Junkscience.com -- Archives, September 2009

The Copenhagen meeting in December from which a successor to Kyoto was meant to emerge will obviously be a bust. The G20 has at last caught on that the global economy doesn’t really need another policy shock right now. Rich nations are reluctant to ship more billions to corruptly-governed poor nations under the cover of “green development.” China and India — rightly — aren’t going to curtail their growth in order to cater to the self-serving nightmares of would-be global governors.

Desperation was obvious last week in the appearance of yet another hysterical report from the UN. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wailed that, “The science has become more irrevocable than ever: climate change is happening. The evidence is all around us. And unless we act, we will see catastrophic consequences, including rising sea-levels, droughts and famine, and the loss of up to a third of the world’s plant and animal species.”

Ho hum. More irrevocable? In fact, the science is falling apart faster than the policy. Evidence is appearing not merely of major flaws in the computer models on which apocalyptic scenarios are based, but of blunders in the numbers behind the history of global temperatures. (Peter Foster, Financial Post)

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data. (Andrew Orlowski, The Register)

For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the following story is dynamite. And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, it will no doubt feel as comfortable as the rectally inserted suicide bomb that put paid to an Al Qaeda operative earlier this week.

Now read on. (James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph)

There has been a flurry of activity in recent weeks in the discussion as to the significance (scientific, political, social) of the evolution of the global average surface temperature during the past 10 years or so.

For those of you who don’t know, the surface temperature of the globe, as a whole, has not warmed-up by anyone’s calculation since at least the turn of the century (January 2001) and depending on your dataset and statistical technique of choice, perhaps as far back as January 1997. And all of this non-warming occurred over a period of time during which the global emissions of CO2 increased faster than ever before (thanks primarily to China). In fact, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing is about 5 percent greater now than a decade ago (about 16 parts per million). (Chip Knappenberger, MasterResource)

Global warming has put the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the hot seat. In recent weeks, three utilities have announced plans to drop their membership or reduce their role in the powerful business organization because of the Chamber’s opposition to pending legislation that would cap carbon emissions.

First, there was Pacific Gas and Electric, whose chairman found it “dismaying that the Chamber rejects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored.”

Next came PNM Resources, which announced it was giving up its seat on the Chamber’s board because it disagreed with the Chamber’s position on climate change. Then on Monday, Exelon CEO John Rowe announced the utility will not renew its membership in the Chamber “because of their stridency against carbon legislation.” (Portfolio)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 -- JunkScience.com issued a mock media release today spotlighting Exelon Corp.'s recent announcement that it was cancelling its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber's opposition to carbon dioxide emissions caps.

The mock release says that Exelon quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over global warming to form the U.S. Chamber of Rentseeking where, according to the mock release, big businesses can forego "free enterprise, free markets, risk, and competition," in favor of "getting in bed with big government in order to guarantee big profits."

"We issued the mock release to spotlight how Exelon CEO John Rowe is selling America down the river on cap-and-tax so that he can bask in the glow of unearned, windfall and government-guaranteed profits," said Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of the Amazon.com best-selling book "Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them." (PRNewswire-USNewswire)

Why Climate Change?

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis. (BAD)

The BAD Blog

The official blog of B(log) A(ction) D(ay)
Why Blogging on Climate Matters Right Now (BAD)

About Blog Action Day

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. (BAD)

Who could have guessed…journalists are third from bottom in the list of trusted public figures in the UK, a poll has just shown. A great progress indeed (they had the pride of last place until now), apart from the fact that this year they have been beaten by scandal-plagued parliamentarians and Government ministers on their way down.

Now, consider also the vast amounts of AGW belief among British journalism (eg BBC, Guardian, Independent, most tabloids if not all of them, apart from a tiny number of mostly politically-motivated people at The Daily Telegraph).

Perhaps the impact of all the rivers of ink and bytes dedicated by non-skeptical AGW British media should not be underrated… (OmniClimate)

Climate change lawsuits gained new urgency for environmentalists and industry groups alike last week when a federal appeals court issued a ruling that both sides see as a potential game changer.

In that case, Connecticut v. AEP, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' panel sided with a coalition of eight states, New York City and environmental groups that had filed a public nuisance lawsuit against the nation's largest coal-burning utilities (Greenwire, Sept. 21).

"A lot of observers thought that this kind of litigation was dead or nearly dead in the wake of some of the district court rulings that proceeded this case," said Bruce Myers, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law Institute. "But you've got a very respected circuit court coming forward with a panel of two [judges] appointed by conservative presidents saying, 'No, in effect, this kind of litigation can proceed.'"

Environmentalists hailed the decision, which created a new judicial remedy, holding greenhouse gas emitters responsible for causing a "public nuisance" in the form of global warming. (Greenwire)

When it comes to fighting climate change, pick a number -- any number.

Nearly 200 countries have signed a U.N. treaty pledging to avoid "dangerous" climate change. But lately, it seems, "dangerous" is lost in translation. Fifteen years since that agreement took effect, scientists and governments are still grappling with what carrying out its promise means.

For the European Union, it means limiting Earth's warming to just 2 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of this century than it was before the Industrial Revolution. That's a goal many experts believe is roughly equivalent to capping atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million. But a growing number of countries -- mostly vulnerable ones and small island nations like the Maldives -- say that won't prevent rising sea levels from swamping their coasts.

They're calling for an even stricter standard: 350 parts per million, a number endorsed by NASA climatologist James Hansen.

Some scientists mapping out Earth's potential futures say both targets are arbitrary. What's essential, they insist, is that countries start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions soon and stay flexible in case the planet behaves in unexpected ways. (ClimateWire)

Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report says today.

If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable – south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, according to the report, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

The children of 2050 will have fewer calories to eat than those in 2000, the report says, and the effect would be to wipe out decades of progress in reducing child malnutrition.

The grim scenario is the first to gauge the effects of climate change on the world's food supply by combining climate and agricultural models. (The Guardian)

The Central Intelligence Agency is launching The Center on Climate Change and National Security as the focal point for its work on the subject. The Center is a small unit led by senior specialists from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology.

Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources. The Center will provide support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues. That is something the CIA has done for years. “Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security. The CIA is well positioned to deliver that intelligence,” said Director Leon Panetta. (CIA) [em added]

Back at the end of June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey cap and trade global warming tax bill.

This bill would cost millions of American jobs, raise our electric bills by 40% or more, hinder much-needed refining capacity, hurt foreign trade, block much-needed power plant development, require home inspections and environmental retrofitting before we can sell our homes, regulate how much water we can use in our own homes,

Courtesy of the Green Hell Blog, we have a look at the draft of the Senate version of the cap and trade global warming tax bill.

Apparently, not to be outdone by the asininity and hostility toward the American people of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate has upped the ante and called for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases, even more egregious than the House bill.

All this to “fix” a problem that doesn’t even exist! (Bob Ellis, Dakota Voice)

An early version of Senate climate legislation obtained today by E&E confirms that Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) largely plan to follow the path their Democratic colleagues pursued in the House-passed climate bill.

But the 684-page Senate draft bill (pdf) diverges from the House measure in its push for a 2020 emissions target of 20 percent, compared with the House's bill's 17 percent limit.

Both the House-passed bill, H.R. 2454 (pdf), and the preliminary Boxer-Kerry proposal contain the same longer-term emissions limits of 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and an 83 percent cut for 2050.

A senior Boxer aide cautioned that the draft bill does not reflect proposed changes that have recently been incorporated from senators both on and off the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The latest version, which the aide says stretches for more than 800 pages, is scheduled to be released tomorrow during a Capitol Hill press conference with about a dozen senators, veterans, environmentalists and industry officials.

"It's a snapshot in time of our restructure of the [House] bill, but it doesn't really reflect where the bill is now," the Boxer aide said. (Greenwire)

ClimateWire, via the New York Times, leads its Boxer-Kerry climate-change-bill story thusly:

Odd. We don’t remember most Americans being at the table, so we’re curious to see what comes out. And, as we’ve stated time and again, it is us workers and consumers that will be hardest hit by the kind of cap and trade bill passed by the House of Representatives and whispered about in the Senate.

In fact, there’s new evidence of just how bad cap and trade will be for most of us. Andrew Chamberlain, lead author of a new analysis released for the Institute for Energy Research, said:

BRUSSELS — Carbon trading put the European Union in the environmental vanguard.

Since 2005, the trade bloc has operated the world’s only continent-wide system that puts a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and that requires major polluters to hold tradable allowances.

But the system has also been the most “costly climate policy program in the world,” according to Jürgen R. Thumann, the president of BusinessEurope, a powerful confederation of industry and employer groups.

Mr. Thumann said European business leaders are desperate to expand the system to the United States and eventually across the globe to reduce the “dangers to our ability to compete internationally.”

But with talks on a new global climate treaty seemingly at a stalemate, and with climate legislation delayed in major polluting countries like the United States and Australia, those prospects look increasingly distant.

Meanwhile the E.U. shows no sign of abandoning the system, leaving business leaders like Mr. Thumann with little choice but to speak out at home and to press developed nations abroad to match Europe’s efforts when they gather at the U.N. summit meeting on climate change in December in Copenhagen. (NYT)

COPENHAGEN -- In speech after rousing speech at the United Nations summit on global warming last week, politicians emphasized the need to protect the world's most vulnerable, who will be hit hardest by climate change. The rhetoric did little to disguise an awful truth: If we continue on our current path, we are likely to harm the world's poorest much more than we help them.

Urged on by environmental activists, many politicians are vowing to make carbon cuts designed to keep expected temperature rises under 3.6 degrees (2.0 Celsius). Yet it is nearly impossible for these promises to be fulfilled.

Japan's commitment in June to cut greenhouse gas levels 8 percent from its 1990 levels by 2020 was scoffed at for being far too little. Yet for Japan -- which has led the world in improving energy efficiency -- to have any hope of reaching its target, it needs to build nine new nuclear power plants and increase their use by one-third, construct more than 1 million new wind-turbines, install solar panels on nearly 3 million homes, double the percentage of new homes that meet rigorous insulation standards, and increase sales of "green" vehicles from 4 percent to 50 percent of its auto purchases.

Japan's new prime minister was roundly lauded this month for promising a much stronger reduction, 25 percent, even though there is no obvious way to deliver on his promise. Expecting Japan, or any other nation, to achieve such far-fetched cuts is simply delusional. (Bjorn Lomborg, Washington Post)

Climate is too complex an issue to get in one gulp. If Copenhagen can pave the way for practical steps, an agreement can wait (Jeffrey Sachs, The Guardian)

A deal at Copenhagen must have equality and social justice at its heart, or our time may be seen in future as the Age of Stupid

We know today that climate change is a global challenge that involves every nation on our planet. As a negotiator for the EU at the Kyoto 1997 conference on climate change, I can confidently say that these negotiations will be 10 times more difficult. The Copenhagen negotiations are Kyoto Part 2; an agreement will apply to 187 countries, not 47.

Not all developed countries delivered as promised on their Kyoto target. Only four did, out of the 15 countries in Europe that signed up so far; while the US, under President Bush, refused to accept it. (John Prescott, The Guardian)

As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is?

King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential.

In December, the world's kings and princes will journey to Copenhagen, Denmark, for climate change talks in hopes of replacing the failed Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto didn't change Earth's climate a wit, but it did burden the economy of any nation that embraced it.

Professor John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an adviser to the German government, thinks Copenhagen may also be a failure, largely because the U.S. refuses to line up behind the rest of the climate lemmings and follow them over an economic cliff.

Speaking at an Oxford University climate science conference on Monday, Schellnhuber blamed the U.S. for a decade of inaction caused by President George W. Bush. Ironically, it was a decade where the sun grew quiet and the Earth cooled as result.

Yet, ignoring the empirical evidence, he says it's we American cowboys who are "climate illiterates" for actually looking at the Earth's thermometer and daring to notice the snow in Malibu.

The Oxford conference is centered on a study predicting a 4-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures as soon as 2060-2070. Schellnhuber mourns our failure to embrace economic ruin and pass cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey, warning: "If the U.S. doesn't move then nothing will happen."

Gee, we hope so. (IBD)

While delegates at the just-opened round of UN climate negotiations in the Thai capital are working their way through an extensive draft text for a global accord, the pressure is on rich countries to deliver finance for developing world’s adaptation. (CoP15)

BRUSSELS – Europe, which hopes to be a model for the world at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, is squabbling internally over who cuts what and who pays for it.

On paper the EU commitment is good; agreeing last December to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent overall by 2020, and by 30 percent if the rest of the world agrees in Copenhagen.

But the three months leading up to the conference aiming to prevent devastating global warming could be fraught for Europe. (AFP)

Australia's top climate change expert has likened global warming sceptics in rural areas to sharks.

Ross Garnaut's comments come as a Newspoll shows the Rudd government losing support in regional Australia, with the Nationals benefiting from opposition to an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Without mentioning the Nationals by name, Prof Garnaut said climate change sceptics in rural areas were exploiting the ignorant.

'That's a sad thing,' he told ABC television on Monday night from Beijing. 'There, you have climate sharks preying on the vulnerability of people who aren't in a position to be well informed themselves.'

Asked who the climate sharks were, Prof Garnaut said it was anyone who played on the human instinct to deny bad news.

'It's the sort of denial we see going on with a lot of tragic circumstances, but you never make a problem easier to handle by pretending it doesn't exist,' he said. (Sky News)

“Rural areas have much worse sharks circling them than climate change sceptics,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell today in response to Ross Garnaut’s recent comments on Sky News.

“The real sharks are those who want rural and regional areas to pay for climate change policy while professional climate change touts earn big bucks and resort to name calling to justify themselves.”

“The real ignorance is that of city based academics and professional elites refusing to see how their grand ideas impact on the small family farmer at the end of the day.”

“Labor’s ETS imposes a cost on these farmers and miners that their overseas competitors won’t have to pay so their markets, their livelihoods are threatened. There is plenty of hard evidence to back up these concerns.”

“It’s all very well for wealthy city dwellers who can afford a power price hike but that is only the beginning of the problems that will face many in rural and regional areas under Labor’s ETS.”

“The problem with public comment that relies on Treasury modelling to extinguish fears about the economic backlash of an ETS is that it ignores the key assumption of coordinated global action on emission reductions.”

“Without coordinated global action the Treasury model outcomes are worthless.”

“Skynews reports Garnaut as defining a climate shark as ‘anyone who played on the human instinct to deny bad news’. In that case, Garnaut should look at his own actions in denying the economic fallout from Labor’s ETS on rural and regional areas as detailed by many experts to Senate Committees.”

Senator Boswell said that his chief preoccupation and concern had nothing to do with the science but was all about the impact of Labor’s legislative response.

Conservation groups say creating a global market for trading carbon credits from uncut forests is critical to fighting climate change and should be part of a United Nations-backed agreement being whittled down in Bangkok. But, there are many challenges to expanding the carbon market.

The conservation group WWF on Tuesday told journalists any global deal on climate change should take into account the importance of forests in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (VOA News)

THE world must invest more in identifying plants and animal species in the wake of climate change, the author of a new audit of global species has warned. (SMH)

Global warming could create "ghost states" with governments in exile ruling over scattered citizens and land that has been abandoned to rising seas, an expert said yesterday.

Francois Gemenne, of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris, said the likely loss of small island states such as Tuvalu and the Maldives raised profound questions over nationality and territory. (The Guardian)

A leading sea level scientist says a rise of at least two metres in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable.

Stefan Rahmstorf from Germany's Potsdam Institute has told a climate conference at Oxford University that if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees sea levels would still rise two metres rise over centuries. (Radio Australia News)

Waist-deep in fieldwork - Anticipating global warming, scientists are measuring the long-term effect of extra carbon dioxide on marsh plants

This lush marsh south of Annapolis seems like an alien landscape - clear plastic bubbles dot the watery plain, with curved white pipes poking, periscope-like, out of the tall, green grass.

The odd-looking structures spread across Kirkpatrick Marsh are providing researchers with a peek into Earth's future, helping them understand how climate change could alter the world we live in.

For the past 23 years, Bert Drake and other scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Shady Side have been monitoring the growth of marsh grasses and plants encased in the clear plastic bubbles on the fringe of the Rhode River. Those patches have been fed a steady diet of air enriched with carbon dioxide - the gas scientists say is driving our climate toward irrevocable change as human activity spews more of it into the atmosphere.

What Drake and colleagues have found is good news, of a sort. These wetlands, which help protect the Chesapeake Bay from water pollution, might also offer some protection from the climate upheaval that experts expect to come with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Three-square, or scirpus olneyi, a sedge blanketing this salt marsh and commonly found throughout much of North America, grows thicker and faster as it's fed more carbon dioxide, Drake says.

Scientists have known for quite a while that plants generally grow better when exposed to air with higher-than-normal concentrations of carbon dioxide. But some shorter studies suggested that the plants' growth spurt would tail off after a few years. With funding at first from the Department of Energy and more recently from the U.S. Geological Survey, Drake and colleagues tested the long-term effects by piping carbon dioxide into chambers enclosing the marsh plants. The clear plastic allowed sunlight to penetrate, so plants' photosynthesis was not affected. The researchers enriched the air inside to double the level of CO2 in the open air outside - about how concentrated the gas might be in the Earth's atmosphere by the end of the century, Drake notes, given current increases from burning fossil fuels.

They compared the number and size of plants inside the chambers with patches of vegetation outside in the open air, and they checked the carbon-dioxide effect on another marsh plant, Spartina patens, or saltmeadow cordgrass, which is known not to respond to elevated levels of the gas.

Now, after more than two decades of tracking in the longest-running field study of its kind, Drake can say, "The bottom line is these plants have taken up a lot more carbon over the course of the study." And they don't become saturated. (Timothy B. Wheeler, Baltimore Sun)

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 735 individual scientists from 431 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Lake 4, Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Floods (Europe): Climate alarmists are always claiming we will see more and larger floods in a warmer world. We here review several papers describing relevant studies in Europe to see if this claim has any merit.

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: False Olive (Vitale et al., 2008), Peanut, cv. Georgia Green (Bannayan et al., 2009), Peanut, cv. Pronto (Bannayan et al., 2009), and Tropical Spiderwort (Price et al., 2009).

Journal Reviews:
The Relative Merit of Multiple Climate Models: Not even a model's close replication of past reality insures that its projections of future reality will prove equally accurate.

Urs Neu has alerted us to an observationally based paper that documents a change of surface radiative forcing that is consistent with our studies {as well as further refutes claims to the contrary; e.g. see).

“…… if, for instance, there is a long-term positive trend in greenhouse gas concentrations or cloudiness over the observing site, it may introduce an upward bias in the observational record of minimum temperatures that necessarily will result in an upward bias in the long-term surface temperature record.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and radiative forcing to increase as a result of human activities. Nevertheless, changes in radiative forcing related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations could not be experimentally detected at Earth’s surface so far. Here we show that atmospheric longwave downward radiation significantly increased (+5.2(2.2) Watts per meter squared) partly due to increased cloud amount (+1.0(2.8) Watts per meter squared) over eight years of measurements at eight radiation stations distributed over the central Alps. Model calculations show the cloud-free longwave flux increase (+4.2(1.9) Watts per meter squared) to be in due proportion with temperature (+0.82(0.41) C) and absolute humidity (+0.21(0.10) g per meter cubed) increases, but three times larger than expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gases. However, after subtracting for two thirds of temperature and humidity rises, the increase of cloud-free longwave downward radiation (+1.8(0.8) Watts per meter squared) remains statistically significant and demonstrates radiative forcing due to an enhanced greenhouse effect.”

This paper documents that changes of 1 Watt per meter squared (or more) in the long wave fluxes that we examined in Pielke and Matsui (2005) are realistic. The Klotzbach et al (2009) paper demonstrates that a significant bias is introduced in the land portion of the global surface temperature trend which is used in the assessment of global warming, that can be explained, at least in part, due to such changes in long wave radiative fluxes at night. (Climate Science)

A start-up automotive company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has been loaned more than half a billion dollars by the federal government.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Fisker Automotive Inc. has received $529 million in taxpayer money. The loan was intended to help Fikser produce a hybrid sports car to be sold in Finland.

"This is not for average Americans," Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, told the Journal. "This is for people to put something in their driveway that is a conversation piece. It's a status symbol thing." (Newsmax)

Ed. note: This item originally ran in Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog.

I consider the level of dependence of the U.S. on imported petroleum to be a very large financial risk endangering the country's future. There are certainly other import-related risks as well, but here I want to talk about the financial risk.

I consider it similar to having a mortgage upon which you pay interest each month - but in which the interest rate can fluctuate wildly. If you typically pay 7% interest on your mortgage, but your rates quickly climb to 12%, a lot of people would find themselves in a deep financial hole. Come to think of it, a lot of people did when they found themselves in a similar situation. They gambled on the future and lost.

With respect to oil prices, we are also gambling on the future. We import a bit over 9 million barrels per day of crude oil (we also import gasoline, diesel, etc.) Each $10/bbl increase in the price of oil means that consumers pay $33 billion more each year for oil. We are now paying $100 billion more each year for oil than we were just a few short years ago, and that money comes out of all of our pockets. This acts as a tax upon the U.S. economy, albeit one that doesn't primarily benefit U.S. citizens.

The drain on the U.S. economy is one thing, but the risk is quite another. Why do we tolerate that sort of price risk? In my opinion, it is because tolerating the status quo is viewed by politicians as the cheapest, most politically safe option. And even if they are concerned about the risks, when economists say that oil might be going back down to $30, politicians are paralyzed from taking action. The uncertainty is a killer. (Robert Rapier, Energy Tribune)

The largest utility company in Arizona has no plans to build another coal plant, despite the fact that energy demand is scheduled to rise 50% over the next 15 years. NV Energy, another utility with 2.4 million customers, is putting its only scheduled coal plant on hold indefinitely--until carbon capture becomes viable. These are just a couple of the utility companies that are willingly killing plans for coal power to prepare for laws that would put a price on carbon. Here's how the mere specter of a climate bill is phasing out coal--and how a good bill could finish the job without damaging the economy. (Brian Merchant, TreeHugger)

A new international research partnership based in Alberta hopes to answer an intriguing question: Could the warm rocks of deep Earth wean the oil sands off their heavy natural gas diet?

The University of Alberta has linked arms with the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Germany's largest scientific organization, in hopes of furthering research into this and other oil-sands-emissions-related questions.

The partnership, signed Tuesday, brings with it the promise of international financing and German expertise in research areas where Canada has not typically excelled. One area is the use of geothermal energy in the oil sands. (Globe and Mail)

BERLIN, Sept. 28 -- Nuclear energy is set to be revived in Germany as Chancellor Angela Merkel can form her coalition of choice after this Sunday's elections.

Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union and the pro-business Free Democratic Party were in coalition negotiations Monday; a government will be formed within the next four weeks, the chancellor said.

With the CDU and the FDP both supportive of nuclear energy, their coalition agreement is slated to address the country's nuclear phase-out plan, which foresees all German reactors to be shut down by 2021.

Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert with the Berlin-based DIW research institute, said the phase-out, drafted and defended by the SPD and the Greens, should no longer hold. (UPI)

Nuclear energy will become a cornerstone of India’s efforts to supply its population with electricity while keeping down contributions to global warming, says Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. (CoP15)

The U.S. Secretary of Energy—channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?—has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: We will bury you. Nobel laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

But to give you a sense of the challenge, here are his estimates of the scale of the challenge: six billion metric tons of coal burned every year, producing 18 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and requiring an underground storage volume of 30,000 cubic kilometers per year with untold consequences on subsurface pressure, mineral composition and the like. And we are nowhere near that scale: "We now sequester a few million metric tons of CO2 per year," he wrote, largely from cleaning natural gas or so-called "enhanced oil recovery" efforts, in which CO2 is pumped down to flush out more of the valuable petroleum (and therefore not as useful, from a climate perspective, as sequestration for its own sake).

But there is hope. This week the world's first carbon capture and storage at an actual power plant burning coal fired up near New Haven, W. Va. China is following suit, according to a news story in the same issue of Science, launching the Erdos coal-to-liquid plant in Inner Mongolia that will capture some of its 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions and use it to flush out oil from nearby fields. (David Biello, SciAm)

OTTAWA – Canada is being courted to form a group of countries that will commit to permanently storing greenhouse gas emissions underground on a large-scale by 2020, pushing an expensive but promising technology into the vanguard of the global warming fight.

John Ashton, Britain's climate change envoy, stopped in Ottawa today to ask that Canada consider joining a "global partnership" of nations committed to the mass deployment of carbon capture and storage by the end of the next decade.

Carbon sequestration collects emissions from the fossil-fuel burning facilities where they are produced and pumps the gases deep underground into geological formations where they can be stored for thousands of years, according to scientists. The method is still controversial, though, because it takes up to 40% more energy to pump the gases to their geological reservoir.

The technology does show promise in the fight against climate change by allowing countries to bury up to 95% of carbon dioxide emissions underground. But it remains costly for individual companies. The only projects to have gone ahead so far are those funded disproportionately by the federal and provincial governments as demonstration projects. (Toronto Star)

Coerced vaccinations? For 'flu-A-H1N1? Seems a bit over the top but not particularly hazardous nor unreasonable: N.Y. Health Care Workers Revolt Over H1N1 Vaccine - Saying They Should Be Given A Choice, Employees Rally In Albany, Around State, Chant "No Forced Shots!"

They're upset over an ultimatum from the health department.

Workers are being told to either get the swine flu vaccine or lose their jobs.

New York is the first state in the country to mandate flu vaccinations for its health care workers. The first doses of swine flu vaccine will be available beginning next week. Much of it is reserved for state health care workers, but there is growing opposition to required inoculations. (CBS)

A vaccine to protect against cervical cancer was unlikely to have caused the death of the schoolgirl Natalie Morton, health officials said last night.

Preliminary results from a post-mortem examination suggest that the 14-year-old had a “serious underlying medical condition”.

Natalie died suddenly on Wednesday afternoon shortly after receiving the Cervarix vaccine, prompting fears about a vaccine that is being offered to millions of girls in Britain as part of a national immunisation campaign.

The national programme to deliver the vaccine was in disarray last night because up to 200,000 doses had been recalled by health authorities.

Caron Grainger, joint director of public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry City Council, said: “The preliminary post-mortem examination results have revealed a serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death. We are awaiting further results that will take some time. However, indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV \ vaccination was the cause of death.”

No further medical information was provided, but Dr Grainger added: “We would like to reiterate our sincere sympathies to the family and friends of Natalie Morton.”

A spokesman for NHS Coventry said that he could not disclose the exact nature of the underlying health condition but that it was clearly identified in the initial assessment by a pathologist at University Hospital, Coventry.

“We are aware of the condition and we have spoken to the family, but we are not revealing any more details at this stage. It’s fair to say that in the pathologist’s examination that something was identifiable from the initial post-mortem activity. We wanted to get a message out as soon as possible to reassure any parents who are worried about giving their daughters this vaccine.” (The Times)

When I was 6, very shortly before polio vaccine was released, my best friend, from whom I was inseparable, contracted the disease, and was permanently paralysed from the waist down.

Unbeknown to me, my parents, lived many weeks of terrible anxiety on my behalf. This is an anxiety that no parent now has to experience, thanks to the vaccine.

But as a medical student, I saw a case of generalised vaccinia (the active virus in the smallpox vaccine) and never forgot it. A young man with severe eczema had, against all accepted practice, been immunised against smallpox and later died.

In the absence of perspective, information can be dangerous; and nothing is harder to assess than the proper significance of a single dramatic event. Such an event can be greeted by complacency when, in fact, it is the harbinger of disaster; or it causes panic when there is little to worry about. Panic itself can be more dangerous than what gives rise to it. We have, therefore, to control our first reactions by rational thought.

The death of a 14-year-old girl shortly after immunisation against cervical cancer is certainly a dramatic — and terribly tragic — event. It is increasingly unlikely that the vaccine was responsible for her death: one event following closely upon another is not in itself sufficient proof of causation. But let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the vaccine caused her death. What then? (Theodore Dalrymple, The Times)

TUESDAY, Sept. 29 -- Most Americans don't eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, says a U.S. government study released Tuesday. And no state has achieved national objectives for consumption of fruits and vegetables, it found.

The goal for the Healthy People 2010 program is to get at least 75 percent of Americans to eat the recommended two or more daily servings of fruit and for at least 50 percent of Americans to consume three or more daily servings of vegetables.

But surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that only 33 percent of adults meet the fruit consumption target and only 27 percent eat the recommended amount of vegetables. The statistics are worse for high school students -- only 32 percent eat the recommended amount of fruit and 13 percent meet the goal for vegetables. (HealthDay News)

NEW YORK - That friend who stays thin despite eating anything and everything is not just annoying. She might also wreck your diet, new research suggests.

Researchers found that when they had college students watch a movie and snack with either a skinny or overweight companion, the students typically followed the thin friend's lead when she overindulged.

In contrast, study participants used more self-control when snacking with a heavier companion who overate.

The findings, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, suggest that seeing a thin friend devour a big meal gives us implicit permission to do the same.

"We think 'if she can eat like that and stay thin, so can I,' or 'she is having cake, then I can too,'" explained Dr. Brent McFerran, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada.

"In other words," he told Reuters Health in an email, "the most dangerous person to eat with is not someone who is obese, but a thin friend with a large appetite." (Reuters Health)

The link between obesity and osteoarthritis may be more than just the wear and tear on the skeleton caused by added weight.

A Duke University study has found that the absence of the appetite hormone leptin can determine whether obese mice experience arthritis, no matter how heavy they are.

"We were completely surprised to find that mice that became extremely obese had no arthritis if their bodies didn't have leptin," said Farshid Guilak, Ph.D., director of orthopaedic research in the Duke Department of Surgery. "Although there was some earlier evidence that leptin might be involved in the arthritis disease process, we didn't think that there would be no arthritis at all."

In fact, the joints from the obese mice in the study appearing in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism looked better than those of the normal control mice, Guilak said. "However, in another study, we found that mice that gained half as much weight on a high-fat diet but processed leptin normally showed significant knee osteoarthritis." (ScienceDaily)

A previous post by David Boaz poked fun at bureaucrats in Michigan for threatening a woman for the ostensible crime of keeping an eye on her neighbors’ kids without a government permit. English bureaucrats are equally clueless, badgering two women who take turns caring for each other’s kids. The common theme, of course, is that bureaucrats lack common sense — but the real lesson is that this is the inevitable consequence of government intervention (especially when politicians say they are “doing it for the children). The BBC reports:

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless. (NYT)

Backroom lab boys in the US Navy say they have developed hugely more efficient desalination machinery, ideal for making seawater drinkable. The new tech, as well as saving space and energy aboard US warships, could also bring relief to water-poor areas around the world.

"They say that water is the next petroleum," comments J Paul Armistead of the US Office of Naval Research (ONR). "Around the globe there are a lot of countries with a lot of worse water problems than we have, so bringing down the cost to desalinate water should help a lot." (Lewis Page, The Register)

Exelon, one of the country’s largest utilities, said Monday that it would quit the United States Chamber of Commerce because of that group’s stance on climate change. It was the latest in a string of companies to do so, perhaps a harbinger of how intense the fight over global warming legislation could become.

“The carbon-based free lunch is over,” said John W. Rowe, Exelon’s chief executive. “Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society’s energy efficiency are within reach.” (NYT)

I keep thinking Krugman is a gibbering nitwit... and he keeps proving me right: Cassandras of Climate

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years. Paul Krugman, NYT) [em added]

A TV advert paid for by an oil industry lobbyist telling Americans "more CO2 results in a greener earth" would be almost funny if it weren't so depressing

"Is this a joke?" splutters one of the comments underneath the YouTube video of a new 30-second TV advert that has started being aired in a handful of US states over the past few days telling viewers that "CO2 is green". Sadly not, it seems. (The Guardian)

The population explosion in poor countries will contribute little to climate change and is a dangerous distraction from the main problem of over-consumption in rich nations, a study has found.

It challenges claims by leading environmentalists, including Sir David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt, that strict birth control is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The study concludes that spending billions of pounds of aid on contraception in the developing world will not benefit the climate because poor countries have such low emissions. It says that Britain and other Western countries should instead focus on reducing consumption of goods, services and energy among their own populations. (The Times)

Population growth is not a problem - it's among those who consume the least. So why isn't anyone targeting the very rich? (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

It was a startling admission. Prior to passage of "Cap-and-Trade" legislation by the House of Representatives, Mr. Henry Waxman (D, CA), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman and co-sponsor of the bill, in responding to a question from Mr. Joe Barton (R, TX) at a May 22 hearing, admitted the following:

Since then, the House of Representatives has passed and sent to the Senate a major piece of legislation which both Republicans and Democrats agree will heavily tax certain industries, significantly raise prices on energy consumption, and increase the cost of almost all produced goods. President Barack Obama, in a September 22 speech at the United Nations "climate summit," said, "We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations."

Americans have been told that climate change legislation must become law based upon findings by scientists in a group called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If that "science" becomes the justification for all of the forecasted economic pain, doesn't it deserve scrutiny and independent validation? (John McLaughlin, American Thinker)

Calling on America to save the world, again: Fate of US climate bill casts shadow over Bangkok talks - Evidence of 'clear movement' on domestic front would lend weight to UN climate talks in Bangkok, says US chief negotiator.

The fate of US carbon emission cap and trade legislation weighed heavily on delegates at United Nations climate talks which started today in Bangkok, with the Americans saying delays in passing the bill could deter commitments from other nations. (Associated Press)

Green is the new black – for chic environmentalists and eco-intellectuals, that is.

Yet the “green” movement also has the potential, in the form of a climate and energy bill, of being even more divisive than the health-care debate.

On one side, you have environmental activists who live, breathe, dress and eat green. It’s the other side that is a bit harder to define, with potent political consequences for the 2010 midterm elections.

With cap-and-trade (slang for the climate and energy bill), who are the enemies – coal miners? Factory workers? Farmers? Those constituencies are a lot harder to rail against, and they represent a lot of voters to alienate. (Salena Zito, Townhall)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Senate version of controversial and far-reaching federal climate-change legislation is expected Wednesday with initial hearings possible later in the week and throughout October.

As passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June, the so-called cap-and-trade law would remake American industry and change everyday life in ways that neither critics nor supporters have probably imagined.

Acceptance of the legislation in Ohio and other traditional manufacturing states is crucial -- and as if to prove that, the Obama administration sent U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to the state Monday to pass out energy stimulus dollars, talk up high technology and talk about the legislation. (John Funk, The Plain Dealer)

Seeing Red On Cap And Trade - Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship on why he thinks the government's environmental policies are wrong.

WASHINGTON -- Energy and environmental policy returns to the spotlight on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and John Kerry, D-Mass., are expected to introduce legislation to curb climate change.

It's the Senate's version of a bill the House of Representatives passed in June known as "Waxman-Markey" for its primary sponsors. The House measure would establish a so-called cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

All the talk of energy and the environment in Washington means critics of climate change legislation are getting increasingly vocal. Among them is Don Blankenship, chairman and chief executive of Richmond, Va.-based Massey Energy Company ( MEE - news - people ), the largest coal producer in central Appalachia.

"I don't know how we let the enviros and the humanitarians off the hook, that they continue to stymie the development of other countries," he says. "You've got people dying of preventable disease every day, and yet we're getting ready to spend billions of dollars on climate change." (Brian Wingfield, Forbes)

To bury, or not to bury - Panelists bash government investment in carbon capture and sequestration

Experts gathered at the Munk Centre on Wednesday morning to discuss the merits of carbon capture and storage, which has emerged in the past several years as a key strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Professors, policy wonks, and industry representatives responded to a conference paper titled “Burying Carbon Dioxide in Underground Saline Aquifers: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix?”

Carbon capture and storage, known as CCS, involves capturing carbon dioxide and injecting it into rock formations deep inside the earth. The federal government has earmarked $140 million for eight CCS projects, and Alberta has allotted $2 billion to build three CCS plants.

“Instead of buying us time to find alternative sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians time to avoid making tough, unpopular decisions,” declared Graham Thomson, the author of the paper and a columnist for the Edmonton Journal. Thomson argued that CCS is too risky, expensive, and dangerous at its current stage of development to be worth heavy investment. Investing in CCS technology also diverts resources from energy efficiency and delays more durable reforms, Thomson said. He suggested alternative policies, such as systematic reduction of fossil fuel consumption.

Several panellists agreed with Thomson to some degree. “I really don’t think carbon capture and storage is worth the money we plan to spend on it,” said geology professor Andrew Miall. (The Varsity)

Cash sequestration - Alberta’s funding of carbon-capture technology is taxpayer-funded publicity for private companies

In an effort to blunt some of the criticism of Alberta’s tar sand industry, Premier Ed Stelmach has pledged to spend $2-billion to fund research on technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated by the oil sands industry. He hopes to take the greenhouse gas issue off the list of grievances.

But in many ways, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is, both literally and figuratively, a pipe dream. Rather than producing a viable greenhouse gas control technique, the taxpayers’ $2-billion “investment” will be little more than a free PR campaign for the tar sand industry.

Let’s review the problems with the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS), which make it unlikely as an environmental saviour. Land-based CCS consists of three primary activities: capturing carbon dioxide out of an emissions stream, compressing it into a liquid, and then piping that liquid over land, and down into the Earth where, in theory, it will be retained in geological formations for hundreds or thousands of years. It sounds quite simple, until you dig into the details. (Kenneth P. Green, Financial Post)

I have an unhealthy obsession with Guardian Environment and their Climate Change web site. As the unofficial voice of the worried middle classes, they have (of course) every right to express the consensus views of their readers on global warming – but twenty times a day?

In the year or so that I have been following their climate change coverage, the Guardian has foresaken all pretence of rational argument. Monbiot’s “Bullshit” campaign; the use of the terms “denier”, and “climate creationist”; and the savage censorship on the so-called “Comment is Free” blogs, all disgrace the reputation of this once respectable newspaper.

There’s a wonderful moment in “the Office” when a confused Brent is trying to dig himself out of the racist hole he’s dug for himself, and his colleague (the sane one) whispers “He’s going to mention ‘Melting Pot’” – and sure enough he does.

The most ardent warmist, the Greenest believer commenting on a Guardian blog would know better than to utter these ineptitudes, simply because a few hours on a climate change blog would make you savvy enough to know that polar bears are passé; everything that needs to be said about polar bears has already been said a million times.

The only people who don’t know that are the country’s greatest writers, apparently.

Not only is there not a single murmur of doubt or dissent from the consensus view of imminent catastrophe; but the sickening regurgitation of the tiredest warmist clichés demonstrates that not one of “our greatest writers” has spent a single hour researching the subject of AGW.

They don’t need to – They Know, and their warning to the doubters is terrible. Here’s Helen Simpson:

That’s right. Our greatest writers know what’s going on, because they saw it on the telly.

These are proper writers, with talent. But so were the Union of Soviet Writers who extolled Stalin’s five-year plans. No-one is threatening our best writers with the labour camp if they don’t conform. So why do they do it? Are they too stupid, or too lazy, or too cowardly, to confront received opinion?

If, like me, you have been confused, frustrated, dispirited or all of the above by the health care debate in Congress, get ready for more as the U.S. Senate prepares to take up climate-change legislation. The stakes are high. The debate will not be high-minded.

Expect opponents of mandatory carbon regulation to distort the science and economics of global warming, predicting an economic catastrophe if the bill passes, even as environmentalists promise a green jobs nirvana and warn of an environmental catastrophe if it doesn’t.

The fact is, any meaningful effort to regulate carbon will carry real but not catastrophic costs for businesses and consumers -- that’s part of the point, to raise the price of burning fossil fuels -- and that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be disruptive, under the best of circumstances. Solar-power manufacturers in China will gain at the expense of coal miners in West Virginia. That makes the politics of the bill a challenge, but so be it. (Marc Gunther, Greener World Media)

There is no plan B...If we do not realize plan A, we go straight to plan F, which stands for failure, says Thai Prime Minister. (CoP15)

Draft agreement being discussed ahead of December's crucial Copenhagen summit is long, confusing and contradictory (The Guardian)

Disagreement over EU's emissions trading scheme and over a French and German proposal to hold states accountable, if they fail to sign a new climate protocol in Copenhagen. (CoP15)

BRUSSELS - Aviation and shipping should cut their respective carbon dioxide emissions to 10 and 20 percent below 2005 levels over the next decade, the European Union is likely to propose at global climate talks this week.

EU diplomats said the cuts might be linked to a tax on fuel to generate billions of dollars of revenues to help poor countries cope with climate change -- a key contribution to finding a global climate deal by December.

"We are concerned about the slow international negotiations and are keen to shift gear," said an EU diplomat involved with the proposal. "This is a concrete measure from the EU side in order to contribute to this step-up." (Reuters)

MALCOLM Turnbull will be forced to stare down more than two-thirds of the Liberal back bench if he proceeds with his plan to negotiate with the government over amendments to the emissions trading scheme before December's Copenhagen climate change conference.

The Australian can reveal that two-thirds of his back bench disagree with the Opposition Leader's plan in what looms as a serious blow to Mr Turnbull's capacity to negotiate in good faith.

Over the past four days, The Australian contacted all 59 Liberal Party backbenchers in the House of Representatives and the Senate, asking: Do you think the opposition should negotiate amendments to the ETS with the government ahead of the Copenhagen conference?

Only 12 MPs said they supported Mr Turnbull's decision to negotiate, while 41 wanted the opposition to either not negotiate at all or to do so only on the guarantee that the legislation would not be passed ahead of the Copenhagen conference in December. Six MPs were either unwilling to disclose their position or unavailable.

Senior opposition frontbenchers have claimed for weeks that it is only a vocal minority of the Liberal partyroom that is critical of the negotiating position Mr Turnbull and his shadow minister Ian Macfarlane have adopted, and most media reports have reinforced this position.

But The Australian's survey proves that the so-called maverick Liberal parliamentarians Wilson Tuckey and Cory Bernardi are reflecting the views of an overwhelming majority of their colleagues when they publicly criticise the shadow cabinet for endorsing Mr Turnbull to negotiate with the government over the ETS. (The Australian)

Dust storms like the one that plagued Sydney are blowing bacteria to all corners of the globe, with viruses that will attack the human body. Yet these scourges can also help mitigate climate change. (John Vidal, The Observer)

Science can prove global climate change is happening, but it won't tell us what to do about it, says professor of climate change.

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.

Many voices are clamouring to be heard in the turbulent posturing and diplomacy ahead of this December's international climate negotiations in Copenhagen. One of the loudest says we must 'let the science speak for itself', that the science is clear, and that 'now is the time for action'.

But exactly what action is it that the science demands? And action by whom and by when? These are questions for politics to decide, not for science to dictate. (Mike Hulme, New Nation)

Warming guru Ross Garnaut – one of many warming gurus who speak in a zombie monotone, for some reason – mourns rural doubt over climate change:

Professor Garnaut seems to define money-making warming doubters as “well-informed”. Interesting. (He also says: “It’s the sort of denial we see in relation to a lot of tragic circumstances.” Care to name those circumstances, Prof?) Their well-informedness aside, I’m not aware of too many warming doubters who’ve turned their scepticism into massive dollars. Warming alarmists, on the other hand …

UPDATE. Rural voters – tragic, exploited rural voters – speak out. (Tim Blair)

As a geoscientist who works in that often strange area where government policy, academia and commercial practicality overlap I fully understand the quote, paraphrased from Heraclitus, circa 500BC, that "nothing is constant except change." I suspect Heraclitus had some geoscientist in him.

A recent article in EOS, the weekly magazine of the American Geophysical Union, by Kastens and others, describes a study, by a very diverse research group including theologians, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as earth scientists, about how geoscientists think. Geoscientists think temporally, in time, far into the past and future, think of the earth as a system of complex inter-related processes, stress learning based on observations of data from what the Earth tells us, and think spatially about how things are arranged in all dimensions. Change is inherent in a geologist's understanding of the Earth and is a principal tool for defining what happens between various observed events. Thinking like a geologist is a very good approach to understanding large-scale, complex problems and this includes climate change. (Doug Wyatt, Aiken Standard)

Leading climate scientist criticises Bush administration and points to general ignorance of global warming in US public polls (The Guardian)

America's lack of knowledge on climate change could prevent the world from reaching an agreement to stop catastrophic global warming, scientists said in an attack on the country's environmental policy.

Professor John Schellnhuber, one of the world's leading global warming experts, described the US as "climate illiterate" (Daily Telegraph)

A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time…

The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre’s site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up.

The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included.

Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his data for years. When McIntyre finally got hold of it, and looked at the 34 samples that Briffa left out of his graphs, a stark message was displayed. McIntyre describes it today as one of the most disquieting images he’s ever presented.

Since 1995 Kieth Briffa has been publishing graphs about temperature of the last thousand years. Like Michael Manns’ famous (and discredited) Hockey Stick graph, Briffa’s graphs were based on tree rings and appeared to show dramatic evidence that the current climate was extraordinarily warm compared to previous years. They were used in the infamous spagetti plots, and the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report, and recycled in other publications giving the impression they had been replicated. His work has even made it into school resources (Cimate Discovery, p4). His publications since 2000 are listed here.

Suspiciously Briffa refused repeated requests to provide the Yamal data that his analysis was based on (something about the data belonging to the Russians). As Steve McIntyre points out, this kind of data should be archived and freely available after any peer reviewed paper is published.

Last year Briffa published a paper in a journal (Philosophical Transactions of Biology, the Royal Society) that did maintain basic standards, (after being prodded), and a few days ago McIntyre noticed the data was finally up. This data had been used in papers going back as far as 2000. (And no one thought to politely inform McIntyre that the information he’d requested for years was now available.)

Hiding data in science is equivalent to a company issuing it’s annual report and telling the auditors that the receipts are commercial in confidence and they would just have to trust them. No court of law would accept that, yet at the “top” levels of science, papers have been allowed to sit as show-pieces for years without any chance that anyone could seriously verify their findings. In science, getting the stamp of Peer Review has become like a free pass to “credibility”.

If all the tree rings are combined, the graph looks like this below. (I’ve added the black thick line to the original to make the merged data stand out). Obviously today is not as warm as things were 1000 years ago (at least not in far north Russia), and it’s also clear things have been warming since 1800 in Yamal.

Here’s a map to help put places to the names. These are the four sites mentioned as sources of the tree ring data. Yamal and Taymir are roughly 400 km apart.

In the mid 1990’s the Polar Urals were the place to be for interesting tree rings, but then as the data got updated and yielded a medieval warm period that Team AGW preferred to ignore, they moved their focus to the Yamal Peninsula. There was plenty of data to pick from, but that’s the point. They chose 10 data sets from 1990, and only 5 post 1995. Which seems curious as presumably there is no shortage of 20 year old trees on the Yamal Peninsula. As Ross McKitrick notes, a small sample may have been passable, but it appears that these trees were not selected randomly.

Honest scientists who believe in there is a crisis in carbon must surely be starting to ask questions about what’s going on with their colleagues. If the evidence is so strong, so undeniable; if the warming recently has been so unprecedented, why won’t people offer their data up freely so that science can progress as fast as possible? When is deluding the public, other scientists and our elected representatives ever a useful thing to do? People have invested money and careers, governments have paid millions for reports, and billions for research; and companies have planned years ahead, all partly based on the Hockey Stick Graph.

If the data had been archived immediately for the public, the world could have had access to better information for nearly a decade.

Last week, Yugratna Srivastava, a 13-year-old Indian girl, was hired by the United Nations to present a poem to the world's leaders and the humanity.

In the tradition of Nazi and Soviet methods of propaganda, a kid was asked to explain that our world is gonna fry unless everyone buys all the ideology and policies that her propagandistic employers wanted her to disseminate.

There apparently exist adults whose skulls are comparably unhinged. The girl wasn't strong enough to convince the world about the looming catastrophe - and they need much stronger "momentum" for the Copenhagen negotiations that should efficiently cripple the world's economy.

So most of the media, such as The Telegraph, have informed about a "research" of the British Met Office. These guys - no longer stupid girls from third-world countries but paid "expert" adults from the U.K. - predict 4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2060. I kid you not.

You may wonder why those articles in the media don't contain any graphs. Well, here is how the graph of the UAH MSU global temperatures between 1979 and 2059 has to look like, in order to support the claims in the media:

Click to zoom in...

I created the graph from the existing 1978-2009 data of UAH MSU combined with a Brownian noise that leads to the right difference between 2059 and 2009. Try to create your own graph. You won't be able to find one that looks more sensible than the graph above. Do you really believe that it is conceivable that the UAH graph that the people will have in 2059 will look like the graph above?

Clearly, the graph above shows that Nature was changing the temperature by a little bit between 1979 and 2009. But it suddenly lost Her mind in 2009 and started to warm up. Why did She stop obeying Her own laws? And how much more quickly will she warm up? Well, the net UAH warming between 1979 and 2009 has been around 0.4 degrees Celsius. If extrapolated, and such extrapolations of violent short-term trends are likely to be overestimates, that would produce 0.6 degrees Celsius by 2060.

Their figure, 4 degrees Celsius, exceeds this extrapolated figure by a factor of seven, despite the approximate constancy of the CO2 production since 1979. In reality, the warming by 2060 will almost certainly be smaller than 0.6 degrees Celsius.

These people must think that all the other people have the IQ of a pumpkin to buy such manifest nonsense. If they overstate the measured warming trend by a factor of seven, do they think that no one will notice? Why should Nature suddenly change a quantity - the decadal warming trend - by one order of magnitude relatively to all existing measurements and all sensible theories? Do they really believe that anyone but corrupt people trying to steal billions from the taxpayers, and/or mentally retarded individuals are ready to buy this crap?

Their projections are exactly as ludicrous as the "judgement day" warnings by the Jehovah's Witnesses. The only difference is that the Met Office religion lacks the tradition, even the short tradition of the other sect.

Click to zoom in. Another extrapolation of UAH MSU to 1979-2059. If you had to make a bet - your house - which projection among the two graphs you were offered would you expect to be more likely? (The Reference Frame)

we show that the surface and lower tropospheric temperature trends are diverging in time. We offer an explanation for some of this related to the use of minimum temperatures over land as part of the construction of the global average surface temperature trend. Other sources of bias and uncertainty are reported in our 2007 JGR paper [Pielke et al 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends].

This also means that the diagnosis of the radiative forcing using the surface temperature trends introduces errors. The assumption of a linear relationship between the radiatve forcings and surface temperature is clearly stated in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report (e.g. see Chapter 2 page 133), where it is written

“Radiative forcing [RF] can be related through a linear relationship to the global mean equilibrium temperature change at the surface (delta Ts): delta Ts = lambda * RF, where lambda is the climate sensitivity parameter (e.g., Ramaswamy et al., 2001).”

The lower troposphere is also expected to have a linear relationship to the radiative forcing although amplified relative to the surface; e.g. see Figure 5.6 for the tropics in CCSP 1.1. Chapter 5.

Our Klotzbach et al 2009 paper shows that there is not a temporally invariant linear relationship between the global average surface and lower tropospheric temperature trends. Based on this paper, and our other papers such as JGR 2007, there is also not a linear relationship between the global average surface temperature trends and the radiative forcing. This view is at significant variance to the IPCC view, which used the CCSP 1.1 report in its assessment. In our new Klotzbach et al paper, we present additional observational evidence that the paragraph above from the IPCC report is not correct, and we discuss one of the reasons for the discrepancy.

“The simplification of complex, mechanistically disparate processes to the same radiative forcing metric, with the implication that positive forcings may cancel negative forcings, provides a way of easily communicating climate forcing factors and their relative importance to general audiences. However, a net zero global mean radiative forcing may be associated with large regional or nonradiative (e.g., precipitation) changes. Further, when forcings are added, uncertainties in individual forcings must be propagated, resulting in large uncertainties in the total forcing. Adding forcings also belies the complexity of the underlying chemistry, physics, and biology. It suggests that all effects on climate can be quantified by a similar metric without knowing, or needing to know, the details of the climate response as captured in feedback effects. Yet there are many aspects of climate change—including rainfall, biodiversity, and sea level—that are currently not related quantitatively, much less linearly, to radiative forcings.” (Climate Science)

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing” Edmund Burke

I experienced two apparently disparate events recently. Both speak to the magnificent hypocrisy Burke identifies. They also illustrate Burke is wrong when he said it costs nothing. We’re all paying and will continue to pay for hypocrisies in climate science and research funding.

The first event involved a stay in an upscale hotel. I’ve learned to ignore moral lectures in the bathroom – reuse the towels and save the planet - because I know the real beneficiary is hotel profit. Now it’s gone further. This time there was a “green” card I could hang on my door to stop the room being serviced at all. I didn’t use it because of the profit issue, but it would also put hotel support staff jobs in jeopardy. I have no problem with profit, free enterprise and capitalism; however, the hypocrisy of corporations exploiting the environment and people’s guilt purely for profit is obscene. (Tim Ball, CFP)

An amazing number of oil finds have been made this year, including the biggest in California in 35 years. If the world is running out of oil, why do we keep finding more of it?

The mantra of the anti-drilling crowd has been that oil companies like to sit on their leases and the oil in the ground, hoping to drive up the price. They should use the leases they have or lose them, these critics say. They also like to add that the world is running out of oil so it doesn't matter anyway.

Occidental Petroleum hasn't been sitting on anything. For the past decade it's been actively acquiring drilling rights and leases in California where the oil, at least on land, has been said to be an exhausted resource. (IBD)

CHINA'S ambition to create "green cities" powered by huge wind farms comes with a dirty little secret: Dozens of new coal-fired power plants need to be installed as well.

Part of the reason is that wind power depends on, well, the wind. To safeguard against blackouts when conditions are too calm, officials have turned to coal-fired power as a backup.

China wants renewable energy like wind to meet 15 per cent of its energy needs by 2020, double its share in 2005, as it seeks to rein in emissions that have made its cities among the smoggiest on Earth.

But experts say the country's transmission network currently can't absorb the rate of growth in renewable-energy output. Last year, as much as 30 per cent of wind-power capacity wasn't connected to the grid. As a result, more coal is being burned in existing plants, and new thermal capacity is being built to cover this shortfall in renewable energy.

In addition, officials want enough new coal-fired capacity in reserve so that they can meet demand whenever the wind doesn't blow. This is important because wind is less reliable as an energy source than coal, which fuels two-thirds of China's electricity output. Wind energy ultimately depends on wind strength and direction, unlike coal, which can be stockpiled at generators in advance.

Further complicating matters is poor connectivity between regional transmission networks, which makes it hard for China to move surplus power in one part of the country to cover shortfalls elsewhere.

China may not be alone in having to ramp up thermal power capacity as it develops wind farms. Any country with a combination of rapidly growing energy demand, an old and inflexible grid, an existing reliance on coal for power, and ambitious renewable energy-expansion plans will likely have a similar dilemma. What marks China out as different is the amount of new coal-fired capacity that needs to be added. (Wall Street Journal)

The industrial boomtown of Dongguan in southeast China's Pearl River Delta could soon host one of the country's most sophisticated power plants, one that uses an unconventional coal-gasification technology to make the dirtiest coal behave like clean-burning natural gas. Its developers, Atlanta-based utility Southern Company and Houston-based engineering firm KBR, announced the licensing deal with Dongguan Power and Chemical Company this month. (Technology Review)

GM's Hummer division has commanded attention ever since the vehicles first appeared on American highways at the height of the sport-utility boom.

The Hummer brand, however, could be on the road to extinction if GM cannot soon finish a deal with China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, the only bidder for the controversial brand. GM announced plans to spin it off while reorganizing under bankruptcy protection this past summer. (See the 50 worst cars of all time.)

GM spokesman Chris Preuss acknowledges GM won't complete the sale of Hummer by the end of September as it originally planned, but it still hopes to finish the negotiations soon, he says.

The tentative plan is for GM to continue building Hummer vehicles through a transitional period. The length of the transition is one of the unresolved issues. Longer term, Hummer is hoping to replace its gas guzzlers with new models that use lighter-weight materials and advanced power trains, and maybe even hybrid vehicles. The plan is to continue building Hummers in the U.S., not in China where the prevailing wages, $12 to $25 per day, are significantly lower.

For now, the Hummer H3 is built at a GM plant in Shreveport, La., which is scheduled to close sometime next year, while the hulking H2 is made at a plant in Mishawaka, Ind., belonging to AM General, which also builds the Humvee for the U.S. Department of Defense. (Joseph R. Szczesny, Time)

The government plans to rush through measures allowing people with suspected mental health issues to be quickly detained because of fears over staff shortages in any forthcoming swine flu outbreak, it has been revealed.

The temporary changes to the Mental Health Act, as laid out in an unusually short consultation lasting just one month, would mean it would only take one doctor, rather than two, to have a person sectioned and put on medication without their consent.

The measures could have a serious effect on the thousands of patients with psychiatric issues who currently live outside state care, meaning many could be detained against their will on the word of just one health professional.

With very little information on the proposed changes published, many mental health experts have warned the government that they risk side-lining an already vulnerable community and have called on it to spell-out the full raft of changes proposed in the consultation. (Management in Practice)

As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry.

But those events will not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine. That poses a public relations challenge for federal officials, who remember how sensational reports of deaths and illnesses derailed the large-scale flu vaccine drive of 1976.

This time they are making plans to respond rapidly to such events and to try to reassure a nervous public — and headline-hunting journalists — that the vaccine is not responsible.

Every year, there are 1.1 million heart attacks in the United States, 795,000 strokes and 876,000 miscarriages, and 200,000 Americans have their first seizure. Inevitably, officials say, some of these will happen within hours or days of a flu shot.

The government “is right to expect coincident deaths, since people are dying every day, with or without flu shots,” said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine and co-author of “The Epidemic That Never Was,” a history of the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign.

Officials are particularly worried about spontaneous miscarriages, because they are urging pregnant women to be among the first to be vaccinated. Pregnant women are usually advised to get flu shots, because they and their fetuses are at high risk of flu complications, but this year the pressure is greater. Expectant mothers are normally advised to avoid drugs, alcohol and anything else that might affect a fetus. (NYT)

This simple little chart shows the steps needed to keep your doctor if the health care plan put forth by Senator Baucus becomes law. For a closer look, click this link.

What kind of country would imprison citizens who felt it was in their best interest not to purchase health care insurance? We may soon find out.

Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, got an interesting handwritten note last week from the chief of staff of Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation. Tom Barthold told Ensign that an American who did not buy health care insurance or pay the fee — up to $1,900 — that is required from those who opt out would find themselves in deep trouble with the government.

"Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead," Politico reported. (IBD)

NEW YORK - The economic downturn may not be good for your bottom line, but it might be a boon to your health, a study on health trends during the Great Depression suggests.

Looking at U.S. death rates between 1920 and 1940, researchers found that during the bleakest years of the Great Depression, death rates dipped when compared with years of economic expansion. The patterns were seen among men and women, and across age groups.

At the same time, life expectancy generally increased during the recession years and declined during years of growth.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may seem counterintuitive.

However, they add to previous research showing correlations between economic woes and health improvements in various countries.

Many people may assume that the health of the general population takes a hit during recession, noted lead researcher Dr. Jose A. Tapia Granados, an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"But it is very clear that this is not the case," he told Reuters Health.

This study could not look at the reasons why. However, Tapia Granados speculated on some potential factors.

Economic expansions have been linked to population increases in smoking and drinking, as well as less sleep and more stress. (Reuters Health)

A 14-year-old schoolgirl has died after being given a vaccine to protect against cervical cancer as part of the national immunisation programme. Some of her classmates suffered side-effects such as dizziness and nausea.

Natalie Morton, a pupil at Blue Coat Church of England school in Coventry, died yesterday afternoon at the city’s University Hospital hours after receiving Cervarix. The NHS in Coventry said that no link had been made between her death and the HPV jab, but that it had quarantined the batch used at the school as a precaution.

Cervarix guards against certain strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection that causes up to 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases. In the UK, 3,000 cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year and about 1,000 women die from the disease.

More than 1.4 million have been given the jab since the vaccination programme began last year. This is believed to be the first death. By 2011 all girls under 18 will have been offered the vaccine. The public awareness campaign about cervical cancer was boosted by the death of the reality television star Jade Goody, 27.

Health officials said that they had begun an urgent investigation and that the death could not be linked directly to the vaccination until after a post-mortem examination.

Julie Roberts, head of the school, which has 1,350 pupils, said in a letter to parents that the girl had suffered a “rare but extreme reaction to the vaccine”. She added: “A number of other girls also reported being unwell and some were sent home.” She asked parents to be vigilant. It is understood that none of the other girls who reported side effects was admitted to hospital.

Britain is the only country to have picked Cervarix, made by GlaxoSmithKline, for a mass public health programme, instead of Gardasil, a more expensive vaccine made by Merck that also protects against strains of HPV that cause genital warts. (The Times)

That's the title of my latest HND piece, and the good guys here are Lafarge's Ravena, NY cement plant. One of the largest such plants in the country, it is also about the best in terms of mercury emissions, coming in at one percent or less of allowable levels.

For some reason, Erin Brockovich targeted this facility and town, while trolling for clients. Memo to Erin: Try researching the plant you pick on, before you give your dog and pony show. It might help if the plant in question is actually a polluter.

For those who never saw it, here is Walter Olson's masterful takedown of this incredible phony.

I don't even mention Erin in my HND piece, since she is completely irrelevant. In fact, John Reagan, my contact over at Lafarge, said that nothing seemed to come of her visit. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

NEW YORK - A small but growing number of women with breast cancer are choosing to have the unaffected breast removed in an effort to prevent a recurrence, researchers reported Monday.

Using data from New York State hospitals, the researchers found that between 1995 and 2005, the prevalence of preventive mastectomy among women with a history of cancer in one breast more than doubled.

The procedure was performed in about 2 percent of all women diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995 and 1996 -- rising to just over 4 percent by 2005.

In contrast, there was only a small increase in preventive mastectomies among women who had no personal history of breast cancer but were considered at risk because of a strong family history of the disease.

The findings suggest that while the number of preventive mastectomies performed each year in New York was small, the procedure is becoming more common, the researchers report in the journal Cancer.

The more marked increase among women with a history of breast cancer raises some concerns, senior researcher Dr. Stephen B. Edge, of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, told Reuters Health.

The central issue, he explained, is that there is no evidence that removing the unaffected breast improves long-term survival. (Reuters Health)

A grandmother in Indiana has been arrested for purchasing cold medicine. We can all sleep more safely now that this hardened criminal has been taught a lesson. The Terre Haute News reports:

“A Michigan woman who lives in front of a school bus stop says the state is threatening her with fines and possibly jail time for babysitting her neighbors’ kids until the bus comes,” CNN reports.

She’s not getting paid. She’s possibly not even letting the neighbor kids into her house. The kids are waiting for a school bus in front of her house, and she’s told her neighbors she’ll keep an eye on their kids. And the government wants her to get a license. (Something similar is happening in Britain.) This is what people mean when they warn that an ever-expanding government threatens the values of neighborliness and community. When the government provides services for free, or when it erects obstacles to individuals’ providing those services, it reduces private provision and simultaneously increases the demand for government services. If you make it illegal for neighbors to watch one another’s kids, you weaken ties of neighborhood and community.

Our nanny-state government not only wants to take care of us from cradle to pre-K to K-12 to homebuying to medical care to retirement to grave, it not only considers adult Americans “just like your teenage kids, [not] acting in a way that they should act,” it not only wants to “nudge” us into acting the way it thinks we should, now it thinks that neighbors should have to get a license to keep an eye on the kids congregating in front of their homes. It’s enough to make you think we have too much government. (David Boaz, Cato at liberty)

The New York Times, still smarting after losing scoops to Fox News, has thrown in the towel, vowing to avoid future embarrassment by monitoring the cable channel. We have a better idea — it's called reporting.

An Illinois senator rises to the highest office in the land on pillars of a spectacularly slimy political organization, a group with a long record of voter fraud, theft, thuggery and partisanship. As sexy as such a story might seem, the New York Times didn't consider it news.

That's why the Times got scooped by outlets such as Fox News, for which it has nothing but contempt, on revelations that led to the fall of community organizing behemoth Acorn.

The wound was self-inflicted, rooted in little more than the partisanship of protecting a favored president. It left the field clear for a couple of journalism students to show that Acorn staffers openly encouraged pimping, child prostitution, human trafficking, mortgage fraud and tax evasion.

It's right there on tapes posted to Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com. Unlike the disdainful Times, Fox ran with it, toppling a behemoth of political power.

Fox's judgment now seems to play the role the Times' once did, and the Times is no doubt left wondering how it could have lost out on yet another one.

It's not the first: It missed the John Edwards mistress and baby scandal in campaign 2008; it missed the National Endowment for the Arts press conference shilling for Obama; it also missed the debacle over the seamy background of "green jobs" czar Van Jones.

Now it's missed the Acorn scandals — all because of its "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues dominating Fox News and talk radio," according to managing editor Jill Abramson, who will now "assign an (unnamed) editor to monitor opinion media."

Baloney. Those Fox stories had impact because they were fact-, not opinion-based. The public agreed, and the politicians were forced to act. The Times' "monitor" idea smears Fox as an opinion outfit whose product must be handled with tongs.

In fact, it's ideological bias that keeps Times journalists from covering the news with impact. The newspaper of record should be reporting the news "without fear or favor," as its motto says — not simply by accepting the liberal line.

If they happen to hit their favorite politicians, too bad. Because if they don't do this, they aren't newsmen. By taking a cheap shot at Fox and then bitterly following it instead of leading, the Times blows its credibility even more than its missed scoops do. (IBD)

CHURCHVILLE, VA: The Chesapeake Bay is in eco-collapse. The once-clear waters are clouded with sediment, so the eel-grass cannot grow across the bottom for baby crabs to hide in. The oysters, which once filtered every bit of the bay’s water twice daily, have mostly succumbed to such viral diseases as MSX and Dermo.

The bay that yielded 25 million bushels of oyster per year in the 1940s has lately produced only about 200,000 bushels annually. Chesapeake seafood restaurants mostly import their crabmeat and oysters. Watermen have left for other jobs. A massive federal restoration project began in 1983, aiming to cut “over-fertilization” in the Bay by 40 percent—but regulating sewage plants and farm fertilizer has failed to make much difference.

We hadn’t done the science. Blaming “pollution” was no adequate prescription for restoring the Bay’s health. But research has apparently now found the key. A recent massive experiment in the Great Wicomico River found that oysters on high shell reefs (16–18 inches above the bottom) are thriving. The test-bed oysters are fighting off the diseases and grow above the sediment, while oysters on the river bottom and on lower shell mounds failed again.

The Great Wicomico now has as many oysters as all the waters of Maryland—185 million. The journal Science reports “unprecedented restoration of a native oyster population.”

It wasn’t pollution. It was the gradual permission for power dredges in the Bay, which traditionally had permitted only sail-powered dredges. The power dredges tore at the shell piles that were vital to the health of the oysters and the baywater they filtered. Viruses attacked successfully because the oysters were no longer growing high up at optimum-flow depths. After the oysters failed, the water then clouded, hampering the eelgrass and the baby crabs.

The eco-activists’ cries of “overharvesting” and “pollution” led us in the wrong direction. The money spent on the bay’s restoration up until now has been largely wasted. But now the future of the by looks bright: give the oysters high starter-reefs, protect them from harvest until they reach sustaining numbers, and guard the shell reefs against power dredging.

Obviously, we need a better way to harvest oysters—which will provide major benefits to oyster populations in Europe, Australia and affluent regions around the world where oysters and their water-filtering have been 90 percent lost.

It seems so simple suddenly! Since we did the research.

The environmental movement hasn’t been much help at fixing things:

Conservation is a wonderful thing, but it is science that gives us the capacity to achieve it.

Resource:
D.M. Schulte et al; “Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Population, Science, vol. 325, August 28, 2009; pp. 1124–1127.

On climate change, nuclear weapons and poverty, the world's nations are showing a new spirit of multilateralism (Ban Ki-moon, The Guardian)

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — Climate change campaigners expressed dismay on Friday after the leaders of the world's most important economies failed to earmark funds to pay for a deal to cut carbon emissions.

States are due to hold a global summit -- billed as the last chance to halt global warming -- in Copenhagen in December in order to agree on ambitious new targets for cutting the production of greenhouse gases.

Emerging economies, led by a skeptical India, have insisted that they can not sign up to such a deal unless the rich-world nations whose industry caused the problem pay billions to finance their transfer to new clean technologies.

Campaigners had hoped that under the chairmanship of US President Barack Obama the Group of 20 summit might agree to set aside 150 billion dollars to pay for this work and convince emerging economies to sign the deal.

The final summit statement agreed by the leaders, however, was fairly vague.

"We will spare no effort to reach agreement in Copenhagen through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations," it said, without going into specifics of how the funding gap might be met.

Hopes that the world's leading powers would get behind measures to help poorer countries fight climate change were raised in July in L'Aquila, Italy, when G8 leaders sent their finance ministers to seek sources of cash.

On Friday, however, the broader G20 group promised simply to "intensify our efforts" and sent the ministers back to do some more research. (AFP)

India today declared that the G-20 was not a forum for negotiating climate change issues, although it was aware that its leaders assembled here for the Summit were expected to convey a significant commitment to move away from the current pattern of economic activity through promotion of renewable and clean sources of energy.

In a press briefing here today, Shyam Saran, Special Envoy of the Indian Prime Minister, said India believed that the G-20 was not the forum for discussing either the extent of cuts to be enforced by countries on emission of greenhouse gases or the financing pattern for mitigating the adverse climate-related effects of the current pattern of economic activities.

“The sole negotiating forum for climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC),” Saran said. Nevertheless, a strong political message from the G-20 leaders that they were committed to a comprehensive, balanced and equitable outcome at the Copenhagen summit on climate change to be held later this year would have a favourable impact on the negotiations, he said.

He also clarified that as far as India was concerned, it was not under any threat or demand from any country on enforcing an absolute cut in its gas emission levels. On the contrary, India’s stand that developing countries should not be expected to agree to absolute cuts in their gas emission levels had received endorsement from 37 countries including China and Brazil. India continued to stick to its earlier position that by 2020, the developed countries should agree to a 40 per cent reduction in their gas emission levels, assuming 1990 as the base year. At the same time, India stood by its commitment that its emission levels would not cross those of the developed countries, thereby putting on them the onus of determining an effective cap on emissions for all developing countries. (Business Standard)

When the panda smiles the world applauds. Or so it seemed on Tuesday after President Hu Jintao’s speech at the UN. From the way that much of the media reported his words it was as if China had actually made an important announcement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It hadn’t. All Mr Hu actually said was that China would now “endeavour” to curb its carbon emissions by a “notable” margin. But how does one measure “endeavour” or “notable”? As someone with close links to the Chinese administration told me when pressed: “What was said was actually pretty meaningless.”

There were no specific targets and, as any China watcher knows, this green story is old news. Official Chinese policy over the past couple of years has been to make GDP growth more green. But not at the expense of growth itself — and China plans to grow pretty fast.

At least, I suppose, the panda smiled. Poor Barack Obama didn’t even have that to offer. There was no pledge to cut emissions, and with vote-sapping battles already afoot over healthcare reform, one wonders how much time and energy the President will have for environmental imperatives.

I fear, therefore, that all we got at the UN this week was insubstantial rhetoric. The bad news is that we are likely to get more of that today at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. When I asked one finance minister what he expected to be delivered on climate change there, he said, rather wistfully: “Words, just words.” (Noreena Hertz, The Times)

The G20 did agree to back Obama's efforts to end the annual subsidies on fossil fuels, which globally cost $300bn. Photograph: Frank Krahmer/Getty Images

Barack Obama has talked down the importance of sealing a global deal on climate change before the end of the year, world leaders said yesterday.

Obama's comments, made in private talks at the G20 summit, downplay the need to reach a strong deal at UN talks in Copenhagen in December and contradict the United Nations and others, who have billed the meeting as a crucial moment for the world to avoid catastrophic global warming. The president did win a partial victory on his signature climate issue at this G20 summit – removing fossil fuel subsidies – but there was no headway on the much bigger issue of climate finance, which Obama had taken up as his issue at the last G20.

Barring small but significant steps forward from China and India, there has been little progress this week at a UN summit or the G20 towards a deal at Copenhagen. Obama's remarks yesterday resonated among world leaders, who have been looking to America – as historically the world's greatest polluter – to lead on climate change.

"I would cite what President Obama said to us at our meetings and that is that while Copenhagen is a very important meeting we should not view it as a make or break on climate change. It will be a step, an ongoing step, in an important world process to deal with this critical issue," Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, said yesterday. Harper cited the comments when he said he was not inclined to take up Gordon Brown's challenge to attend the meeting himself, in order to add political weight to the negotiations.

South Korea's Lee Myung-bak also referenced Obama's remarks. "The Copenhagen climate summit meeting is not the end, but it is going to be the start of a new beginning, and having that kind of perception is more realistic," he said. There was no immediate comment from the White House on Obama's remarks. (The Guardian)

Just as President Obama was exciting the frustration of the greenies by making his conspicuously commitment-free speech to the UN about global warming, a Bloomberg poll reported that, asked what was the most important issue facing their country today, 46 per cent of Americans replied "the economy".

This was followed by health care (23 per cent), the budget deficit (16 per cent) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (10 per cent). Way at the bottom of the list, on 2 per cent – as Obama is doubtless aware – was "climate change". As he dithers around over Afghanistan and so many other issues, it seems that, now the great campaigner is in office, his slogan has subtly morphed from "Yes we can" to "No we can't". (Christopher Booker, Daily Telegraph)

Cumbersome at the best of times, UN procedures seem unable to bear the weight of an issue as important, urgent, and complicated as climate change, says Geoffrey Lean. (Daily Telegraph)

This week’s speeches at the United Nations by President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China raised hopes that — with vision, political will and a lot more work — the world may eventually reach a new agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the struggle continued on a retail level.

The Senate’s Democratic leadership managed to beat back an extraordinarily mischievous amendment to a spending bill offered by Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican. The amendment would have blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from using its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from major sources like power plants and vehicles.

The amendment was in clear conflict with a landmark 2007 Supreme Court decision giving the agency explicit authority to regulate such gases from vehicles and implicit authority to regulate them from other sources. With a global climate summit in Copenhagen less than three months away, the move would also have sent a terrible signal about Washington’s lack of commitment. (NYT)

At the United Nations, President Obama tried desperately to convince the international community we have entered a “new era,” one in which the United States was serious about tackling global warming. His allies in the U.S. Senate do not appear eager to address the issue, as they used parliamentary procedures to dodge tough climate-related votes on the Interior-Environment Appropriations bill. (The Foundry)

Politically vulnerable Democrats say Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders aren’t offering them the protection from tough votes that they did in the last Congress.

Conservative Democrats fear that dozens of members could be swept out of their districts in the midterm election next year, and that fear has been intensifying in recent weeks.

Between a tough vote on a climate change bill that many don’t expect to become law and a leftward push on healthcare legislation, Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) critics within her caucus say she’s left the so-called “majority makers” exposed.

“She keeps trying to push an unpopular package,” said Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), a centrist Blue Dog Democrat, referring to healthcare. “I think it’s fair to say they were better at it before.” (The Hill)

WASHINGTON — Although President Barack Obama confidently assured world leaders last week that the U.S. was determined to combat global climate change, that resolve isn't shared in the U.S. Senate.

The chamber has instead been consumed by other domestic priorities — including the administration-backed push to overhaul health care — and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., is months behind her original timetable for introducing legislation that would cap greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

With all of the obstacles, it is increasingly likely the Obama administration will not have a new climate change law — or even a preliminary version passed by the Senate — to bring to international negotiations on a global warming pact this December in Copenhagen.

“I don't think there's any chance you can have a complete bill passed by the Senate and the House and signed by the president in time for him to head to Copenhagen with the bill in his coat pocket,” lamented Jim DiPeso, an environmentalist who backs the effort.

Even the odds of Senate passage are 50-50, DiPeso said, adding: “It's chancy that the Senate will pass a bill this year.”

Boxer and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., are set to introduce a climate change bill Wednesday, after months of delays and negotiations aimed at appeasing moderate Democrats worried that new emissions caps could impose hefty economic costs on the energy industry, struggling manufacturers and coal mining.

