fat to have killed his former son-in-law told jurors Wednesday that all they have to do is look at his client to see that he's obese, old and in no condition to have committed such a murder.

Prosecutors agreed that Edward Ates is far from fit but said he's still capable of methodically planning and carrying out the killing of Paul Duncsak. (Associated Press)

More than a third of American youth of military age are unfit for service, mainly because they are too fat or sickly, the Army Times reports, quoting the latest Pentagon figures.

Most of the rest are too dumb or have used too many drugs to qualify, the study shows.

The report says 35% of the 31 million Americans aged 17 to 24 are unqualified because of physical and medical issues.

"The major component of this is obesity," Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, tells the Times. "We have an obesity crisis in the country. There's no question about it." (USA Today)

No room for obesity complacency - 'Good' headlines about revised projections mustn't distract us from the work that needs to be done to tackle childhood obesity

On the face of it, the latest forecast that there may well be fewer overweight and obese children in 10 years' time than was previously predicted would seem to be good news.

If the calculations are correct, it is suggested that "only" about 30% of youngsters will be overweight or obese – and remarkably the government's revised target of reducing the scale of the problem to year 2000 levels by 2020 might well be achieved. That assumes no improvement in the situation over the next decade and still leaves obesity among young children at twice the level it was in 1990 – the baseline for all the calculations.

What is extremely worrying is to note how easily the projections from the National Heart Forum can be misinterpreted as evidence that the obesity rates are falling – ergo, problem solved. The rise in obesity rates may be lessening, but obesity itself is now consolidating as a hardcore problem. The last Department of Health data showed excess weight and obesity among the two to 15 age group was 30%. Across Europe, the latest available surveys suggest that, in some countries, the prevalence is levelling off. But this "saturation" effect where obesity peaks and remains on a new high plateau means most worryingly that childhood obesity – at whatever level – is here to stay. (Neville Rigby, The Guardian)

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is accepting grant applications for a total of $1 million in funding for projects aimed at addressing environmental and public health issues in communities. EPA expects to award approximately 40 grants of up to $25,000 each and will accept applications until January 8, 2010. Local governments and non-profit organizations are eligible to apply. (Press release)

The United States is using less water than during the peak years of 1975 and 1980, according to USGS water use estimates for 2005. Despite a 30 percent population increase during the past 25 years, overall water use has remained fairly stable.

So what else do we know--and not know--about water use in the U.S.? Learn from a USGS scientist and partners, and hear what they're going to talk about at a water use briefing on Capitol Hill. (USGS CoreCast)

English farmers have been given a last chance to adopt greener practices that benefit wildlife and help to combat climate change or face deductions from their state hand-outs of cash.

The Government has set a tough new target which requires that the area of arable fields covered by environmental schemes should double within three years.

Every farmer has also been told that he or she should fund some environmental improvements on their land without any financial support from payments made under the Common Agriculture Policy.

In addition, Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary, has made clear that he expects farmers to keep some land fallow to help to provide habitats for birds and small mammals such as voles and field mice. (The Times)

American families and businesses are being economically threatened by cap-and-trade schemes. If cap-and-trade is approved, Americans can expect to pay thousands of dollars every year in "carbon taxes". Millions of American jobs will be lost as companies seek more business-friendly locations elsewhere in the world. All this for what proponents acknowledge will at best result in 1/10 of 1 degree temperature change in 100 years!

But these facts don’t seem to matter to those corporations that have joined forces with the green lobby in supporting cap-and-trade. Some corporations stand to make millions as the result of cap-and-trade. Others have simply caved in to the political pressure from the green lobby. Regardless of their reasons, all of these companies are undermining American citizens by supporting cap-and-trade.

The Center for American Progress published a list of 100 organizations that support cap-and-trade. Hopenhagen, a website supporting the Copenhagen Climate Treaty, lists 92 organizations as "friends" of their effort. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) is a group of 30 large corporations and Park Avenue environmental groups that have joined forces to lobby for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill.

Why would you choose to support these corporations with your wallet when they are advocating for policies that will be disastrous for most American families? Here is a list of 20 companies that we believe would be most susceptible to a consumer boycott campaign. They have decided to support cap-and-trade, now you need to decide whether you are going to support them.

Organizations can be removed from the boycott list by taking the following two actions: 1) withdrawing their names as a supporter of cap-and-trade from the appropriate list above; and 2) issuing a press release stating that their organization will not take a specific position on cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen climate treaty. (No Cap & Trade)

This is an advertisement being sponsored by the NO CAP-AND-TRADE COALITION, a group of like-minded organizations that have joined forces to fight cap-and-trade. Our coalition has launched a television and radio ad campaign in Minnesota and is seeking individuals/groups to sponsor this ad in other states. Please send an email to: mail [at] nocapandtrade [dot] com.

The New York Times and reporter John Broder get partial credit for spotlighting Al Gore’s climate profiteering on the front-page of today’s paper.

Unfortunately the article offers really lame justifications for Gore’s self-serving alarmism. (Green Hell)

The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments.

'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen.

In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar- and Nobel Prize-winning former vice president writes: "Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. 'Our Choice' will answer that call."

This is big. Al Gore is now saying carbon dioxide isn’t actually to blame for most of the warming we saw until 2001:

Which suggests not only that was Gore wrong to claim the science was “settled”, but that the hugely expensive schemes to “stop” warming by slashing carbon dixoide emissions will be less than half as effective as claimed.

Meanwhile, the Victorian Government privately admits that green energy and “clean coal” technology may be just snake oil:

Gore’s appeals to faith, not reason, should work now that a British court has (rightly) ruled that global warming is a kind of religion. (Andrew Bolt)

In a SPIEGEL interview, former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, 61, discusses Barack Obama's environmental policies, the endless push by lobbyists to derail reforms and his hopes for a global deal at the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month.

There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed. (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

BEIJING — Two prominent American research organizations that are pushing for greater cooperation between the Obama administration and China on the issue of climate change say the two governments should make a priority of supporting the use of carbon capture technology and the creation of a market for carbon. (NYT)

Angela Merkel is blocking aid commitments for climate protection and risking the failure of a global deal in Copenhagen. The chancellor is squandering an opportunity to demonstrate European leadership and show Barack Obama what it really means to be a "citizen of the world."

She was once celebrated as the "Climate Chancellor" and seen as an important campaigner for the environment on the international political stage. Now it appears that it is Angela Merkel, of all people, who is dealing a death blow to international climate deals -- by navigating a shortsighted course within the European Union. (Der Spiegel)

The FT usually has cogent analyses of global issues, but its analysis of climate policy has fallen well short. Here is an example, which focuses on "myth busting" leading up to Copenhagen. I'd characterize it instead as pretty detached from reality. It looks like the FT has become a cheerleader rather than a critical observer.

On the prospects for a meaningful deal to be reached in Copenhagen:

Some 190 countries are due to meet for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month to agree a new deal to stop global warming.

Scientists have recommended rich countries should cut greenhouse emissions by between 25 to 40 per cent by 2020, while poorer nations also agree to make cuts.

But Mr Ban said many countries are simply not in a position to sign up to legally-binding targets.

He said the best the world can hope for is a "political commitment" to work towards targets. He also said money pledged by rich nations to help vulnerable countries to adapt to global warming will have to be "scaled up" from the £90 billion per annum currently on the table. (TDT)

COPENHAGEN -- The job of Denmark's Connie Hedegaard, as chairwoman of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, is to lead negotiators from some 190 countries toward a deal that would replace the Kyoto Protocol. With only three weeks before the conference begins, there is a crescendo of voices around the world declaring that her job is impossible.

Hedegaard disagrees. A former journalist who has a master's degree in literature and history, she is a skilled communicator who projects a determined confidence. She has been traveling all over the world telling anyone who would listen that a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen is not hopeless. (ClimateWire)

WASHINGTON - U.S. President Barack Obama and European Union leaders pledged on Tuesday to redouble efforts for a deal on climate change at a summit in Copenhagen, but gave no details of how to reach that ambitious goal.

"We discussed climate change extensively and all of us agreed that it was imperative for us to redouble our efforts in the weeks between now and the Copenhagen meeting to ensure that we create a framework for progress," Obama told reporters. (Reuters)

Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Pakistan telling the Pakistanis to burn more coal. Today, President Barack Obama met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House to assure her that the US will stand with the European Union on cutting emissions of carbon dioxide.

The juxtaposition of those two events provides a window into the essential conflict at the heart of any workable plan to deal with global carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time that Obama and top Congressional leaders are claiming that they are serious about cutting carbon dioxide emissions, the reality is that in developing countries like China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Indonesia, carbon dioxide emissions are soaring. A key reason for those soaring emissions: those countries desperately need electricity. And when it comes to generating electricity, coal usually provides the cheapest option. That reality leaves diplomats like Clinton with no choice but to acknowledge the obvious, which is exactly what she did during her meeting with business leaders in Lahore on October 29.

Change in CO2 Emissions Per Capita in the Six Most-Populous Countries, 1990 to 2007

Source: IEA, “CO2 Emissions From Fuel Combustion 2009,” 90, 91. Available here.

Clinton told her hosts that “Pakistan has to have more internal investment in your public services and in your business opportunities.” When it comes to electricity, that is abundantly true. Pakistan, with about 170 million people, has just 20,000 megawatts of installed generating capacity. For comparison, France, with about 61 million people, has 112,000 megawatts of electric generation capacity.

And make no mistake, there is a direct correlation between electricity use and development. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills declared in their 2005 book, The Bottomless Well, “Economic growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity–-always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of modern industrial history.”

Given that Pakistan will never develop its economy without more electricity, Clinton was careful in how she phrased her message to the Pakistanis – you can almost feel her squirming to get the wording right – but the underlying idea comes through loud and clear. “The more economic development, the greater the energy challenges,” Clinton said during her visit to the Governor’s House in Lahore.

International negotiators lost one of the key elements to a successful deal on global warming today after Democratic leaders in the US Congress ruled out passing a climate change law before 2010. In the latest obstacle on the road to the UN summit in Copenhagen next month, Senate leaders ordered a five-week pause to review the costs of the legislation.

The delay, which would push a Senate vote on a climate change bill into next year, frustrates a last-minute push by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to get America to commit itself at home to cut greenhouse gas emissions before the Copenhagen meeting. World leaders – and US officials – have repeatedly said US legislation is crucial to a deal on global warming.

Merkel used a historic address to a joint session of Congress today to urge America to act on climate change, stating that success at Copenhagen rested on the willingness of all countries to accept binding reductions in carbon emissions. (The Guardian)

WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid today committed to subject a broad climate change bill to a full cost analysis that could take five weeks — a plan that would delay full Senate debate on the proposal until after next month's planned international negotiations in Copenhagen.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said Reid made the pledge in a phone call with her this morning, before the start of an Environment and Public Works Committee work session on the measure that would cap carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

“Sen. Reid made a commitment to me just by phone that after we vote our bill to the floor and before he brings up this bill on the floor ... he will ask for another five-week analysis (from the Environmental Protection Agency),” Boxer said.

Boxer said the new review would be based on whatever final legislation Reid assembles using the different versions of the bill that are expected to be approved by the environment committee and five other panels that have a role in vetting the measure. Even if the environment committee approves its version of the legislation by Friday, it would take at least another two weeks — until late November — for other panels to weigh in.

Reid's decision appears designed to soothe Republicans on the environment committee who have threatened to block work on the legislation until the EPA prepares a new analysis of the bill's long-term price tag. (Houston Chronicle)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on a visit to the US, on Tuesday said there can be no agreement on efforts to tackle climate change at the UN conference next month in Copenhagen without taking India and China on board.

"There can be no agreement without India and China. No doubt about it, in December, the world will look to us, to the Europeans and to the Americans. And it is true, there can be no agreement without China and India," she said to a round of applause while addressing a joint section of the US Congress.

"But I'm convinced, once we in Europe and America show ourselves ready to adopt binding agreements; we will also be able to persuade China and India to join in," she said. (Press Trust Of India)

BEIJING - China will insist key global climate change negotiations next month build on current treaties that limit the obligations of poor countries in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said.

In a phone call with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Monday, Wen said the December meeting in Copenhagen to forge a new pact on global warming should stick to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, the official People's daily reported on Tuesday. (Reuters)

STOCKHOLM, Nov 3 - Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called on China to set a tougher target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions after 2020 as its part of a U.N. climate change agreement to be negotiated in Copenhagen.

China, which recently overtook the United States as the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter, has said it will cut its C02 emissions per dollar of economic output by a "notable margin" by 2020 compared with 2005.

But it has resisted calls for quantifiable cuts which the European Union, among others, hopes will be the basis for a United Nations climate treaty to be agreed in the Danish capital in December. (Reuters)

Boycotts on either side of the Atlantic on Tuesday showed just how difficult it will be to clinch an agreement on global warming next month.

At U.N. climate talks in Barcelona, Spain, African nations walked out of meetings to protest rich nations' reluctance to make substantial carbon-cutting commitments. In Washington, some conservative Republicans boycotted the start of committee debate on a bill to curb greenhouse gases, fearful of the cost to the U.S. economy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a bid to support the Democratic-sponsored climate bill, told a rare joint session of Congress "there is no time to lose" in tackling climate change.

But the lukewarm response to her comments on global warming — in contrast to the ovations she received at other times — only underscored the skeptical mood in the United States about climate action, which would require a shift away from fossil fuels to wind and solar power, smaller cars and — the Republicans argue — more expense to consumers.

GOP senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee shunned the planned startup of voting on amendments to the bill. Only Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, showed up and he stayed only for 15 minutes to give the reasons for the Republicans' absence. (Associated Press)

We are sleepwalking into some of the most disruptive and costly energy-policy misadventures since the National Energy Plan of the 1970s without the Conservatives having published a single estimate of the economic consequences (Financial Post)

The giant cash deal to save the planet – proposed by Europe for the forthcoming Copenhagen climate conference – will not be enough, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, said today.

The public-money fund of up to €50bn annually, which the European Union suggested would be adequate to help developing nations protect themselves from global warming, and cut back on their own carbon emissions, would need to be “scaled up”, Mr Ban said.

His remarks threw into sharp relief the vast scale of new financial aid from the rich to the poor countries which will be necessary to secure a new international climate change treaty in the Danish capital next month. There is already a colossal divergence between what the poorer, developing countries say is necessary, and what the rich developed countries are prepared to pay – which could lead to a deal breaking down. (The Independent)

Money is the key to the success of Copenhagen - Developing countries want up to £245bn to reduce their carbon emissions while the EU thinks it should cost them as little as £20bn. Michael McCarthy reports on the huge gap

You think it's about greenhouse gases. You think it's about carbon emissions. And it is. But the Copenhagen agreement on climate change that the world community will attempt to sign in December is just as much about money – enormous, mind-boggling amounts of money.

In brutally simplistic terms, the essence of any deal will be to pay the developing countries of the world, led by China and India, to cut back on the carbon dioxide pouring out of their now-mushrooming economies, which will come to represent 90 per cent of all future emissions growth, and the inducement for them to do this will have to be substantial.

It has hardly dawned on the general public just how big are the sums of cash that the developing world is seeking, and that the rich world will have to go some way towards providing, if the vital pathway to keeping global temperature rises below C is to be mapped out. (The Independent)

NEGOTIATIONS aimed at clearing the way to next month's showdown on climate change in Copenhagen ran into problems overnight as African countries demanded rich nations show their hand on curbing carbon emissions, delegates said.

Talks were suspended in one of the twin tracks of negotiations under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as intermediaries grappled for a solution behind the scenes, they said.

African countries pointed the finger at advanced economies, accusing them of backsliding on showing how deep they would rein in their greenhouse-gas pollution.

They demanded emissions curbs of 40 per cent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, as a sign of good faith in the complex negotiations to craft a post-2012 climate treaty. (Agence France-Presse)

BARCELONA - African nations agreed on Tuesday to resume work on a new U.N. climate pact after a day-long boycott of the 175-nation negotiations, the chair of the talks said.

"We were able to arrive at a solution," John Ashe, the head of a group chairing talks among parties to the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, told delegates.

The African nations were protesting at what they said were inadequate promises by developed nations for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 as part of a U.N. deal due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. (Reuters)

NEXT month Kevin Rudd flies to Copenhagen to help seal a United Nations deal to cut the world’s emissions - and to make Australia hand over part of its wealth

So keen is the Prime Minister to get this new global-warming treaty signed that he’s been appointed a “friend of the chairman” to tie up loose ends.

So here’s the question: is Rudd really going to approve a draft treaty that could force Australia to hand over an astonishing $7 billion a year to a new and unelected global authority?

Yes, that’s $7 billion, or about $330 from every man, woman and child. Every year. To be passed on to countries such as China and Bangladesh, and the sticky-fingered in-between.

And a second question, perhaps even more important: is Rudd really going to approve a draft treaty which also gives that unelected authority the power to fine us billions of dollars more if it doesn’t like our green policies?

It is incredible that these questions have not been debated by either the Rudd Government or the Opposition, whose hapless leader, Malcolm Turnbull, on Monday admitted he did not even have a copy of this treaty.

Australia’s wealth and sovereign rights may soon be signed away, so why hasn’t the public at least been informed? (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

BARCELONA - Developing nations could end up being paid billions of dollars to raze rainforests and build palm oil plantations in their place if the current text of the Copenhagen climate treaty sticks, a group of advocates warned at the United Nations climate talks on Tuesday.

It's not set in stone. Negotiators could still reinsert a 10-word phrase that was sliced from the treaty language, but that would have to happen by Friday, the last day of the U.N. talks in Barcelona.

Barcelona is the last stop for global warming delegates before the Copenhagen summit starts on December 7. After that, negotiators must whittle down the bloated text, not add to it, as instructed by the U.N. Secretariat.

"There is enormous pressure to reduce down," Andrea Johnson of the non-governmental Environmental Investigation Agency told SolveClimate. "And safeguards have been discussed already more than anything else since August." (Reuters)

So now we know that, according to an employment appeal judge, it is possible in the eyes of the law to have a "philosophical belief" that manmade climate change is real and that the "resulting moral imperative" to take action is justified. Furthermore, such a philosophical belief must not be discriminated against in the workplace, as set out in the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003. (Leo Hickman, The Guardian)

Nobel winner adapts fact-based message to reach those who believe they have a moral duty to protect the planet in Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (The Guardian)

An online course provided by the National Weather Service states that while carbon dioxide has been linked to global warming, there is no evidence to back the claim up. The series of lessons on the atmosphere are part of “JetSream - Online School for Weather” and according to a time stamp at the bottom of the page was updated as recently as September 1, 2009.

The lesson in question is titled “It’s a Gas, Man” with a stated objective to “Discover if carbon dioxide has an effect on temperature.”

In this, the tenth in a series of lessons, the National Weather Service points out that CO2 has increased greatly in the atmosphere but questions the validity of the argument manmade climate change via CO2 increases are the reason behind increasing global temperatures. The lesson says that, “there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.” (Tony Hake, Examiner)

A survey report titled Climate Confidence Monitor commissioned in part by the Earthwatch Institute, World Wildlife Fund, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute shows that confidence that we can actually manage climate change has been falling for the last two years in most countries:

I suppose that is one way to spin it. Here’s some other findings from the report. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

A professor writing in Christian Science Monitor is going away from the science and toward a shady PR maneuver. Dr. Robert Dujarric — no, not a climate scientist but a professor of “Contemporary Japanese Studies” at Temple University — notes that it has been a failing battle to try to motivate Americans to impose restrictive, destructive laws based on environmentalist rhetoric.

His answer: “The way to get Americans to take action? Appeal to their patriotism.” That’s right, Uncle Sam wants you to sacrifice your family’s well-being for an entirely worthless carbon dioxide emission reduction (it won’t matter if the US drastically cuts its emissions if developing nations do not act similarly).

On a final note, how smug does one have to be to argue that Americans will be duped by playing to their pride when they weren’t duped by playing to fears about their children’s futures? (Chilling Effect)

International agreements take too long, we need a swift mobilisation not seen since the second world war (Lester Brown, The Guardian)

“How many expert assurances or warnings must turn out to be conspicuously wrong for the authority of science and scientists to be diminished?“: that’s the ominous conclusion of a beautifully no-holds-barred article today:

The last line in a “Some famous (and infamous) predictions” table classifies as “Right or Wrong? PENDING” this 2007 “prediction“

A speech at the Copenhagen Climate Conference of February 2009 by the then Danish Prime Minister is mentioned as example of “politicians [trying to] ‘fob off responsibility to scientists’“

Is it time to design guidelines to “predict responsibly” then? These are Blackman’s suggestions:

The carbon dioxide emissions caused by the destruction of tropical forests have been significantly overestimated, according to a new study. The work could undermine attempts to pay poor countries to protect forests as a cost-effective way to tackle global warming.