Boxer and Kerry are modeling their bill after a broad measure that passed the House in June and aim to get the legislation approved by the Environment and Public Works Committee by the end of October. (Houston Chronicle)

One of the few surprises to come out of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh this week was the sudden emphasis in the group statement on ending "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies." At first glance, this doesn't appear to be a big deal. I mean, who would be for inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, other than the oil and gas industry?

Well, it depends on how you define, "inefficient." A useful guide to what's being talked about here is a recent report from the Environmental Law Institute, which concludes that the U.S. has spent approximately $72 billion on fossil fuel subsidies over the last eight years. The bulk of that — $54 billion — consists of various tax breaks. The rest is direct spending on programs that liberals like, such as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program ($6 billion), and programs that the government is unlikely ever to get rid of (even though it should), such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (another $6 billion). The study also counts funds spent on carbon-capture research ($2 billion) as a subsidy to Big Coal, even though the Democrats' climate-change bill would vastly increase those expenditures.

So when Obama pledges to end inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, he's not talking about the spending; he's talking about the tax breaks. There are two points to make here: First, getting rid of all the tax breaks listed in the ELI report would constitute a huge tax increase on oil and gas consumers — that's you — thus violating Obama's campaign pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000. Obama would counter that by saying that scrapping the breaks would only raise taxes on oil and gas companies, not consumers. This would be an evasion: Corporations are tax collectors, not taxpayers. The corporate income tax is paid by the customers, employees and shareholders of corporations. (Stephen Spruiell, NRO)

World leaders who met on Tuesday at the United Nations to discuss climate change were challenged by 10 year records showing no climate change. This makes enactment of a Climate Treaty tedious. Skeptics use the 10 year temperature plateau as evidence that global warming is a chimera. Scientists say the climate stability results from cyclical variations in ocean conditions and is unrelated to the effect of greenhouse gases. Next decade may be even cooler. The public does not care. (Michael Lynch, GLG)

In spite of the fact that President Obama is facing an uphill battle - in his own party - on domestic climate change legislation; and, with China taking every opportunity to hide behind their "developing" status, both the US and China used the UN General Assembly to ramp up rhetoric on climate change. To misquote the Bard, "methinks they doth protest too much."

With every new splashy promise made, the December climate change conference in Copenhagen is threatening to become little more than a public relations event with little real concerted action. More climate talks are on the agenda for the G20 in Pittsburgh, but Obama and his team should avoid making the push for global leadership on climate change into a new breed of arms race because its a battle that the US cannot win. (Joe Walsh, CleanTechies)

BRUSSELS - France, Italy and several other European Union countries weighed their chances of haggling up their EU carbon emissions quotas on Thursday, one day after Poland and Estonia successfully challenged theirs in court.

The two east European countries won their appeal on Wednesday for more generous caps on industrial emissions in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the EU's main tool for ratcheting down gases blamed for climate change.

The ruling by the European Court of First Instance, the bloc's second highest court, threw European carbon markets into uncertainty and the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) asked countries to refrain from challenging their own quotas.

European carbon markets closed 4 percent lower, leading to a two-day fall of nearly 9 percent.

"We call on all member states to hold back from attempting to make use of a loophole that simply has to be closed for the carbon market, and European climate policy, to continue on a sound footing," IETA said in a statement. (Reuters)

Extreme humidity and high temperatures are awaiting almost 3,000 senior officials and climate negotiators from 192 countries during the 12-day long climate change talks that start in Bangkok on Monday. However, it is not only warm weather.

Heated debates between industrialized and developing countries over greenhouse gas emission cuts are expected to dominate the climate change talks, says Thailand’s Natural Resources and Environment Minister Suwit Khunkitti, according to the Bangkok Post. (CoP15)

BANGKOK, Sept 28 - Delegates from about 190 nations meet in the Thai capital from Monday to try to refine a draft text of the world's most comprehensive pact to fight climate change, with time running out to try to seal a deal.

The Sept. 28 to Oct. 9 U.N. gathering is the last major negotiating session before environment ministers from around the globe meet in Copenhagen in December to produce a broader, tougher, agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

The United Nations says the negotiations are far too slow, with many major issues still to be resolved by year's end. (Reuters)

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act, which if it becomes law would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action. (Paul Krugman, NYT)

In the debate over health care reform, advocates of expanded government health insurance suggest we can pay for this by making Medicare and Medicaid more efficient.

In Paul Krugman’s most recent column, he makes a similar claim about reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

Both claims of a “free lunch” are heroic, at best.

In the case of health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid are inefficient, but to make them more efficient we have to reduce government subsidy for health insurance, not expand it.

In the case of energy efficiency, more energy-efficient practices exist (e.g., replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs), but they are expensive: if they actually made consumers richer, most would be using them already.

Now the fact that expanded government health insurance and increased energy efficiency would cost more, not less, does not prove they are bad ideas (that’s a separate discussion). But it means society must evaluate a tradeoff, not just assert we can have something for nothing.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z (Jeffrey A. Miron, Cato at liberty)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Despite industry objections and threats of lawsuits, California air regulators on Friday approved the nation's first statewide carbon fee on utilities, oil refineries and other polluting industries.

The money raised by the California Air Resources Board, which voted 9-0, is intended to pay for the bureaucratic expenses of carrying out the state's 2006 global warming law, which requires greenhouse gas emissions statewide to be reduced by 25 percent over the next decade.

"It's never pleasant to be in the position of asking consumers to pay," chairwoman Mary Nichols said at the board's meeting in the Southern California city of Diamond Bar. "While we asking for investments here, these are investments being made as our economy begins to come back from the worst recession since the Great Depression." (Associated Press)

Analysts warn Hatoyama after success debut - Japan’s new prime minister will soon have to face the political consequences of his pledge to reduce Japanese greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent.

After a debut week packed with international meetings, Japan's new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama is winning applause from world leaders for his ambitious target on climate change.

But analysts warn that the honeymoon of Yukio Hatoyama's government may not last long as he must soon live up to the political consequences of his promises, AFP reports.

"Hatoyama made an ideal debut as the 25 percent reduction has a great impact," said Tetsuro Kato, a professor of politics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

"But at the same time the pledge, now turning out to be an international one, is weighing heavily on his shoulders."

Some business leaders have warned the 25 percent reduction may force ailing manufacturers to flee overseas and estimated the burden at 4,000 dollars (360,000 yen) per Japanese individual each year.

"I know some industries are saying it's impossible, but I believe we can make it by fully making use of our science and technology," Hatoyama said. "I believe in the Japanese people. I'm confident." (CoP15)

LONDON, Sept 28 - Global temperatures may be 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the mid-2050s if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, said a study published on Monday.

The study, by Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre, echoed a U.N. report last week which found that climate changes were outpacing worst-case scenarios forecast in 2007 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Our results are showing similar patterns (to the IPCC) but also show the possibility that more extreme changes can happen," said Debbie Hemming, co-author of the research published at the start of a climate change conference at Oxford University. (Reuters)

An average global temperature rise of 7.2F (4C), considered a dangerous tipping point, could happen by 2060, causing droughts around the world, sea level rises and the collapse of important ecosystems, it warns.

The Arctic could see an increase in temperatures of 28.8F (16C), while parts of sub Saharan Africa and North America would be devastated by an increase in temperature of up to 18F (10C). (Daily Telegraph)

PARIS — Politicians rarely admit when they sink to new depths but for the Maldives government, it's a badge of honour when fighting global warming is concerned.

President Mohamed Nasheed is to host an underwater cabinet meeting on October 24 to draw attention to the impact of climate change on the Indian Ocean archipelago, his office told AFP on Friday.

"The purpose of the underwater cabinet meeting is to show commitment from the highest political level to the 350.org Global Day of Climate Action," it quoted Deputy Undersecretary Aminath Shauna as saying.

350.org is a grassroots group campaigning for present levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) to be reduced to 350 parts per million (ppm) to restore Earth's atmosphere to safe levels.

Clad in scuba gear and communicating by whiteboards and hand signals, the 14 cabinet members will approve a statement "from Maldivian citizens" that will be presented at the December 7-18 UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

"We call upon all citizens from all countries, big and small, rich and poor, high and low, to join hands and reduce carbon emissions and bring down the level of carbon in the atmosphere to below 350 ppm," the statement will read.

350.org's founder, Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who wrote "The End of Nature," said some ministers were diving neophytes and would undergo scuba training to attend the motion-in-the-ocean meeting. (AFP)

The worldwide building sector accounts for almost 40 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, but it is also the cheapest source of emissions cuts. Improving energy efficiency can cut one third of global emissions with investments that largely pay for themselves, a new study says.

An economic analysis by Trevor Houser, visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economic, estimates that reducing building sector emissions in line with global goals would cost an average of 25 US dollars per ton of CO2.

Trying to squeeze the same cuts out of industry or transportation would cost 210 or 300 US dollars per ton, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) reports. (CoP15)

Craig Sams made his fortune – and changed our eating habits – with Green & Black's chocolate. Now he has his sights set on saving the Earth... using soil. Rhiannon Harries meets the eco entrepreneur at his kiln to find out how (The Independent)

With the news that climate change is occurring at a faster rate than climate models have predicted, geoengineering solutions have been brought to the fore and are being taken more seriously. The main focus of these emergency geoengineering strategies is a reduction in “shortwave” radiation entering the Earth’s atmosphere via the solar wind. (Michael Ricciardi, Ecoworldly)

President Obama, speaking to the United Nations this week, cast climate change unequivocally as a threat to national security. He told the General Assembly, "Our efforts to end conflicts will be eclipsed by wars over refugees and resources. Development will be devastated by drought and famine." The President echoed the sentiments of hawkish-sounding lobby groups, such as the Partnership for a Secure America and the American Security Project, that are promoting cap-and-trade “energy legislation” as vital for national security. Catastrophic climate change, they claim, could become a “threat multiplier” as droughts, pestilences, floods, and famines purportedly caused by global warming spark and exacerbate conflicts overseas.

Behind this movement is an unlikely alliance of national security hawks hoping to boost their budget while reducing American dependence on foreign oil and greens looking to enhance their credibility with centrists and conservatives.

The Pentagon’s tendency toward mission creep could make this a formidable coalition. The Department of Defense now has a financial incentive to incorporate climate change into its risk assessments, in order to secure increasing appropriations from a Democratic Congress and administration committed to fighting global warming. It is all part of the dynamic which the great British Prime Minister the Marquess of Salisbury summed up so well: "If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe."

The “national security” imperative for this policy rests on flawed or non-existing scientific evidence, and prescribes a cure that would be worse than the disease. (Iain Murray and Roger Abbott, Washington Examiner)

Framing global warming as an emergency is not effective in mobilising governments or citizens, as happened with the anti-nuclear movement. It may even have the opposite effect.

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of the world’s leading climate scientists, human-induced climate change presents a serious and growing danger to human societies. Inertia in the climate system means that much of the warming and associated impacts of past and current greenhouse-gas emissions are yet to be experienced. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the US space agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), has argued that business-as-usual would bring about the collapse of major ice sheets, with several metres of sea-level rise this century alone. Continued emissions and further warming could also trigger natural ‘positive feedback’ mechanisms in the climate system – when the ramifications of climate change leads to further change. The warming effect could thus be exaggerated and sustained even after human greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced.

Recently, some scientists have argued that positive feedbacks may begin at lower levels of warming than previously anticipated. Indeed, melting of the arctic ice cap is already creating a positive feedback by reducing the Earth’s albedo, or the amount of sunlight that is able to reflect. This in turn is beginning to melt the permafrost, with its own positive feedback of releasing previously frozen greenhouse gases. Given that most global emissions arise from economic activity underpinned by long-lived capital investments in fossil-fuel energy systems, delays in restructuring current global energy systems to low or zero-emissions technology could have profound consequences in the longer term. Yet little structural change is apparent in governments and bureaucracies. For example, energy and industry departments are still approving new coal mines and coal-fired power stations in countries such as the Australia, Britain, China and the US.

Some climate campaigners argue that the lack of action on climate change means governments and the public do not fully understand the urgency of the situation. Framing climate change as an emergency is one way to draw attention to the dire nature of the problem. But are there disadvantages to the emergency approach? How effective is it in terms of actively engaging people in changing their behaviour over the long term, and bringing sustained pressure to bear on governments to change their policies? (Patrick Hodder and Brian Martin, Himal)

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) may be grappling with health care, but in Montana a new advocacy group opposed to climate legislation called C02 Is Green is taking aim at the next big battle for Congress.

The group is already running television ads: "This will cost us jobs," one says. "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems." It urges voters to contact Baucus, who in the past has backed bills to cap emissions and allow companies to trade pollution allowances.

The man behind the latest entry to the climate legislation wars is H. Leighton Steward, a veteran oil industry executive, co-author of the "Sugar Busters!" dieting books, and winner of an Environmental Protection Agency award for a report on damage being done to Mississippi wetlands. Now retired, he says he wants to "get the message out there" that carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled a pollutant and which most scientists regard as a dangerous greenhouse gas, "is a net benefit for the planet." (Washington Post)

Lawrence Solomon: Hot and cold - If a new Little Ice Age soon sets in, as many scientists believe, Arctic shipping will not happen in our lifetimes.

The Arctic ice “is melting far faster than had been previously supposed,” we heard this week from the UN’s Environment Program, in releasing its 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium.

This same week, National Geographic reported that the Arctic ice is probably melting far slower than previously supposed. After ramping up the rhetoric — two years ago National Geographic told us that “the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions,” and last year that “Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer” — National Geographic now advises that “the Arctic probably won’t experience ice-free summers until 2030 or 2040.”

If you’re confused by stats on Arctic melting, you have lots of company. Arctic stats are easy to misunderstand because the Arctic environment is unlike our own — the Arctic magnifies the changes we experience in the temperate regions. In summer, our days get longer and theirs get really, really long, just as in winter, when our days gets shorter, theirs all but disappear. By analogy, the Arctic also magnifies temperature variations, and resulting changes to its physical environment.

In the Arctic, the ice has indeed been contracting, as the global warming doomsayers have been telling us. But it has also been expanding. The riddle of how the Arctic ice can both be contracting and expanding is easily explained. After you read the next two paragraphs, you’ll be able to describe it easily to your friends to set them straight. (Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post)

OSLO - Dismayed by ice and storms, British explorer Captain James Cook had no regrets when he abandoned a voyage searching for a fabled southern continent in 1773.

Finding only icebergs after he was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, he wrote ruefully that if anyone ventured further and found a "land doomed by nature...to lie for ever buried under everlasting ice and snow":

"I shall not envy him the honor of discovery, but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it."

Things may be worse than he thought.

Climate change is turning Antarctica's ice into one of the biggest risks for coming centuries. Even a tiny melt could drive up sea levels, affecting cities from New York to Beijing, or nations from Bangladesh to the Cook Islands -- named after the mariner -- in the Pacific.

Scientists are now trying to design ever more high tech experiments -- with satellite radars, lasers, robot submarines, or even deep drilling through perhaps 3 kilometers of ice -- to plug huge gaps in understanding the risks.

"If you're going to have even a few metres it will change the geography of the planet," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said of the more extreme scenarios of fast ocean rise.

"Greenland and Antarctica are two huge bodies of ice sitting on land that could really have very serious implications for the levels of the seas," Pachauri told Reuters.

Eventually discovered in 1820, Antarctica locks up enough water to raise sea levels by 57 metres (187 ft). Greenland stores the equivalent of 7 metres.

Worries about sea level rise are among the drivers of 190-nation talks on a new U.N. deal to combat climate change, mainly by a shift away from fossil fuels, due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. (Reuters)

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades". (The Australian)

The United Nations is pulling out the “big guns” in an attempt to create a climate of urgency about climate change so that the meeting of over one hundred world leaders in Copenhagen some 75 days from now can produce an agreement to replace to failed Kyoto accord.

Nature, however, is not co-operating. (Stephen Murgatroyd, Troy Media Corporation)

What follows is a small sampling of quotations from the much larger U.S. Senate Minority Report by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It quotes various experts regarding the claims by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about human caused global warming.

Many scientists quoted – but not all – volunteered their statements for the Minority Report and consider themselves climate skeptics. Some are among the 2,500 UN scientist reviewers of the IPCC Reports who the UN claims support IPCC conclusions. The statements by the UN scientists below prove there is not a consensus, even at the UN, on the IPCC conclusion that “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” In truth, the chapter of the IPCC Report making that conclusion was reviewed by only 62 scientists.

Major media sources continue to parrot the assertion that, except for a few fringe scientists, a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Here, the UN IPCC scientists and others speak for themselves. I invite you to make your own judgment as to their qualifications and whether their views should be considered or their voices even heard. - Senator Orrin G. Hatch (SPPI)

Jeremy Clarkson has claimed that people are "bored" of hearing about climate change and would rather watch Top Gear than worry about the environment.

The outspoken television presenter, who was targeted by environmental campaigners last week, said people should be able to enjoy sunny days without feeling guilty about global warming.

Clarkson, 49, made the claims at the launch of Top Gear's Live World Tour, which will include flaming rally cars, underground street racing and stunt driving led by The Stig.

Speaking at London's Royal Geographical Society on Friday, Clarkson said he was not concerned what people might make of the environmental effects of his long-haul flights to complete the tour.

He said: "Every time they put a climate change programme on, 42 people will watch that, eight million or seven million will watch Top Gear.

"I think people are rather bored with the idea of climate change and, when we do get a lovely day, let's just enjoy it, not get guilty." (Daily Telegraph)

Has climate change been around as long as the pyramids?

It is an odd-sounding idea, because the problem is usually assumed to be a modern one, the product of a world created by the Industrial Revolution and powered by high-polluting fossil fuels.

But a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia has suggested that people began altering the climate thousands of years ago, as primitive farmers burned forests and built methane-bubbling rice paddies. The practices produced enough greenhouse gases, he says, to warm the world by a degree or more.

Other scientists, however, have said the idea is deeply flawed and might be used to dampen modern alarms over climate change.

Understanding the debate requires a tour through polar ice sheets, the inner workings of the carbon molecule, the farming habits of 5,000-year-old Europeans and trapped air bubbles more ancient than Rome.

"The greenhouse gases went up, and they should have gone down" many thousands of years ago, said U-Va.'s William Ruddiman. "Why did that happen?"

His answer is based on circumstantial evidence. Ruddiman said two events in world history -- an apparent shift in the composition of the atmosphere and the first explosion of human agriculture -- took place at nearly the same time.

"Greenhouse gases do something they never did before," Ruddiman said. "And humans do something the Earth [had] never seen before."

Ruddiman first presented his idea of ancient climate change in 2003. But he returned to the subject last month, in a paper intended to rebut one major criticism -- that there were not enough people on the planet thousands of years ago for their emissions to make a difference.

Ruddiman's response: yes, there were. And in those days, one farmer was as destructive as multiple farmers are today. (Washington Post)

Our ABC: mired in a moral morass

A broadcaster is in trouble when it, rather than the news that it carries, becomes the story. And thus it now often is with the ABC.

Why are today’s media directors and reporters so incapable of making accurate critical judgements on environmental issues? (Bob Carter, Quadrant)

UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 on page 5 uses the following graph from Wikipedia (not the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report):

CO2 concentration and mean global temperature during the past millennium. CO2 levels (blue line, lefthand axis) are given in parts per million, temperatures (red line, right-hand axis) in degrees Celsius. Source: Hanno 2009 Page 5

Hanno is the pseudonym for a Wikipedia contributor. The graphic itself compares CO2 levels from Mauna Loa and Law Dome ice core to a splice of the HadCRU temperature index and the Jones and Mann 2004 reconstruction (dominated by Graybill bristlecone chronology).]

The latter splice is, of course, the splice that Mann has informed us is never done by responsible climate scientists, further informing us that the allegation that such splices are done is disinformation by fossil fuel companies.

As I work on finishing our forcing/feedback paper for re-submission to Journal of Geophysical Research – a process that has been going on for months now – I keep finding new pieces of evidence in the data that keep changing the paper’s focus in small ways.

For instance, yesterday I realized that NASA Langley has recently updated their CERES global radiative budget measurement dataset through 2008 (it had previously ran from March 2000 through August 2007).

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this update because of the major global cooling event we saw during late 2007 and early 2008. A plot of daily running 91-day global averages in UAH lower tropospheric (LT) temperature anomalies is shown below, which reveals the dramatic 2007-08 cool event.

I was especially interested to see if this was caused by a natural increase in low clouds reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the climate system. As readers of my blog know, I believe that most climate change – including “global warming” – in the last 100 years or more has been caused by natural changes in low cloud cover, which in turn have been caused by natural, chaotic fluctuations in global circulation patterns in the atmosphere-ocean system. The leading candidate for this, in my opinion, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation…possibly augmented by more frequent El Nino activity in the last 30 years.

Now that we have 9 years of CERES data from the Terra satellite, we can more closely examine a possible low cloud connection to climate change. The next figure shows the changes in the Earth’s net radiative balance as measured by the Terra CERES system. By “net” I mean the sum of reflected shortwave energy (sunlight), or “SW”, and emitted longwave energy (infrared) or “LW”.

The changes in the radiative balance of the Earth seen above can be thought of conceptually in terms of forcing and feedback, which are combined together in some unknown proportion that varies over time. Making the interpretation even more uncertain is that some proportion of the feedback is due not only to radiative forcing, but also to non-radiative forcing of temperature change.

So the variations we see in the above chart is the combined result of three processes: (1) radiative forcing (both internal and external), which can be expected to cause a temperature change; (2) radiative feedback upon any radiatively forced temperature changes; and (3) radiative feedback upon any NON-radiatively forced temperature changes (e.g., from tropical intraseasonal oscillations in rainfall). It turns out that feedback can only be uniquely measured in response to NON-radiatively forced temperature changes, but that’s a different discussion.

The SW component of the total flux measured by CERES looks like this…note the large spike upward in reflected sunlight coinciding with the late 2007 cooling:

And here’s the LW (infrared) component…note the very low emission late in 2007, a portion of which must be from the colder atmosphere emitting less infrared radiation.

As I discuss at length in the paper I am preparing, the physical interpretation of which of these 3 processes is dominant is helped by drawing a phase space diagram of the Net (LW+SW) radiative flux anomalies versus temperature anomalies (now shown as monthly running 3-month averages), which shows that the 2007-08 cooling event has a classic radiative forcing signature:

The spiral (or loop) pattern is the result of the fact that the temperature response of the ocean lags the forcing. This is in contrast to feedback, a process for which there is no time lag. The dashed line represents the feedback I believe to be operating in the climate system on these interannual (year-to-year) time scales, around 6 W m^-2 K^-1 as we published in 2007…and as Lindzen and Choi (2009) recently published from the older Earth Radiation Budget Satellite data.

The ability to separate forcing from feedback is crucial in the global warming debate. While this signature of internal radiative forcing of the 2007-08 event is clear, it is not possible to determine the feedback in response to that temperature change – it’s signature is overwhelmed by the radiative forcing.

Since the fluctuations in Net (LW+SW) radiative flux are a combination of forcing and feedback, we can use the tropospheric temperature variations to remove an estimate of the feedback component in order to isolate the forcing. [While experts will questions this step, it is entirely consistent with the procedures of Forster and Gregory (2006 J. Climate) and Forster and Taylor (2006 J. of Climate), who subtracted known radiative forcings from the total flux to isolate the feedback].

The method is simple: The forcing equals the Net flux minus the feedback parameter (6 W m^-2 K^-1) times the LT temperature variations shown in the first figure above. The result looks like this:

What we see are 3 major peaks in radiant energy loss forcing the system: in 2000, 2004, and late 2007. If you look at the features in the separate SW and LW plots above, it is obvious the main signature is in the SW…probably due to natural increases in cloud cover, mostly low clouds, causing internal radiative forcing of the system

If we instead assume a much smaller feedback parameter, say in the mid-range of what the IPCC models exhibit, 1.5 W m^-2 K^-1, then the estimate of the radiative forcing looks like this:

Note the trend lines in either case show a net increase of at least 1 W m^-2 in the radiant energy entering the climate system. The anthropogenic greenhouse gas component of this would be (I believe) about 0.4 W m^-2, or a little less that half. I’ll update this if someone gives me a better estimate.

So, what might all of this mean in the climate debate? First, nature can cause some pretty substantial forcings…what if these occur on the time scales associated with global warming (decades to centuries)?

But what is really curious is that the 9-year change in radiative forcing (warming influence) of the system seen in the last two figures is at least TWICE that expected from the carbon dioxide component alone, and yet essentially no warming has occurred over that period (see first illustration above). How could this be, if the climate system is as sensitive as the IPCC claims it to be? (Roy W. Spencer)

or “On The Surface Of The Moon, a Four-billion-year Record of Solar Activity Awaits Us”

Actually, there is another source of information for the history of solar activity, and it could open possibilities of discovery and understanding of an almost unheard-of scale.

One doesn’t need to be a hardcore skeptic or AGW believer to understand the enormous worth of getting such information, awaiting us at a distance that can be covered in a mere 3 days. (OmniClimate)

Using satellite infrared spectroscopy to provide an almost global perspective on the near-surface distribution of water vapor, a new report in Science has identified more water vapor inaccuracies in current general circulation models (GCM), the computer programs used by climate scientists to predict future climate trends. The researchers uncovered anomalies in the Hadley circulation and its misrepresentation in GCM. Looks like climate theory and the IPCC's error ridden models are in for another round of corrections.

Following hot on the heals of my last column that reviewed a study on water vapor latent heat transfer and climate modeling modeling (see “Climate Models Blown Away By Water Vapor”), a new report has identified even more places where current climate models get atmospheric circulation and the hydrological cycle wrong. Christian Frankenberg of the SRON-Netherlands Institute for Space Research, et al., in a paper entitled “Dynamic Processes Governing Lower-Tropospheric HDO/H₂O Ratios as Observed from Space and Ground,” used a previously overlooked technique to obtain global information with high sensitivity near ground level. This part of the lower troposphere, the bottom 1-2 km of the atmosphere, has previously been missed because earlier satellites used thermal infrared frequencies lacking sensitivity in that area. At the start of the report the authors explain the motivation for their work:

Evaporation, precipitation and atmospheric circulation are all part of the hydrological or water cycle that constantly recirculates water throughout the biosphere. People have kept rainfall records on land for centuries, but there are many isolated regions and vast expanses of ocean for which no records are available. Isotope measurements of water vapor can give important information regarding precipitation and evaporation. Using remote sensing from satellites, proxy readings from even Earth's remotest regions can be gathered. Atmospheric applications have traditionally focus on isotopes as a proxy for exchange processes in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere and few models incorporated any water vapor components for other factors. The results of this report, which extends observations to the lower atmosphere, will hopefully allow current models to be corrected.

The trick here is that part of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere has, as one of its molecule's two hydrogen atoms, an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium or D. Such isotropic water molecules are referred to as Hydrogen Deuterium Oxide, or HDO for short. Owing to the large spectral displacement of the rotational and vibrational modes of HDO, it has spectroscopic absorption lines distinctly different from those of H₂O. This allows simultaneous measurements of the relative abundance of HDO and normal H₂O by the SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography) instrument aboard the European Space Agency (ESA)’s environmental research satellite ENVISAT.

For the first time a global picture of near surface HDO/H₂O levels can be constructed. The HDO abundance relative to standard mean ocean water (SMOW) in delta-notation (δD) is shown below. Figure 1A from the Sciencereport shows the global δD distribution as derived from 3 years of SCIAMACHY spectra. From these data, the isotopic fractionation of water provides deeper insight into the global hydrological cycle as evaporation and condensation processes deplete heavy water in the gas phase.

Over the large ocean basins, where few surface stations are located, the high δD values typical for the tropics extend farther north than over land. This is most striking in the north Atlantic, where zonal symmetry is broken and δD iso-lines point northeast (see the arrow). This feature can be attributed to the warm Gulf Stream and strong evaporation, associated with storm tracks efficiently transporting vapor northeastward.

Strong continental gradients were observed in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Eurasia. The smaller gradient in Eurasia can be explained by the relatively efficient transport of Atlantic water vapor into the continent. In North America, by comparison, the Rocky Mountains and their associated precipitation obstruct the propagation of oceanic moisture further inland.

Some of the most interesting data are from comparisons of direct measurements with model results for several northern locations. The researchers suggest that the contrast of sea surface temperature against air temperature in the lower troposphere results in maximum ocean evaporation and more local moisture origin of precipitation in winter. Particularly at Ny Ålesund, in the Norwegian high arctic (78.9°N 11.9°E), where the monthly predictions of the IsoGSM model underestimate the amplitude of seasonal change. Quoting from the report:

The researchers also observed an unexpectedly high seasonal change in the HDO/H₂O ratio in the inner Sahel region of Africa. Such seasonal δD variations provide important insights into dynamic changes in evaporation, precipitation, and general atmospheric circulation. Conditions similar to the “continental effect” appear in tropical regions such as the Amazon basin or central Africa, where continental water vapor is least depleted.

In addition to comparing measured results with the IsoGSM model other models were run. These included ECHAM-4 and GISS-E, a favorite of the IPCC. In simulations of the Sahara region, the GISS-E model captured the large isotopic seasonal changes well but was too moist during the Northern Hemisphere summer. ECHAM-4 also missed the mark on summer moisture content. This can be seen in Figure S12, taken from the report's online supplement.

So to sum up, here is yet another scientific report identifying the shortcomings of current GCM programs. In this case better empirical data has shown things in the lowest parts of the atmosphere to not behave as the models describe. Evaporation rates are higher up north and precipitation predictions inaccurate in many regions. These are not minor factors, the report's authors termed them “critical” to correctly modeling the atmosphere and hydrological cycle.

Tie these findings to the new revelations regarding latent heat, insolation effects and aerosols and you have to ask why mainstream climate science has bet its reputation on climate modeling. The siren call of easy grant money and media acclaim has lured many otherwise sensible scientists onto the rocks of politically motivated consensus science. They have forgotten that science demands they adhere to the truth as dictated by nature, and nature cannot be negotiated with or ignored. We can expect the clamor from global warming true believers to rise during the run-up to Copenhagen, the last shrill outcries defending a discredited theory.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

“Prior numerical modelling studies show that atmospheric dispersion is sensitive to surface heterogeneities, but past studies do not consider the impact of a realistic distribution of surface heterogeneities on mesoscale atmospheric dispersion. While these focussed on dispersion in the convective boundary layer, the present work also considers dispersion in the nocturnal boundary layer and above. Using a Lagrangian particle dispersion model (LPDM) coupled to the Eulerian Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), the impact of topographic, vegetation, and soil moisture heterogeneities on daytime and nighttime atmospheric dispersion is examined. In addition, the sensitivity to the use of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived spatial distributions of vegetation characteristics on atmospheric dispersion is also studied. The impact of vegetation and terrain heterogeneities on atmospheric dispersion is strongly modulated by soil moisture, with the nature of dispersion switching from non-Gaussian to near-Gaussian behaviour for wetter soils (fraction of saturation soil moisture content exceeding 40%). For drier soil moisture conditions, vegetation heterogeneity produces differential heating and the formation of mesoscale circulation patterns that are primarily responsible for non-Gaussian dispersion patterns. Nighttime dispersion is very sensitive to topographic, vegetation, soil moisture, and soil type heterogeneity and is distinctly non-Gaussian for heterogeneous land-surface conditions. Sensitivity studies show that soil type and vegetation heterogeneities have the most dramatic impact on atmospheric dispersion. To provide more skilful dispersion calculations, we recommend the utilisation of satellite-derived vegetation characteristics coupled with data assimilation techniques that constrain soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) models to generate realistic spatial distributions of surface energy fluxes.”

In terms of climate, this paper is another example of the major role of landscape heterogeneity in local and regional climate patterns. (Climate Science)

The Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules Thursday allowing California's biggest timber firms to cash in on the fight against global warming even as they clear-cut parts of their forests.

Forest owners stand to reap tens of millions of dollars in the coming decades by selling the capacity of their woods to cleanse the air of carbon dioxide, offsetting greenhouse gases belched by industrial polluters.

But the administration's successful effort to allow loggers to sell their carbon credits to industry while also clear-cutting their lands sparked intense opposition from several conservation groups. ( Eric Bailey, LA Times)

President Obama has embarked upon a costly and potentially dangerous energy path that may threaten our quality of life, our place in the world, and even our economic and national security.

As a result, the energy most Americans depend upon will become more foreign, more expensive, and more scarce, and the U.S. may find its national security interests compromised in order to secure the supplies necessary to run our economy.

The singular tragedy of this looming threat is that it is based upon the false but oft-repeated premise that the U.S. and North America is running out of energy while the government’s own documents and the energy industry’s experience has shown that it is not.

Under Obama and President George W. Bush before him, the main impediment to reducing foreign imports of oil has been the government itself, and flawed intelligence.

Obama’s intelligence about energy resources is flawed because it has come mostly in sound bites from the very groups most opposed to more domestic energy development. These are the groups who condemned Bush for a mad rush to drill at any cost during his eight years.

Their false claims about reckless leasing and drilling for oil and gas on government lands and waters have convinced Obama to slow down or in some cases, stop domestic energy leasing.

But here are the facts regarding leasing, courtesy of the Congressional Research Service: The administration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore offered more lands for lease than the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In fact, on western government lands, the Clinton Administration offered 50% more acreage for leasing than the Bush Administration.(46 million acres Clinton/Gore; 31 million Bush/Cheney. (Daniel Kish, Washington Examiner)

There has never been a more global, more integrated, more transparent market than the modern crude oil and oil products market. And yet, the calls for America to be “energy independent” continue to be heard from both the Right and the Left.

The most persistent of the advocates for “energy independence” are the neoconservatives affiliated with Set America Free, a Washington-based group that has been touting the mirage of independence since 2004. And the highest-profile member of that group is former CIA director James Woolsey. Woolsey and his allies at Set America Free have written several articles, and have even recently published a book, claiming that the US should take the lead by, as they put it, “turning oil into salt.” Their claim: oil’s importance as a strategic commodity will end if only the US would get more aggressive in its use of plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, as well as the use of more “methanol, butanol, and other alternative fuels produced from grasses and even waste.”

While Woolsey and his allies are focusing on turning petroleum into various condiments, a look back at the federal efforts to create alternatives to petroleum shows an unbroken record of failure, i.e., the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and the corn ethanol scam.

Of course, the neoconservatives at Set America Free seldom let the facts get in the way of their demagoguery. Nor have they bothered to pick up a dictionary to examine the word “fungible.” Were they to do so, they might begin to understand the global nature of the oil industry. Alas, the neoconservatives aren’t alone in this regard. Most of the energy talking-heads on TV and elsewhere (T. Boone Pickens, Thomas Friedman, etc.) only talk about US oil imports. Few bother to look at the amount of oil leaving US ports. And fewer still bother to look at just how many trading partners the US has when it comes to oil and oil products. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

A federal judge said Friday he is unlikely to allow a University of Utah student to testify before a jury that he spoiled an oil and gas lease auction to combat the global climate crisis.

But U.S. District Judge Dee Benson said he would allow Tim DeChristopher's lawyers to spell out in advance what they would want a jury to hear if he could mount such a defense.

Given what he sees as a straightforward criminal charge, Benson said he is "reluctant to open my courtroom to a lengthy hearing on global warming."

"I wouldn't hold out hope," he warned, "for an in-court evidentiary hearing."

DeChristopher faces up to 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines under felony charges he organized and participated in a scheme to "defeat" federal law and made a fraudulent statement when he registered as a bidder at the Bureau of Land Management's Dec. 19 lease sale in Salt Lake City. He has freely admitted he disrupted the auction as an act of civil disobedience. If he cannot claim principle in his defense, he is unlikely to prevail. (Salt Lake Tribune)

A New Mexico electric utility will leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the business group's position on climate change.

"We see climate change as the most pressing environmental and economic issue of our time," PNM Resources Inc. spokesman Don Brown said in an e-mail. "Given that view, and a natural limit on both company time and resources, we have decided that we can be most productive by working with organizations that share our view on the need for thoughtful, reasonable climate change legislation and want to push that agenda forward in Congress."

The Albuquerque-based company (NYSE: PNM), which is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, is the second major electric utility this week to say it will not renew its chamber membership next year. Fellow U.S. CAP member PG&E Corp. sent the chamber a letter Tuesday, criticizing the business association for taking an "extreme position" on climate change. (Greenwire)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A rift widened between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some utilities as another major power provider quit over the business group's hard stance on pending climate regulation.

The Public Service Company of New Mexico, the state's largest utility, quit the chamber Friday just days after California's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., said it was leaving because of the chamber's "extreme" positions.

Both sides of the climate change debate are escalating campaigns to sway national and global policy at a critical juncture. (AP)

In December, climate scientists, policy makers and other representatives of 192 nations will convene at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. In advance of that meeting, Science News earth sciences writer Sid Perkins spoke with Richard A. Bradley, head of the Energy Efficiency and Environment Division of the International Energy Agency in Paris. An intergovernmental organization that counts 28 industrialized nations as members, the IEA analyzes and facilitates global energy policy. (Richard Bradley, Science News)

If Alaska's natural gas ever flows to markets in Canada and the Lower 48, the pipeline carrying it must secure the blessing of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

This week, one of FERC's four commissioners is in Alaska for an update on proposals for the estimated $30 billion to $40 billion pipeline.

FERC Commissioner Phil Moeller met Friday in Anchorage with officials with Denali - The Alaska Gas Pipeline (a partnership between BP and Conoco Phillips), and Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. Each is pursuing separate large-diameter pipelines linking the North Slope's vast natural gas reserves with Outside markets.

Pipeline projects will have to earn from FERC what is called a "certificate of public convenience and necessity," which would allow a company to build and operate a line. Moeller doesn't hold back in his assessment that only one of the two projects will ever be built. Yet, both Denali and TransCanada have pre-filed applications for the FERC certificate, and both are undertaking costly and extensive environmental studies.

FERC is charged with evaluating environmental issues, checking off on project plans, and approving tariffs. FERC commissioners will weigh the risks each party - shippers, producers and end customers - are taking against their prospective payouts. In the end, FERC has oversight on how much profit is allowed. (Alaska Dispatch)

We have a regressive tax that takes hundreds of millions of pounds from customers – including the fuel-poor – and redistributes it to major companies that have already received subsidies for generating renewable energy.

Equally, the policy fails to address carbon emissions because a tilted playing field transfers this money to some of the least dependable low-carbon generation while providing no financial support to the most reliable.

Of the two low-carbon forms of power generation, renewables – including the use of wind and solar – receive subsidies and are set to do so until 2037. Nuclear, by contrast, is unsubsidised. Moreover, these subsidies are not paid by the Government, but by all electricity customers through Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs), which are incorporated into their bills.

According to the most recent figures from the industry regulator, Ofgem, there were more than 16m ROCs in the year to March 2008, worth £872m. That is an extra £872m on the bills of every household and business in the UK supplied with electricity – in just one year. Of this, £565m subsidised renewable generation. The remaining £307m related to so-called "buy-out" payments. Suppliers – in reality, their customers – paid this £307m as penalties for failing to meet "renewable obligations". (Daily Telegraph)

HONG KONG — A Chinese threat to halt exports of rare minerals — vital for high-performance electric motors in wind turbines, hybrid cars and missiles — appears to have backfired.

With control of more than 99 percent of the world’s production of these minerals, China could try to use a ban to force other countries to buy the crucial motors for these high-tech end products, instead of just the minerals, directly from China.

But other governments and businesses reacted quickly as word of the proposed ban spread late this summer.

The Chinese threat has touched off a frenzied international effort to develop alternative mines, much as the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo’s repeated increases in oil prices prompted a global hunt for oil reserves.

In Washington, the House and Senate amended their defense budget authorization bills to require the Defense Department to review the military’s almost complete dependence on Chinese supplies of rare-earth minerals. In Australia, the government blocked a Chinese state-owned company on Thursday from acquiring a majority stake in a large mine being developed for these minerals, also called rare earths.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is financing exploration as the share prices of rare-earths mining companies soar — as much as sevenfold since March.

“Because of China’s focus on maximizing the benefits of its rare-earth resources for its own industry, there is now a focus on identifying alternatives elsewhere,” said Dudley J. Kingsnorth, a rare-earths production consultant in Perth, Australia.

Unleashing funding elsewhere has undercut China’s ability to take big stakes easily in new mines.

“You couldn’t borrow 10 cents from anybody in the financial community” to develop a rare-earths mine just three months ago, said James B. Engdahl, the chief executive and president of the Great Western Minerals Group, a rare-earths mining and processing company in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “We get inundated with calls offering financing these days.”

International pressure — including the possibility that the plan violated World Trade Organization rules — has forced the Chinese ministry drafting the ban to call for further review. (NYT)

A dust storm on 25th September 2009 viewed from the office of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Wind farms can reduce bird numbers by up to half, according to a new study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that raises questions about the charity's support of the new technology.

The study, in conjunction with the Scottish Natural Heritage, looked at 12 upland wind farms in the UK during the breeding season for a dozen common species including rare species such as hen harriers and skylarks.

The research, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, found seven species were found less often than would be expected close to the turbines. The breeding population of buzzard, hen harrier, golden plover, snipe, curlew, wheatear and meadow pipit were reduced by up to half within 500m of the turbines. (Daily Telegraph)

WHEN Kevin Rudd returns to Australia to translate the grand rhetoric of the international stage into action on the domestic front, he could start by trying to sort out the mess and the confusion in the country's solar ambitions.

The government is driving the solar industry to the point of exasperation because of the lack of clarity, constant changes, and delays in its policy for supporting large-scale solar development.

The industry has already urged the government to rework its Solar Flagships program, after pointing out that the $1.5 billion scheme unveiled in May was ill-conceived, unworkable and simply wasn't enough to fund the 1000MW target.

That program, proudly unveiled by Rudd, was for four large-scale solar thermal and solar PV installations located in a single project that would be the largest in the world. But as this column pointed out in July, the idea of creating four 250MW projects was strategically suspect, locating them in a single location was technically impossible, and there was simply not enough money to match the megawatts.

Now, while the government considers whether it wants to double its funds or halve its ambitions, an accompanying scheme that was to support smaller but still significant installations in the 10-80MW range is also in doubt. (The Australian)

President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao both were criticized because their climate change speeches last week at the United Nations lacked solid commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

One reason for their reluctance to promise big cuts is that they share a huge climate change challenge. They're trying to figure out how to keep producing electricity from their abundant stores of coal without spewing the massive quantities of greenhouse gases that usually come from burning coal.

In recent weeks, Chinese officials have been visiting some projects in the United States that are experimenting with technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the exhausts of existing coal plants. So far, the costs make these technologies impractical. (NPR)

Despite the recent push for clean energy, coal and its exchange traded funds could still find a home as more nations join the fight to combat global warming.

In fact, coal is the world’s fastest-growing fuel based on consumption. So much so that it leaves crude oil and natural gas in the dust. The demand is on the rise, too: consumption of coal grew by 5.7% over the past five years, compared to 1.4% for oil and 3% for natural gas. This trend is expected to remain in place as populations grow. Global demand for the dark commodity is expected to grow 55% by 2025, states Sham Gad of Investopedia.

There is an abundant supply of coal, enough to last the United States for decades, if not centuries, and it is one of the most inexpensive energy sources around. Lastly, as industrial production improves and the demand for steel increases, the demand for coking coal, the coal used in making steel, is expected to increase, states the Associated Press.

Although coal seems like a winner, there are negative aspects of the energy producing commodity. The biggest disadvantage of coal is the hazardous gases it produces in the atmosphere when it is burned. However, clean technology has come a long way, such as carbon-capture technology, which many hope will mitigate the negative effects of coal. (seekingalpha)

Dithering by the Department of Energy has probably cost Britain the chance to become a world leader in green power station technology, killing off hopes of creating thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of export orders.

Internal rows at the department coupled with fractious negotiations with the Treasury mean that a decision on the winner of a competition to build an environmentally friendly coal-fired plant is running three years late.

The Government is subsidising a £1billion competition between Eon, ScottishPower and RWE. Two finalists will be chosen by Christmas, but they will then be given another year to come up with detailed plans. A final decision is unlikely before 2011.

When the competition was first announced by then Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks, he promised that a winner would be revealed in 2008 and that the 'green' power station would be built between 2011 and 2013. His department boasted that Britain would be a world leader by being the first to build a carbon captured coal-fired power station on a large scale.

But since then at least five other countries - Canada, Germany, Norway, Australia and France --have announced similar competitions or ordered the construction of post carbon capture plants. (Daily Mail)

There is now a special magazine called “Carbon Capture Journal” devoted to carbon capture pipe dreams.

But despite all the hype, there still isn’t any commercial scale power plant (1000 MW) operating anywhere in the world that captures and stores CO₂.

There are gas and oil rigs that pump it back down into reservoirs, there one small 200 MW pilot/demonstration generator in Germany that captures the CO₂ and then trucks the CO₂ halfway across Germany to an injection point (but is it a real commercially viable plant anyway – or just a heavily subsidized exercise in PR?).

All a big fronted farce designed to gather lots of Government funding (our tax money!!)

Geological formations under the North Sea could store more than 100 years' worth of emissions from British power stations, energy officials said.

The process, known as carbon capture and storage, could reduce airborne carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fueled power plants by up to 90 percent, Ed Miliband, Britain's minister for energy and climate change, said.

Without carbon capture and storage, there is no solution to climate change, he said.

The technology, which has yet to be tested on a large scale, could be a massive industry for Britain, replacing what it now takes in from North Sea oil, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.

Miliband's office is to host a meeting of energy and environment ministers in London in October and already has begun identifying potential sites where the technology could be explored.

"We are also working closely with Norway and other North Sea Basin countries to ensure the North Sea fulfills its potential in the deployment of (carbon capture and storage) in Europe," Miliband said. (United Press International)

President Obama's choice to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is an "aggressively anti-business" proponent of junk science who should not be confirmed by the Senate, his critics say. (Joshua Rhett Miller, FOXNews.com)

Modeling how disease spreads shows that the most vulnerable to H1N1 are those who aren’t being urged to get the vaccine.

When the swine flu first hit the news media, it was as a menacing, deadly virus that was just about to getcha! People bought face masks, schools closed, and emergency rooms were inundated with people worried that they were a sneeze and a cough away from dying. The fear was that H1N1 Influenza – as swine flu is formally called – was going to be another Spanish Flu, bequeathing a pandemic similar to that of 1918, which killed more than 50 million people out of an estimated 500 million people infected. With one-in-ten infected people dying from the flu (and one in three people in the world infected), the 1918 flu pandemic was one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in modern history. (Rebecca Goldin, STATS)

FEARS over the side-effects of heart drugs used by four million Britons have sparked a two-year investigation.

Statins have been hailed as a “wonder drug” for reducing cholesterol and preventing tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes.

But experts are becoming worried by the unpleasant reactions that some patients are experiencing.

Scientists at Nottingham University have been given £250,000 to investigate the problem. They want patients over 65 who suffer from muscle aches – a common side-effect – to help them with their work.

Statins are already known to cause tummy upsets, liver problems and muscle pains in some users as well as a rare but serious lung disorder.

Packets warn patients of these side-effects but last year manufacturers were forced to add new cautions, telling patients that statins can sometimes cause memory loss, sexual problems, depression and disturbed sleep.

The research team wants to discover why people are suffering such unpleasant reactions to the drugs and how widespread the problem is.

The side-effects have not deterred the use of statins by the National Health Service.

Later this year, family doctors will be asked to screen everyone over the age of 40 for their risk of cardiovascular disease and prescribe statins to those most at risk – an estimated 1.4 million more Britons. (Express)

Blast form the past: The Great Cholesterol Myth - We all know that a high cholesterol diet is bad for you, right? Wrong, says this medical writer.

If you eat too much cholesterol, or saturated fat, your blood cholesterol will rise to dangerous levels. Excess cholesterol will then seep through your artery walls causing thickenings (plaques), which will eventually block blood flow in vital arteries, resulting in heart attacks and strokes….

Scientific hypotheses don’t get much simpler than this: the cholesterol, or diet-heart, hypothesis, which has broken free from the ivory towers of academia to impact with massive force on society.

It has driven a widespread change in the type of food we are told to eat, and consequently the food that lines the supermarket shelves. Many people view bacon and eggs as a dangerous killer, butter is shunned, and a multi-billion pound industry has sprung up providing ‘healthy’ low-fat alternatives.

At the same time, millions of people are prescribed statins to lower cholesterol levels, and each new set of guidelines suggests that ever-more lowering of cholesterol is needed. When it comes to explaining what causes heart disease, the cholesterol hypothesis reigns supreme.

But as the US editor and critic HL Mencken put it, ‘For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong.’ This is how we might view the diet-heart hypothesis: just because it is dominant does not mean it is right, and just because it looks simple does not mean that it actually is. (Malcolm Kendrick, sp!ked)

NEW YORK - Despite theories to the contrary, adults who eat a lot of meat may not have a heightened risk of the most common type of malignant brain tumor, a new study finds.

The study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at the potential link between brain tumors called gliomas and people's intake of meat and compounds called nitrosamines.

Nitrosamines, which are potentially cancer-promoting, are present in certain foods, or are formed in the body other chemicals we eat called sodium nitrites and nitrates. These compounds are used in preserving and flavoring processed and cured meats -- like hot dogs, bacon, sausage and ham -- which makes those foods major sources of dietary nitrosamines. (Reuters Health)

When Dawn adopted her 7-year-old nephew, Dylan (not their real names), she expected a difficult initial adjustment. The 51-year-old Wisconsin homemaker, who is married to an attorney, has 10 children—8 adopted, 2 biological—and jokes that her occupation is "laundry." She knew that Dylan had been starved and neglected by his cocaine-addicted mother.

But what Dawn didn’t expect was for her nephew to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. "He was climbing the walls," she says. "He couldn't even sit still to eat." At school, he wasn't learning because he was in constant motion.

Dawn suspected that Dylan's main problem wasn't really ADHD. Her pediatrician wanted him evaluated and suggested medication. "It was tempting," she says, but "I had a gut feeling I should wait." Dawn believed that her nephew's inattention and over-activity were linked instead to his disrupted parental relationships and chaotic early experience.

Identifying trauma

Dawn's maternal intuition about the effects of trauma on attention is increasingly backed by science. "The big problem is that people just don't identify trauma in kids," says Claude Chemtob, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Mt. Sinai Medical School in New York City, who recently published a study of children who were attending preschools near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Though we tend to think of traumatic experiences as rare, in fact, by age 16, seven of 10 children have been exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event—such as a natural disaster, severe car accident, child abuse or the loss of close family member—according to a study of a representative sample of more than 1,400 children living in North Carolina published in 2007.

In Chemtob's 9/11 study, even children who saw people jump from the towers tended not to have lasting problems. But preschoolers who had experienced multiple traumatic events were 16 times more likely to have attention problems—and 21 times more likely to be overly emotionally reactive and/or to show symptoms of depression and anxiety—than children who had not had such experiences. (Maia Szalavitz, MSN Health & Fitness)

At least since 1994, when seven tobacco executives testified before Congress that they didn't think cigarettes were addictive, the public has not put great trust in those who sell carcinogens for a living. What Americans may not realize is that they also shouldn't believe the people who are supposed to protect us from tobacco. When it comes to cigarettes, the federal government can blow smoke with the best of them.

That became clear the other day, when the Food and Drug Administration announced it was prohibiting the sale of cigarettes with candy or fruit flavors. "These flavored cigarettes are a gateway for many children and young adults to become regular smokers," said Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. The ban, said Howard Koh, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, "will break that cycle [of addiction] for the more than 3,600 young people who start smoking daily."

Sure it will. And I'm Megan Fox. (Steve Chapman, Townhall)

The momentum for federal taxes on soda is growing. President Barack Obama recently said he thought Congress "should be exploring" the idea of a tax on sugared drinks as a way of tackling the nation's ever-expanding waistline. Thomas Frieden, the president's nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, argued in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine last April that "a penny-per-ounce excise tax could reduce consumption of sugared sodas by more than 10%."

And now, in a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, Kelly Brownell, Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, and a bevy of public health experts, reiterate the litany of studies correlating our increasing girth to our increased appetite for sugared soda. In "The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages," they argue that the government should intervene in the market because people do not appreciate the health consequences of drinking soda and, in particular, that children's thirst for instant gratification prevents them from appreciating the potential long term harm.

A tax on soda, therefore, seems like a no-brainer. "If it costs more, people will drink it less," as Frieden has said. But is it actually that simple? Those who advocate taxing soda as a way to tackle obesity often point to cigarette taxes as a model for success. The relationship between smoking and cancer is linear: If you smoke, you increase your risk of lung cancer by 1,000%; if you smoke two or more packs a day, the risk is even greater--1,500% to 2,500%--and you increase your risk of other cancers too. So, when you impose punitively high taxes on cigarettes, you see both a decline in the number of cigarettes sold and a decline in cancer rates.

The problem is that it's not clear whether there is a similar linear relationship between soda and obesity, or that one can be established without first taxing sugared soda out of existence and then assessing the impact on the nation's waistline. Our consumption of soda may have increased, per capita, by 500% over the last 50 years, according to the Department of Agriculture, but that still only represents 7% of our collective energy intake. (Trevor Butterworth, Forbes)

According to Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s Annual Report, claims in 2008 reached $10.7 Billion — half the entire budget for the state of North Carolina. Claims increased nearly three times the growth in health plan members. Claims also cost the State Health Plan more than $200 million over that budgeted. Politicians had believed that preventive wellness and managed care in the State Health Plan, administered by BCBSNC, would save the state money.

Participants in the State’s Health Plan pay more out-of-pocket expenses for medical care than those in any other major health plan in the state, and that’s about to go up even more for some of them. They believed that wellness care and healthy lifestyle benefits were free.

Employers will now perform random tests of employees for evidence that they’ve smoked outside of work and will weigh employees in the workplace and report their BMIs to the state. Employees deemed noncompliant with the State Health Plan’s employer wellness initiative, will pay one-third-more for health insurance. Employers believed that eliminating smokers and fat people would lower health costs.

Employers, politicians and participants believed the marketing. The results were easily predictable. When decisions work from false beliefs, rather than sound evidence, the end results aren’t likely to be very good. (Junkfood Science)

Australia needs a government-funded nutritional survey to better determine which fatty foods are consumed most and which junk-food items should be taxed, according to anti-obesity campaigners.

Health groups argue that there has been a lack of comprehensive data on the national diet for more than a decade, despite the nation's rising obesity rate.

The Obesity Policy Coalition, which includes VicHealth, Cancer Council Victoria and Diabetes Australia, believes a yearly national survey such as the one recently conducted in Denmark is needed to understand what foods pose the highest risk.

''What we haven't had, since 1995, is an understanding of what adults are eating,'' coalition senior adviser Jane Martin said. (The Age)

NEW YORK - Air conditioning is certainly welcome during hot summers. But could it actually be good for your health?

According to a new study, maybe: People living in communities where more homes have air conditioning are less likely to suffer ill effects of air pollution, new research in the journal Epidemiology suggests.

But because air conditioning can also contribute to pollution by using energy, it's not clear whether it provides a net benefit for health, Dr. Michelle L. Bell of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and her colleagues say. And climate change may mean even more people end up installing air conditioners. (Reuters Health)

Jaycee Dugard's tale will be seared in our memories forever. Unfortunately, so will the ridiculous advice we're getting now on how to avoid this same fate -- advice that makes it seem as if abduction/rape/enslavement is something we just have to be ever-prepared for, like the possibility of overcharges on our credit card bills.

Dugard, as you undoubtedly know, was kidnapped 18 years ago at age 11 and kept imprisoned since then, bearing her rapist/captor two daughters, who also were imprisoned until just recently, when Jaycee walked into a police station.

This is, of course, every parent's -- every human's -- worst nightmare. So naturally, our first instinct is to think, "How can I make absolutely sure this never happens to MY child?" But as Trevor Butterworth, an editor at the think tank STATS, points out: Preparing for very unlikely events is impossible. It's like preparing for the possiblity of being hit by a frozen turkey through the car window while you're driving on the expressway.

Yes, that is something that really happened, at least once. But should you live your life on the constant lookout for flying turkeys? That would be inconvenient, if not insane, because what could you do? Never drive on the expressway again? Avoid all overpasses? Get your car window replaced with lead? Sure, you couldn't see through it, but at least you'd be protected from frozen airborne Butterballs!

One post-Dugard advice article, on a Web site called Associated Content, earnestly suggested that from now on, we simply "never go anywhere alone." That's not asking too much, is it?

Alas, this kind of over-the-top suggestion leads to over-the-top situations, such as parents' getting picked up by the police for letting their 10-year-old walk solo to soccer, for having their 9-year-old wait in the car while they ran inside the pharmacy, etc. These are real stories, brought to us by a society increasingly convinced that any moment a child is left alone easily could be his last. One mom I know was reading a book on her lawn, kids cavorting around her, when a neighbor walking by yelled: "Put down that book! Your children could be snatched at any second!" (Post Chronicle)

The fight for freedom has many fronts, observes Trevor Butterworth of Stats.org, pointing to the work of a libertarian protest group in Britain. Members of the Manifesto Club ("For Freedom in Everyday Life") may not need the same bravery as the protesters in Tehran, to put it mildly, but they have targeted for rollback an inarguable area of creeping government intervention: warning-sign overkill.

As part of a project called Freedom Summer, the Manifesto Club is publicizing its "Attention Please" project. The project began last year with a photo essay by Tom Mower, a young graduate of the of the Royal College of Art, featuring signs warning Brits against, for example, approaching a jagged tree stump in a park, stumbling over a tiny crack in a tiled floor, and walking mindlessly into traffic. ("Caution: Vehicles in Road.")

Commenting on the photo-essay, the University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi wrote: "The photos provide striking illustrations of how risk management has turned into a performance."

The club subsequently asked for more photographic examples from the public, and many of these--ranging from the arguably overcautious to genuine theater-of-the-absurd--can be found on the Web site attention-please.co.uk. Most of the examples are British, but a few Americans chimed in, too. (Boston Globe)

An ongoing split within the HARP experiment at CERN in Geneva has come out into the open – with fierce differences of opinion between rival groups within the collaboration over how to analyse their data. One of the groups accuses the other of research that "violates standards of quality of work and scientific ethics on several counts", and its leader, CERN’s Friedrich Dydak, believes this to be a reflection of a more general decline in scientific standards at the lab. (Physics World)

Progress means different things to different people, particularly when they are not from the same culture. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi famously said that he thought it would be a good idea. More recently, some have questioned the dominance of economic measures of prosperity such as GDP as indicators of progress, suggesting that some measure of overall contentment would be better. And, of course, economic growth is not necessarily a good in itself, but it is by any measure the greatest enabler of all aspects of progress. Money does not necessarily bring happiness, but lack of it is certainly the cause of much misery.

Richer societies have the wherewithal to support their disadvantaged members, to open museums and fund cultural activities, and to build physical and societal infrastructure which benefits everyone. Perhaps most notably is the desire by more prosperous people to protect and enhance their environment. Despite the many concerns regularly raised, air and water quality in Europe have improved enormously in the last half century. After the fall of the Berlin wall, ex-Communist bloc countries could also at last begin to share in these benefits.

But in much of the developing world, including large swathes of Africa and the Indian sub-continent, the situation is very different. Water supplies, even if assured, are often contaminated, large numbers of trees have been felled to provide fuel, and the consequences of cooking over inefficient, smoky wood stoves or fires is a very high level of indoor air pollution and resultant respiratory disease, particularly among women and children. Insecure subsistence farming, coupled with such environmental pollution, malnourishment, lack of educational opportunities (the list could continue) can only be overcome if the necessary resources are available. And resource cost money. (Scientific Alliance)

Q: I was persuaded to sign a petition as part of a successful campaign preventing the building of a local incinerator. Now I’m wondering if I was too hasty: I know that we can’t continue just dumping waste in the ground — is incineration safe?

A: A petition is thrust at you. An incinerator will be harmful to health — think of your children. It will emit a serious pong. It will be unsightly and, the final weapon in the anti-incinerator armoury, having one nearby is sure to bring down the value of your house.

Amid all the emotion and Nimbyism about waste disposal, the facts tend to go up in smoke. Modern incinerators are far more efficient and well-designed than those of only 15 years ago.

According to a recent report by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), air pollution — expressed in volumes of what’s called particulate matter — is a tiny fraction of that caused by the exhaust fumes from cars and lorries.

“The evidence suggests that any potential damage to the health of those living close to incinerators is likely to be very small, if detectable,” the HPA says.

The Germans, Swedes and Danes have been happily incinerating on a big scale for years. The UK at present has 23 incinerators in operation, with another 70-80 planned. Burn it, don’t bury it is the new catchphrase: as you say, we can’t go on shoving our refuse into holes in the ground. Landfill creates large amounts of methane, one of the most potent of greenhouse gases. If we don’t find alternative ways of dealing with waste, the EU will clobber us with ever-bigger fines. (The Times)

On paper, the recycling program was touted as a bold step toward California's green, climate-friendly future.

A mountain of plastic and metal would be diverted from landfills. Greenhouse gas emissions would tumble. And one of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's climate change goals – trimming power use in state buildings by 20 percent – would nudge closer to reality as agencies snapped up new, more efficient office printers.

That is what state and Hewlett-Packard officials said last year when they joined forces to ship used HP printer ink cartridges from state offices to Virginia to be ground up and recycled into auto parts, serving trays, clothes hangers and other products.

But a Bee investigation, based on more than 100 pages of e-mails and other records, has found that 17 months after it was created, the program has delivered few if any of its promised climate benefits.

Almost from the start it ran into opposition from the state's purchasing specialists at the Department of General Services, who were not consulted about it and who – once they started asking questions – turned up other concerns, including allegations of unfair competition and ink waste.

They also favored reusing cartridges by refilling them at local businesses, a process known as remanufacturing.

"It is to HP's advantage to get as many remanufacturable cartridges off the market as possible," Robert Tetz, manager of the department's environmentally preferable purchasing program, said in an e-mail to his boss last year. "I don't believe that this partnership arrangement passes the smell test." (Tom Knudson, Sacramento Bee)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein votes to deny water to California's drought-stricken San Joaquin Valley. Farmers, families and food are being held hostage to an endangered fish called the delta smelt.

There was a time when the San Joaquin Valley was the most productive agricultural region in the world. It was a large part of what made the Golden State golden.

Now it's a place where farmers no longer farm, but instead line up at food banks to feed the families of those who once fed the rest of the country and a good chunk of the world.

The largest man-made agricultural disaster since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s is unfolding in the valley due to yet another attempt to protect a fish declared to be threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This damage is being done to protect the hypomesus transpacificus, otherwise known as the delta smelt.

Last December the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in its finite wisdom, issued something called a biological opinion imposing water restrictions on the San Joaquin Valley and surrounding areas to protect the habitat of this tiny fish. The authorities forget the species homo sapiens, also part of the ecosystem, is threatened.

Its habitat is being destroyed — by government edict. (IBD)

The Government is expected to create a network of ecological “motorways” that will allow animals to migrate when climate change affects their current habitats. (Daily Telegraph)

Giant pandas should be allowed to die out, BBC wildlife expert Chris Packham has said.

The television presenter said that the species was not strong enough to survive on its own and that the millions spent preserving them could be better spent elsewhere.

Mr Packham, who hosts BBC2’s Springwatch, also argued that breeding the animals in captivity for later release was pointless because there is not enough habitat left to sustain them.

He said: “Here’s a species that of its own accord has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac. It’s not a strong species.

“Unfortunately, it’s big and cute and it’s a symbol of the World Wildlife Fund – and we pour millions of pounds into panda conservation. (Daily Telegraph)

Why are we asking this now?

Because ornithologists have just launched an international quest to rediscover a large group of "lost" bird species – believing that some may not be lost after all.

Why does that matter?

Because the human pressure on the natural world is increasing to such an extent that more and more creatures face being wiped out. According to the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 12 per cent of the world's birds, 21 per cent of mammals, 30 per cent of amphibians, 31 per cent of reptiles, 37 per cent of fishes and 70 per cent of the world's plant species are now threatened with extinction. Extinction is one of the great blights of our times. Any creatures that are labelled extinct, but which can be rediscovered, offer enormous hope for conservation.

Are there likely to be many?

More than you might think. In the past few years there has been a whole series of rediscoveries of birds, mammals, fish, insects and other creatures that were supposed to have died out.

For example, the mahogany glider, an Australian possum, was rediscovered in 1989 after an absence of more than 100 years, while the New Zealand storm petrel, a seabird, was thought to have vanished a century and a half ago – it was only known from museum specimens – until it was rediscovered in 2003, and India's large-billed reed warbler was thought to have died out a similar time ago, until it was rediscovered in 2006.

Why have we labelled so many things extinct when they are not?

Perhaps because of the old sin of the pride of knowledge (which was Adam's sin, if you remember); we really enjoy saying I know. It is much more tempting for humans to express certainty about a point than to express doubt, and because we are generally anthropocentric – that is, we put ourselves at the centre of the universe – we tend to think that if we can't see something, then it's not there.

We forget that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – it's harder to prove something isn't, than it is to prove something is. And we also forget that while life in the natural world can be fragile, it can also be astonishingly resilient, and capable of clinging on against all expectations.

There have been so many recent rediscoveries of supposedly vanished birds – five in New Zealand alone – that, last month, BirdLife International, the Cambridge-based global partnership of bird protection organisations, was prompted to launch a campaign to try to confirm the continued existence of no fewer than 47 bird species, which have not been seen for up to 200 years. (The Independent)

'CLOUDY With a Chance of Meat balls" doesn't lack for ideas. It's the Food Network meets The Weather Channel meets . . . the Scary Doomsday Preachers Channel.

The animated movie greatly expands on the kids' book on which it's based in a clever and engaging first half. But the second half leaves a foul aftertaste. Slapdash action scenes play against dreary warnings to fear wealth and beauty.

Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) is a genial young genius whose inventions always go wrong. The latest is a machine that converts water to food. Although ridiculed by the townsfolk (Mr. T makes a funny contribution), he could save his decaying island home, whose only industry is sardines. Things go bonkers, and the gizmo winds up in the clouds, raining food on the delighted town. A foxy weather girl (Anna Faris) hurries to the scene: "My forecast: Sunny! Side up!"

Flint ignores the warnings of his humble dad (voice of James Caan, looks of G. Gordon Liddy). Dad is poor -- he spends his days grinding sardines into chum at his bait shop. He's also verbally inept, technologically illiterate and stuck in the past -- and he's the voice of reason. He's the only one who sees the aporkalypse coming.

The island has an environmental problem (excess food goes to a dump that threatens to overflow) and people are getting obese. Dad wants Flint to save the day by shutting down his machine.

But that would plunge the island back into rusty destitution. The town problem isn't complacency or greed -- it's just growth. When steaks the size of Priuses rain down, the father's point is proved: The population is being buried by its own prosperity, and the solution is not to manage the resources but to cut them off.

Why not export the surplus and get rich? Because then there'd be no message about our collective guilt. It's telling that the gadgets in the film are relics from the 1970s and '80s (loved the use of the old Simon electronic party game). The movie is a high-tech celebration of Luddism, not because the filmmaking digerati are actually nostalgic for low tech themselves, but because they think it, like poverty and ugliness, suits the sweaty throngs out beyond the 310 area code who are messing up the planet. (NY Post)

HOBART: Moves into the last great untapped resources of the Antarctic have led leading scientists to raise the alarm about the validity of the world's premier stamp of approval for sustainable fishing.

The Marine Stewardship Council's blue tick is appearing increasingly on seafood sold in Australian supermarkets - and will be the focus of a global sustainable seafood lunch next week.

But the scientists say the council's certification process is flawed, and is encouraging further depletion of already severely damaged fisheries.

At a time of crashing wild fish stocks and wary consumers, a blue tick on a seafood label is becoming sales gold.

Australians can find the council's tick for sustainable fishing on a tin of John West's Alaska pink salmon or a yellow-eyed mullet lunch in the upmarket restaurant Rockpool.

Globally, council-approved fisheries already catch more than 5 million tonnes of seafood. Such is its success that, with 50 fisheries certified, another 100 are in assessment.

However, scientists say certification may do the opposite of what was meant, and encourage the depletion of fisheries. (SMH)

In gearing up for the 2010 release of its super-genetically modified corn called "SmartStax", agricultural-biotechnology giant Monsanto is using an advertising slogan that asks, "Wouldn't it be better?" But can we do better than nature, which has taken millennia to develop the plants we use for food?

We don't really know. And that in itself is a problem. The corn, developed by Monsanto with Dow AgroSciences, "stacks" eight genetically engineered traits, six that allow it to ward off insects and two to make it resistant to weed-killing chemicals, many of which are also trademarked by Monsanto. It's the first time a genetically engineered (GE) product has been marketed with more than three traits. (David Suzuki with Faisal Moola, LondonTopic.ca)

The ploughed field, one of the most cherished images of the English countryside, could become a rare sight under government plans to protect soil.

Farmers are being urged to adopt technology that allows “no tilling and low tilling” in a move that would also reduce the environmental impact of food production. The suggestion is part of a “soil strategy” published yesterday by Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary.

“Precision farming” is already widely used by the traditional “barley barons” who in recent years have invested in machines that do not churn up the earth. Instead the equipment merely turns over the top layer and new seed is planted on soil that includes stubble from the previous crop. Ministers want the technique to become standard practice.

Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said that safeguarding soil was critical to allow food production to double in the next 20 to 30 years. (The Times)

Paganism? Is biodynamic the new organic? - The biodynamic movement, advocating food that is grown and harvested in accordance with lunar cycles, is taking off.

Organic food has had a terrible recession. Before the crunch, the organic sector had been growing steadily year on year – but sales came to a crashing halt when cost-conscious customers began to look for cheaper alternatives.

Last week, sales of organic vegetables were revealed to be down by a fifth, while demand for organic wine and bread sales has halved in 12 months. On top of the dip in sales, the Food Standards Agency's Organic Food Report this summer concluded that the nutritional benefits of organic food were negligible.

So you might think that now is no time to get into biodynamic food, a spin-off of the organic revolution.

Biodynamics embraces a holistic view of nature: it is by definition organic but it also involves biodiversity and – strangest of all – astronomy. Food is grown, harvested and sometimes even consumed in accordance with lunar cycles. (Daily Telegraph)

NEW YORK - Low levels of vitamin D appear to increase the risk of death in older adults, researchers report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Skin produces vitamin D when directly exposed to the sun. But older people, particularly those living in northern regions, rarely obtain sufficient sun exposure for adequate vitamin D production and need supplements to achieve healthy vitamin D levels.

Increasingly, evidence points to health risks from inadequate vitamin D. (Reuters Health)

GENEVA - The World Health Organisation said on Thursday it was looking into an unpublished Canadian study indicating that a seasonal flu shot could increase the risk of catching the H1N1 virus.

Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO's initiative for vaccine research, said no other researchers had presented similar findings and it could be a "study bias", although the Canadian investigators were well known and capable.

"The reason why this may be different in Canada and in this particular study than in other places of the world is not yet identified. It may be a study bias, it may be that something is real," Kieny told a teleconference from the WHO headquarters.

She said all drug manufacturers who produced seasonal influenza shots will be able to make H1N1 vaccine, for a total annual output of 3 billion doses. Health workers, who make up 2 percent of the world's population, should be a priority. (Reuters)

BERLIN - More than 124,000 people in Europe developed cancer last year because they are overweight, and rising body fat levels threaten to add tens of thousands more to their ranks, experts said on Thursday.

A study of cancer among overweight people in Europe showed the proportion of new cases of the disease caused by people being fat was highest in women and in central European countries like the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria.

The most common cancers linked to excess body weight were endometrial, breast and colorectal cancers.

"It is possible that obesity may become the biggest attributable cause of cancer in women within the next decade," lead researcher Andrew Renehan, of Cardiff University in Britain, told the ECCO-ESMO European cancer congress in Berlin. (Reuters)

‘Heart attacks plummet after smoking ban’ declared The Sunday Times earlier this month, as it reported that England’s smoking ban has ‘caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10 per cent’ (1). A few days later, The Scotsman upped the ante, informing its readers that ‘Smoking ban slashes heart attacks by up to a third across world’ (2).

Tales of heart attacks being ‘slashed’ by smoking bans have appeared with such regularity in recent years that it is easy to forget that there is a conspicuous lack of reliable evidence to support them. It is almost as if the sheer number of column inches is a substitute for proof.

The most recent reports are a case in point. Although The Sunday Times claimed a 10 per cent drop in heart attacks, nowhere in the 500 word article was a source mentioned and no one was quoted giving this figure. The ‘study’ the newspaper referred to does not exist, and the anti-smoking pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) – not renowned for downplaying the risks of passive smoking – went to the unusual lengths of posting a notice on its website the following day to point out that ‘the figures reported in The Sunday Times yesterday (and now circulating elsewhere) are not based on any research conducted to date’ (3).

Although the story quickly went around the globe, no one seems to know where the figure came from. It’s all rather strange. Basing journalism on anonymous sources is commonplace in the world of politics, but it is surely not necessary in the realms of science.

The second story – reported by a host of news organisations, including the BBC – also had no new data to report. Instead, it took its cue from an article in the journal Circulation which examined previous smoking ban/heart attack studies. If nothing else, the Circulation paper offers an opportunity to reflect on just how feeble the collected evidence is on this issue (4). (Christopher Snowdon, sp!ked)

What sort of future are green groups pushing us toward? If they get their way, it will be one that won't look much different than the world our great-grandparents were born into.

While some want to put an end to soft toilet paper, the Brits are moving toward a regime in which workers who discharge "more than their fair share of carbon emissions" will have their pay docked. Meanwhile, in California, regulators are hoping to ban big-screen TVs.

There are no limits to which environmentalists won't go to, to put limits on human freedom and progress. Not even our personal choice of toilet paper is beyond what they believe to be their business. The Washington Post reported Thursday that environmentalists have been campaigning against soft toilet paper because of the timber needed to make it. (IBD)

The Precautionary Principle basically says that we should not do something unless we are sure it will have no harmful or potentially harmful side-effects.

On the face of it, that may sound reasonable, but in reality it is a one-sided consideration, which completely ignores the benefits or potential benefits of any action/product/invention. The Principle does not weigh benefits against costs; it just says that if there are any costs at all, the action should not be carried out. For example, a new invention which could benefit millions of people, but also might possibly harm a few (people or other species) in the process, should be banned according to the Precautionary Principle.

If the Precautionary Principle had been enforced at the time of the invention of the wheel, the wheel would surely have been banned, especially if the people of that time had had the imagination to foresee all the death and destruction this invention has caused in terms of traffic accidents, contamination, environmental destruction, obesity, etc.

A more modern example is Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), which have the potential to substantially increase crop yields, to reduce the need for expensive and dangerous herbicides and pesticides, and to make food products healthier, tastier and more nutritious, as well. This should be good news if you are worried about hunger in the third world, protection of the environment, and/or your own health. Still, many people and organizations are opposed to the use of genetically enhanced crops, frequently citing the Precautionary Principle.

Every single invention (indeed every single action) between the invention of the wheel and the GMOs has some risk associated with it. If it were not for billions of brave persons willing to take a risk and willing to violate the Principle, we would all be living in the stone-age, walking around paralyzed.

Unless stone-age living is your ideal way of living, you should be very cautious in the application of the Precautionary Principle. (Lykke E. Andersen, Institute for Advanced Studies)

Carbon Capture and Sequestration
Steven Chu

Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have caused the climate to change, and a dramatic reduction of these emissions is essential to reduce the risk of future devastating effects. On the other hand, access to energy is the basis of much of the current and future prosperity of the world. Eighty percent of this energy is derived from fossil fuel. The world has abundant fossil fuel reserves, particularly coal. The United States possesses one-quarter of the known coal supply, and the United States, Russia, China, and India account for two-thirds of the reserves. Coal accounts for roughly 25% of the world energy supply and 40% of the carbon emissions.* It is highly unlikely that any of these countries will turn their back on coal any time soon, and for this reason, the capture and storage of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants must be aggressively pursued.

Carbon Capture and Storage: How Green Can Black Be?
R. Stuart Haszeldine

The capture of carbon dioxide at the point of emission from coal- or gas-burning power plants is an attractive route to reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. To commercialize carbon capture, as well as transport of liquified carbon dioxide and its storage in exploited oil fields or saline formations, many technological, commercial, and political hurdles remain to be overcome. Urgent action is required if carbon capture and storage is to play a large role in limiting climate change.

Why Capture CO2 from the Atmosphere?
David W. Keith

Air capture is an industrial process for capturing CO2 from ambient air; it is one of an emerging set of technologies for CO2 removal that includes geological storage of biotic carbon and the acceleration of geochemical weathering. Although air capture will cost more than capture from power plants when both are operated under the same economic conditions, air capture allows one to apply industrial economies of scale to small and mobile emission sources and enables a partial decoupling of carbon capture from the energy infrastructure, advantages that may compensate for the intrinsic difficulty of capturing carbon from the air.

Amine Scrubbing for CO2 Capture
Gary T. Rochelle

Amine scrubbing has been used to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from natural gas and hydrogen since 1930. It is a robust technology and is ready to be tested and used on a larger scale for CO2 capture from coal-fired power plants. The minimum work requirement to separate CO2 from coal-fired flue gas and compress CO2 to 150 bar is 0.11 megawatt-hours per metric ton of CO2. Process and solvent improvements should reduce the energy consumption to 0.2 megawatt-hour per ton of CO2. Other advanced technologies will not provide energy-efficient or timely solutions to CO2 emission from conventional coal-fired power plants.

Storage of Carbon Dioxide in Offshore Sediments
Daniel P. Schrag

The battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the most dangerous consequences of climate change will be waged across multiple fronts, including efforts to increase energy efficiency; efforts to deploy nonfossil fuel sources, including renewable and nuclear energy; and investment in adaptation to reduce the impacts of the climate change that will occur regardless of the actions we take. But with more than 80% of the world’s energy coming from fossil fuel, winning the battle also requires capturing CO2 from large stationary sources and storing that CO2 in geologic repositories. Offshore geological repositories have received relatively little attention as potential CO2 storage sites, despite their having a number of important advantages over onshore sites, and should be considered more closely.

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats will unveil legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions next Wednesday, kicking off what is likely to be a battle in Congress as lawmakers tussle over the economic impact of controlling global warming.

The bill has not been released formally but will be coauthored by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and California Senator Barbara Boxer, a Congressional source said on Thursday.

"The overall architecture of the Senate bill is going to be very similar to the House version of the bill," a separate source at an environmental group said via telephone from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

The proposal will add to an already full plate for lawmakers in Congress who are still working to hammer out details on healthcare and financial reforms. (Reuters)

Over at Greenwire, Anne C. Mulkern has written a superb article demonstrating how a reporter can can use a "news" story to editorialize, advocate and attack a position that s/he personally disagrees with. It should be required reading for anyone wanting to learn how to editorialize through news stories.

The subject of Mulkern's attack is The Breakthrough Institute (disclaimer: where I am a Senior Fellow) and the reason for the attack appears to be to generally discredit a recent analysis that shows that emissions allowances in the Waxman-Markey Bill are overallocated, a substantive point that is unimpeachable, even in the article. Maybe Mulkern has other issues with The Breakthrough Institute beyond this. (Roger Pielke, Jr.)

Damage being caused by climate change is a real threat to the entire planet and is no longer a matter of debate, according to a new report from the United Nations.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was blunt in his comments in the 2009 Climate Chance Science Compendium, released Thursday. (Canwest News Service)

The CSIRO seems about as confused as Colonel Gadaffi.

It wasn't so long ago that the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet became a publishing triumph, allegedly outselling Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code for a golden period.

It championed a high animal protein plan - lots of beef, lamb and dairy - which was perhaps not surprising, given that the research behind it was partly funded by the Meat and Livestock Industry and Dairy Australia.

But now, with climate change all the rage, the CSIRO has had a re-think.

Out with the steak, in with vegetarianism, indeed.

Its latest publication - the CSIRO Home Energy Saving Handbook - gives the big tick to "high-carbohydrate, healthy heart and vegetarian diets".

The reason? They "all combine healthy eating patterns with lower greenhouse gas impacts". (SMH)

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

In 2008, at least 36 million people were displaced by sudden-onset natural disasters including over 20 million displaced by climate-related, rapid-onset disasters, according to a new report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

According to the study "Monitoring Disaster Displacement in the Context of Climate Change", climate changes are already increasing the frequency and intensity of natural hazards, and the numbers of natural disasters reported and people affected are rising.

"Had it not been for the Sichuan earthquake in China, which displaced 15 million people, climate related disasters would have been responsible for over 90 percent of disaster-related displacement in 2008," the study commented.

The estimates do not include the number of people displaced by slow-onset disasters such as drought and rise in sea level. (CoP15)

Three months to go until the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Three months in which we will be repeatedly assured by climate fear promoters such as Al Gore, George Monbiot, Ed Miliband and the risible Ban Ki-moon that this really is absolutely, definitely, totally and irrevocably the very last chance the world’s leaders will have to save the planet from ManBearPig.

(Just like they said at Rio and Poznan and all the other “let’s see who can rack up the biggest carbon footprint” global shindigs that eco-campaigners insist on staging, the better to stoke up their self-flagellatory eco-guilt).

But, for the global warming deniers among us at least, the panic’s off. Nothing scary or dangerous is going to happen as a result of the Copenhagen summit. It will be a talking shop, abundant with airy platitudes and earnest pieties, but signifying less than ****er all as far as economy-damaging Kyoto-style legislation goes. There will be a political statement of intent. But no binding “agreement”.

Here are few reasons why: (James Delingpole, Daily Telegraph)

Estonia and Poland have scored deeply significant wins in their battle with the EU over carbon quotas. In a decision that threatens to scupper Europe's cap and trade scheme, the Court of First Instance annulled the European Commission's decision to lower the carbon emission quotas of both countries.

The court said setting carbon limits is a matter for member states rather than the EU. The ruling could force the European Commission to review its quotas and undermine the fledgling carbon market.

Estonia and Poland have been fighting for more generous national caps on industrial carbon emissions, arguing that their industry would be hamstrung under the EU scheme.

A Commission spokesperson said the EU executive would consider appealing the decision, which was described as "extremely disappointing". An appeal process could take more than a year. (EurActiv)

The Europe-wide carbon trading market suffered a severe blow yesterday when a European court issued a ruling that will weaken carbon prices and undermine efforts by the European Commission to curb carbon emissions further.

In a landmark decision, the European Court of First Instance ruled in favour of an appeal by Poland and Estonia for the right to be more generous in granting carbon emission allowances. In its surprise annulment of a Commission decision to cut the carbon quotas of the two countries, the court said: “The Commission exceeded its powers.”

The decision is expected to weaken prices in Europe’s troubled carbon market and undermine efforts by the Commission to impose a stricter regime on carbon polluters. (Carl Mortished, The Times)

Hot on the heels of an EU court ruling that the EU cannot dictate national emissions allowances over the objections of national governments, Italy now wants to renegotiate its allowances, from Reuters:

European governments are warming to the idea of taxing end-users directly for their carbon emissions. France, despite popular opposition, has announced it will introduce a so-called carbon tax next year, and Ireland has suggested it may do the same.

But why now? And is this a trend that could spread throughout Europe or to other countries? (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)

Let’s get this straight. The planet is not warming. Hasn’t warmed since around 1998. Instead, it’s cooling, and scientists say that it’s going to continue to cool for at least the next 20 or 30 years. Some even warn that based on the lack of sunspots evidenced on the sun’s surface, a reliable indicator of future climates, we may be on the verge of another little ice age.

The global warming alarmists assure us that we shouldn’t worry — global warming has simply gone on vacation and will surely be back, hotter than ever, sooner or later.

I’ll tell you where global warming is hiding. It has taken refuge in the computer models where it was first discovered and where it has been since. (Phil Brennan, Newsmax)

An issue for which the science is supposedly "settled" by a complete "consensus" of scientists would seem to offer the perfect opportunity to win over a skeptical public once and for all. But look no further than global warming movement's effort to ignore the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's call to put the science on trial, involving cross-examinations, witnesses, and a judge to make a final ruling.

Climate fear promoters, knowing that they will lose an open, honest public debate, fear a trial more so. There are some important pieces of evidence that cast into serious doubt the case for manmade global warming. (Marc Morano, AXcess News)

Back in 2005, we told you about Bolivia's Chacaltaya Glacier, which contained the world's highest ski run at 17,388 feet -- the ropetow attached to an old auto motor, the little shack where the locals drink chicha cochabambina, a strong corn-based alcohol, the dedicated ski club that made the trek up to Chacaltaya in mismatched ski boots and decades-old skis. We also told you it was going to disappear soon due to global warming -- and we were right. As of May 2009 the glacier had completely melted away. In 1999, a team of researchers studying the glacier predicted it would die in 2015, but the rate of melting tripled in the last decade, wiping out the glacier in just 10 years.

Climate change has suddenly become a hot research topic in Bolivia (1). The glaciers in the highlands are melting, the lowlands are flooded, and the government has declared a state of national emergency due to natural disasters. It is a good time to ask how climate change might be affecting the poor Bolivians.

But first let's check exactly what climate changes we are talking about.

The National Meteorological Service (www.senamhi.gov.bo) provides useful data for 33 different stations across Bolivia. They provide daily minimum and maximum temperatures since 1/1/2004 until yesterday, as well as historical monthly averages for the 1961-1990 period, which can be used for comparison. It is therefore relatively simple to calculate daily temperature anomalies for different parts of Bolivia.

The results of such an exercise might surprise you.

Of the 33 Bolivian weather stations, 7 experienced significant warming, 6 experienced no significant change, and 20 experienced significant cooling. Most of the cooling took place in the highlands (-1.5 degrees Celsius in Charaña, -1.2 in Oruro, -0.5 in Potosí, and -0.3 in El Alto, for example), while the lowlands experienced much more modest changes (about -0.2 degrees in most places). (Lykke E. Andersen, Institute for Advanced Studies)

Figure 1: La Paz (El Alto): Average Daily Temperature Anomaly 1/1/1995 – 12/3/2008, compared to average monthly temperatures for 1918-1989.

In 2007 I published a paper on the relative roles of climate change and societal change in future hurricane losses:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Future Economic Damage from Tropical Cyclones: Sensitivities to Societal and Climate Changes, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 365, No. 1860, pp. 1-13.

Last month a group of German authors, including several associated with Munich Re, published a discussion paper online that replicated this analysis, confirming its results. The paper, by Silvio Schmidt, Claudia Kemfert and Eberhard Faust adopts a similar approach to that which I used, which was simply to assume that tropical cyclones will become more intense in the future, and then compare the expected damage from that intensity increase with the effects of projected societal change.

As I found in Pielke (2007), they also found that societal factors are overwhelmingly dominant in coming years, even assuming a direct and significant relationship of greenhouse gas emissions and tropical cyclone intensity and under a range of socio-economic scenarios. They find that about 90% of the increase in losses to 2015 and 96% to 2050 will be due to societal factors even when assuming a greenhouse gas effect on tropical cyclones. In other words, assuming a direct greenhouse gas-tropical cyclone link, reducing greenhouse gas emissions such that they have no effect addresses a maximum of only 4% of the increased losses in 2050, under the assumptions of the study. Obviously therefore, damage from tropical cyclones is primarily an issue of adaptation to climate, not mitigation.

Interestingly, they find in their literature review that the only studies that quantitatively compare the expected costs of human-caused climate change on tropical cyclones with the effects of societal change are the two studies that I have conducted. Schmidt et al. 2009 is thus the third. While I do have some quibbles (e.g., their study focuses on the U.S. and mine is global), I am happy to report that their results are entirely consistent with my own. Schmidt and colleagues have replicated other work that I have done on hurricanes and I welcome this confirmatory work.

You can see their paper here in PDF. Here is the citation:

Silvio Schmidt, Claudia Kemfert and Eberhard Faust, 2009. Simulation of Economic Losses from Tropical Cyclones in the Years 2015 and 2050 – The Effects of Anthropogenic Climate Change and Growing Wealth, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, August. (Roger Pielke, Jr.)

In “Identifying signatures of natural climate variability in time series of global-mean surface temperature: Methodology and Insights”, Thompson et al (2009) remove the effects of three natural variables from the Global Surface Temperature record (January 1900 to March 2009). Those three natural variables are El Nino-Southern Oscillation, stratospheric aerosols emitted by explosive volcanic eruptions, and “variations in the advection of marine air masses over the high latitude continents during winter”, which they condense to “dynamically induced variability” or Tdyn in the paper. Thompson et al use “a series of novel methodologies to identify and filter out of the unsmoothed monthly-mean time series of global-mean land and ocean temperatures the variance associated with ENSO, dynamically-induced atmospheric variability, and volcanic eruptions.”

This post briefly discusses the data made available by Thompson et al (2009), it illustrates the ENSO and volcanic aerosol residuals that remained in the global temperature anomaly data after the effects of ENSO, volcanic aerosols, and dynamically induced variability were said to be removed, and it illustrates the El Nino-induced step changes that resulted from the significant El Nino events that occurred since 1976.

The data furnished by Thompson et al actually reinforces the fact that the global temperature response to El Nino events is not linear. Read the rest of this entry »

WUWT reader Mike writes with this little bombshell on one of the world’s leading meteorological agencies. It seems they can’t get their thermometer siting correct which resulted in a bias to the record. Hmmm. Where have we heard this before? The newspaper “AD” in the Netherlands has picked up the issue with two separate stories.Mike writes:

Mike’s translations of the newspaper stories are below, I’ve added relevant graphics. – Anthony

The instrument stood too close to a line of trees, due to which on average half a degree (Celsius) too high was measured.

After discovery of the fault the thermometer was moved to an open spot on the measurement field before last summer, the KNMI has confirmed. Due to the change the average measured temperature fell half a degree. This measurement should be reliable. Read the rest of this entry »

The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers, even if you are at the top of your field. What follows is an example of a scientific group that not only stopped a leading researcher from attending a meeting, but then-without discussing the evidence-applauds the IPCC and recommends urgent policies to reduce greenhouse gases. What has science been reduced to if bear biologists feel they can effectively issue ad hoc recommendations on worldwide energy use? How low have standards sunk if informed opinion is censored, while uninformed opinion is elevated to official policy? (Joanne Nova, SPPI)

From living in virtual darkness to minutely measuring their water-use, greens’ fixation with carbon counting is verging on a mental illness. (Austin Williams, sp!ked)

Bill Clinton's presidency has served as a roadmap for Barack Obama's—a roadmap, that is, of what not to do. Don't try to pass health care reform without congressional input. Don't tackle controversial social issues early in your presidency. Don't alienate the military. Now there's another lesson: Don't promise the world you're going to fight climate change when you can't. (Christopher Beam, Slate)

President Barack Obama, who challenged world leaders to overcome “doubts and difficulties” and reach a global accord on climate change, faces skepticism over whether he can deliver legislation in his own country. (Bloomberg)

PITTSBURGH — New climate-change commitments from China and Japan have ratcheted up pressure on Canada and other countries to put money and measures on the table at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper joined other leaders of rich and emerging market economies Thursday following ground-shifting talks on climate change in at the United Nations in New York.

The host of the Pittsburgh meeting, U.S. President Barack Obama, has seen his carbon cap-and-trade commitment stall. Harper and the other leaders will be watching to see whether Obama will make some kind of firm commitment on greenhouse gases to reciprocate the goodwill shown by the two Asian powers. (CP)

European leaders voiced growing doubts Thursday on whether the world will meet a December deadline for a new climate deal as a summit here looked set to take up global warming in generalities.

Twenty leaders who represent 90 percent of the global economy were holding two days of talks in the eastern US city of Pittsburgh, itself billed as a model of transition from decaying steel town to a green technology hub.

The summit opened two days after a high-powered climate meet at the United Nations, where Japan and China offered new pledges on how to save the world from rising temperatures predicted to threaten entire species if unchecked.

But with just a little more than two months before a conference in Copenhagen -- designated two years ago as the venue to seal the successor to the landmark Kyoto Protocol -- pessimism was growing. (AFP)

The EU set aside diplomatic language and issued a bare-boned challenge to industrialised countries to come up with the cash developing countries need to deal with climate change today.

The unusually blunt language from the European commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, on what was needed for an agreement on global warming at Copenhagen was delivered as leaders began arriving in Pittsburgh for a G20 summit of major economies.

In a speech at Pittsburgh University, Barroso said the industrialised economies would have to make significant reductions in emissions as well as make "a credible financial commitment" to help developing states obtain new greener technology. "In other words, no money, no deal," he said. (The Guardian)

To get a sense of how far the Chinese leadership has come on the issue of climate change in a relatively short period, consider a conference held two years ago on the tropical island of Hainan, where, every year, China invites the high and mighty from around the world to address the weighty issues of the day at a plush resort. The theme of the conference was "Green China," and if there was a single underlying idea, it was that China, having just become the world's largest emitter of CO2 gases, was going to jump wholeheartedly on the global bandwagon to combat climate change. But on the conference's final day, during the main event and keynote address, President Hu Jintao talked about China's commitment to economic reform, to maintaining its extraordinary pace of economic growth, to opening China's market further to foreign investment and products — but only the barest nod in the direction of climate change. A confused American environmental consultant left the speech sputtering. "What was that about?" he asked former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was walking out with him. Powell laughed. "You know what the first thing is that Hu Jintao doesn't think about when he wakes up every morning?" Powell joked. "Climate change." (Bill Powell, Time)

Recently I've seen a number of claims made about China's plans to improve the energy intensity of its economy. Here are some examples:

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Energy intensity is thus energy consumption divded by GDP. The graph below shows Chinese energy intensity for the period 1998 to 2008, with 2005 (the Plan's base year) set to 1.0.

A few things stand out. One is that China's energy intensity in 2008 is about the same as it was in 2001. Any claim that China's energy intensity has improved by 20% over the past five years is incorrect. The second is that energy intensity has improved by only about 7.4% since 2005, meaning that it has a long way to go to reach a 20% target by 2010 (i.e., 0.80 on this graph). Can it happen? Sure. But to say that China is "well on its way" does not square with the data. It would be "ironic" indeed if China has figured out how to grow its economy at 9% per year while increasing energy use by only 3% and decarbonizing its economy at an even lower amount. If this were true, then China would have discovered the holy grail of emissions reductions and we can all forget about the challenges of climate policy.

With all of the talk of China now being the "world leader" on emissions reductions, is this story just another myth of climate policy? It sure looks that way. (Roger Pielke, Jr.)

THE dust storm that swept through Sydney has hit the headlines in the US, but Kevin Rudd has been struggling to kick up enough dust on his latest New York trip to attract American media attention.

A quaint blogging column from The New York Times website called City Room reported yesterday that the city's Argosy bookstore kept its doors open past closing time on Monday for the Prime Minister.

That is the newspaper's only mention of Mr Rudd's five-day New York visit before he heads to the G20 meeting of world leaders today.

Mr Rudd has received no coverage from the Times or other respected newspapers that would indicate he is an influential player in climate change negotiations or the push for a new world order. None appear interested.

Some of the breathless reporting in Australia suggests otherwise: one day Mr Rudd is pressuring world leaders to accept a new climate treaty, the next he is advocating a new global power shift or praising China's efforts on carbon emissions.

The difficulty for Mr Rudd -- unless the US media's reflections are hopelessly wrong -- is that he does not appear to have much impact.

Almost all the focus during climate change summit talks in New York has been on the big players -- Barack Obama and China President Hu Jintao.

Even Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have scored more media hits, even if they are for notoriety.

One US journalist told The Australian: "He is not getting media attention here because he is just not doing much on the world stage." (The Australian)

I suppose the attraction of the buzzword “Tibetan” dulled any urge the Greenpeace apparatchiks might have had to get their facts correct.

The oil industry has been on a hot streak this year, thanks to a series of major discoveries that have rekindled a sense of excitement across the petroleum sector, despite falling prices and a tough economy.

These discoveries, spanning five continents, are the result of hefty investments that began earlier in the decade when oil prices rose, and of new technologies that allow explorers to drill at greater depths and break tougher rocks.

“That’s the wonderful thing about price signals in a free market — it puts people in a better position to take more exploration risk,” said James T. Hackett, chairman and chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum.

More than 200 discoveries have been reported so far this year in dozens of countries, including northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, Australia, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Norway, Ghana and Russia. They have been made by international giants, like Exxon Mobil, but also by industry minnows, like Tullow Oil.

Just this month, BP said that it found a giant deepwater field that might turn out to be the biggest oil discovery ever in the Gulf of Mexico, while Anadarko announced a large find in an “exciting and highly prospective” region off Sierra Leone.

It is normal for companies to discover billions of barrels of new oil every year, but this year’s pace is unusually brisk. New oil discoveries have totaled about 10 billion barrels in the first half of the year, according to IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. If discoveries continue at that pace through year-end, they are likely to reach the highest level since 2000.

While recent years have featured speculation about a coming peak and subsequent decline in oil production, people in the industry say there is still plenty of oil in the ground, especially beneath the ocean floor, even if finding and extracting it is becoming harder. They say that prices and the pace of technological improvement remain the principal factors governing oil production capacity. (NYT)

Executives at small oil refiners who broke with the industry to support the House climate bill now oppose it advancing in the Senate, illustrating the stiffening resistance to the sweeping legislation.

The relationship between the oil sector and the majority party in Congress is often antagonistic. But climate deliberations in the House made frenemies — if not friends — of Democrats and small-refinery executives, even though the bill seeks to drive down the market for fossil fuels.

That’s so because House Democratic leaders added a provision to their cap-and-trade bill that could mean billions of dollars for small oil refiners as they searched for support in the days before the critical floor vote. (Jim Snyder, The Hill)

Reports of funding U-turn prompts stark warning from carbon capture industry (Tom Young, BusinessGreen)

THE creator of the "Kevin 07" advertising campaign, Neil Lawrence, has been recruited by coalmining companies to design a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign against the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme, to be launched next week in key marginal seats.

Australian Coal Association executive director Ralph Hillman said the "key message" of the campaign - to be targeted at mining regions, including Labor-held marginal seats - would be the "major job losses" the regions could suffer if the ETS were passed without significant changes in its treatment of coalmining.

Mr Hillman said the campaign was designed to inform workers in coalmining regions and was not a political campaign, nor aimed at marginal seats. (The Australian)

Dust on a solar panel will reduce its efficiency by up to 50%.

In the brave green Australia of 2020, just a decade away, Canberra has mandated that about half the Simpson desert will be covered in solar panels.

Have they allowed for the army of cleaners and the giga-litres of water that will be needed to clean the panels after every dust storm?

Maybe this where the Green jobs are coming from, and where the Cubbie Station water is going to?

For more info on dust on solar panels see: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfhw7d9z_0gtk9bsgc

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
info@carbon-sense.com
www.carbon-sense.com

As Michael Cannon discussed in an earlier post, the White House is trying to claim that health care “reform” does not mean higher taxes. This is a two-pronged issue. First, there is a mandate to purchase health insurance. Second, there is a tax (the White House calls it a fee) on people who fail to purchase a policy.

The White House claims this mandate is akin to state-level requirements for the purchase of health insurance, and that the newly-insured people will be getting some value (a health insurance policy) in exchange for their money. These assertions are defensible, but that does not change the fact that a tax is being imposed.

It might be plausible to argue that the mandate is not a tax if the value of the insurance policy to the individual was equal to the cost. But since these are people who are not buying policies, their behavior reveals that this obviously cannot be true. So this means that they will be worse off under Obama’s plan and that at least some of the cost should be considered a tax.

The Social Security payroll tax allows a good analogy. Labor economists correctly argue that the payroll tax functions, in part, as a “premium” for what can be considered a government-provided annuity. As such, when we try to measure the disincentive effect of the payroll tax, it is appropriate to include the perceived value of future Social Security benefits (for most Americans, especially with average or above-average incomes, the “rate of return” is very low or negative, so a substantial share of the payroll tax is a tax both in the legal sense and economic-distortion sense). The same is true of a mandatory health insurance policy (even if the money does not go through the government’s hands).

On the broader issue of paying money and getting something of value in return, another analogy is helpful. A share of the gasoline excise tax is used for road construction and maintenance. We all benefit from roads, even if we don’t drive (let’s set aside issues such as whether the benefits equal the costs, whether the federal government should be involved, etc). Does that somehow mean the gasoline excise tax is not a tax? Of course not.

Turning now to the excise tax, the Administration’s argument that this is a fee is even less defensible. The Baucus legislation in the Senate Finance Committee explicitly references an excise tax. Equally revealing (and even more ominous), the IRS is charged with collecting the fee. The White House can argue that the tax – in the economic sense – is lower than the fee if something of value is exchanged. But the tax is still there.

Rather than play games, the White House should make an open argument for bigger government. The fact that the Administration prefers to be deceptive says a lot about the underlying merits of their proposal. (Daniel J. Mitchell, Cato at liberty)

There is never a good time to have a heart attack, but the wise person afflicted with clogging arteries might want to be especially careful in future to avoid stress and watch the diet as August rolls around.

The NHS, it is revealed today, has its very own black Wednesday, when death rates go up by an average of 6%; and there is a somewhat disturbing underlying cause – the arrival on the wards of a new intake of junior doctors.

On the first Wednesday in August every year, a freshly qualified set of junior doctors arrives on the wards. Pristine and eager and brilliant they no doubt are, but while they are finding their way around something unexplained and slightly perplexing appears to happen.

Researchers from the Dr Foster unit and the department of acute medicine at Imperial College London say there has been a suspicion for years that more people die on the day the new doctors arrive, but for the first time they have established that it happens – although they say the rise in deaths is very small.

They do not blame the doctors' inexperience or confusion in the hospital and say it is also possible that only the severest cases are admitted in that week, because of the changeover. (The Guardian)

The Bloomberg administration, in its ever-expanding campaign to make New Yorkers eat better, has already clamped down on trans fats, deployed fruit vendors to produce-poor neighborhoods and prodded corner bodegas to sell leafy green vegetables and low-fat milk.

Now, in a city known more for hot dogs and egg creams than the apple of its nickname, officials want to establish an even bigger beachhead for healthy food — new supermarkets in areas where fresh produce is scarce and where poverty, obesity and diabetes run high. (NYT)

NEW YORK - Two-year-old UK regulations designed to cut down on TV ads that pitch unhealthy foods to kids are likely to only prohibit only a tiny fraction of food advertising, new research shows.

TV advertising of junk food is believed to contribute to the obesity epidemic among kids, note Dr. Jean Adams of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne, and her colleagues, in their report. With this in mind, in 2007, the UK implemented regulations on food advertising during children's programming.

However, "Only about 5% of food adverts would have been prevented by the regulation," Adams told Reuters Health, because roughly half of the ten percent of ads targeted to kids were for food considered "unhealthy." The rules, she explained, define programs "of particular appeal to" children in a way that's simply too narrow to have much of an effect. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Having doctors routinely weigh overweight children and give parents advice on diet and exercise may have little impact on kids' weight gain or lifestyle habits, a new study suggests.

The findings call into question national policies in countries like the US, UK and Australia, researchers report in the medical journal BMJ.

According to those policies, pediatricians and family doctors should be at the front lines of combating childhood obesity -- monitoring children's weight and, when needed, giving parents advice on weight control.

The problem is that there is little evidence that these strategies work, according to the researchers on the current study, led by Dr. Melissa Wake of Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.

One recent research review, for instance, found that no clinical trials have been done to see whether the common practice of weighing children at school has any effects on their odds of becoming overweight.

What's more, even when screening spots children with weight problems, little is known about what types of treatments are effective. (Reuters Health)

It's 6 p.m. and you still have tons of e-mail to answer. You find yourself grabbing a bag of chips from the office vending machine and settling in for another hour or two -- again.

Is there any wonder half of America's employees haven't exercised in the past 30 days and obesity levels are climbing?

In the midst of the most vigorous national healthcare debate in 15 years, the link between our work life and our weight is intensifying. Two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is overweight.

The economic crisis has exacerbated the obesity epidemic: Workers are putting in longer hours, afraid of losing their jobs. With less time to exercise, more than a third of employees report that work drains them of energy, leaving nothing for their personal lives.

At the same time, pay cuts and rising food prices, particularly for more nutritious foods, are making fast food and vending machines a quick and cheaper option during a lunch break. (Miami Herald)

Ten million Brits are unaware they are obese because being fat is now seen as the 'norm', according to new research. (Daily Telegraph)

A survey suggests the vast majority of those who are obese do not realise they are so. How is this possible amid what some see as saturation coverage of the nation's burgeoning bellies? (BBC News)

Last January, the city council of El Paso, Texas, unanimously approved a resolution urging the federal government to support “an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.” Soon afterwards, the mayor of El Paso received a call from Washington, DC demanding that he veto the resolution, otherwise his city would be cut off from some federal money. He did. However, the city council approved a new resolution calling for a conference assessing U.S. drug policy and the War on Drugs.

That led to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) organizing a two-day conference on the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs with leading experts from all over the world in the field of drug policy. The event was heavily attended by students, journalists and people interested in the subject. I had the chance to speak on the first panel, addressing the “History, Successes and Failures” of the War on Drugs. Not surprisingly, I failed at pointing out a single success from the current prohibitionist approach to drug policy. A summary of that first panel is available here.

Unfortunately, two Obama czars (on border and drugs) called off their participation just days before the conference. It was a missed chance to find out if there’s any change going on with the new administration regarding drug policy. In his opening remarks, Beto O’Rourke, the city councilman who introduced the original resolution that was later vetoed, said that he never imagined that calling for an “open and honest debate” on drug policy was going to be so controversial.

El Paso is at the crossroads of the War on Drugs. One of the safest cities in the Unites States, it’s just across the Rio Grande from one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, where so far this year more than 1,000 people have died in drug related violence. El Paso is not isolated from this carnage. Both cities are deeply intertwined economically, culturally and by blood ties. “Todos somos juarences” (we are all Juarezians) was the most common phrase from residents of El Paso expressing concern about the situation in their sister city.

Needless to say, the participants at the conference were highly critical of the War on Drugs. Some speakers focused on the empirical evidence coming from countries with flexible drug laws, such as the Netherlands and more recently Portugal. Luis Astorga, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) gave an interesting presentation on the history of drug cartels in Mexico. Other presentations dealt with the social consequences of prohibition, and how the War on Drugs is affecting communities in Mexico and the United States.

As I’ve written earlier, in Latin America there have been growing calls in recent months to reconsider the War on Drugs. It is about time that this discussion also takes place in the United States. Kudos to UTEP and the city of El Paso for taking that step. (Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Cato at liberty)

New approaches are needed to help humanity deal with climate change and other global environmental threats that lie ahead in the 21st century, according to a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists.

The scientists propose that global biophysical boundaries, identified on the basis of the scientific understanding of the earth system, can define a "safe planetary operating space" that will allow humanity to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. This new approach to sustainable development is conveyed in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature. The authors have made a first attempt to identify and quantify a set of nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, freshwater use, biological diversity, and aerosol loading.

The research was performed by a working group at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in cooperation with the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

One important strand of the research behind this article is based in the global project known as IHOPE. The goal of the Integrated History and future Of People on Earth (IHOPE) project is to understand the interactions of the environmental and human process over the ten to hundred millennia to determine how human and biophysical changes have contributed to Earth system dynamics. The IHOPE working group is assembled at NCEAS today.

The scientists emphasize that the rapid expansion of human activities since the industrial revolution has now generated a global geophysical force equivalent to some of the great forces of nature.

"We are entering the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which our activities are threatening the earth's capacity to regulate itself," said co-author Will Steffen, professor at the Australian National University (ANU) and director of the ANU Climate Change Institute. "We are beginning to push the planet out of its current stable Holocene state, the warm period that began about 10,000 years ago and during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, have developed and flourished. The expanding human enterprise could undermine the resilience of the Holocene state, which would otherwise continue for thousands of years into the future." (ScienceDaily)

The scientific name is the Holocene Age, but climatologists like to call our current climatic phase the Long Summer. The history of Earth's climate has rarely been smooth. From the moment life began on the planet billions of years ago, the climate has swung drastically and often abruptly from one state to another — from tropical swamp to frozen ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, however, the climate has remained remarkably stable by historical standards: not too warm and not too cold, or Goldilocks weather. That stability has allowed Homo sapiens, numbering perhaps just a few million at the dawn of the Holocene, to thrive; farming has taken hold and civilizations have arisen. Without the Long Summer, that never would have been possible. (Bryan Walsh, Time)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and Senator John Barrasso (R-Wy.), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, today sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging the EPA not to finalize the Agency’s Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (proposed rule) until it provides answers to letters that the Senators sent regarding the process behind EPA’s proposed endangerment finding for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

“In order for the public to have a complete understanding of the scientific process behind the endangerment finding, we request that you should not finalize the endangerment rule or any further related affirmative findings under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act without developing a response to these transparency issues outlined in our August 4th letter,” the Senators wrote. “In this instance, there is no legally imposed deadline by which the Agency must finalize the proposed rule. So we believe the Agency has ample time to respond to the transparency issues outlined in our letter and place the response in the record to receive public feedback. Our investigation focuses on the process EPA used to determine the credibility and relevance of scientific data and studies that support its proposed endangerment finding.” (Press Release)

The CBO has issued a new report [.pdf] that summarizes the economic effects of greenhouse-gas legislation, relying on previously published analyses. The report shows just how weak the case for the proposed cap-and-trade plan really is. In fact, the CBO demonstrates that the theoretical benefits of Waxman-Markey to the United States fall far short of its costs.

Even more surprising, the CBO report reveals (without trumpeting the result, of course) that the costs borne by the U.S. may exceed the benefits to the entire world. This should be surprising indeed to the casual observer who thought there was a “clear consensus” on the net benefits of the cap-and-trade component of Waxman-Markey. (Institute for Energy Research)

From Ms Annie Walker.

Sir, The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research finds that 20 per cent of the population are hardened sceptics about man-made global warming ("Public scepticism takes the steam out of debate", September 22). Could it be that this is the top 20 per cent of the population who are able to read? The others simply believe any rubbish that they are told. I am a 70-year-old granny. I have actually read Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth. I have read David Archibald's Solar Cycle 24 and I have read Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder's The Chilling Stars . These serious scientific books are trashed by the believers, but those of us who can read and have done GCE chemistry and physics can follow the science, and can make up our own minds.

I would have thought that most of the readers of the FT fall into the top 20 per cent of the population in levels of IQ. No wonder your readers are tired of reading the stupidities which, like me, they know to be without proper scientific basis.

Annie Walker,
London NW11, UK (The Financial Times)

As part of a well thought out and executed plan to convince the public there is global warming despite the cold and snow records of the last two years, get state climate action plans approved, keep the grant gravy train rolling through the university systems, and get government legislation or carbon control legislation approved that will benefit Wall Street and the government at our expense is underway.

Detailed well produced reports are being dribbled out state by state warning of a ridiculously warm and severe climate future. They are based on the same climate models which have failed miserably in the first decade showing strong warming while the globe cooled, sea levels accelerating up while they have stopped rising and heat records increasing in frequency while we have had fewer heat records in any decade since the 1800s, and disappearing snow while all time snow records occurred in the last two years. But don’t confuse the issue with facts. These reports are timed to affect the decisions made by congress w/r to Cap-and Tax. (Joseph D’Aleo, Icecap)

NEW YORK—Companies sued for creating damage by contributing to global warming have a major defense available against such charges, according to an attorney at a legal session for policyholders.

The remarks were made last week by Finley Harckham, a senior litigation shareholder in the New York office of Anderson Kill & Olick and president of Anderson Kill Insurance Services, LLC at the law firm’s 12th Annual Policyholder Advisor Conference.

He explained that plaintiffs need to establish two levels of causation. They must prove that something has happened to the environment other than what would have happened naturally, and that the defendant is responsible for that action.

“It’s a huge hurdle,” he said, noting that a lawsuit would have to distinguish why a given condition was caused by a single entity as opposed to greenhouse gases emitted by the population at large. (National Underwriter)

Like most large international conferences, the United Nations climate summit meeting in New York this week generated a hefty dose of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and officials from across the globe this week took airplanes to the United Nations meeting, some accompanied by dozens of people. Limousines and motorcades ferried the dignitaries from airports to meetings to hotels and back, often getting stuck in Midtown Manhattan gridlock.

But since the goal of this meeting was to reduce the global emissions that have been linked to global warming, the United Nations decided to try to do something about all the carbon dioxide produced by the delegates: it bought carbon offsets. (NYT)

NEW YORK — Former Vice President Al Gore told attendees Wednesday at the Clinton Global Initiative to reach out to U.S. senators and urge them to pass climate change legislation, saying it was the "crucial step" in solving the climate crisis. (AP)

Of more than 100 world leaders who gathered Tuesday at the United Nations for a summit meeting on climate change, two mattered most: Barack Obama and China’s president, Hu Jintao. Together their countries produce 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Together they can lead the way to an effective global response to this clear global threat. Or together they can mess things up royally. (NYT)

Four to five years from now China could launch a tax on greenhouse gas emissions if proposal from Chinese energy research institute wins political support. (CoP15)

Myron has already pointed out how most of what the President claimed were the threats from global warming are exaggerated. Here’s the data to back that up.

“…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.” Reality: global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000. Temperatures have been flat since then.

“Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.” Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago. The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

“More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.” Reality: there is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

“More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.” Reality: there is no upward global trend in major droughts. Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

“On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.” Reality: some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

UNITED NATIONS — World leaders gathered here for a global summit meeting on climate change made modest proposals on Tuesday for combating the problem, underscoring the way domestic political battles still trump what United Nations officials had hoped would be a sense of global urgency. (NYT)

This week's summit on climate change offered cause for confidence. But all nations now need to redouble their efforts (Nicholas Stern, The Guardian)

World leaders tried to jump start climate negotiations at UN summit on Tuesday, but did not break the deadlock. (CoP15)

All eyes are on New York today, for the latest political moves ahead of the make-or-break conference in Copenhagen in December seeking a global climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

And last night it looked as if Danish prime minister and host of the talks, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was about to drop a quiet bombshell.

He was expected to make clear that he is no longer looking to Copenhagen to deliver a "treaty", that is a document with legally enforceable emissions cuts, but only "a political declaration" - an altogether different outcome.

But overnight reaction from European countries has now put a question mark over that, suggesting that he may now defer his announcement.

Downgrading from a treaty to a political declaration would be a bitterly disappointing result for those pinning their hopes on Copenhagen, despite all the warning signs that a meaningful deal looks perilously close to impossible. (Susan Watts, BBC Newsnight)

No deal in Copenhagen might not be a disaster for the global climate, as long as the UN climate conference reaches agreement on important issues leading to a deal in 2010, says Head of the Climate Panel at Aarhus University in Denmark. (CoP15)

President signals intention to abandon intransigence of his predecessor – but admits it will be tough to get treaty through the Senate (The Independent)

How’s this for awkward timing? Even as President Obama tries to persuade other countries gathered at the U.N. climate confab and upcoming G-20 meeting that the U.S. will take action on climate change, senators from both parties are moving to limit what his administration can do to fight climate change.

At issue are two amendments to a huge government spending bill nearing a vote in the Senate that would pare the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate various industries’ greenhouse-gas emissions.

One amendment, drafted by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) and backed by ethanol companies, would limit how the EPA could measure the global-warming impact of growing corn and other crops for fuel. It would prohibit the agency from considering the emissions that are said to result when farmers overseas clear grasslands and cut down forests in response to higher food prices. What do those farmers’ decisions have to do with ethanol production in the U.S.? Well, according to some researchers, there are some nasty ripple effects when farmers in the U.S. convert their farmland to growing corn for fuel.

Still, why would the EPA want to go down this road, given the U.S. government’s traditional support for ethanol? Because a 2007 energy law says it has to! More about this debate here and here.

Another amendment, being circulated by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), would prohibit the EPA for one year from regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, factories and small businesses. Sen. Murkowski says she’s worried about the economic toll of any regulations that EPA might set; environmental groups say her measure would render the EPA toothless and undermine U.S. efforts to convince other countries to reduce their emissions.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration is speaking out against Sen. Murkowski’s proposal. “We don’t think trying to legislate on an appropriations bill is a good idea,” Carol Browner, the President’s assistant on energy and climate change issues, tells WSJ’s Jonathan Weisman. So does that mean President Obama would veto the entire spending bill if Ms. Murkowski succeeds in attaching her amendment to the final bill? Ms. Browner said she’s not in a position to comment.

Our sources predict a close vote in the Senate, possibly as early as Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned … (WSJ)

WASHINGTON, D.C., ' The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has sent a Key Vote letter to U.S. Senators urging them to support an amendment by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from issuing an "endangerment finding' for carbon dioxide in an attempt to regulate greenhouse gases (GHG) under the Clean Air Act. (Manufacturing and Technology)

The Dog Ate Global Warming - Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense. (Patrick J. Michaels, NRO)

Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), tells NRO that he plans to “lead a truth squad” at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.

The Oklahoman predicts that he probably will not be welcomed with open arms. Inhofe, as you may remember, led a similar group of conservative legislators in 2003, during the U.N.’s climate-change negotiations in Milan, Italy. “I was the outcast at that time,” recalls Inhofe. “Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate. Some people, like Senator Barbara Boxer, will tell the conference, with Waxman-Markey having passed in the House, that they can anticipate that some kind of bill will pass EPW.” Such statements, Inhofe says, deserve a bold response. “Look,” he says, “there is no bill that is bad enough to not pass out of our committee. There may be enough votes to get a bill out of EPW, but there is far from enough support in the Senate. The Democrats don’t have the votes. There are too many newly-elected Democrats in the Senate who don’t want to go home and tell voters that they just voted for the largest tax increase in American history.”

Six years ago, when Inhofe was in Milan, global-warming activists were so infuriated by his mere presence that they papered “Wanted” posters with his picture across the conference center, emblazoned with his famous quote about global warming: “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” That was the “first time the environmentalists have ever quoted me accurately,” he quipped at that time. (Robert Costa, The Corner)

WASHINGTON - U.S. groups pushing for a new international accord on climate control are scaling back their expectations for an end-of-year deal, openly talking on Wednesday about either pushing for an "interim" plan or a simple extension of negotiations set for December in Denmark.

With fewer than 75 days remaining before an international conference convenes in Copenhagen to determine the next steps on curbing destructive greenhouse gas emissions, some climate change experts are assessing the lack of progress and crafting what might be called a "Plan B."

"A blitz of high-level diplomacy might yet conjure a miracle, but ... the odds of a final, ratifiable deal by the time the clock hits zero appear virtually nil," wrote Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, in a recent Internet posting.

That assessment comes as developed and developing countries remain deeply divided over the burden each should shoulder in reducing carbon emissions and the U.S. Congress has yet to settle on legislation that would commit one of the world's largest polluters to significant reductions. (Reuters)

What utter nonsense: The full climate change tale - Carbon dioxide emissions are a significant cause of global warming. But that’s only half the story

Think “climate change” and “carbon dioxide” is probably one of the first things that comes to mind. “Copenhagen”, symbolizing all of the tension and nuance of international action, is probably a close second. “Catastrophe” might be another association, as reports about glacial melting, monsoon disruption, sea levels rising and other environmental changes pile up.

But the truth is that the CO2 emissions at the centre of international discussions only account for half of global warming to date. Half is big and CO2 should be at the centre of the debate, especially since what we emit today will contribute to warming for centuries. But it’s still just one half. The other half offers precious opportunities to tackle climate change and see the positive effects quickly while at the same time meeting development goals. (Jessica Seddon Wallack, LiveMint)

With the onset of the Autumnal Equinox today at 21:18 UTC, the severe weather season winds down. I reported earlier on the finding of Ryan Maue, who showed that we’ve reached a 30 year low in Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) which is a measure of global hurricane activity.

Now it appears the 2009 tornado season is significantly lower as well, which is a very, very, good thing. The actual number of tornadoes so far this year is only 850 compared to the previous three years, all above 1000. 2008 saw 1691 tornadoes in the USA, almost double. The three year average is 1297 tornadoes. Tornado related deaths are also way down with only 21 so far this year compared to 126 last year and a 3 year average of 91.

Going from last year’s La Niña to a weak/fading El Niño this year had more of an impact on this than any measure of global warming in the USA because as we’ve seen from the NCDC announcements this year, we had a cool summer despite supposedly record sea surface temperatures. Our quiet sun may also be a factor.

click for larger image

So far the hurricane season for the Atlantic has been pretty quiet for 2009. Ryan Maue from Florida State University explains why. In related news, Al Gore has dropped the [hurricane frequency] related slide in his traveling PowerPoint show. – Anthony

Global hurricane frequency versus global ocean temperatures - Top image from FSU ACE, bottom image from GISS ocean data plotted by WUWT - click for larger image

Both Northern Hemisphere and South Hemisphere AND therefore overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least. Since hurricane intensity and detection data is problematic as one goes back in time, when reporting and observing practices were different than today, it is possible that we underestimated global hurricane energy during the 1970s.

Using a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short (Bell and Chelliah 2006), which has been used by Klotzbach (2006) and Emanuel (2005) (PDI is analogous to ACE), and most recently by myself in Maue (2009) , simple analysis shows that 24-month running sums of global ACE or hurricane energy have plummeted to levels not seen in 30 years.

Much has been written of late regarding the impending demise of the world’s coral atolls due to sea level rise. Recently, here in the Solomon Islands, the sea level rise has been blamed for salt water intrusion into the subsurface “lens” of fresh water under some atolls. Beneath the surface of most atolls, there is a lens shaped body of fresh water which floats on the seawater underneath. The claim is that the rising sea levels are contaminating the fresh-water lens with seawater.

These claims of blame ignore several facts. The first and most important fact, discovered by none other than Charles Darwin, is that coral atolls essentially “float” on the surface of the sea. When the sea rises, the atoll rises with it, and when the sea falls, they fall as well. Atolls exist in a delicate balance between new sand and coral rubble being added from the reef, and sand and rubble being eroded by wind and wave back into the sea.

When the sea falls, more sand tumbles from the high part, and more of the atoll is exposed to wind erosion. The atoll falls along with the sea level. When the sea level rises, wind erosion decreases. The coral grows up along with the sea level rise. The flow of sand and rubble onto the atoll continues, and the atoll rises. Since atolls go up and down with the sea level, the idea that they will be buried by sea level rises is totally unfounded. They have gone through sea level rises much larger and much faster than the current one.

Given that established scientific fact, why is there water incursion into the fresh water lenses? Several factors affect this. First and foremost, the fresh water lens is a limited supply. As island populations increase, more and more water is drawn from the lens. The inevitable end of this is the intrusion of sea water into the lens. This affects both wells and plants, which both draw from the same lens. It also leads to unfounded claims that sea level rise is to blame. It is not. Seawater is coming in because fresh water is going out.

The second reason for salt water intrusion into the lens is a reduction in the amount of sand and rubble coming onto the atoll from the reef. When the balance between sand added and sand lost is disturbed, the atoll shrinks. This has two main causes — coral mining and killing the wrong fish. The use of coral for construction in many atolls is quite common. At times this is done in a way that damages the reef as well as taking the coral. This is the visible part of the loss of reef, the part we can see.

What goes unremarked is the loss of the reef sand, which is essential for the continued existence of the atoll. The cause for the loss of sand is the indiscriminate, wholesale killing of parrotfish and other beaked reef-grazing fish. A single parrotfish, for example, creates about half a tonne of coral sand per year. Parrotfish and other beaked reef fish create the sand by grinding up the reef with their massive jaws, digesting the food, and excreting the ground coral.

In addition to making all that fine white sand that makes up the lovely island beaches, beaked grazing fish also increase overall coral health, growth, and production. This happens in the same way that pruning makes a tree send up lots of new shoots, and in the same way that lions keep a herd of zebras healthy and productive. The constant grazing by the beaked fish keeps the corals in full production mode.

Unfortunately, these fish sleep at night, and are easily wiped out by night divers. Their populations have plummeted in many areas in recent years. Result? Much less sand.

The third reason for salt water intrusion into the lens is the tidal cycle. We are currently in the high part of the 18 year tidal cycle. The maximum high tide in Honiara in 2008 was about 10 cm higher than the maximum tide in 1996, and the highs will now decrease until about 2014. People often mistake an unusually high tide for a rise in sea level, which it is not. There has been no increase in the recorded rate of sea level rise. In fact, the global sea level rise has flattened out in the last couple years.

What can be done to turn the situation around for the atolls? There are a number of essential practical steps that atoll residents can take to preserve and build up your atoll, and protect the fresh water lens:

1. Stop having so many kids. An atoll has a limited supply of water. It cannot support an unlimited population. Enough said.

2. Catch every drop that falls. On the ground, build small dams in any watercourses to encourage the water to soak in to the lens rather than run off to the ocean. Put water tanks under every roof. Dig “recharge wells”, which return filtered surface water to the lens in times of heavy rain. Catch the water off of the runways. In Majuro, they have put gutters on both sides of the airplane runway to catch all of the rainwater falling on the runway. It is collected and pumped into tanks. On other atolls, they let the rainwater just run off of the airstrip back into the ocean …

3. Conserve, conserve, conserve. Use seawater in place of fresh whenever possible. Use as little water as you can.

4. Make the killing of parrotfish and other beaked reef grazing fish tabu. Stop fishing them entirely. Make them protected species. The parrotfish should be the national bird of every atoll nation. I’m serious. If you call it the national bird, tourists will ask why a fish is the national bird, and you can explain to them how the parrotfish is the source of the beautiful beaches they are walking on, so they shouldn’t spear beaked reef fish or eat them. Stop killing the fish that make the very ground under your feet. The parrotfish and the other beaked reef-grazing fish are constantly building up your atoll. Every year they are providing tonnes and tonnes of fine white sand to keep your atoll afloat in turbulent times. You should be honoring and protecting them, not killing them. This is the single most important thing you can do.

5. Be very cautious regarding the use of coral as a building material. An atoll is not solid ground. It is is not a constant “thing” in the way a rock island is a thing. An atoll is an eddy, an ever-changing body constantly replenished by a (hopefully) unending river of coral sand and rubble. It is a process, wherein on one side healthy reef plus beaked coral-grazing fish plus storms provide a continuous stream of coral sand and rubble. This sand and rubble are constantly being added to the atoll, making it larger. At the same time, coral sand and rubble are constantly being eaten away, and blown away, and eroded away from the atoll. The shape of the atoll changes from season to season and from year to year. It builds up on this corner, and the sea washes away that corner.

And of course, if anything upsets that balance of sand added and sand lost, if the supply of coral sand and rubble per year starts dropping (say from reef damage or coral mining or killing parrotfish) or if the total sand and rubble loss goes up (say by heavy rains or strong winds or a change in currents) the atoll will be affected.

So if coral is necessary for building, take it sparingly, in spots. Take dead or dying coral in preference to live coral. Mine the deeps and not the shallows. Use hand tools. Leave enough healthy reef around to reseed the area with new coral. A healthy reef is the factory that annually produces the tonnes and tonnes of building material. You mess with it at your peril.

6. Reduce sand loss from the atoll in as many ways as possible. This can be done with plants to stop wind erosion. Don’t introduce plants for the purpose. Encourage and transplant the plants that already grow locally. Reducing water erosion also occurs with the small dams mentioned above, which will trap sand eroded by rainfall. Don’t overlook human erosion. Every step a person takes on an atoll pushes sand downhill, closer to returning to the sea. Lay leaf mats where this is evident, wherever the path is wearing away. People wear a path, and soon it is lower than the surrounding ground. When it rains, it becomes a small watercourse. Invisibly, the water washes your precious sand into the ocean. Invisibly, the wind blows the ground out from under your feet. Protect your island. Stop it from being washed and blown away.

7. Monitor and build up the health of the reef. You and you alone are responsible for the well-being of the amazing underwater fish-tended coral factory that year after year keeps your atoll from disappearing. Coral reseeding programs done by schools have been very successful. Get the kids involved in watching the reef. Educate the people that they are the guardians of the reef. Talk to the fishermen.

8. Expand the atoll. Modern coastal engineering has shown that it is quite possible to “grow” an atoll. The key is to slow down the water as it passes by. The slower the water, the more sand builds up. Slowing the water is accomplished by building low underwater walls perpendicular to the beach. These run out until the ends are a few metres underwater. Normally this is done with a geotextile fabric tubes which are pumped full of concrete. In the atolls the similar effect can be obtained with “gabbions”, wire cages filled with blocks of dead coral. Wire all of the wire cages securely together in a triangular shape, stake them down with rebar, wait for the sand to fill in. It might be possible to do it with old tires, fastened together, with chunks of coral piled on top of them. It will likely take a few years to fill in. Here’s a before and after picture of the system in use on a beach (not an atoll), taken three years apart. Note the low height and triangular shape of the wall extending out from the beach and continuing underwater (made of 3 concrete-filled geotextile fabric tubes). This triangular shape does not attempt to stop the water currents. It just slows them down and directs them toward the beach to deposit their load of sand. Eventually, the entire area fills in with sand.

Of course to do that, you absolutely have to have a constant source of sand … like for example a healthy reef … with lots of parrotfish. That’s why I said above that the single most important thing is to protect the fish and the reef. If you have beaked fish and a healthy reef, you’ll have plenty of sand and rubble forever. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.

Coral atolls have proven over thousands of years that, if left alone, they can go up and down with any sea level rise. And if we follow some simple conservation practices, they can continue to do so and to support atoll residents. But they cannot survive an unlimited population increase, or unrestricted fishing, or overpumping the water lens, or unrestrained coral mining.

On global sea level rise levelling off: University of Colorado at Boulder’s Sea Level Change

On Darwin’s discovery: Darwin, C., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, 1887

On the same topic: Xue, C., Malologa, F. (1995) Coastal sedimentation and coastal management of Fongafale, Funafuti, Tuvalu, SOPAC Technical Report 221

On the cause of erosion in Tuvalu: Tuvalu Not Experiencing Increased Sea Level Rise, Willis Eschenbach, Energy & Environment, Volume 15, Number 3, 1 July 2004 , pp. 527-543

Melting ice is pouring off Greenland and Antarctica into the sea far faster than was previously realised because of global warming, new scientific research reveals today.

The accelerating loss from the world's two great land-based ice sheets means a rise in sea levels is likely to happen even more quickly than UN scientists suggested only two years ago, the findings by British scientists suggest.

Although floating ice, such as that in the Arctic Ocean, does not add to sea-level rise when it melts as it is already displacing its own mass in the water, melting ice from the land raises the global sea level directly. At present it is thought that land-based ice melt accounts for about 1.8mm of the current annual sea level rise of 3.2mm – the rest is coming from the fact that water expands in volume as it warms. But the new findings, published online today in the journal Nature, imply that this rate is likely to increase. (The Independent)

The 2009 “super El Nino” predicted by some may be a “fizzle” according reports attributed to NASA JPL’s Climatologist Bill Patzert. I wonder who he might be referring to when he says “eroding the credibility”? Hansen’s prediction perhaps?

GONE? The reddish-orange satellite markings visible at the equator during a class El Nino seem to have disappeared, says JPL. The red spots shown here, above the equator, depict a current. Image courtesy of NASA.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) — This year’s El Nino would be mild, resembling the pattern of 2006 and 2007, weather experts said in remarks published on Sunday.

The oscillation of hot water in the eastern Pacific Ocean is going to be a let-down, in terms of precipitation over a parched California, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) researcher Bill Patzert told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“This El Nino is definitely puny,” Patzert said , adding that this year’s pattern resembles the mild El Nino of 2006-2007, which left California’s snowpack and reservoirs short of what water experts had coveted: an end to five years of drought.

Although the jet stream pattern still shows that California might get a wet winter, the likelihood of floods and massive rains is diminishing, the paper quoted climatologists as saying.

“We’re planning for a dry 2010,” said Elissa Lynn, senior meteorologist for the state Department of Water resources, in an interview with the paper. Read the rest of this entry »

Parts of what is reported by Revkin is interesting as it appears there is no shortage of scientists providing all sorts of opinions on why the world has not been warming as expected. Trouble is, if the recent 10-year-long set of observations showing “non-warming” cannot be used to falsify AGW, then no 10-year-long set of any observation showing anything can be used to demonstrate AGW either.

Therefore there is no meaning in the just-released climate forecasts by the Met Office talking about “the odds of a 15-year pause” after analysing “how often decades with a neutral trend in global mean temperature occurred in computer modelled climate change simulations” (my emphasis).

In fact, some are fond to say that climate is a 30-year-long average of weather. Well, if that is true, all we should be scientifically able to talk about with any amount of knowledge, is the climate trends for… 1979.

ps Dr Mojib Latif says he “gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and officials each year“. There are 365 days, in most years. At what times during the year is then “climate science” studied at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, Germany? And shall we worry about the absence of private life for AGW scientist-advocates?

pps Shame to Revkin for publishing this absurdist remark by Joe Romm: “We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get“. Why? Because Romm is a known “muffler” himself. (OmniClimate)

Global warming may not be the cause of the most severe dust storm to blight eastern Australia in 70 years, an Australian climate scientist says.

Monash University geography and environmental science head Nigel Tapper said that, while a decade of drought and a month of strong westerly winds combined to send possibly millions of tonnes of dust from the Lake Eyre basin over NSW, Victoria and Queensland, the jury was still out on whether climate change was responsible.

"We've always had dust storms," Professor Tapper said.

"There's plenty of evidence that, during the last ice age, there was lots of dust being blown around the southern hemisphere, a lot of it coming from Australia.

"So to that extent you can't say that it's related to greenhouse-induced climate change in the last few years. (SMH)

There was an interesting article on August 3 2009 by Andy Revkin [thanks to Benny Peiser for alerting us to this] titled “Nobel Halo Fades Fast for Climate Change Panel”. This article includes the following text:

”…… scientists who question the likelihood of a calamitous disruption of the Earth’s climate accuse the panel of cherry-picking studies and playing down levels of uncertainty about the severity of global warming.

‘It just feels like the I.P.C.C. has gone from being a broker of science to a gatekeeper,’ said John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a former panel author.

In an interview, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the I.P.C.C., rejected the charge of bias, noting layers of transparent peer review. “

John Christy is completely correct on his view of the IPCC as a gatekeeper. The IPCC WG1 report is a biased advocacy document. I have documented the gatekeeper format of the WG1 2007 IPCC report in my Appendix in

There was a useful proposal in the Revkin news article that should be pursued. In the article, it states

“……..Dr. Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Victoria, Australia [proposed] that the group [in his proposal this would be the IPCC scientists] write more focused, expeditious reports on issues relevant to setting policy. Dr. Nicholls suggested that the panel could eventually shift to reviewing the flow of research on more basic questions through a constantly updated Wikipedia-style system.”

This is an good idea, but the ability to update a Wikipedia-style system must be available to all climate scientists, not just a cherrypicked subset of this community. (Climate Science)

The ditching of a desert renewable-energy project shows just how difficult it is to maintain our standard of living while pleasing the purists. Maybe we shouldn't even try.

Anyone who has set foot on a dry lake bed in California's Mojave Desert knows the meaning of barren. There's not much growing or moving there — just hot sun beating down on parched earth. So why not use it for a solar farm, since nothing else can be done with it?

That train of thought has led a number of solar power companies, backed by utilities and encouraged by the federal government, to propose big energy facilities in the wide-open spaces between Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Huge swaths of that land are under federal ownership, and a law passed in 2005 opened up most of those federal holdings for solar and wind energy projects.

A land rush has ensued, with firms such as Oakland Calif.-based BrightSource Energy staking out sites to develop solar power plants.

The technology to be used is called "solar thermal." Rather than convert sunlight directly into electricity (photovoltaics), solar thermal plants use mirrors to heat water with sunlight and create steam to power electric generators.

Of all the solar technologies in use or on the drawing board, solar thermal is the cheapest per watt. With the right economies of scale, it also seems to stand the best chance of getting the price of its power down to that of coal-fired plants.

But those economies of scale are part of the problem for the dominant left wing of the environmental movement. One activist, Santa Monica attorney Sheila Bowers, told the Los Angeles Times that the new solar power firms "are trying to perpetuate the old Big Energy paradigm into the renewable-energy era ... They have a monopoly agenda."

Then there are the preservationists of the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) school. (IBD)

Washington, DC - The U.S. Senate can increase the number of Americans with health insurance by tens of millions -- at zero cost to taxpayers -- by rejecting cap-and-trade legislation passed by the U.S. House, according to a policy analysis just released by The National Center for Public Policy Research.

In June, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act – commonly referred to as the Waxman-Markey bill after its principal sponsors, Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) – which seeks to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 percent by 2050.

The National Center for Public Policy Research contends the Waxman-Markey bill would increase energy prices, slow the economy and result in higher unemployment. This, in turn, the group says, would increase the number of uninsured.

"For every one percentage point increase in unemployment, 1.1 million Americans lose their health insurance coverage," said David A. Ridenour, Vice President of The National Center for Public Policy Research. "With the Waxman-Markey legislation projected to cost an average of 1.15 million jobs annually between 2012 and 2030, this could translate into tens of millions of Americans losing their health insurance coverage. The best health care reform is doing nothing at all – at least on cap-and-trade."

Loss of health insurance coverage, however, is only one of the negative health consequences that would result from a Waxman-Markey-style bill, according to Ridenour. (Press Release)

GENEVA - The World Health Organisation (WHO) has drastically cut the maximum amount of radon -- a naturally occurring gas -- that should be permitted in homes because of strong evidence it causes lung cancer.

In a WHO Handbook on Indoor Radon issued on Monday, it called for public health authorities and the construction industry to make great reductions in exposure to radon, calling it a "major and growing public health threat in homes."

Radon is a cancer-causing radioactive gas that humans cannot see, smell or taste. It arises from the natural decay of uranium and can seep into homes through cracks in basements or cellars. (Reuters)

Our newest Knowledge Base article gets into measurement ranges for EtO monitoring instrumentation. In so doing, we had to take a hard look at certain OSHA documents, as well as examine some literature references.

More often than you would think, references cited in a particular article don't necessarily support the contention being made. We link to a comprehensive report from 1989, and most of its content is still excellent. Too bad the authors who referenced it couldn't quote it properly.

One of the more popular pages on Interscan's website has been built out with more content and more links. Check it out. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Over the past 30 years, Americans have gotten a lot heavier thanks primarily to technological progress in the food industry, which has provided an abundance of tasty, caloric treats. The champions of public health are now fighting fat with the same tools that helped turn the smoky city of the “Mad Men” era into the clean-aired boroughs of Bloomberg.

New York City is running anti-soda ads where a brown liquid streaming out of a bottle turns into fat in a glass. The New York Times editorial page wants sterner stuff. It suggests that these ads are distinctly inferior to “the best move when it comes to soft drinks — a tax on sodas and other sugary beverages.”

Many public interventions can be readily dismissed because they are costly and ineffective. Yet the battle against cigarettes has taught us that taxes and advertising together can dramatically reduce an unhealthy habit. The public sector could indeed dramatically drive down the consumption of sugary sodas, but should it? Is public paternalism appropriate? If the state wants to champion health, should it use stomach-churning public service messages or sin taxes? (Edward L. Glaeser, NYT)

In leukemia patients, excess fatty tissue allows cancerous cells to avoid destruction by chemotherapy drugs, a study in mice suggests.

The findings, combined with tests on human leukemia cell lines, may explain why previous studies have shown that obese children and adults with leukemia are more apt to relapse than their leaner counterparts, scientists report in the Oct. 1 Cancer Research.

Other research has hinted that obesity may play a role in other cancers as well, says Steven Mittelman, an endocrinologist at the University of Southern California and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. (ScienceNews)

There is new evidence that depression, obesity and alcohol abuse or dependency are interrelated conditions among young adult women but not men.

Using data collected when young adults were 24, 27 and 30 years of age, a team of University of Washington researchers found that nearly half the sample of 776 young adults tracked during the study met the criteria for one of these conditions at each of these time points.

"The proportion of people with all three of these conditions at any one point is small," said Carolyn McCarty, the lead author of a new study and a UW research associate professor of pediatrics and psychology. "For women there is a great deal of overlap between these common emotional and health problems that span early adulthood. Men may develop one of these conditions but they don't tend to lead another one later on."

"These conditions are major public health problems. They take a toll on families and community and are not subject to quick fixes. It requires a lot of time, money and energy to treat them." (University of Washington)

NEW YORK - People who suffer a traumatic brain injury from a car crash or other mishap are more apt to survive if they had been drinking at the time of the injury, according to a study published Monday.

The finding "raises the intriguing possibility" that giving alcohol to brain injured patients may improve outcome, the study team suggests in the Archives of Surgery.

Alcohol and driving "is and will always continue to be bad -- it contributes to over 40 percent of traffic-related fatalities," first author Dr. Ali Salim of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles emphasized in an email to Reuters Health.

"However, of those patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury who survive their initial insult, those with alcohol in their system seem to have a slight survival advantage compared to those without alcohol in their system," Salim noted. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Sticking to a Mediterranean diet rich in fish, olive oil, legumes, fruit and vegetables is heart healthy, but expensive, maybe even prohibitively so, new research from Spain hints.

Consequently, "upstream" measures -- such as taxes on unhealthy foods and/or subsidies on healthy foods -- may be needed to "increase the probability of adopting a healthy dietary pattern leading to better health and disease prevention among the population," Dr. Maira Bes-Rastrollo told Reuters Health. (Reuters Health)

BERLIN - Cancer is a bigger killer in developing countries than tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS combined and a "tsunami" of the disease threatens to overwhelm the nations worst equipped to cope, experts said on Tuesday.

While only about 5 percent of global resources for cancer are spent in developing countries, the burden of the disease is far greater there, they said, with 60 percent of last year's 7.6 million cancer deaths occurring in poorer nations.

Women-specific cancers like breast and cervical cancer, which account for more than a quarter of all female deaths worldwide, could be dramatically cut in low and middle-income nations by improving awareness and detection, they said.

"There are tens of millions of people living with cancer or at risk of cancer in low and middle-income countries who do not benefit from all these advances," said Anne Reeler, who launched a report on cancer in poorer countries at the ECCO-ESMO European cancer congress in Berlin. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - People who say their asthma gets worse when the weather changes are on to something, new research hints.

Dr. Alan Baptist of the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor and his colleagues found that pediatric emergency department visits for asthma attacks jumped after increases -- or decreases -- in humidity, while rises in temperature also sent more asthmatic kids to the ER.

"When we ask patients what set off your asthma...they'll say it was the change in the weather," Baptist noted in an interview with Reuters Health. And while the National Institutes of Health lists weather changes as a risk factor for worsening of asthma symptoms, he and his colleagues note in their report, no one has yet investigated whether this is true, independent of known asthma aggravators like pollution and airborne allergens. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Very light-skinned children who tan in the sun develop significantly more moles than their peers who stay pale in the sun, new research shows.

The number of moles a person has is among the strongest risk factors for developing melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, so the findings suggest that parents of these children should take extra care to protect them from the sun's rays, Dr. Lori A. Crane of the University of Colorado in Denver and her colleagues conclude in a report in the Archives of Dermatology.

While sunburns are known to increase melanoma risk, Crane and her team note in the report, the effect of tanning on skin cancer risk isn't clear; in fact, some studies suggest it's protective. (Reuters Health)

SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency filed a complaint against VF Corp, owner of the North Face brand, on Tuesday, claiming that more than 70 styles of shoes advertised as bacteria-killing by the company had not been registered with the agency.

"The company sold the products making unsubstantiated claims that the footwear would prevent disease-causing bacteria," said the EPA in a statement.

In order for a manufacturer to make such claims, the EPA first tests, and then registers the pesticide.

The brands from North Face included "Fury Gore-Tex XCR," "Hedgehog SCR" and "Off-Chute," advertised as preventing bacterial and fungal growth for their wearers.

Although North Face did incorporate registered pesticides into the shoes, the claim that they would protect users against bacteria went too far, the EPA said. (Reuters)

STRONG evidence is emerging that, together, governments have probably dodged another environmental bullet at a time when global climate change agreement is under threat.

Human-induced ozone depletion, which once threatened massive disruption to life on Earth, is lessening on a global scale, the European Space Agency said yesterday.

''We found a global slightly positive trend of ozone increase of almost 1 per cent per decade in total ozone from the last 14 years,'' said Diego Loyola, of the German Aerospace Centre.

Their finding comes as this year's Antarctic ozone hole appears likely to level out below the worst 2006 benchmark, confirming predictions that repair is likely, though distant. (SMH)

In 2005, the US Congress gave NASA a deadline of 2020 to detect, track and characterize 90% of near-Earth objects bigger than 140 meters. This is the size of objects thought to pose a significant risk if they strike in urban areas.

In 2008, NASA spotted a total of 11, 323 objects of all sizes. However, the goal of 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters across can’t be reached without additional funding. NASA has calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would cost about $800 million between now and 2020, either with a new ground-based telescope or a space observation system. (Jack Dini, Hawaii Reporter)

Pity Britain’s organic farmers. According a full-page report in today’s Guardian, they’re close to going bust. Sales of organic produce have fallen 13% per cent in a year (organic vegetables, for example, are down £34.1 million). So Green and Blacks, Rachel’s and Yeo Valley are all fighting for their survival, and the firms are meeting today in London to help co-ordinate a fightback.

...

But what has caused the demise of the organic food industry? Well, no surprises, it was the recession. Andrew Baker, the chief executive of Duchy Originals (the Prince Of Wales’s expensive food company) told the Guardian: “The organic industry hasn’t done a good enough job of informing consumers about the benefits, so it was vulnerable in recession when the choices we make are based on price.”

Aha! So the recession has forced people to make choices based on price, has it? Welcome to planet earth, Andrew. That’s what most of us have been doing our entire consumer lives. And it seems the well-off, organic brigade, are now learning how to look after the pennies too. Sure, they won’t admit at their trendy soirées that the chicken they are serving is Waitrose own-brand battery hen - but then the guests won’t able to tell it’s not organic, Normandy-raised, and corn-fed either. (I wonder, what the hell else are you supposed to feed a chicken?) We know that organic food isn’t more nutritious. And it’s also pretty obvious that it doesn’t taste any better. It’s clear, then, that the organic food industry has been quiet over consumer benefits because, besides feelings of righteous smuggery, there aren’t any.

But the decline of organic food has broader implications. It shows that when you are strapped for cash, eco-worry simply moves further down your list of priorities. You want to pay the electricity bills, you don’t want to default on your mortgage, and the kids need to be fed - so what if their vegetables are coated with insecticide? (Will Heaven, Daily Telegraph)

LONDON - Organic food in Britain is often too expensive in comparison with non-organic products and the price gap must narrow if the struggling sector is to return to strong growth, the Organic Trade Board said.

Organic bread costs nearly a third more than non-organic, while the differential for Gala apples was 69 percent.

"More than a 60 percent premium is a big decision for any shopper," Finn Cottle, trade director for the organic sector umbrella body, told a conference on Tuesday.

After years of double-digit growth the organic sector, which also includes products like make-up and clothes, hit a barrier last year when the economic downturn kicked in. (Reuters)

These eight are the usual suspects - Green Alliance, Friends of the Earth, the Woodland Trust, WWF, the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and Greenpeace.

We’ve written before about the influence of NGOs in today’s world, and the roles they seem to have positioned themselves into. When Conservative leader, David Cameron gave a press conference at Greenpeace’s HQ, the relationship between the political establishment is (symbolically, at least) transformed. Once the thorn in the side of Western governments, the organisation was now operating as a de-facto PR consultancy, lending the Tories’ energy policies the appearance of legitimacy.

In October last year, we asked whether the arguments made by Oxfam’s campaigns were consistent with reality, and suggested that in fact they end up encouraging a very selfish understanding of ‘injustice’ in the world, as though it were experienced, not by people actually suffering injustice or inequality, but by the organisation’s would-be donors. More worryingly, the development agency increasingly appeared to be taking an anti-development line, pushing for policies that seemingly aimed to ‘protect’ traditional lifestyles on the basis that they were ‘environmentally sustainable’. But as we pointed out, this may well preclude the possibility of the ‘beneficiaires’ of Oxfam’s campaigns from asserting their own political interests, as well as realising their own ambitions for development.

There is no denying that the NGO has increased its influence over the past few decades. The questions we have concern the legitimacy of the new configuration of domestic and international politics, and the kind of elite politics it generates, and why this is happening.

The power of NGOs begins with people putting cash in tins rattled at passers by on the High Street. Increasingly, this process - once an activity of concerned citizens giving up their spare time - has become professionalised, and now consists of teams of people employed to accost shoppers with direct-debit forms, and stories and pictures about the plight of animals and African babies. They want to you to sign up, now, and rarely have any literature which you may take away with you. When the shopper gets home, he or she still is likely to be contacted by the same fund-raising teams who make calls on behalf of the same NGOs with the same stories, on the basis that they earn a commission.

Handing over cash to an organisation that putatively aims to protect Things with Wings seems like an innocuous gesture. Who wouldn’t want to protect the whale/dolphin/puffin? And indeed, if you’re worried about donkeys or elephants, there is nothing wrong with giving money to an organisation which goes about making life comfortable for creatures. But, increasingly, organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (the RSPB - part of the Green Alliance) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF - also part of the alliance) aren’t engaging in the simple provision of sanctuary for bunny rabbits, nor even lobbying for a bit more recognition for the rights of grasshoppers, but are instead directing their campaigning funds at the entire business of politics. These green NGOs turn a routine concern for fluffy and feathered animals into a political force. Did the pensioner who signed up to a £5 a month direct debit to ’save the creature’ imagine that it would be spent directly on a tiger, owl, and badger, or were they aware that it would be spent on delimiting the possibilities of democratic expression? And did those who forked out cash to aid Third World development imagine that it would be spent on precisely the opposite?

It ends with governments funding NGOs to lobby them. Groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF are the beneificiaries of £millions of EU funds.

Back to the demands of the Green Alliance. The intention is to get each of the UK’s political parties to include the following statements in their manifestos: (Climate Resistance)

What if the underlying problem is exactly their rejection of the value of skeptical / unorthodox / anti-dogmatic thinking?

And what if by that very rejection, they are actually revealing nasty undertones that risk placing AGW centuries against Science and against centuries of philosophical advances too, starting from the Enlightenment if not from the times of Ancient Greece?

That is one’s feeling having read an extraordinary page in Italy’s biggest business daily “Il Sole24Ore”, in particular in its separate Sunday section dedicated to cultural and scientific matters. In the Sunday, August 2 2009 edition, page 35 is an almost solid praise of skepticism, described as

That’s the skepticism that has reached us through the Enlightenment. Those that refuse skepticism in the realm of science then, and denigrate it, and recklessly rely on an “Unquestionable Authority“, they are ultimately placing themselves outside of Science itself, and outside of nearly four hundred years of philosophy if not more.

What is obvious is that the “skeptical attitude” of ancient and modern philosophers is antithetical to current fashionable AGW, where an incredibly dogmatic rigidity leads to cries of lese-majeste for example when anybody dares to doubt prophecis of upcoming catastrophes, or some of the conclusions of the latest IPCC report, or even the very dangers of anthropogenic climate change.

(All articles appear here in my own translation. Unfortunately they do not seem to be available on the internet)

Let’s start from Remo Bodei’s “An Enlightenment to turn back on“. UCLA’s History of Philosophy Professor Bodei invites readers to rediscover some oft-forgotten aspects of the Enlightenment, such as being aware of the “limits of Reason“, and of the importance of a skeptical approach to Knowledge.

Bayle is Pierre Bayle, a famous-no-longer XIX-century French philosopher. Bayle considered knowledge as an endless process whose only “true source” is reality rather than formal logic. “General theories” are therefore impossible, and Bayle dedicates large swaths of his 1697 “Dictionnaire historique et critique” to sarcastically compare wisdom and stupidity in order to debunk seemingly unassailable “truths”. Because what is “true” today is almost certain to become “false” sometimes in the future.

According to Leopardi, “to know” means “to discover which truth has now become false”, that is, “to learn more about our own ignorance”. And so as time progresses, we will know more and more, that is less and less, because each new “positive truth” will eventually join this paradoxical increase in the “knowledge of ignorance“.