The loss of forests in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia is widely assumed to account for about 20% of all carbon dioxide produced by human activity – more than the world's transport system. The 20% figure was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 and was widely quoted after being highlighted by the Stern review on the economics of the problem. It is repeatedly used by Prince Charles and others as an incentive to push efforts to include forests in carbon trading.

Curbing emissions from deforestation is one of the main issues being discussed at a UN climate meeting in Barcelona this week, before crucial talks in Copenhagen next month.

But researchers led by Guido van der Werf, an earth scientist at VU University in Amsterdam, say that figure is an overestimate and that the true figure is closer to 12%. Publishing their analysis in the journal Nature Geoscience, they say the 20% figure was based on inaccurate and out-of-date information. "It's a tough message because everybody would like to see forests better protected and it is difficult to tell them that carbon dioxide emissions are less important than assumed. Still, the good news of lower emissions is no bad news for the forests," said Van der Werf.

The lower figure could make it harder to agree ways to reward forest protection, he said. "If you want to put a price on carbon [in forests] then you would get less carbon for your money now." (The Guardian)

In a blogpost Why is Climate Change Education Failing, and At a Time When it CANNOT Fail? here, Dr Jeff Goldstein bemoans the public not buying into the hoax.

“It’s all about the nature of education. Those loud voices espousing that Global Warming is not real, or that it is certainly not from human activity, are swaying those that are willing to listen. The shift in public perception is stunning and scary. We’re doing a bad job of informing and educating with regard to climate change. The aim should be conceptual understanding, not just the streaming of disconnected scientific conclusions as memorizable nuggets. Education is about ownership in understanding - not reporting in the conventional sense, and not political spin. Just like the researcher who is trained to frame ideas about observed natural phenomena and put those ideas to the test, true education is about the learner being presented with information that he or she can process, question, and internalize as their own conclusions.”

In the comments he finds an opportunity to provide a teachable moment using Venus as an example of what a runaway greenhouse would do if we don’t act now.

DrJeff Says: A TEACHABLE MOMENT ALERT
Gosh Tom, not sure what you are saying. Let’s keep this simple. Do this calculation - figure out what temperature say Venus ought to be at its distance of 0.7 AU from the Sun. (Earth is at by definition 1.0 AU.) I guarantee it is not supposed to be anywhere close to 900 degrees F, which is its surface temperature. Hot enough to melt lead. It has NO water or ice. It has a thick CO2 ATMOSPHERE with a little water vapor. It is hotter than Mercury (which has no atmosphere), which is far closer to the Sun. Does that tell you something? Readers, just process these very simple facts. Something on Venus must be dramatically elevating the temperature there. It is called the GREENHOUSE EFFECT. IT’S VERY REAL. IT’S HUGE ON VENUS. IT ELEVATES SURFACE TEMPERATURE. THIS IS ASTROPHYSICS 101. See this is exactly what I mean. Someone reading Tom’s reply says, “hey he sounds believable.” But he is soooo not. He does not understand the physics. You see how easy it is to wage a science smear campaign?”

I logged in and commented back to him that Mercury has no atmosphere - or very little, oxygen, sodium, hydrogen (surface temp 800C). Venus has an heavy thick atmosphere with 96.5% CO2, 3.5% nitrogen and small amounts of other gases including sulfur dioxide and water which forms thick sulfuric acid clouds. The pressure at the surface is 92 times the earth. Boyle’s Law tells us high pressure = higher temp which would explain most of the warmth at the surface (750C). At the same level in the Venusian atmosphere with earth’s surface pressure, the temperature is about the same as the earth (300K or 27C) even though the planet is closer to the sun.

Mars also has 95% CO2 atmosphere but a pressure of 1% of the earth and an average temperature of -55C. It has weather like earth, Mars landers showed thin clouds and even light snow. Little evidence of greenhouse warming though of course a thin atmosphere.

All the good doctor proved is that Boyle’s law works on the planets. The comment was blocked because, although registered - I was “outside the proxies” whatever that means. Maybe only tree rings and bristlecone pine need apply. Too bad, I think it would be a teachable moment for the good doctor.

Update: a few others have emailed me and noted their inability to comment on this site, a typical tactic of the alarmist sites like RC, Climate Progress, and Desmogblog. One commenter though, a Tom Rowan, has managed to penetrate the wall and tried to make the pressure temperature connection. But Dr. Jeff proves to be just as dense as the Venusian atmosphere and doesn’t hear what Tom is trying to tell him, continuing to try and explain how CO2 produces the warming. (Joseph D’Aleo, Icecap)

During the last three months, a paper by Lindzen and Choi (full text, PDF) has been repeatedly mentioned in the climate blogosphere.

Anthony Watts wrote about it July 2009. The key graphs were already announced in June, see Climate sensibilities and sensitivity on The Reference Frame.

This test of intelligence (which of the graphs depicting models doesn't belong here? The red one - it's reality) appeared in Climate feedbacks from measured energy flows, before I studied the paper more carefully.

The point of their paper is that in the reality, as measured by ERBE, the amount of outgoing radiation increases if the temperature increases. Lindzen and Choi claimed that all the 11 climate models had the opposite property: the outgoing radiation was shrinking if the Earth were getting warmer.

This conclusion of the models is paradoxical, contradicts the measurements, and Lord Monckton has elegantly promoted this disagreement on Glenn Beck's show. Unfortunately, I am going to argue that the falsification is not quite correct.

Bill Nichols is a 35 year Atmospheric Physicist, spending over 7 years in the Climate Change arena. Working projects ranging from Nuclear Winter to Global Warming for future weapon systems (e.g. B-2, F-117A) in the USAF starting in 1987 before retiring from the military in August 1994. Since September 1994, he’s been employed by NOAA NWS, first as a Science and Operations Officer (SOO), and currently as a Senior Forecaster. He can be contacted at William.Nichols@noaa.gov.

“Are The Operational Weather Models Creating Too Much Moisture In The Upper Troposphere? If So, Does This Suggest Too High Moisture Feedback To The Climate Change Models?”

Over the past several years, there has been considerable discussion about the amount of radiative feedback related to changes in moisture due to increasing greenhouse gases, most notably CO2. One important research question is if the magnitude used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of a significant positive forcing is accurate. A central issue is the climate models distribution of moisture at higher levels, suggesting a higher positive radiative feedback, versus the lower levels where less positive feedback is suggested, such as discussed in Tropical Water Vapor and Cloud Feedbacks in Climate Models: A Further Assessment Using Coupled Simulations by De-Zheng Sun, Yongqiang Yu, and Tao Zhang in Journal of Climate, Volume 22, Issue 5 (March 2009) pp. 1287–1304.

A figure of this suggested warming, roughly centered near 300 mb by the models in the upper levels of the troposphere can be found at the IPCC. Operational Weather Models and Climate Models share very similar moisture and physics packages, so if a discrepancy is noticed in the operational weather models, closer investigation to answering this question in climate models is valid.

In operational weather forecasting, meteorologists have the capability of comparing upper air observational data to various model solutions. This is a critical first step, as ensuring the models are accurately portraying the real atmosphere must be assessed in the forecast process. This is called model initialization, where the models start from. The next step in the forecast process is verifying the model output in real time at a future time period to again observational data. Since these two steps determine when and if a model can be used in forecasting, we have several tools to accomplish this task.

The two figures below compare observations and model temperature dewpoint depression at 300 mb, or roughly near 40,000 feet. The first figure (Fig 1) is for the Western Pacific with a graphic image of the Hi-Res ECMWF verifying at 12 hours. The second image (Fig 2) is the initialization at zero hours of the 90 km GFS with North American observations. Both graphic images are customized to show areas where the model dewpoint depression is less than or equal to 5 degrees celsius in purple. The moderate purple frost is for dewpoint depression values of 2 to 4 with values less than 1 a near white frost, which is over 50 percent purple coverage in both images. Rawinsonde observations (Raobs) are plotted as filled circles whenever the dewpoint depression values are less than or equal to 5 degrees Celsius. Note the discrepancies below of a significant number of sites showing open circles in purple areas with actual dewpoint depression value (lower left) often in double digits. Almost none of the reporting sites have a dewpoint depression value of 1 or less.

Personal observations, now for over a year, in the forecast process has noted this discrepancy in all seasons in the Northern Hemisphere, and for all model solutions with the two figures below representative both at model initialization and verification. The images are reasonable examples of what occurs with each forecast and raob cycle.

Figure 1: Comparison of 12 hour forecast of the Hi-Res ECMWF with actual Western Pacific Observations.

Figure 2: Comparison of 90 KM GFS initialization with North American Observations.

In the tables below, a mean comparison was done for dewpoint depression in the above images (Fig 1 & 2). Note the several degree Celsius model too moist bias for both moist and dry environments (fourth column higher value to the third column). The numbers of data points are large enough to suggest this may be statistically significant. In addition, it encapsulates numerous countries, different parts of the world and multiple model.

Comparison Dewpoint Departure – North America – 300MB – 90KM GFS versus RAOBS

Comparison Dewpoint Departure – Western Pacific – Hi-Res ECMWF (EMF) versus RAOBS

Another method of displaying this discrepancy is through a vertical slice in the atmosphere by the Skew-T Log P diagram (Fig 3). Note the actual dew point values (far left set) of the observations are drier than all 3 model solutions at the 12 hour forecast point above 400 mb.

Figure 3: Typical Skew-T from DVN of RAOB Temperature and Dewpoint (Solid Yellow) and Various Models (Dashed) of 80km NAM (Green), 90 km GFS (Rust), and ECMWF-Hi-Resolution (Blue).

The 3 images above all illustrate a model moist tendency both at model initialization and verification in a future time period.

Therefore, an explanation of this discrepancy of model output to observational data is warranted since these models have similar physics with Climate Change Models. With this apparent discrepancy, and the importance of how vertical moisture distribution impacts radiative forcing with increased greenhouse gases, it is proposed this should be looked into.

2.) If this bias is real, what tests should be done to gain further insight on the impacts and reliability of current climate change models?

3.) If this does impact climate change models, how can this be effectively communicated to key decision makers toward Climate Change mitigation decisions?

One specific suggestion toward determining if this discrepancy is valid pertains towards question 2. Rerun the models with the more accurate, drier observational data. Then compare and assess the magnitude of any changes in the output of both temperature and moisture, this could provide insight to our understanding of the energy and hydrologic budget (conservation of energy) in the models.

Note: This post does not necessarily reflect in any way, or is associated with, the position of NOAA on Climate Change.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 758 individual scientists from 445 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Lapland (northern regions of Finland and Norway). To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Extinction (Real-World Observations - Animals: Amphibians): Earth's amphibians have suffered greatly over the past few decades, due to an emergent infectious disease; but there is no evidence that concurrent global warming has been a problem for them.

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Lambsquarters (Borjigidai et al., 2009), Sorghum Hybrid (Wu et al., 2009), Spruce (Rodenkirchen et al., 2009), and Wheat (Zhang et al., 2009).

Flight taxes are being raised to help bail out the banks, Alistair Darling admitted yesterday.

In an extraordinary intervention, the Chancellor said the higher air passenger duty being introduced tomorrow was needed to plug gaps in the national finances.

He made no attempt to justify the move - which will add £340 to the ticket for a family of four flying long haul - on environmental grounds, the official reason for the tax.

Airlines warned yesterday that the tax would cost thousands of jobs and do nothing to combat global warming.

Addressing journalists in Newcastle, home of the failed bank Northern Rock, Mr Darling said: 'I am quite blunt about it, we need to raise money to pay for some of the things we have done. (Daily Mail)

Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather. But is so-called geoengineering more than wishful thinking? And, if so, should we be worried? (David Adam, The Guardian)

From virtual volcanoes to space mirrors, science is exploring new ways to fend off global warming (David Adam, The Guardian)

No, no, NO! Bury Our Carbon At Sea - Here's an innovative business model that may be one way to afford the clean coal chimera.

The world's climate cabal gathers in Copenhagen next month to debate what to do with the 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide the human race produces every year by burning fossil fuels. Half of this man-made exhaust is absorbed by oceans, plants and trees. The rest contributes to the atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gas that has climate scientists envisioning global catastrophe.

After the Copenhagen attendees talk up wind, solar, nuclear and spray-foam insulation, a bold solution that will inevitably come up is to capture and sequester some of that carbon dioxide deep underground. Geologic cavities in the U.S. alone could hold between 2,020 and 14,220 billion tons of CO2, enough to soak up three to 36 months of national output. Doing so would cost $200 or so per ton of carbon. It would require permits from local, state and federal agencies and would generate a good deal of anxiety for those living above the gas. In 1986, a volcano crater in Cameroon released a CO2 bubble large enough to kill 1,800 people while they slept.

What if you could put the carbon where nobody lives? There is a perfect place 70 miles off the eastern U.S. seaboard and two miles below the ocean floor. It's a porous sandstone formation, trapped under a mile of hard shale, that stretches from New Jersey to Georgia. The section off the Jersey shore alone is capacious enough to store several hundred billion tons of CO2, enough to take on all the power plants within 155 miles of the coast from Maryland to Massachusetts for the next 100 years.

Those very round numbers come from Daniel Schrag, a 43-year-old Harvard University geophysicist and MacArthur fellow. Schrag uncovered the sandstone field's potential after studying data from test gas wells drilled 30 years ago. When Schrag's idea to pipe carbon there was written up in 2006 in Harvard's magazine, the executives from a small but scrappy engineering firm called SCS Energy of Concord, Mass., called Schrag up to hear more about it. (Bruce Upbin, Forbes)

Oh... Eat My Carbon - What to do with the world's fossil fuel pollution? Why not feed it to plants?

If the world is going to make progress toward the goals to be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, it's pretty clear that carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, must be captured. Fossil fuel produces nearly two-thirds of the world's electricity. All those power plants can't just be turned off.

But then what? Once carbon is captured, there are just a few places it can be sent. It can be piped thousands of feet underground into saline aquifers, it can be pumped into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, it can be used to help extract oil and gas, and it could be sent to the bottom of the ocean.

All of which is expensive. The cost of pressurizing captured carbon dioxide and injecting it underground or to the bottom of the ocean could be about $100 a ton. And that's not including the legal and insurance outlay it might take to convince (or force) local residents to allow it to be stored underneath them. (Jonathan Fahey, Forbes)

Oil and gas companies are not only major contributors to climate change, they are also uniquely at risk from the impacts of global warming. But despite the dual legislative and operational risks they face, many are burying their heads in the sand and failing to properly assess climate change risks.

That is the stark conclusion of a major report from environmental consultancy Acclimatise, which assessed oil and gas companies' responses to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and found that while more than three quarters accepted that already inevitable levels of climate change would affect their business through increased downtime, system failures and rising safety risks, only 19 per cent were taking action to address those risks. (James Murray, BusinessGreen)

CIUDAD OJEDA, VENEZUELA - Five months after Venezuela nationalized dozens of oil service contractors in Zulia state, the once-bustling industrial dock on Lake Maracaibo is nearly abandoned, and the 16 red flags raised to celebrate the takeovers are already tattered and faded.

A few small groups of workers remain, hoping to get the jobs they were promised after the expropriations.

"We demand our jobs. Because we haven't gotten an answer, we're still here," said Demostenes Velasquez, who for months has lived under the scorching sun in a tent improvised from remnants of oil union election pamphlets.

Like Velasquez, many workers on the eastern shores of the lake have protested or gone on hunger strikes to demand jobs promised them after President Hugo Chavez's government expropriated 76 oil services companies on the Maracaibo Lake. The western region has a long history of oil production.

As part of his drive to install socialism in the OPEC nation, Chavez expropriated the companies contracted by state-run PDVSA, with promises of social prosperity and worker justice.

Over the months since then, protests have intensified so much the government sent troops to control the discontented workers. (Reuters)

Vast amounts of oil lie in the bitumen-rich sands of Northern Canada, but whether oil companies choose to spend billions extracting them will hinge on decisions made 6,000 miles away in Denmark next month.

Even at the best of times, squeezing crude from Alberta’s tar sands is an environmentally fraught process that is economic only with very high oil prices. The cost of oil production can be $70 (£43) per barrel compared with only $5 for the onshore oilfields of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

The prospect of a successful climate deal in Copenhagen threatens to hit the industry with a cost that could drive it out of business: international carbon regulation. Like all big economies, Canada will be expected to agree to make cuts in its CO2 emissions of at least 20 per cent by 2020 and up to 80 per cent by 2050.

A key goal of the UN meeting is to create an effective global trading scheme for carbon emissions — a tool that would place a firm price on greenhouse gases produced by industry. A weak trading system of this kind already exists in Europe but governments want to create a bigger and bolder scheme that would penalise the use of high carbon fuels and drive global investment into cleaner energy.

As one of the most carbon intensive fuels around, the Canadian oil sands industry would be one of the biggest losers. So much energy is needed to heat raw bitumen into a usable crude that an oil sand operator typically uses up the equivalent of one barrel of oil for every three barrels it extracts. For the same energy expenditure you would expect 100 barrels from a conventional Middle East oil well. (The Times)

EDMONTON — There likely won’t be another boom, but the number of Alberta oilsands projects is set to increase “at a realistic rate” within a few years, and could deliver a total of $850 billion in royalties by 2043, says an industry update released Tuesday.

The scenario released by the Canadian Energy Research Institute expects oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel within a few years and gradually increase.

Oilsands projects, now expected to boost bitumen output to 1.7 million barrels a day by 2015, will increase to 2.5 M/bpd by 2020 and 4.5 M/bpd by 2030 in the “realistic scenario,” one of four prepared by the institute but the only one released to the public — and a more positive estimate than one it released earlier this year.

Provincial coffers will benefit as much as industry bottom lines, with provincial bitumen royalties estimated to total $850 billion over the next 35 years, thanks in part to the new royalty formula. Under the previous formula, the province would have received much less. (Dave Cooper, Edmonton Journal)

Passage of a comprehensive national climate policy will create jobs, increase personal income and boost all U.S. states’ gross domestic product, without raising energy costs to the consumer, according to a new national economic impact study performed at the University of California-Berkeley.

Lead author David Roland-Holst unveiled the results Oct. 28 during a Clean Energy Works teleconference. Holst, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, said the study was an organized collaboration across three universities to examine the impact of a national climate change policy and to capture the diverse perspectives on individual state levels.

We’ve created a state-of-the-art forecasting model that provides national and state level detail on the economic effects of a national climate policy such as the one being debated in the Senate this week,” Holst said. Specifically, Michigan stands to gain from such a policy—one that adopts all of the majors that are currently being considered, according to Holst.

There are three pillars: reducing carbon emissions, improving energy efficiency and promoting renewable energy alternatives, he said. “It’s very important that all three pillars are developed in unison in order to get the gross dividend,” Holst added. “In Michigan, as these polices are adopted, they stand to gain up to about 40,000 additional jobs by 2020. Gross state product and personal income will grow in Michigan and our estimates are that personal income will be $600 to $1,000 higher in 2020 as a result. It’s not a huge increase but definitely much better than many of the doomsayers have predicted.” (Ethanol Producer Magazine)

VICTORIA will rely on fossil fuel for energy for decades, with leaked documents revealing the Brumby Government is set to take a multibillion-dollar gamble on ''clean coal''.

A high-level leak to The Age indicates the Government will embark on an education campaign around carbon capture and storage aimed at a public that it say does ''not understand the unique challenges facing the state'' under emission trading.

While the state will continue to depend on coal-fired power, confidential cabinet documents acknowledge the clean coal strategy may not work.

''A key question for Commonwealth and state governments is whether to consider long-term contingency options to deal with the risk that clean coal proves to be more costly and limited an option than currently believed,'' one document says. (The Age)

In this new video, Eline van den Broek of the Netherlands needs only about four minutes to explain why government-run healthcare in Europe is a mistake and why the problems in the U.S. healthcare system are the result of too much government, not too little.

The only thing I don’t like about this video is that I fear people may no longer want to watch the ones I narrate. (Daniel J. Mitchell, Cato at liberty)

Did I really say such an outrageous thing? Well, I did not use exactly those words (as Matt makes clear), but yes, that is the logical implication of my position.

First, my assessment is that even with no government health insurance, hardly anyone would die on the street for lack of health care. The poor would use their income transfers to buy some health care or insurance. The poor would receive private charity. And health care would be far less expensive due to elimination of the distortions caused by government health insurance.

Second, my position is that government provision of health insurance is enormously inefficient: it means worse health care for everyone, and it wastes resources that can be put to other uses. So the negative of having a few people suffer without government health insurance must be balanced against the good of having better medical care for all and against the good that can be accomplished with those saved resources.

That good might be lower taxes for everyone, or more government spending on education, or greater public health spending to combat HIV in poor countries. Whatever the alternate uses turn out to be, one cannot escape the fact that a tradeoff exists between protecting the poor and other goals.

Our friends at IJ have filed an exciting new lawsuit, one that, if successful, could save the lives of more than 1,000 people a year: people who die needlessly of assorted blood diseases (including leukemia) because the federal government criminalizes the offering of even modest compensation for bone marrow donation.

That is, the National Organ Transplant Act — which outlawed the sale of kidneys and other organs — for some reason included bone marrow.

NOTA’s criminal ban is unconstitutional because it arbitrarily treats bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells – such as blood or sperm — for which compensated donation is legal. (That makes no sense because bone marrow, unlike kidneys, replenishes itself in just a few weeks, leaving the donor whole. )

The ban also fails constitutional muster because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

As Chip Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice, said in a press release announcing the case: “Bad things happen when the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority. In this case, people actually die. The Institute for Justice intends to stop that and to restore constitutional constraints that prohibit arbitrary limits on individual liberty.”

IJ brought this suit on behalf of adults with deadly blood diseases, the parents of sick children, a California nonprofit, and a world-renowned medical doctor who specializes in bone marrow research. You can find more information here. Perhaps more interestingly, IJ senior attorney Jeff Rowes is guest-blogging about the case all week at the Volokh Conspiracy. Here’s his first post. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

While past costs are irrelevant to present decision-making — they are history but they are not economics — those past costs do matter when pharmaceutical companies decide whether, or to what extent, to invest in developing more new drugs. If those past costs have not been covered, future costs may not be as readily incurred to create future drugs to cure or prevent such scourges as Alzheimer's, AIDS or cancer.

Despite such weighty economic considerations — for the society, as well as for the company — in political terms the pharmaceutical drug industry is virtually ideal for imposing price controls.

Price controls can be very popular in the short run, with their bad effects usually coming some time after the next election. Since pharmaceutical drugs can easily take a decade or more to be created, even if price controls caused all research and development of new drugs to come to a halt immediately, it would be long after the next election before people began to notice that no new medications were being created to deal with the ravages of still-deadly diseases.

These are virtually ideal political conditions for killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The short-run result would be visibly lower drug prices, making millions of voters happier, and the long-run consequences would be postponed until several elections later, by which time even those suffering needlessly from illnesses that new medications could have cured or prevented may see no connection between their own suffering and political decisions made years earlier. (Thomas Sowell, IBD)

The health of amphibians is commonly used to give a rough assessment of pollution levels in an area, but an analysis of more than 20,000 toxicity studies now suggests that these creatures are relatively resilient and not well suited to the task.

The finding could have a significant effect on the way that the environment is assessed. (Nature)

While we can only speculate as to how many studies of this type will be necessary to remove the scarlet letter from BPA, unjustly stitched on it by the fear entrepreneurs, a new rodent study—funded and conducted by EPA—finds that low-dose exposures of bisphenol A (BPA) showed no effects on the range of reproductive functions and behavioral activities measured.

This work, entitled "In Utero and Lactational Exposure to Bisphenol A, in contrast to Ethinyl Estradiol, Does not Alter Sexually Dimorphic Behavior, Puberty, Fertility and Anatomy of Female LE Rats," was published online on October 28, 2009 in the journal Toxicological Sciences.

The study concludes: "The lack of effect of BPA on female and male rat offspring after oral exposure to low doses in our studies is consistent with the lack of adverse effects on growth, vaginal opening, fertility and fecundity of low doses of BPA in several other robust, well designed, properly analyzed multigenerational studies (Cagen, et al.,1999; Ema, et al., 2001; Tinwell, et al., 2002; Tyl, et al., 2002)."

It is noted that 11 regulatory agencies from around the world have concluded that science supports the safety of BPA for people of all ages in its current uses. The results of this new study provide further strong support for those conclusions.

Only, don't hold your breath waiting for these new findings to be publicized in the mainstream media. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Over at Overlawyered, pundit Walter Olson laces into the NY Times for not being "...a day late and a dollar short, but more like 300 days late and many billions of dollars in overlooked costs short. He goes on, "Still, let's be grateful: the paper's news side has now implicitly rebuked the editorial side's fantastic, ideologically blinkered dismissal of "needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises."

Olson has been on the CPSIA beat since the beginning, and his relatively positive take on this turn of events is encouraging. However, part of me thinks that the real purpose of the NY Times editorial is to appear sympathetic while giving its Lefty readership an "in the field" portrayal of those poor quaint family businesses that will just have to be sacrificed on the altar of the great Utopian experiment (read: a socialist power-mad government).

The lesson of CPSIA is that a bill can have 106 co-sponsors, and not a single one of them gave one second's thought to the consequences of their handiwork. CPSIA, like no other bill in the past 50 years, gives you a stark picture of how stupid and feckless Congress really is. More than that, of those members who may have had doubts, they were all too craven to express them, lest they be thought of as being against children's health.

Run health care? They couldn't even write a bill that limited the amount of lead and phthalates in toys! (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Beginning Nov. 3, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will again study the safety of the economical and reliable farm herbicide atrazine. While a small group of activists argues that traces of atrazine in our streams pose a health hazard, numerous studies report otherwise.

With nearly 6,000 EPA studies under their belt, every EPA administrator since the agency began has certified atrazine’s safety.

In a recent report, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer placed atrazine in the same cancer-risk category as tea.
Nevertheless, the EPA announced another review because “articles in the media” were critical of the agency’s oversight.

The activists’ protest of atrazine is not rooted in a concern for our health. If it were, a long list of common substances, such as table salt, aspirin and tea, would be targeted for removal because they, too, can cause cancer if consumed in unrealistic amounts.
In these difficult economic times, it doesn’t make sense to increase the cost of food production on a scare campaign with no substance.

— Curt Zingul, president and Environmental Resource chair, Linn County Farm Bureau, Marion (Des Moines Register)

The green blog has been covering the carbofuran issue ever since the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided in 2008 to cancel the pesticide's registration because of concern for its health safety.

Carbofuran is an N-methyl carbamate insecticide and nematicide that has been registered to control pests in soil and on leaves in a variety of field, fruit, and vegetable crops.

In October 30, the EPA finally decided to implement its final rule to ban the pesticide and said that farmers who use the product should switch to safer alternatives instead. The carbofuran ban will start after December 31, 2009.

The EPA also denied any objections or requests for hearings regarding the ban, which of course FMC - the lone US producer of carbofuran, strongly objected to. During the 3-month commentary period on the ban, the National Corn Growers Association, National Sunflower Association, National Potato Council and FMC filed objections to the EPA proposal. (Green Chemicals)

Letter to the Editor

With all of the controversy surrounding health care, or the lack of it, perhaps we should consider that for better than 30 years and untold trillions of dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency has been on a mission to eradicate all health hazards, be they legitimate, exaggerated, imaginary or fabricated, and without accountability, in what seems to be a quest for eternal life — at least for the EPA.

Considering this, along with the fact that the taxes on one of civilization’s greatest threats, tobacco, are earmarked for existing health care, we wonder why there is even a health care problem.

In the meantime, what does the future hold? The three absolutes: death, taxes and never-ending environmental regulations.

DONALD GIBLIN
MASSILLON (Canton Repository)

Previous government forecasts of a relentless rise in childhood obesity may have been excessive, according to research released today.

Updated assessments by public health scientists working for the National Heart Forum suggest the anticipated surge in the numbers of severely overweight children is now levelling off. (The Guardian)

A study in California shows that about a quarter of the people hospitalized for H1N1 complications were morbidly obese, even though less than 5% of the population falls into that category. (Los Angeles Times)

As the sudden deaths of young children from H1N1 drive unprecedented demand for flu vaccine, a new study of the first 1,000 cases in California of H1N1 hospitalizations and deaths confirms the pandemic virus is disproportionately infecting and killing young people.

The study also shows obesity is emerging as a newly identified risk factor for severe H1N1. Of those adults whose body mass index, or BMI, was known, more than half — 58 per cent — were obese. Almost one-third did not have any other known condition that might increase their risk of dying from H1N1. (Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News Service)

The Legatum Institute's Prosperity Index goes a long way toward addressing shortcomings in other measurements of people’s well-being around the world. (Roger Bate, The American)

I’m sure we’ll see some emails from beachfront land speculators in Nigeria and Ethiopia soon.

On the serious side, University of Rochester researchers have found evidence that Earth, doing what it darn well pleases despite our protestations, is making a new ocean in the African desert.

Geologists Show that Seafloor Dynamics Are at Work in Splitting African Continent

In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

As stormwater runoff endangers the world’s water supply, the EPA is busy planting gardens and repaving its parking lots.

Don’t worry — it’s not just an attempt to beautify the agency’s field offices in Edison, New Jersey. The renovations are being done in the name of science, with a field test of runoff-reducing pavements and installation of water-cleansing rain gardens. The Environmental Protection Agency is using the trials to see how pavement and plant choices can help filter pollutants out of rain water before it reenters the water supply.

“Runoff from parking lots and driveways is a significant source of water pollution in the United States and puts undo stress on our water infrastructure, especially in densely-populated urban areas,” EPA Acting Regional Administrator George Pavlou said in a statement. The study, he said, “will help us develop strategies to lessen the environmental impacts of parking lots across the country.”

Plus, the agency gets a fancy new parking lot. (Wired)

Six years ago, tiny mustard-coloured toads could be found in their thousands living under the spray from an African waterfall. No one even knew they existed until 1996. Yet today the Kihansi spray toad will be declared extinct in the wild, a symbol of the plight facing 17,000 species that are slipping towards obscurity. (The Independent)

… and here’s the bobblehead being presented to his Rowe at last week’s Senate hearing on Kerry-Boxer:

Will the real John Rowe please stand up… or at least stop rent-seeking? (Green Hell)

Since I’m not legally allowed to show the American Physical Society logo (they complained last time) this will have to do:

You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.

We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no.

We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Some geoengineering schemes to fight climate change would probably succeed in cooling the planet, scientists said here Friday -- but whether we should ever deploy them is still an open question.

Researchers who gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outlined a stark list of potential side effects of different climate engineering approaches, including further depleting the ozone layer, inducing drought and turning the blue sky white.

At the same time, many experts said geoengineering could be a planetary "Plan B," an option to exercise if cutting greenhouse gas emissions can't stave off dangerous climate change.

"Even if we cut emissions, we have a lot of carbon dioxide already in the air," said David Keith of the University of Calgary. "We don't know exactly how bad the climate response will be, and we have to think clearly about how we manage the risk posed by CO2 already in the air."

An ongoing MIT research project into the risks posed by different levels of greenhouse gas emissions suggests that even steep cuts won't guarantee the world will stay under the 2-degree-Celsius climate guardrail espoused by many political leaders.

Stabilizing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at the equivalent of 550 parts per million of CO2 -- a goal that's "not easy," according to MIT Energy Initiative director Ron Prinn -- would give the world just a 25 percent chance of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees between 1990 and 2090. (ClimateWire)

Deep-sea ecosystems occupying 60% of the Earth's surface could be vulnerable to the effects of global warming warn scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Physorg)

Here is an open invitation to my loudest critics. I'd like to invite Joe Romm, Tim Lambert, the guys at Real Climate, William Connolley and anyone else (apologies to critics not mentioned, no slight intended;-) to engage in a substantive debate on the following 10 conclusions that I've reached about the climate issue, based on the fact that the human influence on climate is real, serious and deserving of significant policy attention:

1. There is no greenhouse gas signal in the economic or human toll record of disasters.
2. The IPCC has dramatically underestimated the scale of the stabilization challenge.
3. Geoengineering via stratospheric injection or marine cloud whitening is a bad idea.
4. Air capture research is a very good idea.
5. Adaptation is very important and not a trade off with mitigation.
6. Current mitigation policies, at national and international levels, are inevitably doomed to fail.
7. An alternative approach to mitigation from that of the FCCC has better prospects for success.
8. Current technologies are not sufficient to reach mitigation goals.
9. In their political enthusiasm, some leading scientists have behaved badly.
10. Leading scientific assessments have botched major issues (like disasters).

Here is my guarantee:

Your comments will be allowed here in full, they will not be deleted or snipped. I will delete comments that are off topic much more rigorously than I usually do to keep a clear focus. Anyone can participate, but I will require respectful, substantive discussion at all times. If there is enough interest, I will be happy to spin off unique threads for any of the 10 topics that people want to challenge or debate.

OK guys here is your chance to step up and show the world where I am wrong based on a substantive discussion of issues that really matter. What do you say? All are welcome. (Roger Pielke Jr)

The annual Climate Confidence Monitor found the number of people worrying about global warming worldwide has fallen by eight per cent to just over a third in the last year as the economic downturn kicked in.

Just fifteen per cent of people in Britain worry about climate change and how the world responds to the problem, the lowest figure for any of the 12 countries surveyed. The figure is down from 26 per cent last year. In the US 18 per cent of people said global warming was one of their biggest concerns followed by 22 per cent in Australia. (TDT)

STOCKHOLM — European Union leaders want President Barack Obama to clarify the U.S. position on climate change as they meet in Washington this week.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt says the EU is looking for "a clear position" from Obama before the December U.N. climate summit. Sweden holds the rotating EU presidency.

Reinfeldt said Monday he hopes the U.S. will make a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions and help finance poorer countries' efforts to cope with global warming.

EU leaders pledged last week to pay their "fair share" into a global fund for developing nations but failed to agree on a figure.

The last round of U.N. climate change talks before the Copenhagen conference are being held this week in Barcelona, Spain. (Associated Press)

BEIJING – China and India could use their growing clout to shame developed countries into committing to a climate change deal in Copenhagen in December, the UN's top climate scientist said on Friday.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told AFP on the sidelines of a conference in Beijing the two Asian giants would have "a lot of moral force" at the global talks in Denmark.

"China and India can play that kind of role," Pachauri said in an interview.

"(They can) take a few steps beyond what the developed world expects them to do and then they can point the finger at developed countries and tell them, 'Look, in comparison, we are much poorer than you, yet we are taking all these actions so why don't you do what is expected of you'." (AFP)

MOSCOW - Russia will only support a new global climate deal if all major industrialized nations sign up to it and if the capacity of Russia's giant forests are taken into account, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Monday.

Putin said the capacity of Russia's forests to balance carbon dioxide emissions would have to be taken into account for any global deal to replace the Kyoto protocol. (Reuters)

THE Rudd government has been accused of concealing critical information until "a minute to midnight", after Treasury costings showed a big shortfall in the revenue available to pay for the Coalition's amendments to Labor's emissions trading scheme.

Opposition emissions trading spokesman Ian Macfarlane made the charge after the costings found that instead of between $11 billion and $20bn in excess revenue that was anticipated by the Coalition to pay for its proposed changes, the ETS will deliver just $2.5bn over 10 years.

The revenue shortfall, foreshadowed in The Weekend Australian, means it is impossible to pay for Malcolm Turnbull's proposed amendments from funds generated through emission permit sales, and makes it far more difficult for the negotiations now under way between the government and opposition to conclude successfully.

"This really stretches the friendship ... dropping these numbers at a minute to midnight," said Mr Macfarlane, who has been charged with doing a deal with the government on the ETS before the vote scheduled for late this month.

"It will certainly make the negotiation more difficult - there are areas we are working on where a lack of money could make a difference."

Despite engaging in what it has called good-faith negotiations with the Coalition for the past two weeks over its set of proposed amendments to increase long-term compensation for small businesses and industry, the government released 10-year costings for the scheme with its mid-year economic forecasts only yesterday.

The Coalition had relied on private estimates that there would be between $11bn and $20bn in excess revenue available under the ETS to fund its amendments, which Liberal hardliners are insisting need to be accepted in their entirety for the ETS laws to be given Coalition support in the Senate. (Lenore Taylor, The Australian)

A FORM of carbon tax such as the emissions trading scheme cannot reduce global emissions unless there is agreement for a similar level of tax across all economies. That aside, the government's immediate issues are how to spend the money the tax raises, including how to avoid compensating the privatised brown coal generators for losses the tax causes.

Naturally, to ensure re-election, the Rudd government wants as much of the revenue as possible to go to voters. But the government is constrained because the tax would cripple firms that are unable to pass on all its costs. Twenty-five per cent to 35 per cent of the revenues raised are, therefore, to flow to the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. This has kept those firms quiet by cushioning the effects of the carbon tax on their existing assets.

That the carbon tax means nobody will again build an aluminium smelter, a steelworks or any other facility that makes use of Australian low-cost energy is not their worry. Nor, apparently, is it a concern of governments, all of which seem to envisage a dreamy, new low-energy economy that jettisons domestic consumption of our coal reserves and, eventually, our gas reserves.

Other business users also will be losers from the higher priced electricity brought about by the ETS tax. Higher energy costs will undermine the profits of all firms and even destroy some businesses. But the damage to relatively low energy users will be less easily traced to the government imposition.

The other major loser industry comprises carbon-based electricity producers. These provide 85 per cent of Australia's electricity. The ETS tax hits the brown coal generators hardest, followed by black coal generators. Notwithstanding the government's fantasy about new low-cost power generation technologies emerging, there is no alternative to the present supply profile, so it's more than likely we will see few generator departures.

Indeed, the compensation offered to the coal power stations is contingent on them remaining online when the only way the government can meet its stated carbon reduction goals is if they close down.

That aside, as with energy-intensive industries, the government has made it impossible for any firm to again build a base load power station in Australia without giving it a cast-iron carbon tax indemnification. As with the energy-intensive industries, the proposed tax will impose substantial costs on the existing generators. The most vulnerable are Victoria's privately owned brown coal generators. (Alan Moran, The Australian)

A CSIRO economist whose research criticising emissions trading schemes was banned from publication said last night he had been subjected to harassment by the senior agency management.

Clive Spash also accused the agency of hindering public debate and trampling on his civil liberties by preventing the research being published in British journal New Political Economy.

Dr Spash defended the paper, The Brave New World of Carbon Trading, saying it was a dispassionate analysis of ETS policies and was not politically partisan.

He was told in February he could publish the work if it were peer reviewed. But in July, CSIRO management said it could not be published after it was cleared for publication.

This month, he was informed he could not publish it even in his private capacity, because it was "politically sensitive". Within 24 hours, he also received a letter outlining a list of trivial instances in which he was accused of breaching CSIRO policy, for example not completing a leave form properly.

Dr Spash said he believed the letter was intended to, and did, intimidate him and denied him due process. None of the matters were raised with him prior to the letter being sent and each of the alleged misdemeanours could be explained.

"We are not members of the Defence Department, we are scientists who are supposed to be discussing research in an open forum. How do you advance knowledge if you stop people from publishing their work?

"I am totally happy to have my work criticised and debated but I'm not happy to have it suppressed." (Nicola Berkovic, The Australian)

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says, “Unless we fight climate change, unless we stop this trend, we’ll have devastating consequences for humanity.”

Other leaders make similar silly statements. Obama claims the “threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”

But which way is it growing? Which trend are they going to stop? The one predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the one Mother Nature is providing? They’ve chosen the IPCC even though all their predictions (scenarios) are wrong. But it is worse. Global temperatures of the last few years are impossible according to the ‘science’ of the (IPCC). (Tim Ball, CFP)

Three years ago, 77 percent of Americans believed the Earth is getting warmer.

Today, despite more scientific evidence that global warming is a real threat, only 57 percent agree.

The poll of 1,500, taken by the reputable Pew Center for the People and the Press, also found that only 36 percent of those surveyed believe that human activities are making the globe warmer and that it is a serious problem.

This is alarming. Not only do a lot of Americans not know what they are talking about but also the nation is becoming so polarized politically that common sense has become a victim.