It is customary at this stage to stop and wonder if all the above be an invitation to let go of Knowledge, since we will never be able to reach any “Truth“. But the answer can only be a resounding “No”. In fact, Bodei mentions “pyrrhonism“, the ideas of ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho, unwilling to choose between the existence (dogmatism) and the denial of existence (stoicism) of an Absolute Truth.

“We can have opinions, but certainty and knowledge are impossible“, Pyrrho said. This would make it absurd to be offended by people having different opinions than ours. If anything, the skeptical invitation is to avoid all dogmatisms, even and perhaps especially those related to scientific discoveries, and to allow us instead the luxury of the possibility to change our mind.

It t all gets explained in Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge Nicla Vassallo’s “Who’s afraid of skepticism?“

There is no sense, no legitimacy in claims that do not pass the obstacle represented by the virtuous “skeptical challenge”. So for example we can not take as incontrovertible dogma, or even as scientific knowledge, AGW claims that are compatible with everything and its opposite, able to explain the warming and then the cooling too, and any future heating and/or cooling.

That’s because if we are not able to tell a natural warming from an anthropogenic one, how can we then claim to have seen AGW?

Rigidity, dogmatism, the claim of possessing an absolute truth that no one may dare challenge, they all do not belong to the wise, the philosopher, the sensible person.

In Kenya, a country severely affected by climate change, meteorologists cooperate with traditional rainmakers. The idea is both to benefit from their understanding of nature and to create public awareness.

A century ago, British colonial authorities would put them in jail for sorcery, but in an age of global warming, the Kenya Meteorology Department (KMD) has decided to partner up with the traditional rainmakers of the Nganyi community. (CoP15)

If you worry about what Congress could do in its health care legislation, you should be terrified by the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which could cost millions of Americans their health insurance.

Nearly 15 million Americans are now looking for work, bringing the official unemployment rate to 9.7% – the highest in 26 years. If the Senate passes Waxman-Markey, that rate will go much higher.

And employment and access to health insurance are inextricably linked.

There’s no debating a cap-and-trade system would harm the economy. The only question is how costly it would be.

The CBO low-balled the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June, saying it would cost just $175 per household per year. This is the “less than the price of a postage stamp per day” figure we keep hearing.

But to arrive at this number, the CBO had to ignore employment and income losses from cap-and-trade – costs estimated to be thousands of dollars per household per year. After figuring that in, yes, cap-and-trade would cost less than a postage stamp per day, but only if you’re buying a $17.50 Express Mail stamp.

The Heritage Foundation provides a more comprehensive estimate, projecting a family of four would pay an additional $4,609 per year by 2035. Annual job losses would average 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030, with job losses rising to nearly 2.5 million in 2035. (David A. Ridenour, Townhall)

I HAVE been asked several times ‘why am I so sceptical of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis’? There are many reasons, some of which I have documented in previous articles at this weblog, but these have relied on sometimes complex calculations which I admit can be difficult to appreciate. So I would like to outline here a few of my reasons based only on simple consistency with the AGW proponents’ own data. (Michael Hammer, JenniferMarohasy.com)

The First World’s biggest Climate Liars are gathering at the UN in New York. Their Big Lies are the EU and now G8 “targets” of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees C (now inevitable whatever we do) and of limiting atmosphere greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration to 450 ppm CO2-e (it is already at a dangerous 475 ppm).

A further Big Lie is that an atmospheric GHG concentration of 450 CO2-e will ensure a safe planet – a recent report from the prestigious UK Royal Society informs us that the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level must be returned “to 320ppm [about 370 ppm CO2-e] to ensure permanent planetary health”.

The Mainstream media won’t generally report the utter falsity of these 3 Big Lies for obvious reasons – perhaps there would be rioting in the streets. The racist, genocidal leaders of the First World are pretending to tackle climate change while cementing in place a worsening climate genocide that is predicted to kill 10 billion non-Europeans this century due to unaddressed, First World-imposed global warming. (Gideon Polya, MWC)

We are – at the same time – thrillingly close and sickeningly far from solving our planetary fever. The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday to discuss man-made global warming, in a United Nations building that will soon be underwater if they fail. They all know what has to happen: their scientists have told them, plainly and urgently.

As man-made warming rises by up to 2.4C, all sorts of awful things happen – whole island-states in the South Pacific will drown, for example – but we can stop it. If we turn off the warming gases, the temperature will stabilise. But if we go beyond 2.4C, global warming will run away from us, and we will have lost the "Stop" button. The Amazon rainforest will dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon stored in the trees; the vast amounts of warming gases stored in the Arctic will be belched into the atmosphere; and so 3C will turn ineluctably to 4C, which will turn to 5C, and the planet will rapidly become a place we do not recognise. (The Independent)

WASHINGTON - The U.S. government will begin requiring big companies to monitor and report greenhouse gas emissions, officials said on Tuesday, a move that could make it easier for federal regulators to cut emissions if Congress does not pass a climate change bill.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said its new reporting system will help it understand where greenhouse gas emissions originate and ultimately help reduce emissions.

"This is a major step forward in our effort to address the greenhouse gases polluting our skies," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "The American public, and industry itself, will finally gain critically important knowledge and with this information we can determine how best to reduce those emissions." (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would be prohibited for one year from clamping down on some new carbon dioxide pollution under legislation being crafted on Tuesday by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. (Reuters)

AUSTIN — Scores of Texas politicians, regulators and industry representatives took aim Tuesday at proposed federal legislation to combat climate change, saying it would cripple the state's economy.

The proposed bill would “make every product that uses energy more expensive, forcing hardworking Texans to bear substantial new costs, and kicking a hole in our state's economic strength,” Gov. Rick Perry said.

Perry's comments opened a daylong hearing hosted by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, Public Utility Commission and Railroad Commission.

It came on the same day as President Barack Obama and other world leaders met at the United Nations in an attempt to build momentum for an international deal to cut emissions of gases linked to global warming. (Houston Chronicle)

UK Prime Minister (unelected) Gordon Brown, whose ascent to power has sadly coincided with the start of the global financial crisis, has given a little less than three minutes of his time to a blatantly orchestrated gimmick related to Avaaz.org’s “The Global [AGW] Wake Up Call“.

Mr Brown has agreed to appear in a video taking up a phone call from an Avaaz.org’s activist.

Of course it was just perchance that video recording facilities were available exactly where Mr Brown happened to pick up his phone. And of course the visage of the Avaaz.org activist was remarkably well lit, again due to chance.

The video has several low points: first Mr Brown is just too eager to agree on everything, thereby defying the point of the “wake-up call” (it’s like bringing a bucket of sand to the Sahara…).

Secondly, there is a pathetic attempt to claim that “hundreds of people” had shown up in Parliament Square. Despite plenty of video recording equipment, we are only shown a handful of the “hundreds”. There is mention of 300 activists in this eWeek article, but again no pictures or videos of them. Here’s a flickr page full of them (I wonder if there were more than 100 people at most?).

According to Google News, the eWeek article has been published at around 12.30PM London time, remarkably only a few minutes after the Brown phone call took place. And finally, what did Mr Brown promise? Why, to go to Copenhagen himself…the very thing Avaaz.org wanted to persuade him to do.

President Barack Obama’s speech on global warming to the United Nations yesterday was based on fantasy. Here are some quotes from the speech followed by the reality.

Obama “…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”

Reality Global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000. Temperatures have been flat since then.

Obama “Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.”

Reality Sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago. The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the 19th and 20th century average.

Obama “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

Reality There is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

Obama “More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.”

Reality There is no upward global trend in major droughts. Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

Obama “On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.”

Reality Some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

President Obama’s policy prescriptions are energy rationing and energy poverty disguised as growth and prosperity. The emissions reductions that he promises the United States will make through cap-and-trade legislation are dead in the water in the U. S. Senate and would not survive a second vote in the U. S. House. If enacted, cap-and-trade would consign the economy to perpetual stagnation and make the U. S. into a second-rate economic power.

His policy prescription for poor countries is to promise them massive “financial and technical assistance”. The track record of paying off poor countries is that it has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders and bureaucracies with billions and tens of billions of dollars, but has done nothing to help those countries become prosperous. What these countries need is free markets and abolishing barriers to trade. The global warming policies advocated by the Obama Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress would raise trade barriers and foster energy poverty throughout the world. Energy rationing is not the way forward and is not a message of hope for the poorest people in the world, who lack access to electricity and modern transportation. (Myron Ebell, Financial Post)

European leaders who once saw Barack Obama's election as a new dawn in the battle against global warming are becoming concerned, three months ahead of a key UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

One sign of this is the revival of the idea for a "carbon tax" to protect Europe's industry and environment, amid fears that Europe's commitments on tackling climate change will not be matched in the United States and elsewhere.

"I confess that I am very worried by the prospects for Copenhagen (in December). The negotiations are dangerously close to deadlock at the moment," EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso told a think-tank in New York on Monday.

"This may not be a simple negotiating stand-off that we can fix next year. It risks being an acrimonious collapse, delaying action against climate change perhaps for years. And the world right now cannot afford such a disastrous outcome," he warned. (EUbusiness)

In this week’s battle of the summits, Pittsburgh wins. As the world’s top 20 political figures, leaders of the so-called G20 group of nations, open two days of summit work in Pittsburgh tomorrow, it can now safely be concluded that one issue has been resolved.

In the great public policy battle between global economic growth and global climate change, the G20 is going for growth. And if growth trumps climate at the G20, that spells the end of any hope of a major climate agreement in Copenhagen in December.

Copenhagen was essentially sidelined yesterday at another event, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Climate Change Summit in New York. There, along with Chinese leader Hu Jintao, U.S. President Barack Obama more or less shuffled climate control policy off into the great dreamscape of unattainable plans and long range objectives. Like equality for all and peace in our time, the world will have to wait for sweeping and binding climate policy.

On the urgency of climate policy, Mr. Obama used language with enough drag coefficient to stop an ocean liner, even one with the momentum and power of climate change.

“The journey is long and the journey is hard,” said Mr. Obama, leaving his audience bogged down in rhetorical sludge. “Difficulty is no excuse for complacency,” said Mr. Obama. “Unease is no excuse for inaction. And we must not allow the perfect to become the enemy of progress.” And, in another exhortation, he said: “Each of us must do what we can when we can to grow our economies without endangering our planet — and we must do it together.”

While Mr. Obama repeated many of the usual dramatic claims of looming climate disaster and catastrophe, growth comes first, climate second. “We seek sweeping but necessary change in the midst of a global recession, where every nation’s most immediate priority is reviving their economy and putting their people back to work.” (Financial Post)

A growing rift between the US and Europe is overshadowing Tuesday’s United Nations climate change summit in New York, further damping hopes for a breakthrough at the Copenhagen talks in December.

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish environment minister, lowered expectations, saying: “Things are looking difficult and too slow, that is the fact.”

The downgrading of expectations comes as relations between the US and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.

In Brussels, European Union officials have grown increasingly frustrated at the US stance, saying it has fallen short on both its level of ambition to reduce emissions and on offering aid to developing nations.

“So far, we thought the basic problem was the Chinese and the Indians. But now I think the problem appears to lie most clearly with the US,” a European Commission official said. Talks were “not going well”. (Financial Times)

As world leaders and their top advisers convened in Manhattan for Tuesday’s United Nations summit on global warming, there were hints of accord on a few issues that could form the basis for a climate deal in December in Copenhagen – something less that a full-blown treaty but sufficient to avoid total breakdown of an international effort. (More on those hints can be found below and on our Green Inc. blog.)

But in remarks by officials, there were also displays of the deep rifts that persist between rich countries and emerging powers. How this all shakes out in the 77 days leading up to the Copenhagen meeting remains to be seen. But for the moment, the familiar roadblocks to a climate deal appear to be strong and holding.

Most notable today was the continuing insistence by top officials from developing countries, including the president of South Korea and representatives of China and India, that the world’s established powers need to provide money and technology to help developing countries shift away from fossil fuels. (dearth)

Beijing will raise the stakes in the race to agree a global climate change treaty by using a summit of world leaders in New York today to announce that China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is ready to take new measures to cut pollution.

Although more than 100 leaders will attend today's conference, the focus will be on China's premier, Hu Jintao, and US President Barack Obama, who together may hold the fate of the treaty in their hands. (The Independent)

Can China make a great green leap forward? - The world’s most polluting country has pledged to end its energy-squandering ways. Beijing’s commissars have the power to do it

The Chinese once rode to work on bicycles. Millions of pedalling commuters in Chinese cities would, decades ago, crowd out ancient lorries and limousines carrying Communist Party officials. The choice of two wheels wasn’t a fashion for Lycra-clad ethically green mobility. It was poverty. Given the choice, today’s Chinese commuters would rather burn petrol while seated in air-conditioned cars than inhale the foul fumes of China’s cities, while burning body fat.

The Chinese need to get back on their bikes. Not back-pedalling to a bleak past of rural poverty and backyard steel mills but a great leap forward. It must leapfrog from a neo-Victorian world of metal-bashing heavy industry to a low-intensity, low-carbon world of electric vehicles, wind turbines, light industry, organic farming and bicycles.

That is what many in the rich world would like. At the UN in New York, Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, yesterday made a gesture that might begin to bridge the gap between our carbon-neutral fantasy and the real world of energy choices. He set out targets to reduce China’s energy intensity by pledging to “cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020”.

The first point to make is that this is not a pledge to cut emissions. If China’s economy is expanding at a rate of 7-8 per cent per annum, China’s carbon dioxide emissions will increase because the country is powered by coal: it must burn more tonnes as it moves forward. China’s leaders have made clear that their primary goal is to lift people out of poverty. Up until yesterday, the best China had offered the UN climate talks was a vague promise that CO2 emissions will plateau before 2050. (Carl Mortished, The Times)

World leaders have failed to break new ground in climate talks, making the chance of finalizing a full global treaty in Copenhagen in December remote.

The stalemate followed brief optimism that China's President had travelled to a one-day UN climate summit in New York with firm commitments to reduce the growth in the emissions China produces.

But the hype about a new direction from the biggest developing economy – which would have pressured developed countries, notably the United States, Europe and Canada, to commit to binding cuts and offer huge sums to compensate poorer nations for restraining emissions – was not fulfilled.

Instead, Chinese President Hu Jintao left his promises vague or emphasized domestic measures rather than binding international commitments – and the focus for December's negotiations turned toward a pared-down, Plan B agreement-in-principle, rather than a treaty. (Globe and Mail)

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has undermined his own argument that his emissions trading legislation must be passed before Copenhagen, admitting its defeat has not hampered his role in international climate-change talks.

The Government has previously insisted the legislation's early passage is needed to maximise its muscle for Copenhagen as well as to provide business certainty.

But Mr Rudd, in New York for United Nations climate talks, drew on his recent Senate defeat to refute suggestions US influence is weakened by the stalling of legislation in the US Senate.

''Let me give you a parallel,'' he told CNN. ''Australia is very active in climate change … We are into these negotiations big time. But you know something? Our domestic emissions trading scheme was also voted down by our Senate a very short time ago. That doesn't impede me from being active in these negotiations, and my observations of President Obama is that it doesn't impede him either.''

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said Mr Rudd was ''telling Australians one thing at home and telling Americans another thing abroad''. Mr Rudd's statement to the Americans ''takes away his own argument for a [trading] system before the world comes to an agreement,'' he said. There should be global agreement first ''so as our action is not futile by merely acting alone''.

Mr Hunt said Mr Rudd's case for the legislation passing in November was also weakened by the shaky state of the international negotiations. ''Copenhagen is looking a little less certain. It is likely to be a process rather than an outcome on the day,'' Mr Hunt said. The US legislation was not likely to be passed until early next year, he said. (The Age)

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public — and to policy makers — can be frustrating, they say. (NYT)

UNITED NATIONS - Czech President Vaclav Klaus sharply criticized a U.N. meeting on climate change on Tuesday at which U.S. President Barack Obama was among the top speakers, describing it as propagandistic and undignified.

"It was sad and it was frustrating," said Klaus, one of the world's most vocal skeptics on the topic of global warming.

"It's a propagandistic exercise where 13-year-old girls from some far-away country perform a pre-rehearsed poem," he said. "It's simply not dignified."

At the opening of the summit attended by nearly 100 world leaders, 13-year-old Yugratna Srivastava of India told the audience that governments were not doing enough to combat the threat of climate change.

Klaus said there were increasing doubts in the scientific community about whether humans are causing changes in the climate or whether the changes are simply naturally occurring phenomena.

But politicians, he said, seem to be moving closer to a consensus on climate change.

"The train can't be stopped and I consider that a huge mistake," Klaus said. (Reuters)

In Guatemala, farmers growing coffee are forced to move production to higher altitudes where less land is available. The good news: conditions for high quality coffee are actually better. (CoP15)

The Scientists Speak:
Al Gore: Master of Truth or Politics?: A New Zealand climatologist discusses the Nobel Prizewinner's climate science credentials. Featuring Dr. Chris de Freitas, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Editorial:
On the Potential Extinction of High-Elevation Species: If the world were to begin warming again, would earth's high-altitude plants and animals find themselves "in danger of being pushed off the planet," as NASA's James Hansen has claimed they would be?

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 732 individual scientists from 429 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Rawson Lake, Northwestern Ontario, Canada. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Extinction (Real-World Observations - Plants: Stationary): In addition to migrating to more suitable locations, earth's plants have other ways of successfully responding to various pressures that might otherwise lead to their extinction.

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: Dropwort (Nagy and Tuba, 2008), Orchardgrass (Nagy and Tuba, 2008), Rice (Yang et al., 2009b), and Robusta Poplar (Lagomarsino et al., 2009).

Journal Reviews:
The Status of Earth's Ocean Heat Content: Is it going up, down or holding relatively steady? ... and what is the significance of the result?

There is a new paper which addresses the issue of surface albedo and how this affects surface air temperatures (thanks to Dev Niyogi for alerting us to it!). The article is

Huwald, H., C. W. Higgins, M.-O. Boldi, E. Bou-Zeid, M. Lehning, and M. B. Parlange (2009): Albedo effect on radiative errors in air temperature measurements, Water Resour. Res., 45, W08431, doi:10.1029/2008WR007600.

“Most standard air temperature measurements are subject to significant errors mainly due to sensor heating by solar radiation, even when the measurement principle is accurate and precise. We present various air temperature measurements together with other measurements of meteorological parameters using different sensor systems at a snow-covered and a vegetated site. Measurements from naturally ventilated air temperature sensors in multiplate shields are compared to temperatures measured using sonic anemometers which are unaffected by solar radiation. Over snow, 30 min mean temperature differences can be as large as 10°C. Unshielded thermocouples were also tested and are generally less affected by shortwave radiation. Temperature errors decrease with decreasing solar radiation and increasing wind speed but do not completely disappear at a given solar radiation even in the presence of effective ventilation. We show that temperature errors grow faster for reflected than for incident solar radiation, demonstrating the influence of the surface properties on radiative errors, and we detect the albedo as a variable with major influence on the magnitude of the error as well as a key quantity in possible error correction schemes. An extension is proposed for an existing similarity regression model to correct for radiative errors; thus, surface-reflected shortwave radiation is identified as a principal source of error and the key variable for obtaining a unique nondimensional scaling of radiative errors.”

This paper further documents one of the sources of spatially non-representative temperature data that we highlighted in our papers

The Huwald et al 2009 paper shows that if the local surface characteristics, such as albedo, change over time, the long term trends in surface temperatures will have a non-spatially representative component if the larger scale landscape did not have the same changes. (Climate Science)

In the Guardian yesterday, the paper’s US Environmental correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg writes:

However, as Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts point out at the latter’s blog, there are many reasons to be cautious about taking the claim at face value. It is the product of one dataset, and is not supported with data from satellites. Indeed, according to the UAH satellite record, the average temperature of the world in August was just 0.23°C above the average.

But that’s not what really piqued our interest. Goldenburg’s story finishes,

The difference between ‘18.4 percent’, and ‘18.4 percent below’ is 63.2 percent. But of course, it may well just be a typo than a reflection of Goldenberg’s misunderstanding of the science. But notice another interpretation. The original quote speaks of the 2009 ice extent representing the continuation of a general trend, ‘consistent with a decline of August sea ice extent since 1979′, ie, not as much ice as there was, once. But this is transformed in Goldenberg’s copy, and becomes ‘the continuing retreat in Arctic sea ice over the summer’, which is palpably not true.

Perhaps you think we’re nit-picking by pulling Goldenberg up for what might well be the result of an honest misunderstanding married to a slack rewording of the press release. But what is strange is her apparent complete lack of surprise at the notion that summer ice has declined by a factor of five in such a short time. And that’s after two years of recovery. … (Climate Resistance)

WASHINGTON - As the United States' power grid becomes more sophisticated, electricity rates will need to rise to reflect periods of intense energy use and to encourage consumers to change their electricity habits, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Monday.

Chu said currently most local electricity rate commissions view themselves as consumer advocates and try to keep electricity prices as low as possible.

"Hopefully that will evolve somewhat, so that they begin to fold in some of the real costs of electricity generation and electricity use," Chu said at conference focused on creating a "smart grid." (Reuters)

UNITED NATIONS - Ecuador, a member of OPEC, is willing to preserve a tropical forest with reserves of 900 million barrels of oil if rich countries pay it about $360 million a year to keep the petroleum in the ground.

Under the proposal, the international community would pay Ecuador an annual fee equal to about half of the total cash it would generate from selling the crude. Leaving the oil under the Yasani rainforest would prevent the release of up to 410 million tons of carbon. (Reuters)

CCS: all about the ‘right rocks’ - A report from the Third Annual Coal Tech conference, held on September 15-16, on steps to carbon storage in Australia.

The Third Annual Coal Tech conference hosted a range of insightful presentations on coal related technologies, including clean coal and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies; coal-to-liquids; underground coal gasification; and syngas.

James McGregor, energy systems manager, CSIRO Division of Energy Technology, gave a timely update on the organisation’s progress with CCS for coal fired power generation.

And, global specialist in geological storage solutions for carbon dioxide, Schlumberger Carbon Services, shared its expertise on the parameters of capture and storage. The company’s Andrew Garnett drew from its 80 year history in subsurface evaluation in the oil and gas industry, to provide a picture of what development may look like in Australia’s coal fired electricity sector. (AJM)

The government's claim to be a world leader in developing clean coal technology has been dented after officials warned privately that public spending constraints could force them to cut the £10bn programme.

The Guardian has learned that Ed Miliband's energy and climate change department is under pressure from the Treasury to scale back its ambitions for new carbon capture and storage (CCS) coal plants.

Officials have admitted that securing the necessary investment is "challenging in the current climate". (The Guardian)

WASHINGTON - A senator from the U.S. Corn Belt filed an amendment on Tuesday that would bar federal regulators from considering how land is used overseas when they write rules to expand use of biofuels.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin filed the amendment while the Senate was considering the annual funding bill for the Interior Department and related agencies, said an aide. It was not immediately clear when the amendment would be debated. (Reuters)

A power company's plans to create energy by harnessing power from sea waves suffered a setback after an 80-tonne generator capsized off the coast.

A spokeswoman for Trident Energy, who developed the pioneering technology, said the experimental wave generator was being towed out to sea to begin a year-long offshore trial when the accident happened yesterday near Southwold, Suffolk.

The technology, which was featured in Leonardo Di Caprio's eco-documentary, The 11th Hour, was being tested in the sea to gather detailed information on how the machine performed.

A Coast Guard spokeswoman added the floating generator was being towed to its new location five miles off Southwold when it capsized at 12.35pm yesterday. (Press Association)

The backward attacks on Norman Borlaug - Who could possibly think that Borlaug’s ideas for feeding millions were a bad thing? Green activists, that’s who.

The death of Norman Borlaug on 12 September was widely marked as a sad loss. Borlaug’s development and introduction of high-yielding crop varieties into Mexico, India and Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century helped avert a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions. Instead of hundreds of millions of people starving, food production in these and other developing countries shot up as a result of his work.

Nobody could complain about that, right? In fact, in amongst the lavish praise for Borlaug there has been an environmentalist critique of his work – and the underlying message is that, somehow, Borlaug helped to make things worse rather than better. It takes some extraordinarily twisted thinking to conclude that the preservation of hundreds of millions of lives could be a bad thing, but green commentators have given it their best shot. (Rob Lyons, sp!ked)

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It was 1950. World War II, with its 40 million deaths, was over. Doctors were conquering smallpox with vaccines, protecting millions from malaria and typhus with new pesticides, and treating infections with the miraculous new antibiotics.

Then we realized that humanity was still at massive risk—from hunger. With death rates falling radically, there was suddenly a real possibility that medical progress could be overwhelmed by lack of food. Experts predicted a billion people would soon starve in Asia, followed by similar disasters in Latin America and Africa.

Enter Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The young plant breeder from the University of Minnesota had been hired by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, because Mexico could no longer feed itself.

The semi-dwarf wheat that made him famous was a cross between Mexican wheats and a dwarf Japanese variety that didn’t fall over even under the weight of enormous seed heads. It was also disease-resistant. Given fertilizer, the new wheat could produce four times as much food per acre. It was also indifferent to day-length, so it could be planted widely across the world’s good soils. The International Rice Research Institute used the same semi-dwarf strategy for similarly high-yielding new rice varieties. .

The Green Revolution was born. Over the ensuing decades, crop yields were tripled with improved seeds, industrial fertilizer, irrigation pumps and pesticides. The Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s seeds, and the research stations and agricultural extension services he founded, saved a billion human lives.

Tragically, Borlaug’s triumph has been tarnished by complaints from the environmental movement that should have applauded him. The Greens complained the high-yield seeds benefited big farms more than small ones. Studies show both benefited, but the biggest gains went to billions of consumers worldwide through lower-cost food abundance. And to the wildlife that wasn’t displaced by their habitat being destroyed for cropland.

The Greens complained the new seeds needed too much fertilizer. But high-yield wheat takes no more fertilizer per ton of food than low-yield wheat—high yields just grow the grain on far less land

Borlaug told writer Gregg Easterbrook that “most Western environmentalists have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. . . . If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals. . .”

I suspect much of the environmental movement blames Norman Borlaug for preventing the massive famines that would have solved the “population problem” quickly in the 1960s—with starvation. But the starving would have raped the wildlife habitat before they allowed their children to die. Today, we’ve solved the population problem with affluence.

Not surprisingly, Borlaug spent the last decades of his richly productive life working to bring the Green Revolution to Africa. He hadn’t yet succeeded when death claimed him. Fortunately, however, the challenge of a second Green Revolution has now been picked up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with enormous support from the Warren Buffet family.

Hopefully, they will be able to lead the completion of Dr. Borlaug’s work: feeding the hungry and saving the planet’s wildlife with science. It’s the only food-success strategy humanity has ever found. (Dennis T. Avery, CGFI)

President Obama argued on TV talk shows this weekend that his proposed mandate for everyone to buy health insurance – or face a large financial penalty – is not a tax increase:

The real question is whether this tax increase is a good idea. My answer is no. If others disagree, then fine, let’s have that debate. But denying plain truths suggests that advocates of Obamacare are trying to pass something that Americans would not endorse if it were structured and explained clearly.

As my colleague Jefferey Myron noted earlier today, when grilled by George Stephanopolous on whether the so-called “individual mandate” is a tax increase, Obama replied, “Nobody considers that a tax increase….You can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase…My critics say everything is a tax increase.”

Where do Obama’s critics get these wacky ideas? From a bunch of nobodies, that’s who!

Here’s a question: if an individual mandate is not a tax, why exempt anybody? If an employer mandate isn’t a tax, why exempt small businesses? (Michael F. Cannon, Cato at liberty)

The world is fat, which is part of the reason that processed foods — the kind that can sit in the cupboard for three years without going bad — have been demonized. Instead, health advocates claim fresh fruits and vegetables are the key to healthy living.

And while eating fresh fruits and vegetables may be ideal, it isn’t always realistic, Eric Decker , a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst said.

Decker, one of 15 experts who spoke about the current state of food and public health at the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Symposium at the University of Minnesota on Monday, said America’s fattest people also tend to be its poorest, and while fresh organic foods may be more nutritious, they don’t come cheap. (Minnesota Daily)

THE CRITICAL time to intervene to prevent the development of obesity is during the pre-school years and in early adolescence, a conference on sport and exercise medicine has been told.

With one in five Irish teens either overweight or obese, Cork GP Dr John O’Riordan argued strongly that it was vital to intervene early in a child’s life with healthy eating and activity programmes.

He recommended the widespread use of programmes like littlesteps.eu – a guide to eating well and being active – as well as An Bord Bia’s Food Dudes initiative and the Action for Life exercise programme for primary schools.

Dr O’Riordan was addressing the sixth annual conference of the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine, RCPI and RCSI in Dublin at the weekend on the topic of Obesity in Childhood: Primary Care Perspective. (Irish Times)

DENVER -- Normal values for 10 body composition parameters -- including a proposed replacement for body mass index (BMI) -- have been established from NHANES data, a researcher said here.

Separate reference values were calculated for three major racial groups and both genders for such measures as total body bone mineral content, trunk-limb fat mass ratio, and total body fat percentage, reported Thomas Kelly, PhD, of Hologic in Bedford, Mass.

In a poster presentation here at the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research meeting, and in a full publication this week in the PLoS ONE online journal, Kelly and colleagues provided normal ranges for the body composition measures based on whole-body dual x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) studies conducted as part of the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Kelly and colleagues were particularly enthusiastic about one of these measures, the ratio of fat mass to height squared, also known as the fat mass index (FMI).

In their PLoS ONE report, they suggested it could eventually replace BMI as a more accurate Action Points
Explain to interested patients that many clinical decisions as well as research depends on knowing the normal range of body composition including the relative amounts of fat, muscle, bone, and other tissue for people of the same age and height.

Explain that these data were taken from a high-quality survey of about 20,000 people who underwent detailed physical exams as well as interviews.
indicator of excess body fat and, therefore, of obesity-related health risks. (MedPage Today)

Under the contentious proposed tax on soft drinks, a can of soda might cost more than that crumpled dollar bill in your pocket.

The tax, which has yet to make its way through Congress, on sugary soft drinks won’t be limited to soda pop, however. Energy drinks, sports beverages, juices and iced-tea will be taxed, as well, according to The New York Times. Diet sodas are exempt from the tax despite their potentially harmful artificial sweeteners.

As Americans, we’re somewhat accustomed to governmental regulation of what goes into our bodies. Cigarettes and alcohol are far from healthy — we’ve known that for decades. To dissuade our intake of such products, the government has affixed sin taxes — special taxes levied on products viewed as objectionable — to these goods. Sugar-laced beverages might not carry the carcinogenic toxins of a smoldering cigarette, but they’re still a prime culprit responsible for America’s expanding waistline and a contributor to our millions of cases of heart disease.

Some — particularly, the soda pop industry — view this new tax as unnecessary and question its real effectiveness. The causes behind obesity are complex and diverse. (Pitt News)

The video shows dozens of children playing “Red Rover” and singing “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” It is a summer scene that took place nearly 50 years ago.

The video is adapted from a 15-minute home movie taken in 1960 at a vacation Bible school. The First Baptist Church in my hometown, Rome, Ga., found the movie and posted it on its Web site as part of preparations for its 175th anniversary.

As the film moves from a church classroom to a rolling lawn outside, it offers quick glimpses of childhood friends and my mother, who was one of the teachers. You can tell the movie’s age by the clothes (all of the girls wear dresses) and the tail fins on the cars. But one other big difference becomes evident as more and more kids scamper across the frame — not a single one is overweight.

I don’t think of 1960 as being a particularly health-conscious time. More than half of American men smoked, and cholesterol was not a common term.

But it also was not a time when childhood obesity was a public health concern. Today it is a virtual epidemic. (Robert Powell, Virginia Business)

In 1977, county attorney David Richter and assistant county attorney Joseph Hrvol worked side by side with police to investigate and “solve” the notorious murder of a former police officer in Pottawattamie County, Iowa. The prosecutors fabricated evidence and used it to charge and convict Curtis McGhee and Terry Harrington, sending them to prison for 25 years.

After the convictions were overturned for prosecutorial misconduct, McGhee and Harrington sued the county and prosecutors. The defendants in that civil suit invoked the absolute immunity generally afforded prosecutors to try to escape liability. After the Eighth Circuit ruled against them, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

On Friday, Cato joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the ACLU on a brief supporting the men unjustly imprisoned. We argue that prosecutors should be responsible for their role in manufacturing a false “case,” just as police officers would be under the same circumstances. As the Court has held, prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity only during the prosecutorial phase of a case, not its investigatory phase. Were prosecutors to receive absolute immunity here, citizens would have no protection from or recourse against prosecutors who frame the innocent by fabricating evidence and then using that evidence to convict them.

To read Cato’s brief in the case of Pottawattamie County v. McGhee, see here. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

DUBLIN, Sept 18 - Independent News & Media is likely to close its flagship London title The Independent by Christmas, the publishing group's second biggest shareholder Denis O'Brien said on Friday.

"There's no point in us as a company subsidising a newspaper that really nobody wants to read in the United Kingdom," O'Brien told Bloomberg TV in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Irish Economic Forum.

"It's not a relevant newspaper anymore and this newspaper's going to be closed by Christmas," said O'Brien, who has been at odds with the company's board over plans to refinance a 200-million-euro debt issue that was meant to be paid in May. (Reuters)

A couple of interesting “greenie” articles…if only because one doesn’t have to follow through to each and everyone of their conclusions to agree with their observations: much of what is being touted as solution to (alleged) planetary environmental problems is “a way of making you think” begging the question of “what difference does it make?“

NEW YORK, Sept. 21 -- Newsweek launched a ranking of the greenest companies in America in its current issue and Hewlett-Packard took top honors. The Newsweek Green Rankings is the first-ever report based on companies' actual environmental footprint, policies and practices. The twelve-page report in the September 28 issue, (on newsstands September 21), features a green ranking of America's 500 largest publicly-traded companies as measured by revenue, market capitalization and number of employees. On Newsweek.com, can search and sort the data in several ways, analyze the detailed methodology of the study and submit and review comments. (PRNewswire)

BILLINGS, Mont. — Facing the combined pressures of climate change, hunters and lax protections, 600 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park are going back on the threatened species list under a federal court order issued Monday.

The ruling highlighted climate change's devastation to whitebark pine forests, which produce nuts that some grizzlies rely upon as a mainstay. (AP)

Industrial biotechnology has the potential to save the planet up to 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per year and support building a sustainable future, a new WWF report found.

Industrial biotechnology applications are already widely used in everyday life. They help reduce the amount of time needed to bake fresh bread, increase the yield in wine, cheese and vegetable oil production and save heat in laundry washing. Industrial biotechnology could help create a true 21st century green economy, the report states.

WWF Denmark identified the potential to be between 1 billion and 2.5 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2030, more than Germany's total reported emissions in 1990.

"Low carbon biotech solutions are a good example of hidden or invisible climate solutions that are all around us already today but are easy to overlook for policymakers, investors and companies." says John Kornerup Bang, Head of Globalization Program at WWF Denmark and coauthor of the report. (Reuters)

The recession and political initiatives to cut emissions lead to significant decline in carbon emissions this year, a study from the International Energy Agency shows. The world has seen nothing like this for 40 years. (CoP15)

As the real-world impacts of climate change begin to materialize and regulation of greenhouse gases appears more likely, corporate America has begun to grapple with a challenging question: How do you quantify the risks associated with climate change?

The answer depends on one's perspective. But companies are beginning to show increased willingness to disclose the extent to which they're contributing to global warming and what they're doing to keep it from harming their business. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

NEW YORK -- A federal appeals court ruled Monday that states trying to combat global warming can sue six electric utilities to force them to cut the greenhouse gases emitted by their power plants in 20 states.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reinstated the lawsuits after a lower court judge tossed out the actions brought in 2004 by eight states, New York City and three land trusts.

The lawsuits accuse the companies of being among the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world and sought to force them to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

The appeals court said the lower court judge erred in ruling that the issue was a political one that was not meant to be decided by the courts. (Associated Press)

As the U.S. Senate gears up to consider the Waxman-Markey climate protection bill this fall, we should expect to hear heightened denials about the reality of human-induced global warming.

New research suggests, however, that the global warming debate is much less about science than it is about ideology.

The Center for Climate Change Communications at George Mason University recently joined former Eugene resident Tony Leiserowitz, now director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, to produce a study describing where Americans stand on global warming. It found that the public can be grouped into six audiences, each of which responds to the issue in its own unique way.

The first group, which the researchers call the Alarmed, constitutes 18 percent of Americans. Members of this group are convinced of the reality and seriousness of global warming and are addressing the problem through their personal, purchasing and political activities. (Bob Doppelt, The Register-Guard)

The North Atlantic nation wants wetland restoration to be assessed for emission reduction units at December's UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. (CoP15)

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair stresses that 10 million jobs could be created by 2020, if developing nations agree to big cuts in greenhouse gases. (CoP15)

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today that he sees more bipartisan support for climate change legislation than for health care reform.

Chu, who spoke to reporters this morning during a conference on the smart grid, was asked whether Congress would rally around energy better than it has around health care. "Oh yeah," Chu said emphatically, adding that there was an intrinsic, vital link between the U.S. economy, its role in global efforts to curb greenhouse gases and domestic climate change legislation.

"This is the prosperity of the United States," Chu emphasized. "I see agreement on both sides of the aisle... that the United States should be leading the way in the green energy economy and that that is going to be the basis" for future growth. (Energy & Environment)

The cap-and-trade movement, spooked by the pounding health care reform took over the August break, is scrambling to persuade nervous Democrats they won’t suffer politically for taking another tough vote this year.

“When you get your butt kicked, like we did [after the House energy vote], it focuses the mind,” said Steve Cochran, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Climate Campaign. “We found out that this is not something to hide from but something to lean on — even in places where coal is king and Blue Dogs were perceived to be running for cover.”

Climate bill supporters say they have spent the summer building precisely the kind of grass-roots network that health care didn’t have, with grass-roots operations in more than 20 states.

A “climate war room” — funded by more than 60 labor, business, faith, agriculture and environmental groups — has been set up to coordinate ad dollars and communications. (Politico)

The way to get a deal in Copenhagen is to accept that the developing countries should not make the same commitments as the rich countries, says the Australian Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong. (CoP15)

MONTREAL — Canada should be doing much more to tackle climate change, and consider closing down the oilsands projects in northern Alberta, the head of an international scientific panel on climate change said Monday.

Canada should follow the European Union, which has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In contrast, Canada’s plan is to only cut emissions by 20% below 2006 levels by 2020, a target that many scientific and environmental observers say is far too low.

Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed 26% between 1990 and 2006. (Canwest News Service)

The United Nations' commitment to securing an international climate deal will be on full display Tuesday, as world leaders come together in New York to discuss how best to address global warming. But the event, arranged by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, highlights both the possibilities and obstacles Ban and his deputies face in orchestrating the historic pact.

Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister for climate and energy, will be chairing the pivotal U.N. climate talks in December and is in New York this week. She said in an interview that people often fixate on the world's major carbon emitters, and forget that any final agreement must involve powerful and small countries alike.

"It's not just a bilateral U.S.-China thing, or even a trilateral U.S.-China-Europe thing," Hedegaard said. "It's 192 countries."

Ban has made a binding, international commitment to cutting greenhouse gases a central pillar of his tenure. (Juliet Eilperin and Colum Lynch, Washington Post)

A new YouTube channel is aimed at opening up the UN climate conference in Copenhagen (COP15) to the public. Google Maps and Google Earth offer guided video tours that illustrate climate change.

A new YouTube channel will allow users of the online video sharing website to share their thoughts on climate change before and during December’s UN climate change conference (COP15) in Copenhagen.

Through the channel, users can contribute their own opinions and questions, and view and respond to videos by climate change opinion makers. The channel will also allow users to watch videos that go behind the scenes of the conference itself. (CoP15)

Fulvio Conti, chief executive of Enel, Italy's largest power utility, says that the U.N. needs to give market forces free rein as it designs the next phase of a global carbon cap and trade market. "Common sense," says Conti, dictates that Western companies have unlimited ability to reduce their carbon footprint as cheaply as possible, namely by investing in offset projects in developing countries like China, where carbon dioxide reduction projects are relatively inexpensive. (Andy Stone, Forbes)

A sense of urgency that has led to Tuesday’s meeting of world leaders in New York has been driven by an increasingly troubling consensus of scientific opinion.

Nearly all scientific experts agree that allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise, unchecked, will lead to substantial – some say dramatic – warming.

“The biosphere that provides us with life is being put under enormous pressure,” says Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK and holder of distinguished academic posts at Oxford and Cambridge universities.

“Changes are already occurring – increased desertification, changes to rainfall patterns.”

The gap between the glacial pace of negotiations and the rapid progress of global warming is now endangering the safety of the planet, scientists are warning. Martin Parry, of Imperial College, London, says: “That is what is at stake. I don’t think people have realised. We are nowhere near tackling this.”

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the body of the world’s leading climate scientists set up by the UN – warming beyond a level of about 2ºC above pre-industrial levels would lead to severe damage to natural systems, provoking floods, droughts, storms and sea level rises. (Financial Times)

NEW YORK, Sept 21 - Small island states that could face devastating storms and floods from climate change urged on Monday that global temperature increases be sharply curtailed from goals set recently by industrialized countries.

Leaders of the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, a group of 42 island countries, said the rest of the world should agree to agree to cut emissions at a U.N. meeting later this year to limit temperature increases well below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels.

Temperatures have already risen about 0.8 degree C from pre-industrial times. (Reuters)

Let it not be said that no one is using eye-catching stunts to raise awareness about global warming. The activist group the Yes Men is distributing 85,000 free copies of a “special climate edition” of the New York Post throughout New York City today, with the goal of, well, terrifying people into action against climate change.

The popularly promoted accounts reduce a complex climate change process to a simplistic global warming argument based on carbon dioxide and some other compounds in the atmosphere that absorb infrared (IR) radiation. The promoters employ atmospheric temperature measurements of relatively short term trends, extenuate the influence of natural events and emphasize a greenhouse-related rationale. But their greenhouse analogy is scientifically incorrect, and they offer no clean supporting data from experiments carefully designed to minimize confounding by natural influences. Their scientific transgressions originate from misapplication of the electromagnetic spectrum, disregard for three fundamental laws of physics, and the misrepresentation of greenhouse operation and absorption behavior of photons. (Tom Kondis)

I’ve unearthed from the YouTube dustbin what I believe to be some significant video of man-made global warming alarmist extraordinaire Stephen Schneider’s appearance on a May 1978 episode of the old television series, In Search Of…. For this episode, the show was In Search Of…The Coming Ice Age.

I used to watch In Search Of… when I was a kid. I loved it. It was mystery documentary series, and one of the things that made it cool was that it was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, i.e. Spock. In Search Of… did shows on such topics as Bigfoot, The Bermuda Triangle, UFO captives, and The Ogopogo Monster. As a skeptic looking back on the show today, I find it hilarious that the show included climate alarmism alongside those campy topics.

The episode in question, titled, The Coming Ice Age, has much that is worthy of discussion, and features several scientists warning of a coming ice age, including Dr. Gifford Miller, Chester Langway, and Dr. James Hays. But for the purposes of this post I’ll focus on Stephen Schneider who is featured in Part Three. (Gore Lied)

LONDON - A coalition of more than 500 international companies on Tuesday urged rich countries to commit to "immediate and deep" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions at U.N. climate talks to help combat global warming.

The group of some of the world's biggest energy companies, retailers and manufacturers said a failure to agree a strong new climate deal at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December would erode confidence and cut investment in low-carbon technology.

In a statement issued as nations met for a climate summit at the United Nations in New York, the coalition said economic development will be impossible without a stable climate. (Reuters)

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. climate chief says China is poised to join the European Union in claiming "front-runner" status among nations battling climate change.

Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press that China is leaping ahead of the United States with domestic plans for more energy efficiency, renewable sources of power, cuts in vehicle pollution and closures of dirty plants.

Chinese President Hu Jintao will announce new plans to fight global warming at a U.N. summit on climate change on Tuesday. (AP)

NEW DELHI: In what could turn into a deal-breaker at the climate talks, US and other industrialized countries in the Major Economies Forum meet
at Washington this week told India that they wanted to do away with the Kyoto Protocol, a move opposed by India.

The industrialized countries proposed that the developing world should agree to the Australian proposal, which demands all countries, regardless of development levels, take on commitments and fix timetable by when they start reducing emissions. It demands that all key countries, including India, curb their emissions by 2020.

The Indian delegation led by the PM’s special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, pointed out that the official negotiations at UN were already grappling with the question of strong mid-term targets for rich nations under the second phase of Kyoto Protocol and to do away with the protocol was not part of the mandate of negotiations. US and some other industrialized countries have for long opposed strong mid-term targets and demanded China and India get on board on a long term agreement. (Times of India)

In an effort to revive the rapidly fading global warming climate scam, the UN has enlisted fossil fuel-guzzling supermodel Gisele Bündchen to lead the counter attack. Ms. Bündchen has been named an official UN Environmental Ambassador by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), one of the parent organizations of the infamous IPCC.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director said: “Gisele is among a handful of talented individuals and personalities that have a truly global reach. She is also a committed and passionate environmentalist. UNEP is delighted to welcome her on board as a Goodwill Ambassador so that with her help, we can make environmental action a global brand and a life-style choice, from New York to Nairobi and from Sao Paolo to Shanghai.”

Director Achim Steiner announced Gisele's new position as UNEP's new Goodwill Ambassador, with Girl Scouts in the background wearing life vests to symbolize rising sea levels. How adorable! The Brazilian supermodel herself said, “Climate change is something we can't deny? It affects all of us. At the end of the day, it's our planet ? we all have to feel accountable.” She went on to ask developing countries including China and India to invest more in green technologies.

So what's wrong with the beautiful Gisele wanting to help save the planet from the ravages of CO₂ induced global warming? Well her message might be more convincing if she showed signs of understanding the tripe she is shilling for. If she truly believes that the world is at risk from demon CO₂ she has a strange way of demonstrating it. According to the Boston Globe:

Evidently Ms. Bündchen is also in the process of getting her helicopter pilot's license. We guess that for celebrity supermodels “going green” means driving a Prius to the private helicopter pad for a quick hop to the airport, then boarding your private Gulfstream jet for a little international climate change fighting. Someone should clue the eco-bimbo in—living large and jetting around the world in your own private aircraft is not exactly leading by example. Reportedly, the UN will be publishing a web-based cartoon series called “GiGi and the Green Team,” portraying Gisele as a pollution-busting superheroine, an “environmental heroine, aiming to empower girls to protect the environment.” We think she's already cartoonish enough. Congratulations Gisele, this Crank of the Week is for you.

I am working to encourage the adoption of the assessment of vulnerability as a focusing approach for the climate community (as well as for colleagues that are involved in other types of environmental research). This is a much more useful and comprehensive bottom-up, resource-based approach to reduce societal and environmental risk to climate variability and change than relying on the use of multi-decadal global climate model projections.

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 advantage of the bottom-up, resource-based perspective is summarized in Table E.7 in

Pielke, R.A. Sr., and L. Bravo de Guenni, 2004: Conclusions. Chapter E.7 In: Vegetation, Water, Humans and the Climate: A New Perspective on an Interactive System. Global Change – The IGBP Series, P. Kabat et al., Eds., Springer, 537-538.

WASHINGTON - Environmental and pro-drilling advocates pitched dueling messages about expanded offshore oil and natural gas production to the U.S. Interior Department on Monday, as the comment period on a Bush-era energy plan came to a close.

The draft five-year offshore drilling proposal offered in the last days of the Bush administration would allow drilling along the East Coast and off the coast of California.

Drilling was banned in most of the offshore areas of the United States outside the Gulf of Mexico for more than 20 years until Congress allowed the prohibition to expire last year.

Environmental groups and some lawmakers have raised concerns about the impact increased drilling would have on coastal areas. (Reuters)

The nation and the coal industry must get more serious about research to ensure the use of so-called "clean coal," especially if the United States wants to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor said Monday.

Stabilizing the world's climate and preventing damage from global warming will require a "portfolio of strategies and technologies" to cut emissions, Granger Morgan told about 250 people at the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference in the Westin Convention Center, Downtown.

"Coal with carbon capture and sequestration will be an essential part of the solution," Morgan said.

Two other experts in coal usage agreed with Morgan, saying that capturing emissions from coal-fired power plants needs to be part of the solution because the nation relies on coal to generate about 50 percent of its energy needs. (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

While carbon capture and sequestration technology remains controversial, studies to delve deeper into it are ongoing in hopes of presenting one way to alleviate emission levels. A team from MIT has been studying a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technique called pressurized oxy-fuel combustion. This process converts the carbon dioxide emissions of a power plant into a pressurized liquid stream meant to be pumped underground. Team leader Ahmed Ghoniem of MIT claims that his team is the only one conducting an academic study of "pressurized combustion system for carbon dioxide capture."

A huge setback for this kind of technology that prevents it to be used widely is the need for energy in order to separate pure carbon dioxide from the mixture of gases emitted by a power plant. "Nobody in their right mind will jump into this and do it unless we can reduce the energy penalty and the extra cost, and only if it is mandated to reduce CO2 emissions," Ghoniem says. But the technology under observation promises to be more efficient than other systems, with the possibility of becoming 10 to 15 percent more efficient (it's now rated at three percent more efficient) than unpressurized CCS systems. MIT claims this could pave way for widespread acceptance of the CCS technology, although it needs to be demonstrated first to prove itself economically viable. (CleanTechnica)

Researchers at MIT have shown the benefits of a new approach toward eliminating carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions at coal-burning power plants.

Their system, called pressurized oxy-fuel combustion, provides a way of separating all of the carbon-dioxide emissions produced by the burning of coal, in the form of a concentrated, pressurized liquid stream. This allows for carbon dioxide sequestration: the liquid CO2 stream can be injected into geological formations deep enough to prevent their escape into the atmosphere.

Finding a practical way to sequester carbon emissions is considered critical to the mitigation of climate change while continuing to use fossil fuels, which currently account for more than 80 percent of energy production in the United States and more than 90 percent worldwide. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise by more than 50 percent worldwide by 2030. (ScienceDaily)

NEW HAVEN, W.Va. — Poking out of the ground near the smokestacks of the Mountaineer power plant here are two wells that look much like those that draw natural gas to the surface. But these are about to do something new: inject a power plant’s carbon dioxide into the earth. (NYT)

Might burning coal thousands of feet below the surface be the secret to making coal climate friendly?

That's what fans of underground coal gasification will be saying this week at several sessions and in the keynote speech at the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference, which goes through Wednesday. Momentum is growing worldwide to look closely at the idea, a 150-year-old technique of igniting seams of coal deep under the ground to produce electrical power or chemicals. It's a proven technology: Joseph Stalin launched the first national research program into the idea in 1928 and the Soviets used it for 40 years to produce power. Since then, cheap natural gas and shallow, easy-to-mine coal burned in traditional power plants have prevented the technique from taking off.

But gasifying coal underground is now a hot topic among power companies and scientists, with at least 10 pilot projects around the world planned or underway. The cost benefits and climate advantages are among the reasons that five countries run national research programs on the technique; is the United States falling behind on the next big fossil fuel technology? (Eli Kintisch, Science Insider)

LONDON - British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh will tell world leaders at the U.N. climate summit on Tuesday the aviation industry could halve its carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, a spokesman for the airline said on Monday. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON—Opponents of offshore drilling—including some dressed as salmon and a polar bear—delivered more than 250,000 postcards and letters to the Interior Department Monday on a proposal to open vast waters off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to oil and gas drilling.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar invited public comments on a sweeping blueprint for expanded offshore drilling that was initially proposed in the final days of the Bush administration. He didn't rule out expanded offshore drilling. But he criticized "the enormous sweep" of the Bush proposal, which envisioned energy development from New England to Alaska, including lease sales in areas off California and in the North Atlantic that have been off-limits for a quarter century. (Associated Press)

Two New Mexico nurses have paid a heavy price for following their consciences and the basic tenet of the nurse’s Code of Ethics — the ethical duty to protect and advocate for the rights, health and safety of patients. After unsuccessfully going up the chain of command at the Winkler County Memorial Hospital, a small West Texas hospital in Kermit, Texas, they made an anonymous report to the Texas Medical Board with concerns about a doctor selling his own sham herbal remedies to patients in the hospital’s emergency department and at a health clinic.

When the Texas Medical Board contacted the doctor to investigate him for poor quality of care, the doctor went to the Winkler County Sheriff who left no stone unturned to learn the identity of the nurses, including accessing confidential patient records and issuing a search warrant to seize their work computers. The whistle blower nurses were fired from their jobs, imprisoned and criminally prosecuted, and later let out on $5,000 bonds. They will finally face a jury trial next week for third-degree felony charges, carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years’ imprisonment and maximum fines of $10,000.

Experienced nurses, whose only “crime” was to report to the appropriate medical agency something they felt was medically unsound and unethical, were imprisoned, their livelihoods taken, and criminally prosecuted.

In America. (Junkfood Science)

I like listening to journalists talk about science, as such fields have parochial tests and models that can take years of devoted study to fully appreciate. Some of these insiders, like Steven Pinker, are good at communicating to a general audience, but most of the translation to outsiders comes from non-scientists simply because there are more of them, and some write very well.

Yet, I find many times, when these journalists digress from a specific subject, to science in general they are extremely naive or duplicitous. If you go to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, you invariably hear a bunch of caricatures of those who disagree with conventional wisdom on science—most of which truly are quacks, but not always—and they pedantically emphasize how these alternative views are 'not science': they have beliefs that do not have peer-reviewed tests supporting a falsifiable hypothesis. Or listen to Chris Mooney, a journalists who thinks the masses are insufficiently scientific, and argues that Republicans hate or are ignorant of science. He argues we should have more 'pro science' candidates, reflecting the 19th century progressive notion that with education, most disagreements and bad policy disappears. Most importantly, if the masses knew more, he surely thinks then popular opinion would converge to his. This from a journalist, a clan whose scientific proficiency is similar to the athleticism of mathematicians.

When journalists talk about science in general this is usually a pretext for saying those who disagree with their favorite idea are wrong, because they are unscientific. Who can be against science? There isn't a formal anti-science movement because it's indefensible in principle. They then caricature their opponents, taking the most inarticulate advocates from the other side, and skewering their illogic. They then sit back and take take inordinate pride in their scientific pretensions, as if their selective discussion was objective. The fact is, most 'big' scientific issues do not conform to the scientific method, where one puts out testable hypotheses, rejecting ones that are falsified. (Falkenblog)

GENEVA - Production of H1N1 vaccine over the next year will be "substantially less" than the 4.9 billion doses previously forecast but one dose should provide adequate protection, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday.

Based on clinical test results from some 25 drugmakers, weekly production of the new vaccine will be less than 94 million doses, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

"The real figure will be substantially less than 4.9 billion (over the year)," Hartl told reporters.

But supply fears have eased as the northern hemisphere heads into winter and with major drug manufacturers reporting that a single dose is successfully providing immunity.

"All the clinical trial results that we have seen show that apparently one dose is enough," Hartl said.

The United Nations agency previously forecast one third of the world's nearly seven billion people could be affected by the H1N1 pandemic, but so far the vast majority of victims are suffering only mild symptoms. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Health department staffers scrambling to answer 100 calls a day. Harried hospital workers rushing to swab hundreds of sore throats. Out of practice school nurses learning how to give vaccines all over again.

City and state health department officials from across the United States say that while the H1N1 swine flu pandemic may be mild in terms of mortality rates, it is killing them in terms of workload.

And they are dreading the task of vaccinating tens of millions of people against the new virus beginning in October.

"We do not have the resources we need and we haven't for a while," Dr Jeffrey Duchin of Public Health in Seattle & King County and the University of Washington said in an interview.

"The problem is we don't have a coordinated healthcare system in this country. We don't have a national framework that allows these interventions."

Duchin said the first wave of the pandemic, which swept across the United States in May and June, is just a foretaste of an unpleasant autumn flu season.

"We needed over 200 staff and 40 volunteers for our outbreak response," he told a meeting of flu experts sponsored by the Institute of Medicine this week. The office was receiving 100 calls a day with reports of cases and requests for testing.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization gave up keeping a precise tally of H1N1 cases, saying merely that there have been more than a million in the United States alone. (Reuters)

CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.

“The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.”

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba. (NYT)

NEW YORK - Girls whose mothers, fathers, and grandparents are highly educated may have an increased risk of developing an eating disorder, a new study suggests - particularly if the girls themselves do well in school.

The study, which followed more than 13,000 females born in Sweden between 1952 and 1989, found that as parents' or grandmothers' education increased, so did girls' risk of being hospitalized for anorexia or another eating disorder.

Similarly, the risk climbed in tandem with the girls' own grades in high school, researchers report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The vast majority of girls in the study were never treated for an eating disorder, regardless of family education and grades; 55 out of 13,376 were hospitalized during the study period.

Still, the findings suggest that girls from families with higher academic achievement are at relatively greater risk, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Jennie Ahren-Moonga of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

It's possible, the researchers write, that these girls feel more pressure from family to succeed -- which for some could translate into an obsession with controlling their eating and body weight.

In addition, higher-achieving girls may be more likely to have certain personality traits, such as perfectionism, that make them relatively more vulnerable to eating disorders. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.

Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.

"We're very worried," Dr. James Diaz of the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center told a meeting on airlines, airports and disease transmission sponsored by the independent U.S. National Research Council.

"Unlike West Nile virus, where nine out of 10 people are going to be totally asymptomatic, or may have a mild headache or a stiff neck, if you get Chikungunya you're going to be sick," he said.

"The disease can be fatal. It's a serious disease," Diaz added. "There is no vaccine."

Chikungunya infection causes fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, rash and joint pain. Symptoms can last a few weeks, though some suffers have reported incapacitating joint pain or arthritis lasting months. (Reuters)

MORRISON, Wis. — All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe.

There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water. (NYT)

Two-thirds of the world's major deltas, home to nearly half a billion people, are caught between sinking land and rising seas, according to a new study.

The new findings, based on satellite images, show that 85% of the 33 largest delta regions experienced severe flooding over the past decade, affecting 260,000 square kilometres. (AFP)

A significant volcano eruption in Australia is ‘well overdue’ and emergency authorities must better prepare themselves and the wider community to respond to it, the recipient of the prestigious Geological Society of Australia (Victoria Division) Selwyn Medal for 2009 has warned.

“We can’t say with 100 per cent certainty that a significant volcano will strike tomorrow, next week, next year, or even 100 years down the track—but these geo-hazards are real and they must be given much more focus by emergency management authorities” Associate Professor Joyce said. (Geological Society of Australia)

As I walked back the other night from dinner at a lodge near the Van Diemen Gulf on the north coast of Australia, I accidentally stepped on a toad in the dark. When I looked down, I realized there were toads all around me and that they were cane toads — Bufo marinus — natives of Central and South America. Tens of thousands were released in Australia in the 1930s to control a beetle that preyed on sugar cane, another introduced species.

The toads have marched slowly ever since from the Queensland cane fields into New South Wales and the Northern Territory, reaching the country around Darwin, on the north central tip of the continent, only a couple of wet seasons ago. Cane toads are poisonous, from tadpole to adult. They kill whatever eats them, including birds, reptiles and carnivorous mammals.

Cane toads are only one of the pressures on Australia’s small and increasingly endangered species — others include large grazing (non-native) herbivores, ferocious late-season wildfires and feral cats.

It’s estimated that there are between 4 million and 12 million feral cats in Australia, the progeny of former house cats. Just in the Kimberley — a region of northwestern Australia that is about the size of California — feral cats are eating as many as 300 million small mammals, especially small nocturnal marsupials, a year.

What is happening is a population crash. Scientists surveying native mammals in northern Australia, widely regarded as an oasis of biodiversity, report that they are finding it almost impossible to catch native mammals. During a recent study, it took an average of 1,000 trap-nights to trap 3 mammals.

The scale of this crisis is partly the result of Australia’s unusual and particularly vulnerable ecology. It has always been a predator-poor country — no bobcats, no weasels — so the effect of feral cats has been especially devastating. And though there are many poisonous reptiles in Australia, the advent of a new poisonous amphibian — one so apparently edible as a cane toad — has completely upset nature’s balance. Some birds, crows especially, have already learned how to flip cane toads over and eat their stomachs, avoiding the poisonous glands near the head. But nothing is really stopping the cane toads.

And in most places, nothing is stopping the cats. There is an exception: Australia’s native dogs, the dingoes. They, too, are under attack. Since dingoes sometimes kill sheep, the owners of pastoral stations have tried to exterminate them by using poison bait — a practice once called “dog stiffening.” (NYT)

A government plan unveiled Thursday would limit sugarcane plantations to 18 percent of Brazilian territory. (CoP15)

In a move which could signal a strategic shift by many of the world’s leaders The Swedish Presidency of the European Union and the European Commission welcomed the universal ratification of the Montreal Protocol announced on September 16, following ratification by Timor-Leste.

This announcement coincides with International Day for the preservation of the ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol, which bans the production of ozone-depleting substances, is widely recognized as a success story which has put the ozone layer on the road to recovery. The Protocol has also helped significantly to protect the global climate since ozone-depleting substances are also potent greenhouse gases. The EU is keen to ensure the Montreal Protocol plays a continued role in combating climate change in co-operation with the UN climate convention, particularly regarding possible action on HFC industrial gases. HFCs are increasingly being used to replace ozone-depleting substances but are themselves powerful greenhouse gases. (New Europe)

ROSEMONT, Ill., Sept. 18 -- On 24 September, the dairy industry will make history signing a Global Dairy Agenda for Action during the World Dairy Summit in Berlin, Germany.

Signed by seven organisations on behalf of the world's dairy associations and companies, the Global Dairy Agenda for Action is an industry pledge to reduce carbon emissions as part of its contribution to help address global warming. This pledge builds on past performance to address climate change. (PRNewswire)

BANFF, Alta. -- Electricity prices will quadruple as countries toughen their stance on greenhouse gas emissions, and governments need to brace the public for the price spike, a chief executive of a major power generating company said Friday.

Further, as jurisdictions search for cleaner energy sources, Hal Kvisle, chief executive of TransCanada Corp., said Alberta should use its vast coal resources rather than burn natural gas, a plentiful and exportable fossil fuel in Canada and considered a cleaner alternative to oil.

"Electricity consumers have to get used to paying $200 a megawatt hour rather than $50 a megawatt hour," he told reporters at the Global Business Forum in Banff. "It is time we get that message out to people. They need to be prepared for it."

The price jump, Mr. Kvisle said, will come as countries wean themselves off dirty energy sources such as coal-fired power plants and implement expensive projects designed to help stem greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS). Experts believe CCS can be applied across the energy sector, from coal plants to oil sands projects.

Alberta, a province stuffed with both natural gas and coal, should burn coal rather than gas in order to keep the value of its exports healthy, he said.

"There's a hungry North American market for natural gas... There's really no market outside of Alberta for our coal," Mr. Kvisle said. "So to stop using the coal and start burning the natural gas, it dramatically reduces the value of our exports." (Carrie Tait, Financial Post)

“Since when did you become a global warming alarmist?” I kidded Norman midway into our telephone conversation a few weeks before this amazing scientist and humanitarian died. “What are you talking about?” Dr. Borlaug retorted. “I’ve never believed that nonsense.”

I read him a couple sentences from his July 29 Wall Street Journal article. “Within the next four decades, the world’s farmers will have to double production … on a shrinking land base and in the face of environmental demands caused by climate change. Indeed, [a recent Oxfam study concludes] that the multiple effects of climate change might reverse 50 years of work to end poverty.”

I mentioned that my own discussions of those issues typically emphasize how agricultural biotechnology, modern farming practices and other technological advances will make it easier to adapt to any climate changes, warmer or colder, whether caused by humans or by the same natural forces that brought countless climate shifts throughout Earth’s history, including the Ice Ages, Dust Bowl and Little Ice Age.

“You’re right,” he said. “I should have been more careful. Next time, I’ll do that. And I’ll point out that the real disaster won’t be global warming. It’ll be global cooling, which would shorten growing seasons, and make entire regions less suitable for farming.”

I was amazed, as I was every time we talked. Here he was, 95 years old, “retired,” still writing articles for the Journal, and planning what he’d say in his next column.

The article we were discussing, “Farmers can feed the world,” noted Norman’s deep satisfaction that G-8 countries have pledged $20 billion to help poor farmers acquire better seeds and fertilizer. “For those of us who have spent our lives working in agriculture,” he said, “focusing on growing food versus giving it away is a giant step forward.”

Our previous conversations confirm that he would likewise have applauded the World Bank’s recent decision to subsidize new coal-fired power plants, to generate jobs and reduce poverty, by helping poor countries bring electricity to 1.5 billion people who still don’t have it. For many poor countries, a chief economist for the Bank observed, coal is the only option, and “it would be immoral at this stage to say, 'We want to have clean hands. Therefore we are not going to touch coal.’” Norman would have agreed.

As he argued in his WSJ article, “governments must make their decisions about access to new technologies … on the basis of science, and not to further political agendas.” That’s why he supported DDT to reduce malaria, biotechnology to fight hunger, and plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity to modernize China, India and other developing nations.

His humanitarian instincts and commitment to science and poverty eradication also drove his skepticism about catastrophic climate change. He was well aware that recent temperature data and observations of solar activity and sunspots indicate that the Earth could be entering a period of global cooling. He had a healthy distrust of climate models as a basis for energy and economic policy. And he knew most of Antarctica is gaining ice, and it would be simply impossible for Greenland or the South Pole region to melt under even the more extreme temperature projections from those questionable computer models.

He also commented that humans had adapted to climate changes in the past, and would continue to do so. They would also learn from those experiences, developing new technologies and practices that would serve humanity well into the future. (Paul Driessen, Townhall)

Evidence is growing that relatively cheap policies like climate engineering and non-carbon energy research could effectively prevent suffering from global warming, both in the short and long term. Unfortunately, political leaders gathering at a special meeting of the United Nations in New York this week will focus on a very different response.

They will make many of the most important decisions on how to respond to climate change over the next decade. They are expected to thrash out political disputes like how much carbon rich and poor nations should agree to cut. The real question that must be addressed is: Do we want to be the generation that promised so much but failed to solve global warming? We will not be judged by our descendants on our rhetoric, nor on the scale of our promises. We will be judged on what we deliver.

We have failed to rein in emission rises despite sincere and well-meaning promises made in Kyoto in 1997 and earlier, because carbon cuts are expensive to enact. That problem is only going to grow as our promises become more ambitious.

Research by climate economist Professor Richard Tol shows that carbon cuts big enough to keep temperature rises lower than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)--a target that the G-8 and many others argue is necessary--could cost a staggering 12.9% of global GDP in 2100. That is the equivalent of $40 trillion a year. Available estimates show that the welfare loss induced by global warming will be just $3 trillion per year by 2100. For each dollar spent on global carbon cuts, we buy two cents worth of avoided climate damage. The solution is far more costly than the problem. (Bjorn Lomborg, Forbes)

President Obama’s risky perseverance on health care is running over another of his pet government expansions—the cap-and-trade bill sent by the House on June 26 for Senate consideration. Recall that cap-and-trade is complex legislation with a very simple premise: make energy so expensive to consume that Americans use less of it, and “greenhouse gas” emissions are thereby curtailed.

But even though it’s now clear the bill is not getting out of Congress, look for the Obama Administration to saddle our economy with this huge new energy tax through other means. (Patrick J. Michaels, Townhall)

THE MOST effective way for the United States to fight global warming is for Congress to put a price on carbon, either through a cap-and-trade system or, as we'd prefer, a carbon tax that rebates the revenue to taxpayers. But last month the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced a delay in introducing its climate change bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that such legislation might not be acted on until next year. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act. As Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) once warned, EPA action would create "a glorious mess" of regulation. How much of a mess is only beginning to become clear.

Gradually raising the cost of carbon, which Congress but not the EPA can do, would send signals throughout the economy that would help shift the nation to fuels and practices that wouldn't warm the planet. Research into such fuels and practices would become attractive to investors, and new technologies would emerge. Efficiency would become cost-effective. The government would set the goal, but the market, science and common sense would dictate how the country reached it.

EPA regulation has none of those advantages. The Clean Air Act gives the agency the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as "pollutants." But that means only that the agency can go plant by plant, refinery by refinery, and issue orders ostensibly intended to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Since almost all human activity emits some greenhouse gas, the EPA in theory also could go shopping mall by shopping mall, apartment building by apartment building. It says it is devising new rules to prevent that from happening. (Washington Post)

The debate over climate change has spent too much time describing the problem and debating its causes. Too little time has been spent on distributing solutions. It is possible to substantially reduce the global carbon footprint by profit-driven companies. (Richard N. Swett, Washington Times)

As Congress considered the Waxman-Markey "cap-and-trade" bill, President Obama rallied House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats at the White House. In making a point, he gestured to Abraham Lincoln's portrait and said, "He had a chance to affect history. You, too, have a chance to affect history."

How ironic.

Lincoln is remembered for liberating blacks from slavery. Cap-and-trade legislation supported by Obama, allied lawmakers and now the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would, conversely, enslave all Americans.

Billed as a way to combat global warming, cap-and-trade legislation already passed by the House and now under consideration in the Senate is -- at its most basic level -- a tax that punishes those who rely on fossil fuels. That unfortunately means virtually every American.

Higher energy costs, higher unemployment and slower economic growth expected from cap and trade would reduce living standards, increase dependency and likely chain Americans to government programs. (Deneen Borelli, Examiner)

Top U.S. energy and climate leaders yesterday began to openly plan for international global warming talks to trickle into 2010.

Experts have predicted for months that a major U.N. summit in Copenhagen this December -- billed as the place 192 nations would complete a new emissions pact -- would not deliver by deadline. With health care reform now sucking all the political oxygen out of the U.S. Senate, and with countries still bickering over fundamental issues, completing a new treaty within three months is looking more and more improbable.

Key leaders are starting to say it out loud, and are putting the best face on what some are calling "Plan B."

"The mission is to get the most ambitious, most far-reaching accord that we can in Copenhagen, and to the extent that there's some things that need to be completed after that, then that will happen," U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters yesterday. (ClimateWire)

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Sept 18 - Climate change legislation is unlikely to pass the U.S. Congress until the first half of 2010, and maybe not until 2011, Duke Energy Corp Chief Executive Jim Rogers said on Friday.

Rogers is one of the biggest supporters of national carbon-cutting rules among power utility executives and is active on Capitol Hill both in relations with lawmakers and as a Congressional witness.

Rogers said he has not ruled out passage of legislation this year, but believes that it is highly unlikely.

If the bill does not pass in the first half of 2010, Rogers said 'it won't be done until 2011 because 2010 is an election year.'

Rogers made his comments at an energy symposium at the University of Michigan. (Reuters)

KEVIN Rudd has talked down prospects of international agreement at a crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen in December, amid fresh predictions the conference is doomed to failure. (The Australian)

Developing economies shouldn't be locked into carbon lowering targets under a new global climate pact, Australia said on Monday, outlining a deal it hopes will avert failure at make-or-break talks in Copenhagen. The plan by the world's biggest per-capita carbon polluter would give India and China flexibility to lower emissions through a "national schedule", potentially taking some of the heat from near-gridlocked talks between rich and developing countries. "We simply won't get the broad participation from major developing economies that the climate needs and that Australia, in terms of our national interest, needs," Climate Minister Penny Wong said of Canberra's compromise proposal. (Reuters)

The United Nations is planning a form of diplomatic shock therapy for world leaders this week in the hope of injecting badly needed urgency into negotiations for a climate change treaty that, it is now widely acknowledged, are dangerously adrift.

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon and negotiators say that unless they can convert world leaders into committed advocates of radical action, it will be very hard to reach a credible and enforceable agreement to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change. (The Observer)

THE Copenhagen tourist board is facing a PR disaster. Its symbol is the small copper statue of the Little Mermaid but, after December, the city is likely to be better known as the place where the world failed to agree on a deal to prevent catastrophic climate change. (The Australian)

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Barack Obama promised strong action on climate change from his first day in office, but he is heading into a series of meetings with other world leaders this month under growing pressure to deliver on his rhetoric.

More than 100 world leaders, including Mr. Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, are scheduled to meet Tuesday at the 64th United Nations General Assembly to talk about fighting climate change, in a prelude to the Pittsburgh Group of 20 meetings starting Thursday.

While the talk will be about the environment, the substance will be about money. Poor nations say that if rich nations want them to stop burning coal or cutting down forests, they should be willing to pay.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made global warming a focus, and he is worried that the meeting won't move the ball forward toward a new global climate-change treaty in Copenhagen this December to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

"We want world leaders to show they understand the gravity of climate risks, as well as the benefits of acting now," Mr. Ban said. "We want them to publicly commit to sealing a deal in Copenhagen." (WSJ)

WASHINGTON - U.N. climate change talks are "dangerously close to deadlock," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso will warn on Monday, kicking off a week that could prove critical for efforts to halt global warming.

The head of the European Union's executive will challenge developing nations to commit to greenhouse gas emissions curbs to get financial support from industrial nations, according to excerpts of his remarks obtained by Reuters.

"Europe's message to the developing world is that if you are serious about the challenge of cutting emissions, we will be there to help," Barroso will say at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

"Our message to the developed world is that we need to make a credible financial commitment to the developing world," he continues. "The equation is straightforward: no money, no deal. But no actions, no money!" (Reuters)

NEW YORK — Last Tuesday, Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was asked by a reporter to appraise the odds that Congress, in the throes of debating health care changes, would manage to pass climate legislation in 2009 — including provisions for an emissions cap-and-trade plan.

“So, you know, we are going to have a busy, busy time the rest of this year,” Mr. Reid replied. “And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year. We still have next year to complete things if we have to.”

That is, one might guess, the last thing many people in the international community want to hear as they round the final turn and tumble headlong, ready or not, toward a climate meeting in Copenhagen in December.

A statement from the European Union’s ambassador to the United States, John Bruton, was unambiguous in its displeasure.

“It is suggested that the U.S. Senate may not, after all, deal with the climate change issue until next year, when the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen is over and the delegates have gone home,” Mr. Bruton said. “If this were to happen, it would open the United States to the charge that it does not take its international commitments seriously and that these commitments will always take second place to domestic politics.”

Mr. Bruton added: “Is the U.S. Senate really expecting all the other countries to make a serious effort on climate change at the Copenhagen Conference in the absence of a clear commitment from the United States?” (Green Inc)

PARIS — The leaders of France and Germany called Friday for the United Nations to support a carbon tax on imports from countries who fail to back international efforts to fight global warming.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arguing that states that fail to back a deal at a climate summit in Copenhagen in December should be held accountable.

"It would be unacceptable for the efforts of the most ambitious countries to be undermined by the carbon emissions released by lack of or insufficient action by other countries," reads the letter released by the French presidency.

"For that reason, it should be possible to put in place appropriate adjustment measures targeting the countries that do not implement or fail to support this accord," they wrote. (AFP)

WASHINGTON, Sept 18 - The U.S. Senate should act to head off a potential trade war by adding a "peace clause" to a climate change bill that threatens China and other countries with a tariff on their goods, a business group said on Friday.

The House of Representatives included a carbon tariff in its climate change bill to address concerns that U.S. steel, cement and other big energy-consuming industries could be badly hurt unless big developing countries also take major steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

But many U.S. exporters are worried the provision will backfire on the United States by inviting countries to impose their own tariffs on U.S. goods.

"Border measures, or carbon tariffs, are a sleeping giant ... in the climate change debate" with a tremendous potential to disrupt trade, said Jeremy Preiss, chief international trade counsel at United Technologies Corp.

Preiss is also chair of the climate working group for the National Foreign Trade Council, a leading business group that represents exporters ranging from Caterpillar to Microsoft .

The group urged the Senate to include language calling for a peace clause against carbon border taxes while countries negotiate an international framework for dealing with trade-related climate concerns.

The Senate also should give the president more discretion not to impose carbon tariffs than allowed in the House version of the bill, the National Foreign Trade Council said.

Both China and India have harshly criticized the House measure as an unfair attack on their trade. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN — Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, feels little kinship with the green end of the political spectrum — people who stage sit-ins at power plants or vote for the Green parties in elections.

“I’ve never understood why the environment should be a left-wing issue,” said Ms. Hedegaard, with an exasperated sigh. “In my view there is nothing as core to conservative beliefs — that what you inherit you should pass on to the next generation.”

Denmark — and Ms. Hedegaard — will play host in December to hundreds of nations that will gather in Copenhagen for the United Nation-sponsored global climate treaty negotiations. The meetings are tasked with finalizing a new global plan to tackle climate change. Ms. Hedegaard, who two years ago offered her city as the site for the negotiations, will be the president and the chairwoman of the 12-day event.

“It’s a very, very important job,” said John Hay, a spokesman for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, noting that the president of the climate meeting is the one who “hammers through the deal.”

Ms. Hedegaard, he said, “fully appreciates that role and is taking it very seriously.” The placement of Ms. Hedegaard, a lifelong conservative, at the center of the preparations reflects in large part the shifting of global environmental issues from the fringe into the political mainstream. A movement whose symbols were fuzzy endangered animals is now more concerned with oil futures and budget sheets.

Unlike Germany, the Netherlands and France, Denmark has never had a Green party, Ms. Hedegaard points out. In fact, she said, she sees herself as an environmentalist in the model of Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong hunter who campaigned ardently for protecting natural resources.

“People say environment is a soft issue, but it’s not,” she said recently, sitting in her spartan office in a pink sweater and neatly pressed slacks. “It’s about where we get our energy from, about security, about growing economies. I’m a conservative, I worry about that.” (NYT)

UNITED NATIONS — Economists point to powerhouse countries like India to illustrate the hurdles facing some 100 world leaders due to gather in New York this Tuesday for the highest level summit meeting on climate change ever convened.

The Indian government has announced a major commitment to solar power as a renewable means of bringing electricity to more than 400 million people now living without it. Yet the government was pilloried at home last summer for accepting the international goal of preventing a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above present temperatures by limiting emissions. Opposition parties accused it of selling out the country’s future development.

While virtually all of the largest developed and developing nations have made domestic commitments toward creating more efficient, renewable sources of energy to cut emissions, none want to take the lead in fighting for significant international emissions reduction targets, lest they be accused at home of selling out future jobs and economic growth.

The negotiations for a new climate change agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December are badly stalled. With the agreement running more than 200 pages — including what negotiators estimate are a couple of thousand brackets denoting points of differences — diplomats and negotiators fear that the document is too unwieldy to garner a consensus in the coming months. (NYT)

It's becoming increasingly clear that the demands of domestic politics in several key countries ensure that there isn't going to be a substantive treaty agreement on climate change from December's Copenhagen summit. No government will want the blame --but Washington is the most likely to take a diplomatic black eye. (Ian Bremmer, Foreign Policy)

Reading the international climate change news recently has reminded me more than a little of The Three Stooges, those kings of physical comedy that permanently warped at least one generation of Americans. Sadly, our modern day climate stooges are toying with something far more important than our sense of humor as they jostle for position and generally play politics leading into December’s Copenhagen conference.

The stooges are, of course (in alphabetical order): China, India, and the US. (Lou Grinzo, The Energy Collective)

Link to this statement: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/09/19/ditch-the-ets/

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on Australian politicians to ditch the Emissions Trading Scheme and dismantle the expensive Global Warming empire they have created.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense” Mr Viv Forbes, said that the scientific case had collapsed and the political coalition was evaporating, but still the major political parties continue to serve vested interests and fish for Green preferences.

He comments:

“The case for action on global warming is essentially this: “Man’s emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing dangerous global warming”. This scare has been disproved in triplicate.

“Firstly, both long term and short term temperature records show that CO2 does not control temperature. This destroys the whole basis for the global warming hysteria.

“Secondly, recent temperature records show that, despite constantly increasing aerial CO2, world temperature is falling, not rising alarmingly.

See: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/09/19/temp-vs-co2/

And: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/08/15/isolated-australian-temperatures/

“Thirdly, it is clear that global cooling is a far bigger threat to all life on earth than global warming – there are many benefits of a warmer world with plenty of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“The global political support is also collapsing, although few politicians will yet admit it.

“It has suffered three major political reverses.

“Firstly, the US Senate is not going to pass their Ration-N-Tax Scheme this year, probably not next year, maybe never.

“Secondly, there is scant political support for capping carbon dioxide in Eurasia or South of the Equator. There are many countries lined up looking for billions of dollars in carbon credit handouts, but none want to cap or tax their own emissions.

“For example, China has announced that it doubts the science and the economics of caps (but it is keen to build heaps of windmills and solar panels for anyone silly enough to buy them).

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/17/climate-rise-fears-china

“India will burn more coal, and will not accept caps, and Russia is only interested in selling carbon credits.

“Finally, even in Europe, the citadel of global warming, public support is evaporating.

“The British public is “tired, bored and resentful” of the hysteria and cost of the low carbon vision.

See: http://www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=698

“And, despite their heavy reliance on nuclear power, two thirds of French voters oppose their new carbon tax.

“Both Australian political parties cite “pressure for certainty from big business” as the main justification for rushing into the Ration-N-Tax Scheme.

“The sad fact is that a majority of big businesses look to benefit from the whole new tax-subsidise-and-trade empire that will be created. Banks, commodity traders, lawyers, accountants, regulators, academics, solar, wind and gas entrepreneurs, and the carbon sequestration lobby are all planning to profit from trading hot air certificates. They also see opportunities to profit from increasing energy prices or they need special subsidies and tax breaks to justify some foolish gambles they have taken in the alternate energy business.

“And the hidden agenda of both major political parties is to gain or retain power by courting green preferences.

“These are all grubby reasons for saddling ordinary Australians with a scheme that will increase the costs for everything, particularly electricity, food and travel, as well as destroying real jobs and slashing the value of their superannuation funds.”

Viv Forbes

info@carbon-sense.com
www.carbon-sense.com

In its recent report on Geo-engineering, the Royal Society argues that ‘air capture’ carbon dioxide absorption techniques are probably the best geo-engineering option in that we should ‘address the root cause of climate change by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere’. Solar heat reflector techniques were seen as generally less attractive. It may well be true that carbon dioxide absorption is the best type of geo-engineering option, but surely, geo-engineering of whatever type in no way deals at source with the ‘root cause’ of climate change- which is the production of carbon dioxide in power stations, gas boilers and vehicles. (ERW)

Better, perhaps, to let the earth look after itself than try to regulate its system through mirrors, clouds and artificial trees (James Lovelock, The Guardian)

A vote for the Green Party would be a wasted vote, as only one party has both the will and the power to tackle climate change

The threat of climate change rivals any the modern world has faced. No challenge for our generation is greater than averting a climate catastrophe. The best predictions science offers suggest that, if the planet warms by more than C, it will tip us into the nightmare scenario of climate chaos we cannot control. It will affect not only the world's prosperity, but also our very ability to feed ourselves, threatening resource wars and mass migration on an unprecedented scale.

Time is of the essence in taking on this enormous threat. Campaigners and scientists alike are now clear: the next government is the last government that will be able to act. If the government chosen in next year's election doesn't take the action necessary to change the way Britain uses energy, it will probably be too late. That means next year's election is our best chance – probably our last chance – to get a government that will protect our planet for our children. (The Independent)

LONDON - Contraception advice is crucial to poor countries' battle with climate change, and policy makers are failing their people if they continue to shy away from the issue, a leading family planning expert said on Friday.

Leo Bryant, a lead researcher on a World Health Organisation study on population growth and climate change, said the stigma attached to birth control in both developing and developed countries was hindering vital progress.

"We are certainly not advocating that governments should start telling people how many children they can have," said Bryant, an advocacy manager at the family planning group Marie Stopes International, who wrote a commentary in the Lancet medical journal on Friday.

"The ability to choose your family size...is a fundamental human right. But lack of access to family planning means millions of people in developing countries don't have that right," he told Reuters.

Bryant's study of climate change adaptation plans by governments in the world's 40 poorest countries showed that almost all of them link rapid population growth to environmental impact, but only six had proposed steps to tackle it. (Reuters)

The Senate’s rejection of the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in August presents the Australian climate community with the opportunity to reassess and recalibrate their messaging and advance an effective policy agenda. Regardless of whether the Senate approves the bill when it is reintroduced this November, the climate movement must be prepared for the next stage of climate and energy advocacy - one that will focus on renewable energy deployment.

A new and improved policy agenda must do several things: it must unite the nation's climate movement that has been split by Labor’s flawed CRPS; it must be politically palatable for both the government and the public; it must exclude powerful fossil fuel interests intent on thwarting progress; it must be politically feasible to pass the senate; and all importantly, it must have a positive climate impact. (Leigh Ewbank, On Line Opinion)

Sometimes The Economist can produce some really good stuff... and then there's now: A bad climate for development - Poor countries’ economic development will contribute to climate change. But they are already its greatest victims

IN LATE April Mostafa Rokonuzzaman, a farmer in south-western Bangladesh, gave an impassioned speech at a public meeting in his village, complaining that climate change, freakish hot spells and failed rains were ruining his vegetables. He didn’t know the half of it. A month later Mr Rokonuzzaman was chest-deep in a flood that had swept away his house, farm and even the village where the meeting took place. Cyclone Aila (its effects pictured above) which caused the storm surge that breached the village’s flood barriers, was itself a plausible example of how climate change is wreaking devastation in poor countries. (The Economist)

Steve Milloy’s "junk science" detector started running high when he got hold of a new study in the American Journal of Public Health claiming nearly 45,000 Americans die from a lack of health insurance.

According to the study, titled "Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults," working-age Americans without insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts. It also includes a chart showing how many people have died state by state, supposedly because of lack of insurance. For example, researchers say 4,675 Texas have died because they didn’t have insurance during their study period.

Mr. Milloy, founder and publisher of Junkscience.com and co-founder and portfolio manger for the Free Enterprise Fund, said the study was created to boost President Obama’s health care agenda. Mr. Milloy reminded that Mr. Obama recently told Congress people would die if they didn’t have insurance. (Amanda Carpenter, Washington Times)

An Obama administration-funded study to published Sep. 17 in the American Journal of Public Health claims that the lack of health insurance causes as many as 45,000 deaths per year.

This is political science at its finest: (Steven Milloy, JunkScience.com)

NEW YORK - If U.S. health reform efforts lead to higher costs for employers, employees may end up bearing the brunt, according to a new survey.

Employers will not absorb higher costs, choosing instead either to reduce benefits, lower salaries or cut jobs, the survey from professional services firm Towers Perrin said on Thursday.

Eighty-seven percent of employers said they were very likely or likely to cut benefits if reform leads to higher costs. Only 11 percent said they would accept lower profits.

"They simply don't have money and margins today to absorb additional healthcare costs," said Dave Osterndorf, chief health actuary at Towers Perrin.

Should reform reduce benefit costs to the companies, 78 percent they were very likely or likely to retain the savings in the business. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Lead pollution in the environment remains a health hazard for children.

Research released today reveals that blood lead concentrations well below the accepted "safe" level harm youngster's intellectual and emotional development.

Researchers from University of Bristol in the UK measured blood lead levels in 488 youngsters at age 2 and a half and linked these levels to scores on standardized assessment tests at age 7 to 8.

There was a clear link between blood lead levels in early childhood and academic performance by the ages of 7 and 8, the researchers report in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. (Reuters Health)

CHICAGO -- The U.S. obesity epidemic, which afflicts all age groups, has stabilized in the past five years among preschool-age children at about one in seven children, government researchers said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Procter & Gamble, the maker of Mr. Clean, is under pressure to come clean itself.

Manufacturers of detergents, household cleansers and furniture polish, like Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and others, are facing questions from consumers about the chemicals in their products. While many of the chemicals are present only in small amounts, some have been associated with asthma, birth defects and fertility problems in higher doses. And even if the amounts are low, consumer groups say, what is the effect of using these products over a lifetime?

The questions have left the industry in an awkward position. It wants to be seen as environmentally sensitive and consumer-friendly. But at the same time, companies do not want to give competitors and makers of cheap knock-offs all the details of what goes into Pine-Sol, for instance, or Windex.

So they have been working with consumer groups to devise a plan that could satisfy both sides. Come January, the industry has said it will voluntarily start to disclose much of what is in its cleaning products, which now represent a $14 billion-a-year business. Consumers will be able to call an 800 number, look at a Web site or, in some cases, simply check the product label to find the ingredients.

The industry’s plan has been praised by consumer groups as a step in the right direction. “The voluntary plan is not perfect, but it is worlds ahead of where the industry was before,” said Alexandra Scranton, director of science and research at Women’s Voices for the Earth, a nonprofit group that published a study in 2007, “Household Hazards,” that catalogued potential health risks. “We had been talking about this issue for years, and now it is being fast-tracked.”

But whether it goes far enough for some critics is another question. (NYT)

LOS ANGELES - The California lawmaker who spearheaded a high-profile anti-obesity effort across the country's most populous state is now training his sights on sugar-sweetened drinks.

Sen. Alex Padilla, who led a campaign requiring big restaurant chains to disclose calories in meals, said on Thursday he planned to hold hearings in November on the link between soda consumption and obesity. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Airline employees who report to work ill are more likely than sick passengers to spread infections such as the H1N1 swine flu virus aboard airplanes, with low-paid workers posing the greatest danger, a U.S. government expert said on Thursday.

Dr. Michael Bell, an expert on infectious disease with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said flight attendants and other employees who move through aircraft can leave germs on any number of surfaces, while sick passengers could be more likely to remain stationary.

But the greatest threat could come from low-paid airline contractors, such as cleaners, if slim wages and poor benefits make it difficult for them to take a sick day.

"That individual may be just as effective at spreading infection as anybody else," Bell told a meeting sponsored by the independent National Research Council on the role that airports and aircraft play in transmitting disease.

Public health officials ask sick people not to travel and risk spreading infection to others and advise ill workers to stay home as well. (Reuters)

Earlier this month, the Lowy Institute in Australia published a paper offering some very sound and, obviously, very timely advice about how to contain, and ultimately, eradicate protectionism. The paper is being circulated among the G20 delegations, who will undoubtedly discuss the topic of trade and protectionism in Pittsburgh next week. So for those of you interested in getting a sense of what will probably be the single best idea on (or at least near) the table at the G20 summit, I highly recommend this 20-pager.

The solution proposed by the authors boils down to a two-word phrase: “Domestic Transparency.” What is meant by that phrase is that “defeating protectionism begins at home.” And by that slogan, the authors mean that the key to reducing, and ultimately eliminating, protectionism is not external pressure from other countries, mercantilist trade negotiations, or filing trade complaints at the WTO, but rather greater awareness at home of the real costs of protectionism. I couldn’t agree more. (In fact better transparency is one of our recommendations in this paper).

When governments impose trade barriers at the behest of special interests, they usually justify that protectionism with diversionary rhetoric concerning some vague conception of the “national interest,” and the imperative of shielding domestic business from unfair competition and other vagaries of the globalized economy. That the protectionist measure itself—the product of special interests diverting productive resources from economic to political ends—forces involuntary and usually unknowing subsidization of those protection-seekers by the same citizens at large who are expected to buy into the national interest canard is a detail about which most people remain in the dark.

The central theme of the Lowy paper is that once people become informed about the costs of protectionism, not only to the broader economy, but in terms of what it means for their own personal budgets, politicians and lobbyists will find it much more difficult to concoct protectionist schemes.

That this paper is written by Australians is no accident. The Aussies have experience and credibility implementing a successful domestic transparency regime, which entailed the establishment of an independent authority (independent from the levers of government and business) to provide advice to governments that is “disinterested, open to public scrutiny, and formulated from the perspective of national welfare rather than the needs of particular producer groups.” The establishment of that agency (oddly named the “Industries Assistance Commission”—one of the authors, Bill Carmichael, is the former Chairman of the IAC) in 1974 and its successor agency (also oddly named the “Productivity Commission”) are widely credited with exposing the costs of protectionism to Australians, who subsequently supported dramatic waves of trade liberalization and have since been skeptical of efforts of industries to secure protection.

In this country, the U.S. International Trade Commission is an agency with a stable of economists that measures the welfare effects of trade liberalization and protectionism. While it may have the resources to conduct the analyses, it doesn’t have the independence. Regrettably, ITC studies are often subject to the whims of politics, particularly when the objectivity and facts in their reports don’t comport with politicians’ “expectations.” We need something similar to Australia’s domestic transparency institution in the United States, and in other countries, too.

G20 members should seriously consider the proposal in this excellent Lowy paper. (Daniel Ikenson, Cato at liberty)

LONDON - A third of malaria cases in African babies can be prevented by giving them regular doses of antimalarial drugs even before the children are infected, researchers said on Thursday.

Research into intermittent preventive treatment of malaria in infants (IPTi) found it helped children build better immunity to the disease and reduced the risk of the parasite becoming drug-resistant.

Both of these benefits decrease if treatment is given continuously as a prophylaxis, according to the research, published in The Lancet medical journal.

Pedro Alonso from the University of Barcelona, who led a study using data from 8,000 children and infants in Tanzania, Mozambique, Gabon and Ghana, said the research showed IPTi with the medicine sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) could save "tens of thousands of lives every year across Africa".

If IPTi using SP were expanded to other African countries, 6 million cases of malaria could be prevented each year in those most vulnerable to the disease, he told a London teleconference.

"International policy-makers and heads of national malaria control programmes should consider its immediate adoption and integration into existing programmes," he said.

Malaria is one of the world's most demanding public health problems. It kills around 1 million people a year and of an estimated 247 million cases of malaria in 2006, 86 percent were in Africa. (Reuters)

Introduced more than a decade ago, genetically modified crops are now planted on millions of acres throughout the world. But the fundamental questions about them remain — both about their safety and their long-term impact on global food security and the environment. (Verlyn Klinkenborg, Yale 360)

Norman Borlaug died on September 12th, aged 95. The name will be unfamiliar to many, but not to those concerned about food security in the developing world. Borlaug has been called the 'grandfather of the Green Revolution' for his breakthrough in breeding disease-resistant strains of so-called semi-dwarf wheat. This led to apocalyptic forecasts of global famine – given a high profile by Paul Ehrlich and others in the 60s and 70s – being proved dramatically wrong. In the 40 years from 1963, the world population doubled, and the number of chronically malnourished people (essentially a problem of poverty and infrastructure rather than overall food availability) hardly changed. Over 3 billion more people were fed from essentially the same total area of farmland.

The principle on which the new varieties of wheat were bred is simple in principle, but far-reaching in its consequences. Visitors to the Cambridge Botanic Garden can see an excellent display of old and new varieties of wheat grown side-by-side. Accustomed as we are to modern short-straw cereals, it comes as something as a shock to see that wheat varieties grown in the first half of the 20th Century were about shoulder height; more like maize plants. Rather than putting so much energy into straw production, dwarf wheats produce much more grain.

But to get the best yields, high levels of nitrogen are needed in the soil. This can be provided in principle by animal manure or a green manure of a leguminous crop which has been ploughed in, but this can only be achieved year after year in a consistent way by the use of manufactured fertilizer, in which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed via use of the Haber-Bosch process. The fact that this planet currently supports about 6.7 billion people, and will have the capacity feed the 9 billion or so who are likely to be alive by mid-century, is due to the use of high-yielding cereal crops and synthetic nitrogen fixation.

Borlaug's dramatic achievement was recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. However, he had the misfortune to be working at a time when environmentalism was beginning to catch people's attention and gain support. To set against the success of the Green Revolution were the deep concerns being expressed about human impact on the environment, catalysed by the publication of Rachel Carson's iconic (and emotive) book 'Silent Spring'.

Over the years, the view that humankind should work 'with Nature' – and the implicit belief by the deeper greens that our species has no greater worth than any other – has become pervasive among those with the good fortune to live in prosperous societies and have enough to eat. While trying (with significant success) to change attitudes in their own countries, environmentalists have also created a belief among development agencies that poorer countries should not follow the same path to prosperity as the industrialised world had taken. As they put it, developing countries should not make the same 'mistakes' as we had already done.

One of these 'mistakes' was the development of highly productive intensive agriculture. The Green Revolution, kick-started by Borlaug's wheat breeding success in Mexico, has actually resulted in a greater production of food per capita than was the case half a century ago. In this period, the world's population has more than doubled. To feed the further 2 billion or more people likely to be alive by the time the population peaks will need more of the same progress, in this case also using the most recent technological advance, genetic modification.

Nevertheless, environmentalists, development agencies and the organic movement continue to preach from the gospel of small-scale, extensive farming. Although well-meaning, this is at best likely to result in the institutionalising of a somewhat more secure form of subsistence agriculture. Undoubtedly the rapid urbanisation seen in many developing countries creates problems and human miseries of its own, but the long-term continuation of a primarily rural economy is no better.

If food security can only be guaranteed by a productive, intensive farming system, so be it. First solve the problem of hunger, then deal with whatever other problems remain. Whatever critics may say, the industrialised world has been very successful at doing just this. Norman Borlaug did not want to deny developing countries the opportunity to do the same, and neither should we. (Scientific Alliance)

Contrary to oft-repeated claims, climate change is unlikely to cause a major rise in malaria, says medical entomologist Paul Reiter.

Climate change is incriminated in a wide range of environmental and public health disasters. A contender for the top calamity is the idea that climate change is encouraging malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, and that this rise will become catastrophic in coming years.

To the layperson, the notion is persuasive because it is intuitive — malaria is rife where the world is hot, so if the world gets hotter there will be more of it.

Not so to the scientist. The epidemiology of the disease is highly complex, and the dominant factors are the ecology and behaviour of both humans and mosquitoes. (Paul Reiter, SciDev)

This year's World Bank WDR – Development and Climate Change – argues that poverty reduction remains top priority, but it must be combined with urgent action on climate change. The report prescribes massive investment in new energy technologies and renewal of generating systems to slash carbon dioxide emissions, and argues that continued growth alone would not be fast or equitable enough to enable developing countries to counter the effects of climate change.

It is inevitable that this year's report would address climate change, just a few months before the signatories of the UN Convention on Climate Change will sit down in Copenhagen to thrash out a post-Kyoto deal. The issue has become ubiquitous, and the stakes are high. Failure to at least agree a face-saving formula to permit further delay (in practice, the most likely outcome) would make a massive dent in the credibility and prestige of the climate change mitigation juggernaut.

But failure to agree might actually be a good thing. Intensive work on new energy generation and transport technologies would doubtless continue, and some of these will certainly become commercially viable before too long. But the first priority must surely be to rebuild national economies and encourage sustainable growth in the developing world, to create resilient societies which are more capable of dealing with any future threats.

But when might these threats materialise? According to a recent New Scientist article, Mojib Latif, a climate modeller and IPCC author, has suggested that we may be in for one or two decades of lower temperatures. This trend – ironically reported at a World Meteorological Organization conference on predictions of the short-term impacts of global warming – is, according to Latif, caused by natural variations in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO). The NAO was also blamed for at least part of the most recent warming trend.

At the same conference, it was reported that higher than usual summer losses of Arctic ice were partly due to natural cycles, and that this year's loss is likely to be much lower than for the last two years. It seems that some mainstream climate scientists are at last ready to discuss the relative contributions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and natural cycles in determining climate trends. Whatever the outcome of the debate, it is good for the scientific community that it is happening.

Meanwhile President Sarkozy, never lacking in ambition, has launched a new tax set at 17euro per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to help 'save the human race'. If he also succeeds in introducing a proposed 'carbon levy' on imported goods to protect French industry from the anti-competitive effect of his tax, he will surely have put the cause of free trade back quite considerably in support of a cause which seems to becoming less pressing. (Scientific Alliance)

The global warming narrative - that mankind's addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate - may be about to go seriously off message.

Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world's leading climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global cooling.

Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, professor Latif found the results would bring the remorseless rise in average global temperatures to an abrupt halt. (Tom Feilden, BBC)

The world is "doomed to experience some global warming, and countries must prepare for those changes," warns an international expert, looking at upcoming global climate treaty meetings. In the current Nature, David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, calls for abandoning hopes for a global treaty on climate change in Copenhagen in December, arguing that the 192 nations involved cannot get their act together by then.

Instead, he suggests the major nations releasing greenhouse gasses, particularly China and the United States, cut their own separate deals to save time. "Copenhagen, at best, is a starting point for the most influential nations to make ambitious commitments," he says. "Luckily, just a dozen countries account for nearly all warming emissions." (USA Today)

The global warming scare campaign goes through phases. Warmists are collectivists, and they buzz like a hive. The overall narrative of doom does not change, but every couple of months or so the hive settles on a different scare to buzz about most loudly.

That’s the best way to get media and public attention, after all. Single out one alleged global warming terror, publicize the heck out of it until ”everybody knows” the “crisis” is “even worse than scientists previously believed,” and then move on to the next scare-of-the-month. The intended effect, as H.L. Mencken put it, “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.”

Previously featured scares include killer heat waves, malaria epidemics, more powerful hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and, my personal favorite, a shutdown of the Gulf Stream leading to a new ice age. Some of these have been scares-of-the-month more than once — a form of recycling, if you will.

You might think that after so many years of hearing about so many ways global warming is going to wreck the planet, the American people would be “clamorous to be led to safety” and demand cap-and-trade as the salvific path to a “clean energy future.”

But no, the American people aren’t buying it — at least not enough to overcome their repugnance to a massive new energy tax, which, many now understand, is what cap-and-trade boils down to. (Marlo Lewis, OpenMarket)

Government and business face a big challenge in changing the public's use of energy at home and reducing the UK's overall carbon emissions, report finds. From the Ecologist, part of the Guardian Environment Network

The general public are resentful, cynical and resigned when it comes to the issue of climate change, according to an IPPR report.

Unless they can be persuaded to adopt lower-carbon lifestyles, it will be impossible to meet new emissions targets, says the report. (The Guardian)

WASHINGTON — Representatives of the world's 17 biggest carbon polluters kicked off a week of high-stakes talks on climate change Thursday with a discussion at the US State Department.

The main aim of the week of meetings is to bridge differences ahead of the UN December 7-18 climate change conference in Copenhagen, where a pact for curbing global warming beyond 2012 -- when Kyoto Protocol obligations on cutting emissions expire -- is to be crafted.

Negotiators will meet for two days at the State Department in Washington, then move to New York next week and then on to Pittsburgh.

The meetings come as Washington tries to resume a leadership role on climate change, and follow a warning from UN chief Ban Ki-moon that world leaders need to "get moving" on climate change.

Representatives from the European Union, France, Italy, Germany and Britain were at the State Department talks, along with officials representing Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and host, the United States.

The participants belong to the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, an initiative that US President Barack Obama launched in March -- a sharp change from the policies of his predecessor George W. Bush, who rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the previous UN framework on climate change.

Together the countries are responsible for 80 percent of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions. (AFP)

GENEVA | Western nations that spent the past several years slamming the Bush administration for not doing enough to deal with climate change were conspicuously absent from a recent global climate conference.

The Obama administration sent a large entourage to the third World Climate Conference in Geneva earlier this month, trumpeting the return of the United States to the climate change debate.

But representatives from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Australia were nowhere to be found. The European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member European Union, also failed to send a commissioner.

In contrast, the United States sent a 41-member delegation, led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, with representatives from eight agencies, the White House and Capitol Hill. They succeeded in fending off last-minute demands for Western concessions to developing nations, and their diplomatic footwork helped secure the establishment of a global framework for climate services that all nations will need if a carbon-reduction agreement is reached later this year. (John Zaracostas, Washington Times)

SINGAPORE/WASHINGTON - In the game of climate poker, developing nations might feel they have the right cards on the table in U.N. talks after ramping up efforts to curb greenhouse gas output.

China, India, South Korea and other emerging economic powers have announced a series of measures this year to make their economies greener and limit the increase of carbon dioxide emissions from their farms, forests and factories.

The question is whether these domestic steps are enough to seal a new global climate deal, prompt rich nations to toughen their emissions reduction pledges and lead to billions in annual financing to help poorer countries fight global warming.

The measures, focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency, have drawn international praise and helped strengthen the hand of developing nations in talks to try to agree on a replacement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. (Reuters)

Todd Stern, the US’s climate change envoy, has warned countries such as China and India that they run greater risk of protectionist measures in the US Congress if they do not co-operate on international steps to hold down carbon emissions.

Speaking to the FT, he added that the US would still have a solid bargaining position even if, as is widely expected, the Obama administration fails to push its own emissions legislation through Congress before December’s intergovernmental conference at Copenhagen.

Asked about pressure from US legislators to incorporate protectionist measures into the cap-and-trade bill, which has passed the House of Representatives but not the Senate, Mr Stern, said: “The more there is a sense that the big countries are recalcitrant or unwilling to step up then the greater the pressure in Congress is going to be in that direction.”

But he said that in his view a preferable alternative to “border tax-type measures” would be carbon allowances for US trade-sensitive and energy-intensive businesses to help them avoid incurring bigger costs than their competitors in China and elsewhere. (Financial Times)

It is too early to determine the level of meteorological risk posed by global warming, says the director-general of the Beijing Climate Centre (The Guardian)

On the way to the December climate conference in Copenhagen, Chinese scientists are tackling the issue of carbon emissions. To our knowledge this is the first time that this has happened. Until now, China has been sheepish or even defensive as to how they would address carbon dioxide emissions. Considering the strict media controls in China on anything that is published (the government owns all publishing houses) the article below should be viewed as reflecting the views of the Chinese government. China is now questioning the motives of the countries who are promoting limits on carbon dioxide and it sees those limits as an attempt by the developed world to stifle China’s economic growth.

Below is an abridged English translation of an article by Wang Jing that appeared in China’s Science Times on September 7, 2009.

The upcoming Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference in December will have a deep impact on the economic development of every country. Many major, economically strong, countries will come together to discuss climate change and craft a greenhouse gas emission agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, signed in December 1997.

As the biggest carbon emitter in the world, China will certainly be pressured on carbon emission from developed countries. Currently China is at the peak of economic development and any reduction of carbon emissions is considered a fantasy by Chinese experts.

But what kind of gesture should Chinese make at the Copenhagen conference? How can China fight for its right to emit while continuing to develop its economy?

Recently, Ding Zhongli, an academician and the vice president of the Science Academy of China, published a research paper titled “2050 Atmospheric CO2 Concentration Control: Emission Rights Calculation for Each Country” on Science in China Series D: Earth Sciences (Vol. 39, No.8, 1009 -1027, 2009). That paper detailed the historical CO₂ emission data of developed countries and their economic development and provides fresh thinking on how China can win the argument during the carbon emission negotiations.

All developed countries, without exception, became developed through high-speed industrial growth, and that growth inevitably resulted in intense utilization of fossil energy and massive CO₂ emissions. In the US, CO₂ annual per capita emissions increased by an average rate of 5 percent during 1901 to 1910; Germany averaged 9.9 percent during 1947 to 1957; Japan averaged 12 percent during 1960 to 1970. Therefore, emission rates correlate with development rates and emission rights are development rights. However, in exactly the era that China puts its full effort on economic development, some developed countries are proposing CO₂ emission cuts.

The IPCC’s estimate of a global temperature increase of 2.5 degrees C due to CO₂ emissions increase is an average value obtained by some meteorologists through multiple model calculations. Ding’s report found that there is no solid scientific evidence to strictly correlate global temperature rise and CO₂ concentrations. Some geologists believe that global temperature is related to solar activities and glacial periods. At least human activity is not the only factor to cause the global temperature increase. Up to now not a single scientist has figured out the weight ratio of each factor on global temperature change.

However, the massive propaganda “human activity induced the global temperature increase” has been accepted by the majority of the society in some countries, and it has become a political and diplomatic issue. Why do the developed countries put an arguable scientific problem on the international negotiation table? The real intention is not for the global temperature increase, but for the restriction of the economic development of the developing countries, and for keeping their own advantageous positions.

… Ding’s research shows that cumulative emission per capita indicates the economic level of a country. By 1960, US emission per capita was 234.48 tC (tons of carbon); Britain’s level was 177.17 tC; Canada’s level was 149.49 tC; and France’s level was 73.56 tC. However, the cumulative emission per capita for China was only 24.14 tC from 1900 to 2005. China’s GDP per capita in 2005 was much lower than that of the average of the developed countries in 1960.

If the global temperature increase indeed is the result of human activity, controlling the CO₂ concentration should be the historical responsibility of each country that has already emitted CO2. About 70 to 80 percent of the CO₂ in the atmosphere has been emitted by the developed countries. The cumulative emission per capita from Britain and US is about 1,100 tC, the cumulative emission per capita from China and India are only 66 tCO₂ and 23 tCO₂, respectively. Therefore, the obvious conclusion is that the historical emission of the developed countries directly resulted in the global temperature increase, if the claimed correlation is to be accepted.

Nevertheless, after emitting greenhouse gases for over a century and imagining a horrible consequence, the developed countries now strongly require that the developing countries also bear the historical responsibility. As is well known, the long time biggest emitter, the US first refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and then asked that China provides its emission reduction goal. On June 27, 2008, the then-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said in Tokyo that to avoid the risk of extreme climate change, all countries have to adjust their national economic structure. But only the promise of change by the developed countries is not enough for developing countries. It is truly hegemony.

Internationally there are two ways to control atmospheric CO₂ concentration, one is to emphasize on reduction of emissions, another is to emphasize emission quotas. … Ding’s research indicates that whenever there are conflicts between the international climate framework and US domestic economic development, the climate policies are adjusted to protect the economic development and business interests. Since the 1950s, US academics led in global climate change studies and have made significant contributions on this issue. However, the US government policy started to change in the late 1980s. The first Bush administration appeared sluggish on the climate issue. The climate policy of the Clinton administration was active internationally, but inactive internally. The second Bush administration became even more hesitant and instead of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, they structured a replacement for Kyoto Protocol “Clear Skies & Global Climate Change Initiatives” to put the US in a good position for economic development. Therefore, it is necessary for China to insist on emission quotas to ensure a continuous economic development.

The G8 meeting held in Italy in July 2009 proposed to reduce CO₂ emissions by 50 percent globally and by 80 percent for G8 countries by 2050. … It looks like the developed countries contribute more on reducing emission, but if using 1900 level as the baseline, the average cumulative emission per capita for G8 countries is 356.58 tC, compared to 59.95 tC per capita for all the other countries. Ding’s calculations indicate that the average cumulative emission per capital of G8 countries from 1990 to 2050 would be 3 times more than that of other countries. Therefore, the G8 proposal is extremely unfair….

Currently the need for fossil energy in China is enormous. China can use the “cumulative emission quota per capita” strategy to gain favorable status. Ding’s research categorized countries with population over 300,000 into four different groups according to four indices:

He concluded that although China is in the group that needs to reduce the emission increase rate, China can strive for more emission rights since China could get over 30 percent of the global emissions quota. (Energy Tribune)

NEW DELHI — India said Thursday it was ready to set itself non-binding targets for cutting carbon emissions in a bid to shed its image as an intransigent polluter ahead of UN climate change talks in December. (AFP)

While admitting to be a ”culprit” on the climate scene, Africa’s largest economy can’t accept targets for its greenhouse gas emissions, minister states. (CoP15)

Scotland today unveiled the world's first "carbon budget" to link greenhouse gas emissions with government spending, revealing that its plans will emit the equivalent of four coal-fired power stations next year.

The Scottish government has estimated that its spending next year on £33bn worth of core services such as hospitals, schools, roads, local government and farming, will lead to the release of 11.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide.

The "carbon budget" is being claimed as another world first by ministers in Edinburgh, after the Scottish parliament set the first legally binding CO2 reductions target of 42% by 2020 in a climate act in June. The UK Treasury has no plans to follow suit but officials in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are closely watching the Scottish government's efforts. (The Guardian)

In [10] days the curtain will rise in Bangkok for the penultimate round of negotiations before the climate change conference in Copenhagen. David Victor warns of the dangers of a rushed, stapled-together deal. (David Victor, Nature)

LONDON - The European Union's flagship emissions trading scheme has had no negative impact so far on business costs or competitiveness, a survey by non-governmental organization The Climate Group said on Thursday.

But costs could rise as the EU's ETS develops and free emissions permits are phased out for some emitters, the survey found. (Reuters)

If China's energy usage structure remains unchanged, its emissions of greenhouse gases would represent 60 percent of total global emissions and three times China's current production by 2050, a study says. (CoP15)

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar launched the Obama administration's first coordinated response to the impacts of climate change Monday, which he said would both monitor how global warming is altering the nation's landscape and help the country cope with those changes.

Salazar will lead a new "climate change response council" that will coordinate action among the department's eight bureaus and offices. A secretarial order will create eight "regional climate change response centers" in areas ranging from Alaska to the Northeast and build landscape conservation cooperatives that will create strategies for the eight regions with the help of state and local groups, and other federal agencies.

Interior manages one-fifth of the nation's land mass and nearly 1.7 billion acres on the Outer Continental Shelf. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

Today at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) we are launching the Climate Passport program allowing travelers to offset the impact of their air travel through an airport kiosk. This will be the world's first airport kiosk-giving people the opportunity to calculate the environmental impact of their flights and purchase carbon offsets to address that impact while at the airport. (Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco)

WASHINGTON - Rules to add costs to fuels that emit the highest levels of carbon dioxide would deny millions of Americans access to stable Canadian energy and add to the nation's security risks, an interest group backed by oil companies said Thursday.

The Consumer Energy Alliance said a so-called low carbon fuel standard would restrict the use of fuel derived from Canada's oil sands, a major supplier of crude oil to the United States. The group called for an Obama administration study of of the issue.

"Considering the enormous investment involved and the serious security implications an LCFS entails -- greater dependence on unstable energy, greater volatility of supply -- it stands to reason that the National Security Council would want to take an active role in studying this issue," the alliance said in a letter to national security advisor James Jones.

A low carbon fuel standard would rank fuels, and potentially feedstocks like crude oil, by the amount of carbon dioxide they emit and levy fees on the dirtiest ones. (Reuters)

Global surface temperature anomalies for the month of August 2009. Temperature is compared to the average global temperature from 1961-1990.

The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record, and the warmest on record averaged for any June-August (Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter) season according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The preliminary analysis is based on records dating back to 1880.

NCDC scientists also reported that the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for August was second warmest on record, behind 1998. For the June-August 2009 season, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was third warmest on record. (WUWT)

Besides the UAH data for August I cited, Bob Tisdale shows that some other datasets don’t agree with NOAA’s conclusion. – Anthony

The NOAA press release claims the August Global Sea Surface Temperature (SST) was the warmest on record.

And of course SST anomalies, Figure 2, were also at record levels in August 2009.

LOS ANGELES - The Arctic ice pack melted this summer to its third-smallest size on record, up slightly from the low points of the past two years but continuing an overall shrinking trend symptomatic of climate change, U.S. scientists said on Thursday. (Reuters)

This is the press release sent out by NSIDC today (sans image below). Instead of celebrating a two year recovery, they push the “ice free” theme started last year by Marc Serreze. There’s no joy in mudville apparently. My prediction for 2010 is a third year of increase in the September minimum to perhaps 5.7 to 5.9 million square kilometers. Readers should have a look again at how the experts did this year on short term forecasts. – Anthony

NOAA computer model output depicting the trend for the next 30 years

Image source: NOAA News
Arctic sea ice reaches minimum extent for 2009, third lowest ever recorded

CU-Boulder’s Snow and Ice Data Center analysis shows negative summertime ice trend continues

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

While this year’s September minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years, it is still significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, said NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth’s atmosphere. (WUWT)

I have just been at a beautiful presentation at the British Interplanetary Society in London, by Jessica Housden of EADS-Astrium about the upcoming ESA “EarthCARE” satellite (beautiful especially to us engineering boffins that is).

Ms Housden said that EarthCARE, designed to look at clouds and aerosols, will be up there for 4 years from around 2013 (don’t bet your house on that though…there’s lots to learn before it can actually fly).

Upon hearing that I suddenly realised something confirmed during the Q&A session later: the climate-change EarthCARE satellite is not exactly a satellite to study the climate.

For a start, 4 years are way too short a time to see what climate is doing, let alone to see it changing.

You see, EarthCARE is a climate-change satellite. Its measurements will be used to (surprise, surprise!) help climate modellers improve their models (as everybody knows, clouds have been particularly badly modelled up to now).

After all, that’s what it “says on the tin” (”Spacecraft to observe Climate Change“, not “Climate“). Nothing to fault EADS-Astrium for…still, I suspect in the upcoming future one will have to be careful about this apparently minute distinctions.

What about the Climate then? Well, EarthCARE would be a good starting point. For example one of its instruments is designed to measure incoming and outgoing fluxes, thereby answering many of the questions we still have about the planetary energy budget.

But you’d need a constellation of EarthCAREs for proper climate research, perhaps 5 or 6, if only to observe a particular spot more than once a month. And you’d need also a steady supply, to have enough of them up there despite the relatively-short 4-year lifetime. (OmniClimate)

After being starved of any significant solar activity for so long, any detection of a sunspot very nearly becomes headline news. Therefore when a significant spot is detected on the solar farside, people start writing furiously.

So what to do? The first detection of a potential (and substantial) sunspot in more than a month came from GONG

There’s something that might be a spot on the far eastern limb of the latest STEREO image

So what to believe? The next few days should show whether we’re looking at a spot or a plage. I confess that the sensitivity of the seismic results interpreted by GONG are often less accurate as to whether we are seeing a solar disturbance (like a coronal hole or a prominence) or a real sunspot.

I suspect that this is continuation of a pattern we have been seeing for many months, a single sunspot or very small group with SC24 polarity passes in front of us, but nothing else happens and the Sun’s activity quickly falls back to very low levels.

Because of this phenomenon, the most likely response from the solar science community is likely to be muted, after so many false dawns.

Solarcycle24.com has produced a graph showing the remarkable difference between the spotless days between solar cycles 22 and 23 and between 23 and 24.

Solar Cycle Driven by More than Sunspots; Sun Also Bombards Earth with High-Speed Streams of Wind

BOULDER—Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun’s impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. The study, led by scientists at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Michigan, finds that Earth was bombarded last year with high levels of solar energy at a time when the Sun was in an unusually quiet phase and sunspots had virtually disappeared.

“The Sun continues to surprise us,” says NCAR scientist Sarah Gibson, the lead author. “The solar wind can hit Earth like a fire hose even when there are virtually no sunspots.”

The study, also written by scientists at NOAA and NASA, is being published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics. It was funded by NASA and by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

Scientists for centuries have used sunspots, which are areas of concentrated magnetic fields that appear as dark patches on the solar surface, to determine the approximately 11-year solar cycle. At solar maximum, the number of sunspots peaks. During this time, intense solar flares occur daily and geomagnetic storms frequently buffet Earth, knocking out satellites and disrupting communications networks.

(Illustration by Janet Kozyra with images from NASA, courtesy Journal of Geophysical Research – Space Physics.) click for larger image”]

When the solar cycle was at a minimum level in 1996, the Sun sprayed Earth with relatively few, weak high-speed streams containing turbulent magnetic fields (left). In contrast, the Sun bombarded Earth with stronger and longer-lasting streams last year (right) even though the solar cycle was again at a minimum level. The streams affected Earth's outer radiation belt, posing a threat to earth-orbiting satellites, and triggered space weather disturbances, lighting up auroras in the sky at higher latitudes. [ENLARGE

When those streams blow by Earth, they intensify the energy of the planet’s outer radiation belt. This can create serious hazards for weather, navigation, and communications satellites that travel at high altitudes within the outer radiation belts, while also threatening astronauts in the International Space Station. Auroral storms light up the night sky repeatedly at high latitudes as the streams move past, driving mega-ampere electrical currents about 75 miles above Earth’s surface. All that energy heats and expands the upper atmosphere. This expansion pushes denser air higher, slowing down satellites and causing them to drop to lower altitudes. (WUWT)

As to the first point, most skeptics have been maintaining that similar Arctic conditions were experienced recently, that the current climate state is similar to the Medieval Warm Period, and possibly temperatures have exceeded the present throughout the recent geologically warm 10,000 years called the Holocene. These issues as far as I know are still unsettled. Holdren is criticizing skeptics for not coming up with an explanation for a non-disruption that has not been observed.

OTOH, the record of alarmists of loudly proclaimed ‘disruptions’ that have subsequently been discredited provides numerous examples of scientific bias: that the climate system is ‘more sensitive than we thought‘, that the intensity of hurricanes and others storms are increasing, that droughts and floods are increasing, that the Walker circulation is weakening, a miserable record predicting Arctic ice extent, to name a few.

On his second point, skeptics have also “consistently affirmed modern science and interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere” by finding that the rate of underlying warming that can be attributed to increases in CO2 is consistent with the direct radiative effect of CO2, a paltry 0.05C/decade. The graph below lists some of the authors that have arrived at the same basic rate of warming through completely independent means (there are others as well such as Miskolczi and Nir Shaviv).

These sources of observational evidence suggest that the amount of warming will be 0.5C by 2100, not nothing, but not catastrophic and certainly well below the IPCC projections, produced by a chorus of climate simulations sharing many common aspects. The difference is due to the warming attributed to speculative and as yet unconfirmed positive feedbacks. Holdren tells us that:

One of the main reasons for persistent skepticism is that people look at the evidence and find it wanting, they look at the AGW proponents and find misrepresentation of the alternative arguments, and they look at the emotional appeals and see bias. When people of science like RealClimate start worrying that their lack of results is due to being ‘unlikable’ and ‘poor communicators’, its my experience that the real problem is the use of subjective vehicles to back up inconclusive science. Skepticism is healthy, and the way for AGW proponents to further their work is through greater openness and objectivity, not stronger emotional appeals. (David Stockwell, Niche Modeling)

The World Bank is spending billions of pounds subsidising new coal-fired power stations in developing countries despite claiming that burning fossil fuels exposes the poor to catastrophic climate change. The bank, which has a goal of reducing poverty and is funded by Britain and other developed countries, calls on all nations in a report today to “act differently on climate change”.

It says that the world must reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, but it is funding several giant coal-burning plants that will each emit millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for the next 40 to 50 years.

Britain is contributing £400million to a World Bank fund that claims to support “clean technology” but is financing coal power plants. (The Times)

Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc agreed to invest in the $37 billion Gorgon natural gas venture only after Australia’s government assumed liability for potential damages hundreds of years from now. That may set a precedent in this resource-rich nation.

The three oil companies said Sept. 14 they will proceed with the liquefied natural gas development, the continent’s biggest single investment, at Barrow Island off the northwest coast. The national and Western Australia state governments removed a key obstacle last month when they accepted “any long term liability” should carbon dioxide captured from the project escape sequestration, or storage, two kilometers underground.

“Letting taxpayers ultimately take responsibility for any problems with the CO2 sequestration is a calculated risk by the government,” said Craig Wallace, a senior associate of Lavan Legal in Perth who has advised companies on Australia’s draft climate-change legislation.

“It sets a precedent. It’s probably very likely other operations would get on the bandwagon.” (Bloomberg)

FRANKFURT - Energy conscientious Germans taking power production into their own hands may give a wake-up call to established utility firms, as innovators roll out new competition on the clean energy front to grab market share.

A daring plan by alternative power firm LichtBlick and carmaker Volkswagen to put mini power stations into people's basements from next spring shows big generators that their fossil-fuel-based power stations could become replaceable faster than they thought.

Germany faces elections this month and the country's four big suppliers have been banking on a conservative win that would give them time to adapt slowly to the low carbon emission future that is so dear to consumers in Europe's biggest energy market.

"The big power companies are still earning good money with the old structures but it is essential that the top managers can think up ways to put money from the generation business into investment areas closer to the customers," said Holger Krawinkel, energy expert at German consumer organization VZBV.

"That could be decentralized power and heat units in basements or solar panels on the roofs," he added.

Upstart green technologies have a mountain to move, though, as the big guns defend the status quo. (Reuters)

Transport secretary says it is 'perfectly credible' for airlines to continue to expand as new technology to control their carbon emissions becomes available (The Guardian)

GENEVA - Investors betting on renewable or clean energy and related green themes are looking for healthy and sustainable returns, but the road is full of pitfalls for the unwary, investment managers warned on Thursday.

Attendees at the Jetfin Green 2009 alternative investment conference in Geneva heard that some alternative energy sources are now in a position to compete with more established sources, even in the absence of government subsidies.

"Renewable energy technologies are at a point where they are cost competitive with the grid, Copenhagen aside," said Walther Lovato, a portfolio manager at California-based asset manager Passport Capital.

He was referring to a summit to be held in Copenhagen in December, when world leaders will attempt to agree a new global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012, potentially leading to more subsidies for green energy. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - High exposure to certain now-banned industrial chemicals may lead to fewer female births, a new study suggests.

The findings, reported in the journal Environmental Health, add to evidence that the two groups of related chemicals -- polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- may affect human reproduction.

PBBs were once widely used as flame retardants in plastics, electronic and textiles, while PCBs were used in everything from appliances and fluorescent lighting to insulation and insecticides.

While the chemicals were banned in the 1970s as potential health hazards, they remain a public-health concern because they linger in the environment and accumulate in the fat of fish, mammals and birds. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - One million heart attacks, 700,000 strokes and 900,000 miscarriages -- U.S. public health officials want Americans to know these will happen every single year with or without a swine flu vaccine campaign.

Yet this year, they know a significant number will be blamed on the H1N1 vaccine, which will roll out within weeks, and they are struggling to be ready.

They expect an avalanche of so-called adverse event reports, which are reports of death, illness or other health trauma that occur within two weeks after receiving treatment -- in this case, the swine flu vaccine.

"We are going to be overwhelmed with potential events," said Mike Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota.

"Anything that happens to anybody in the period of 7 to 14 days after vaccination will be reported." (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - The death rate from the pandemic H1N1 swine flu is likely lower than earlier estimates, an expert in infectious diseases said on Wednesday.

New estimates suggest that the death rate compares to a moderate year of seasonal influenza, said Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University.

"It's mildest in kids. That's one of the really good pieces of news in this pandemic," Lipsitch told a meeting of flu experts being held by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

"Barring any changes in the virus, I think we can say we are in a category 1 pandemic. This has not become clear until fairly recently."

The Pandemic Severity Index set by the U.S. government has five categories of pandemic, with a category 1 being comparable to a seasonal flu epidemic.

Seasonal flu has a death rate of less than 0.1 percent -- but still manages to kill 250,000 to 500,000 people globally every year.

A category 5 pandemic would compare to the 1918 flu pandemic, which had an estimated death rate of 2 percent or more, and would kill tens of million of people. (Reuters)

Younger workers are typically more healthy than the population at large, and a significant share of them quite rationally choose not to buy health insurance, as my colleague Mike Tanner explains in a recent op-ed. The major health care plans on the table in Washington would force them to buy coverage. As the Post story explains:

I’m beginning to see a pattern. Those same young workers will be forced to pay the bills for soaring Social Security and Medicare expenditures when the Baby Boomers begin retiring en masse a decade from now. And of course, they will be the ones paying off the $9 trillion in additional federal debt expected to be wracked up from the current explosion in federal spending.

I always thought parents were supposed to support their kids, not saddle them with bigger bills and huge debts. (Daniel Griswold, Cato at liberty)

The debate over a tax on sugary soft drinks — billed as a way to fight obesity and provide billions for health care reform — is starting to fizz over.

President Obama has said it is worth considering. The chief executive of Coca-Cola calls the idea outrageous, while skeptics point to political obstacles and question how much of an impact it would really have on consumers.

But a team of prominent doctors, scientists and policy makers says it could be a powerful weapon in efforts to reduce obesity, in the same way that cigarette taxes have helped curb smoking. (NYT)

LONDON - Food aid is at a 20-year low despite the number of critically hungry people soaring this year to its highest level ever, the head of the United Nations relief agency said on Wednesday.

Josette Sheeran, UN World Food Programme's (WFP) executive director said the WFP is facing its biggest ever challenge.

"The problem with the food crisis and the financial crisis is that it has silently permeated throughout the world with the world's bottom billion (in terms of poverty) selectively hit the hardest because they're the most vulnerable," Sheeran told Reuters in an interview.

The number of hungry people passed 1 billion this year for the first time, she said, adding the WFP has barely a third of the funding it needs to feed 108 million people this year. (Reuters)

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. (Gregg Easterbrook, WSJ)

Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry have delayed the introduction of their long-awaited climate change bill until the end of this month — one more sign that Congress will be hard pressed to get a bill to President Obama’s desk before the international summit on global warming in Stockholm in December.

The chances of action this year, never all that good, are even slimmer now that the White House and the Senate leadership have pretty much agreed to keep controversial issues — and a bill limiting greenhouse gas emissions certainly falls into that category — on the back burner until the health care debate is resolved.

Though smart politics, it is a disappointment to everyone who hoped that the United States would be able to go to Stockholm with a clear strategy in hand.

All is not lost. The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling out rules that, when fully effective, could place limits on at least half the greenhouse gas emissions emitted in this country. (NYT)

NEW YORK — Industry, economic and environmental groups are making a final push to influence a climate bill that may go before the Senate within weeks.

Investors managing more than $13 trillion in assets called for new global emissions laws Wednesday, illustrating how the issue has divided even groups that traditionally have opposed new curbs.

Speaking at the International Investor Forum on Climate Change, Lord Nicholas Stern, among Britain's most influential economists, said the global debate over curbing greenhouse gases has reached a critical point.

If the U.S. does not pass substantial climate legislation, few believe other nations, particularly developing countries, will cut emissions on their own.

"We have to act now," said Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "Some things you can postpone. This is not one of them." (Associated Press)

St. Paul, Minn. — Nearly all of the Republicans running for governor next year say they don't believe in human-caused climate change.

In fact, eight of the nine declared GOP candidates say they view global warming science as an unproven theory that should no longer drive state policy. Environmental activists say the prevailing GOP view not only runs counter to the beliefs of most scientists, but also to Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The global warning debate has not yet eclipsed the economy or health care as a campaign issue, but the topic has been coming up at Republican gatherings. (Tim Pugmire, Minnesota Public Radio)

Rep. Mark Kirk’s “aye” vote in the House of Representatives was something of a surprise and something of a mistake, if one reads the tea leaves. Now his back-pedal is odd:

The logic, if one calls it that, is odd but the result is a positive. Frankly, we don’t imagine that most politicians understood the breadth and depth of anger that would follow cap-and-trade “yes” votes.”

Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times.

These estimates were made in Treasury memos, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through a Freedom of Information Act request that sought information related to proposals originated by Treasury involving "cap-and-trade schemes" that deal with "carbon," "carbon dioxide" or "greenhouse gases." The memos were given to The Times by CEI.

The House narrowly passed cap-and-trade legislation earlier this year, and now the Senate stands poised to take up its version of the bill at any time, although it has been largely overshadowed by health care reform efforts. The ultimate cost of the bill to taxpayers has been the subject of fierce debate between supporters and opponents of the legislation. CEI, a free-market think tank that opposes the bill, thinks the Treasury documents prove the legislation would pose a significant burden to the economy. (Amanda Carpenter, Washington Times)

A Treasury Department analysis says a cap-and-trade law could cost American families more than $1,700 a year. No wonder administrators tried to keep the study secret. (IBD)

At the BBC’s Earth Watch blog, Richard Black takes a different perspective on the recent survey of the British public (well, 500 of them, anyway) and Climate Porn that we covered in our last post.

Thirteen months ago, the New Economics Foundation, with a group of other organisations including the UK’s Green Party, launched its 100 Months campaign, claiming that:

2009 also saw the release of the film, The Age of Stupid, which claims to be a documentary, but is in fact a fiction set in the future, charting the fall of civilisation as it was torn apart by Gaia’s wrath. Environmentalism’s inability to construct an understanding of the present forces it to base its fantasies - climate porn - from a position in the future. The film’s director, Franny Armstrong, was met in several public meetings by the UK’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, who was entirely unable to challenge her catastrophism, as we reported, back in June:

Miliband needed Armstrong, we said. To give his government’s policies moral legitimacy, she had thrown at him the figure that, according to the UN, 150,000 people die each year as a result of climate change, for which the UK would be culpable if it failed to act on climate change. As we pointed out in the same post, the figure had just been raised by the GHF, to 300,000 - another case of climate porn in 2009 - but both figures were dubious. What they entirely failed to show is how few people in the developing world died of causes attributed to climate change compared to other causes. In fact, as a cause it ranked the lowest, beneath obesity - not something you’d expect people in the Third world to suffer from. Moreover, what the figure entirely omits is that these secondary effects of climate change, were they experienced in the industrialised world, would likely have resulted in no deaths at all. And yet these 300,000 deaths are used as the basis for an argument for the mitigation of climate change rather than as a good reason for industrialisation and economic development. Such is the distorting effect of climate porn on political discourse.

Expressing the thesame symptoms of disorientation, here are some headlines from the Independent over the past year.

Adam finished his week of misery with a podcast about what he took from the conference:

But as we pointed out at the time, in an echo of his criticism of climate porn in 2006, Professor Mike Hulme gives us reason to take Adam’s and the conference organisers’ claims to be reporting ’scientific opinion’ verbatim with a pinch of salt.

Richard Black is perhaps a great deal more sensible in his reporting than his fellow journalists at the BBC, the Guardian, and the Independent. Yet he seems to have become immune to their sensational climate stories. They simply no longer register. But this desensitisation means a failure to reflect critically on environmentalism and its influence, and his journalism suffers as a consequence. With ‘a number of reports hinting that the pace of global temperature rise may have abated, for now at least’ in mind, Black considers whether this, rather than climate porn, may be having an influence over the direction of policy.

Here, he misses the point that climate change isn’t something difficult for governments to cope with. It is actually convenient. The political establishment’s absorption of environmentalism allows it to substantially lower the standard by which it is measured, and gives authoritarianism a legitimising basis. The looming, inevitable environmental crisis instructs the public to lower their expectations accordingly. It means that rather than finding a way through problems such as energy supply, water and travel infrastructure, and of course, raising expectations, politicians can turn the normal business of politics around, and redefine the problem as one of individual morality. The statement that the public must use less electricity, must travel less, and must consume fewer resources is a statement that the public must expect less of politicians and politics, and behave themselves. The failure of the establishment’s collective imagination is what drives ‘climate change ethics’. The search for international agreements and legal frameworks to ‘combat climate change’ is a way of externalising what cannot legitimately be done domestically. Once in place, politicians can reasonably argue that punitive climate laws are a matter of international obligation; we are all bound by them, and cannot do anything about them. It defers politics and political accountability to the strange, undemocratic, inaccessible space that exists between states.

Climate porn operates at these levels, not just in the media. According to Black’s un-named climate negotiator, we can’t even trust the consensus - represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - to paint a reliable picture of the future. Therefore there can be no parameters by which we can begin to rationally understand or criticise the governmental, or inter-governmental response to climate change. Things can be perpetually based, not on what has been observed, or produced by science, but on the possibility that ‘the picture would be worse than the IPCC painted’… Climate porn, just as Hulme warned.

Black concludes by taking a closer look at the results produced by the survey of the British public, and determines, weakly, that theirs “and their leaders’ perceptions of climate change, in the UK and elsewhere, are not significantly out of step”.

Here, again, Black sees the world upside down. He can point to as many opinion polls and interpret them in as many ways as he likes: environmentalism has never been tested in the UK at the only poll that counts - democratic elections. Fear (climate porn), and hashed-together international frameworks (Copenhagen) - not democracy - are the vehicles through which environmental ideology cements itself in public institutions. Environmentalism’s influence within the establishment is ascendant precisely because the political establishment has such trouble connecting itself with the public. (Climate Resistance)

More than 180 of the world's largest investors, with collective assets of $13tn, put their combined weight behind a passionate call for strong US and international action on global warming in New York today.

"We cannot drag our feet on the issue of global climate change," said Thomas DiNapoli, who heads the $116.5bn New York state pension fund. "I am deeply concerned about the investor risks climate change presents, and the human cost of inaction is unthinkable." (Global Warming)

Human society faces a global health catastrophe if climate change is not effectively tackled at the UN conference in Copenhagen in December, leading doctors from around the world warn today.

Calling on medical practitioners everywhere to put pressure on politicians in advance of the meeting, the doctors say that the world's poorest people will be hit first by the health effects of global warming, but add that "no one will be spared".

Their stark challenge to governments follows a report in May which said climate change would represent "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century". (The Independent)

More almost-pure nonsense about AGW and health, this time even bigger than last time, from two famous medical journals and 18 professional medical organizations.

Anybody could write them down by using a little catastrophical imagination (poverty, death, plagues, famines, the works). They should be titled “No University degree needed”.

I demonstrated that a few months ago. And I was only able to analyze the bits I am familiar with…who knows how many more articles have been left out.

The result can only be a full rejection of the latest claims. That’s why, whatever the intentions (and professional competence) of those writing them, they are almost-pure nonsense. (OmniClimate)

Questioning the soundness of climate-related science should not be the realm solely of climate skeptics. That’s what makes the following even more welcome.

That’s the start of a courageous, no-holds-barred Sep 9, 2009 editorial by Sian Lewis on SciDev.net (”a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology for the developing world“).

The United States, Canada and Mexico now support using the UN ozone treaty to require cuts in powerful greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. (CoP15)

Millions of children could die because cash for food aid is diverted to tackle climate change, Oxfam has warned. (Daily Telegraph)

One year on, the world still looks to the US and holds its breath. The fate of a global climate treaty rests in American hands (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian)

Discussions between Europe and the US on whether or not an upcoming ”Copenhagen Protocol” should be build on the expiring ”Kyoto Protocol” may undermine a new worldwide treaty, sources say. (CoP15)

An entertaining split between Europe and America has emerged concerning the question how the carbon emissions reductions should be achieved in individual nations.

Obama and Barroso in Prague, April 2009. Things may have been different then.

As The Telegraph, The Guardian, and everyone else reports, Europe and America differ in their opinion how the internal rules to reduce the CO2 production should be set.

The European politicians think that Kyoto I has been such an amazing success ;-) that it should be repeated and its successes should be amplified. Among other things, it means that all nations should adopt the same internal mechanisms to punish the CO2 emissions. The U.S. economy should be controlled by the Eurocrats in Brussels in the same way as any other decent EU country and Barack Obama should remain what he is appreciated for, namely a puppet of the global political correctness headquarters that should stay in Brussels.

On the other hand, Barack Obama himself dared to disagree. Kyoto I hasn't been a sufficiently huge disaster so the U.S. president wants to engineer an even better scheme. As the first post-Hoover protectionist president of a country that rejected Kyoto I and is going to reject Kyoto II as long as it is isomorphic (and gives a free pass to the poorer emerging markets), he thinks that every country should be allowed to decide about its own methods to achieve the targets and the carbon flows in America should remain uncontrollable by the EU and the U.N. That's quite a heresy for the EU, comrade Obama! ;-)

Even Steven Chu has warned that deep CO2 reductions cannot be achieved politically in the U.S. Why doesn't he follow the example of the tall and strong Napoleon in France who defeated 74% of the French citizens and imposed a carbon tax upon them? ;-) Sarkozy also wants to start a world trade war by a new CO2 border tax. Swedish EU presidency also urges the U.S. Senate to behave; if they won't, the U.S. Senators will be spanked just like any bad EU kids. ;-)

It's not hard to understand Europe's newly gained self-confidence with respect to America. The Made-In-America downturn has allowed Europe to surpass North America as the wealthiest region of the world. And the future fate of the U.S. dollar - whose reserve status is being questioned by all members of BRIC as well as others (everyone can see that the U.S. may suffer from the same kind of an irresponsible socialist government as everyone else) - may turn out to have something to do with this picture.

The declared purpose of the December 2009 negotiations in Copenhagen that will hopefully fail completely is to save the Earth if not the multiverse. The UAH AMSU data see the average annual and global brightness temperature of the Earth to be close to minus 15.5 °C. Ban Ki-Moon and similar stellar scientists have calculated that if the temperature exceeds f***ing frying minus 13.5 °C which is by 2 °C higher, all of us are going to evaporate or transform into plasma and the Universe may decay into a different state, too. And I don't have to explain you the staggering statistical implications for the whole multiverse. ;-)

During the year, the brightness temperature oscillates approximately between -17 °C in January and -14 °C in July - because the variations of the landmass, which is mostly on the Northern Hemisphere, are more pronounced than the variations of the oceanic temperatures. The recent, 30-year trends indicate that the temperature is increasing roughly by 1 °C per century, so the catastrophic level when the temperature will oscillate between -15 °C and -12 °C could occur around the year 2200 or so - whether or not we will continue to use fossil fuels.

If you have ever experienced how much brutally hotter -12 °C is relatively to -14 °C, you must agree with all these guys that we're all doomed already next year - because we can already predict that the year 2200 will come - unless Obama and his compatriots will join the EU as obedient members. :-) (The Reference Frame)

Climate change activists reacted sharply yesterday to indications from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that cap-and-trade legislation may have to wait until 2010, warning that the delay could derail international negotiations in Copenhagen.

Annie Petsonk, international counsel for Environmental Defense Fund, said she fears the U.N. talks slated for December will flounder without a clear plan from President Obama to move climate legislation through Congress.

"The appearance to the international community would be that the U.S. Congress is just adrift," she said.

Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for Natural Resources Defense Council, said State Department negotiators need domestic legislation in order to convince China and other developing countries that the United States is prepared to act -- and to push those countries in turn to make emissions-cutting commitments.

"We're at a critical stage in the negotiations," Schmidt said. "Reid is sending signals, and it's not clear what they all mean."

Reid, speaking to reporters yesterday, said health care and regulatory reform may dominate the rest of the legislative session, and suggested cap and trade may not come until next year.

"So, you know, we are going to have a busy, busy time the rest of this year," Reid said. "And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year. We still have next year to complete things if we have to." (E&ENews PM, Sept. 15). (ClimateWire)

European farmers must slash agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% by 2020, primarily by producing biomass and storing carbon in the soil, but they risk ruin without outside help, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said yesterday (15 September). (EurActiv)

First of all: French people are against it! Two recent polls point out that a large majority are dissatisfied:

According to IFOP Institute, which questioned 1011 persons on 3 and 4 September, 65% are against a carbon tax while 34% approve [see Paris-Match weekly magazine].

The French Consumers Union “UFC”, a very powerful consumers lobby, after having ordered a survey from the CSA polling institute, wrote in UFC’s review “Que Choisir” that 74% are rejecting a carbon tax. The main reasons are:

Both surveys show that roughly the same proportion of right-wing and left-wing voters disapprove of a carbon tax. (CCNet)

What is China playing at on climate change? That may be the most important question in the world right now, thanks alone to its status as the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gasses. But what Beijing is – or is not – prepared to do will also determine whether the rest of the world can reach a deal on combating global warming that is worth the paper it's written on. (Ian Katz, The Guardian)

China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, and countries around the world from the United States to Japan are pressuring Beijing to lower emissions and to introduce an absolute cap on emissions. But asking China's central government to impose a carbon cap is the wrong approach. Even if Beijing wanted to do so, such a decision would be almost impossible for the central government to enforce. Greater political freedoms are the key for real environmental improvements in China.

Since economic reforms began in China 30 years ago, local governments have been given wide autonomy in pursuing economic growth. One widely noted result is the inability of Beijing to implement tough planning, tax or environmental policies that might constrain that growth. To some extent, public pressures have forced the hand of local governments on environmental issues that have a direct impact on everyday quality of life air and water quality, waste disposal or food toxins, for instance.

But greenhouse gases, the most common of which is CO2, are different. Like the protection of a threatened animal or plant species, reducing greenhouse gases has little noticeable impact on the communities concerned. Reducing CO2 is rarely a pressing public priority in a country like China, where rapid development is a top goal and other pollution problems are more tangible. Add to that the fact that local governments are autonomous of top-down regulation from Beijing. In essence, the most critical government actors for controlling global carbon emissions are insulated from both top-down and bottom-up political pressures.

There are a few reasons why local governments in China may get more serious about climate change on their own, although these are probably insufficient to control emissions nationwide. One is the lucrative "clean development mechanism" administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change under which polluters in one country can buy carbon-emission credits from another country. China is expected to rake in about 59% of the global revenues (likely worth several billion dollars, depending on carbon prices) from this mechanism through the end of 2012, according to the U.N. Local governments and their companies will get most of this revenue. There are also first-mover advantages for cities and provinces that develop the technologies that will likely prove a growth industry in future. The city of Yangzhou, for instance, is pushing ahead with a low-carbon "eco-city" development model that, unusually, includes an immediate reduction in absolute emission levels, something the national government has not embraced.

Beijing itself could take the lead by making greenhouse-gas mitigation efforts one criterion in the evaluation of local cadres, who are currently judged mainly by their economic records and ideological rectitude. In April, the State Council required that all provincial and local governments consider climate change initiatives in their economic and social development policies. But the well-known ability of local governments to evade such top-down mandates is unlikely to be any different in the case of climate-change efforts.

Better yet would be to open up political space at the local level so that citizens and advocacy groups can create a public consensus on the need for action. While Beijing talks about "public participation" in its response to climate change, so far that has meant mainly authoritarian-style efforts to educate the public and encourage greater obedience. In a few places, however, citizens and groups have been brought into the making of policy. The northeastern city of Shenyang, for instance, has been experimenting with participatory approaches to environmental policy since passing a law in 2005 under which citizens must be included in the making of all environmental laws. So far, this has meant mainly public consultations on laws, but the city also tolerates an active community of environmental nongovernmental organizations. One result: its air quality has improved faster than almost any other similar city in China.

Another approach being considered is meetings of representative groups of citizens who deliberate on the best policy approach and then deliver their findings as binding policy mandates to the government concerned known in China as minzhu kentanhui or "sincere democratic forums." In China, experiments with this system, mainly in the city of Wenling in Zhejiang province, have demonstrated that Chinese citizens place a high priority on environmental protection when asked to rank different government projects. In one forum in Wenling in 2005, citizens selected six environmental protection projects among the top 10 projects they wanted the government to fund.

Deliberation not only expands information but also expands the sense of common responsibility on which the willingness to embrace potentially costly carbon emission programs depends. If Beijing were to start targeting environmental performance in cadre promotions and expand political freedoms that would generate social pressures, more local governments would have an incentive to embrace this bottom-up approach to emissions control.

Despite these signs of progress on locally driven initiatives, many foreigners continue to misunderstand the causes of China's environmental-policy failures. Most foreign assistance, whether government-to-government or private sector, has replicated the top-down approach by giving money to Beijing. This aid has centered on helping central bureaucrats to develop national policy, transferring technology to energy users, or improving policy monitoring.

That's a mistake. While some well-known commentators have praised China's authoritarian approach to climate change, the truth is that Beijing is failing on the environment precisely because of the lack of political freedoms. Rather than leaning even more heavily on Beijing, the critical need is to invest in approaches that will hold local governments accountable to their citizens. Only then can China really tackle CO2. (Bruce Gilley, WSJ)

China's emissions unlikely to fall low enough because 2C target 'does not provide room for developing countries (The Guardian)

This is a funny story about getting monthly mean Australian temperatures from the Bureau of Meteorology. I hope for happy ending, but we have yet to see.

About 2 weeks ago I tried to download these data from the BoM website set up for the purpose.

I have noticed before that temperature is NOT available as a MONTHLY mean series, but this time I was very perplexed. It is available by season, by January, February, etc. but not all together.

To get the data into a monthly series would require me to download all 12 raw datafiles (one for each month) then interleave them to create a continuous list with 12 values for each month. This would be timeconsuming and a potential source of error.

Note that all of the major sources of global mean temperature data on the web are available in as a monthly temperature series, GISS , HadCRUT, RSS MSU, etc…

It would seem relatively easy to add an option for download of data to the selection menu.

So I contacted the help desk, and after some time, had a delightfully frustrating conversation along the lines of: “I would like the monthly data series.” “But all the months are there.” etc, etc. Finally, she agreed to send my enquiry on to the technical department I presume, and today I found out why Australian temperature is not available as a monthly series.

So the reason why stock standard monthly data series are not available is because they don’t look good as a barchart. Well, I would never have guessed. (David Stockwell, Niche Modeling)

he world's ocean surfaces had their warmest summer temperatures on record, the US national climatic data centre said today.

Climate change has been steadily raising the earth's average temperature in recent decades, but climatologists expected additional warming this year and next due to the influence of El Niño.

Ocean surface temperatures were the warmest for any August since record keeping began in 1880. For the June to August summer months, average ocean surface temperatures rose to 16.9C (62.5F), which is 1.04F above the 20th century average, said the report from the climate centre, which is a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The Guardian)

There is further evidence with respect to major issues in using minimum 2m temperatures as part of the diagnosis of climate system heat changes (i.e. global warming and cooling). [thanks to Jielun Sun for alerting us to it!].

“The stable nocturnal boundary layer is commonly viewed or modelled as a balance between the temperature tendency (cooling) and vertical heat-flux divergence. Sometimes the radiative-flux divergence is also included. This perspective has dictated the design of field experiments for investigating stable nocturnal boundary layers. Tower-based micrometeorological data from three field campaigns are analysed to evaluate the vertically integrated sensible-heat budget for nocturnal stable conditions. Our analysis indicates frequent occurrence of large imbalance between the temperature tendency and vertical heat-flux divergence terms. The values of the radiative-flux divergence are generally too small and sometimes of the wrong sign to explain the residual. An analysis of random flux errors and uncertainties in the tendency term indicate that such errors cannot explain large imbalances, suggesting the importance of advection of temperature or possibly the divergence of mesoscale fluxes. The implied role of advection is consistent with circumstantial evidence. Even weak surface heterogeneity can create significant horizontal gradients in stable boundary layers. However, it is shown that existing field data and observational strategy do not allow adequate evaluation of advection and mesoscale flux divergence terms.”

Even weak surface heterogeneity may induce important horizontal variations in the very stable boundary layer, and new approaches for measuring horizontal variation of temperature and fluxes are required.”

Thus minimum temperatures over land are very sensitive to their immediate local environments. Their use to characterize minimum temperatures as being spatially representative over a larger area, such as used to diagnose global warming and cooling, are not appropriate. (Climate Science)

Earth is experiencing a sunspot drought which, if it persists, may deliver a make-or-break test of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Along with a dearth of sunspots, NASA reports other signs of a current lull in the sun’s activity, including a 50-year low in solar wind pressure and a 12-year low in the sun’s brightness.

Some scientists believe that these signs point to more than just a low point in the 11-year solar cycle. The sun may be entering a “deep solar minimum”.

Previous solar minimums – the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, the Sörer Minimum of 1460-1550 and the Dalton Minimum of 1790-1830 – coincided with periods when Earth’s climate was colder than average.

While the link between solar minimums and a dip in global temperature isn’t fully established, some believe a solar minimum over the next couple of decades may be a litmus test of whether greenhouse gas emissions are the primary cause of Earth’s sudden warming.

Among them is University of New England researcher, Dr Robert Baker, who has for several years worked on a theory that the sun is a key driver of Australian rainfall. (The Land)

CALGARY, Alberta - Greenpeace activists who occupied mining equipment at Royal Dutch Shell Plc's Canadian oil sands project ended their protest on Wednesday after 1-1/2 days and were escorted away without facing charges, the environmental group said.

Shell said production at the Muskeg River mine, one of four oil sands projects in northern Alberta, operated at normal rates throughout the day as the demonstrators worked to spread their message that developing the oil sands hampers the fight against global warming.

The protest, which began with 25 activists and ended with 15, coincided with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Wednesday.

Greenpeace spokesman Mike Hudema said the group was allowed to leave the mine after leaders spoke with company officials and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Harper-Obama meeting did not produce the results that climate change activists hoped for. (Reuters)

Like Daniel in the lion's den, Sierra Club representative Nachy Kanfer stepped to podium at the Southern Coals Conference meeting in downtown Cincinnati Wednesday.

He was there to explain why the environmental group wants coal to be replaced by cleaner forms of energy by 2030.

His 30-minute presentation didn't change the minds of the 70 or so coal industry executives in the room. But in a time when even the president isn't immune from abuse in the halls of Congress, both sides appreciated the chance to exchange views without rancor.

"The level of civility is so low in this country," said Kanfer, who said he appreciated the opportunity to share the Sierra Club's views. The Southern Coals Conference, consisting of sales and marketing executives from about 80 companies including coal producers, utilities, traders and rail and barge companies, has held twice-annual informational meetings here since 1962.