The Environmental Protection Agency says there is no doubt that climate change is a documented, human-driven, scientifically provable fact. Less certain but still worrisome are the likely effects. (Ann McFeatters, Scripps Howard)

J. I. Barredo of the European Commission published an interesting paper earlier this year titled, "Normalized Flood Losses in Europe: 1970-2006" (PDF) in the open access journal Natural hazards and Earth System Sciences of the EGU. The study looks at a relatively short period, 37 years, but its findings are interesting nonetheless. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):

The recent warning by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact: “We are simply talking about the very life support system of this planet” [1] is consistent with the lessons arising from the history of the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system. A rise of CO2-e (CO2-equivalent, including the effect of methane) above 500 ppm and of mean global temperature toward and above 4 degrees C, projected by the IPCC [2], Copenhagen [3] and Oxford [4] scientific reports, as well as reports by the world’s leading climate science bodies (NASA/GISS, Hadley-Met, Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, NSIDC, CSIRO, BOM), would transcend the conditions which allowed the development of agriculture in the early Neolithic, tracking toward climates which dominated the mid-Pliocene (3 Ma) (1 Ma = 1 million years) and further toward greenhouse Earth conditions analogous to those of the Cretaceous (145–65 Ma) and early Cenozoic (pre-34 Ma). Lost all too often in the climate debate is an appreciation of the delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and the evolving biosphere, which controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans. (Andrew Glikson, Peoples Voice)

Last week it became clear that the Advertising Standards Authority had launched an inquiry into the Government’s £6m TV advertising campaign aimed at climate change sceptics. Now it appears that the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, will also investigate complaints that the advert is politically motivated and therefore breeches the ban on broadcasting political adverts. They would seem to have good reason for deciding to do so. (Harmless Sky)

Abstract: Atmospheric CO₂ background levels are sampled and processed according to the standards of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Earth System Research Laboratory mostly at marine environments to minimize the local influence of vegetation, ground or anthropogenic sources. Continental measurements usually show large diurnal and seasonal variations, which makes it difficult to estimate well mixed CO₂ levels

Historical CO₂ measurements are usually derived from proxies, with ice cores being the favorite. Those done by chemical methods prior to 1960 are often rejected as being inadequate due too poor siting, timing or method. The CO₂ versus wind speed plot represents a simple but valuable tool for validating modern and historic continental data. It is shown that either a visual or a mathematical fit can give data that are close to the regional CO₂ background, even if the average local mixing ratio is much different. (Francis Massen and Ernst-Georg Beck, Klima2009)

Conferece REPORT Number 1

'Global Warmers' blasted for refusal to present their case in front of scientists as Piers Corbyn presents key concepts of his Solar Weather Technique at international conference in Imperial College 28th October

CO2 theory refuted by science fact

FIRST CONFERENCE VIDEOS RELEASED

Piers Corbyn Opening remarks – We stand for Evidence based science
http://www.kane-tv.com/wa/piers1.html

Sammy Wilson DUP MP blasts the hypocrisy of the ‘Global Warmers’
http://www.kane-tv.com/wa/sammywilson.html

NINO3.4 SST Anomalies have reached 1.5 deg C for the week centered on October 28, 2009.

NINO3.4 SST AnomaliesSOURCEOI.v2 SST data is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite

Gore started this. Note to journalists everywhere: IT’S THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION STUPID!

See this article to understand why linking snow on Kilimanjaro to small changes in global temperature is just flat wrong. The plains around Kilimanjaro have gone through years of deforestation. Less trees > less evapotranspiration > less snow.

The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 1912 was 85 per cent smaller by 2007, and since 2000 the existing ice sheet has shrunk by 26 per cent, the paleoclimatologists said.

The findings point to the rise in global temperatures as the most likely cause of the ice loss.

Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may have also played a smaller, less important role, especially in recent decades, they added.

“This is the first time researchers have calculated the volume of ice lost from the mountain’s ice fields,” study co-author Lonnie Thompson said.

I keep getting requests to comment on the recent GRL paper by Lindzen and Choi (2009), who computed how satellite-measured net (solar + infrared) radiation in the tropics varied with surface temperature changes over the 15 year period of record of the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS, 1985-1999).

The ERBS satellite carried the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) which provided our first decadal-time scale record of quasi-global changes in absorbed solar and emitted infrared energy. Such measurements are critical to our understanding of feedbacks in the climate system, and thus to any estimates of how the climate system responds to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The authors showed that satellite-observed radiation loss by the Earth increased dramatically with warming, often in excess of 6 Watts per sq. meter per degree (6 W m^-2 K^-1). In stark contrast, all of the computerized climate models they examined did just the opposite, with the atmosphere trapping more radiation with warming rather than releasing more.

The implication of their results was clear: most if not all climate models that predict global warming are far too sensitive, and thus produce far too much warming and associated climate change in response to humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions.

One thing I liked about the authors’ analysis is that they examined only those time periods with the largest temperature changes – whether warming or cooling. There is a good reason why one can expect a more accurate estimate of feedback by just focusing on those large temperature changes, rather than blindly treating all time periods equally. The reason is that feedback is the radiation change RESULTING FROM a temperature change. If there is a radiation change, but no temperature change, then the radiation change obviously cannot be due to feedback. Instead, it would be from some internal variation in cloudiness not caused by feedback.

But it also turns out that a non-feedback radiation change causes a time-lagged temperature change which completely obscures the resulting feedback. In other words, it is not possible to measure the feedback in response to a radiatively induced temperature change that can not be accurately quantified (e.g., from chaotic cloud variations in the system). This is the subject of several of my previous blog postings, and is addressed in detail in our new JGR paper — now in review — entitled, “On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedbacks in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing”, by Spencer and Braswell).

Now for my main concern. Lindzen and Choi examined the AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) climate model runs, where the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were specified, and the model atmosphere was then allowed to respond to the specified surface temperature changes. Energy is not conserved in such model experiments since any atmospheric radiative feedback which develops (e.g. a change in vapor or clouds) is not allowed to then feed-back upon the surface temperature, which is what happens in the real world.

Now, this seems like it might actually be a GOOD thing for estimating feedbacks, since (as just mentioned) most feedbacks are the atmospheric response to surface forcing, not the surface response to atmospheric forcing. But the results I have been getting from the fully coupled ocean-atmosphere (CMIP) model runs that the IPCC depends upon for their global warming predictions do NOT show what Lindzen and Choi found in the AMIP model runs. While the authors found decreases in radiation loss with short-term temperature increases, I find that the CMIP models exhibit an INCREASE in radiative loss with short term warming.

In fact, a radiation increase MUST exist for the climate system to be stable, at least in the long term. Even though some of the CMIP models produce a lot of global warming, all of them are still stable in this regard, with net increases in lost radiation with warming (NOTE: If analyzing the transient CMIP runs where CO2 is increased over long periods of time, one must first remove that radiative forcing in order to see the increase in radiative loss).

So, while I tend to agree with the Lindzen and Choi position that the real climate system is much less sensitive than the IPCC climate models suggest, it is not clear to me that their results actually demonstrate this.

Since I have been doing similar computations with the CERES satellite data, I decided to do my own analysis of the re-calibrated ERBE data that Lindzen and Choi analyzed. Unfortunately, the ERBE data are rather dicey to analyze because the ERBE satellite orbit repeatedly drifted in and out of the day-night (diurnal) cycle. As a result, the ERBE Team advises that one should only analyze 36-day intervals (or some multiple of 36 days) for data over the deep tropics, while 72-day averages are necessary for the full latitudinal extent of the satellite data (60N to 60S latitude).

Lindzen and Choi instead did some multi-month averaging in an apparent effort to get around this ‘aliasing’ problem, but my analysis suggests that the only way around the problem it is to do just what the ERBE Team recommends: deal with 36 day averages (or even multiples of that) for the tropics; 72 day averages for the 60N to 60S latitude band. So it is not clear to me whether the multi-month averaging actually removed the aliased signal from the satellite data. I tried multi-month averaging, too, but got very noisy results.

Next, since they were dealing with multi-month averages, Lindzen and Choi could use available monthly sea surface temperature datasets. But I needed 36-day averages. So, since we have daily tropospheric temperatures from the MSU/AMSU data, I used our (UAH) lower tropospheric temperatures (LT) instead of surface temperatures. Unfortunately, this further complicates any direct comparisons that might be made between my computations (shown below) and those of Lindzen and Choi.

Finally, rather than picking specific periods where the temperature changes were particularly large, like Lindzen and Choi did, I computed results from ALL time periods, but then sorted the results from the largest temperature changes to the smallest. This allows me to compute and plot cumulative average regression slopes from the largest to the smallest temperature changes, so we can see how the diagnosed feedbacks vary as we add more time intervals with progressively weaker temperature changes.

For the 20N-20S latitude band (same as that analyzed by Lindzen and Choi), and at 36-day averaging time, the following figure shows the diagnosed feedback parameters (linear regression slopes) tend to be in the range of 2 to 4 W m^-2 K^-1, which is considerably smaller than what Lindzen and Choi found, which were often greater than 6 W m^-2 K^-1. As mentioned above, the corresponding climate model computations they made had the opposite sign, but as I have pointed out, the CMIP models do not, and the real climate system cannot have a net negative feedback parameter and still be stable.

But since the Lindzen and Choi results were for changes on time scales longer than 36 days, next I computed similar statistics for 108-day averages. Once again we see feedback diagnoses in the range of 2 to 4 W m^-2 K^-1:

Finally, I extended the time averaging to 180 days (five 36-day periods), which is probably closest to the time averaging that Lindzen and Choi employed. But rather than getting closer to the higher feedback parameter values they found, the result is instead somewhat lower, around 2 W m^-2 K^-1.

In all of these figures, running (not independent) averages were computed, always separated by the next average by 36 days.

By way of comparison, the IPCC CMIP (coupled ocean-atmosphere) models show long-term feedbacks generally in the range of 1 to 2 W m^-2 K^-1. So, my ERBE results are not that different from the models. BUT..it should be remembered that: (1) the satellite results here (and those of Lindzen and Choi) are for just the tropics, while the model feedbacks are for global averages; and (2) it has not yet been demonstrated that short-term feedbacks in the real climate system (or in the models) are substantially the same as the long-term feedbacks.

It is not clear to me just what the Lindzen and Choi results mean in the context of long-term feedbacks (and thus climate sensitivity). I’ve been sitting on the above analysis for weeks since (1) I am not completely comfortable with their averaging of the satellite data, (2) I get such different results for feedback parameters than they got; and (3) it is not clear whether their analysis of AMIP model output really does relate to feedbacks in those models, especially since my analysis (as yet unpublished) of the more realistic CMIP models gives very different results.

Of course, since the above analysis is not peer-reviewed and published, it might be worth no more than what you paid for it. But I predict that Lindzen and Choi will eventually be challenged by other researchers who will do their own analysis of the ERBE data, possibly like that I have outlined above, and then publish conclusions that are quite divergent from the authors’ conclusions.

In any event, I don’t think the question of exactly what feedbacks are exhibited by the ERBE satellite is anywhere close to being settled. (Roy W. Spencer)

“What we highlight here is that a significant trend, particularly the warming trend in terms of temperatures, can also be partially explained by land-use change,” said Dev Niyogi, a Purdue earth and atmospheric sciences and agronomy professor, and the Indiana state climatologist. He is the study’s corresponding author.

Niyogi and Fall say the idea that land use helps drive climate change has been poorly understood compared to factors such as greenhouse gas emissions. But that is changing.

“People realize that land use cover also is an important force and not only at the local but also at the regional scale,” said Fall, whose doctoral research focuses on the impacts of land surface properties on near-surface temperature trends.

The study took an approach called “observation minus reanalysis,” or OMR. Through this process, the researchers used temperature data from local ground observations, observation and computer modeling, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistical methods. They were able to separate the effects of land use or cover from greenhouse warming and isolate the impact from each land use or cover type. The more detailed data provided a clearer picture of the effects of land surface properties on near-surface temperature trends.

“We showed this quantitatively for the first time,” said University of Maryland atmospheric and oceanic science Professor Eugenia Kalnay, who developed the OMR method with Florida State University Professor Ming Cai. She also is a co-author of the study.

While the effects of greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide are clear, Kalnay said, the study does suggest land use needs to be considered carefully as well.

“I think that greenhouse warming is incredibly important, but land use should not be neglected,” she said. “It contributes to warming, especially in urban and desertic areas.”

Another study co-author, Roger Pielke Sr., said the results indicate that “unless these landscape effects are properly considered, the role of greenhouse warming in increasing surface temperatures will be significantly overstated.” Pielke is a senior research scientist in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder.”

He is correct! There is an growing acceptance that the first order human climate forcings are more diverse than was communicated in the 2007 IPCC report.

Drew T. Shindell, Greg Faluvegi, Dorothy M. Koch, Gavin A. Schmidt, Nadine Unger, Susanne E. Bauer, 2009: Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions. Science 30 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5953, pp. 716 – 718 DOI: 10.1126/science.1174760

“Evaluating multicomponent climate change mitigation strategies requires knowledge of the diverse direct and indirect effects of emissions. Methane, ozone, and aerosols are linked through atmospheric chemistry so that emissions of a single pollutant can affect several species. We calculated atmospheric composition changes, historical radiative forcing, and forcing per unit of emission due to aerosol and tropospheric ozone precursor emissions in a coupled composition climate model. We found that gas-aerosol interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, assessments of multigas mitigation policies, as well as any separate efforts to mitigate warming from short-lived pollutants, should include gas-aerosol interactions.”

Arneth, Almut , Nadine Unger, Markku Kulmala, Meinrat O. Andreae, 2009: Clean the Air, Heat the Planet? Science 30 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5953, pp. 672 - 673 DOI: 10.1126/science.1181568

“The push toward cleaner air in Beijing before the 2008 Olympic Games was a vivid reminder of the need to control air pollution, not only in Asia but in many regions of the world …. There is mounting evidence for particle- and ozone-related health effects …. Furthermore, ozone and aerosol particles affect Earth’s radiation balance …: Many aerosols cool the atmosphere (a negative forcing), whereas ozone and black carbon aerosol have a warming effect (a positive forcing). There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks … However, recent model studies … have shown that changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional. Furthermore, as Shindell et al. report on page 716 of this issue, current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases.”

“How will the geographically inhomogeneous changes in emissions translate into the metric that dominates the political debate— the global and local surface temperature?”

“Direct and indirect interactions between climate change, land ecosystems, and chemistry can amplify or dampen the climate effects of air pollutants, but are poorly represented in models……..Furthermore, land use and land cover change may alter biogenic and pyrogenic emissions of short-lived species as strongly as, if not more than, climate change. These interactions are increasingly being studied …..but are not yet well understood…”

“The relationship between TOA radiative forcing and surface temperature is affected by the vertical distribution of radiative forcing within the atmosphere. This effect is dramatic for absorbing aerosols such as black carbon, which may have little TOA forcing but greatly reduce solar radiation reaching the surface. It can also be important for land-use driven changes in the evapotranspiration flux at the surface, which change the energy deposited in the atmosphere without necessarily affecting the surface radiative flux. These effects can be addressed by considering surface as well as TOA radiative forcing as a metric of energy imbalance. The net radiative forcing of the atmosphere can be deduced from the difference between TOA and surface radiative forcing and may be able to provide information on expected changes in precipitation and vertical mixing. Adoption of surface radiative forcing as a new metric will require research to test the ability of climate models to reproduce the observed vertical distribution of forcing (e.g., from aircraft campaigns) and to investigate the response of climate to the vertical structure of the radiative forcing.”

“Regional variations in radiative forcing may have important regional and global climatic implications that are not resolved by the concept of global mean radiative forcing. Tropospheric aerosols and landscape changes have particularly heterogeneous forcings. To date, there have been only limited studies of regional radiative forcing and response. Indeed, it is not clear how best to diagnose a regional forcing and response in the observational record; regional forcings can lead to global climate responses, while global forcings can be associated with regional climate responses. Regional diabatic heating can also cause atmospheric teleconnections that influence regional climate thousands of kilometers away from the point of forcing. Improving societally relevant projections of regional climate impacts will require a better understanding of the magnitudes of regional forcings and the associated climate responses.”

“Several types of forcings—most notably aerosols, land-use and land-cover change, and modifications to biogeochemistry—impact the climate system in nonradiative ways, in particular by modifying the hydrological cycle and vegetation dynamics. Aerosols exert a forcing on the hydrological cycle by modifying cloud condensation nuclei, ice nuclei, precipitation efficiency, and the ratio between solar direct and diffuse radiation received. Other nonradiative forcings modify the biological components of the climate system by changing the fluxes of trace gases and heat between vegetation, soils, and the atmosphere and by modifying the amount and types of vegetation. No metrics for quantifying such nonradiative nonradiative “>forcings have been accepted. Nonradiative forcings have eventual radiative impacts, so one option would be to quantify these radiative impacts. However, this approach may not convey appropriately the impacts of nonradiative forcings on societally relevant climate variables such as precipitation or ecosystem function. Any new metrics must also be able to characterize the regional structure in nonradiative forcing and climate response.”

The new Shindell et al 2009 and Arneth et al 2009 papers, while still too narrowly focused on global average radiative forcing as the appropriate metric to diagnose climate change, nevertheless, support the NRC (2005) findings that global climate syatem heat changes involve much more than just ”a buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels“.

The authors of the Shindell et al and Arneth et al papers are starting to move in the direction of a broader viewpoint of how humans are affecting the climate system. They still need to reject, however, the scientifically (and policy) inadequate focus on “the global and local surface temperature” as “the metric that dominates the political debate” .

The human role in the climate system needs to be also assessed using the resource-based, bottom-up approach that is discussed, for instance, in our paper

As my son discussed, “Once reconceptualized, climate policy can proceed upon multiple, parallel tracks, and thus have a greater chance to keep in step with evolving science and actually have a chance to make progress with respect to policy goals”. The use of the vulernability framework, summarized below, can assist in this reconceptualization.

There are 5 broad areas that we can use to define the need for vulnerability assessments : water, food, energy, health and ecosystem function. Each area has societally critical resources. The vulnerability concept requires the determination of the major threats to these resources from climate, but also from other social and environmental issues. After these threats are identified for each resource, then the relative risk from natural- and human-caused climate change (estimated from the GCM projections, but also the historical, paleo-record and worst case sequences of events) can be compared with other risks in order to adopt the optimal mitigation/adaptation strategy.

The Great Light Bulb Robbery has been called off in Ohio due to consumer outrage.

In early October, Akron, OH-based First Energy planned to force consumers to buy two compact fluorescent lightbulbs for $21.60 — bulbs for which the utility paid only $3.50 each.

The utility then planned to charge consumers $0.60 more per month to make up for lost electricity sales due to the bulbs’ energy efficiency.

The scam would have netted First Energy $7.6 million — more than the $7 million (in 1963 dollars) netted during the August 1963 Great Train Robbery.

NEW YORK - U.S. climate legislation would hike gasoline prices about 13 cents a gallon as oil companies push the price of carbon permits on to consumers, according to report by Point Carbon, an independent consulting company that tracks global carbon and energy markets.

The analysts did not share the oil industry's view that a U.S. cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions would decimate demand for gasoline and force large numbers of refineries to shut down.

Climate legislation being debated in the Senate after passing in the House of Representatives narrowly in June would force big polluters to hold carbon credits for every tonne of carbon they emit.

Point Carbon analyst Emilie Mazzacurati said oil companies would face substantial carbon permit costs under the legislation because they would get few of the permits the government would distribute to companies during the first years of a cap-and-trade program.

But that should not hurt integrated oil companies very much, she said, because they could largely pass the costs on to consumers in the form of higher fuel prices. (Reuters)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Oct 6 - Oil companies scouring the coastline of Alaska's North Slope for new production sites are converging on the same territory as hungry polar bears trying to escape shrinking and thinning sea ice.

Polar bears have not attacked any workers recently, but oil companies are reporting four times as many sightings as they did last decade.

"These bears will walk the coast," said Craig Perham, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "So if you've got an operation right on the coast, you're going to see bears."

There were 321 polar bear sightings in and around Alaska oil and gas operations in 2007 and 313 in 2008, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That is about four times the annual average posted for the period of 1994 through 2000. (Reuters)

Internal Treasury Department numbers show that coal power generators are not going to generate less power for the first 20 years of an emissions trading scheme - but hey let’s give them a stack of compensation. (SMH)

Each spring, sage grouse gather on their "lekking" grounds to engage in a cacophonous courtship ritual. Males inflate large orange air sacs on their chests and boom out eerie calls to attendant females, sounding like a bizarre orchestra of distant foghorns. The song was once familiar across the Great Basin, but in recent decades, cattle grazing, oil and gas exploration and the spread of invasive species have put a huge dent in sage grouse habitat.

Now wind power development is adding another threat. The birds will not breed near tall structures for fear of predators, and so the springtime booming of sage grouse is being replaced with the even eerier whoosh of whirring turbines. (Michael Fry, Los Angeles Times)

On October 31, 2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.

How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America's industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.

America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?

Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.

But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?

We need to look no further than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America's elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups. Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos stated to fall. (Edwin X Berry, Lew Rockwell)

KUALA LUMPUR - Planned palm oil carbon emission targets will be delayed by at least a year as planters clash with NGOs on calculating the vegetable oil's environmental impact, officials said on Monday.

The measure was aimed at combating the negative image of palm oil output, which green groups say has been partly fueled by producers in Southeast Asia cutting down swathes of rainforests and draining carbon-rich peatlands.

But Malaysian and Indonesian producers say imposing limits on land expansion based on greenhouse gas emissions was an unfair barrier to trade as oil palm estates could act as net carbon sink. (Reuters)

The great thing for legislators about a nearly 2000 page bill — such as, oh, the House’s latest health care salvo — is that very few people bother to read the whole thing. So it’s easy to bury little gifts to favored supporters. Or big ones.

For example, check out section 2531 — that’s pages 1431-33 for those following along at home — which has gone largely unnoticed in the major news cycle. These three pages of the bill reward states that refrain from setting (or repeal) any caps on medical malpractice rewards — and the accompanying lawyers’ fees! – by requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide them a bribe an “incentive payment.”

As Hans von Spakovsky notes at NRO’s Corner, this “alternative medical liability law” aims to eviscerate cost-saving measures that protect doctors from frivolous lawsuits that increase the cost of health care to the consumer. So this has nothing to do with providing better or cheaper care, covering the uninsured, or even eliminating waste and fraud. Instead, it’s a pure sop to one of the Congressional Democrats’ key constituencies: trial lawyers.

For more information on free market health care reform alternatives, please visit Cato’s Health Care website here. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

Kellogg, the nation's largest cereal maker, is being called to task by critics who object to the swine flu-conscious claim now bannered in bold lettering on the front of Cocoa Krispies cereal boxes: "Now helps support your child's IMMUNITY."

Of all claims on cereal boxes, "this one belongs in the hall of fame," says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. "By their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity." (Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY)

My latest HND piece takes a look at this situation, amidst the most ambitious vaccination program our country has undertaken since the anti-polio campaign of the 1950s.

And, vaccine production still relies on the 50-year-old method of inoculating chicken eggs, a process that can take upwards of six months.

This year's delays have caused the government to award contracts for novel vaccine production modalities, including the use of mammalian cells, and antigen harvesting in insect cells, which, of course, are infinitely plentiful.

LONDON - Nearly a million people die from malaria each year because they cannot afford the most effective treatment and instead often buy old drugs to which the malaria parasite has become resistant, researchers said on Monday.

Artemisinin combination therapy, or ACT, drugs made by firms such as Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis can cost as much as 65 times the daily minimum wage in some African countries, according to a study of 6 high-risk nations by Populations Services International Malaria. (Reuters)

Consumer Reports made so many factual errors in presenting its data on BPA in canned goods that no-one could have possibly read the actual research. Call for ban on chemical puts public at risk from deadly food borne pathogens.

Consumer Reports have come out with a purported investigation into the chemical Bisphenol A that shows scant familiarity with any of the risk assessments of the chemical. Given that BPA is used to prevent food spoilage in cans, and given that food spoilage can lead to bacterial infection putting people at risk from botulism, and given that there is no safe and effective alternative as yet for BPA, these errors and exaggerations and omissions are not trivial. Consumer Reports seems to be oblivious to the extensive research on BPA carried out by the European Union, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others, all of which refutes the magazine’s claims about the chemical. (Trevor Butterworth, Stats)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered the first test for pesticide chemicals to be screened for their potential effects on the endocrine system. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that disrupt the hormones produced or secreted by human and animal endocrine systems, which regulate growth, metabolism and reproduction, said the EPA.

The EPA has released the test guidelines and schedule for issuing test orders to manufacturers for 67 chemicals during the next four months. The first seven pesticides that will be screened under the agency’s Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) are 2,4-D; atrazine, benfluralin, chlorthal-dimethyl (DCPA), fenbutatin oxide, norflurazon and propargite.

Testing, conducted through EDSP, will eventually expand to cover all pesticide chemicals. The data generated from the screens will provide scientific information to help EPA identify whether additional testing is necessary, or whether other steps are necessary such as further regulation.

Earlier this month, the EPA announced the Obama Administration’s goals to reform the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). (EL)

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. And what happens in Washington can spread consternation and do economic harm from coast to coast.

Americans are already alarmed by the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and the consequent damage to our hopes for economic recovery.

Few are aware, however, of how a little noticed meeting at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday could add a fresh layer of concern about the likelihood of an economic recovery in the very heartland of America.

EPA is about to conduct a redundant review of a commonly used herbicide called atrazine. It is not overstating the case to say that at stake is nothing less than the future health of the American farm economy - and for city folk, a plentiful supply of food at reasonable prices.

Atrazine has been used by farmers for more than 50 years to keep weeds and grasses from robbing water and nutrients from food crops. It is used on more than one-half of all U.S. corn (fed to farm animals, as well as humans), two-thirds of sorghum, and 90 percent of sugar cane. It is one of the primary elements that make American agriculture so phenomenally productive.

Atrazine is common because it is very effective and very gentle on plants other than weeds. The EPA estimates losing atrazine would cost farmers $28 an acre - a devastating hit that would, in this economy, mean the loss of many a family farm. (Alex Avery, Washington Times)

If you don’t know what atrazine is, consider yourself lucky. Or, more likely, consider yourself … how shall we say … pre-educated? It looks like the activists (especially those in the government) may be ramping up to make the next chemical martyr.

First, it was DDT with truly disastrous results. Then it was alar fears turning the apple industry into sauce. Now, it seems*, it’s atrazine.

That ought to be a startling admission, but we’re living in a world in which hippies want us to engage “planned recessions” and kill our pets to feed the Green moral panic. This is just another sad example of a truly sad phenomenon. It’s not the moral evil that was the campaign to ban DDT, but it seems to be of the same campaign playbook.

* This story was passed along by a friend and colleague who’s helping raise awareness about the campaign to attack atrazine … we thank everyone for solid tips on topics to discuss (The Chilling Effect)

The big story in the UK is that the Government’s drugs advisor has been sacked. The medical establishment’s position on this subject is seriously contaminated by Political Correctness. Consider this table, recreated from a sidebox that does not seem to appear in the Telegraph online version:

Figures refer to 2004 where a substance is mentioned on the death certificate, except alcohol and tobacco, which are annual estimates.

It is the old junk science ploy of mixing chalk and cheese. Whether any contributor to death is mentioned on the death certificate is largely a matter of taste and discretion. It is almost certainly grossly understated and has been shown, for example, to vary from country to country.

The big numbers come from “estimates”, which means epidemiology or worse. These numbers are pure fantasy. Take the one for tobacco. Oddly enough, when Number Watch first described such fabrications in 2001 the heading was Halloween Horror Story. As then, the extrapolations are worse than worthless: they are deliberate, cold-blooded misrepresentation. The British medical establishment has been mired in such PC manipulations for years (see, for example, The BIG liars, 2004).

Of course, the Government's position is also nonsensical, but that goes without saying. (Number Watch)

NEW YORK - Poultry workers may be at particularly high risk of developing several forms of cancer, according to a new study that points to viruses carried by birds as a possible cause.

The findings come from an ongoing effort by researchers to identify job-related illnesses in the nation's 250,000 poultry processing workers. It found higher than expected rates of cancers of the sinuses, mouth and blood, as well as other forms of the disease, in poultry plant employees.

The researchers said cancer-causing viruses transmitted during the handling and slaughter of chickens and turkeys, as well as environmental factors such as exposure to fumes generated during the wrapping, smoking and cooking of meat, along with other aspects of production, may be to blame for the increased rates of illness.

Some of the viruses present in birds are found in the egg supply. And because many vaccines are made using chicken eggs as incubators, the viruses have also been found in the vaccine stock - in particular, the shots against measles, mumps, and yellow fever, according to the researchers. However, scientists have not found evidence that the presence of the viruses is harmful to humans.

Still, "These observations have serious public health implications and reiterate the urgent need for studies to be conducted in subjects that have high exposure to the (cancer-causing) viruses of poultry, such as workers in poultry slaughtering and processing plants," they wrote in the journal Cancer Causes & Control. (Reuters Health)

Decreased physical activity may have little to do with the recent spike in obesity rates among U.S. adolescents, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Prompted by growing concern that the increase was due to decreased physical activity associated with increased TV viewing time and other sedentary behaviors, researchers examined the patterns and time trends in physical activity and sedentary behaviors among U.S. adolescents based on nationally representative data collected since 1991. The review found signs indicating that the physical activity among adolescents increased while TV viewing decreased in recent years.

The results are featured in the October 30 online issue of Obesity Reviews. (ScienceDaily)

Forecasts of a huge rise in obesity among children in England have been significantly downgraded following a new analysis of data.

The National Heart Forum found evidence that the rate of increase in childhood obesity may be starting to slow.

Its figures suggest that by 2020 the proportion of boys aged 2-11 who will be overweight or obese will be 30% - not 42% as previously predicted.

For girls of the same age the revised prediction is now 27% - down from 48%.

The revised predictions also show a big predicted drop in the number of overweight and obese young people aged 12-19. (BBC)

Researchers at the University of Warwick have identified a particular combination of health problems that can double the risk of heart attack and cause a three-fold increase in the risk of mortality.

The team, led by Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at Warwick Medical School Dr Oscar Franco, has discovered that simultaneously having obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar are the most dangerous combination of health factors when developing metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome is a combination of medical disorders that increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The main five health problems normally associated with metabolic syndrome are abnormal levels of blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglyceride levels (the chemical form in which fat exists in the body), too much sugar in the blood and central obesity (excess of fat around the waistline). (ScienceDaily)

Nearly all Americans say sending a text message while driving should be illegal, and about half say texting while behind the wheel should be punished at least as harshly as drunken driving, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.

“If you’re going to drive, drive; if you want to talk or text, pull over to the side of the road,” Constance Drake, 71, of Toms River, N.J., said in a follow-up interview.

Ninety-seven percent support the prohibition of texting while driving, an unusual level of agreement for any topic. Eighty percent also support a ban on talking on a hand-held cellphone while driving.

Fifty percent said the punishment for texting while driving should be just as severe as for drunken driving. (NYT)

OXFORD, England — Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer.

Ms. Curtis had plowed her Peugeot into the rear end of Ms. McBryde’s neon yellow Fiat, which had broken down on the A40 Motorway, killing Ms. McBryde, 24, instantly.

The crash might once have been written off as a tragic accident. Ms. Curtis’s alcohol level was zero. But her phone, which had flown onto the road and was handed to the police by a witness, told a story that — under new British sentencing guidelines — would send its owner to jail.

In the hour before the crash, she had exchanged nearly two dozen messages with at least five friends, most concerning her encounter with a celebrity singer she had served at the restaurant where she worked.

They are filled with the mangled spellings and abbreviations that typify the new lingua franca of the young. “LOL did you sing to her?” a friend asks. Ms. Curtis replies by typing in an expletive and adding, “I sang the wrong song.” A last incoming message, never opened, came in seconds before the accident.

With that as evidence, Ms. Curtis was sentenced in February under 2008 British government directives that regard prolonged texting as a serious aggravating factor in “death by dangerous driving” — just like drinking — and generally recommend four to seven years in prison.

The case reveals the tensions that arise when law enforcement and the courts begin to crack down on a dangerous habit that has become widespread and socially acceptable. Is texting while driving bad judgment, or a heinous crime? And what is the appropriate punishment? (NYT)

Oregon’s biggest problem used to be logging jobs lost from spotted owl lawsuits.

A new sort problem is developing. Green jobs and green programs are going off the rails. Portland recently passed a draconian “Climate Action Plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% that has little chance of succeeding by its 2050 deadline.

The latest news is that the Green Tax breaks aren’t what they were promised to be and taxpayers are getting hosed for a cost 40 times what was voted on:

It gets worse. Now tax breaks are being sold in Oregon for less than they are worth. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

WASHINGTON - All seven Republicans on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee plan to boycott next week's work session on a climate-change bill, an aide said on Saturday, in a move aimed at thwarting Democratic efforts to advance the controversial legislation quickly.

"Republicans will be forced not to show up" at Tuesday's work session, said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Republican senators on the environment panel.

Under committee rules, at least two Republicans are needed for Chairwoman Barbara Boxer to hold the work sessions that would give senators an opportunity to amend the controversial legislation and then vote to approve it in the panel, which is controlled by President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats.

But Republicans are demanding more detailed economic analysis of the bill by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- a task that could take more than a month -- before agreeing to participate in the work sessions that are called "mark ups."

The seven Republicans have not indicated they ultimately would vote for the bill, which Boxer wants to move through her committee before December's international climate-change summit in Copenhagen.

Even with committee approval of the bill, the full Senate is not expected to vote on it this year. The legislation, as currently written, would have a hard time gaining the support of the 60 senators needed to pass major bills. (Reuters)

Opening Statement of Sen. James M. Inhofe, Ranking Member Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Hearing on S. 1733

“We are here today to discuss a 923-page bill to fundamentally redesign our $14 trillion economy. The bill is no doubt ambitious but it’s also extremely costly and ineffective. It is a massive new tax on consumers that will have virtually no affect on climate. (CleanBeta)

There's much debate about the efficacy of controlling pollutants with economic incentives, also known as cap-and-trade. Its advocates dress it up with a lot of moral indignation. Cap-and-trade would not achieve its goals—and it would put America on a ruinous course. Here's why: (Karl Rove, NEWSWEEK)

The proposed “solutions” to scientifically fading man-made global warming fears are set to alter American lifestyles and sovereignty in ways never before contemplated.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has warned: “‘He who controls carbon controls life. It is a bureaucrat’s dream to control carbon dioxide.” Washington, D.C., and the U.N. are in a field of dreams right now as they envision one of the most massive expansions of controls on human individual freedom ever contemplated by governments. (Marc Morano, CFP)

Some consumers may not as so eager to save the planet when they see the bill. (Tim Kelly, Forbes)

WASHINGTON — An island in the Indian Ocean, vital to the U.S. military, disappears as the sea level rises. Rivers critical to India and Pakistan shrink, increasing military tensions in South Asia. Drought, famine and disease forces population shifts and political turmoil in the Middle East.

U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, viewing these and other potential impacts of global warming, have concluded if they materialize it would become ever more likely global alliances will shift, the need to respond to massive relief efforts will increase and American forces will become entangled in more regional military conflicts.

It is a bleak picture of national security that backers of a climate bill in Congress hope will draw in reluctant Republicans who have denounced the bill as an energy tax and jobs killer because it would shift the country away from fossil fuels by limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities. (AP)

BERLIN, Oct 30 - Every single person should set a cap of a total of 110 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next four decades to avoid irreversible and uncontrollable consequences of climate change, under a new proposal.

The German advisory council on global changes (WBGU, after its original name), which advises the German government on climate change, says in its report 'Solving the climate dilemma' that the best solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to allocate them worldwide on a per capita basis.

WBGU spokesperson Benno Pilardeaux told IPS that a per capita cap for industrialised and developing countries alike could become a cornerstone of international negotiations towards a new treaty on reducing greenhouse gases, after the likely failure of the UN conference on climate change scheduled to take place in Copenhagen Dec. 7-18.

"Copenhagen will most likely not succeed in ratifying a treaty, and shall only set the framework for a further conference, probably next March," Pilardeaux said.

At a press conference in London last week, Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the conference in Copenhagen will not succeed in ratifying a new international treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

"If you look at the limited amount of time that remains to Copenhagen, we have to focus on what can realistically be done and how that can realistically be framed," De Boer said. (IPS)

This week the Argus saw the return of a darling activist issue to its pages—an issue whose inherent emotional appeal to many students on this campus can only be compared to the formulaic emotional appeal inherent in the struggle against all forms of “inequality,” and the emotional appeal of Joss Whedon-directed Saturday morning cartoon shows. In the Argus op-ed article “350: What’s Behind the Number?”, Sam Bernhardt ’10 and Daniel Fischer ’12, both members of the Environmental Organizers Network (EON), Wesleyan’s self-appointed set of environmental moral guardians, inform their readers that “either we change our destructive ways, or we face a self-induced annihilation.”

I hate to rain on Bernardt and Fischer’s parade—who am I kidding, with these temperatures, I’d be sleeting on it—but there is a third option: that we maintain our “destructive” ways and when nothing happens, radical environmentalism suffers yet another self-induced annihilation of its own scant credibility. (Mytheos Holt, Wesleyan Argus)

Gov. Gary Herbert and several Utah legislators argue that the costs of addressing global warming are so great that we should not act absent conclusive proof of human responsibility. They cite a few scientists who dissent from the vast majority of scientists studying the issue.

The governor and his legislative colleagues are correct that skeptics can play an important role in scientific inquiry, and those critics' voices should never be stifled.

But insistence that mitigation await conclusive evidence, which can be stymied so long as even a few scientists disagree, sets an impossible burden of proof that we never apply to similar public decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty.

Science is inherently fraught with uncertainty, and a standard of conclusive proof guarantees policy paralysis.

The argument that steps to address global warming require conclusive scientific proof is based on the deceptively appealing but flawed logic that the costs of controls could be so large and the resulting economic impacts so severe that they are not justified until we know we are correct.

Decisions about how to act in the face of uncertainty, however, should consider three factors: the cost of taking action, the likelihood of harm and the cost of not acting if the risk turns out to be real.

The "conclusive proof" standard considers the first two but not the third issue, in this case the potentially catastrophic economic, human and environmental costs of global warming if the majority scientific view is correct. (Robert W. Adler, Salt Lake Tribune)

Outrageous nonsense: Climate change could kill 250,000 children - Climate change could kill 250,000 children next year, and the figure could rise to more than 400,000 by 2030, according to Save the Children.

The charity warns that over 900 million children in the next generation will be affected by water shortages and 160 million more children will be at risk of catching malaria – one of the biggest killers of children under five – as it spreads to new parts of the world.

In a new report Save the Children claims that climate change is the biggest global health threat to children in the 21st century as droughts and floods force families to leave their homes and children to drop out of school. Starvation and economic collapse caused by natural disasters could even lead to more child trafficking and child labour. (TDT)

WASHINGTON -- Global warming would be bad news for all those amber waves of grain, and for the corn and soybeans that are plentiful throughout the Midwest. (McClatchy Newspapers)

There’s serious concern in the scientific and environmental communities about the geoengineering moral hazard — the fear that studying or even just talking about geoengineering will cause people to give up on or at least lose focus on our primary mission: reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The issue came up several times at the MIT geoengineering workshop Friday.

It’s an important concern, especially given the entrenched interests who are opposed to reducing emissions and the difficulty of convincing the public to make sacrifices when faced with a long-term, difficult-to-perceive threats.

I don’t think researchers should avoid studying geoengineering. We might want to be careful about the name, however. It implies a greater degree of control and precision than we have or are likely to gain in the next generation or so. A misperception about precision could make it easier to persuade the public to accept geoengineering uncritically.

You can’t restrict a term to its teleological argument, said Jim Fleming, a science historian from Colby College. In other words, no matter how imprecise or unsuccessful the practice may be, it is still engineering.

It’s important to capture intentionality, said David Keith, an environmental sciences and chemical engineering professor at the University of Calgary. In other words, it’s engineering because engineers are attempting to achieve the degree of control and precision we associate with the term engineering.

Looking through the pessimism-brings-optimism lens, I see an inverse of the moral hazard. If these really smart people who understand climate as well as anyone say that geoengineering is fraught with peril and may not work but we should still consider it, then the threat from global warming must be truly scary and we should curb emissions now. I’m not counting on this idea to get much traction in Washington or with the public, however. (Eric Smalley, Energy Collective) [em added]

Tom Fuller has set up a survey on various aspects of the climate issue. Please take a moment to participate. Here are his ground rules:

The challenge of global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December U.N. conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue: (Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ)

NEVER in the field of human deceit have so few taken so many for a ride to so little effect. I refer, with apologies to Churchill, to the ridiculous competition among our politicians to scare us silly about global warming.

This week, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell paused from threatening the City as chairman of the Financial Services Authority to seek, as boss of the Green Fiscal Commission, a re-balancing of the tax system against carbon, even to the tune of a £3,300 levy on new cars.

He said it would not lead to more overall taxation.

If you believe that in view of Gordon Brown's gargantuan debt legacy, you will believe anything.

Last week, the PM said we had only 50 days to save the planet. That was 50 days after Prince Charles, speaking in advance of the great UN global warming jamboree in Copenhagen, in December, gave us the 100-day warning. (Yorkshire Post)

European Union leaders on Friday offered to contribute money to a global fund to help developing countries tackle global warming hoping kick-start stalled talks on a new agreement on climate change.