He acknowledged he'd have a hard time getting Sierra Club members to sit still for a meeting with a coal industry representative. But he didn't pull any punches either.

"We need to end coal's contribution to global warming by 2030," he told the group which meets here twice a year. That means opposing new coal-burning plants that don't sequester the carbon they produce, replacing existing coal plants with cleaner burning alternatives and "cleaning up egregious coal mining practices," he said.

But he also pointed out coal, which accounts for about half U.S. electricity production and more than 90 percent in Greater Cincinnati, has been an important contributor to America's standard of living. "We don't acknowledge that enough," he said. (The Enquirer)

BEIJING | If China's economy continues to expand rapidly and rely heavily on coal and other fossil fuels until the middle of the century, its power consumption would be unsustainable, according to a study by government think tanks released Wednesday.

The two-year study, supported by the U.S.-based Energy Foundation and the international environmental group WWF, also said if China's energy usage structure remains unchanged, its emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming would reach 17 billion tons a year by 2050. That would represent 60 percent of total global emissions and three times China's current production, it said.

"If the current mode of economic development drags on, the scale of China's fossil fuel consumption will be shocking," said the study, titled "China's Low Carbon Development Pathways by 2050." (Associated Press)

BEIJING, Sept 16 - China needs huge flows of clean technology investment to maintain hope of keeping greenhouse gas emissions below levels that could help push the planet deep into dangerous global warming, a Beijing energy think-tank has said.

China is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuels, and the nation's Energy Research Institute said in a new study that with enough money and the right policies, emissions could peak around 2030-35 and then by 2050 fall to the same level as 2005.

Such steps would help the world to avoid greenhouse gas concentrations likely to stoke worsening droughts, floods and sea-level rises caused by these gases retaining growing levels of the heat in the atmosphere.

But the Institute, which advises Chinese energy and climate change policy-makers, stressed such an undertaking would come with a big bill, one that it said rich nations should help pay. (Reuters)

All of us want to use energy and feel good about it. The challenge is to supply sufficient amounts of affordable energy to power our lives and build an energy system that can sustain future generations. (Globe and Mail)

Uh oh. First President Obama pointed to Spain and Germany as models for how the U.S. could create a robust "green jobs" economy that even would lift us out of our current — an increasingly appropriate term — malaise.

Confronted by meddling academics who analyzed the Spanish situation and laid out the monitory lesson of its green-jobs regime, the White House quickly pivoted and said, uh, look to Denmark and Germany, yeah, that's it, Denmark.

OK. That's been done — by the establishment think tank CEPOS, and you can read it here. The answer is that the president's (repeat) claim that "Denmark produces almost 20 percent of their electricity through wind power" is false. Denmark actually produces much less of its own electricity from wind, as low as 4 percent depending on the year, with the recent average of 9.7 percent. This despite a massive buildout of what they flatteringly call the "wind carpet," on some of the most hospitable terrain for wind power in the world.

It is also in return for its households paying the highest electricity rates in Europe. With a substantially lower per-capita energy use. That means, to get half of what Obama seeks, the U.S. would have to carpet itself twice over — which means lots of windmills where birds fly and Kennedys live — and pay Danish-style rates. (Chris Horner, Planet Gore)

White House officials are calling for international efforts to end fuel and electric power subsidies as part of the agenda for next week's G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, according to a letter from a senior administration official.

The White House also says G-20 nations should take steps to improve oil market transparency and scale up financing for tackling climate change.

Michael Froman, the White House's deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said in a Sept. 3 letter that cutting the subsidies would improve energy security and help fight climate change by encouraging conservation and boosting new technologies. (Greenwire)

Top contenders for California governor interjected an unexpected issue today into the fledgling 2010 campaign: Most of them said they will at least consider expanding nuclear power to meet the state's growing energy needs and reduce carbon emissions.

California has banned new reactors since the late 1970s amid concerns over the disposal of nuclear waste. No new plants can be built in the state until industry finds a way to permanently dispose of its waste, according to state law.

Energy from California's four nuclear reactors, plus nuclear power imported from Arizona, provides 15 percent of the state's electricity supply. But California's next governor may be more amenable to expanding that amount.

The most enthusiastic supporter for nuclear power at today's forum at Santa Clara University was Republican Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who promised to make nuclear power a centerpiece of his campaign.

He said the state needs an alternative power source to meet the demand for 50 percent more electricity in the coming decade. (SF Chronicle)

The energy secretary has claimed that Conservative-run councils are frustrating plans for wind power.

Ed Miliband also told the TUC congress on Wednesday that he was "very sorry" for workers at the Vestas plant.

The Danish firm closed its plants on the Isle of Wight and in Southampton with the loss of 425 jobs, blaming a lack of demand in the UK.

Miliband said that in negotiations with Vestas "the issue for them was quite simple, they did not have the orders for onshore wind turbines to justify keeping the factory open".

"They did not have the orders because up and down this country local councils are turning down wind turbine applications; 60 per cent of applications made to Conservative councils are turned down," he said. (ePolitix)

Electric vehicles are the clear favored technology for concept cars at the Frankfurt Motor Show this week. But Toyota, the leader in hybrid cars, thinks that the high cost of the lithium ion batteries will keep electric cars from penetrating the mass market for another decade.

Over the past three years, Toyota secretly tested lithium ion batteries as a potential replacement for the nickel metal hydride batteries now used in the Prius, according to a Bloomberg report

In its tests, Toyota concluded that lithium ion batteries were safe and reliable, but the higher cost doesn't justify a complete shift over for Toyota's hybrids, executives said. As a result, the company will remain with nickel-based batteries for most of its hybrid cars, according to the report. (CNET)

NEW YORK - Think you need antibiotics to fight that cough or cold? Numerous Web sites are willing to sell them to you without a doctor's prescription -- a loophole, researchers say, that could undermine efforts to curb the problem of bacteria that shrug off powerful antibiotics.

In a simple Internet search, investigators found 138 online vendors that sell antibiotics without a doctor's prescription. More than one third supplied the drugs with no questions asked, while 64 percent made their own prescriptions after having prospective customers fill out an online health survey.

The problem, the researchers report in the Annals of Family Medicine, is that these antibiotics are likely to be used inappropriately.

And that, in turn, could contribute to the major and growing problem of antibiotic resistance -- where populations of bacteria become immune to the drugs that once controlled them.

Antibiotic resistance is a public-health concern worldwide, as bacteria that cause skin infections, meningitis and pneumonia, to name a few, have developed immunity to certain antibiotics.

Misuse of antibiotics -- using them for infections like the common cold that are caused by viruses, not bacteria, for example -- has helped fuel antibiotic resistance. So far, efforts to address the problem have mainly focused on changing doctors' prescribing practices.

But if people are diagnosing and treating themselves with the help of online vendors, then simply altering prescribing practices may not be enough, according to Dr. Arch G. Mainous, the lead researcher on the new study.

In an interview, he noted that many people may, after having a bacterial infection treated with antibiotics, feel they can recognize and treat the next one. Seeing the doctor may seem like a waste of time and money.

"Patients feel like they know what's wrong and what they need to take," said Mainous, of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. "But I would contend that that's probably inaccurate."

In addition to feeding the wide-scale problem of antibiotic resistance, taking the drugs without a prescription also presents more-immediate potential risks, Mainous noted -- like allergic reactions or interactions with other medications a person may be taking. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - Iowa senator Tom Harkin, newly empowered to investigate health matters as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, promised on Monday to probe deeply into any potential links between cellphone use and cancer.

Harkin, who took over the committee earlier this month after the death of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, said he was concerned no one has been able to prove cellphones do not cause cancer.

"I'm reminded of this nation's experience with cigarettes. Decades passed between the first warnings about smoking tobacco and the final definitive conclusion that cigarettes cause lung cancer," Harkin said.

Cell phones, used by an estimated 275 million people in the United States and 4 billion worldwide, use radio waves. Years of research have failed to establish any clear link between their use and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumors.

Recent worries have been raised by the Environmental Working Group, an activist group, and epidemiologist Devra Lee Davis of the University of Pittsburgh, who has written a book alleging the government has overlooked many potential sources of cancer. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Is melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer, on the rise, as is often reported? Maybe not, says a new study: The "melanoma epidemic" may simply represent a change in how doctors are diagnosing the disease.

Anti-skin cancer campaigns have highlighted the fact that the number of melanomas has doubled in the past two decades, and continue to rise. However, some have doubted whether there are actually more cases of the cancer.

"The main message is to be cautious about overstating messages about a melanoma epidemic to the public and media," study co-author Dr. Nick J. Levell from Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, Norwich, UK, told Reuters Health in an email. "Such behavior will tend to induce unnecessary anxiety and behavior that may cause distress and harm." (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Sitting in traffic can get your blood boiling temporarily, but living near it might raise your risk of long-term high blood pressure, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that among more than 24,000 Swedish adults, those living near relatively noisier roads were more likely to say they had high blood pressure than those living in more peaceful surroundings. (Reuters Health)

Lumping Mozart and Einstein in with those who have severe socialisation problems is no help to sufferers or science. (Sandy Starr, sp!ked)

New York City’s workplace smoking ban six years ago drove cigarette and cigar puffers outdoors. But soon some of the outdoors may be off limits, too: The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said Monday that he would seek to ban smoking at city parks and beaches.

Dr. Farley said the ban — which officials said may require the approval of the City Council, but could possibly be done through administrative rule-making by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — was part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates, which have fallen in recent years. The proposal, however, seemed to catch Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg off guard.

On Monday night, the mayor, who has championed antismoking programs but also is running for re-election, issued a statement that did not disavow the proposal but appeared to qualify it, saying he wanted “to see if smoking in parks has a negative impact on people’s health.”

He added, “It may not be logistically possible to enforce a ban across thousands of acres, but there may be areas within parks where restricting smoking can protect health.” (NYT)

WASHINGTON - The new pandemic H1N1 influenza was circulating undetected in pigs for at least a decade before it jumped to people, and much better surveillance is needed among both pigs and people, an expert said on Tuesday.

Molecular tests show the swine flu virus made a mutational jump as it passed from pigs to humans, which apparently happened recently, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona told a meeting of flu experts sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

"This virus most likely has been circulating under the radar in pigs for the better part of 10 years," Worobey, who specializes in tracking viruses using a so-called molecular clock, told the meeting.

"Once it jumped into humans it probably circulated for months under the radar. There is lots of room for improvement of our surveillance of swine flu in pigs."

H1N1 was first detected in April and declared a pandemic in June. It has spread quickly around the world but so far causes moderate illness, to the relief of public health experts.

The Institute, an independent organization that advises the U.S. government and other bodies on health matters, called the meeting to examine the pandemic and look for ways to better prepare for the next one.

Influenza viruses mutate regularly and are easy to trace using their rate of change, Worobey said. He collaborated with researchers around the world who dug out samples from freezers.

By comparing recent gene sequences to older samples, Worobey was able to track the evolution of the pandemic. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Autopsies on people who have died from the new pandemic H1N1 flu show this virus is different from seasonal influenza, even if it has not yet caused more deaths, experts told a meeting on Tuesday.

Americans who died from swine flu had infections deep in their lungs, Dr. Sherif Zaki of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told a meeting of flu experts, including damage to the alveoli - the structures in the lung that deliver oxygen to the blood.

This in turn caused what is known as acute respiratory distress syndrome - an often fatal development that leaves patients gasping for breath.

The World Health Organization has confirmed 3,205 deaths globally from swine flu but experts agree all estimates of the extent of the pandemic are grossly understated because so few patients are ever actually tested.

Seasonal flu kills, too - about 250,000 to 500,000 cases a year globally, according to the WHO. But not in the same way as swine flu, which unlike seasonal flu frequently causes severe disease in young adults and children.

"It is very rarely you see what we call diffuse alveolar damage in fatal seasonal influenza," Zaki told a meeting sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, which advises government on health matters.

Seasonal flu causes bronchitis and other upper respiratory disease. But Zaki, the chief infectious disease pathologist at CDC, said the new virus had burrowed into the lungs of the 90 or so people he examined after they died, and they had huge amounts of the virus in their blood.

"This is almost exactly what we see with avian flu," Zaki said. "This looks like avian flu on steroids." (Reuters)

GENEVA - H1N1 influenza is "a virus of extremes" likely to cause far more deaths in poor countries than affluent ones, the head of the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the pandemic flu virus caused mild symptoms in most patients, the overwhelming majority of whom recover fully within a week and without medical treatment.

But she warned the small subset of patients who developed serious illness from the strain widely known as "swine flu" needed very specialised, intensive care to survive infection.

"Clinically, this is a virus of extremes. It does not seem to have a middle ground," she told a WHO regional meeting in Copenhagen, according to the text of her remarks.

Pregnant women, diabetics and those with stressed immune systems have been most vulnerable to severe infection from H1N1, which was discovered in North America in April and declared a global pandemic in June. (Reuters)

Though its money is welcome, we should have no illusions that China is a normal investor that plays by our rules

The “China Syndrome” describes a nuclear meltdown in which molten material from an American nuclear reactor blasts a hole through the Earth’s crust and reaches China. It could just as well describe the consequences of the U.S. financial and economic meltdown, which has left China with trillions of U.S. dollars that it is now using to go on a global shopping spree to meet its insatiable demand for oil, copper, iron ore, aluminum and other minerals while reducing its exposure to a fall in the value of the increasingly vulnerable U.S. dollar.

Should we be worried that China is eying Canada’s oilsands and mineral deposits? The short answer is yes. China is in the lead of those countries whose actions represent a return to state sponsored capitalism. (Fen Osler Hampson, Financial Post)

Every home will be issued with a kitchen slop bucket under plans being drawn up in Whitehall.

Ministers aim to ban the dumping of food waste in landfill sites.

They insist that all the food collected by binmen is instead sent to recycling plants. (Daily Mail)

GOSAT - click to enlarge

WUWT reader Anna V. alerts us to the preliminary report from the JAXA GOSAT Project. According to the project website:

For a complete description of how GOSAT works, please read their summary here (PDF)

GOSAT Worldwide Methane - click for larger image

GOSAT Worldwide Methane - Methane (column averaged dry air mole fraction) initial analysis (April 20-28 observation data)- click for larger image Source: JAXA

Note that the areas with the most concentration of methane are in China, Middle East, Southern Europe, and Africa.

The real surprise comes from the GOSAT CO2 data analysis. This first global CO2 map released from GOSAT is shown below:

GOSAT Worldwide CO2 - Carbon dioxide (column averaged dry air mole fraction) initial analysis (April 20-28 observation data) - click for larger image Source: JAXA

While this is just a short data set comprising a few days from April 20-28th 2009, it does show some surprising features for hotspots of CO2 in the atmosphere over many of the same areas methane had higher concentrations. One difference is that some spots in the Eastern USA, presumably the larger cities, show CO2 hotspots also. From looking at the large CO2 map, it appears Atlanta, Charlotte, and NYC are the three cities in the USA with higher CO2 concentrations.

However, China, India, Southern Europe, the Mideast and Africa have the majority of the CO2 hotspots.

It will be very interesting to see if the hotspot CO2 distribution holds with more data from GOSAT. If it does we’ll be asking the question of why the USA seems to have less CO2 concentrations than other parts of the world. I’m sure it will fuel some political and policy debate.

We’ll be watching for releases of more complete data with better coverage. (WUWT)

The global-warming industry would probably still be solely owned by assorted cranks and romantics (and the odd vice president) if it weren't for a bunch of CEOs taking a leaf from Enron's playbook and attempting to monetize the issue. Playing the bootleggers in a classic bootleggers and baptists alliance, these businessmen have realized that they can get the government to increase their profits by means of "cap and trade" and similar regulatory interventions, at the expense of other businesses and the paying public. Ordinarily, such shenanigans would have the corporate watchdog groups in arms, but by getting the "baptists" of the green movement on their side, they have shielded themselves from public disgust.

This has to stop, and the good folks at Junkscience.com are at the forefront of calling foul. They are releasing a series of "Wanted" posters for six corporate fat cats who want to grow fatter by means of the Waxman-Markey Bill. Junkscience describes the six and their crimes as:

* Exelon CEO John Roe, the "carbon bandit," who stands to make billions of dollars at taxpayer expense from Waxman-Markey's free carbon allowances;

* General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, the "carbon schemer," who would rather profit from lobbying for Waxman-Markey than innovating products that consumers actually want;

* Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, the "carbon betrayer," who is lobbying for higher energy prices and against his own customers and shareholders;

* Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, the "carbon extortionist," who threatens to send American jobs overseas unless Congress pays him off with free carbon allowances;

* Caterpillar CEO James Owens, who can only be considered as "carbon clueless" since he is lobbying against the coal industry, one of his biggest customers; and

* John Deer & Co. Chairman Robert Lane, the "carbon crapshooter," who seems to be betting that he can wreck the economy and profit simultaneously.

The sun has gone quiet

IT IS almost exactly 400 years since Galileo turned his telescope on the sun and saw it to be an imperfect orb covered in spots, quite unlike the teachings of Greek cosmology. If his observations had been made four centuries later, he would have drawn a different conclusion. The sun has recently shed its spots, prompting sceptics to renew their claims that climate change is not anthropogenic but rather heliogenic.

Sunspots are a bit of a mystery. They appear as dark patches in the photosphere—the surface layer of the sun—that come and go. Normally the number of sunspots peaks every 11 years, coinciding with times when the sun’s magnetic field is at its strongest. As the field wanes, the number of sunspots falls to a trough at which point the sun’s magnetic field reverses direction and starts to regain its strength.

As early as 1801 William Herschel, a British astronomer, suggested that when sunspots were plentiful the Earth would be warmer. He supported his hypothesis by reference to variations in the price of wheat published in Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations”.

More recently, solar scientists and climatologists have played down the role that sunspots might play in climate change. Certainly they do affect the amount of radiation coming from the sun. The dark sunspots are encircled by brighter areas, so when they are plentiful, the sun shines more brightly than when they are sparse. Yet the overall variation is tiny, just 0.1% of the sun’s total output, which seems insufficient to be the cause of a warming Earth.

Yet there is a curious historical correlation between sunspot cycles and global temperatures. Between 1645 and 1715, for reasons unknown, there were very few sunspots. At the same time, Europe and North America experienced bitterly cold winters in what has come to be known as the Little Ice Age. There is also some evidence that the southern hemisphere was similarly affected. But correlation is not causation.

Might the sun be going through another extended period of inactivity? Certainly it is the quietest that it has been for almost a century. Weeks and sometimes months go by without a single sunspot. Solar scientists have been waiting since December 2008 for signs that sunspot activity is picking up but so far without success.

That has prompted some to speculate that the Earth may be entering another cool period that could offset the warming caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat in the planet’s atmosphere. Only time will tell, but your correspondent is thankful that any influence of the sun on climate change would be benign. (The Economist)

I was sitting at home in my pajamas, glossily checking Facebook, when I saw a status update that caught my attention. It alluded to homework which forced a student to prove that global warming is a hoax. Eyebrow raised, I investigated. Turns out, a public school teacher in my state, Utah, gave this assignment to students last week:

Of course, I had to sleep on this before I trusted myself to react.

The next morning, I decided I needed a couple of questions answered before I could decide what to do about this. Here’s what I asked and what I found out:

Q: Was the teacher giving some sort of clever lesson aimed at waking the students up to the overwhelming evidence in favor of global warming? A: No. In fact, the teacher specifically told the students that they could NOT turn in a paper to the contrary or they would receive no credit.

Q: How could the teacher get AWAY with this? A: The teacher isn’t getting away with it. Disciplinary action is being taken by the school. (itsgettinghotinhere)

Sharon Begley, after a five-year stint at the Wall Street Journal returned to greener pastures at Newsweek in 2007, where she started her career. It was just in time to take part in Newsweek’s embarrassing August 13, 2007 issue “Global Warming is a Hoax” edition.

The cover story entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contained very little that could be considered ‘truth” by journalistic or scientific standards. In what could surely be considered one of the most one-sided coverage of any important issue in American journalism for decades, Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein, Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips purported to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry that they… created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”

The only problem was -- Newsweek knew better. Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it was the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoyed a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics (a whopping $50 billion to a paltry $19 million for the skeptics). Newsweek contributing editor Robert J. Samuelson, called the piece "fundamentally misleading" and "highly contrived."

Begley’s next screed was “Climate Change Calculus” in the August 3, 2009 issue, subtitled “Why it’s even worse than we feared.” She begins: “Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: "that really shocked us," "we had no idea how bad it was," and "reality is well ahead of the climate models."[…] Although policymakers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the opposite is true, particularly in the Arctic.”

What is the reality? Well the models are failing miserably, but in the wrong direction. Over the last eight years, the world has cooled in contrast with the forecast rise in all the IPCC scenarios. The Arctic ice extent as of September 10, 2009, climatologically close to the maximum melt date, is 21.7% greater than the minimum in September 2007. (Joe D’Aleo, Energy Tribune)

One of Russia's commercial maritime trade routes for the past 70 years has been "re-opened" by a press hungry for dramatic Global Warming scare stories - but who failed to check the most basic facts.

I've traced this fascinating example of "eco-churnalism" - peddled by both BBC Radio and its website, the Daily Mail, The Independent, Reuters and many others - back to its origins, with a press release from a German shipping group. But first of all - what on Earth is the Northern Passage?

Also called the Northeast Passage or North Sea Passage, it's a trade route that in summer months links the North European and Siberian ports to Asia, around the Arctic Circle. Orient-bound traffic heads east, then South via the Bering Straight. Much of the Siberian North coast lies outside the Arctic Circle, and the route offered significant gains over the alternatives via Suez or the Cape. But until technological advances in the early 20th Century it was considered too hazardous for commercial operation.

Since the 1930s the route has seen major ports spring up, carrying over 200,000 tons of freight passing through each year, although this declined with the fall of the Soviet Union.

But none of this ever happened, we learned on Saturday. The Independent reported that the journey had been traversed for the very first time, proclaiming that two German ships had completed "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage", proclaiming it "a triumph for man, a disaster for mankind". BBC Radio followed suit.

It didn't take long to trace the origin of the story. On Wednesday, German shipping group Beluga claimed "the first non-Russian commercial vessels to make it through the Northeast Passage from Asia to Europe".

You can still read their press release, here. Journalists failed to challenge Beluga's claim that the Northeastern Passage was "formerly impenetrable", but bloggers had debunked it within seconds.

North unearthed a fascinating account of the past 80 years of this sea route (pdf, 17pg) by a retired mariner Jan Drent, who made the Europe to Asia Northeast Passage himself. Drent writes that the Soviet Union offered to open the route to global commerce in 1967, but with war in the Middle East closing the Suez, Russia didn't want to offend its Arab allies.

In their haste to bring us Thermageddon, journalists now simply manufacture the evidence. But wasn't the recent warming period - which started began in the mid-1970s and with temperatures peaking in the late-1990s - a contributory factor? Arctic Ice has recovered the past couple of years, but it's still down on 30 years ago.

As it happens, the thaw has helped, but isn't the primary reason, according to maritime historians.

"In the past ten years voyages between the northern coast and Japan and Canada have demonstrated how modern ice-strengthened vessels and contemporary ice forecasting have extended the navigation season."

Ignore all that, however. If the BBC is to remain trusted, we can only conclude that these are phantom ships, failing to penetrate a previously impenetrable trade route, dropping off phantom cargo at phantom port towns. (Andrew Orlowski, The Register)

Alternative titles: “Dear George, In Any Sport, No-Show Means Automatic Loss“, and “Don’t Mention Gish If You Can’t Debate

Why has Plimer won the debate? Because the end result is that Monbiot has refused to publicly debate with him. And in any sport, failure to show up automatically makes you a loser.

The Monbiot/Schmidt couple took the Plimer bait actually a tad too easily. Evidently knowing how to make opponents fall flat on their faces even when apparently much more powerful than him, all Plimer had to do is artificially concoct an “escape route” that would allow Monbiot to declare himself the winner without actually having won anything.

The “escape route” is Plimer’s refusal to answer in print. And Monbiot, shall I say OF COURSE, eagerly took it, unable to understand the consequences.

Isn’t it more heartwarming to be able to tell one’s own troops about how bad the enemy is, rather than getting into a dangerous, live debate with that same enemy?

Especially when one has extremely poor argumentative skills, like Monbiot when he includes the mention of the “Gish Gallop“, “named after [creationist] Duane Gish [...] a special case of fast talking (the technique famously employed by Snake Oil Salesman that confuses people with fast long strings of words long enough to convince them to buy snake oil“.

Yes, but: people like Michael Shermer (and Ian Plimer, by the way) have actually debated with Gish. They haven’t just sat at their desk whining about the Gish Gallop.

Now we will only get Plimer on Thursday 12 November at 2 Savoy Place, London WC1, where he “will give a 30 minute lecture on global warming and then take questions/points from the audience for 60 minute“.

I will believe in that only when I see it happening, by the way…whose kneecaps is Plimer going to try to (figuratively) break?

(OmniClimate)

The whole thing looks like an elaborate trap prepared by experienced debater Plimer with the goal of convincing Monbiot to run away from the debate. And it looks like it worked.

Talk about the elephant being afraid of the mouse. Yet again, one is glad not have the likes of Monbiot (and Schmidt) on one’s side!

But wait…it gets even funnier. What I just wrote might have crossed a few minds already, of people unfortunately too eager to bite the bait, therefore missing the chance to take their own reasoning to its natural conclusions:

If you are debating with anybody, and they use any logical device of any kind, please oh please DO NOT follow through along the device, for any reason whatsoever.

VIENNA - Nations aiming to agree on a new global climate deal should focus on achievable greenhouse gas emissions targets, to involve as many nations as possible, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Tuesday.

The world is meant to thrash out in December in Copenhagen a new international climate change pact beyond 2012, to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (Reuters)

Harry Reid - the Senate Majority Leader who’s facing a potentially difficult reelection campaign and known for announcing legislative timetables that he can’t deliver on - told reporters Tuesday that the Senate might wait until next year to vote on legislation that would require companies to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases. (Environmental Capital)

President Obama’s risky perseveration on health care is running over another of his pet governmental expansions—cap-and-trade legislation sent by the House on June 26 for Senate consideration.

How soon we forget. By a squeaky 219-212 vote, the House rushed Congressman Waxman’s 1300-page opus out the door so the members could get back to the hustings for the Fourth of July. When many freshman democrats got home, those who voted for it experienced the first angry “town hall” of their careers. The blowback caused by Obamunism began over energy, not healthcare.

Obama is taking great risks with healthcare because he can’t cobble enough votes from his own party. About 50 congressmen won’t vote for anything with Public Option in it, while another 50 won’t vote for anything without it. There’s no doubt that this impasse is going to continue for some time.

Given that health care is bottled up in the house, why isn’t Obama pushing Cap and Trade in the Senate? Simple: the votes aren’t there. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), the new head of the Agriculture Committee calls cap-and-trade a “complete non starter” and said that it is not her “preference to move on cap and trade this year.”

Now the White House is providing cover for the Senate in order to keep Obama from another legislative embarrassment (assuming health care will be his first). When asked last week about cap-and-trade, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs completely ignored the question and segued into the need for major legislation to prevent some future financial crisis.

For cap-and-trade, “next year” translates as “never.” Senators know what touched off the town halls, and they know what fate awaits many of their democrat counterparts come November 2010. Voting for an unpopular Public Option healthcare program along with cap-and-trade will easily realign the Senate into its old filibustering self. (WCR)

Now that the debate on cap-and-trade has stalled indefinitely in the Senate, inquiring minds are wondering: what’s next? While there’s no question the Democrats have declared a cease fire on cap-and-trade—many of them want nothing to do with the issue—their allies outside the Beltway are preparing a massive $20 million campaign to push legislation forward.

This effort should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who believes cap-and-trade is dead and buried—it is very much alive. So Republicans remain ever vigilant, preparing to defeat any cap-and-trade energy tax that will drive up unemployment, slow our economic recovery, and make America less competitive in the global marketplace.

A key component of this pressure group campaign will be the so-called “endangerment” finding now under review at the White House. This finding under the Clean Air Act will declare that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and thus will trigger a cascade of new regulations that will crush small businesses and raise electricity, food, and gasoline prices.

Green groups and the Obama Administration are threatening Congress with this finding, arguing that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, or any cap-and-trade bill, will take care of it. They argue that cap-and-trade is more efficient than command-and-control regulation. But this is a smokescreen for the truth: cap-and-trade would simply substitute one bad policy for another, as Congress would be replacing one energy tax with another. Republicans reject both, and both should be defeated.

Meanwhile, EPW Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) continues to seek votes for her climate legislation, the introduction of which has been delayed twice in the last two months. This is no surprise, as the politics of climate legislation in the Senate are daunting. Several members of the Democratic caucus have expressed outright opposition to cap-and-trade or hesitation about consideration of cap-and-trade this year.   The latter is due in large part to health care reform, which has, in the view of many, “poisoned the well” for cap-and-trade. “It's a difficult schedule," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said last week, adding that many members are already “anxious” about health care reform.   "We have enough on our plate at the moment (with the fight over healthcare reform). It's questionable to open another front,” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said.   Sen. Kent Conrad, (D-N.D.) added, “Given everything that has happened and all the things there are to do, it is a little hard to see how there is sufficient time on the floor to do it.”

So in the coming weeks, expect Sen. Boxer and her supporters to cut any and all deals to secure votes. Those deals will appear to be major concessions on such issues as nuclear power, coal, trade, and manufacturing. But once one scratches the surface, those concessions will come to light as nothing more than fig leaves. For instance, one can legitimately question the sincerity of Sen. Boxer’s commitment to a nuclear title. That’s because in 2005 she voted against the McCain-Lieberman bill specifically because it included pro-nuclear language. As she said in a floor statement at the time, “Nuclear power is not the solution to climate change, and it is not ‘clean.’ The nuclear industry has not solved its waste and safety problems. By subsidizing the creation of new nuclear plants, we are condoning the creation of more waste and turning a blind eye to the hazards associated with nuclear power.”

As Sen. Boxer looks for votes, the Administration will press forward with its strategy for international climate change talks in Copenhagen in December. The key focus of that strategy will be to convince a skeptical U.S. Senate that China can agree to emissions reductions on a scale and timetable comparable to Waxman-Markey, or similar cap-and-trade legislation. But China simply won’t agree to climate restrictions that meet the Senate’s Byrd-Hagel test, which states that no treaty can get 67 votes for ratification if it causes significant harm to the U.S. economy or if developing countries are left out.

President Obama will travel to China in November, and will likely lay the groundwork for some sort of bilateral agreement, in which China will agree to implement a climate regime—but it won’t require mandatory reductions and won’t make a dent in global greenhouse gas concentrations.

Those following the cap-and-trade debate should expect a busy fall, with lots of activity in the Administration, Congress, and beyond the Beltway. Republicans will argue that cap-and-trade legislation is a bad idea that the Senate should reject. Green groups are repackaging cap-and-trade as “clean energy legislation.”   But the American people won’t be fooled, and they will call instead for the GOP energy policy, which reduces our dependence on foreign oil, creates jobs, and grows our economy.

Inhofe is the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. (Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.))

Hard geo-engineering is a temporary cure. Far preferable is geo-renovating, the sophisticated way of solving the problems of climate change.

Rockets that release dust particles into the stratosphere, plans to fertilize oceans, or huge mirrors that reflect the sun's radiation may sound like handy shortcuts to cool the earth.

“It's a temporary cure and doesn't solve anything, and the second thing is that we don't know the earth system enough to start playing with it,” says Frank Raes, head of the climate change unit at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in an interview with EurActiv.

He also warns against manipulation of the climate by large-scale reforestation programs in desert areas, since dark trees absorb sunlight previously reflected by sandy deserts and heat up the system. The climate benefits of removing CO2 from the atmosphere do not occur until years later, when the trees have grown, he explains. (CoP15)

A team of researchers has come up with a simple plan to halt global warming: All we need to do is turn both the Sahara and the Australian outback into vast, shady forests. (Discover)

BEIJING - China's President Hu Jintao will present China's new plans for tackling global warming at a United Nations summit on climate change later this month, the country's senior negotiator said on Tuesday.

"He will make an important speech," Xie Zhenhua told reporters ahead of Hu's trip next week to the United Nations and the G20 summit of major rich and developing economies in Pittsburgh.

Hu "will announce the next policies, measures and actions that China is going to take," added Xie, who steers China's climate policy as vice director of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission.

Xie said China will strengthen its policies and take on responsibilities in keeping with its level of development and practical capacities, but declined to give further details. (Reuters)

Exclusive: Key differences between the US and Europe could undermine a new worldwide treaty on global warming to replace Kyoto, sources say (The Guardian)

However, the country has not yet decided whether to support a sectoral approach to emissions reduction.

Despite calls from industrialized countries for developing nations to set emission reduction targets, Thailand and ASEAN does not want to make such commitment, says the Office of Climate Change Coordination in Thailand according to The Bangkok Post.

Thailand is also not prepared to create new commitments to replace the Kyoto Protocol. The country’s position on this issue is very unambiguous. (CoP15)

The world's largest island may remain outside a climate agreement if it impedes development. (CoP15)

Norway’s DNV (Det Norse Veritas, “The Norwegian Truth”) was the largest auditor of the infamous CDM’s (Clean Development Mechanisms) until it was suspended last December when it was caught selling carbon credits for projects it hadn’t checked. At the time it was so large it had approved fully half of all CDM credits on the market. Its excess workload was transferred to number two auditor, SGS, and shock, this week, SGS has been caught and suspended because it couldn’t prove it’s staff had properly vetted projects either. Indeed it couldn’t show that they were even trained to do that vetting. (Did SGS not see this coming?)

When the West offered money to buy the rights to air-with-slightly-less-carbon-dioxide-than-it-could-have-had, China and India put up their hands and said “Yes please” 900 times. And why wouldn’t they? CDMs are worth about 20% of all emissions trades, which amounted to $126 billion in 2008. Up until the global financial crisis it was doubling annually, like all good ponzi schemes do.

This supposedly “free market” has none of the normal limits which make it hard for companies to get away with cheating … namely a connection to real material goods: usually if you don’t have it, you can’t sell it. But with carbon credits, customers can buy fake products and never know the difference — even after it’s “delivered”. That’s what you get when you deal in atmospheric nullities.

It might be called a “carbon market”, but remember that no one actually trades carbon, they trade rights to emit air with less carbon, and it’s not even as physical as air with less carbon than it used to have (something we can measure). No, it’s worse than that: it’s air with less carbon than it might have had.

So it’s an underwhelming surprise that the top two auditors have both been caught selling “Credits for emitting air that might-have-had-more-carbon-in-it, which might-have-been-checked by people who might-have-been-qualified to check these things”. Selling bridges in Boston has more respectability.

Fortunately, because carbon doesn’t appear to make much difference to the climate, whether the schemes work or not is a moot point. Arguably, if The Point is assuaging western guilt for our successes, then an imaginary credit is just as good as a real one. It’s one of those rare occasions where the placebo effect is 90% effective.

Ultimately this is a market that depends on unknowable, unprovable motivations: I wouldn’t have cleaned up or closed down my dirty factory without all that money. Really. And by the way, I’m thinking of building another one just like it… (Oi! want to pay me not to build it?)

Mass marketing meets the Emperors new clothes — with undertones of extortion. This is how we save the world?

Recent legislation has tried to close some of the loopholes, and like everything, there are honest operators out there among the crooks. But seriously. It’s like knitting a battleship and hoping to make it waterproof with bureaucrats. It’s not a question of closing loopholes — it IS a loophole. There is almost nothing we can actually pin down — it’s an open invitation for scammers and con-artists. The mat at the door says: “All Rorters Welcome. If we catch you cheating we’ll change the rules. Next time you’ll have to cheat differently.”

“It’s not as if we’re printing money in a garage,” Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said of the credits. Which is true, there are no garages involved. Just large multinational corporations.

And it’s not as if the funds transfer from the West to the Third world is helping the poor people in the street. The billions of dollars in payments often end up with the financial brokers in London, and with potentially corrupt bureaucrats in China. Interviews with locals near the Xiaoxi dam project suggest people were evicted from their homes, and were not paid enough compensation to buy new homes. The money for the credits associated with the dam was supposed to reduce carbon emissions, yet construction for the Dam started a full two years before the application for CDM funding was even entered. What looks like a Dam, acts like a Dam, but isn’t…?

Bureaucrat-ite may work like a glue plugging holes, but it repels free-markets. Too many bureaucrats and too many rules makes a free market “fixed” in every sense of the word. But the carbon-that-might-have-been-released market can’t be a bureaucrat-free, free-market. It has to be a bureaucrat-rich. The only thing “free” about this market is the price people would pay for carbon-which-might-have-been-released-but-wasn’t.

Full stories:

There have been a series of research papers which document major unresolved problems with the use of multi-decadal trends in surface temperature to diagnose global warming and cooling (e.g. see and see and references therein).

There is an early paper of mine which documents another effect in mountainous terrain, and, more generally, wherever there are significant elevation changes over relatively short distances.

Our paper that documents a variation of mean monthly temperatures as a function of terrain height is

As shown in Table 1 of this paper, the variation within the year is estimated as ranging from -5.23C per kilometer in January to -6.61C per kilometer in July; a difference of 1.38C per kilometer of elevation change. If a station were moved an elevation change of just 100m, , for example, a monthly mean temperature change of 0.138C between January and July would be found even if there were no other effects. This effect has nothing to do with long term climate change but is due the existence of an elevation dependence on anomalies due the change of location of the observation site.

In terms of constructing multi-decadal assessments of temperature trends, even relatively small elevation changes in station locations will introduce a change in temperature trends and anomalies which is just due to the variation of the elevation of the site. The Global Historical Climate Network (and see for a post on the new USHCN Version 2 analyses) may be able to correct to some extent for this effect in their homogenization methodology if the change in the data sharply defined, however, it is a quite complicated issue since the effect varies within the year (due to the variation of the average change of temperature with elevation during the year) and due to the variability of individual months of this change of temperature with height (see Table 1 in Pielke and Mehring, 1977 for the statistics). This will mask the magnitude of this effect.

There is a second issue. The construction of an annual average of temperature trends and anomalies includes this seasonal variability. Thus for a temperature measurement of trends and anomalies at a single height to be representative of a deeper layer of the troposphere, it must be assumed that the trends and anomalies at all elevations in complex terrain must just be shifted by an equal amount (i.e. it does not matter what elevation the measurements are made at). That is there needs to be an elevation invariance to the trends. This requires that the monthly mean change of temperature with elevation that is presented in Figure 1 does not change over time under larger scale climate variability and change. This stringent assumption needs to be tested but it does not seem likely.

As the issues with the use of the surface temperature to diagnose global warming and cooling continue to mount, it is imperative that policymakers who are using the global average surface temperature anomaly (e. g. the “+2C threshold; e.g. see) recognize the data has serious issues with its quantitative robustness. (Climate Science)

The Scientists Speak
CO2: Undergirding Modern Science: Its presence in the atmosphere reminds us of what the life-giving gas has done for us, and what it may yet do ... if we let it. Featuring Dr. John Christy, University of Alabama, USA.

Editorial
Fat Folks Beware!: All those extra pounds are not only killing you, according to climate alarmists they're setting the world afire.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 732 individual scientists from 429 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from North Slope Central Tianshan Mountains, Xinjiang, China. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary
Droughts (Global): Are droughts increasing in either frequency or severity throughout the world in response to global warming?

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: Diazotrophic cyanobacterium (Fu et al., 2008), Olive Tree (Biel et al., 2008), Rice (Li et al., 2008), and Wheat (Veisz et al., 2008).

You couldn’t make it up even if you try. One day the UK Energy Secretary Ed Milliband sets out his proposed expansion of the UK’s wind power-led alternative energy revolution, the next, Vestas, the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, closes for business citing “low demand” and public opposition to onshore windfarms.

Just bad luck or bad PR? Not quite. Simply another blatant example of the on-going ‘disconnect’ over energy between those suffering from WTS (Wishful Thinker Syndrome) and the hydrocarbon-fuelled present and future energy realities.

Driven by panic-inducing IPCC theory on the man-made CO2 threat – after a decade where the scientific data shows a downward trend in global mean temperatures – and supplemented with irrational fears over early peak oil theories, Western politicians and others remain consistently obdurate to the energy (and economic) facts of life.

In 2006 Germany’s Angela Merkel was hailed as the ‘Green Chancellor’ for promising to rid her country of coal and nuclear power in its bid to give a clean energy and climate change “world lead”. Three years on and Merkel’s government actively supports the construction of a new generation of 26 coal-fired power plants as well as keeping Germany’s nuclear power stations open. In addition she wants special protection for German heavy industry via free cap and trade permits. A powerful German industry, the need to remain competitive and a desire to work with the lights on, all combined to help Ms Merkel ‘re-connect’.

In 2008, Italy, to everyone’s surprise, reversed its decades long ‘no nuclear power stations’ policy in the interest of their power needs. And Italy’s PM Silvio Berlusconi, along with leaders from Austria, Poland and a rolling bandwagon of other countries, also now demands protection for its heavy industry when it comes time to handing out free cap and trade permits. Across in the UK, the government has been wriggling out of its Kyoto ‘clean energy’ commitments for years as the country inches towards building an urgently needed new generation of coal-fired power plants. To help critics swallow the bitter pill of yet more coal usage, the UK Government is subsidizing ‘clean coal’ technology strategies via CCS (Carbon Capture Sequestration). But adding $1 billion to the cost of each plant for a hugely speculative unproven technology that may, as one recent study reveals, prove downright dangerous, has already created a politically paralysing impasse in the UK energy strategy. The spectre of the UK facing “South African-style power cuts” and being plunged into “third world darkness” now looms. Hence the UK’s grand wind power plan. Unfortunately, last December, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) was forced to scale down its calculation of harmful CO2 emissions “displaced”, from 860 to 430 grams for every kilowatt hour of electricity produced. With more coal use in prospect and less help from wind sources the UK has no chance of getting near its Kyoto CO2 commitments. In fact, with less than 2400 wind turbines in operation across Britain currently, the UK would still require a further 100,000 to meet its targets. Plenty of scope for massive wind turbine growth we might think. So why the Vestas pull-out?

Not that Eurocrats are easily deflated by wind power facts on the ground. Speaking at a key European wind power conference in March 2009, EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, claimed, “Wind energy can replace a large proportion of the polluting and finite fuels we currently rely on. It makes good sense to invest in indigenous sources of power which hedge against unpredictable fossil fuel prices and in which Europe has a real competitive advantage.” Windbag Piebalgs adds pompously, “Wind energy is Europe’s contribution to peace, progress and prosperity.”

Mr Piebalgs’ claims entirely epitomise the energy disconnect. As Michael J. Trebilcock has shown, wind power is a complete disaster with the much-vaunted ‘Danish green energy miracle’ turning out to be a well-worn myth in an industry that would blow out tomorrow without on-going and massive public subsidy. And all for an energy source that can, in the next few decades, provide only a tiny amount of the world’s power. For all the political bluster, the best energy estimates suggest that by the year 2030 energy demand will rise by a further 50 percent and that oil, gas and coal will still fulfil 87 percent of the world’s energy needs. Shell has dumped its alternative energy program (except for biofuels) in part of a broader trend of European alternative energy companies already heading their ‘wagons’ West, drawn by the far richer cash pickings in prospect on the new frontier of President Obama’s stimulus billions. Germany’s REpower US subsidiary has just relocated its US HQ to Denver, Colorado to take full advantage of the “supportive business climate” – read government cash – along with (surprise, surprise) Vestas, late of the UK.

Today, the Obama White House is recycling all the same European political energy rhetoric so familiar to Europeans. Yet the US has its own instructive case study. One day billionaire T. Boone Pickens has a Grand Wind Plan for Texas, with further plans to forest the nation with turbines “from Canada to Mexico”. The next, T. Boone drops his wind plan in favour of ... a hydrocarbon (natural gas) solution instead.

Meanwhile the political energy disconnect has fuelled an almost ethereal, religious vision among those who seek to appease the earth and climate gods. In 2003 Al Gore predicted we had just 96 months (ten years) before fossil-fuel assisted climate Armageddon kicked in. We have just four years left. In 2006, Greenpeace’s Steven Guilbeault said, “Time is running out to deal with climate change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time.” Yet back in 1997, Greenpeace’s Chris Rose was claiming, “Time is running out for the climate.”

The UK’s Prince of Wales ruminates that, “Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse”. The Prince adds, “The age of convenience is over”. As international columnist Mark Steyn comments, “The Prince then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.”

Meanwhile, NASA’s James Hansen, continues to lead the war against the green’s bête-noir of fossil fuels: coal, at the very time Europe and the UK, indeed much of the world, is again turning to the black stuff as the fuel for a new generation and to nuclear power stations. For millions in India and elsewhere cheap coal is the answer to ending their poverty. Yet, last year, Hansen was not at all concerned for what this key energy resource is doing to pull millions out of poverty, obsessing instead with his private vision that burning coal could “accelerate floods, droughts and heat waves” and “lock us into future climate disasters”.

For men like Hansen, the reality that coal power is a key energy resource in the war on global poverty means little if it clashes with his climate-appeasing, prophetic insights. And given the eco-alarmist capacity for failed prophecy thus far, we might offer the sage advice of one Lao Tzu, a 6th century BC Chinese poet that “Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge”.

In August 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon ramped up the politico-energy disconnect further, claiming, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet. If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters. Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest even violence could follow.”

Moon’s ‘four months’ is a reference to December’s Copenhagen conference when alarmists want binding international CO2 targets to trigger a global switch to alternative sources of energy. As we have seen, however, national leaders will ultimately refuse to impoverish their industries even to save the planet. Neither will Copenhagen provide impetus for a speedier move to alternative energies. The still ‘disconnected’ flower power generation and its idealistic offspring would do well to grasp that the energy future is not green it is hydrocarbon, and will continue to be for another century, at least. Perhaps it’s just that we have yet to learn a language they’ll understand? Maybe we should run the energy stats past them one more time, make a peace V-sign and (gently) ask: “Re-connected yet, man?” (Peter C Glover and Michael J. Economides, Energy Tribune)

WASHINGTON/CALGARY - Environmentalists shut down a Canadian oil sands mine on Tuesday in a series of protests on the eve of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit with President Barack Obama, aimed at pressing their case that the projects undermine the fight against climate change.

Green groups accused Harper's government of trying to hamper U.S. efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by seeking protections for Canada's oil sands industry, a major supplier of crude oil to the United States.

Harper meets with Obama at the White House on Wednesday, with climate and environmental issues expected to be on the agenda.

In northern Alberta, Royal Dutch Shell Plc suspended production at its Albian Sands Muskeg River mine after 25 activists from Greenpeace blockaded a massive dump truck and mining shovel to protest against oil sands development.

Shell, which owns 60 percent of the 155,000 barrel a day operation, said it temporarily shut down operation to ensure that the activists and its staff did not get hurt.

"Shell's No. 1 concern is their safety and our preference is for a negotiated end to this demonstration," the company said in a statement. "We have invited the group into our administrative building to sit down with management to discuss their concerns."

It said Greenpeace has not tried to contact Shell to discuss environmental initiatives it is employing at the site. (Reuters)

Your bending author is a fairly placid sort of fellow, usually taking the whips and scorns of time and all that as they come. There are, however, certain phenomena of the modern world that stir him into intemperate rage. One of these is the use of spin to cover up Governmental insouciance in the face of inevitable disastrous consequences of its own perverse (or even absent) policies. There are two areas of policy that Number Watch has been banging on about since its birth. One is debt (of which we have just begun to experience the consequences) and the other is energy. Over the same period it has also been repeatedly warning about the coming energy crisis and the inevitability of power cuts. With a few honourable exceptions (including, of course, the sainted Christopher Booker) journalists have largely ignored the subject, while politicians make only pious asides and do nothing. You can bet your sweet bippy that they will all be wise after the event.

The basic requirements of a sound energy policy are so self evident that it would seem unnecessary to state them. Yet Government continues brazenly to ignore them (see, for example, Power mad). This is an age of political obscurantism. The EU deliberately rewrites its unacceptable constitution in a way that it now cannot be understood. Members of Congress vote for gross increases in taxation via lengthy bills that none of them has read. The Blair Government, however, was unique in that it had deception woven into its structure from the outset. The two abstract nouns we have most associated over the years with Tony Blair are insouciance and chutzpa. These characteristics have been most in evidence over energy policy. Look at this as an example of chutzpa. Even more startling than that came this quotation a year later in May 2008:

Britain faced the prospect of being largely reliant on foreign gas imports for its future energy needs and it would be a "dereliction of duty" if he failed to take long-term decisions.

The "dereliction" had, of course, occurred five years previously. Meanwhile, the appalling and disruptive plague of giant windmills spreads across the once beautiful landscape, now forced on us as one of the many dire consequences of the treachery of the political class in sacrificing our hard-won democracy to the new soviet in Brussels, breaking a firm promise to conduct a referendum before such action.

Wind power is a delusion. Take the example of Texas. It is no coincidence that this state is the first to experience power cuts because of a drop in the wind. The only thing you can guarantee about wind power is that is will not be available during in extremes of temperature, which are almost invariably associated with a windless stationary high. Denmark, littered with giant windmills, claims to get 20% of its power from that source. The reality is considerably less than half that amount, while the consequent taxes and charges make it the most costly energy in Europe. A yield of less than 20% of installed capacity would mean that to meet the EU target of 20% of energy from renewable resources (which for most, in effect, means wind) the installed wind capacity would absurdly have to be larger than the total energy requirement. The reality is that absence of wind, as occurs at the extremes of temperature associated with stationary high pressure zones, coincides with the highest demand. Most countries are not as fortunate as Denmark in having near neighbours with more controllable hydro-power. Furthermore wind is subject to short term random fluctuations, making control distribution grid a herculean task. The real result of this is major and spreading power cuts. In the modern world, extensive power cuts mean suffering and death.

So the western population is threatened with the Green Death and there is little they can do about it. (Number Watch)

Germany’s general elections later this month have reignited a debate over the future of nuclear energy in the country. The frontrunner, Chancellor Angela Merkel, wants to review a law that requires shutting down all nuclear power plants by around 2021, but the plan has been undermined by political opposition, recent nuclear accidents, and allegations that during the 1980s, her party improperly maneuvered to have a nuclear waste storage facility approved.

While Merkel and her coalition partners remain ahead in recent polls, the nuclear issue has snowballed into probably the biggest threat to the chancellor’s nuclear friendly political platform. Free Democrats, a pro-nuclear party, would replace Social Democrats in the current grand coalition with the ruling Christian Democrats. What remains unclear, though, is just how much the nuclear issue will weigh on voters’ minds when they go to the polls in two weeks.

Earlier this year, almost half of Germans said they would support extending the life of its nuclear power plants, compared to around 40% two years ago. But since a recent nuclear accident, several surveys have shown support increase for the Social Democrats proposal to speed up phasing out nuclear power in the country. (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)

Ed. Note: A shorter version of this story appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 8.

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 Treaty 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.

The ExxonMobil prosecution is 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.

Those cases were obviously justified. So, too, was the recent MBTA case against Oregon-based PacifiCorp. On July 10, the electric utility agreed to pay $1.4 million in fines and restitution for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over the past two years. The birds were electrocuted by the company’s poorly-designed power lines.

But the ExxonMobil and PacifiCorp prosecutions bring up an obvious question: why aren’t wind power companies being prosecuted for their bird kills? A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, 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, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, estimated that about 10,000 other birds -- nearly all of which are protected under the MBTA – are being whacked every year at Altamont.

To recap: ExxonMobil was prosecuted for killing 85 birds over a five-year period. The wind turbines at Altamont, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, are killing more than 100 times as many birds as were Exxon’s tanks, and they are doing it every year. Furthermore, the bird kill problems at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since at least 1994. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

MADRID - Spain slashed subsidies for power from solar panels in 2008, after causing a bubble, and is almost bound to reduce support for bigger solar farms that use mirrors -- but this sector may have the clout to limit cuts.

A 2.6 gigawatt surge in solar panels connected to Spain's power grid last year made it second only to Germany in photovoltaic (PV) power generation.

This sharp growth then led to state cuts in tariffs and caps on qualifying plants that hit the worldwide PV industry, which had come to rely on the Spanish market.

Questions now surround prospects for the concentrated solar power (CSP) sector which, unlike PV panels that turn sunlight directly into electricity, uses mirrors to super-heat liquids to drive turbines.

"The caps and subsidy cuts for PV power in Spain came as a result of the development of a bubble in the sector, we cannot rule out the possibility of a bubble developing in CSP," Alex Toledo, Iberian energy team manager for BNP Paribas Fortis, said.

Spain slashed subsidies for PV generation and placed a 500 megawatt per year cap on the installations eligible for state aid in September 2008. (Reuters)

FRANKFURT - Greed -- not green -- drives sales of small, environmentally friendly cars, a top industry executive said on Tuesday.

Volvo Car Corp Chief Executive Stephen Odell said studies show environmentalism dropped "below the top 10 reasons" for buying a car last year as wary customers shunned showrooms.

The reason to opt for a fuel efficient smaller car was value for money driven by generous tax breaks. "If it just so happens that you had a car that qualified for incentives...then that was great," he said, calling the shift "a function of the economy."

European governments have promoted fuel efficient vehicles through tax breaks, a policy that has benefited mainly makers of smaller, cheaper cars rather than premium auto brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volvo. (Reuters)

Ed. note: This item originally ran in Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog. It is the third installment of his series on biofuels.

This is the final installment of a three-part series that examines some of the renewable energy options that are presenting themselves as possible contenders to step up as petroleum steps down the depletion curve. The previous installments were:

Today I want to talk about Biofuel Niches. Here is how I would define a Biofuel Niche: A technology that is capable of supplying, long-term, up to 10% of our present liquid fossil fuel consumption, often by utilizing specific, localized synergies.

This definition covers a great number of possibilities, and I don't pretend that I will even cover a large fraction of them. But I want to cover some specific niches for fuels - like cellulosic ethanol - that I believe can work in a niche. If readers can think of others, let's discuss them. I want to lead off with some of the options I categorized as "Pretenders", and then discuss corn ethanol which I did not discuss in the previous installments.

To reiterate, my views are based on the following expectations: 1). That the average oil price over the next 10 years will exceed $100/bbl; 2). That biomass prices will rise in response to demand, putting a premium on efficient conversion technologies; 3). That these biofuel technologies will eventually have to compete on the basis of oil price and not government handouts. This latter point is key, because it favors those technologies that can decouple from fossil fuel inputs. (Robert Rapier, Energy Tribune)

Go to virtually any film history website, search for "The Conqueror," released in 1956, and the odds are that there will be several paragraphs on how a disproportionate number of the cast and crew died from cancer. Most citations will then explain that this cancer was caused by their exposure to radioactive fallout on location near St. George, Utah—derived from atomic tests earlier in that decade.

An incredibly biased article from the November 10, 1980 issue of People magazine can probably be credited for re-igniting this baseless conspiracy theory. Here are a few indisputable facts that were strangely left out of the People piece:

1. All the stars mentioned were heavy smokers, including John Wayne at five packs a day.

2. 91 of the 220 cast and crew members were said to have contracted cancer, but given the 40% lifetime rate for all individuals, this is hardly disproportionate. The People article quotes the late Robert Pendleton from the University of Utah saying that "30-some" cancers would be expected in a cohort that size, contrary to all data from the National Cancer Institute. The Pendleton quote appears in almost identical form on dozens of websites.

3. The cancer mortality rate for Utah was then and continues to be one of the lowest in the country, with Washington County (containing St. George) among the lowest in the state.

While there is no science to support a cancer cluster here, politics eventually won out, and a program was set up to pay off anyone (usually $50,000) who got certain cancers and happened to live in the appropriate counties at the right time. Even if you believe that the fallout was a factor, radiogenic cancers typically do not take 40-50 years to manifest themselves. Yet, such "victims" were paid off just the same.

Given that well over $1 billion has been paid out by this program since 1990, this whole business may qualify as the most successful environmental fraud of all time.

Do you have friends who say that they feel physically sick and develop headaches, heart palpitations, nausea and dizziness when they eat sugar or anything with high fructose corn syrup? Do you know others who report feeling tired, bloated and nauseous when they eat meat or saturated fats, especially fatty meats processed with nitrates? Do you know people who say that they feel less energetic or alert when they eat processed foods or who feel nervous, shaky and irritable when they drink something with an artificial sweetener in it? Do you know people who develop rashes and congestion when they eat or drink various foods or who feel depressed and fatigued when they eat refined white flour or carbohydrates?

A reader recently wrote puzzled about a strange phenomenon she was seeing among a large and growing number of healthy, nondiabetic young women. They complain of feeling jittery, dizzy and sick the rest of the day after consuming “too much sugar,” she said. When she pins them down, they define “too much sugar” as the amount in a scoop of ice cream or can of soda — yet they say they have to “detox for a week because of ‘all that sugar’,” she wrote. “Detox … from sugar?” They’ve become so afraid of sugar that if they enjoy even the smallest treat, it ruins their entire day, she lamented. “What is going on here? Are all of these people losing their minds because of the hysteria they’re being whipped into? Could you shine a sane light onto this sucrophobia?”

There is a name for the ill health effects reported associated with our modern diet.

It’s called the nocebo effect and it’s far more widespread than many people realize. (Junkfood Science)

LONDON - Drugmakers look set to sell all the swine flu vaccine they can make in 2009, despite growing evidence just one shot, not two, is needed to protect most people against the virus.

But industry analysts say sales in 2010 could be crimped by governments moderating orders.

While the success of single dosing has effectively halved the potential global H1N1 vaccine market, the fact is there was never going to be anywhere near enough vaccine to go around at this early stage in the pandemic.

"I don't think it will make any difference to this year's expectations for companies because they will be selling what they can produce anyway," said Michael Leacock, an analyst at ABN AMRO.

"It is reassuring news that maybe one dose will be sufficient, but that doesn't mean there won't still be a significant opportunity for all the companies involved in this." (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Swimming in a chlorinated pool may boost the odds that a child susceptible to asthma and allergies will develop these problems, a study released today indicates.

"These new data clearly show that by irritating the airways of swimmers chlorination products in water and air of swimming pools exert a strong additive effect on the development of asthma and respiratory allergies such as hay fever and allergic rhinitis," Dr. Alfred Bernard, a toxicologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, noted in an email to Reuters Health.

"The impact of these chemicals on the respiratory health of children and adolescents appears to be much more important -- at least by a factor of five -- than that associated with secondhand smoke," Bernard noted.

Taken together with his team's prior studies, he added, "There is little doubt that pool chlorine is an important factor implicated in the epidemic of allergic diseases affecting the westernized world." (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - That morning shower you rely on to get clean may be dousing you in a daily dose of potentially sickening bacteria, according to a study published Monday.

In an analysis of showerheads collected from nine U.S. cities, researchers found that about 30 percent harbored high levels of Mycobacterium avium -- a group of bacteria that can cause infection when inhaled or swallowed.

M. avium and other so-called non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (NTM) mainly affect the lungs, causing symptoms such as a persistent drug cough, breathlessness and fatigue. (Reuters Health)

Epidemiologists love to crunch numbers — and Americans, on the whole, love to ignore them. Even the most health-conscious among us soon grow numb to the storm of statistics warning us about rising levels of obesity or falling levels of exercise or all the other numerical indicators that tell us how unwell we're getting. But on Sept. 14, a team of researchers released a new finding that should cause even the most data-weary folks alarm.

According to a paper published Monday in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, fewer than 8% of all Americans can now be considered at low risk for heart disease. No one needs a statistician's help to know that that means more than 92% of us are not as healthy as we could be, and that's worth paying attention to. (Jeffrey Kluger, Time)

New York City health experts wanted to discourage people from drinking sugary sodas and sports drinks, so they devised a stomach-churning solution. Their new “Don’t drink yourself fat” commercials show drinks being poured into a glass. There is no ice, no delicate frostiness or smiling polar bears. Instead, fat globules ooze over the rim of the glass like some alien life form. If the response is “Yuck,” then the ad is doing its job, city officials have decided.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took on the smoking culture seven years ago, city health officials have been figuring out how best to steer people away from unhealthy behavior.

But so far, neither Mayor Bloomberg nor Gov. David Paterson is ready to make the best move when it comes to soft drinks — a tax on sodas and other sugary beverages. The best tax would be a penny an ounce, not a nickel on every bottle or can, which could just encourage even larger bottles and cans. (NYT)

The current health care debate, when it focuses on food at all, focuses on obesity. Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. That is shocking, but in the national panic about obesity, we run the risk of making things worse.

More people could get caught in the grip of eating disorders. Already, an estimated 11 million Americans have anorexia or bulimia. Hospitalizations are increasing. Even more worrisome, the American Medical Association found the greatest increases among boys and girls younger than 12, and among adults ages 45 to 65.

We could save a lot of pain, suffering and money by incorporating obesity into the range of illnesses now classified as eating disorders, and by focusing on prevention. Agencies that are working on ways to combat obesity should include experts in eating disorders.

Maybe you didn't feel fat, just a touch overweight, before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised the height/weight tables, and now your weight hits the category of "morbidly obese."

Do you automatically exercise more and eat less? More likely, you feel bad, blame your genes or your lack of willpower, try a new diet, fail, feel worse, eat more.

Practically all disordered eating begins with a diet. (Sheila Himmel, Mercury News)

Well, we at Cato and elsewhere have warned repeatedly of the dangerous consequences of this outcome (June 18, July 24, August 13, September 9, September 11). Former Cato colleague and coauthor Scott Lincicome has an excellent analysis on the ramifications right here.

The good news is that we now have clarity about where the president stands on trade. The bad news is that his stance reflects his isolationist primary election campaign rhetoric and not the post-election messages of avoiding protectionism and repairing the damage done to America’s international credibility by unilateralist Bush administration policies. Short of armed hostilities or political subversion, no state action is more provocative than banning another’s products from entering your market. I guess this paper was too audaciously hopeful. We’re chastened.

Technically, the Chinese are not legally entitled to retaliate because the United States has legal recourse to restrictions under this so-called “China safeguard” law until 2013. But plenty of American exporting interests have been worried enough to write numerous letters to Obama urging restraint–but to no avail.

Restrictions have never been imposed under this law because in all previous cases — all during the previous administration — President Bush exercised his discretion to reject the recommended duties because of the likely cost of those restrictions on the broader economy. Thus, the Chinese know the decision is a matter of presidential discretion, unlike the antidumping and countervailing duty laws, which are on statutory autopilot and don’t require the president’s attention. Accordingly, the tire restrictions are the edict of the American president, and thus carries more profound meaning for the Chinese.

One of the more thrilling spectacles in all of this, if politicians were capable of humility, would be watching President Obama explain his decision to impose tire duties on China at the G-20 meeting he is hosting in Pittsburgh in 12 days. Recall the president’s pledge (along with the other G-20 leaders) at the last G-20 meeting in London to avoid new protectionist measures.

American credibility on trade is spent. And maybe Obama will find comfort in that fact because he won’t be burdened with that historic responsibility, as he signs off on the slew of new requests for trade restrictions (which are undoubtedly coming soon) under this law from other U.S. industries seeking handouts.

President Obama’s decision to impose a 35 percent tariff on imported tires from China was not an act of statesmanship. The White House admitted as much by announcing its decision at 10 p.m. on Friday evening in order to minimize news coverage.

A few union leaders are cheering, but in just about every other way our country is worse off. Among the biggest losers will be low-income American families. The tariffs apply to lower-end tires that sell for $50 or $60 each, compared to $200 for higher-end tires. As The Wall Street Journal reported this morning:

The anti-poor bias of U.S. tariffs is one of the themes of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization. With his decision Friday, President Obama has revealed himself to be a friend of the status quo. (Daniel Griswold, Cato at liberty)

U.S. producers? No, they are the ones who, pursuing profit-maximizing strategies, have consciously shifted production of low-end tires from their U.S. plants to their Chinese plants over the past few years. They will now have to incur the costs of shifting production from China to production facilities in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and other developing countries, where it makes economic sense to produce low-end tires.

U.S. workers, then? Nah. Low-end U.S. tire production workers won’t see an increase in U.S. capacity, capacity utilization, hours worked, or wages because, as implied above, production isn’t coming back to the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. workers in tire wholesaling, distribution, and other segment of the supply chain are likely to see a decline in business in the short-run, as higher prices reduce demand for tires. Things may improve once adjustments are made to the new production locations, but that will involve certain adjustment costs and lower profit margins because presumably China is the profit-maximizing production location. Right? Why else would producers have chosen China?

Does the tariff benefit consumers, then? Come on. Not only will it lead to higher prices for consumers, but it will hit cost-conscious consumers the hardest. And you thought President Obama opposed regressive taxation?

No, the only beneficiary of the tariff is President Obama, who presumably gets some political mileage for his Chicago-style payback of Big Labor. But make no mistake that any benefits to the president will be fleeting, as the direct costs of the tire tariff and the costs of copycat protectionism start to squeeze economic recovery. As the president is flooded with similar requests for protection from other unions and producers, he will have to choose between disappointing those favor-seekers or strangling economic prospects entirely. The tire decision was selfish and shortsighted. (Daniel Ikenson, Cato at liberty)

HONG KONG — China unexpectedly increased pressure Sunday on the United States in a widening trade dispute, taking the first steps toward imposing tariffs on American exports of automotive products and chicken meat in retaliation for President Obama’s decision late Friday to levy tariffs on tires from China. (NYT)

That’s my favorite placard from the Washington tea party protests on Saturday. No Child Left a Dime underlines perhaps the central concern of the protesters — the ongoing massive fiscal irresponsibility in Washington by both parties.

We’ve got deficits of more more than $1 trillion for years to come. Federal debt will approach World War Two levels within a decade. Even so, the Democrats are trying to ram through a $1 trillion health care expansion, and the head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is defending against any cuts to Medicare, the program that is the single biggest threat to taxpayers. People are marching not just because Obama and the Democrats are scaring their pants off, but because most Republicans in positions of power are spendthrifts as well.

The chart illustrates that no child will be left a dime because the government will have it all. This is the CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario,” which essentially means the business-as-usual scenario if Congress doesn’t cut anything in coming years.

Note that the most rapidly growing box, the white box, is the program that Michael Steele doesn’t want to touch. The program is expected to grow by 6.3 percent of GDP by 2050. In today’s money, 6.3 percent of GDP is about $900 billion a year in added spending. So it’s like Steele doesn’t see anything wrong with tomorrow’s young families forking over an additional $900 billion a year in taxes on this one program, or about $7,700 a year for every American household.

It’s worse than that. The biggest box on the chart by 2050 is interest on the government debt, and by far the biggest contributor to the growth in interest is Medicare. So including interest, Michael Steele’s (ridiculous) Medicare position is sort of like supporting a more than $10,000 tax hike on every young family for this one program.

(By the way, interest costs rise in coming years because of an excess of spending, not a shortage of revenues. Under this CBO scenario, all current tax cuts are extended, and yet federal revenues still rise as a share of GDP over time above the historical norm of recent decades). (Chris Edwards, Cato at liberty)

YUMA, Ariz. — The Southwest drought has reached the point where even drain water is coveted.

Beginning nearly 40 years ago, the briny runoff from the “salad bowl” of southern Arizona, some of the most productive farmland in the nation, has been channeled into an arid plain of the Sonoran desert in Mexico.

It is an engineered solution to the vexing problem of keeping the nearby Colorado River free of agricultural wastewater too heavy in salt compounds for drinking water and other uses. An accidental result south of the border has been a thriving man-made wetland, the largest in the river’s delta, a key stopover for migratory birds and home to a bounty of endangered and threatened species.

But now the protracted drought in the Southwest has led water managers to rethink the possibilities for the wastewater, placing the preservation of the wetland, the Ciénega de Santa Clara, at the center of a delicate balancing act between the growing thirst of California, Nevada and Arizona and the delta’s ecology.

The biggest challenge involves a plan to take some of the wastewater, purify it at a desalination plant and direct it to other uses under a treaty that proportions the Colorado River among the Western states and Mexico.

The desalination plant, here in Yuma, about 30 miles north of the Ciénega, is a $256 million federal facility that although completed 17 years ago, has never run beyond two brief trial periods. It has been long maligned as among the federal government’s biggest white elephants, a plant essentially mothballed from the start by budget and technical difficulties and the vagaries of the Colorado River supply.

But so pressed is the region for water that the plant is getting another look. The water the plant could produce — about 100,000 acre feet per year, enough to supply the needs of a half-million people — would allow Western states to preserve that quantity upriver for their use rather than send it to Mexico, as is done now to fulfill treaty requirements. (NYT)

Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, has died at 95. Ron Bailey calls him “the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history.” In an as-yet-unpublished letter to the New York Times, Don Boudreaux reflects:

In 1992 the late Senator Kennedy said, “The ballot box is the place where all change begins in America.” I wrote a few years later that he was “conveniently forgetting the market process that has brought us such changes as the train, the skyscraper, the automobile, the personal computer, and charitable or self-help endeavors from settlement houses to Alcoholics Anonymous to Comic Relief.”

Some day a history book will describe Bill Clinton as “a scandal-ridden president in the age of Bill Gates.” Or maybe “in the age of the Green Revolution.” Either way, the biggest changes in our lives — certainly the biggest improvements — will have come from scientists, inventors, and businesses, not from politicians.

But that’s not the way journalists and historians see it. Just think of the people who have gone down in history as “the Great“: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Frederick the Great, Peter the Great — despots and warmongers. Just once it would be nice to see the actual benefactors of humanity designated as “the Great”: Galileo the Great, Gutenberg the Great, Samuel Morse the Great, Alan Turing the Great.

So just for tonight, drink a toast to one of the great benefactors of the poorest people in the world, Borlaug the Great. (David Boaz, Cato at liberty)

A few weeks ago, the world of organic food proponents was rocked by new research that organic food was not any more nutritious than conventionally-grown food. Consumers have long been interested in knowing if the extra money they have been shelling out for organic food is justified and the subject, therefore, is of much interest. (Joseph D. Rosen, Health Facts and Fears)

Sixteen months ago Costco and Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. limited how much rice customers could buy at one time, while ‘food riots’ erupted in a number of countries as food prices spiraled upward. Concerns about food supply and distribution spread worldwide. (Joseph Dancy, Market Oracle)

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Meat production has always been somewhat awkward, both for the farmer and the consumer as it always involves the death of the meat animals. Milk and eggs have meant “protective custody” for the dairy cows and laying hens.

As a farm kid, I learned early that the cute little piglets of the spring would become our pork chops in the fall. I learned that when mother told me to “get her a chicken,” it was to be delivered deceased and de-feathered. That didn’t weaken my parents’ concern that our animals all be treated well while they were in our care. .

Today’s big confinement livestock industries have a major problem in convincing distant consumers that they treat their animals with full consideration. On the other hand, the activists who make “gotcha” videotapes may not be the best people to oversee livestock production

The anti-meat activists tell us their goal is to end animal “exploitation.” That apparently would mean no meat production, no household pets, no circuses, no dog shows, no rodeos nor any hunting. There’s a strong temptation for activists to misrepresent the farmers and their standards of animal care, in order to get restrictive legislation.

One of President Obama’s “Czars”—a Harvard lawyer named Cass Sunstein—says livestock and poultry should have the right to sue their owners in the courts. A wondrous boon to lawyers that would quickly force us all into vegan diets—and poorer health, especially for kids..

California voters in a recent election banned cages for laying hens as of 2015. But banning layer cages results in more cannibalism among the birds, and far more bacterial contamination of the eggs.

Equally awkward, California egg producers will probably be forced out of business because the cost of keeping laying hens without cages has proven about 20 percent higher. It seems certain that California will thus be forced to import cage-produced eggs from adjoining states. They cannot be barred because of the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution. California will simply lose thousands of egg-production jobs, huge amounts of fuel will be used to transport the eggs, and they will be less fresh.

Ohio is exploring a middle option. They want the public to have confidence that the farmers are treating their livestock humanely, but they don’t want to put farm supervision in the hands of extremists.

Their solution is a proposed amendment to Ohio’s constitution creating an Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. The 13 members would include:

The board is directed to maintain food safety, encourage locally-grown food, and protect Ohio farms and families—with best-management practices for animal care and well-being, disease prevention, food safety and affordability. This board would not, of course, end the activist complaints. But it would also not end meat production, dairying, pet ownership or hunting.

The Humane Society of the U.S. (not the organization that runs local animal shelters) doesn’t like the idea. It says the “industry-dominated board” is poor public policy.

Political compromises, however, always leave most of us with less than we’d like—but perhaps with more than we deserve.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The Duning-Kruger effect evidently exists. This post is not an attempt to debunk it: rather, it’s a plea for DK not to be abused.

Anybody and everybody can use a variant of the following: “Since you are not an expert in the field, your skepticism about it is derived from you overestimating your own knowledge about it“. Such an argument “provides poor reasoning in support of its conclusion” and therefore can be classified as a (material) fallacy (in particular, as an example of “Affirming the Consequent“).

To understand the above, imagine that any “expert” in homeopathy, in UFOs, in chemtrails will of course be able to repeat the same argument against any skeptic, for the simple reason that few if any skeptic will have devoted their lives to the study of homeopathy, UFOs or chemtrails.

Why, if the DK argument were valid, we would all be forced to believe in all sorts of religions, since it would be impossible to know more about the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Mahabharata more than respective (believer) scholars!

There could be many reasons not to believe in something. The abuse of the DK effect as a DK argument is just a naive case of “pop psychology“. (OmniClimate)

Swiss man says that scientists and corporations deny the actual extent and magnitude of coming environmental destruction; has documented, decades long record of impeccable prophetic accuracy; goes far beyond any information associated with Mayan Calendar for 2012 (Press Release)

Revkin’s actual words include “first known commercial shipment” and “Lawson W. Brigham, a longtime source for anything related to Arctic shipping, confirmed that this is, indeed, a first“. Yes but…a first of what? If “commercial exploitation began in 1877” then the latest “first” needs some good qualifier. Here’s what the Company managing those German ships actually claims in their website (sep 9):

Was this all too difficult to read and understand? Would the explanation of the “non-Russian” bit have removed too much from the news for it to get any space in the newspaper?

What I am sure of though is that a little less ambiguity and a little more explanation on his part would have been quite welcome. Otherwise readers might get the impression that either the Northeast Passage is ready for leisure yachts, or that it has been forever closed by giant chunks of ice for millennia… (OmniClimate)

We were not going to return immediately to the "Northeast passage" but the temptation proved too great when we found the photograph shown above. It depicts an SA-15 type multipurpose icebreaking cargo ship of the Norilsk class. Nineteen were built for the Soviet Union between 1982-1987 at Finnish shipyards Wärtsilä and Valmet.

The significance of the picture is that it was taken in 1984 when the 20,000-dwt ship made the first of several shipments of pipes from Japan to the Ob' estuary via the "impossible" Northeast passage. It was following exactly the same route, to exactly the same destination as the much-lauded Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight. Furthermore, the ship made the journey without an icebreaker escort.

From the same source, we also learn that ships plying this route have been visiting Vancouver since 1979.

In 1986 three made homeward passages with grain after the end of the normal navigation season. The last cleared Vancouver on 12 November, and with minimum assistance reached Arkhangelsk on 2 December. Grain shipments from Vancouver to Arctic ports were continuing up to 1992, when the Ivan Bogin cleared Vancouver on 27 August 1992 for Murmansk.

As to European ships making the passage, the Germans have been there before, beating the Beluga fleet by nearly 70 years. This they did with the 3,287-ton converted merchantman Komet.

She left Germany on 3 July 1940 with a crew of 270, sailed up the Norwegian coast and then, with the assistance of the Soviets, navigated the northern route, crossing the Bering Straits into the Pacific Ocean in early September. She returned safely to Germany on 30 November 1941, after sinking seven ships.

During the war US-built lend-lease vessels, including liberty ships handed over to the Soviets, made 120 voyages with cargoes from the American west coast via the Bering Strait to northern ports, following routes similar to that followed by the Beluga fleet. Navigation by Soviet vessels continued after the war but, in the early stages of the Cold War, the route was closed to Western vessels – not by ice but by politics.

The first offer to open the Northern Sea Route to international shipping was made early in 1967, when it was argued that it could save thirteen days between Hamburg and Yokohama as opposed to the conventional link via Suez. To demonstrate the viability of the route, Soviet cargo carriers made three demonstration voyages from north European ports and Japan.