But E.U. leaders disappointed climate campaigners by making the offer conditional on donations from other parts of the world and by failing to decide how much Europe would contribute to a global pot of up to 50 billion euros by 2020. (NYT)

OSLO, Oct 30 - Climate negotiators from 175 nations meet in Spain next week for a final session to try to break deadlock between rich and poor and salvage a U.N. deal due in Copenhagen in December.

The Nov. 2-6 talks in Barcelona of almost 4,000 delegates, led by senior government officials, will seek to end deep splits about sharing out curbs on greenhouse gases and ways to raise billions of dollars to help the poor tackle global warming.

In a step forward, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said European Union leaders agreed on funds at a summit on Friday with three conditional offers for Copenhagen. He said poor nations need 100 billion euros ($148 billion) a year from 2020.

Brown told reporters in Brussels that EU states would pay their "fair share". "I think this is a breakthrough that takes us forward to Copenhagen," he said.

Most industrialised nations have not outlined offers. (Reuters)

BEIJING: Two Indians, Amartya Sen and Rajendra Pachauri, opened and closed the International Conference on Environment and Development in Beijing over the past three days. But there is still a big question mark on whether India and China will speak in the same voice at the Copenhagen Climate summit next December.

“I doubt China will dilute its stand or go with the United States on the issue,” Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told TNN on the sidelines of the conference on Friday. He did not agree with people who felt that China might break away from India on the issue.

At present, both India and China are opposing western pressure to enforce mandatory limits on emissions and even punish countries that fail to meet emission standards that will be set at the Copenhagen conference. But there are many who fear that the United States might succeed in getting China to change its stand. (Times of India)

OSLO, Nov 1 - Major nations still want a new U.N. deal in Copenhagen in December and a few months' delay to give bogged-down negotiators more time would not help, Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard said on Saturday.

"The resolve is there" to reach agreement this year, Hedegaard told Reuters after hosting two days of informal talks in Barcelona among ministers from 23 nations including China, the United States, European states, Brazil and South Africa.

"I don't think that we can solve anything in March or April that we can't solve in December," she said by telephone. Hedegaard will preside over the Copenhagen meeting. (Reuters)

The Copenhagen summit opens in December. Many see it as the last chance to limit the consequences of global warming – but failure is a real prospect. Here, we examine the complex trade-offs that will have to take place for the summit to succeed (Robin McKie, Suzanne Goldenberg and Jonathan Watts, The Observer)

The head of the international group leading the fight against climate change has accused countries of pushing science aside in favour of self-serving "political myopia" ahead of the vital Copenhagen summit.

Senior officials and negotiators are increasingly gloomy about the prospects for a global warming deal next month, with the British government admitting there is now no chance of a legally binding treaty. (The Guardian)

MARRAKESH, Morocco, Nov 1 - Delegates to climate talks in Copenhagen may not be able to agree even a partial solution to the problem of how to tackle global warming by December, a top international climate change official said.

The head of energy efficiency and environment at the International Energy Agency, Richard Bradley, said he sensed delegates were not interested in half-way measures because they feared that might tie their hands in other areas later.

"It looks like negotiators from the major economies are unlikely to conclude that addressing part of the problems in Copenhagen and then finishing them later is an outcome they could live with," Bradley told Reuters late on Saturday.

"The negotiators I have talked to ... probably aren't prepared to solve part of the problems (in Copenhagen)," he said. "Frankly, from what I have seen, they are not even ready to solve any of the problems." (Reuters)

November 2, 2009 - Churchville, VA - The leftish Brookings Institution and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce basically agree that the energy taxes in the House Waxman-Markey bill could total $9 trillion over ten years. As an economist, I look at these forecasts and wonder "How can we possibly know?"

These estimates cover only the costs of the "user permits" that companies will have to buy. They don't even try to measure the massive reduction in our economic output as energy costs double and triple with scarcity.

Let's look at a couple of "case studies":

First, we use a lot of natural gas to make fertilizer, pulling 90 million tons per year of natural nitrogen from the air (which is 78% N). The world has only about one-third of the cow manure needed to nourish today's crops, so nitrogen fertilizer is feeding 2 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people through higher food yields per acre.

Imagine that ten years from now the carbon taxes have eliminated half of the nitrogen fertilizer: global food production has fallen massively— say by 25–30 percent; world food prices have tripled; and storage bins are empty. What price would we pay to keep the other half of the nitrogen fertilizer so our kids won't starve?

Would farmers and the public defend the remaining fertilizer factories with roadblocks—or even firearms? Will governments overcome the "fertilizer fanatics" with force? How would the governments convince troops to fire on their own people? By giving the troops food the public can't get?

Moreover, the BBC has just admitted what careful observers already knew—the planet hasn't warmed since 1998! Many climatologists say we're in a 30-year cooling driven by Pacific Ocean cycling. Will "global warming" come to be viewed as just a "weapon of mass taxation"?

Second case: Britain is supposed to lose 40 percent of its electrical generating capacity in the next eight years. All but one of its nuclear plants is due for decommissioning, and the EU declares that nine of its big coal-fired plants emit too much CO2. As the blackouts spread across a shivering winter countryside, will the UK government carry through its fossil-reduction commitments while elderly people are dying in their homes?

None of the taxes, remember, will bring fossil fuel use down enough to actually forestall man-made global warming—even if the embattled Greenhouse Theory was valid. The energy taxes will be "all pain and no gain."

Remember, too that the "Green alternatives" aren't working out well

Meanwhile, the natural, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle predicts only 0.5 degree C of warming over the next several centuries. The ice cores and seabed fossils tell us this has all happened many times in the past—including five natural global warmings in the last 9,000 years.

Politicians can pass fossil fuel taxes through today's "tame" legislatures—but they can't make the public obey those laws after they clearly begin to violate human rights and common sense. (Dennis T. Avery, PipeLineNews)

A new report (PDF) from the TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) reveals the high costs being imposed on British and European consumers by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The ETS is intended to reduce carbon emissions across Europe by increasing the cost of energy for households, businesses and other organisations. This increases household bills, but also increases business running costs and the cost of running public services such as hospitals.

As well as calculating the cost of the scheme, the report investigates the flaws in its design and function. These include the problem of the burden falling disproportionately upon the poor, the highly volatile price of carbon emissions under the Scheme and the failure of the Scheme to properly balance the social costs of carbon emissions with the cost of reducing them.

The full report is available online here (PDF). (TaxPayers' Alliance)

According to an Australian economist, Clive Spash, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has been attempting to prevent him from publishing a paper critical of carbon trading which had already been accepted for publication. Here is a news report:

The CSIRO charter referred to by Huw Morgan can be found here in PDF. The charter states that:

So the idea that CSIRO researchers do not comment on real-world policies is simply false. CSIRO even has a paper a paper on the CSIRO website by one of Spash's collaborators on carbon markets and their problematic implications for natural resource management.

Carbon trading is at the center of domestic debate about climate cahnge in Australia. It is understandable that the government would be sensitive to criticism at this time. How it responds to these allegations will likely shape the short-term debate about Australian climate policy, but as importantly, the longer-term issues of the ability of government researchers to freely express their views and their research. If CSIRO has indeed attempted to meddle in an international peer review process, then there could be significant fallout. (Roger Pielke Jr)

THE Rudd Government has questioned the value of continuing to negotiate with the Opposition after its Leader in the Senate, Nick Minchin, said the Coalition might not vote for the emissions trading scheme even if Labor accepted every change being demanded.

With the threat of an early election still alive, the Government said talks were "in an untenable position" and the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, needed to repudiate Senator Minchin if they were to continue.

"We'll give him the option of deciding whether or not he wants to continue to negotiate," the Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, said. "The Government can't negotiate with a party that says it might rat on any deal."

The Assistant Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said Senator Minchin's threat was "entirely incompatible with good faith negotiations".

Mr Turnbull did not respond but the Coalition's emissions trading spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, who is leading negotiations with the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, scrambled to limit the damage.

Although the Coalition party room has the final say on whether there would be a deal, Mr Macfarlane said if the Government accepted all the amendments, he would recommend to the party room that it supported the bill.

Mr Macfarlane said he was confident the numbers existed to make a deal should a reasonable offer be made. But he was sceptical the Government would give enough ground.

"As I have said all along, it will be very difficult to get this across the line because not everything I take to them, I will get," he told the Herald.

Senator Minchin, one of the Coalition hardliners on emissions trading, was asked by Fairfax Radio why the Opposition did not call the Government's bluff about an early, double dissolution election by blocking the legislation in November.

"Even if the Government accepts all our amendments, we may well still vote against the bill, or seek to defer the bill, but that's a decision we're yet to make," Senator Minchin said.

Afterwards, Senator Minchin said he was simply stating party policy. The party room had agreed to allow negotiations with Labor. It would have to agree again before any deal was made. (SMH)

Next month Kevin Rudd goes to Copenhagen to agree to a UN deal to cut emissions. Point 41 of the draft treaty obliges Australia to hand over an astonishing $7 billion a year to a new and unelected global authority:

.7 per cent of that is $7 billion a year. That’s the size of the handout that the UN officials and government negotiators working on the Copenhagen draft want Kevin Rudd to hand over each year to a new world body.

What the United Nations’ new global warming bureaucrats want from Australia amounts to twice what we already pay in all forms of foreign aid. Nor does that $7 billion a year represent our total bill under this treaty. Not counted are the costs for meeting the new emissions targets, and the fines to the UN’s new body for failing to meet any targets. (Andrew Bolt Blog)

LIBERAL Party frontbenchers have begun to dump their support for carbon emissions trading after receiving party research showing voters are increasingly skittish about putting a price on carbon.

Despite Malcolm Turnbull's ongoing attempts to broker a deal with Labor that would clear the way for Kevin Rudd's proposed ETS, political hardheads among the Liberals are moving closer to the Nationals' view that endorsing carbon trading is political poison. (Matthew Franklin and Dennis Shanahan, The Australian)

A new international survey has found Australians no longer care about climate change as much as they do about domestic issues and the financial crisis.

The survey looks at attitudes towards climate change in 12 different countries and found concern in Australia dropped in the past year by 14 per cent - the largest drop among the developed nations surveyed. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

So a lawyer is afraid we’ll miss the boat. Which boat? That would be the boat-full of money from Australian workers that’s headed for major international banks, right?

(Isn’t that the kind of boat we would want to catch, but with a tactical nuclear sub and an armed SWAT team?)

Yes, that market is projected to be big, not just $1.9 trillion though, some say $10 trillion. This is not a point in it’s favor, not for anyone except traders, lawyers and bankers.

Let’s translate that. Being BUYERS of credits means we are payers for permits. Thus meaningless pieces of paper about air that could-have-had-more-carbon-it-it will come to Australia, while real money that buys real things, leaves. This is not usually the way to run a free market, or a healthy economy. More like lemming economy management. Witness the economic suicide of a whole continent.

Exactly. If we don’t want to miss out on the chance to fleece the people with a financial system based on science decreed by an unaudited, unelected committee in Geneva — then we’d better let those big bankers in, and give them a guarantee that all Australians will be forced by law to pay for valueless, unauditable, unverifiable permits issued in the third world, in schemes brokered by the largest financial entities in the world.

Quick and hurry! Rush to be slaves to corruption, crime, bullies, bankers, and an international bureaucracy redistributing money to make up for alleged carbon “crimes”. Don’t check the science whatever you do. We trust the IPCC.

Remind me again how many degrees cooler we’ll be if we buy all these “permits”? (JoNova)

PSST. Want a surefire way to get a grant - maybe $300,000, or even more - for your university research?

Then gather around, my dear professors, and say these magic words.

Climate change.

You scoff? You say it’s too crazy to work, given that your expertise is actually in Bible studies, Aboriginal history, ceramics or sorghum?

More fool you. Just check the 1136 grants of the Australian Research Council that were approved this week by Science Minister Senator Kim Carr.

That’s $392 million Carr has splashed out in this year’s funding round for university research into everything from history and anthropology to physics and genetic engineering.

Yet with so much to choose from, an astonishing 10 per cent of that entire budget for ARC Discovery and Linkage grants went on projects submitted by academics who’d squeezed in some reference to “climate change”, no matter how preposterous.

Ten per cent! Oh, those cunning academics. Those wind-sniffers.

How well they understand the far-Left Kim “Il” Carr’s fierce need to have all scientists sing the Rudd Government’s hymn of global warming doom. How closely they heeded his decision to make climate change research this year a “priority”.

Still, I must laugh at the inventiveness some showed to scramble on to this greatest of gravy trains. (Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun)

Peter Foster: Muddled models - The UN will send billions to the Third World in carbon credits. Remember Oil for Food?

When the TD Bank’s Don Drummond agreed to spend $110,000 on a study of the impact of climate change policy on Canada, what he had in mind was to elucidate the regional impacts of such policies. This was a worthy objective, although everybody knows that it’s Alberta that stands to get hammered. But Mr. Drummond chose to channel the study, which was carried out by climate policy wonk Mark Jaccard, through the Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, organizations hardly known for their objectivity on the issue. Why do this? Mr. Drummond told me yesterday that these activist organizations have “technical expertise,” while Mr. Jaccard apparently has “the models.”

TD certainly got media bang for the buck. His report was leaked to The Globe and Mail, and yesterday’s Globe featured a front-page story, two columns and an editorial. However, the thrust of coverage appeared to contradict the smiley-faced conclusions of the report, which was titled “Climate leadership, economic prosperity.” Or, please hobble us so that we can run faster! (Financial Post)

On my way to a climate conference yesterday, I wondered what £6m worth of TV advertising might look like if it climate sceptics dominated the political and media elites, rather than environmental activists. This campaign would obviously be targeted at the small minority of people who think that their lifestyles affect the climate.

Perhaps creatives could come up with a 'Numptie' Family - who run around the house turning off lights, spend hours doing recycling, demand to eat vegetarian food, and send back their energy bills because they're not high enough. The message would be don't waste your time on pointless activities. The tag line could "Don't be a Numptie".

I expect that this would become a national sensation, (but perhaps not with Guardian readers,) and possibly even generate spin-offs. It would surely draw fewer complaints than the current £6m "behaviour change" campaign featuring the drowning cartoon dog.

It would certainly meet with approval from most attendees of Piers Corbyn's "Climate Fool's Day" conference yesterday. There, at Imperial College, the air was thick with heresy. (Andrew Orlowski)

There's been interest on this blog and elsewhere about a meeting organised on Wednesday by Piers Corbyn, the independent UK weather forecaster who argues that the sources of modern-day climate change lie in magnetic interactions around the Earth rather than greenhouse gas emissions on it.

So - a genie to your Aladdin, though emphatically not all-powerful - I thought I'd go along.

Held at Imperial College London - Mr Corbyn's alma mater - the meeting featured presentations from Northern Ireland's famously "climate-sceptical" environment minister Sammy Wilson, botanist and ex-BBC TV nature presenter David Bellamy, and a handful of academics - as well as from Mr Corbyn himself.

(The meeting wasn't endorsed or sponsored by Imperial - I'm sure they'd want me to point that out.) (Richard Black, BBC)

As next month’s Copenhagen conference approaches, politicians should not be distracted by the apparently growing volume of sceptical voices challenging the need for global action against climate change. Some of the sceptics may have scientific backgrounds but they are not in the mainstream of contemporary climate research. The real experts – hundreds of scientists worldwide who are examining the link between climate and carbon dioxide emissions – have no doubt that man-made global warming is a real crisis that must be addressed urgently.

When science and politics mix, scientists have to simplify their arguments to enable politicians to grapple with the issues. The sheer complexity of climate science, from atmospheric physics to polar glaciology, makes it harder to convey than some other science-based issues such as space policy, stem cells or HIV/Aids. And there has inevitably been oversimplification – sometimes amplified by environmental groups keen to present the threat of global warming in the starkest terms. (Financial Times)

Climate change raises many questions about development goals and practices. These can only be resolved through widespread social deliberation and hard political negotiation. Simply more or 'better' science won't be enough.

The idea that humans are changing the global climate system was first developed, elaborated and demonstrated by natural scientists. The scientific evidence backing this basic idea is now overwhelming, even if scientific predictions of future climate changes are still shrouded in uncertainty.

But although science is very good at revealing how things are, and suggesting what physical manifestations might follow a particular course of action, it has limited relevance and reach when deciding what should be done in the face of complex dilemmas — such as climate change. (Mike Hulme, Science Alert)

In a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900, the most famous scientist of the day, Lord Kelvin, declared, "Physics is essentially complete".

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now," he said. "All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

He did note a couple of "dark clouds on the horizon" but expected they would be erased without much trouble.

One cloud was the puzzle about the constancy of the speed of light; the other how matter absorbed and emitted light. Just five years later Albert Einstein's theories about both would shatter Lord Kelvin's world view.

Einstein wasn't as arrogant as Lord Kelvin. He was to say of his theories, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong". (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time. Our planet is usually in a deep freeze. The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000 years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.

We are in-betweeners, and just barely — we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so after the end of the last ice age. But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.

Our luck is even better than that. Those 10,000-year warm spells aren’t all cosy-warm. They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren’t around during its fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable — even the Inuit fled. While the cold spells within the 10,000 year warm spells aren’t as brutal as a Little Ice Age, they can nevertheless make us huddle in gloom, such as the period in history from about 400 AD to 900 AD, which we know as the Dark Ages. We’ve lucked out twice, escaping the cold spells within the warm spells, making us inbetweeners within the inbetween periods. How good is that? (Financial Post)

Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.

In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.

They claim that United Nation's figures have severely underestimated the greenhouse gases caused by tens of billions of cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and other animals in three main areas: methane, land use and respiration.

Their findings – which are likely to prompt fierce debate among academics – come amid increasing from climate change experts calls for people to eat less meat.

In the 19-page report, Robert Goodland, a former lead environmental adviser to the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, a current adviser, suggest that domesticated animals cause 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), more than the combined impact of industry and energy. The accepted figure is 18 per cent, taken from a landmark UN report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow.

"If this argument is right," write Goodland and Anhang, "it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.

"In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy." (The Independent)

According to the 2007 IPCC AR4 Methane has a “global warming potential” of 25 times that of CO2 over 100 years. Here’s a CH4 budget pie chart. Note that there are several sources where we can manage methane without affecting energy creation. Starting on Methane, rather than CO2, is an idea that I could get behind because it can be recycled and used for many things.

His views are now being robustly vindicated as a quiet revolution is occurring in climate science. Here is how PhysOrg reports on a study out today in Science by NASA’s Drew Shindell and others:

Of note, Shindell et al. cautiously suggest that the entire framework of international climate policy may be based on an overly-simplistic view of the human effect on climate, by focusing on carbon dioxide equivalencies in radiative forcing (i.e.,g “global warming potential” or GWP), from their Science paper out today (emphasis added): Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Well, we warned about the outbreak of worse than was thought that would result from the spread of Copenhagen fever. Now the big one has arrived. It concerns the surprise new celebrity molecule of methane (but, my dear, carbon dioxide is so passé).

It was adumbrated by LORD Stern, who even for an economist has an appreciation of relative magnitudes of numbers that is remarkably poor, or even absent. Now, a few days later, we have this headline in The Times:

Gas Name	Chemical Formula	Percent Volume
Nitrogen	N₂	78.08%
Oxygen	O₂	20.95%
*Water	H₂O	0 to 4%
Argon	Ar	0.93%
*Carbon Dioxide	CO₂	0.0360%
Neon	Ne	0.0018%
Helium	He	0.0005%
*Methane	CH₄	0.00017%
Hydrogen	H₂	0.00005%
*Nitrous Oxide	N₂O	0.00003%
*Ozone	O₃	0.000004%

Various figures have been bandied about on the relative greenhouse gas potential of methane compared with carbon dioxide, ranging from 23 times to 75 times, but there is about one 200^th of the amount. Both gases are negligible in effect compared with water vapour.

We are now told that methane is responsible for one fifth of the human contribution to global warming (that is, if there is any global warming or any human contribution). Nifty ploy this, just when the opposition is poised to squash the carbon dioxide chimera on both theoretical and experimental grounds they simply switch the campaign and say "Now for something completely different". The famous Mencken quote can never be repeated too often:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

This is the proportion by volume of methane in the atmosphere. To all intents and purposes there isn’t any. It is all eventually oxidised into carbon dioxide and water, with a half life of about seven years.

In the face of ever mounting evidence that CO₂ is incapable of causing the level of global devastation prophesied by climate change catastrophists a new villain is being sought. The leading candidate is nitrous oxide (N₂O), better known as laughing gas. A report in Science claims that N₂O emissions are currently the single most important cause of ozone depletion and are expected to remain so throughout the 21^st century. The IPCC rates N₂O as 310 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO₂ on a 100 year time scale. Is this a greenhouse gas bait and switch, or are the global warming alarmists trying to up the ante?

Nitrous oxide is a colorless non-flammable gas with diverse uses. It is used as an oxidizing agent to boost power output from internal combustion engines and as a propellant for canned whipped cream. Historically, it was used as an anesthetic in surgery and dentistry. Inhaling the gas can cause euphoric effects, which led to it being named “laughing gas.” Public exhibitions and private “happy gas” parties were all the rage during the mid-19th century. Recreational use continues to this day, but for the environment N₂O may be no laughing matter.

A. R. Ravishankara, John S. Daniel, Robert W. Portmann, all scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory, claim that limiting future N₂O emissions would enhance the recovery of the ozone layer from its depleted state and would also reduce the anthropogenic global warming (see “Nitrous Oxide (N₂O): The Dominant Ozone-Depleting Substance Emitted in the 21st Century”). They call reigning in the currently unregulated gas a “win-win for both ozone and climate.” This is because, while N₂O on its own is a potent GHG, it also damages the ozone layer which protects Earth's surface from UV radiation and provides a cooling effect for the atmosphere.

I have previously commented on the Global Warming Potential of various greenhouse gases but not addressed nitrous oxide specifically. N₂O was one of the GHGs that the IPCC claimed to understand in their last full report (AR4). Also included in the general category of greenhouse gases was ozone (O₃), though the confidence level was only rated as “medium” for its contribution. As can be seen from the chart below, ozone behaves differently in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) and upper atmosphere (stratosphere). It is the stratospheric ozone layer that N₂O damages, reducing the cooling effect of that layer.

As you may recall, depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer by human-made chemicals, referred to as ozone-depleting substances (ODSs), was one of the major environmental issues of the 20^th century. As a result of the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer most of the world's nations signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (MP). The MP has been highly successful in reducing the emissions and concentrations of chlorine- and bromine-containing halocarbons limiting ozone depletion and helping recovery of the ozone layer. These substances can be tens of thousands of times more potent GHGs as CO₂ and were the historically dominant ODSs. Since these man-made substances have been successfully regulated scientists have turned their attention to N₂O as the next most potent threat to Earth's ozone layer.

Nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (NO and NO₂), generically referred to as nitrogen oxides (NO_x), are known to catalytically destroy stratospheric ozone. The primary source of stratospheric NO_x are surface N₂O emissions, hence the new interest in nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide shares many similarities with the now banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). N₂O, like CFCs, is stable when emitted at ground level, but breaks down when it reaches the stratosphere to form nitrogen oxides, which in turn trigger ozone-destroying reactions. Both substances have human emissions sources but, unlike CFCs, N₂O also has natural sources.

Nitrous oxide is emitted from soil fertilization, livestock manure, sewage treatment, combustion and certain other industrial processes. In nature, bacteria in soil and the oceans break down nitrogen-containing compounds, releasing N₂O. About one-third of global nitrous oxide emissions are attributed to human activities. Ravishankara et al. report that N₂O is now ozone enemy number 1:

Here ODP stands for ozone depletion potential, which compares the amount of stratospheric ozone destroyed by the release of a unit mass of a chemical at Earth’s surface to the amount destroyed by the release of a unit mass of chlorofluorocarbon 11, CFC-11 (CFCl₃). The researchers conclude that, if N₂O emissions continue unabated, their impact could be 30% higher than the CFC peak in 1987. Ecologists and environmental activists count the rescue of the ozone layer as a major triumph, does this mean that the celebration was premature? Are we certain that the ozone layer is once again threatened by human emissions? Here is what the study says:

As with carbon, all the intricacies of the nitrogen cycle are not understood by modern science. In particular the mechanisms that convert free nitrogen gas, N₂, into biologically useful compounds. “Current global ocean nitrogen budgets do not balance, which suggests that existing models miss or underestimate some contributions to oceanic nitrogen fixation,” reports Robinson W. Fulweiler in a perspecive article (see “Fantastic Fixers ”) from the October 16, 2009, issue of Science. Moreover, recent studies have found higher rates of nitrogen fixation in coastal sediments and more abundant nitrogen-fixing organisms in the open ocean than previously suspected.

In that same issue of Science Anne E. Dekas et al. describe a community of archaea and bacteria in deep-sea sediments that can fix nitrogen. Their report, entitled “Deep-Sea Archaea Fix and Share Nitrogen in Methane-Consuming Microbial Consortia,” reveals direct evidence of a previously unknown environment for nitrogen fixation that can deliver biologically usable nitrogen to deep-sea sediments. This exciting study provides a link between the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles.

According to the study: “Using single-cell–resolution nanometer secondary ion mass spectrometry images of ¹⁵N incorporation, we showed that deep-sea anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea fix N₂, as well as structurally similar CN^–, and share the products with sulfate-reducing bacterial symbionts. These archaeal/bacterial consortia are already recognized as the major sink of methane in benthic ecosystems, and we now identify them as a source of bioavailable nitrogen as well.”

Many mysteries still remain, such as why N₂ fixation in anoxic marine sediments, which often contain ammonia compounds, should occur at all. These findings have important implications for Earth's environment and once again highlight how much mankind doesn't understand about nature. “The current discrepancy in the oceanic fixed N budget underscores the possibility of new sources of fixed N in nontraditional and potentially unexpected habitats,” the study concludes. “N₂ fixation in ANME-2, combined with the diversity of nifH genes recovered from marine sediments here and previously, suggests that our inventory of marine diazotrophs is incomplete and that we are only beginning to understand the extent and importance of benthic marine N₂ fixation.”

If there is an effort afoot, to shift the focus of climate change study from CO₂ to nitrogen compounds, it may be ill advised—it appears that the nitrogen cycle is as poorly understood as the carbon cycle. One final warning comes from Ravishankara et al.: “N₂O could be an unintended byproduct of enhanced crop growth for biofuel production or iron fertilization to mitigate CO₂ emissions. Such an enhancement would lead to the unintended "indirect" consequence of ozone layer depletion and increased climate forcing by an alternative fuel used to curb global warming.” In other words, we had best be damned careful in our efforts to “cure” global warming.

Indeed, according to P. J. Crutzen et al., writing in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (see “N₂O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels”), much of the rush to biofuels could actually be worse for the environment than current fuels. Their 2007 study reported: “When the extra N₂O emission from biofuel production is calculated in "CO₂" global warming terms, and compared with the quasi-cooling effect of "saving" emissions of fossil fuel derived CO₂, the outcome is that the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N₂O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings.”

This knowledge has not dampened the enthusiasm for ethanol and biodiesel in some quarters. Ignoring repeated reports that biofuels are bad for the environment, governments around the world press ahead with expensive subsidies for their production. Biofuels, clean coal and cottage industry solar power are just a few of the scams that have popped up to take advantage of global warming hysteria. Climate scientists are reassessing the accuracy of climate change claims but the true believers continue to preach imminent disaster. Global warming is the scam of the century and it won't be going away anytime soon—there's too much money to be made and political influence to peddle. And the biggest climate change scam of all is about to resurface in America, it's called Cap and Trade.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

The UK Government has been at the forefront of AGW for a long time now. All in good intent and fully based on scientific evidence, of course.

Sure, this year's Atlantic hurricane season has been slow with eight named storms, just two hurricanes and about $100,000 in damages to U.S. property. But that's to be expected during El Niño, a warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that tends to dampen tropical activity on this side of the world.

What's more surprising is that, globally, the picture's much the same. Activity through October in each of the world's six cyclone basins, from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, has been at or below historical levels.

In fact, the last 12 months may have seen the least amount of hurricane activity since satellites began continuously monitoring Earth's oceans in 1979.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses a measurement called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or the ACE Index, to determine a season's activity. Essentially the ACE Index approximates the total energy of a storm from its intensity and duration. A seasonal ACE Index is simply the summation of all the storm values.

For the North Atlantic basin this season, the ACE Index is 45 percent of its normal level, the weakest season since 1997. And globally the ACE Index this past spring and summer were lower than at any point during the last 30 years.

“If it's not the lowest it's been in the satellite era, it's definitely an example of a period of the slowest activity,” said Ryan Maue, a Florida State University doctoral candidate in meteorology who has tracked global ACE values in recent years. (Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle)

Gore 2.0, now with Pacific Hurricanes, coming to a book store near you. Gore plans to hawk it on David Letterman next Tuesday night. One more reason not to watch Dave anymore. One can always hope though. Maybe he’ll feature Gore as a “stupid human trick”.

Al doesn’t seem to learn when it comes to visuals. Or maybe he just thinks that he’s obligated to put a picture of a hurricane on the front cover to keep the theme of AIT going. Either way. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

My prediction: sales will be a fraction of AIT, and it probably won’t make the NYT bestsellers list. People are tired of the yap, as indicated by recent polls.

Here’s what he has to say about it on his blog (note: he doesn’t take comments)

A very important paper was published today by Chen et al. in the open-access journal Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Science (of the EGU) titled, "Quantifying changes of wind speed distributions in the historical record of Atlantic tropical cyclones" (PDF). The paper should go some way toward resolving disputes about the behavior of hurricanes in the North Atlantic, as it provides compelling evidence of a bias in the historical record due to observational practices. For instance, the paper finds that no Category 5 hurricane was observed in the North Atlantic until 1924, observing that "if the average frequency of Category 5 TCs during 1924–2008 were to be representative of the entire record, there should have been about 28 Category 5 TCs during the period 1851– 1923." The paper also provides (once again) strong confirming evidence supporting our work on the relative role of societal changes in the economic record of U.S. hurricane losses.

Here is an excerpt as related to that last point:

I’m not going to add much more than to say that its enjoyable and refreshing to see a senior scientist admit that they were wholly wrong in their predictions.

So kudos to David Hathaway for writing a paper talking about how wrong his previous papers have been. Absolutely no sarcasm intended or implied. (Solar Science)

Last week, a poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press showed that there has been an erosion of the percentage of American’s who think that the earth is heating up.

And now, the AP’s Seth Borenstein is out there trying to find out whether or not the earth is cooling!

Borenestein had been hearing so much recently about the possibility that the earth has been cooling that he decided to go out and find some statisticians that could analyze the earth’s temperature history and give him some insight as to what has been going on:

Hmm. Why go to all the bother? This analysis has already been done numerous times. A recent example that clearly lays out the ups and downs of current temperature trends was posted about two weeks ago at the blog MasterResources.org. The figure below is taken from that post. It shows the current temperature trends from 5 to 15 years in length from all available global temperature datasets.

Figure 1. Each point on the chart represents the trend beginning in September of the year indicated along the x-axis and ending in August 2009. The different colored lines represent different temperature datasets as indicated. The trends which are statistically significant (<0.05) are indicated by filled circles. The zero line (no trend) is indicated by the thin black horizontal line, and the climate model average projected trend is indicated by the thick red horizontal line.

By judiciously selecting the time period and the dataset, you can make a case or cooling, warming, or neither.

In other words, over the last dozen years, the earth’s average temperature has remained relatively steady during a time period when the globe should be warming rapidly as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions—or at least that is what all of the climate models are projecting should be happening.

While you would think this would be headline news—”Global Warming Is Not Proceeding According To Plan”—instead, Borenstein opts to run a story primarily focused on various people struggling to explain why the decline in the earth’s temperature over the past 8 years really isn’t global cooling.

This biggest message from Borenstein’s article is that global warming proponents are starting to get irritated at the earth’s lack of cooperation. Especially with big national and international negotiations taking place on actions aimed at reducing the rate of global temperature rise. If the earth’s temperature isn’t rising along with greenhouse gas emissions as expected, then why all the bother?

This desperation is none more obvious than in remarks made by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, as quoted by Borenstein:

That’s pretty wishful, but unrealistic, thinking. After all, 10 years ago, the year 1998 smashed all previous global temperature records and yet today everywhere you turn, as evidenced most recently by Seth Borenstein’s article, you are greeted by discussions of global cooling.

Glowing reviews for Bill Streever’s “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places”, admittedly with some questioning about the book lacking somewhat in the AGW catastrophe department.

I’ll definitely look to buy or borrow “Cold“. In the meanwhile, here’s an interesting quote from the book (my emphasis):

Always happy to contribute at least a little something to the public policy debate as it concerns climate change, your humble staff at World Climate Report are pleased announce the inclusion of our article “Scientific Shortcomings in the EPA’s Endangerment Finding from Greenhouse Gases” in the latest issue (Fall 2009) of the Cato Journal.

Hopefully it will prove to be valuable resource for scholars and laypersons alike during the continued debate concerning our national energy policy and how it may (or may not) relate to the issue of global climate change.

The global warming lobby keeps shooting itself in the foot. ( http://tinyurl.com/yzsnhna ). This is not limited to the scientific frauds of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but extends into other significant agencies. One of the major areas of climate misrepresentation is that involving global sea levels.

Sea levels were portrayed in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as rising twenty feet in the coming years. Meredith Viera of NBC, not to be outdone, threw out the estimated future sea level rise at 200 feet. Global warming’s unscientific fiction writers must always embellish their stories with rich imaginations.

Dr. Vincent Gray is a climate expert living in New Zealand and one of the most prolific reviewers of all of the significant documents produced by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From his intimate knowledge he has found that both the IPCC and its documents are hopelessly flawed scientifically, including the chapters devoted to sea level rises. He recently reported this about the sea level situation in the South Pacific:

“As I keep pointing out Flinders University in Adelaide had the task in 1991 of settling it once and for all by installing state-of-the-art tide-gauge equipment on 12 Pacific islands. The results have been a disaster for the global warmers” (shown in table below)... There was no overall change in sea levels at any of the islands after the sixteen years. The reaction was what might be expected. They have been studiously ignored. The results have never been published in a "peer reviewed" journal. They are only available on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website in a series of Monthly Reports that are "Untitled". (Michael R. Fox, Hawaii Reporter)

A team of chemists from the U.S. and France has found compelling evidence of a previously undocumented large volcanic eruption that occurred exactly 200 years ago, in 1809.

The discovery, published online this week in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, offers an explanation as to why the decade from 1810 to 1819 is regarded by scientists as the coldest on record for the past 500 years.

“We’ve never seen any evidence of this eruption in Greenland that corresponds to a simultaneous explosion recorded in Antarctica before in the glacial record,” said Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego and one of the co-authors of the study. “But if you look at the size of the signal we found in the ice cores, it had to be huge. It was bigger than the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which killed hundreds of people and affected climate around the world.” Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

A blog for observed or verifiable weather data. This is not a weather forecasting site. (Rex Jensen)

Despite the fact that the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming depends mostly upon the strengths of feedbacks in the climate system, there is no known way to actually measure those feedbacks from observational data.

The IPCC has admitted as much on p. 640 of the IPCC AR4 report, at the end of section 8.6, which is entitled “Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks”:

“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed…but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections (of warming). Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”

This is a rather amazing admission. Of course, since these statements are lost in a sea of favorable (but likely superfluous) comparisons between the models and various aspects of today’s climate system, one gets the impression that the 99% of the IPCC’s statements that are supportive of the climate models far outweighs the 1% that might cast doubt.

But the central importance of feedbacks to projections of future climate makes them by far more important to policy debates than all of the ways in which model behavior might resemble the current climate system. So, why has it been so difficult to measure feedbacks in the climate system? This question is not answered in the IPCC reports because, as far as I can tell, no one has bothered to dig into the reasons.

Rather unexpectedly, I have been asked to present our research results on this subject at a special session on feedbacks at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco in mid-December. In that short 15 minute presentation, I hope to bring some clarity to an issue that has remained muddied for too long.

To review, the feedback measurement we are after can be defined as the amount of global average radiative change caused by a temperature change. The main reason for the difficulty in diagnosing the true feedbacks operating in the climate system is that the above definition of feedback is NOT the same as what we can actually measure from satellites, which is the amount of radiative change accompanied by a temperature change.

The distinction is that in the real world, causation in the opposite direction as feedback also exists in the measurements. Thus, a change in measured radiative flux results from some unknown combination of (1) temperature causing radiative changes (feedback), and (2) unforced natural radiative changes causing a temperature change (internal forcing).

The internal forcing does not merely add contaminating noise to the diagnosis of feedback – it causes a bias in the direction of positive feedback (high climate sensitivity). This bias exists primarily because forcing and net feedback (including the direct increase of IR radiation with temperature) always have opposite signs, so a misinterpretation of the sum of the two as feedback alone causes a bias.

For instance, for the global average climate system, a decrease in outgoing radiation causes an increase in global average temperature, whereas an increase in temperature must always do the opposite: cause an increase in outgoing radiation. As a result, the presence of forcing mutes the signature of net feedback. Similarly, the presence of feedback mutes the signature of forcing.

The effect of this partial cancellation is to result in diagnosed net feedbacks being smaller than what is actually occurring in nature, unless any forcing present is first removed from the data before estimating feedbacks. Unfortunately, we do not know which portion of radiative variability is forcing versus feedback, and so researchers have simply ignored the issue (if they were even aware of it) and assumed that what they have been measuring is feedback alone. As a result, the climate system creates the illusion of being more sensitive than it really is.

One implication of this is that it is not a sufficient test of the feedbacks in climate models to simply compare temperature changes to radiation changes. This is because the same relationship between temperature and radiation can be caused by either weak forcing accompanied by a large feedback parameter (which would be low climate sensitivity), or by strong forcing accompanied by a small feedback parameter (which would be high climate sensitivity).

Only in the case of radiative forcing being either zero or constant in time – situations that never happen in the real world – can feedback be accurately estimated with current methods.

Our continuing analysis of satellite and climate model data has yet to yield a good solution to this problem. Unforced cloud changes in the climate system not only give the illusion of positive feedback, they might also offer a potential explanation for past warming (and cooling). [I believe these to be mostly chaotic in origin, but it also opens the door to more obscure (and controversial) mechanisms such as the modulation of cloud cover by cosmic ray activity.]

But without accurate long-term measurements of global cloud cover changes, we might never know to what extent global warming is simply a manifestation of natural climate variability, or whether cloud feedbacks are positive or negative. And without direct evidence, the IPCC can conveniently point to carbon dioxide change as the culprit. But this explanation seems rather anthropocentric to me, since it is easier for humans to keep track of global carbon dioxide changes than cloud changes.

Also, the IPCC can conveniently (and truthfully) claim that the behavior of their models is broadly “consistent with” the observed behavior of the real climate system. Unfortunately, this is then misinterpreted by the public, politicians, and policymakers as a claim that the amount of warming those models produce (a direct result of feedback) has been tested, which is not true.

As the IPCC has admitted, no one has yet figured out how to perform such a test. And until such a test is devised, the warming estimates produced by the IPCC’s twenty-something climate models are little more than educated guesses. It verges on scientific malpractice that politicians and the media continue to portray the models as accurate in this regard, without any objections from the scientists who should know better. (Roy W. Spencer)

Let’s look closely and compare local thermometer records (GISS) with the Twelve Trees, upon whose treerings depend all the IPCC claims of “unprecedented recent temperature rise”.
For my earlier Yamal work, see here and here. For the original Hockey Stick story, see here and here.

Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.

I checked out the NASA GISS page for all thermometer records in the vicinity of Yamal and the Polar Urals, in “raw”, “combined”, and “homogenized” varieties. Here are their locations (white). The Siberian larch treering samples in question come from Yamal and Taimyr. Salehard and Dudinka have populations of around 20,000; Pecora around 50,000; Surgut around 100,000; all the rest are officially “rural” sites. Some are long records, some are short.

IS eating a hamburger the global warming equivalent of driving a Hummer? This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: “Give Up Meat to Save the Planet.” Former Vice President Al Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue, has even been assailed for omnivorous eating by animal rights activists.

It’s true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

So what is the real story of meat’s connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides. (NYT)

Arcata has committed just over 20 percent of its community forest to grow trees and store carbon, part of a contract with the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. meant to reduce greenhouse gases.

The contract, worth $400,000 paid over four years, will reduce logging on 460 acres of the Arcata Community Forest for 100 years. By allowing more trees to grow larger on the plot, more carbon is stored in the form of wood, reducing participating PG&E customers’ greenhouse gas emissions by a total of 40,000 metric tons.

It’s part of a PG&E program called ClimateSmart, which allows customers to “balance out” the carbon emissions of the energy they use. ClimateSmart is a voluntary effort — ratepayers are eligible for tax deductions — and PG&E itself can’t claim the reduction to meet the requirements of climate change Assembly Bill 32.