That the project went no further again was nothing to do with ice. In 1967, after the Six Day War, the Suez Canal was closed. The Soviets did not wish to offend friendly Arab governments – and particularly Egypt - by offering an alternative to the Suez Canal and the invitation for international shipping on the NSR was quietly withdrawn.

Twenty years later, the USSR was shifting its economic enterprises to a self-financing system. In 1989 shipments between western Europe and Japan were made in the new generation of SA-15 freighters, one on charter to a German firm.

The following year space was offered to foreign shippers in eight SA-15s trading between Europe and Japan via the Arctic. In 1991 there were fifteen such voyages with 210,000 tons of cargo (one pictured above). That year, the Northern Sea Route was again declared open to foreign shipping.

To test the route, the French Arctic supply vessel "L'Astrolabe" left Le Havre on 27 July 1991 and successfully navigated the NRS, arriving in Japan in early September.

Yet another European vessel followed in her wake. In the summer of 1997, the Finnish-flag tanker Uikku (pictured, below right) sailed the length of the NSR. beginning in Murmansk 3 September, and discharged fuel along a number of Russian Arctic ports. It arrived in Pevek on the 12th to discharge fuel and then sailed through the Bering Strait on 15 September.

After picking up more fuel in the Pacific the ship sailed back along the NSR, discharging fuel at several ports and reaching Murmansk on 14 October. It was reported by the Russian NSR authorities that a Latvian-flag tanker also completed a full transit of the NSR in 1997.

And yet The Independent has the nerve to claim that, "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage," while The Times in an updated version of its story, is still telling us that "the voyage was considered impossible until a few years ago."

As for Niels Stolberg, founder and president of the Beluga Group, when he tells us that, "We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company to have successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage," why is the media taking him seriously? (EUReferendum)

THE number of sunspots has declined dramatically in the past two years - but scientists say it is too early to tell if it is the start of a solar depression that could lead to cooler weather on Earth.

Over the past millennium, whenever the sun has had long periods of low sunspot numbers, Earth has weathered equally long cold snaps. The most famous of these was the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, when sunspots all but vanished for 70 years. It coincided with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age.

For the past two years, sunspots - dark and intensely magnetic blotches on the sun's surface - have been at their fewest since 1913.

''This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century,'' said NASA solar forecaster David Hathaway. ''Since the space age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high … We're just not used to this type of deep calm.''

Sunspots cause other solar activity such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, radiation from which can interfere with Earth's magnetic field, upper atmosphere and, many scientists believe, climate.

Scientists expect to record 290 spotless days this year. Last year, there were 266, the most spotless days since 1913, when there were 311 recorded.

''People are wondering about whether we're going into another Maunder Minimum or not,'' said Iver Cairns, of the University of Sydney's School of Physics. ''The balance of opinion is that it's too early to tell. But it could be very significant.'' (The Age)

SINGAPORE - A team of scientists studying rock samples in Africa has shown a strong link between falling carbon dioxide levels and the formation of Antarctic ice sheets 34 million years ago.

The results are the first to make the link, underpinning computer climate models that predict both the creation of ice sheets when CO2 levels fall and the melting of ice caps when CO2 levels rise. (Reuters)

Research conducted at Texas A&M University casts doubts on the notion that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming and raises interesting questions about the relationship between El Niño and a severe flu pandemic 91 years ago. The findings are based on analysis of the 1918 El Niño, which the new research shows to be one of the strongest of the 20th century.

El Niño occurs when unusually warm surface waters form over vast stretches of the eastern Pacific Ocean and can affect weather systems worldwide. Using advanced computer models, Benjamin Giese, a professor of oceanography who specializes in ocean modeling, and his co-authors conducted a simulation of the global oceans for the first half of the 20th century and they find that, in contrast with prior descriptions, the 1918-19 El Niño was one of the strongest of the century.

Giese's work will be published in the current "Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society," and the research project was funded by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the National Science Foundation.

Giese says there were few measurements of the tropical Pacific Ocean in 1918, the last year of World War I, and the few observations that are available from 1918 are mostly along the coast of South America. "But the model results show that the El Niño of 1918 was stronger in the central Pacific, with a weaker signature near the coast," Giese explains. "Thus the limited measurements likely missed detecting the 1918 El Niño."

Giese adds, "The most commonly used indicator of El Niño is the ocean temperature anomaly in the central Pacific Ocean. By that standard, the 1918-19 El Niño is as strong as the events in 1982-83 and 1997-98, considered to be two of the strongest events on record, causing some researchers to conclude that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming. Since the 1918-19 El Niño occurred before significant warming from greenhouse gasses, it makes it difficult to argue that El Niño s have been getting stronger."

The El Niño of 1918 coincided with one of the worst droughts in India, he adds. "It is well known that there is a connection between El Niño and the failure of the Indian monsoon, just as there is a well-established connection between El Niño and Atlantic hurricane intensity," Giese says. In addition to drought in India and Australia, 1918 was also a year in which there were few Atlantic hurricanes. (Texas A&M University) [em added]

There is a pioneering study of the role of landscape processes in weather and climate that should be read by anyone working on this topic. It is directly relevant to the issue of how changes in the landscape alter surface heat and moisture fluxes, and 2m and other near surface temperatures. This paper is

The landscape they evaluated ranged from farmland, mostly woods to commercial-industrial. Among their results was a greater than 10C difference in daytime maximum surface temperature between urban and rural sites.

This paper documents that major alteration in surface fluxes and of near ground temperatures are substantially altered by urbanization and other landscape changes. It also provides a baseline to compare with the 2009 landscape and to map the HCN sites in this region to these changes. It provides another reason that the papers

Parker, D. E., 2006: A demonstration that large-scale warming is not urban, J. Clim., 19, 2882–2895.

Peterson, T. C., 2003: Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found. J. Climate, 16, 2941–2959.

are very suspect in their findings, as they are inconsistent with such observational results as given in Dabberdt and Davis (1978). (Climate Science)

If the climate is not quite right, birds will up and move rather than stick around and sweat it out, according to a new study led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. (ScienceDaily)

An anonymous adage advises, “There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don’t respond with encores.” Break your stick in ice hockey and drop it immediately or a penalty is assessed because continued use can cause serious damage (Rule 10.3). Apparently this rule doesn’t apply in climate science where a few scientists continue to use a broken “hockey stick” and cause serious damage.

Facts proving humans are not causing global warming are not enough to stop the political juggernaut. Perhaps exposure of collusion among a small group of self-proclaimed climate scientists who continue to play with a broken stick will stop the madness forcing destructive economic policies. (Tim Ball, CFP)

I am pretty sure Lord May has absolutely no idea of the most obvious consequence of his religion-without-faith approach towards solving the “climate change” issue. And that consequence is…fascism.

In fact, in the past, over and over again, well-meaning atheists have proposed to use religion for social engineering purposes. Invariably, all those doctrines have converged towards authoritarian nightmares. Worse: the whole catalogue of XX century horrors can be traced back to idealists-atheists thinking hard on how to improve societies by using religion.

All of that, because otherwise intelligent thinkers had the stupid idea of using religion without taking care of its Faith component.

Please Lord May would you stop inviting us to repeat that mistake. (OmniClimate)

IF THE sinking Maldives aren't enough to galvanise action on climate change, could losing a classic beer do it? Climatologist Martin Mozny of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and colleagues say that the quality of Saaz hops - the delicate variety used to make pilsner lager - has been decreasing in recent years. They say the culprit is climate change in the form of increased air temperature.

Mozny's team used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns, crop yield and hop quality to estimate the impact of climate change on Saaz hops in the Czech Republic between 1954 and 2006. Best-quality Saaz hops contain about 5 per cent alpha acid, the compound that produces the delicate, bitter taste of pilsners.

The study found that the concentration of alpha acids in Saaz hops has fallen by 0.06 per cent a year since 1954, and models of hop yields and quality under future global warming scenarios predict bigger decreases (Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2009.02.006).

It's not just Czech hops that are at stake here, says Francesco Tubiello, a crop specialist at the European Commission and a lead author of the agriculture chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. "The famous hop-growing regions of eastern Germany and central Slovakia are facing the same situation," he says. (New Scientist)

... As one with many years of experience modeling complex systems, I can assure you that when model assumptions or results contradict reality, one is always better off choosing reality. Students of climate change with the backgrounds necessary to understand how the models work also understand the stunning significance of these results. These are but two examples of the work of hundreds of scientists with impeccable credentials and sterling reputations who remain skeptical of the global-warming hypothesis. (Richard W. Flygare, Salt Lake Tribune)

No, we can't wait.

The scientific evidence of global warming — and of human activities as its main cause — is incontrovertible. Research compiled by the Worldwatch Institute shows that 10 of the last 13 years have been the warmest ever recorded. Of the thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject, only a handful question the validity of these findings.

There is virtually no dissension among serious scientists that global warming is real. But there are several well-funded publicity campaigns pooh-poohing it in an effort to preserve the status quo. While these may grab headlines and the public's attention, they are opinion — not science. Peter H. Raven, St Louis Post-Dispatch)

From a recent op-ed by Max Blumenthal on the International Herald Tribune (”Ike’s other warning“, Sep 2, 2009):

Every call to silence climate skeptics comes from a desire to be insulated “from the pressures of a free society“. (OmniClimate)

LONDON - Climate change could cost some countries up to 19 percent of their gross domestic product by 2030, a panel including major insurance, banking and consulting companies as well as the European Commission said on Monday. (Reuters)

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Yvo De Boer ruled out the possibility that a "comprehensive" international climate treaty will be ratified at Copenhagen in December.

De Boer, speaking at a press conference during the ongoing Summer Davos in Dalian, Northeast China said it is "impossible to craft and draft" a detailed climate treaty in "the time that remains" to address climate change.

"That is not possible. But it is also not necessary," he said, "I think what Copenhagen has to achieve is a basic political understanding" on the essential issues of climate change. (chinadaily.com.cn)

As climate change reemerges as an issue in the national policy debate, it may help define the legislative legacies of two men who once vied for the White House: Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Both men have championed the issue of global warming for years, including when they served as their party's presidential nominees in 2004 and 2008, respectively. But, for the moment, McCain is barely engaged in the issue beyond criticizing the climate bill passed by the House, while Kerry has emerged as one of the chamber's leading dealmakers. The fact that the two no longer appear to be on the same side underscores the challenge Democrats face in enacting the first national cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is a tough lift, in every respect," said Kerry, who has held 40 one-on-one meetings with 25 fellow Democrats over the past couple of months and plans to meet with half a dozen Republicans in the next week or so. "My hope is that common sense and the facts will prevail, but that doesn't always happen around here." (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

As one of the nation's largest producers of coal, West Virginia has more to lose than many other states when it comes to the debate over comprehensive global warming and energy legislation.

And that is why across the state, the loudest voices now being heard are against taking the kinds of aggressive actions envisioned by President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

Yet, Sen. Jay Rockefeller is happy to be at the bargaining table, trying to negotiate the best outcome possible for an industry that has been his home state's lifeblood for more than 150 years.

"I cannot strategically negotiate and fight for West Virginia's future if I just say no outright," he said last week.

In Rockefeller's eyes, coal is in trouble thanks to the increasing uncertainty surrounding a future full of climate-tinged regulation, the result of mounting scientific evidence surrounding global warming and the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that paves the way for new federal rules to clamp down on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

"I think doing nothing at all on legislation causes three horrible things to happen, all of which mean the end of the coal industry. And people don't think of that because they hear 'cap and trade' and they say they don't like it," he said. (ClimateWire)

Sweden's environment minister urges the US Senate on Monday to pass legislation to control greenhouse gases, saying a delay in the vote is impeding negotiations on a new international climate treaty. (CoP15)

If climate talks in Copenhagen fail, the world will not come to a halt, Indian environment minister says. (CoP15)

The legitimacy of the $100 billion (£60 billion) carbon-trading market has been called into question after the world’s largest auditor of clean-energy projects was suspended by United Nations inspectors.

SGS UK had its accreditation suspended last week after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the carbon-trading scheme, or even that they were qualified to do so. (The Sunday Times)

WELLINGTON - New Zealand will revise its emissions trading scheme to lower the costs to businesses and households, although the scheme will still cover all sectors and greenhouse gases, the government said on Monday. (Reuters)

Spain’s biggest oil company Repsol-YPF announced on Friday the discovery of a Venezuelan gas field containing as much as 8 trillion cubic feet of fuel, equivalent to 1.2 to 1.4 billion barrels, one of the world’s largest finds. (MercoPress)

OSLO - A strong shift toward renewable energies could create 2.7 million more jobs in power generation worldwide by 2030 than staying with dependence on fossil fuels would, a report suggested Monday.

The study, by environmental group Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), urged governments to agree a strong new United Nations pact to combat climate change in December in Copenhagen, partly to safeguard employment.

"A switch from coal to renewable electricity generation will not just avoid 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, but will create 2.7 million more jobs by 2030 than if we continue business as usual," the report said. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN - Offshore wind turbines could meet 13-17 percent of Europe's electricity need in 2030 if wind power projects get sufficient support, an industry lobby organization said on Monday.

Offshore wind installations currently account for about 0.2 percent of Europe's electricity demand, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) said in a report.

"Offshore wind power is vital for Europe's future," the EWEA said in the report published in conjunction with a wind industry conference in Stockholm. (Reuters)

NAALEHU, Hawaii — Two miles or so from this tiny town in the southernmost corner of the United States, across ranches where cattle herds graze beneath the distant Mauna Loa volcano, the giant turbines of a new wind farm cut through the air.

Sixty miles to the northeast, near a spot where golden-red lava streams meet the sea in clouds of steam, a small power plant extracts heat from the volcanic rock beneath it to generate electricity.

These projects are just a slice of the energy experiment unfolding across Hawaii’s six main islands. With the most diverse array of alternative energy potential of any state in the nation, Hawaii has set out to become a living laboratory for the rest of the country, hoping it can slash its dependence on fossil fuels while keeping the lights on.

Every island has at least one energy accent: waves in Maui, wind in Lanai and Molokai, solar panels in Oahu and eventually, if all goes well, biomass energy from crops grown on Kauai. Here on the Big Island of Hawaii, seawater is also being converted to electricity.

Still, the state faces enormous challenges in delivering the power to the people who need it. While the urban sprawl around Honolulu consumes the bulk of the energy, most potential renewable sources are far from the city, 150 miles southeast or 100 miles to the northwest.

Each of the state’s six electric grids belongs to its own island and is unconnected to the others. And according to state figures, Hawaii still relies on imported oil to generate 77 percent of its electricity, a level of dependency unique in the United States. Coal-fired power provides 14 percent, and 9 percent comes from renewable sources like the wind or the sun.

Hawaii’s governor, Linda Lingle, a Republican, has resolved to throw off the yoke of oil dependence and harness the state’s potential.

Under an agreement reached last year with the federal government and the dominant local utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, Hawaii plans to generate 40 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030. The state’s six grids will be connected by cables, and planners hope that conservation steps like reducing the air-conditioning load at high-rise hotels will cut Hawaii’s energy consumption by nearly a third. (NYT)

BRUSSELS - The auto industry will have to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new vans sold in the European Union by 14 percent by July 2013 or face fines, a draft EU document shows.

The ban would be a year later than first envisaged. (Reuters)

A NEW three-part report has exposed the harmful impact of the commercial shipping industry on public and environment.

US investigative journalism organisation DCBureau.org has released the No Safe Harbor: The Shipping Industry's Pollution Problem report written by environmental correspondent Adam Sarvana.

The report revealed the shipping industry now contributes more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year than all airlines and railroads combined. (Shipping)

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery. — Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug (1914-2009) (Junkfood Science)

On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that "more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world." The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.

Borlaug, who died Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.

Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of "semidwarf" wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug's "Green Revolution" began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters. (Wall Street Journal)

NEW DELHI: Long before Mr Bush and Dr Rice came by to leapfrog US-India ties to a new level, it was Prof. Wheat who jump-started and nourished the relationship. Norman Borlaug, the genial scientist-pacifist who died of cancer in Dallas on Saturday, was as much India's 'annadaata' as he was the Father of the Green Revolution.

Around the time Dr Borlaug arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, the specter of famine, shortages, and starvation hung over the sub-continent. India was importing huge quantities of food grains from the US - much of it dole - to feed its growing millions in a manner that was famously described as "ship-to-mouth" sustenance.

Enter Norman Borlaug, a strapping, self-made, sun-burnt American from the farmland of Iowa, who had spent more a decade by then in Mexico after hard-earned doctorate in Depression-era US. What he had pulled off in experiments in Mexico was a miracle, that if successfully applied in India, would fill its granaries to overflow - as it eventually did.

By cranking up a wheat strain containing an unusual gene, Borlaug created the so-called ''semi-dwarf'' plant variety -- a shorter, stubbier, compact stalk that supported an enormous head of grain without falling over from the weight. This curious principle of shrinking the plant to increase the output on the plant from the same acreage resulted in Indian farmers eventually quadrupling their wheat -- and later, rice -- production.

It heralded the Green Revolution. (Times of India)

WASHINGTON — Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, has died at the age of 95.

The acclaimed agriculturalist, often called the father of the Green Revolution, died late on Saturday in Dallas, Texas, due to complications from cancer, according to Texas A&M University, where Borlaug served since 1984.

He was best known for his work developing disease-resistant "dwarf" wheat, which yielded two to three times as much as the normal crop.

"Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Program, on Sunday.

"His total devotion to ending famine and hunger revolutionized food security for millions of people and for many nations." (AFP)

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution," died Saturday at his home in Dallas at age 95. Here is a look at some of the honors he received: (Associated Press)

Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University, where Dr. Borlaug had served on the faculty since 1984.

Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.

Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history. Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.

“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”

The day the award was announced, Dr. Borlaug, vigorous and slender at 56, was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City when his wife, Margaret, drove up to tell him the news. “Someone’s pulling your leg,” he replied, according to one of his biographers, Leon Hesser. Assured that it was true, he kept on working, saying he would celebrate later. (NYT)

Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives from starvation. But decades on, his farming methods threaten the health of the planet (Graham Harvey, The Times)

According to the Examiner in Baltimore, mainstream media won’t report the story, accurately. In a history making event reminiscent of other marches, the American people — fat and thin, old and young, black and white, from all walks of life and every corner of the country — made their voices heard about government health care reform. The world press covered today’s events in Washington and across the United States more than our own. But, youtube videos are flooding the internet: (Junkfood Science)

OUR daily bread will get a health booster from tomorrow -- the start date for a national program to cut spina bifida rates by adding folic acid to wheat flour.

But it will do so despite commissioned advice from a senior public health expert that targeted education campaigns could have achieved more at lower cost than the new mandatory program.

Professor Leonie Segal, who was engaged by Food Standards Australia New Zealand to examine the cost effectiveness of options to reduce neural tube defects, said mandatory fortification of bread with folic acid risked turning food into pharmacotherapy when simpler solutions existed.

"If you're only talking about a small percentage of the population that you're targeting, putting folate in the bread flour for everyone wouldn't be your first choice," she said.

Professor Segal, also a member of Kevin Rudd's National Preventative Health Taskforce, said while the strategy might not cause harm, it could detract from more useful efforts to encourage women of child-bearing age to consume more folate and take folic acid supplements. (The Australian)

THE ban on public smoking in Britain has caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10per cent, researchers have found.

Researchers commissioned by Britain's Department of Health have found a far sharper fall than they expected in the number of heart attacks across England in the year after the ban was imposed in July 2007. In Scotland, where the ban was introduced a year earlier, heart attack rates have fallen by about 14 per cent because of the ban, separate research has shown. Similar results are expected in Wales, where a third study is still under way.

The success of the public smoking ban is emerging as one of the most significant improvements in public health that Britain has seen, even measured by heart attack rates alone.

"We always knew a public smoking ban would bring rapid health benefits, but we have been amazed by just how big and how rapid they are," said Professor John Britton, director of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies at Nottingham University.

About 9.4 million British adults smoke, with roughly equal rates among men and women. Each year about 114,000 die of smoking-related diseases.

Ellen Mason, a senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Exposure to cigarette smoke induces rapid changes in blood chemistry, making it much more prone to clotting." (The Sunday Times)

People can develop liver disease even when they are exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke, according to a study.

Scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have found that exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a common disease and rising cause of chronic liver injury wherein fat accumulates in the liver of people who drink little or no alcohol.

For their study, the researchers exposed some mice to second-hand cigarette smoke for a year in the lab, and observed fat build-up in their liver cells, a sign of NAFLD that eventually leads to liver dysfunction. (Times of India)

Debate over funding for Lomborg - Politicians argue over state funding for the controversial political scientist Bjørn Lomborg

Climate sceptic Bjørn Lomborg is hitting back at politicians who have questioned the financing his Copenhagen Consensus think tank receives from the state.

Conservative Party climate spokesman Per Ørum Jørgensen said the government should consider if it was paying for Lomborg to go to Greenland and tell people there that it was fine not to support a climate agreement at the conference in Copenhagen.
Jørgensen was referring to Lomborg’s trip to Greenland in August when he praised the country’s stance that if a climate deal did not allow developing nations to advance industrially it would not support it.

At the time, Lomborg said Greenland could benefit from saying it was merely expressing a view that other countries held but were too afraid to voice during negotiations.

Lomborg rejected the political criticisms, arguing that his trip to Greenland was sponsored by a local employers’ association and not funded by the Copenhagen Consensus.

He did not address the political concerns that he was encouraging Greenland not to sign a climate deal in Copenhagen.

Liberal Party spokesman Eyvind Vesselbo has also called for an analysis into whether the state is getting the most value for money for the environment by financing Lomborg.

‘I don’t think we should be giving him money to declare that the government’s climate policy is foolish,’ said Vesselbo to Berlingske Tidende newspaper.

The debate over funding for the think tank arose after the Danish People’s Party said they planned to propose doubling the financing to 15 million kroner for the next three years. (Copenhagen Post)

Charity accused of damaging the environment as it takes the axe to hundreds of acres of conifer woodland to restore traditional open heaths. Opponents say the scheme threatens UK's fight against global warming (David Adam, The Observer)

India is planning to reintroduce cheetahs into the wild, more than six decades after they were thought to have been hunted into extinction in the sub-continent.

But the plans have ignited a debate about wildlife conservation, with opponents arguing that India has neither the land nor the funds to sustain cheetahs and the dwindling tiger population. Wildlife experts and officials met in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan last week to draw up proposals to import up to 100 cheetahs from Africa over the next ten years.

The cats, which would come from countries such as Tanzania, Botswana and Kenya, would be kept in captivity in semi-wild enclosures until they were acclimatised, the experts said. They would then be released at several potential sites in Rajasthan, the western states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. (The Times)

Harvest time is here again on Germany’s 1.2 million allotments: potatoes have to be hoisted out of the soil and the last of the peas must be plucked.

In the shed, next to the trowel and gloves, there will almost certainly be a well-thumbed copy of the gardeners’ bible written by Alwin Seifert, the country’s organic guru.

Now it emerges that at least some of Seifert’s useful tips in his bestselling book Gärtnern, Ackern-ohne Gift, (Gardening, Working the Soil without Poison) may have been gleaned from his observation of the experimental gardens set up on the grounds around Dachau concentration camp.

Tended by half-starved slave labourers, at least 400 of whom were killed, drowned in the carp pond or trampled into the mud of the latrine trenches, the Dachau gardens were established at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s security chief, and stretched to 211 blossoming hectares.

Seifert, who after the war became a founder of the Green movement, was one of the top landscape gardeners of the Nazi era. He even had the title Reichslandschaftsanwalt — advocate of the Reich’s Landscape. It was Seifert who managed to persuade the Nazi autobahn planners to make the motorway curve, following the natural contours of the German countryside. The well-connected gardener was also opposed to artificial fertilisers poisoning German soil and went to Dachau, apparently oblivious to the emaciated prisoners, to see what could be done in the gardens and arable fields of the Fatherland. (The Times)

UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony

Catainia photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image

Spotless Cueball: Catania observatory photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image

While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen

“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.

But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.

"The March across the Belts was a campaign between January 30 and February 8, 1658 during the Northern Wars where Swedish king Karl X Gustav led the Swedish army from Jutland across the ice of the Little Belt and the Great Belt to reach Zealand (Danish: Sjælland). The risky but vastly successful crossing was a crushing blow to Denmark, and led to the Treaty of Roskilde later that year...." - Click for larger image.

It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.

The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.

You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.

Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.

When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.

That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.

Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.

First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.

Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.

It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.

So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.

That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.

The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.

So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.

-Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508) (WUWT)

As global warming dries out parts of the Earth, the loss of vegetation could hasten expansion of the world’s subtropical deserts, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters.

Climate models predict that rainfall will decrease in subtropical areas as the planet warms. The drying could cause some plant life to disappear, increasing the amount of sunlight that the surface reflects. That change in reflectivity or “albedo” has the potential to alter moisture patterns, reducing rainfall even further, the authors say. (Journal Watch)

In June 2009, Anthony Watts reposted an article by Lawrence Solomon that pointed out that the Earth is greener than it has been in decades if not centuries.

See also NASA's animations of this Earth (the map of its bio-product), for example the low-resolution one.

In less than 20 years, the "gross primary production" (GPP) quantifying the daily output of the biosphere jumped more than 6%. About 25% of the landmass saw significant increases while only 7% showed significant declines.

Note that the CO2 concentration grows by 1.8 ppm a year, which is about 0.5% a year. It adds up to approximately 10% per 20 years. In other words, the relative increase of the GPP is more than one half of the relative increase of the CO2 concentration. The plants also need solar radiation and other things that haven't increased (or at least not that much) which is why the previous sentence says "one half" and not "the same as".

Because the CO2 concentration in 2100 (around 560 ppm) may be expected to be 50% higher than today (around 385 ppm), it is therefore reasonable to expect that the GPP will be more than 25% higher than it is today. Even by a simple proportionality law, assuming no improvements in the quality, transportation, and efficiency for a whole century, the GPP in 2100 should be able to feed 1.25 * 6.8 = 8.5 billion people, besides other animals.

Of course, in reality, there will be lots of other improvements, so I find it obvious that the Earth will be able to support at least 20 billion people in 2100 if needed. On the other hand, I think that the population will be much smaller than 20 billion, and perhaps closer to those 8.5 billion mentioned previously.

Back to the present: oxygen
Now, in September 2009, Anthony Watts mentions a related piece of work that some Danish researchers just published in Nature:

Economic expansion cannot be achieved forever if greenhouse gases are to be curbed, warns the leading economist and author of the UK's government's report on climate change (The Guardian)

Security fears used to sell climate bill - Supporters of President Obama's energy and climate plan are launching a campaign to tout its benefits for national security. Polls show that message resonates with voters

Reporting from Washington - After months of promoting President Obama's climate plan as a vehicle for creating millions of clean-energy jobs, supporters of the legislation are increasingly pushing another strategy -- touting its benefits for national security.

It's a deliberate, anxiety-themed effort to press a handful of fence-sitting moderates to support a bill that is likely to be the Obama administration's next great legislative push after healthcare.

A coalition backing the energy and climate bill pending before the Senate has enlisted war veterans to pressure senators in person. In television advertisements, the coalition calls dependence on foreign oil a threat to national security and fuel for terrorists. (LA Times)

As Tory Outcast points out, the story that the Independent Newspaper thinks a catastrophe is in fact far more mundane:

Such high-pitched tabloidism from the ‘Independent’ is nothing new of course. It epitomises what a think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), called, in 2006, ‘Climate Porn’. A BBC article at the time, picked up the story, and quoted IPPR’s head of climate change, Simon Retallack:

Later that year, the then Director of the Tyndall Centre, Professor Mike Hulme warned that the language being used - not just by the media, but also by politicians, campaigners, and scientists - in the discussion around climate change was increasingly removed from anything scientific, and was likely to encourage people to switch off:

Psychologist Lorraine Whitmarsh, who conducted the research while at the Tyndall Centre, doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to the words of her former boss. As with much social science dealing with matters of climate change, the survey seems to have less to do with shedding light on public attitudes and behaviour and more to do with trying to change them:

It’s interesting that Whitmarsh’s case seems to be reliant on the same outmoded notion of science communication that social scientists have been instrumental in dispelling. The ‘deficit model’ holds that public opposition to certain scientific developments and technologies is simply the result of scientific illiteracy. Get the public up to speed, it says, and they will surely make the ‘right’ decisions. We’ve mentioned before that, while the deficit model and the push for ‘public understanding of science’ have generally been supplanted by strategies of ‘public engagement’ and ‘upstream engagement’, and science academies and governments seek dialogues with the public on everything from nanotech to genomics, climate change is the subject of decidedly one-way conversations. Which is hardly surprising, given that climate change mitigation is central to all parties’ manifestos while at the same time being the source of significant distrust on the part of the electorate.

But that all goes out of the window when it comes to how to get people to do the ‘right’ thing:

‘Residual uncertainty’ has nothing to do with it. The problem for Whitmarsh, and other academics who fail to identify the difference between activism and research, is that the over-statement of ‘the science’ is not normal, and the public are actually rather more clued up - even if only instinctively - than she gives them credit for. And in fact the public seem rather better informed than her.

As we saw, the IPPR and the Director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research - none of them sceptics - were warning back in 2006 that the climate change pudding had been over-egged, and was likely to damage the possibility of reaching the public. Mike Hulme, as director of the Tyndall Centre, would have been Whitmarsh’s boss. It’s not as if Whitmarsh could possibly be unaware of the criticisms of the over-statement of climate change.

Yet she searches for ways in which the public might be force-fed ‘carbon literacy’ programmes.

There exist several non-climate-sceptic explanations for the public’s reluctance to absorb the climate change agenda that didn’t appeal to clumsy hypotheses about disparity between official scientific truth and public opinion. These explanations credit the public with sufficient intelligence to have identified the tendency of many politicians, scientists, campaigners and journalists to exaggerate climate change with stories of ‘tipping points’, ‘N-year windows to save the planet’, and ‘inevitable catastrophe’. But Whitmarsh seems to ignore these far more simple accounts, and takes the view that a new way of conveying the same imperatives to the public is needed, rather than reflecting on the possibility that the public have, in fact, well understood the message and found it wanting. That is to say that it is possible to believe that climate change is a problem, while believing that the politics, posturing and glib copy that is produced seemingly in order to address the problem in fact plainly demonstrate a self-serving and cynical view of the public. Indeed, the ‘man in the street’ seems able to see in the environmental psychologist what the environmental psychologist can’t even see in herself. This inability to self-reflect is the defining characteristic - the symptom - of the entire climate change movement and those who uncritically engage in climate politics. With just a few, largely ignored exceptions, they will criticise anyone but themselves in reflecting on their own failure.

Back in 2006, in the BBC article featuring the IPPR’s criticism of climate porn, the Independent’s deputy editor, Ian Birrell defended his paper thus:

No sooner than his words were spoken, the readers of the Independent decided to express their own independence:

In fact, our models suggest that the Indy will go into negative circulation in Summer 2018:

But scientists predict the tipping point may have already passed sooner than will would have was been previously thought. (Climate Resistance)

A number of readers wrote in to express surprise at the recent letter from the US scientist Dr Michael Mann claiming that his famous "hockey stick" graph, showing temperatures having suddenly soared at the end of the 20th century to unprecedented levels, had been endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences. Neither of the two Congressional inquiries involving the NAS did anything of the kind. Both found that the computer model used to create Dr Mann's "hockey stick", completely rewriting climate history, was fundamentally flawed.

This is one reason why, despite all the efforts made to defend Dr Mann's graph by his academic colleagues (describing themselves as the Hockey Team), I have described it as "one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science".

Now the Hockey Team have done it again. As part of the general drive to hype up panic over global warming in the run-up to December's Copenhagen conference, several of them are among the authors of a paper, published in the September 4 issue of the US journal Science, which claims to rewrite the climate history of the Arctic. As in the original version, the new hockey stick-shaped graph produced by their computer model shows temperatures gently declining for 900 years, then suddenly shooting up in recent years to record levels.

As usual, there are several odd features of their model, which is largely based on data from Professor Philip Jones's Climate Research Unit in Norwich – the data he refuses to publish because it is a state secret. But perhaps the oddest aspect of all is the contrast between this new study and the comprehensive record of Arctic temperatures compiled by the Danish Meteorological Institute from 1959 to the present day.

Anthony Watts's Watts Up With That blog (see the blog posting on September 4) created an animated graphic showing the DMI's temperature changes over the past 50 years. Far from confirming the hypothetical upward spurt claimed by the Hockey Team's computer, the most remarkable feature of the actual record is that it shows no significant change whatever.

The unshakeable faith in computer models shown by the scientists who programme them would be the envy of any religious sect in the world. (Christopher Booker, Daily Telegraph)

BRITONS are becoming less trusting of scientists who say climate change is caused by humans, according to new research.

Almost a third of people questioned (29 per cent) believed evidence linking human activity and global warming had been exaggerated - a figure which has doubled since 2003.

A quarter of those surveyed thought the evidence was “unreliable”, while a third said there was too many “conflicting” views on the environment.

One in five people thought climate change was caused by natural temperature fluctuations and half blamed the media for being too alarmist. (Emily Garnham, Daily express)

New York, Sep 10 2009 10:10AM A United Nations-backed gathering on how to scale up a carbon credit system wrapped up today, with participants agreeing that the mechanism can help contribute to a successful outcome at this December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, which aims to conclude an ambitious new pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions. (Press Release: United Nations)

BERLIN (IDN) – In run-up to a critical global conference coming December in Denmark, the developing countries are not inclined to “suffer the slings and arrows” of a new and dangerous form of trade and technology protectionism fast emerging in the name of Climate Change. On way to Copenhagen, they are determined to “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”.

In fact they have no option other than opposing strong winds and rough seas on way to the United Nations climate change negotiations Dec. 7-18.

Martin Khor, executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre says the rise of ‘climate protectionism’ is “poisoning North-South relations in the two negotiating arenas on climate change and on trade”.

This “mother of new trade protection” is coming at a time of economic recession when world leaders have piously proclaimed they will not resort to trade protection, says Khor who until recently headed the eminently competent Third World Network based in Penang, Malaysia.

If climate protection is allowed, it will also open the floodgates to all kinds of protection by blocking developing country products on the basis of how they are made, cautions Khor. (IDN-InDepthNews Service)

The EU offered up to $15 billion to aid developing countries cutting emissions and urged rich nations to contribute more. (CSM)

LONDON, Sept 13 - Mexico and Argentina are leading a shift to make the global economy more climate friendly, according to an index of "carbon competitiveness", the London-based thinktank E3G said on Sunday.

G20 leaders meet at a summit on Sept 24-25 in Pittsburgh to help steer the global economy out of recession, and will also discuss ways to finance the fight against climate change.

Long-term policies to limit climate change are widely expected to force nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, favouring leaner, more efficient economies run on renewable and other low-carbon energy supplies.

"Countries that adapt quickly to a carbon-constrained world will be better able to deliver lasting prosperity for their citizens," said the E3G report, "G20 Low Carbon Competitiveness". (Reuters)

AUSTRALIA ranks last among wealthy countries in being ready to compete in a clean energy future or play its part in a strong climate treaty, an international report has found.

While the debate in Canberra focuses on whether to pass climate change legislation this year, the analysis by London-based consultants Vivid Economics suggests Australia is already being left behind. (The Age)

THERE is no solution to climate change without rapid escalation of carbon capture and storage technology, Britain's climate ambassador has warned.

John Ashton, Britain's special representative for climate change, said it was inevitable coal would be the dominant source of power in China, the world's largest annual emitter, for the foreseeable future.

''If you don't get CCS [carbon capture and storage] moving in China very quickly, then it doesn't matter what you do in any other sector - you haven't got a 2-degree response to climate change,'' he told The Age.

''It is very hard to see how you could stay within 2 degrees [of warming] unless in all of the major coal-burning economies you have full CCS by 2020 or very soon after.''

Mr Ashton visited Australia last week to push Britain's case for the rapid development of CCS - immature technology that involves capturing carbon dioxide before it is emitted, and burying it kilometres below ground - to be a central plank in a climate treaty due in December. (The Age)

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the emissions trading schemes proposed for the western world will guarantee another global financial crisis for tourism, transport and world trade.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense” Mr Viv Forbes, said that the real global warming crisis, for tourism and trade, was being created in Parliament.

He comments:

“All carbon control schemes have at their core two essential features aimed at reducing man’s production of the harmless gas, carbon dioxide. Firstly, increasingly severe rationing of carbon dioxide (CO2) releases. And secondly, taxes on all permitted emissions and punitive taxes on any excess. They are all Ration-and-Tax Schemes and they will all enforce arbitrary reductions by 2020.

“But not one car, truck, bus, train, plane or ship can move without producing CO2. There is no possibility that this will change significantly before the doomsday year of 2020, just a decade away. Therefore neither Australia nor New Zealand can cut CO2 emissions by 2020 without slowly strangling all those industries that rely on moving people or goods.

“Our politicians should be asked, individually, what food, mineral products and travel they propose doing without in order to meet the 2020 cuts specified in their Ration-and-Tax Schemes.

“Australia and New Zealand comprise four lonely islands in the vast southern oceans which stretch from Africa to South America

“However, world population, political power and finance are concentrated far away in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Apart from a few stock horses used by drovers, the occasional sailing yacht, some suburban bicycles and some hydro power that moves trains, our transport fleets rely totally on petrol, diesel, gas and coal. There are no solar powered aeroplanes or sail powered ocean liners - all produce CO2.

“Neither country can import tourists, get mineral and food products to their cities or export goods to world markets without producing CO2.

“Already France has introduced travel rationing using a carbon tax and the UK Institute for Public Policy says that “the government may need to introduce carbon rationing to cut pollution from everyday activities such as filling up the car, using electricity and flying abroad for holidays”. A UK government committee even proposes that airline taxes should be raised progressively to “a level that would put people off flying”.

“Our politicians should be asked what effect these measures and our local Ration-N-Tax Schemes will have on the South Pacific tourist industries.

“And why are Australian politicians rushing to construct transport infrastructure for trucks, trains, planes and ships if all of these industries are going to be subject to mandatory rationing and taxes – no additional infrastructure or jobs are needed for a world in which tourism, transport and trade are doomed to contract.

“It is a sad indictment of business, media, opposition parties and union leaders in Australia and New Zealand that so few are asking these vital questions.

“The Ration-N-Tax Schemes will have zero beneficial effects but, they will cause crippling contraction and job losses in our backbone industries.

“This is the real global warming crisis.”

Viv Forbes
info@carbon-sense.com
www.carbon-sense.com

Viv Forbes is Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, an Australian organisation which opposes waste of resources, opposes pollution, and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food.

PS By coincidence, the following note came in from a correspondent in UK yesterday:

See also why another lady will no longer be having holidays in Britain: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/09/12/green-britain/

ONE of Australia's most powerful union leaders has lashed out at the push for green jobs, labelling it a "dopey term", and has dismissed environmental campaigns against some of the nation's major export industries as "judgmental nonsense".

The president of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, Tony Maher, said existing industries such as coal and steelmaking would have an important place in the nation's future economic prospects and in producing a lower carbon future.

He said carbon capture and storage and other hopes for cutting emissions such as solar and thermal, would require massive amounts of steel that should be made by Australian steel workers.

Mr Maher said much of the opposition to major industries - particularly the coal industry - was "well-intentioned naivete".

"By mid-century we'll be using twice as much coal and a lot more steel and plastic and concrete that aren't the flavour of the month with environmentalists and green groups," he said.

Yesterday he dismissed a protest at Victoria's Hazelwood power station as "just silly". (The Australian)

People who emit more than their fair share of carbon emissions are having their pay docked in a trial that could lead to rationing being reintroduced via the workplace after an absence of half a century.

Britain’s first employee carbon rationing scheme is about to be extended, after the trial demonstrated the effectiveness of fining people for exceeding their personal emissions target. Unlike the energy-saving schemes adopted by thousands of companies, the rationing scheme monitors employees’ personal emissions, including home energy bills, petrol purchases and holiday flights.

Workers who take a long-haul flight are likely to be fined for exceeding their annual ration unless they take drastic action in other areas, such as switching off the central heating or cutting out almost all car journeys. Employees are required to submit quarterly reports detailing their consumption. They are also set a target, which reduces each year, for the amount of carbon they can emit.

Those who exceed their ration pay a fine for every kilogram they emit over the limit. The money is deducted from their pay and the level of the fine is printed on payslips. Those who consume less than their ration are rewarded at the same rate per kilogram.

The maximum that an employee can earn or be fined has been capped at £100, but is likely to rise once staff have grown accustomed to the idea. (The Times)

A ROAD tax on cyclists is being considered by Scottish Government civil servants.

The prospect of cyclists paying a charge, like motorists, to use roads comes in a document outlining the Scottish Government's vision for cycling.

The draft Cycling Action Plan for Scotland (CAPS), which has been released for public consultation, aims to ensure that, by 2020, 10 per cent of all journeys in Scotland are by bike.

But it also raises the question of cyclists making a financial contribution to roads maintenance. The document states: "Should all road users pay road tax? If so, how much should it be for cyclists and how could it be enforced?"

If introduced, cyclists might be forced to register cycles with their local authority and pay annual amounts, as motorists do with vehicle excise duty. (The Scotsman)

Do dead dinosaurs fuel our cars? The assumption that they do, along with other dead matter thought to have formed what are known as fossil fuels, has been an article of faith for centuries. Our geologists are taught fossil fuel theory in our schools; our energy companies search for fossil fuels by divining where the dinosaurs lay down and died. Sooner or later, we will run out of liquefied dinosaurs and be forced to turn to either nuclear or renewable fuels, virtually everyone believes.

Except in Russia and Ukraine. What is to us a matter of scientific certainty is by no means accepted there. Many Russians and Ukrainians — no slouches in the hard sciences — have since the 1950s held that oil does not come exclusively, or even partly, from dinosaurs but is formed below the Earth’s 25-mile deep crust. This theory — first espoused in 1877 by Dmitri Mendeleev, who also developed the periodic table — was rejected by geologists of the day because he postulated that the Earth’s crust had deep faults, an idea then considered absurd. Mendeleev wouldn’t be vindicated by his countrymen until after the Second World War when the then-Soviet Union, shut out of the Middle East and with scant petroleum reserves of its own, embarked on a crash program to develop a petroleum industry that would allow it to fend off the military and economic challenges posed by the West.

Today, Russians laugh at our peak oil theories as they explore, and find, the bounty in the bowels of the Earth. Russia’s reserves have been climbing steadily — according to BP’s annual survey, they stood at 45 billion barrels in 2001, 69 billion barrels in 2004, and 80 billion barrels of late, making Russia an oil superpower that this year produced more oil than Saudi Arabia. Some oil auditing firms estimate Russia’s reserves at up to 200 billion barrels. Despite Russia’s success in exploration, most of those in the west who have known about the Russian-Ukrainian theories have dismissed them as beyond the Pale. This week, the Russian Pale can be found awfully close to home. (Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post)

Alberta's oilsands produce more greenhouse gas emissions than some European countries right now and will produce more than all of the world's volcanoes in just 11 years if the pace of development continues, says a new report.

"Dirty - How the tar sands are fuelling global climate change" is set to be released Monday.

Greenpeace commissioned author Andrew Nikiforuk, a business and environmental reporter, to write the report.

"Nobody in Canada wants to talk about the scale issues," he said in an interview Saturday.

"The emissions are bigger than Estonia and Lithuania right now and in 2020 will be larger than countries like Belgium, Austria, Ireland and Denmark."

The report documents the "real" cost of the oilsands, which Nikiforuk says is the world's largest energy project.

"The major energy projects in the Middle East ... they don't come anywhere near - none of them approach the scale and capital intensity of the oilsands."

The report says almost $200 billion has been or will be invested in the projects in northern Alberta, and that includes not only the oilsands, but pipelines, refinery expansions and other associated infrastructure.

It adds that the liabilities are a nearly threefold increase in greenhouse gas emissions, enormous amounts of natural gas used and wasted to produce synthetic oil from bitumen - which consists of tarry pitch, or asphalt - and the "economic nightmare" of carbon capture and storage, a technology that has yet to be developed. (CP)

Canada's oilsands are poised to fill a growing need for energy in Asia and the world, but both industry and governments have failed to promote the fuel source, and its detractors have trashed it, said the head of Royal Dutch Shell.

Peter Voser, the company's new chief executive, said crude from Alberta's oilsands will take a more international role in energy markets as pipelines to the West Coast and Asia-Pacific markets are developed.

"China has strong growth and needs more energy," Voser told reporters at a business conference at the Spruce Meadows facility Friday.

"The oilsands are actually well placed to take advantage of that."

Voser also called for both industry and governments to be more active about promoting oilsands to the public, saying they haven't done enough to make the case for the unconventional oil. (Canwest News Service)

he fate of Statoil- Hydro's oilsands investments in Canada could hinge on the outcome of Norway's general election Monday.

The presence of Norway's state-owned oil producer in northeast Alberta has emerged as a contentious issue in the country's bitterly contested vote, which some are saying is too close to call.

The debate heated up on Aug. 30, when the country's main daily newspaper, Aftenposten, wrote that Statoil must share partial responsibility for Canada's inability to meet emissions reduction targets in accordance with the Kyoto protocol. In the absence of international mechanisms to hold Canada accountable, Statoil ought to withdraw from the Leismer pilot project scheduled to begin producing 20,000 barrels a day starting in 2010.

The editorial prompted StatoilHydro CEO Helge Lund to fire back with a sharply worded op-ed piece that was published in Aftenposten and posted on the company's website.

"Oilsand is a young industry which will be continually improved through technology development and increased know-how," he wrote. "We believe that we can play a positive role in Canada with our experience and drive for developing technology.

"The connection between population growth, higher standards of living, energy demand and climate change are challenging dilemmas in the debate and they form the energy realities on which StatoilHydro's involvement in Canada's oilsands is based." (Calgary Herald)

THE State Government is considering exporting millions of tonnes of high-polluting brown coal to developing nations under a plan championed by Energy Minister Peter Batchelor in a recent cabinet meeting.

As hundreds of people gather today in the Latrobe Valley to protest against Hazelwood, the state's dirtiest brown coal power station, a new environmental battle is likely against the Brumby Government over use of the state's massive coal reserves. (The Age)

Schwarzenegger to veto renewable energy bills - Democratic legislation would set up too many regulatory hurdles in California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and some energy producers said Saturday.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office said Saturday that he would veto legislation requiring a third of California's energy to come from renewable sources by 2020, choosing instead to mandate the change through an executive order.

The Democratic bills that passed the state Legislature just before the end of the legislative session Friday would have set up the most aggressive renewable energy standards in the nation.

But they also sought to limit the amount of energy from sources such as wind, solar and geothermal that could come from out-of-state. Schwarzenegger and some energy producers said the legislation would set up too many regulatory hurdles.

"The poorly drafted, overly complex bills passed by the Legislature are protectionist schemes that will kill the solar industry in California and drive prices up like the failed energy deregulation of the late 1990s," Schwarzenegger's communications director, Matt David, said in a statement Saturday. (CoP15)

limitless supplies of greyness just waiting to be tapped

The rest of the world may be moving towards greater use of solar power or wind power, but renewable energy generation that taps into specific local atmospheric conditions in the UK has leapt forward with a Manchester project that uses drizzle to power street lights.

Technical advances in British solutions to the global energy crisis will be driven by the UK’s unique micro-climates, says Professor Tom Choularton of University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.

He explained: ‘Drizzle, which occurs nowhere else in such natural abundance, gives us three ways to generate power. First, it is a relentless source of downwardly vertical hydro energy to drive small turbines.

‘At the same time, the spent drizzle provides a penetrating chill for heat-exchange units. Finally, the small amount of electricity that remains in drizzle droplets from the positively-charged source clouds is farmed and channelled into AA batteries that are then sold at car boot sales.

‘In Manchester, we are fitting lamp-posts and dozens of other outdoor freestanding structures with the tiny but complex drizzle power units that will keep our streets illuminated, day and night.

‘We will soon have enough gloom power for all the city’s street lights, with enough to spare to sell to other European cities that have no natural gloom, like Barcelona and Rome.’

In a parallel project based in the city centre, sonic capture is being used to see if sound waves from traffic noise and the population’s constant whining and bragging can be converted into another source of energy.

A trial of the sound abstraction system at a derby match between City and United at Old Trafford had to be abandoned after an announcement that both Liverpool and Arsenal were winning away caused a sonic power surge that blew all the floodlights. (NewsBuscuit) h/t Benny Peiser, CCNet

NEW YORK - The plume of dust and smoke sent up by the World Trade Center collapse may not have been a substantial cause of respiratory symptoms among people living outside of lower Manhattan, a new study suggests.

The study, published in the September 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, found no clear association between respiratory symptoms and estimates of plume exposure among 1,800 people who were living outside of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - People who live close to a busy road are no more likely than those living further away from heavy traffic to experience declines in lung function over time, new research from the UK shows.

Dr. Andrea Venn of the University of Nottingham and her colleagues also found no evidence that living near traffic increased the likelihood of asthma; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), such as emphysema or chronic bronchitis; or allergic disease. (Reuters Health)

LONDON - Britain is "tantalisingly close" to fending off the H1N1 influenza pandemic, medical officials said on Thursday, as figures show infections continue on a downward trend. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Two girls given antiviral drugs in an effort to protect children at a summer camp from the new pandemic swine flu developed resistant virus, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) said this development supports its new recommendations that flu drugs not be given to prevent infection among people who are otherwise healthy.

Both girls recovered without becoming seriously ill, but the incident shows that it is easy for the new pandemic H1N1 virus to develop resistance to flu drugs, officials said.

"We are concerned about the appropriate use of antivirals," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat said in an interview. (Reuters)

SYDNEY - The first Australian case of swine flu resistant to Roche Holding AG's antiviral drug Tamiflu was confirmed by the Western Australia state government on Friday.

"The 38-year-old Perth man, who has a weakened immune system, initially responded to the drug but developed a resistant strain of the virus when his illness relapsed," the state's Department of Health said in a statement.

There have been 13 cases of Tamiflu-resistant infections around the world, the statement said.

A Roche executive said on Monday that isolated cases of Tamiflu-resistant H1N1 pandemic flu were to be expected, in line with what has been seen in clinical studies.

"There is no evidence that the virus has spread to other people. None of the patient's family or hospital staff caring for him have contracted the virus, and he has not been in contact with the wider community," said the state's Chief Health Officer Tarun Weeramanthri, adding that the case was a rare and isolated one.

The man remained in a critical condition in intensive care. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Viruses resistant to antiviral medications are a growing problem, according to a study in The Netherlands.

"After monitoring antiviral resistance patterns during three subsequent influenza seasons in the Netherlands, we described the unpredictable nature of the emergence of antiviral resistance patterns." Dr. Marcel Jonges told Reuters Health, referring to his team's report in the September issue of Antiviral Research.

"This means," he continued, "that effective treatment or prophylaxis of influenza is becoming more and more complicated, since hospitals and nursing homes cannot base appropriate antiviral therapy on national influenza surveillance drug susceptibility data." (Reuters Health)

That's the title of my latest HND piece. Based on the indie movie the Beautiful Truth (2008), this long ago discredited "therapy" got a new lease on life.

Helmer Steve Kroschel exploited his young son to research Gerson's work, and that all by itself would have made a pretty boring movie, so he added a host of junk science perennials, including a jaw-droppingly stupid demonstration showing water vapor coming off teeth, that he misidentifies as mercury.

Also included are attacks on the evil pharmaceutical and ag industries.

Only two skeptics are shown on camera, and that takes up perhaps 30 seconds of screen time.

Missing from the film is anything about naturopathic doctor Steve Austin's takedown of the whole thing. Austin really did want to believe, but the facts got in the way.

Other sources claim that when asked to produce a SINGLE case whereby a Gerson patient was cured, who was not first the subject of conventional therapy, the clinic was unable to product anything. This doesn't stop them from charging a young fortune for their treatment, however.

More background here. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama addressed the elephant in the room -- a government-run health insurance option -- by playing down its importance in a big speech to Congress on Wednesday, but not everyone was buying it.

The so-called public option is at the heart of the debate on Capitol Hill.

Republicans and some moderate Democrats say they cannot vote for legislation that includes it for fear it will lead to a government takeover of healthcare, while liberal Democrats say they cannot envision a healthcare overhaul without it in order to compete with private insurers. (Reuters)

Translation: I, Barack Obama, ignoring thousands of years of failed price-control schemes, will impose price controls on health insurance. I will force insurers to sell a $50k policies for $10k. What could go wrong?

True. And your employer mandate would kill hundreds of thousands of low-wage jobs that would never come back.

Translation: I will never let seniors control their own health care dollars. I will never give up Washington’s control over your health care decisions. Mmmmuuuuhahahahahaha!

Translation: There are too many lobbyists counting on me to succeed: drug-industry lobbyists, health-insurance lobbyists, physician-cartel lobbyists, large-employer lobbyists, hospital lobbyists….

Translation: I’m going to tax the hell out of you, but I don’t want you to notice how much I’m going to tax you. So I’m going to tax employers and insurance companies, and they’re going to pass the taxes on to you. Most of the taxes won’t even show up in the government’s budget. It’s all very clever. No, seriously – just ask my economic advisor Larry Summers.

Translation: I may have savaged your ideas in the past, called them irresponsible…risky…dangerous…whatever. But that wasn’t about principle; I just wanted to become president. Now that I’m president, I need a win. So you’ll help me, won’t you? Hey, where’s Hillary? (Michael F. Cannon, Cato at liberty)

Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia offers a colorful visual in her take on President Obama’s health care speech: (Michael F. Cannon, Cato at liberty)

Michael D. Tanner: Can’t see this as a game-changer. I would give him an ‘A’ on delivery, but at best a ‘C’ on substance. There were surprisingly few details and very little new.

Patrick Basham: Strikingly political/partisan rather than statesmanlike speech. Obama chose to pressure Republicans to support his plan rather than attempt to persuade them to do so. He risks a another wave of (effective) opposition from conservative talk radio & cable TV.

Michael F. Cannon: Translation: My health plan cannot work if you are free to make your own decisions. (Chris Moody, Cato at liberty)

Michael Tanner and Michael Cannon have been doing an excellent job exposing the fallacies and misconceptions of Obama’s proposal to further expand government intervention in the health-care sector. One of their challenges is explaining to people that many of the problems that currently exist are the fault of government. (Daniel J. Mitchell, Cato at liberty)

CHICAGO - The U.S. is under the gun to find sufficient supplies of medical isotopes used in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients with potentially lethal medical conditions. That's because a global shortage of medical isotopes used in scores of medical imaging tests has forced some doctors to delay patient care or shift to more costly medical tests, experts told U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday.

A medical isotope is a very small quantity of radioactive material used to perform nuclear medicine imaging tests. (Reuters)

The chemical loons are out: My Toxic Baby – Min Sook Lee Interview (2009 Toronto International Film Festival)

My Toxic Baby - Song JiMy Toxic Baby is a new documentary film by Min Sook Lee. One mother’s search for safe, sane and affordable ways to raise her child (Song Ji) in a toxic world. The film is having its world premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept 11th. (kempton)

NEW YORK - When the clock "springs forward" an hour for Daylight Saving Time, on-the-job injuries may follow, according to a new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

"On that day when you lose an hour of clock time, people lose about 40 minutes of sleep," said Dr. Christopher M. Barnes, who conducted the research with Dr. David T. Wagner while both were PhD students at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "That lost sleep seems to increase their risk for injury."

Daylight Saving Time-now observed by 74 countries around the world-could have an effect on worker safety, Barnes and Wagner note in their report, given the potential for lost sleep. But evidence on its effects on accidents in general, they add, has been mixed.

To get a better sense of how these changes might influence the risk of injury on the job, they looked at data from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for mining injuries from 1983 to 2006.

On Mondays after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, they found, there were an average of 3.6 more injuries compared to other days, a 5.7% increase. Injuries on these days led to 2,649 more days of work lost per year, compared to injuries that didn't happen after the time shift, representing an approximately 68% increase. But switching back from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time and gaining an hour didn't affect injury frequency or severity. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - How could something that feels so good - a long night's sleep - have negative consequences? Unfortunately, that is one possibility that results of a new study suggest: Older adults who sleep nine or more hours each day may have a higher risk of developing dementia than those who spend fewer hours in bed. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Meat eaters might happily chew on the findings of a new study out of Japan hinting that eating meat at least every two days during middle age may help maintain independent daily activities when older. (Reuters Health)

FRIDAY, Sept. 11 -- A diverse alliance of payer, provider and consumer organizations, girded by two former U.S. Surgeons General, on Wednesday urged policymakers to address the nation's obesity epidemic as part of federal health care reform legislation.

"At this critical juncture where we're dealing with health-care transformation, we want to make sure that the federal government and our elected leaders recognize the importance of including approaches to obesity that are evidence-based and proven within their legislative strategy," former Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona told reporters during a media briefing.

Carmona serves as the health and wellness chairperson of the Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance, whose steering committee includes the American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, among other public and private organizations.

The alliance is funded by drug makers Sanofi-Aventis U.S. L.L.C. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals. (HealthDay News)

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. (Michael Pollan, NYT)

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana court has ruled that a pizza shop must pay for a 340-pound employee's weight-loss surgery to ensure the success of another operation for a back injury he suffered at work — raising concern among businesses bracing for more such claims.

The Indiana Court of Appeals decision, coupled with a recent Oregon court ruling, could make employers think twice before hiring workers with health conditions that might cost their companies thousands of dollars at a shot down the road.

"This kind of situation will happen again ... and employers are undoubtedly worried about that," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J., an offshoot of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Boston's The Gourmet Pizza must pay for lap-band surgery for Adam Childers, a cook at the store in Schererville, under last month's Indiana ruling that upheld a 4-3 decision by the state's workers' compensation board. (Associated Press)

Children with self-esteem problems are more likely to be obese as adults, a research team has found.

A study of 6,500 participants in the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study found that 10-year-olds with lower self esteem tended to be fatter as adults.

The affect was particularly true for girls, researchers from King's College London reported.

One obesity expert said the results highlighted that early intervention was key to tackling obesity. (BBC)

The risk of becoming obese is 2.5 times higher for those who have double copies of the best known risk gene for overweight and obesity. However, this is only true if the fat consumption is high. A low fat diet neutralizes the harmful effects of the gene.

“This means that the critical factor is what you eat. At least in the case of the FTO gene, the most important obesity gene identified so far,” says Emily Sonestedt, member of Marju Orho-Melanders research group at Lund University Diabetes Centre.

She is the main author of a study that is currently being published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Several studies have found that exercise diminishes the effect of the risk gene but this is the first study where the effect of the gene has been studied in relation to food habits. The risk variant of the FTO gene (fat mass and obesity associated) is common in the general population. 17 percent have double copies, meaning they have inherited it from both parents. Another 40 percent have a single copy.

“It is difficult to calculate how much people eat with any certainty, which is one of the reasons why no one has done this before. But we have good data” says Emily Sonestedt. (ScienceDaily)

Despite receiving a MacArthur genius award for her work in Alabama "forging an inspiring model of compassionate and effective medical care in one of the most underserved regions of the United States," Regina Benjamin's qualifications to be surgeon general have been questioned. Why? She is overweight. "It tends to undermine her credibility," Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, said in an interview with ABC News. "I do think at a time when a lot of public-health concern is about the national epidemic of obesity, having a surgeon general who is noticeably overweight raises questions in people's minds."

It is not enough, it seems, that the obese must suffer the medical consequences of their weight, consequences that include diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and that cause nearly 300,000 deaths in the United States each year. They must also suffer the opprobrium heaped on them by people like Angell or Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who advised the obese to "Look in the mirror because you are the one to blame." In our society, perhaps no group is more stigmatized than the obese. (Jeffrey Friedman, Newsweek)

NEW YORK - Medical editors are growing increasingly frustrated with top researchers who sign their names to manuscripts but fail to disclose the contributions of ghostwriters paid for by pharmaceutical companies. In an effort to crack down on the practice -- widely viewed as unethical -- one tech-savvy editor has been turning to data forensics worthy of a crime investigation drama.

The presence of such authors is not uncommon. A survey presented this week at the Sixth International Congress of Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver found that 12 percent of research articles in top medical journal studies failed to disclose authors who contributed substantially to the work. Those additional authors sometimes have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, and critics say the resulting papers often interpret data about those companies' drugs more favorably.

Frederic Curtiss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy, told Reuters Health that data attached to documents by Word has allowed him to discover undisclosed contributors. In one case, for instance, a revised manuscript arrived at his office with four named authors, but when he examined the metadata, he discovered an additional author was making substantial contributions.

When documents are saved in Word, the software attaches additional information, called metadata, which identifies the creator of the document. During the editing process, changes made by additional authors are also sometimes labeled with authors' names. Curtiss estimates that every third manuscript he receives has metadata that doesn't match listed authors, which can subsequently result in contributors being added to the acknowledgments, or, rarely, as additional authors. (Reuters Health)

TOKYO - More than 40,000 Japanese people are aged 100 or over, up 10 percent over last year, a government survey showed on Friday. The report is the latest reminder of the economic problems facing the world's most rapidly aging country. (Reuters)

LONDON - Childhood deaths have declined across the world, according to data released on Thursday, but mortality is increasingly concentrated in poor countries.

A study by the United Nation's children's fund (UNICEF) showed that thanks to better prevention methods for malaria and action to reduce mother-to-child AIDS virus transmission, some 8.8 million children under five died in 2008 compared with 12.5 million in 1990.

But 99 percent of child deaths occurred in poor countries. (Reuters)

LONDON - In Africa, children with sickle cell anemia develop bacteremia -bacterial infection of the blood - at rates up to 30 times higher than in children without sickle cell anemia.

However, actions as simple as vaccinating against the bacteria that cause bacteremia using vaccines readily available in developed countries could save the lives of thousands of children with sickle-cell anemia in Africa, researchers said on Thursday.

Sickle-cell anemia affects millions of people worldwide, but more than 80 percent of cases are in Africa, where around 200,000 children are born with the disease every year. It is a genetic disease in which red blood cells deform into a sickle shape. These sickled cells cluster together, blocking blood flow and causing pain, vulnerability to infections and organ damage.

Tom Williams, an expert in tropical diseases from the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), said 90 percent of children born with sickle-cell anemia in Africa die before they are diagnosed and can get treatment. Half of those lives could be saved if sufferers were protected from bacterial infections.

"The problem here in Africa is that there is hardly anyone doing any screening," Williams said. "So, as a result, most of the children in Africa who are born with sickle-cell anemia are dead before they are even diagnosed."

Experts estimate that sickle-cell anemia kills more children in Africa than HIV, Williams said. While HIV commands vast attention from the international community, sickle-cell anemia is "virtually invisible." (Reuters)

The answer to the eternal mystery of what makes up a Filet-O-Fish sandwich turns out to involve an ugly creature from the sunless depths of the Pacific, whose bounty, it seems, is not limitless.

The world’s insatiable appetite for fish, with its disastrous effects on populations of favorites like red snapper, monkfish and tuna, has driven commercial fleets to deeper waters in search of creatures unlikely to star on the Food Network.

One of the most popular is the hoki, or whiptail, a bug-eyed specimen found far down in the waters around New Zealand and transformed into a major export. McDonald’s alone at one time used roughly 15 million pounds of it each year.

The hoki may be exceedingly unattractive, but when its flesh reaches the consumer it’s just fish — cut into filets and sticks or rolled into sushi — moist, slightly sweet and very tasty. Better yet, the hoki fishery was thought to be sustainable, providing New Zealand with a reliable major export for years to come.

But arguments over managing this resource are flaring not only between commercial interests and conservationists, but also among the environmental agencies most directly involved in monitoring and regulating the catch. (NYT)

With CoP15 looming there is currently a huge push to "do something". Not just a little something either but something really drastic about whatever is the current scary nom du jour for enhanced greenhouse warming. Let's just stop and think for a moment...

There seems to be fairly general agreement that the world has warmed about 0.7 °C over the last 250 years or so (since the Industrial Revolution and the end of the Little Ice Age). That hasn't been a smooth warming but occurred in a series of about 30 year phases with similar "rest periods" of no warming or slight cooling in between.

More controversially there are suppositions this is indicative of looming catastrophic warming. In the past there have been claims Earth had been consistently cooling for a couple of thousand years prior to this small warming (the briefly popular "hockey stick" hypothesis) but investigation has shown this to be nonsense.

In the two decades since the U.S. held its theatrically staged Senate Hearings in the hottest part of the year and with the air conditioning sabotaged there has been one decade of warming temperatures and then one without any warming.

Solar scientists and other sun watchers suggest we are in for a period of low solar activity and another decade or two without warming, if not cooling.

There hasn't been any warming for a decade. We aren't expecting any for at least another decade.

Why should we allow ourselves to be stampeded into panicked decisions while the world stubbornly refuses to heat catastrophically?

The figures below are courtesy of Phillip Gentry of the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Note that in August, the ENSO effect on lower tropospheric temperatures is still weak. There are large cool anomaly regions in the southern hemisphere which are quite prominent, as is the warm regional anomaly in northern North America and adjacent Arctic Ocean. The regional character of the warm and cold regions are quite evident also. Such regional variations is one of the reasons that seeking to define the climate system and its variability and change over time using a global average surface temperature is so flawed (e.g. see also).

For Additional Information: Dr. John Christy, UAH, (256) 961-7763 [john.christy@nsstc.uah.edu] and Dr. Roy Spencer, UAH, (256) 961-7960
[roy.spencer@nsstc.uah.edu]

The claims of unprecedented (but which is not consistent with other sources of climate data) Arctic warming which I reported on last Friday (see) has prompted today’s post. We have published several papers on the areal extent of the coldest temperatures at 5oo hPa within each year over a multi-decadal time period. We also proposed a physical mechanism (i.e. the transit of air masses over open ocean in which cumulus convection resulted in a constraint onthe coldest temperatures to not much colder than -40C). These papers include

Ben Herman at The University of Arizona (UA) has introduced a routine update for this climate metric (the temperatures at 500 h Pa with the coldest values highlighted) on the website of the UA Department of Atmospheric Sciences. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere information is accessible from

The use of this climate metric permits the real time tracking of the rate at which the higher latitudes cool off each Fall, warm up in the Spring, as well as the maximum areal extent achieved each year. (Climate Science)

David R. Easterling, Briony Horton, Philip D. Jones, Thomas C. Peterson, Thomas R. Karl, David E. Parker, M. James Salinger, Vyacheslav Razuvayev, Neil Plummer, Paul Jamason, Christopher K. Folland, 1997: Maximum and Minimum Temperature Trends for the Globe. Science Volume 277 18 July1997.

“Analysis of the global mean surface air temperature has shown that its increase is due, at least in part, to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range (DTR). The analysis, using station metadata and improved areal coverage for much of the Southern Hemisphere landmass, indicates that the DTR is continuing to decrease in most parts of the world, that urban effects on globally and hemispherically averaged time series are negligible, and that circulation variations in parts of the Northern Hemisphere appear to be related to the DTR. Atmospheric aerosol loading in the Southern Hemisphere is much less than that in the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting that there are likely a number of factors, such as increases in cloudiness, contributing to the decreases in DTR.”

In their paper, they present a figure (their Figure 1) of long term trends over land for maximum and minimum temperatures. The figure caption for the figure reads

“Time series of annual average maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and DTR for (A) the globe, using all available stations, (B) the globe, using only nonurban stations, (C) Chile and Argentina, using only nonurban stations, and (D) Southeast Asia, using only nonurban stations. The heavy line is the result of smoothing with a nine-point binomial filter with reflected ends. Trends (slopes) for the maximum temperatures in (C) and (D) are not statistically significant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed t test).”

For the time period 1949 to 1993 for the global using all available stations, they show a slope of 0.88C per hundred years for the maximum temperature, but over double that of 1.86C per hundred years for the minimum temperatures. This warming is seen in each of their plots in their Figure 1. In fact, for (D), Southeast Asia, while they report a cooling of -0.43C per hundred years for the maximum temperatures (although not statistically significant), they still report a statistically significant linear slope of +2.16C per hundred years for the minimum temperatures.

The presence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record associated with the minimum temperatures (a bias when used to diagnose temperature trends through the lower troposphere) that we reported on in our paper Klotzbach et al 2009 is provided further evidence on its robustness from the Easterling et al 1997 paper. (Climate Science)

For decades, the supporters of CO₂ driven global warming have discounted changes in solar irradiance as far too small to cause significant climate change. Though the Sun's output varies by less than a tenth of a percent in magnitude during its 11-year sunspot cycle, that small variation produces changes in sea surface temperatures two or three times as large as it should. A new study in Science demonstrates how two previously known mechanisms acting together amplify the Sun's impact in an unsuspected way. Not surprisingly, the new discovery is getting a cool reception from the CO₂ climate change clique.

Scientists have long suspected that changes in solar output may have triggered the Little Ice Age that gripped Europe several centuries ago, as well as droughts that brought down Chinese dynasties. Now, in a report in the August 28 issue of the journal Science entitled “Amplifying the Pacific Climate System Response to a Small 11-Year Solar Cycle Forcing,” Gerald A. Meehl et al. have demonstrated a possible mechanism that could explain how seemingly small changes in solar output can have a big impact on Earth's climate. The researchers claim that two different parts of the atmosphere act in concert to amplify the effects of even minuscule solar fluctuations.

Global sea surface temperature (SST) has been observed to vary by about 0.1°C over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. This should require a change in solar irradiance by more than 0.5 W m^–2, but the globally averaged amplitude change from solar maximum to solar minimum is only about 0.2 W m^–2. There has long been a question regarding how this small solar signal could be amplified to produce a measurable response. In fact, the lack of a plausible mechanism has been used to discount the Sun's effect on climate by those who support carbon dioxide as the primary driver of global warming. That line of argument may no longer be persuasive. As the report's authors state in the paper's abstract:

The two mechanisms mentioned have been modeled individually in the past, and neither alone proved sufficient. Prior to this new report both mechanisms had not been included in the same model. Some models operate from the top down, beginning with the small changes in the sun's ultraviolet radiation that occur during the solar cycle. The enhanced UV radiation, which promotes stratospheric ozone production and UV absorption, warm that layer of the atmosphere differently at different latitudes. The temperature gradients this creates provide a positive feedback amplifying the original solar forcing while affecting the climate in the lower atmosphere.

Other models work from the bottom up, using a mechanism that centers around the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Solar energy added during the peak of a solar cycle causes more water to evaporate from the ocean's surface. Through a long chain of changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation, this results in fewer clouds forming in the subtropics. Fewer clouds mean more solar energy reaches the ocean, resulting in a positive feedback loop that amplifies the Sun's climate impact.

The problem to date has been that neither mechanism had a large enough impact to account for observed temperature changes. Suspecting that the two might reinforce each other if modeled together, Meehl et al. decided to modify some existing climate models: “Here we use several related climate model versions wherein we can include both mechanisms separately (an atmospheric model with no stratospheric dynamics or chemistry coupled to ocean, land, and sea ice; an atmospheric model with stratospheric dynamics and ozone chemistry driven by specified SSTs and sea ice) and then combine them (the atmospheric model with stratospheric dynamics and ozone chemistry coupled to the ocean, land, and sea ice) to test if they can, indeed, amplify the climate system response to solar forcing to produce responses of the magnitude seen in the observations.”

Two existing models were chosen, one each for the two distinct mechanisms identified above. These were a global coupled climate model,the Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3), and a version of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM). The first model, CCSM3, has coupled components of atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice. It does not have a resolved stratosphere and no interactive ozone chemistry, so the CCSM3 includes only the bottom-up coupled air-sea mechanism. The second model, WACCM, is a global atmospheric model run with climatological SSTs and changes in solar variability with other external forcings are held constant. It has no dynamically coupled air-sea interaction, but does include a resolved stratosphere and fully interactive ozone chemistry that can respond to the UV part of the solar forcing. Given this configuration it should include the top-down UV stratospheric ozone mechanism.

After confirming that neither model on its own faithfully reproduced the observed changes in temperature over a solar cycle—both predicted changes about a third the size of those observed—a new model was constructed using the atmospheric component from WACCM coupled to the dynamical ocean, land, and sea ice modules in CCSM3. This hybrid model produced negative SST anomalies in the equatorial eastern Pacific of greater than –0.6°C, much closer to the observed values of –0.8°C. In the researchers' words: “Thus, these models indicate that each mechanism acting alone can produce a weak signature of the observed enhancement of the tropical precipitation maxima, but when both act in concert, the two mechanisms work together to produce climate anomalies much closer to the observed values, thus amplifying the relatively small solar forcing to produce significant SST and precipitation anomalies in the tropical Indo-Pacific region.” Results for both SST and precipitation can be seen in the figure above, taken from the report.

Instead of being off by a factor of three as the conventional models were, their new model was within 25% of the actual observed SST variation, a huge improvement indicating that the combination of mechanisms is much more than the sum of their individual effects (see the plot below). This combination of effects enhances precipitation maxima, reduces low-latitude cloud cover, and lowers the temperature of surface waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean, resulting in the larger warm-to-cold variation. “This highlights the importance of stratospheric processes working in conjunction with coupled processes at the surface,” they concluded.

While this result is from modeling, not empirical evidence, it is an important one. As I have often said on this blog, modeling is what you do when your intuition fails you and you need new insights. This combination of mechanisms, building a new hybrid model that simulates conditions not captured by previous models, is a great example of how models should be used. Note that this new model still did not reproduce the observed data, but it did get much closer to reality—an indication that the coupled atmospheric mechanism approach could be on the right track. “The atmosphere and oceans are a big coupled system,” says Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London, who developed the top-down mechanism, “but it's incredibly complicated.” Of course more physical observations will be necessary to lend credence to this hypothesis, but finding evidence is much easier once the cause is know (or at least suspected).

Why then, should this report be getting the cold shoulder from the climate change community? Writing in the same issue of Science, Richard A. Kerr reported, “like much work in the long-controversial field of sun-climate relations, the new modeling is getting a cool reception.” This is because of what the existence of a coupled atmospheric solar amplifier could mean to climate change theory overall. Though Meehl et al. include the obligatory “this response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming” statement at the end of their report, what remains unsaid is that if this effect is present for decadal solar variations it would also be present for longer term changes in the Sun's output.

As I have previously reported, scientific evidence from NASA points to changes in the type of solar radiation arriving at the top of Earth's atmosphere as a possible trigger for other powerful climate regulating mechanisms. Scientists have discovered, that while total solar irradiance changes by only 0.1 percent, the change in the intensity of ultraviolet light varies by much larger amounts. According to Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., its possible that long-term patterns—operating over hundreds or thousands of years—could cause even more pronounced swings in solar irradiance (see “Scientists Discover The Sun Does Affect Earth's Climate”). The discovery of the solar heat amplifying effect provides the causal link between historical changes in solar activity and climate change.

Previously, the direct impact of increased irradiance on global avarage temperature has been estimated at around 0.25°C last century—a three fold amplifying effect would raise that to 0.75°C. This leaves practically no warming effect for CO₂ to account for and renders the whole anthropogenic global warming argument moot. In other words, if the atmospheric solar amplifier theory is correct anthropogenic global warming is wrong, a useless theory describing a nonexistent phenomenon. It seems like poetic justice that a modeling experiment may point the way to discrediting global warming once and for all.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

Henrik Svensmark on the coming global cooling: “enjoy global warming while it lasts” (this is a Google translation from Danish, so the English is a little crazy)

Everybody talks about CO2 and other greenhouse gases as causes of global warming and the large climate changes we are currently experiencing. But what about the atmospheric and oceanic oxygen content? Which role does oxygen content play in global warming? This question has become extremely relevant now that Professor Robert Frei from the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with colleagues from Uruguay, England and the University of Southern Denmark, has established that there is a historical correlation between oxygen and temperature fluctuations towards global cooling.

The team of researchers reached their conclusions via analyses of iron-rich stones, so called banded iron formations, from different locations around the globe and covering a time span of more than 3,000 million years. Their discovery was made possible by a new analytical method which the research team developed. This method is based on analysis of chrome isotopes – different chemical variants of the element chrome. It turned out that the chrome isotopes in the iron rich stones reflect the oxygen content of the atmosphere. The method is a unique tool, which makes it possible to examine historical changes in the atmospheric oxygen content and thereby possible climate changes.