These are uncharted waters, as Arcata is the first public landholder in the state to sign such a contract. City Environmental Service Director Mark Andre said that Arcata wanted to be a leader in showing how forestry can play a role in solving climate change.

”We hope it can be a learning experience for the region and we hope to see it replicated elsewhere,” Andre said. (Carbon Offset Daily)

Environmentalism as practiced by extremists is a blind faith. Their demands for action to deal with non-existent problems create bizarre situations. They ignore science, logic and facts to identify problems so there are often unintended consequences. One involves the environmentalist’s obsession with CO2 and the oil industry. They’re the enemy who produce the energy that drives the engines of capitalism and CO2 supposedly destroying the planet. (Tim Ball, CFP)

Everyone, it appears, is in favor of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Governments from around the globe, from the U.S., China, Australia, Canada, the 27-member European Union, along with the International Energy Agency, environmental groups and some of the biggest energy companies in the world, continue calling for more investment in CCS despite the fact that the technology has not yet been implemented on a truly commercial scale.

Targets have been set, funds have been earmarked, and laws have been written to implement CCS because many people see it as an essential strategy in the effort to avert a future climate catastrophe. But then come the questions: who will pay? and just as important, will CCS work? (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)

From BNET

Here’s a bit of unalloyed pessimism for you: Carbon capture and sequestration, more widely known as clean coal technology, is not going to work out. Governments and the coal industry are trying to bite off too much at once.

In theory, clean coal is a fine idea. The process of burning coal releases gases, which all modern plants already “scrub” of harmful substances like sulfur dioxide. To fight global warming, coal mine and plant owners want to do the same for carbon dioxide.

Sounds great, except that a fairly average-sized 1,500 megawatt coal plant produces about three billion tons of CO2 yearly. All that CO2 has to be separated out, a process that uses up a lot of the energy the plant produces. Then, according to current thinking, we must bury the CO2 and hope that it doesn’t come back up. (Chris Morrison, Energy Tribune)

Oil is now flirting with $80 per barrel. In January, while many other analysts were predicting $40 to $60 oil, I predicted that oil would soon be back at $100.

There are obvious and real underlying reasons for the escalating oil prices. But news headlines have ruled the price of oil since at least 2004. There was no real rational economic reason for oil to reach almost $150 (which for people with short memories may seem to have happened last century – it happened in July 2008) nor was there any reason for below-$40 oil, which happened right after the economic crisis hit last fall.

The crisis overshadowed a November report by the International Energy Agency which showed that oil production from operating wells has been declining by 9.1% per year. That news should have sent oil prices dramatically higher, perhaps to $200. Even now, there is a lingering possibility that a strike by Israel on Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz and thus shoot the price into the stratosphere overnight.

The headlines started in 2004 and included the Abu Ghraib photographs, which increased enormously the fear factor in the Middle East. There was the re-Sovietization of Russia’s oil industry following the assault on Yukos by Russia’s then-president, Vladimir Putin, and the re-nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry by the Hugo Chavez government. That perfect storm of headlines created one of the most telling and repeatable events from 2004 to last year’s economic collapse. With escalating energy and energy product prices, every quarter ExxonMobil, the largest multinational oil company, would announce the biggest profits of any company in the history of the world and “Big Oil” would be in the mouth of many politicians in many countries as the devil incarnate. And yet despite those huge profits, Exxon’s stock would often fall because the company would also announce that their oil production and reserves were declining. Shut out of reserves in some of the most prolific oil provinces of the world, such as Russia and Venezuela, international Big Oil was, and is, in trouble. (Michael J. Economides, Energy Tribune)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Two emails I received yesterday delivered press releases from two organizations with very different agendas, both emphasizing the impact of energy on jobs. With US unemployment showing little response to the economic stimulus, the rebounding stock market, or the "green shoots" appearing in some sectors, it's understandable that companies, groups and even the government would want to play up the direct employment impact of key initiatives or policies. Yet when it comes to energy, I believe much of this effort misses the mark. Our employment goal for energy should not be to have as many people working in the energy sector as we can, but to have the most efficient and cost-effective energy sector possible, in order to promote job creation and retention in the rest of the economy, where the vast majority of jobs are found. Our decisions about energy policy should not depend on the creation of a few green jobs. (Geoffrey Styles, Energy Tribune)

From Capital.gr

Spanish oil firm Repsol YPF SA has struck more oil in two wells in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico in what a company spokesman calls a "fairly sizable" oil find.

Repsol found the crude in wells of the Shenzi field, where it and production operator BHP Billiton Ltd. started output in June, Repsol Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Brufau told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview last week. (Energy Tribune)

WASHINGTON — As Congress debates legislation to slow global warming by limiting emissions, engineers are tinkering with ways to capture and store carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas.

But coal-fired power plants, commonly identified as the nation’s biggest emissions villain, may not be the best focus.

Rather, engineers and policymakers say, it may be easier and less costly to capture the carbon dioxide at oil refineries, chemical plants, cement factories and ethanol plants, which emit a far purer stream of it than a coal smokestack does.

Carbon dioxide typically makes up only 10 percent to 12 percent of a coal plant’s emissions, they note, and the gas is so mixed with pollutants that it is difficult to separate.

Cheaper strategies for sequestering carbon dioxide could prove especially important if Congress passes a law setting up a so-called cap-and-trade system. That would set a national ceiling for overall emissions and allot pollution allowances to utilities, manufacturers and other emitters, which could then trade them among themselves. (NYT)

Coal super-powers China, India and the United States are set to dominate world climate talks next month, but even in the heartland of US coal there are doubts their re-branded fuel can be part of the solution. (AFP)

With coal-fired power plants as the primary source, India’s electricity generation sector space has been dominated by the two state run big companies NTPC (for generation) and BHEL (for equipment manufacturing).

However, a gradual shift is taking place with private players looking to play a bigger role in the country’s electricity generation business. Today, India has about 150,000 megawatts of electric generation capacity. By 2017, the government hopes to more than double capacity to some 330,000 MW, of which some 30% could be owned by private power producers. And while India’s stance toward private investment in the electric sector has changed, it’s stance toward coal has not, and that fact will have a major effect on any attempts at reaching a global consensus on carbon dioxide emission limits. (Energy Tribune)

RIFLE, Colo. — Standing in a canyon in hilly terrain, Ken Neubecker cast his fly into a cold stream. Minutes later he had a bite. Thrashing at the end of his line was a speckled green fish, a scarce Colorado cutthroat trout.

Mr. Neubecker was fishing on the Roan Plateau, a high stretch of terrain beloved by hunters, anglers and hikers for its clear streams, herds of deer and elk, and rugged beauty.

“There just aren’t many places like this in the West,” Mr. Neubecker said. “It’s a real gem.”

Energy companies are looking at the Roan Plateau, too — through entirely different eyes. Vast deposits of natural gas are believed to lie beneath the stretch on which Mr. Neubecker was fishing, and the companies want to drill.

“What is really special about the Roan Plateau, these lands in particular, is the incredible energy density beneath it,” said Duane Zavadil, vice president of the Bill Barrett Corporation, a Denver energy company that holds drilling rights to the Roan.

The company’s plans are at the center of a battle over the future of the plateau, one that could influence the fate of thousands of acres in the high country known as the intermountain West.

A last-minute leasing push by the Bush administration put extensive federal lands in Utah and Colorado into the hands of oil and gas companies, including 36,000 acres of the Roan Plateau. The Obama administration has inherited the touchy question of what to do with those leases. (NYT)

GRAND CANE, La. — Two miles beneath northwest Louisiana's patchwork quilt of forests, cotton fields and pastures, dozens of drill bits are grinding their way toward what may be the nation's energy future.

The region around Shreveport has known oil and gas exploration for decades, but it's now buzzing anew as companies try to capitalize on one simple fact — locked into cement-like shale formations thousands of feet underground are potentially huge quantities of natural gas.

The gas found in the area's Haynesville shale and in other shale formations throughout the country has changed the nation's energy outlook in just a few short years.

Some see abundant North American natural gas as the gateway to reduced dependence on foreign oil and a bridge toward carbon-free energy sources since gas is the lowest-emission fossil fuel.

Others say the surge in next-generation gas production isn't paying off as promised and threatens local water supplies.

Some even see it as another speculative bubble, driven by hype that will never deliver the fuel it promises.

What is happening in Haynesville is typical of what has happened and will likely occur in the other shale regions — millions of dollars in investment, plenty of lawsuits against the drilling companies and concerns about the safety of the drilling techniques being used.

Until just a few years ago, the story of natural gas supply in the U.S. had been one of decline. Dozens of liquefied natural gas terminals were on the drawing board in the earlier part of the decade to help import the fuel from overseas.

But the marriage of two long-used drilling techniques — hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling — is showing potential.

For years, companies have used hydraulic fracturing — injecting water into underground formations to break apart rocks and release more oil and gas. The Woodlands-based Mitchell Energy perfected the techniques in the Barnett shale formations in North Texas. But it wasn't until Devon Energy acquired Mitchell in 2002 that engineers added horizontal drilling — turning the drill bit at a 90-degree angle to tap into a larger section of the strata.

Suddenly these dense formations that companies thought too expensive to drill are economically feasible.

And since companies have been drilling through them for decades to get at conventional oil and gas formations, the locations of the shale formations are well-known, said Rusty Braziel, managing director of Bentek Energy.

“You may as well drop the ‘E' from E&P,” Braziel said, using the common abbreviation for exploration and production. “They don't explore, just produce.”

In just two years the country's estimated natural gas resources rose 39 percent, from 1,320 trillion cubic feet in 2006 to 1,836 trillion cubic feet, according to the Potential Gas Committee, an industry think tank. (Houston Chronicle)

Facts don’t matter. That’s the only conclusion that can be made by looking at two of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches on energy.

It’s not just that Obama continues to repeat the fictions about biofuels. When Obama was a senator, and when he was running for the White House, he was a leading booster of corn ethanol. Now, he’s switched his rhetoric to promote what he is calling “sustainably grown biofuels” – whatever that is.

Of course, Obama is still promoting wind and solar. He’s been doing that for a long time, too. Obama always mentions wind and solar even though those two sources now provide a grand total of about 0.2% of total US primary energy.

On the positive side, Obama is talking about the need for nuclear power and he’s been doing so for months. In an April 2009 speech in Prague, he said “We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.”

All of that said, the truly disheartening omission in Obama’s energy rhetoric is his apparent refusal to accept the fact that the US has entered a new paradigm when it comes to natural gas. After decades of thinking that the US was running out of gas and that it would need to import increasing amounts of liquefied natural gas from overseas, the US now has a surfeit of gas. Over the past two years, several reports have put potential US gas resources on par with the gas reserves of Iran, Russia, and Qatar. In July 2008 Navigant Consulting put potential US natural gas resources at 2,247 Tcf. A few months later, another consulting firm, ICF International, estimated U.S. gas resources at 1,830 Tcf. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 -- The Air Transport Association of America (ATA), the industry trade organization for the leading U.S. airlines, yesterday urged climate negotiators to oppose an exorbitant new climate change tax to be imposed on the airlines and their passengers. The so-called "International Air Passenger Adaption Levy," would single out aviation to raise $10 billion per year for climate-change projects to be built in developing countries. (PRNewswire-USNewswire)

Ofgem will announce on Friday £300m of European funding for investment in power lines from offshore wind farms, as the regulator tries to encourage the "forgotten infrastructure" behind Britain's green revolution.

More than £15bn will be needed to connect 33 gigawatts of wind power to the mainland, if Britain manages to build all the turbines to meet its climate change targets. This is on top of the £60bn to £70bn that will be needed to construct the wind farms themselves.

Simon Brooks, vice-president of the European Investment Bank, said it had decided to consider the funding because grid connections needed promoting within the priority area of energy.

"It is often forgotten and rather important that offshore wind generation actually needs connecting to the shore," he said. (TDT)

There is an informative post titled Biofuel woes by Katharine Sanderson on the Nature.com/climatefeedback website.

“Two papers in Science yesterday have poured cold water on the promise of second generation biofuels.

Biofuels derived from the cellulosic, woody parts of plants are not having their greenhouse gas emissions properly accounted for, says Jerry Melillo from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Melillo’s study suggests that changes in the way land is used, as a consequence of growing crops for biofuels, is not taken into account, and if it were then those biofuels would be shown to actually cause more greenhouse gases to be released than fossil fuels. Nitrous oxide emissions from increased use of fertilisers are a big part of the problem.

“The problem is, we have a finite amount of land where new crops could be grown. Melillo and colleagues now report that if biofuel crops replace food crops on current farmlands, then the clearing of forested land for additional food crops will release more carbon from the soil there than in the areas where the biofuel crops themselves are being grown,” says the press release.

In a related policy forum article, Timothy Searchinger from Princeton University and a bunch of colleagues point out flaws in the ways that carbon emissions are counted for cap-and-trade schemes in both Europe and the US.

They say that the assertion that fuels made from biomass can be counted as carbon neutral is wrong. “Harvesting existing forests for electricity adds net carbon to the air,” the report says. “If bioenergy crops displace forest or grassland, the carbon released from soild and vegetation, plus lost future sequestration, generates carbon debt, which counts against the carbon the crops absorb.”

“In the near-term I think, irrespective of how you go about the cellulosic biofuels program, you’re going to have greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating the climate change problem,” Melillo is reported as saying in Reuters.

More bad news comes from a UNEP report, highlighted by the New York Times. The report calls for greater debate about biofuels before ploughing headlong into a completely biofuel-powered society, although it focuses mainly on first generation fuels, unlike the Science papers.”

Two leading senators sign on with Colorado Sen. Mark Udall

Colorado Senator Mark Udall, has introduced a bill to authorize federal R&D for small, modular reactors. Udall said in a speech on the Senate floor he believes nuclear energy is an important part of the nation's response to global warming.

"Given the economic, national security, and environmental threats that our current energy system creates, we need a comprehensive and cleaner energy policy. In this regard, nuclear energy clearly has emerged as an important player in our search for a stable and domestic energy source that has less greenhouse gas emissions." (Energy Collective)

THE Japanese are increasingly looking to secure further resources supplies in Australia, with a focus on rare earths, to stem the dominance China has on the market. (The Australian)

At last, an incentive for students to make an effort to save energy – a lifetime supply of Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream!

That’s just one of the prizes being offered as part of national campaign the Student Switch Off, which kicked off proceedings again last month, for its third year running and hopefully its biggest year yet. (Birmingham Recycled)

When thrifty Benjamin Franklin spotted a chance to save precious tallow, he didn’t hesitate to pipe up. Franklin suggested that people adjust their sleep schedules in the summer months to enjoy the “economy of using sunshine rather than candles.” He jokingly proposed firing cannons to wake people at dawn and imposing a tax on window shutters that keep out sunlight.

Cutting energy consumption—whether because of wartime shortages, oil embargoes, or global warming fears—has always been the justification for the abuse of American sleep schedules. But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that daylight saving time actually increases demand for energy.

The paper, by the economist Michael J. Kotchen and the environmental scientist Laura E. Grant, takes advantage of a natural experiment in Indiana. The state used to harbor several counties in open rebellion against daylight saving time, but that came to an end in 2006, when a federal mandate forced the counties to fall into line.

Kotchen and Grant estimate that the change cost $9 million a year in higher electricity bills and $1.7 million to $5.5 million a year in pollution emissions. They say the effect is likely to be stronger in other, less temperate parts of the United States. (Reason Foundation)

Last year, Minnesota farm income dropped 15 percent as the economic downturn began to reach family farms struggling to maintain profitable operations. Unfortunately, times could get even worse if media hype trumps science at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

On Nov. 3, the EPA is kicking off a new review of a herbicide called atrazine, which has been the subject of more than 6,000 scientific studies and is used by farmers in 60 countries. For 50 years atrazine has been used safely by U.S. farmers, and every EPA Administrator, Republican and Democrat, since the agency was founded has certified its safety.

In fact the EPA just completed a thorough review of atrazine in 2006, concluding once again that atrazine can be used safely.

Established scientists around the world have also studied atrazine more thoroughly than any other similar product. Time and again they have concluded that it is safe. The governments of Britain, Australia, Canada and France have all given atrazine a clean bill of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a thorough review of the latest science on the subject in 2007 concluding that atrazine is safe. In fact, WHO says atrazine has about the same cancer risk as tea. Even though countries in the European Union currently do not use atrazine, the product received a favorable safety review there from the UK (which was assigned to conduct the safety review). (Lori Feltis, Post-Bulletin)

But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball. (Rod Liddle, Spectator)

One of the country's most senior doctors has warned that obesity will overtake alcohol as the main cause of liver cirrhosis in the "not too distant future".

Professor Christopher Hawkey's comments come as a new poll shows that more than five out of six people are unaware the disease is linked to excess weight. "Obesity is the biggest health problem we face this century," said Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology.

"It is almost certainly going to reverse the rise in life expectancy – so we start living shorter lives than before. It will increase the risks of a number of cancers; hip and knee surgery requirement is going to be vast; and it is now projected to overtake alcohol as the biggest cause of liver cirrhosis within two decades." (The Observer)

Lobbyists are arguing for an increase in some speed limits to curb boredom and road rage.

It's the mantra all drivers learn from the time they first slap on L-plates: the faster you go, the greater your chance of a serious crash.

The reasoning is simple. The greater your speed, the less time you have to react to a problem, the greater the braking distance required and the greater the forces involved in any collision.

But is it always this clear cut?

Not according to pro-speed campaigners, who are agitating for governments around the country and around the world to raise speed limits, particularly in rural areas and on stretches of high-quality highway.

They passionately argue boredom and frustration, rather than speed, are the main killers when people are travelling between isolated rural communities.

With car safety rapidly improving, they see remote parts of western NSW and Queensland, the Nullarbor, north-west Victoria and parts of Western Australia and South Australia as prime candidates for a substantially increased speed limit. Some advocate the total removal of speed limits on these types of roads as a way of reducing the road toll.

Take the case of US activist Chad Dornsife. The executive director of lobby group the Best Highway Safety Practices Institute, he is pushing for the removal of speed limits in his homeland on the grounds it will lower the number of high-risk overtaking moves and reduce trip time and fatigue.

He believes drivers are at their safest (suffering from less stress and impatience) when they are in their comfort zone. (Sydney Morning Herald)

POINT REYES STATION, Calif. — It seems a perfect marriage of nature and commerce. As boats ferry oysters to the shore, pelicans swoop by and seals pop their heads out of the water.

But this spot on the Point Reyes National Seashore has become a flashpoint for a bitter debate over the limits of wilderness and commercial interest within America’s national parks.

The National Park Service has said it cannot renew the permit to farm oysters in a tidal estuary here, which lapses in 2012, because federal law requires it to return the area to wilderness by eliminating intrusive commercial activity.

Kevin Lunny, the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, says he feels persecuted by the National Park Service and has sought legislation that could allow him to continue operating.

He argues that the 70-year-old oyster farm, which predates the park, is part of the historical working landscape of the area — and every bit as in need of protection as the harbor seals and eelgrass that share the bay.

Mr. Lunny and his allies also accuse the park service’s regional office of issuing faulty scientific reports exaggerating the threat that the oyster farm poses to baby seals and flora in the estuary — accusations given credence last spring by the National Academy of Sciences.

The battle has split the local towns into passionately opposed camps: The Point Reyes Light, a local newspaper, has been critical of the park service, as have many sympathetic ranchers. But other residents and environmental groups cast Mr. Lunny as a savvy businessman manipulating public opinion to win favored status at the expense of the estuary.

The furor over the oyster lease has also drawn in partisans across the country because it plays into an old debate: Are the national parks primarily for preserving untouched wilderness, or for preserving the historic human imprint on the land, too? (NYT)

Most would agree that conserving resources and minimizing adverse impacts on the environment make sense, but something has gone terribly awry within the Green Movement. Environmental extremists championing "population control" as a means of protecting Mother Earth show that they have little regard for the human species. (Ken Connor, Townhall)

JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.

Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.

Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.

“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”

Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.

Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.

“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”

Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.

Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into. (NYT)

THE mysterious people who etched the "Nazca lines" across deserts in Peru hastened their own demise by clearing forests 1500 years ago, according to a study.

The Nasca people, famed for the lines that depict animals or geometric shapes most clearly visible from the air, became unable to grow enough food in nearby valleys because the lack of trees made the climate too dry, scientists said.

The report, led by Cambridge University in England, said that the findings showed a need for more action now to protect the world's arid lands. (Reuters)