"But we can simply conclude that high oxygen content in seawater enables a lot of life in the oceans "consuming" the greenhouse gas CO2, and which subsequently leads to a cooling of the earth's surface. Throughout history our climate has been dependent on balance between CO2 and atmospheric oxygen. The more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the warmer the climate has been. But we still don't know much about the process which drives the earth from a period with a warmer climate towards an "ice age" with colder temperatures – other than that oxygen content plays an important role. It would therefore be interesting to consider atmospheric and oceanic oxygen contents much more in research aiming at understanding and tackling the causes of the current climate change," says Professor Robert Frei. (eScienceNews)

Abstract: There has been a lot of discussion about global warming. Some say anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused the earth to warm. Others say there is no abnormality at all, that it is just natural warming. As you will see from the data presented and analyzed, a greater than normal warming did occur in recent times but no measurements confirm an increase in CO2 emissions, whether anthropogenic or natural, had any effect on global temperatures. There is however, strong evidence that anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the major cause of the near recent abnormal warming. (Bob Ashworth, Energy Pulse)

This Capital Weather Gang blog entry is written with considerable trepidation given the politically-charged atmosphere surrounding human-induced global warming.

I am a meteorologist with a life-long weather fascination. As I'm sure you know, meteorology is an inexact science due to the large number of variables involved in predicting and understanding the weather. I frequently say that weather forecasting is a humbling endeavor, and I have learned to respect its challenges. From this perspective, you might be able to better understand why I wince when hearing pronouncements such as "the science is settled", "the debate is over", or even the "the temperature in the 2050s is projected to be..." I realize that forecasting climate and weather are different, but both involve a large number of moving parts. (Matt Rogers, Washington Post)

No heat buildup in the oceans = no global warming:

SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for August 2009 announces the publication of a major paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of the Physics Department in the University of Rochester, New York, demonstrating that the heat buildup in the oceans that is a necessary fingerprint of manmade global warming is not occurring. This is another mortal blow to the alarmist cause in the climate debate. Report, page 4.

“Science should be done by observation, meditation, calculation, and verification. Politicized science cannot usefully inform political decisions.” Editorial comment: Page 3.

The IPCC assumes CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but, for almost eight years, CO2 concentration has headed straight for only 570 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves all of the IPCC’s temperature projections. Pages 5-6.

Since 1980 temperature has risen at only 2.3 °F (1.4 °C)/century, not the 7 F° (3.9 C°) the IPCC predicts. Pages 7-9.

Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century, and has scarcely risen since 2006. The oceans are not warming. Pages 10-11.

Arctic sea-ice extent is currently at its summer low, but there is more summer ice than there was in 2007 or 2008. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years. Pages 12-15.

Hurricane and tropical-cyclone activity is almost at its lowest since satellite measurement began. Pages 16-17.

The Sun is still very quiet. There were no sunspots in August at all. Page 18.

The (very few) benefits and the (very large) costs of the Waxman/Markey Bill are illustrated at Pages 19-21.

Science Focus this month reprints a paper giving the reasons why the great ice sheets will not collapse. Pages 22-28.

As always, there’s our “global warming” ready reckoner, and our monthly selection of scientific papers. Pages 29-34.

And finally, a Technical Note explains how we compile our state-of-the-art CO2 and temperature graphs. Page 35. (Christopher Monckton, SPPI)

Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.

The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years - defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It's "bad timing", admits the magazine's environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It's the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year - causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.

"We have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it," Latif told the magazine. (Andrew Orlowski, The Register)

There isn't so much a shift in severe storm weather activity in Ontario due to global warming, but rather a greater public awareness about the storm activity, an Environment Canada meteorologist told a group attending a presentation on Ontario's Aug. 20, 2009 tornadoes.

The presentation was organized by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) and hosted in Swiss Re's Toronto office.

Geoff Coulson, warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada, was asked if he saw an increase in storm frequency attributable to global warming. "Not that I've seen," he replied.

"I haven't necessarily seen any trends to say there are more. But I think what we are partially dealing with is more awareness. We've spent the last quarter-century telling people about these storms, what causes them, how to react to them.

"And quite frankly in Ontario we've seen the population explode in the last 25 years. There are people sticking cottages in places that never used to have cottages, and they are finding out those big trees on the lake that were so great for shade aren't so good when they land on your cottage [during a storm]." (Canadian Underwriter)

CHICAGO — Polar bear cubs, the arctic fox and caribou herds are among the victims of dramatic changes in the Arctic due to climate change, a study published Thursday found.

"Species on land and at sea are suffering adverse consequences of human behavior at latitudes thousands of miles away," said lead author and biologist Eric Post of Penn State University.

"It seems no matter where you look -- on the ground, in the air, or in the water -- we're seeing signs of rapid change."

The study published in the journal Science reviewed recent ecosystem-wide studies of the biological responses to Arctic warming.

They found the effects of a one-degree Celsius warming over the past 150 years were dramatic and cautioned that it is difficult to predict the consequences of an expected six-degree warming over the next century.

"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," Post said. (AFP)

Young repeat offenders can evade the twin perils of alcopops and chlamydia by building accurate scale models of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Glum retirees awaiting the ferryman can find consolation in making matchstick models of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Even hardened fund managers have been redeemed by making novelty animals from inflated balloons.
Leading healthcare professionals and criminologists agree : modelling makes model citizens.

But from this consensus the fallacy has arisen that modelling, at best a useful form of occupational therapy, is in fact a legitimate profession. Our brightest graduates are encouraged to pursue careers in modelling, and taxpayers now find themselves in thrall to the most overqualified hobbyists in history. These magicians can, with a few keystrokes, construct models that accurately map the full catastrophe of global warming. Or, when prompted, they can depict in chilling detail the progress of the coming Ice Age.

One might think that such esoteric handiwork should be best confined to chic inner-city galleries, along with found objects and raffia-work installations. Unfortunately computer models have been embraced by government, who has too often shown itself pathetically willing to believe such amusing projections as, for example, the conceit that economic rationalism is the key to universal wealth.

Government might care to remember that computer modelling is not the
real thing. Real modelling is a tough, hands-on activity involving
the inhaling of dangerous quantities of hobby glue and the careful handling of stanley knives. Computer modelling requires no assembly skills beyond keying in numbers and programming them to make pretty patterns, an activity no more taxing than String Art, or painting a Mondrian by numbers.

Looking back over the last two decades, it seems no accident that the rise of computer modelling coincided with the rise of de-instutionalisation. To forestall further disaster, it is critical that all computer modellers be released into the care of closely- monitored facilities, there to practise skills appropriate to their abilities. Basket weaving, for one. (Andrew Dyson, SMH)

Researchers at the University of California-Davis are set to rebut a 2006 United Nations study that asserted that livestock operations are responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gases.

In a journal article due out Oct. 1, the research will demonstrate that American beef and dairy production accounts for a much lower percentage of the gases believed to cause global warming.

The study, titled "Clearing the Air: Livestock's Contribution to Climate Change," makes use of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that agriculture as a whole emits only 5.8 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases, said Frank Mitloehner, a livestock air quality specialist who worked on the project.

In California, where about 20 percent of U.S. cows reside and produce some 280 million pounds of manure a day, state officials say only 5.4 percent of greenhouse gases come from agriculture, Mitloehner said.

Researchers have also found that livestock accounts for a far lower level of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which combine with oxides of nitrogen to create smog, than had been previously thought. (Capital Press)

Australia has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter per capita, a study shows. China leads as the world’s biggest overall polluter.

Australians have overtaken Americans as the world's number one individual producers of carbon dioxide, British risk consultancy Maplecroft says. (CoP15)

World leaders need to revive bogged-down climate talks at a one-day summit on September 22, unless they want to risk failure in Copenhagen, UNEP chief Achim Steiner warns. (CoP15)

WASHINGTON, Sept 11 - Despite a host of other urgent problems to tackle, President Barack Obama still inspires confidence from environmental and corporate leaders that he is committed to the fight against climate change.

"He has many mountains to climb, but I think he's demonstrated great leadership and great ability in dealing with multiple issues," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

Even as Obama and the U.S. Congress tackle legislation on healthcare reform and economic recovery, de Boer and other environmental observers said this administration is keeping its focus on climate change in advance of international meetings in Copenhagen in December.

There is less confidence that the United States will be able to cobble together a global deal at this meeting. (Reuters)

As President Obama delivered a possible make-or-break speech on health care last night, climate change activists said they were waiting patiently for a similar rhetorical moment.

For now, advocates said, there is broad acceptance about the president's decision to push their key issue to the back burner. But many argue that Obama needs to grant climate change equal attention on prime-time television in coming months. With international climate talks in Copenhagen in December and 2010 congressional elections looming, time for a major speech is running out, they said.

"I don't have a problem with him keeping the climate powder dry for now," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, which is pushing to strengthen global warming legislation that passed the House in June. "But, ultimately, it may take a big goosing from the White House to achieve some resolution in the Congress." (ClimateWire)

If you liked what Enron, AIG, and the Federal Reserve did to the economy, you’ll love cap and trade.

That’s the thrust of a new paper from Louisiana State University economist Joseph Mason. Cap-and-trade programs, like the one passed by the House and simmering in the Senate, pose a couple of big problems, he says: They don’t work, and they can gum up the rest of the economy. Like many economists, Dr. Mason pines for the elegance of a carbon tax to tackle climate change.

A cap-and-trade plan would work by capping the amount of greenhouse gases a country could emit, then letting companies trade the right to emit them. It’s a market-based solution to a big environmental problem.

However, the cap-and-trade programs in place (i.e., in Europe) have suffered from extreme volatility. The price of the pollution permits has ricocheted all over the place in a short period of time.

That, says Dr. Mason, is chum in the water to financial speculators who quickly learn how to game the system in their interests, something environmental groups have also warned about. And it pretty much defeats the purpose of environmental legislation in the first place: “With carbon permit prices fluctuating wildly, long-term signals regarding the carbon-reducing benefits of investing in clean-air technology are clouded at best and nonexistent at worst.” (WSJ)

US Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars urge the US Senate to agree on climate legislation to protect the nation’s safety and security.

US soldiers should not be sent on dangerous missions around the world that could have been prevented by climate legislation, a group of veterans known as “Operation Free” argues in a pledge to the US Senate to agree on climate legislation.

The group, representing 150 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, highlights the link between climate change and national security. The veterans met with senators this week to urge them to pass legislation that cuts carbon emissions, creates incentives for using clean energy, and promotes energy efficiency. (CoP15)

Public scepticism about climate change has increased over the past five years, as people have learned more about the issues, according to a survey released on Thursday at the British Science Festival in Guildford.

Researchers at Cardiff University asked 550 people in Hampshire and Norfolk a series of questions about global warming, which had first been asked in a similar survey five years ago.

Lorraine Whitmarsh, the project leader, said that “hardened sceptics” who doubt whether climate change is really happening remained steady at 20 per cent of the sample. But the number who agreed with the statement “claims that human activities are changing the climate are exaggerated” rose from 15 per cent to 29 per cent.

Overall, taking the answers to other questions into account, she concluded that scepticism “increased slightly” over the period.

But she added that advocates of climate action should not be too disheartened: “It is clear that the majority of the public accept that human activities have an impact on climate.”

International surveys, such as the Eurobarometer, show that the UK “is one of the most sceptical countries in Europe about climate change,” said Adam Corner, a Cardiff University colleague. “The US tends to be more sceptical still.”

The new study, which was funded by the Met Office’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, showed that Conservative voters are markedly more sceptical than Labour or Liberal voters.

On the whole climate scepticism declines with educational level – with the exception of the highest earners (those earning more than £75,000 a year) who express very high levels of doubt about man-made global warming.

Ms Whitmarsh said this might be because their comfortable lifestyles are contributing more to the problem, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, and they have more to lose when making sacrifices for the environment. (Clive Cookson, Financial Times

It is now or never. The world has to come together in order to reach global agreement on a climate deal. That was the message from five European foreign ministers meeting today in Copenhagen. (CoP15)

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s commissioner for the environment sought Thursday to tamp down expectations that wealthy nations would immediately hand over vast sums of money demanded by developing countries to manage global warming.

Such funds “cannot be a blank check,” the commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said at a news conference.

José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive body, said fast-emerging economies should be expected to do more to finance efforts to combat climate change.

“I am determined that Europe will continue to provide a lead, but developed and economically advanced developing countries must also make a contribution,” said Mr. Barroso, apparently hinting at greater efforts by countries like China.

Under the plan, E.U. member nations would pay €2 billion to €15 billion, or $22 million, annually by 2020 from their national budgets to help the developing world with clean and efficient energy and deal with droughts, disease and crop failures. (NYT)

Greenpeace and Oxfam International criticize the EU Commission for not being ready to pay Europe’s share of the climate bill.

It is not enough. EU has to pay more than 15 billion euro (22 billion US dollars) a year to developing countries to fight climate change and its consequences, Greenpeace and Oxfam International agreed in their comments on the EU Commission’s financing proposal, published yesterday.

"The EU is trying to get away with leaving a tip rather than paying its share of the bill to protect the planet's climate," Greenpeace campaigner Joris den Blanken said to Reuters. (CoP15)

Newly revised Treasury Department documents obtained by E&E show that the United States still has not determined how much money wealthy nations should raise to help developing countries cope with global warming, even as Europe has pledged to give up to $15 billion annually.

The paper, to be presented along with two others when G-20 leaders meet in Pittsburgh this month, calls for public financial flows "to be increased significantly beyond existing levels, starting in the near term with an expectation of continued and substantial growth in the future." But the 13-page report makes no attempt to pinpoint how much the money the world will need to raise.

Climate negotiations are getting down to the wire, with 16 negotiating days left before countries meet in Copenhagen to hammer out a new global emissions treaty. Developing nations have long considered funding to help them adapt to climate change and lower their own emissions trajectory critical to any international pact, and have voiced impatience with the lack of specificity in current talks.

But State Department envoy Todd Stern, speaking after a House hearing yesterday on the Copenhagen talks, said there is as yet no timeline for presenting dollar figures. (ClimateWire)

BRUSSELS--There is no alternative to a global agreement on fighting climate change, so the chances of securing a deal at a meeting in Copenhagen later this year are 100%, European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said Thursday.

"This is what common sense tells us. We need to have an agreement, there is no alternative," Dimas said during a press conference at which he presented a commission blueprint for financing the fight against climate change in developing countries.

The European Union wants to lead negotiations at the Copenhagen summit in December to reach an international agreement on limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial temperatures.

The deal would be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated more than a decade ago. (Dow Jones)

DALIAN - The world must devise a climate change treaty that will allow all countries to contribute to cutting emissions and not drive companies and jobs to other nations, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Thursday.

Negotiations on a new global accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are set to conclude in the Danish capital Copenhagen in December, but officials are struggling to come up with a division of responsibilities that will satisfy all sides.

The United States is committed to reducing its own carbon dioxide (CO2) output, but many legislators are worried that an emissions trading scheme will give a competitive edge to Chinese industries.

"There's a huge concern on the part of employers and labor unions in the United States that an agreement that distorts economic relations is going to have a damaging effect on the United States economy," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The challenge is to craft a way forward in Copenhagen, to craft an agreement which does not result in economic activity shifting from one country to another. That doesn't make sense at the end of the day," he said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Dalian. (Reuters)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is determined to go ahead with a controversial plan to tax carbon emissions by individuals and businesses in his bid to claim a leading role in global efforts to stem climate change. (CoP15)

China potentially could be a 500 billion to 1 trillion US dollar a year market for "green technologies," a group of businesses and experts says and urges governments to ease the way for such initiatives. (CoP15)

CAPE TOWN - South Africa, a major polluter due to its dependence on coal-fired electricity, will not agree to any emission-cutting targets if doing so hurts the country's economy, a cabinet spokesman said on Thursday.

International talks resume in December in Copenhagen where countries will try to thrash out a new international climate change regime beyond 2012 amid increased discord over the role developing countries can play in reducing harmful emissions.

South Africa, echoing a view widely held by developing countries, including China and India, said emission-cutting targets would hit its economy during a global economic downturn. (Reuters)

Scientists and engineers will soon be able to receive advanced training and certification in burying and permanently storing underground the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as part of a recent stimulus award from the Department of Energy. The DOE awarded nearly $1 million to the Seattle-based Environmental Outreach and Stewardship Alliance (EOS) to develop a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) curriculum that will be used to build a skilled workforce through regional training. (PhysOrg)

PLANS for a billion-dollar clean-coal power station in central Queensland have been given the green light.

The $1.25 billion proposed coal-fired Galilee power station, which will incorporate carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, will be based in the Galilee Basin.

Galilee Power is owned by Waratah Coal , which also announced Australia's largest thermal coal mine and infrastructure project, worth $7.5 billion, earlier this year.

Waratah Coal, which is owned by mining magnate Clive Palmer's private company, Mineralogy, announced today the state government declared its proposed power station a "significant project for which an environmental impact statement is required''.

Waratah Coal chief executive Peter Lynch said Galilee Power proposes to construct and operate a 900 megawatt coal-fired power station that incorporates CSS and has launched a pre-feasibility study into the project. (Australian Associated Press)

MINNEAPOLIS — The utility leading an effort to build a $1.6 billion coal-fired power plant in South Dakota pulled out of the project Friday, citing the economic downturn and uncertainty about climate change legislation to regulate carbon emissions. (AP)

You couldn't make it up even if you tried:

One day Energy Secretary Ed Milliband sets out his proposed expansion of the U.K.'s wind power-led alternative energy revolution; the next day, Vestas, the U.K.'s largest wind turbine manufacturer, shuts down a big part of its British operations citing "low demand" and public opposition to onshore wind farms.

Just bad luck or bad PR? Not quite. Simply another blatant example of the ongoing "disconnect" over energy between those suffering from WTS (Wishful Thinker Syndrome) and the hydrocarbon-fueled present and future energy realities. (Peter C. Glover and Michael Economides, IBD)

If you want to reduce global warming, get woolly - by eating lamb and installing ceiling batts, Australia's top scientists say.

A 220-page handbook released by the CSIRO on Thursday says choosing different red meats can reduce carbon emissions.

It is known that cattle produce more greenhouse gas than lamb or game such as kangaroo.

"Replacing some beef meals with other meat options such as lamb, pork or game will help," it says.

...

The CSIRO report also recommends that inner-city dwellers seeking to reduce their carbon footprint install one to four kilowatt solar power systems, that cost between $14,000 and $50,000. (AAP)

As many as 900 million barrels of UK oil reserves could end up abandoned unless ageing fields are exempted from carbon trading, according to one of the industry’s most senior figures.

John Manzoni, president and chief executive of Talisman Energy, told the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen that plans to extend the European carbon trading scheme to such fields would make them uneconomic. He estimated that this might force Talisman to abandon 50 million barrels-worth of reserves.

He said: “Older fields have higher costs with relatively low throughputs, even though they still have significant oil in place... If we have to buy carbon permits it will result in earlier abandonment.”

As part of a volley of calls for looser regulation at the conference, which previously drew veiled criticism from First Minister Alex Salmond, Manzoni said his company was already investing overseas rather than in UK territorial waters because he could get “better rates of return”.

Sir Ian Wood, chairman of John Wood Group, told an audience that the UK government could be missing out on a share of a £1 trillion prize unless it improved the regulatory regime. He warned tax revenues from the remaining 13 billion to 25 billion barrels of North Sea reserves would be unlikely to be extracted as things stood, comparing his industry with the “huge subsidies” received by the renewable sector.

On the basis that the lower-estimate 13 billion barrels would sell at an average $100 (£60) each, he said: “That’s $1300bn over 20 or 30 or 40 years. I am going to repeat that: $1300bn of economic activity to the UK over the next period. That’s something that has to be a priority [for the government] given the economic crisis.” (Steven Vass, The Herald)

China could cut its emissions by 30 percent in the next two decades if it switches to wind power to meet about half of its electricity demands, US study says. (CoP15)

Auto dealers and business leaders appeal a decision by the EPA that allows California to establish the first greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks in the US. The appeal sets the stage for a potential attempt to block the global warming rules.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 11 - California's switch to renewable energy is not going according to plan.

The most ambitious U.S. effort to turn to solar, wind and other renewable energy is certain to miss a 2010 milestone of 20 percent clean power, in a poor sign for a national move to clean power.

The most populous state's 2020 goal of getting a third of electricity from alternative energy, a key part of its plan to cut global warming greenhouse gas emissions, is a long shot, the utility regulator says.

Policymakers and energy executives speaking at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco said that regulatory hurdles, high costs and high environmental standards were slowing the move to curb climate change, although they gave the state high marks for its ambitions. (Reuters)

BG's Guara oil field in the Santos Basin is estimated to contain up to two billion barrels of recoverable reserves (The Guardian)

The huge natural gas reserves off the country's Mediterranean coast are 16% bigger than estimated just one month ago (Business Week)

LANDAU IN DER PFALZ, Germany — Government officials here are reviewing the safety of a geothermal energy project that scientists say set off an earthquake in mid-August, shaking buildings and frightening many residents of this small city.

The geothermal plant, built by Geox, a German energy company, extracts heat by drilling deep into the earth. Advocates of the method say that it could greatly reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels by providing a vast supply of renewable energy.

But in recent months, two similar projects have stirred concerns about their safety and their propensity to cause earthquakes. In the United States, the Energy Department is scrutinizing a project in Northern California run by AltaRock Energy to determine if it is safe. (The project was shut down by the company last month because of crippling technical problems.) Another project, in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down after it generated earthquakes in 2006 and 2007 and is awaiting the decision of a panel of experts about whether it can resume.

The Landau project will be allowed to continue operating while the review panel, which held its first meeting last Friday, deliberates. Geox officials initially denied any responsibility for the temblor and continue to dispute the government’s data linking the project to the quake. The panel will, among other things, have to sort through the conflicting data presented by the company and government scientists.

But some experts in the field say they worry that projects like the one in Germany, if the managers deny responsibility for inducing earthquakes or play down the effects on people’s lives, could damage the reputation of geothermal energy, even in highly environmentally conscious areas of the world like California or Western Europe. (NYT)

The flu season is winding down in Australia, where their winter is nearing end. How did the expert claims, speculations and predictions of the deadly pandemic hold up to the facts?

Three months ago, public health experts and even the President of the Australian Medical Association were warning that one-third of the population would get swine flu. As late as last month, the Australian government had ordered 21 million doses of swine flu vaccine, enough to vaccinate the entire population.

In reality, as of noon today, the Australian Department of Health and Ageing reports that Australia has had 35,775 confirmed cases of pandemic H1N1. The experts had overstated the numbers who would get sick by 203-fold. There have been 162 deaths — a fraction (5.4%) of the 3,000 Australians who typically die from the seasonal flu each year.

It’s a similar story here in the United States. In July, we were hearing projections that as many as 40 percent of Americans could come down with the flu over the next two years and several hundred thousand could die. The government ordered 160 million doses of vaccine.

In reality, the pandemic H1N1 variant has proven to remain far less virulent (milder) than the seasonal flu, as evidenced in Australia and the United States. As of last week, the total number of influenza-related deaths in the United States — including from the H1N1 pandemic — have remained below epidemic levels and resulted in 2009 being the mildest flu year in more than a decade. (Junkfood Science)

NEW YORK - Don't pass the salt: If Americans were to cut their salt intake to recommended levels, they'd have far fewer cases of high blood pressure, and save billions of dollars in health care costs, a new study estimates. (Reuters Health)

Hmm... it'll be interesting to see what Nude Socialist considers a "better world": BLUEPRINT FOR A BETTER WORLD

We live in an imperfect world. Poverty, disease, lack of education, environmental destruction - the problems are all too obvious. Many people don't have clean water, let alone enough food, and the unsustainable lifestyle of the wealthy few is storing up catastrophic climate change.

Can we do anything about it? You bet we can. Technology is a double-edged sword, but science and reason have made our lives immeasurably better overall - and only through science and reason can we hope to make a real difference in the future. So here and over the next three weeks, New Scientist will explore diverse ideas for making the world a better place, and the evidence backing them. (New Scientist)

The recent spate of scientific papers that are attempting to predict what the earth’s temperature might be in the coming decades, and also explain the current global temperature standstill, are very interesting because of the methods used to analyse temperature variations, and because they illustrate the limitations of our knowledge.

Recall that only one or two annual data points ago many scientists, as well as the most vocal ‘campaigners,’ dismissed the very idea that the world’s average annual temperature had not changed in the past decade. Today it is an observational fact that can no longer be ignored. We should also not forget that nobody anticipated it. Now, post facto, scientists are looking for an explanation, and in doing so we are seeing AGW in a new light.

The main conclusion, and perhaps it’s no surprise, to be drawn about what will happen to global temperatures is that nobody knows.

The other conclusion to be drawn is that without exception the papers assume a constantly increasing AGW in line with the increase of CO2. This means that any forecast will ultimately lead to rising temperatures as AGW is forever upward and natural variations have their limits. But there is another way of looking at the data. Instead of assuming an increasing AGW why not look for evidence of it in the actual data. In other words let the data have primacy over the theory. (David Whitehouse)

LONDON - Birth control and new technologies -- not lifestyle change alone -- may be needed to head off a combined climate, food and energy crunch later this century, said the head of Britain's science academy Martin Rees.

The world's population is expected to rise by one third to more than 9 billion people by 2050, and may keep growing, fuelling concern about food and energy shortages and a more difficult task to curb greenhouse gases heating the planet.

But analysts and environment and development groups rarely mention population control, which smacks of totalitarianism, in U.N.-led climate talks meant to agree in December a broader, more ambitious pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol. (Reuters)

Contraception is almost five times cheaper as a means of preventing climate change than conventional green technologies, according to research by the London School of Economics. (Daily Telegraph)

LONDON - Farmers in developing countries are losing traditional varieties because of growing corporate control of the seeds they plant, hampering their ability to cope with climate change, a London-based think tank said on Monday.

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) said in a report that the diversity of traditional seed varieties is falling fast and this means valuable traits such as drought and pest resistance could be lost forever. (Reuters)

Emissions from cattle and sheep are significant contributors to planetary warming. But how close are we to creating low-emitting livestock? Kevin Morrison reports. (Nature Reports Climate Change)

The online magazine CO2 Science has published a review and update on the massive extinction theory, featuring a large section on my guest editorial they graciously hosted back in 2004. This is where I lost my virginity, so to speak, so the treatment is a little more exuberant than I would use now, but not too much. I remember I was so disgusted that anyone could seriously propose an analysis that would show a high number of species extinctions from global warming even if the rate of species extinction decreased. I have seen a lot more now and such bias no longer surprises me.

I developed an error model for quantifying the various systematic biases in ’shift’ analyses, and incorporated it into a chapter in my book, though I don’t think it has ever been used in earnest. Now I tend to avoid working on issues of bias, as they are too hard to describe and prove, and focus instead on provable errors in global warming science, such as Rahmstorf’s ‘worse than we thought’ idea.

So it is with some sense of vindication over my repudiation of the uncritical use of ecological niche models that I read the conclusion of the CO2 Science report on the Dormann paper:

1. High uncertainty in the models does not necessary produce a large bias in estimates of extinction. Just as standard deviations are independent of mean values, the high uncertainty is not necessarily a basis for ‘model bashing’. If the uncertainty ‘cancels out’ then some progress can be made providing the uncertainty is carried through the calculations.

2. The estimates of extinction rely in large part on the quality of the underlying GCM’s, the magnitude of the shift predicted in temperature and precipitation, and the maintainence of the correct relationship between these variables also. If the models are bad, then the extinction prediction will be also.

So to a large extent it it pointless to work on shift models of the form used unless there is enough confidence in the underlying climate model prediction at a scale and resolution and internal coherence (between temperature and precipitation) where such confidence is justified.

I see the widespread uncritical use of climate models to project the effects of global warming as more of a problem that the effects modelling itself. Most effects studies don’t bother to check the validity of the climate models — they just download them from KNMI. It’s a house built on sand.

Just out of interest, I applied a few days ago for a registration account on the CMIP database of climate models stating I was interested in auditing their simulation data. As of today, no response. I also contacted the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for Australian monthly temperature data recently. As of today, no response. (Niche Modeling)

In June Climate Change Minister Penny Wong effectively acknowledged the existence of a scientific view rejecting the thesis that a dangerous increase in temperatures will occur unless government action is taken to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2. This is the first time a government minister with environmental responsibilities has done so formally (as distinct from dismissing such views out of hand). Minister Wong did this by agreeing to respond to three questions posed by Senator Fielding on the interpretations of temperature movements since 1998 and of temperature levels in the past, and on the reliability of models used to project temperature levels. (Des Moore, Quadrant)

Hopes of a global deal to tackle climate change have receded after David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said there was a “real danger” that a UN summit in Copenhagen in December would fail to produce an effective treaty on cutting greenhouse gases.

He said that the world was facing a bleak future in which climate change would cause mass migration and conflict in many regions over declining supplies of food, water and other resources. Suspicion between rich and poor countries was hampering progress towards a deal and other problems, such as the recession, were clouding the agenda.

Speaking before making visits that will take him around Europe in a diplomatic push to raise the issue of climate change, he said that a failure to cut emissions could lead to global temperature rises of 4C.

The world’s leading economies agreed in July that they should try to limit temperature increases to 2C above pre-industrial levels but they were silent on how they would achieve this. (The Times)

Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, has yet to apply his thinking to premises of climate change. (Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post)

The Chilling Effect conducts interviews with those making news, analyzing news, or just being plain interesting when it comes to the ongoing debate over climate change. Our latest installation elicits information from Phelim McAleer, one of the producers of, Not Evil, Just Wrong. (Chilling Effect)

The UN is turning to YouTube to jolt the world's plodding climate diplomacy into higher gear. (CoP15)

As the Government continues to pursue the imminent introduction of an Emissions Trading Scheme more and more questions are being asked about its scientific foundations by highly qualified scientists and others. Yet these doubts are simply being disregarded. This is a high risk path with no apparent ability to back-down if the entire edifice is built on sand. (Tom Quirk, Quadrant)

You can hardly see through the smarminess of today’s New York Times editorial on global warming town hall efforts. The paper, eschewing any notion that people are legitimately disturbed with what has been described as the largest tax increase in the history of the world, chimes in with:

Exercise? Maybe it’s an “exercise” for the editorial board members, but it’s something more serious for the millions of Americans who will see their electricity and gas bills go up dramatically and yet even more serious for the millions of people who will see their jobs disappear. (Chilling Effect)

WASHINGTON - Several U.S. Senate Democrats, including a top leader, on Wednesday questioned whether it would be possible to vote on a climate change bill this year, especially with healthcare reform eating up so much of the lawmakers' time.

"It's a difficult schedule" with many members already "anxious" about healthcare reform, Senator Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat, told Reuters when asked about prospects this year for a bill to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (Reuters)

Will government solutions to global warming be worse than global warming itself? Remember that man-made global warming is a negative externality that occurs when burning fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Economists define negative externality as a spillover from an economic transaction that harms parties not directly involved in the transaction. In this case, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is thought to be boosting temperatures, raising sea levels, and having other effects on the climate that people must involuntarily pay to adapt to (more air conditioning, switching crops, and so forth). Thus, goes the argument, the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the full cost of consuming them. (Ronald Bailey, Reason)

Although it has very much taken a back-seat to health care, and a press report [$] today say it could be bumped down yet another notch on the administration’s hierarchy of goals, climate change is shaping up to be a major battle if the others don’t prove to be prohibitively exhausting. So today I am weighing in on the debate by releasing my new paper on the dangers of using trade measures as a tool of climate policy.

The Democrats were keen to pass a climate change bill in advance of the December meeting in Copenhagen designed to agree on a successor regime to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. However, opposition from a number of quarters and the fear of health-care-town-halls-mark-II has cooled their heels. Senate leaders have pushed back the deadline for passing bills out of committees a number of times.

The reason why climate change legislation has become so controversial is that businesses and consumers are, quite understandably, fearful about any policies that threaten to increase their costs. I’ll leave it to others to blog about the effect of emissions-reductions policies on jobs and profits, but even the fear of losses has led to calls for special deals for “vulnerable industries”, in the form of free emission permits and/or protection from imports that are sourced from countries that purportedly take insufficient steps to limit emissions.

H.R. 2454, the so called Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House in June, contains both free permits and provisions for carbon tariffs. I’ve blogged before about the efforts of trade-skeptic senators to introduce the same kinds of protections in the senate bill. To that end, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D, OH) is reportedly meeting with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee next week about trade protections for manufacturing industries. As my paper makes clear, I think these efforts are misguidedly ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.

I’m looking forward to discussing these issues in more detail tomorrow at a Hill briefing in Washington DC. Registration for the event was closed very early because of overwhelming demand, but you can watch the event when the video becomes available on the Cato website. (Sallie James, Cato at large)

Washington, D.C.-Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) applauded the board of the National Wheat Growers Association, which, on September 4, by a vote of 26 to 2, approved a new resolution on climate legislation and regulation. The new resolution puts the group on record as "opposed to greenhouse gas legislation or regulation that has a negative impact on production agriculture."

The new resolution marks a stunning shift from the group's recent endorsement of the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House of Representatives in June. As the Oklahoma Farm Report noted today, the Wheat Growers Association firmly stated that, "neither greenhouse gas regulation nor legislation should take effect until the major carbon emitting countries of the world have agreed to regulation their own greenhouse gases in a like manner to ours." And it will "oppose EPA regulation and will work to overturn the Supreme Court ruling."

The board also voted 24 to 0 to "remove existing resolutions relating to greenhouse gas regulation and an agriculture cap-and-trade program."

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) issued the following statement on the Wheat Growers' resolution:

"I'm pleased that the organization representing the interests of wheat growers nationwide has reached the right conclusion: cap-and-trade legislation and potential EPA greenhouse gas regulation pose serious harm to farmers and rural America. In times of great hardship in rural communities across America, both of these approaches to addressing climate change will only bring further job cuts and economic decline. This new resolution marks an important step in the effort to defeat a cap-and-trade energy tax and EPA's misguided regulations." (EPW Blog)

The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill uses Cap and Trade to get our current 6 billion tons of CO2 a year down to just over 5 billion tons a year by 2020 (20% by 2020) and continuing down further by 2050.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the auction proceeds of the current Cap and Trade bill would increase Federal revenues by about $846 billion by 2019.

That would more than fund the $821 billion in renewable energy spending that it will take (per the CBO) to reduce the national carbon footprint by almost a billion tons a year on deadline. That would leave $25 billion in the bank for additional renewable energy projects. (Susan Kraemer, Clean Technica)

Back on September 2nd, 2006/2007 instruments were selling as low as 20 cents and held that way until Sept 8th. So this is a boost. See the table below. Zimbabwe money notes are doing pretty well on Ebay. Right now they are actually more valuable than carbon credit notes.

THE Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade assisted an Australian company caught up in Papua New Guinea's carbon trading scandal as it closed deals in Bangladesh and Jordan this year, even giving it funding. (SMH)

ABERDEEN, Britain - A new global treaty on climate change hinges on China and India agreeing to limit their CO2 emissions but it is unclear whether they will do so, Denmark's climate and energy minister said.

Connie Hedegaard, who is a key mediator in the talks to find a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, said western nations must agree to pay to help poorer countries cut emissions.

However, this will not be enough to get a deal at a United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in December, or to solve the problem of global warming.

"We must have all major emerging economies on board," she told the Offshore Europe oil conference on Tuesday, adding it remained "open" whether China and India would agree to curbs. (Reuters)

OSLO - The share of renewable energy will have to rise "dramatically" if the world is to have a chance of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) temperature rise, a leading expert said Wednesday.

Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of a scientific group due to present a U.N. report on renewable energy in 2010, said clean technology such as wind and solar power needed a big role even if the world also turned increasingly to nuclear power.

"To achieve a 2 Celsius target the share of renewables has to be increased substantially and dramatically," he told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in a telephone interview. (Reuters)

Government targets to make an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 may be challenging but they are inadequate, delegates to a recent conference heard. Alison Thomas was among them

Current targets aiming for an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 may be challenging – but they are inadequate. And so far there has been "abject failure" to reduce emissions, says Professor Kevin Anderson.

"Long-term reductions are popular because we don't have to change our lives, but they are not related to the science," Anderson, research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, warned the recent Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership conference. "What matters are the cumulative emissions that will be there for the next 100 to 200 years. That rewrites the chronology to short-term targets that we have to respond to today." (Public Service)

Australia is more likely to push its target on emissions reductions closer to the top end of its 5-25 range as Japan becomes more ambitious, says The Climate Group in Australia. (CoP15)

SYDNEY - The chances of a global agreement to fight climate change at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December are only 50:50, said Australia's leading environmentalist, who warned of "full climactic destabilization" without a pact.

Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council which fosters collaboration between international business and science to fight climate change, said without action in Copenhagen the world faced "runaway" climate change. (Reuters)

Government advisory body on climate change says ticket prices should rise to ensure emissions fall to 2005 levels (The Guardian)

The committee believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain's commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050

Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change.

Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050. (The Times)

LONDON - The British public do not want to give up their holiday flights, said deputy energy and climate minister Joan Ruddock on Wednesday, responding to a letter from the government's adviser on the emissions impacts of aviation.

Britain will depend on energy efficiency measures to meet near-term energy and emissions targets, Ruddock told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

"What we've found in our behavioural research is that people most of all don't want to give up their holiday flights," she said. "There has to be room for people to have choice." (Reuters)

SEOUL - South Korea's top businesses want the government to select the least restrictive option available for greenhouse gas emission cuts when it decides on a target later this year, according to a survey released on Wednesday. (Reuters)

SYDNEY - The Australian government should scrap its proposed carbon trading scheme and concentrate on clean coal technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the country's mining sector.

Executive director of the Minerals Council of Australia, Mitchell Hooke, told Reuters on Wednesday that using technology to reduce emissions from coal-fired generators would have a far greater impact than a carbon trading scheme that is struggling to be approved by parliament.

"We've all gone past the debate about the science so the message is move on and understand that if there is not a clean coal solution, there will not be a global solution to climate change," Hooke said in an interview. (Reuters)

The European Union is to offer a modest €15bn a year to help poor countries cope with the effects of climate change, setting the stage for a fight before an international conference in Copenhagen in December.

Rich and poor nations have traded recriminations over the central question of how much money developed countries should contribute to developing nations such as China and India to help them adapt to and limit global warming.

The European Commission figures emerged as European ministers raised concerns about climate talks progress.

David Miliband, UK foreign secretary, warned there was a “real danger” that the Copenhagen talks would “not reach a positive outcome”. He added: “There is an equal danger that in the run-up to Copenhagen people don’t wake up to the danger of failure until it’s too late.” (Financial times)

In the court of public opinion, Tim DeChristopher always has argued that he monkey-wrenched an oil and gas lease auction to combat the global climate crisis.

Now he wants to make that argument in federal court.

Attorneys for the University of Utah economics major have filed papers in U.S. District Court contending a federal judge should reject a government motion and allow their client to use his battle against global warming as a defense against two felony charges.

"The government is not entitled by way of motion to invade DeChristopher's attorney-client privileges," wrote the defense counsel, "or to violate his Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendment rights to prepare his defense to serious criminal charges."

In a separate motion, DeChristopher's legal team is seeking information from federal prosecutors about whether other individuals or corporations ever had failed to pay for oil and gas lease bids and whether any of them were prosecuted.

Defense lawyer Pat Shea, who oversaw the Bureau of Land Management during the Clinton administration, said Tuesday the Constitution guarantees his client a "full and complete defense, rather than a trimmed defense when the trimming is done by the government."

DeChristopher pleaded not guilty in April to a two-count federal indictment stemming from a Dec. 19, 2008, BLM oil and gas lease auction in which he offered a total of $1.8 million -- admittedly with no intention of paying the money -- to win bids on 14 parcels near Arches and Canyonlands national parks. (Christopher Smart, Salt Lake Tribune)

with thanks to the late John Daly and his timeless, brilliant website page “What the Stations Say” (click on Arctic map above). Click on each thumbnail graph to access Daly’s full size graph with time and temperature scales and other details. The thicker dark horizontal line across some of these thumbnails indicated 0ºC (a few of the graphs are ALL under that line). The Arctic is shown in the condition of summer sea ice (see thumbnail below) and the pale circle is the Arctic Circle. All data comes from NASA GISS or CRU originally.

Paul Vaughan notes at WUWT that he “spent a fair amount of time updating these graphs (& others of Daly’s for other regions)” using http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/ and adds a cautionary note: The time-frame and aspect-ratio of the timeplots can be manipulated to create the illusion of a steep trend in recent years.

The highly variable temperatures and amounts of sea ice in both polar regions is well-known to locals, but cherrypicked extremes have become a media weapon to scare ignorant folk with. Greenlanders today are aware of recent warming; but history, archaeology, and the Norse sagas show that Greenland was warmer than today in the Middle Ages, when crops and trees were grown there. For recent sea ice changes (since 1979) see Cryosphere Today and note that while Northern Hemisphere sea ice (at the top of the CT page) has gone down recently (but is currently going up again), Southern Hemisphere sea ice (at the bottom of the CT page) is going up, so that the overall total is pretty constant although fluctuating between summer and winter.

This represents typical current summer and winter sea ice and snow cover in the Arctic and Antarctic. Permanent icefields are pure white. The difference between summer and winter sea ice is vast, and greatly exceeds the variations between different years.The faint circles are the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Note how they delineate the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctica continent.

With the interest in the minimum areal coverage of Arctic sea ice this month, I am posting data provided by Bill Chapman of the University of Illinois (host of The Cryosphere Today) on the timing within the year of the maximum and minimum of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice coverage [thanks to Bill for doing providing this!].

The dates within each year of the maximum and minimum sea ice coverage are presented in the first set of two figures below for the Arctic and Antarctic regions, respectively. The Arctic is the subject of considerable scrutiny as the effect of human intervention into the climate system is hypothesized to be largest there [Holland and Bitz, 2003, Serreze and Francis, 2006; Graversen et al., 2008; Serreze et al., 2007]. For the Arctic, the time of year of both the maximum and minimum ice coverage is occurring slightly earlier (i.e., negative slopes) but neither trend is significant at the 2 sigma level although the slope for the time of occurrence of the ice maximum is almost significant at the 1 sigma level (p-value=0.66).

For the Antarctic, the time of occurrence of the sea ice maximum shows a slight trend towards later dates, while the minimum coverage shows a slight trend towards earlier dates, but neither trend is significant.

Figure: Date (fraction of year beginning in January) of maximum (red) and minimum (blue) sea ice areal coverage for (a) the Arctic region and (b) the Antarctic region. None of these regressions are significant at the 1-sigma level. Data to complete this figure courtesy of Bill Chapman.

Courtesy of Ben Herman and Mike Berlage, the two figures below show the average annual cycle of daily temperatures for the 60° to 82.5° latitude belts for both hemispheres in two 10-year periods: 1980 to 1989 in blue and 1998 to 2007 in red. The strange “humps” apparent in both hemispheres in early winter in the Northern Hemisphere and late fall in the Southern Hemisphere are likely due to the averaged effect of the sea surface emissivity. The MSU LT channel has about 10% of its signal coming from the surface, so the type of surface is important, particularly if it changes during the course of a year. Sea ice has a higher emissivity in the measured microwave band, so as water turns to ice in the fall (April in the Southern Hemisphere), the brightness temperature, which is what the MSU measures, increases until the area is totally frozen over, after which time the atmospheric temperature is the main driver. Since we are dealing with anomalies in MSU temperatures, this background freezing and thawing is fairly regular. The net impact of an actual loss in sea ice over time would be a small decrease in the measured brightness temperature which would result in an apparent small net cooling in the translational seasons.

Figure: The average of the daily temperature values for two 10-year periods over the latitudes from 60° poleward to 82.5° in (a) the Northern Hemisphere and (b) the Southern Hemisphere. The blue curve is the daily average for the 1980-1989 period, while the red curve is for the 1998-2007 period for each hemisphere. Figure courtesy of Ben Herman and Mike Berlage.

In the Northern Hemisphere (left figure above) it can be seen that the red curve is slightly above the blue curve for every month representing a warming of the later period compared to the earlier one. There appears to be a slightly slower warming rate from March to May of the later period and a slightly higher and later peak temperature also for the later period. For the Southern Hemisphere (right figure above) indicates smaller changes between the two time periods but with slightly colder winter and summer temperatures during the summer maximum and winter minimum periods. Any changes in warming and cooling rates during spring and fall are too small to be detected.

The time of occurrence of the maximum and minimum sea ice coverage in the Arctic showed slight trends towards occurring earlier in the year, although not significant. In the Southern Hemisphere, the trends were smaller and also not significant, but the time of ice maximum was becoming later, contrary to the other three trends. (Climate Science)

Tamino’s website “Open Mind” published a post “Arctic Sunlight” on September 8 2009 which criticizes a observational finding which I presented in my post .

”The documentation of their biased reporting is easy to show. For example, they do not report on observational data which does not show this rapid recent warming; e.g. see that the current high latitude temperatures are close to the longer term average since 1958. The Danish Meteorological Institute Daily Mean Temperatures in the Arctic 1958 – 2008 [and thanks to the excellent weblog Watts Up With That for making this easily available to us!]“

As for current high-latitude temperatures being close to the longer term average since 1958, no they’re not. Pielke and Watts need a sanity check.”

Well, despite the title of Tamino’s weblog as Open Mind, it is anything but that. He conveniently left off the rest of the text in my post on September 4 2009. I will repeat it here for readers who believe in balanced scientific debate:

There are also peer reviewed papers which show that the Schmid and Revkin articles are biased; e. g. see

i) the areal coverage of the coldest middle tropospheric temperatures (below -40C) have not changed radically as shown in the Revkin figure; see

ii) there is a warm bias in the Arctic surface temperature measurements when they are used to characterize deeper atmospheric warming; see

Tamino’s weblog is clearly not an Open Minded source of information on climate science. Tamino’s post just reaffirms that there needs to be a reality check in media reporting. (Climate Science)

The great petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt famously said that “Oil is found in the minds of men.” Discoveries depend on visionary theory, technical innovation and commitment to risky drilling. Plus luck. Peak Oil theory, by contrast – which asserts that global oil production has, or soon will, peak, and that this has powerful policy implications — is found in the limitations of the minds of men. It is less geological theory than unevolved intellectual shortcoming, although it certainly has its political uses.

The fruits of the “greatest resource,” as economist Julian Simon dubbed the human mind, appeared yet again this week with the announcement by BP that it had found a “giant” field at unprecedented depth in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that twenty years ago was regarded as played out. By contrast, the limitations and conceits that characterize Peak Oil were nicely summed up by a report on BP’s find in the leftist British newspaper, The Guardian.

According to that report, BP’s Tiber well, and another recent huge find in Iran, “have encouraged skeptics of theories which say that peak production has been reached, or soon will be, to hail a new golden age of exploration and supply.” (Peter Foster, Financial Post)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Like many bloggers this week, I've been thinking about the implications of BP's big, new oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. Some analysts suggest that the Tiber field might contain as much as 3-4 billion barrels of oil, though much of it might never be recovered. The Wall St. Journal's Environmental Capital blog suggests that such discoveries serve as a kind of Rorschach test, with the various interpretations of it telling us more about the observer than the thing being observed. Fair enough. Without venturing into grandiose conclusions about whether the Tiber-1 deep water well refutes--or in some convoluted fashion confirms--the central hypothesis of the Peak Oil theory, this discovery provides a handy opportunity to remind my readers of a few principles and themes about oil exploration and production that I've been discussing here for the last six years: (Energy Tribune)

Successful well test at Guara shows 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas

BG Group's Guara discovery off the Brazilian coast contains up to 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas, dwarfing last week's "giant" find by rival BP.

Recent drill stem testing produced a flow of 7,200 barrels of oil equivalent (boe) per day, although permanent production using full-scale facilities could raise the rate to up to 50,000 boe per day, BG Group said yesterday.

BG Group and its partners on Guara – Brazil's Petrobras and Spain's Repsol – have agreed a production schedule, which is due to start from 2012 at a rate of 120,000 bpd. The company's nearby Tupi well is expected to go into production at the end of next year, at a rate of 100,000 boe per day.

Frank Chapman, the chief executive of BG Group, said: "The well test results on Guara were excellent and underscore again the outstanding potential in BG Group's extensive position in the world-class Santos Basin. It is clear that the Santos Basin pre-salt will make a very material contribution to the production and cash flow of BG Group for many years to come." (The Independent)

We all grew up believing that oil is a fossil fuel, and just about every day this ‘fact’ is mentioned in newspapers and on TV, often when quoting supposedly learned scientists who should know better. However, let us not forget what Lenin said — “A lie told often enough becomes truth.” Soon after the end of World War II, the Soviet dictator, Stalin, realised that the then Soviet Union needed its own substantial oil reserves and production system if it was ever again called upon to defend itself against an attacker such as Hitler’s Germany.

In 1947, the Soviet Union had, as its petroleum ‘experts’ then estimated, very limited petroleum reserves. Stalin’s response was to set up a task force of top scientists and engineers in a project similar to the Manhattan Project – the top-secret US program to develop the atom bomb during WWII — and initially under the same secrecy, and charged them with the task of finding out what oil was, where it came from and how to find, recover and efficiently refine it.

In 1951, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins was first enunciated by Nikolai A. Kudryavtsev at the All-Union petroleum geology congress. Kudryavtsev analysed the hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum, and pointed out the failures of the claims commonly put forward to support that hypothesis. Stalin’s team of scientists and engineers found that oil is not a ‘fossil fuel’ but is a natural product of planet earth — the high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide — two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust. (Climate Research News)

NEW YORK - Investments in natural gas will play a bigger role in the short-term fight against climate change, the head of Deutsche Bank's global asset management said.

"Clearly natural gas in our view is going to play a much more prominent role because of its significant advantage in its carbon footprint over oil and coal," Kevin Parker, head of the more than $600 billion asset fund at Germany's biggest bank, said at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

Natural gas emits emits about half the carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas -- per unit of energy generated as coal does. It is also cleaner than motor fuels like gasoline and diesel and can be burned in automobiles and trucks. (Reuters)

VIENNA - Some countries that fail to invest in nuclear power for political or financial reasons will be unlikely to meet emissions targets and could miss out on investment as companies build abroad, an IAEA expert said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which advises member states on developing atomic power safely while trying to curb proliferation risks, hiked its nuclear power projections for 2030 on Tuesday with Asian countries seen leading the way. (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES— Today the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a controversial industrial-scale solar energy facility planned for the California desert, moved one step closer to development. The project’s proponent, BrightSource Energy, announced an agreement with Bechtel to build the facility, which is opposed by many conservation groups and scientists due to its proposed location in endangered species habitat. The California Energy Commission and the federal Bureau of Land Management are expected to release their environmental review documents for the project later this month.

“Simply put, this project is proposed in the wrong place,” said Ileene Anderson, biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “There are tens of thousands of acres of already-disturbed lands in the California desert that are much closer to cities and towns that would make far more sense for this kind of project. While rapidly transitioning to renewable energy is essential, we need not sacrifice public lands and rare species to do so.” (Press Release)

The palm oil industry misled the public by claiming production of the vegetable fat was sustainable and socially useful, according to an official investigation.

In a ruling today, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld four complaints against a magazine advert by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) intended to counter environmental and human rights criticism of its record.

Plantations producing palm oil for food, household products and biofuels have destroyed swathes of rainforest on the Indonesian and Malaysian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, evicting indigenous tribes and threatening orangutans and other endangered species. (The Independent)

President Obama has made a mantra, even a fetish, of his determination to "restore science to its rightful place." It appears that he means junk science rather than the real thing. The president's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), a virulently anti-business epidemiologist named David Michaels, is one the nation's foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.

The Senate should reject Mr. Michael's nomination.

The junk-science dispute stems from a crucially important 1993 Supreme Court case, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. In Daubert, all nine justices (with two dissenting in small part) agreed that trial judges could hold hearings without juries present to determine if proposed "expert testimony" is "relevant and reliable," based on objective criteria such as the use of scientific method and peer reviews. This way, a trial can be protected from being polluted by hired guns who may look and sound impressive enough to sway a jury that has no particular scientific expertise but who actually are peddling bogus theories or trumped-up evidence.

Mr. Michaels devoted a whole chapter in his tendentious book "Doubt Is Their Product" to the idea that Daubert created "social imbalance" away from the interests of plaintiffs and their lawyers. Elsewhere, he co-wrote a paper of the exact same name as the book chapter in which the authors claim Daubert "has led to unreasonable legal demands of scientific certainty."

However, contra Mr. Michaels, scientific certainty can be the essential difference between getting a case right or wrong. For example, the Daubert ruling's insistence on sound science directly helped U.S. District Judge Janis Jack of Texas blow the whistle on thousands of false claims for the lung disease silicosis in which radiologists admitted to having "diagnosed" as many as 800 asbestosis cases in just 72 hours -- a physical impossibility.

D.C. lawyer Victor Schwartz, author of a widely used law school textbook on tort law and the lead writer of the crucial friend-of-the-court brief in Daubert, told The Washington Times on Wednesday, "Daubert has been the greatest protection for both defendants and plaintiffs against losing their cases because of blatantly unscientific evidence. Without it, drugs that help cure diseases could be taken off the marketplace, innovation could be stifled in the United States -- and likewise, people who are injured could actually lose cases that have merit." (The Washington Times)

NEW YORK - Findings from a study of Dow Chemical workers suggest that exposure to dioxin may not increase the risk for certain cancers, as is widely believed.

Compared with deaths in the general U.S. population, researchers found no higher deaths from all cancers, and specifically from lung cancers and non-malignant lung disease, among pesticide plant workers exposed to dioxin over 36 years on average.

Dr. James J. Collins, an epidemiologist at Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan, and colleagues assessed the health effects from long term workplace exposures to the dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin.

This form of dioxin, commonly called TCDD, is listed as a known human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Collins and colleagues note in a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The 1,615 workers studied had estimated body levels of dioxins "much higher" than estimated levels from environmental exposures in the general population, Collins noted in an email correspondence to Reuters Health.

Yet, outside of a potentially greater risk of a highly malignant soft-tissue sarcoma reported in 4 workers, there were no more cancer deaths among exposed workers than among the general population.

The investigation did reveal slightly more deaths from diabetes, heart disease, leukemia, and a cancer of the lymph nodes called non-Hodgkin lymphoma among TCDD-exposed workers compared with the general population. But Collins' group observed no trend linking these deaths with dioxin exposures.

Despite hundreds of human studies on the potential health effects of dioxins, "there is still no scientific consensus on the potential for health effects related to dioxin," Collins said.

Therefore, "further studies, especially those which measure dioxin body levels, would be prudent," he concluded. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Contrary to what some previous studies have suggested, children who enter daycare at an early age may not have a reduced risk of allergies and asthma later on, researchers reported Tuesday.

In a study of more than 3,600 children followed from birth, the investigators found that children who entered daycare before the age of 2 were no less likely than their peers to suffer from allergies or asthma at the age of 8.

But early daycare did not appear to raise those risks either, senior researcher Dr. Johan C. de Jongste, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, told Reuters Health in an email.

Instead, the findings suggest that daycare has little long-term effect on children's respiratory health -- and that it should not be seen as a way to protect them from allergies and asthma down the road, the researchers report in the journal American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The study, de Jongste said, challenges what is known as the "hygiene hypothesis" -- the theory that the increasingly germ-free surroundings of modern life are actually contributing to an increase in allergies and asthma. (Reuters Health)

In 1976, a small group of soldiers at Fort Dix were infected with a swine flu virus that was deemed similar to the virus responsible for the great 1918-19 world-wide flu pandemic. The U.S. government initiated an unprecedented effort to immunize every American against the disease. While a qualified success in terms of numbers reached-more than 40 million Americans received the vaccine-the disease never reappeared. The program was marked by controversy, delay, administrative troubles, legal complications, unforeseen side effects and a progressive loss of credibility for public health authorities. In the waning days of the flu season, the incoming Secretary of what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Joseph Califano, asked Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg to examine what happened and to extract lessons to help cope with similar situations in the future. The result was their report, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease (NAP)

In the event that the H1N1 virus creates a surge of patients during the upcoming flu season, it will be critical to protect health care workers from infection, given their central role in treating sick people and lessening the pandemic's overall impact.

This new report from the Institute of Medicine recommends strategies for health care organizations and employees to prepare for the H1N1 virus. These recommendations include wearing fitted N95 respirators to guard against respiratory infection by the virus, and establishing policies for innovative triage processes, handwashing, disinfection, and more. The report also calls for a boost in research to answer questions about how the flu viruses can be spread, and to design and develop better protective equipment that would enhance workers' comfort, safety, and ability to do their jobs. (NAP)

Clinical guidelines are used to measure the quality of care provided by physicians and are purportedly evidence-based. National childhood overweight and obesity policies in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia call for primary care physicians and pediatricians to monitor children’s BMIs and to counsel youngsters with BMIs ≥85th percentile and their families on diet, physical activity, sedentary behaviors and adopting healthy lifestyles.

“Evidence supporting such an approach in primary care, however, is conspicuously lacking,” said pediatrician Dr. Melissa Wade M.D., associate director of the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues. (Junkfood Science)

President Obama continues to portray the debate over health care reform as a choice between his plan for a massive government-takeover of the US healthcare system and “doing nothing.” Those who oppose his plan are said to be “obstructionist” or in favor of the status-quo. Yesterday, the President again said, “I’ve got a question for all those folks [who oppose his plan]: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution?”

Well, I can’t speak for all his critics, but the Cato Institute has a long record of supporting health care reform based on free-markets and competition. If the President wanted to know more he might have read my recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times or Michael Cannon’s piece in Investors Business Daily. He could have read our book, Healthy Competition. Or he might have just gone to healthcare.cato.org and read our plan:

Mr. President, the ball is back in your court. (Michael D. Tanner, Cato @ liberty)

The recession may be thinning our wallets but not our waists. Dietitians say healthy eating could be a casualty of an economy that's making price tags more persuasive than nutrition labels.

Nationally, obesity levels have increased over the past year, and health experts say the weak economy likely will only add heft to the population.

“For better or for worse, calorie-dense foods tend to be cheaper than more nutritious food,” said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust for America's Health, which co-commissioned the July obesity report. “We're worried that could exacerbate what's already a very difficult problem.”

In Texas, where 28 percent of adults are obese — and 32 percent of children are overweight or obese — nutritionists are working against the economy, and the lure of high-calorie, low-cost comfort food, in the fight against fat. (Houston Chronicle)

President Barack Obama said he is willing to consider taxing soda and other sugary drinks as Congress debates overhauling the U.S. health-care system.

“I actually think it’s an idea that we should be exploring,” Obama said in an interview with Men’s Health magazine that goes on sale next week. “There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”

Lawmakers drafting legislation to revamp the U.S. health- care system have considered new taxes on sugar and sweetened soda to help pay the cost, estimated at as much as $1 trillion over the next decade. (Bloomberg)

Obesity, alcohol and smoking increase the chances that breast cancer will return in women who have already fought it off once, research has shown. (Daily Telegraph)

LONDON - A complete ban on alcohol advertising should be imposed and a minimum drinks price set to help deter excessive drinking in Britain, medics said on Tuesday.

The British Medical Association (BMA) said curtailment of the industry's 800 million pound ($1.3 billion) annual promotional budget should also cover sponsorship of sports and arts events.

It called for alcoholic drinks to be taxed higher than the rate of inflation, and for licensing hours to be cut. (Reuters)

President Obama has noted that Spain provides a reference for the establishment of government aid to renewable energy since Spain has given such broad support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources.

The arguments for Spain’s and Europe’s ‘green jobs’ schemes are the same now made in the US, principally that massive public support would produce large numbers of ‘green jobs’.

A recent study by economics professor Gabriel Calzada and his colleagues at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid answers the question ‘at what price’? The answer: The Spanish government’s renewable energy initiatives have destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new ‘green job’ created. The researchers conclude that the US should expect a loss of about 9 jobs for every 4 created.

“Europe’s current policy and strategy for supporting the so-called ‘green jobs’ or renewable energy dates back to 1997, and has become one of the principal justifications for US ‘green jobs’ proposals,” Calzada writes. “Yet an examination of Europe’s experience reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.” (Jack Dini, Hawaii Reporter)

Water is our most fundamental natural resource, a resource that is limited. Challenges to our nation's water resources continue to grow, driven by population growth, ecological needs, climate change, and other pressures. The nation needs more and improved water science and information to meet these challenges.

Toward a Sustainable and Secure Water Future reviews the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) Water Resource Discipline (WRD), one of the nation's foremost water science organizations. This book provides constructive advice to help the WRD meet the nation's water needs over the coming decades. Of interest primarily to the leadership of the USGS WRD, many findings and recommendations also target the USGS leadership and the Department of Interior (DOI), because their support is necessary for the WRD to respond to the water needs of the nation. (NAP)

The spectre of a 4C warmer world, with alligators basking off the coast of Sweden, a vast desert surrounding the Mediterranean and a largely uninhabitable mainland Europe, is to be presented to European Union countries by the foreign secretary, David Miliband. (John Vidal, The Guardian)

LONDON - Climate talks could draw on global recovery spending to smooth a deal in Copenhagen in December to replace the Kyoto Protocol, said Nick Robins, head of HSBC's climate change research center. (Reuters)

It would be wise for anyone concerned about climate change to keep an eye on the movements and pronouncements of the US Chamber of Commerce over the next few months as Barack Obama's cap-and-trade bill finally reaches the Senate.

The world's largest not-for-profit business federation has made it patently clear in recent months that it does not like the look of the so-called Waxman-Markey bill. In fact, it thinks it stinks. So much so that it is currently trying every trick in the lobbyist's handbook to scupper its legislative progress. (Leo Hickman, The Guardian)

WASHINGTON - Despite Washington's nearly single-minded focus on healthcare reform, the Obama administration still expects the U.S. Senate to pass climate change legislation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Tuesday.

"Right now we are focused on this crusade for healthcare reform for the country and that's where our time and energy will go for the days ahead," Salazar said during an interview at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

Even so, he added, "We want both (healthcare and climate bills). The president has been very clear that these are two big issues for the United States and for our time." (Reuters)

OSLO - Prospects for a new U.N. climate pact in Copenhagen have brightened but negotiations must speed up to meet a December deadline, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said on Tuesday.

Yvo de Boer said moves by countries including Japan, China and India to curb greenhouse gases had helped the 190-nation talks in recent weeks despite disappointing progress on financing the fight against climate change by the Group of 20.

"The outlook is brightening," de Boer said in a telephone interview from Manila during a tour of Asian nations. "We are moving in the right direction -- nothing wrong with the direction, something left to be desired in terms of the pace."

"I'm more confident than I've been before, I think the Japanese announcement is incredibly encouraging," de Boer told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit. (Reuters)

LONDON — Two British Cabinet ministers said Tuesday that attempts to broker a new global pact on climate change by the end of the year are at risk of failing.

Hopes for an agreement being reached at a United Nations summit in December "hang in the balance," undermined by a climate of suspicion between rich and poor countries, said Foreign Secretary David Miliband, speaking at a press conference with his brother, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband.

Nations will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark to attempt to strike a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which bound 37 industrial countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012.

But David Miliband told reporters in London that the complexity of negotiations and disputes between industrialized and developing nations over cuts to emissions threaten to scupper a deal. (AP)

BRUSSELS - The European Union has scaled back plans to give billions of euros to poor countries to persuade them to help battle climate change, a draft document shows.

Funding from rich nations to the developing world has emerged as the main stumbling block to progress in climate negotiations ahead of international talks in Copenhagen in December.

Ethiopia warned last week that Africa would veto any deal at Copenhagen that was not generous enough.

The 27-country EU is trying to find unity on its contribution to break the impasse.

"A deal on financing will be central to achieving an agreement at Copenhagen," said a draft European Commission report obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.

The bloc indicated last week that it might pay 13-24 billion euros ($19-35 billion) annually to the developing world by 2020 to help with a total bill of around 100 billion euros.

But that contribution was lowered earlier this week to 2-15 billion euros, according to the report entitled 'A European blueprint for the Copenhagen deal'. (Reuters)

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND -- 09/08/09 -- Scientists gathered in Iceland are urging government leaders to pursue carbon capture and sequestration as a way of addressing global warming.

Scientists gathered in Iceland for a conference are urging government leaders headed to Copenhagen for climate talks later this year to pursue carbon capture and sequestration as a way of addressing global warming. As levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide continue to rise, this technique for removing excess carbon dioxide from the air and storing it safely underground must be part of the solution for solving climate change.

"We are in a mess with CO2," says Wallace Broecker, a climate scientist at Columbia University, "a mess that is cheaper to clean up now, than meeting the consequences of global warming later." (Press Release)

MUNICH, Sept 7 - Carbon capture pilot projects must be made a political priority in Europe to ascertain whether the technology works and can be applied in emerging markets, an official of the United Nations climate panel said on Monday.

"The pilot projects must be realised, it is a political decision," said Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at a German utility congress.

"Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is indispensable if we want a new deal for the climate," Edenhofer said. (Reuters)

Britain could earn billions of pounds a year and sustain tens of thousands of jobs by selling space deep under the North Sea for storing carbon dioxide captured from European power station emissions, geologists told the British Science Festival in Guildford on Tuesday.

“Carbon capture and storage could be an industry the size of present-day North Sea oil,” said Mike Stephenson of the British Geological Survey.

“In Britain we’re lucky in being close to one of the largest areas of potential storage for CO2 in Europe.”

The UK could store at least 60bn tonnes – and perhaps as much as 150bn tonnes – of CO2, according to a new study by Edinburgh university.

Most would be in geological strata beneath the Scottish sector of the North Sea. Only Norway has more storage capacity: most European countries have very few suitable geological strata. (Financial Times)

The U.S. oil and gas industry has contributed nearly half of all dollars invested by the nation’s public and private sectors this decade in low-emissions energy technologies.

The industry’s investment of more than $58 billion in such technologies is documented in “Energizing America: Facts for Addressing Energy Policy,” issued by the American Petroleum Institute (API).

The study points out the $58 billion invested this decade by the oil and gas industry “represents 44 percent of the $133 billion spent by all U.S. industries and the federal government combined.” The oil and gas industry is also at the forefront of developing carbon capturing and storage technology, or CCS, to reduce carbon dioxide, according to the API report. (Bonner R. Cohen, Environment & Climate News)

In order to give further impetus to international climate change negotiations, Denmark’s climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard has invited a number of influential climate politicians to New York. (CoP15)

Developing nations should get free licenses to clean-energy technology and technologies to genetically modify crops resistant to droughts. (CoP15)

CHARCOAL has rather gone out of fashion. Before the industrial revolution, whole forests disappeared into the charcoal-burners’ maw to provide the carbon that ironmakers need to reduce their ore to metal. Then, an English ironmaker called Abraham Darby discovered how to do the job with coke. From that point onward, the charcoal-burners’ days were numbered. The rise of coal, from which coke is produced, began, and so did the modern rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It is a sweet irony, therefore, that the latest fashion for dealing with global warming is to bring back charcoal. It has to be rebranded for modern consumers, of course, so it is now referred to as “biochar”. But there are those who think biochar may give humanity a new tool to attack the problem of global warming, by providing a convenient way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, burying it and improving the quality of the soil on the way. (The Economist)

LONDON - Lobbyist pressure will not weigh on a U.N. panel's decision whether to award carbon finance worth about 100 million euros ($144 million) to Chinese wind power projects, said the chair of the panel on Tuesday.

"If you add it all up there are quite a number of projects, all from China," Lex de Jonge told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, on a ruling due this week.

The issue has caused long-running tension between the panel and project developers and brokers about the speed of approvals in the $6.5 billion global carbon offset market. (Reuters)

Environmental Protection Agency scientist and economist Alan Carlin, Ph.D. made national news this past spring after telling how EPA buried his lengthy assessment that the agency had no scientific justification for its ruling that carbon dioxide endangers human health, and agency officials told him not to discuss his concerns with others.

Dr. Carlin spoke with me and provided some insight into his reasons for questioning EPA’s endangerment finding. He explained how EPA has sought to keep such dissenting voices from jeopardizing the agency’s push to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. (Krystle Russin, Environment & Climate News)

The Scientists Speak:
Fossil Fuels -- A Quickie Divorce is Not an Option: The world demand for energy is just too great to simply walk away from coal, gas and oil. Featuring Dr. Robert Balling, Arizona State University, USA.

Editorial:
Environmental Stresses and Plant Methane Emissions: A new study suggests that the former leads to the latter, and that various global change processes could cause more stress in plants on a global scale, stimulating undesirable CH4 emissions.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 727 individual scientists from 427 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from the Northern Range of Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Extinction (Model Predictions): Like the early reports of Mark Twain's death, climate-alarmist reports of impending species extinctions due to CO2-induced global warming have been greatly exaggerated.

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: Barley (Veisz et al., 2008), Red Oat (Veisz et al., 2008), Rice (Li et al., 2008), and Wheat (Veisz et al., 2008).

Governments around the world are now struggling with the question of how to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The task is bigger than any other environmental challenge humanity has faced. Carbon dioxide, the leading human cause of global warming, is an intrinsic byproduct of burning the fossil fuels that power the world economy and thus difficult to regulate. (David G. Victor and Richard K. Morse, Boston Review)

HOUSTON — Declining industrial electricity demand and an abundance of cheap natural gas will threaten coal's status as the dominant fuel to generate electric power, even after the economic recession ends.

Power companies are reducing use of coal plants because of declining demand from heavy industry, the economic sector hardest hit by the recession. The loss of industrial "baseload" looks long term, analysts and executives say.

Natural gas-fired plants, easier to stop and start, have remained busy serving commercial and household power demand, which varies hour by hour and has been less affected by the recession.

"The recession's impact on our industrial customers has been significant," said Lonnie Carter, chief executive of Santee Cooper, South Carolina's state-owned power and water utility. "We anticipate that as the economy recovers from this economic downturn, long-term power needs will be lower."

Meanwhile, generators' reasons for preferring coal for baseload — lower cost and more reliable supply — weaken with every shale gas discovery, which drives gas prices down and suggests gas will be plentiful for years to come. (Reuters)

On Aug. 13, ExxonMobil pleaded guilty in federal court to killing 85 birds that had come into contact with crude oil or other pollutants in uncovered tanks or waste-water facilities on its properties. The birds were protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which dates back to 1918. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees.

ExxonMobil is hardly alone in running afoul of this law. Over the past two decades, federal officials have brought hundreds of similar cases against energy companies. In July, for example, the Oregon-based electric utility PacifiCorp paid $1.4 million in fines and restitution for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over the past two years. The birds were electrocuted by poorly-designed power lines.

Yet there is one group of energy producers that are not being prosecuted for killing birds: wind-power companies. And wind-powered turbines are killing a vast number of birds every year.

A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.

Altamont's turbines, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, Calif., kill more than 100 times as many birds as Exxon's tanks, and they do so every year. But the Altamont Pass wind farm does not face the same threat of prosecution, even though the bird kills at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since the mid-1990s. (Robert Bryce, WSJ)

A second Arctic marine mammal moved closer to an Endangered Species listing due to global warming Tuesday as a petition to grant the Pacific walrus protection passed its first review.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that a petition presented by the Center for Biological Diversity provided substantial information that listing the walrus as threatened or endangered was warranted.

The determination was based in part on projected changes in sea ice associated with climate change. The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups successfully petitioned for protection of polar bears using the same argument.

Center spokeswoman Rebecca Noblin said Tuesday that unless immediate action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, warming will claim the walrus as a victim.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife determination triggers a detailed status review, including a 60-day public comment period. The comment period closes Nov. 9. (Associated Press)

Bank on solar power, since wind power is inefficient and impossible to store, German-American physicist Jack Steinberger argues. Danish architects have a solution. (CoP15)

By now, you’ve heard it in a thousand political speeches—the shopping-list-style recitation of newfangled-sounding alternative energy sources and technologies. Clean coal! Solar and wind! Switch grass!

Yet few people take the trouble to examine the energy technology field as a whole, comparing a cross-section of future sources across the same set of objective criteria, especially price. The following is reason’s attempt to rectify this gap, giving consumer and policymaker alike a quick guide to alternative energy. (Ronald Bailey, Reason)

Stimulus spending and environmental pressures have made the Japanese producer of atomic reactor parts more than double its forecast for the number of Chinese nuclear plants being built the coming years. (CoP15)

The BBC gave in to a “ludicrous” concern about impartiality when it dropped a day of programmes intended to raise awareness about energy efficiency and climate change, one of Britain’s most senior scientists says.

Lord May of Oxford, a former President of the Royal Society and Government chief scientist, said that the BBC had failed in its public service remit by withdrawing from last year’s Energy Saving Day (E-Day). (Mark Henderson, The Times)

Sir, Lord May of Oxford is misguided (report, Sept 7) when he castigates the BBC for abandoning Planet Relief and for thus not participating in Energy Saving Day (E-Day). For once, Aunty displayed wisdom in grasping that, whatever one’s view of climate-change science, the choices to be made are essentially political and economic, and that these are highly contested, involving adaptation or pseudo-control, punitively high costs, retrogressive and retrospective taxes and near-impossible international agreements.

For many people, ill-judged actions that can mop up billions of pounds for no predictable outcomes are far more frightening than any “global warming”.

Emeritus Professor Philip Stott
Gravesend, Kent (The Times)

We haven’t mentioned Bob May for a while. Here he is, talking to BBC R4’s World at One presenter Martha Kearney today about… oh, you know, everything. [Listen again - UK Only]

In the beginning, there were little groups of hunter-gathering people who didn’t know people from other little groups of hunter gatherers. And we don’t know how these people co-operated, except for being scared by a god. But then a man called Darwin came along and said that the Earth was older than the hunter-gathering god-fearing people said it was. So people stopped being terrified of the god, and therefore stopped co-operating with each other. But now, using special games based on Darwin’s ideas, scientists have worked out that people need to have carrots and sticks to make them co-operate.

In short: No sooner has science proved that religion is nonsense than it proves that we need it after all to save the planet and our own souls. For May, religion is not true, but it is a convenient untruth. He seems to think that religion, the tenets and authority of which science challenged centuries ago, was a good idea because it brought people together so that they obeyed norms. He wants us to believe in a god that he knows doesn’t exist to save us from armageddon, which he knows exists. We need this new religion, because we’re too stupid to behave properly, except through being steered by ‘carrots and sticks’. We’re just a bunch of feckless donkeys.

Is evolutionary theory - the science which played no small part in toppling the illegitimate rule of the church - being used to construct a false religion that coerces us with reward and punishment?

Meanwhile, perhaps a more simple question to answer concerns Bob May and his ilk. Does he need a religion to create the possibility of a cooperative effort to solve a crisis, or does he need a crisis to create the basis for authority? As we argue often here on Climate Resistance, climate politics is prior to the science. Or perhaps that sort of chicken and egg problem is another one for the evolutionary biologists? (Climate Resistance)

The health story for this Labor Day is the health of our labor force. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest employment figures on Friday. The unemployment rate jumped to 9.7% in August — a 26-year high — as payrolls fell by another 216,000 jobs. A total of 14.9 million Americans are now listed as unemployed, with an additional 9.1 million working at part-time jobs rather than the full-time work they want. What does this have to do with health? Let’s look. (Junkfood Science)

NEW YORK - In doctors' offices in the US, skin infections have not become more common since the "superbug" MRSA began showing up in communities.

This finding contrasts with studies indicating that visits to US emergency rooms and all non-hospital-inpatient medical settings for skin infections increased from 1993 to 2005, contemporaneously with the emergence of "community-associated MRSA." (Reuters Health)

PARIS - The French government is looking at ways to plug a gaping hole in its health care budget and may charge patients more for hospital stays, Budget Minister Eric Woerth said on Monday.

France's health system is largely financed by the state and has been hailed as the best in the world by the World Health Organisation. It is also one of the most costly and the government constantly struggles to control spending.

After a 4.4 billion euro ($6.31 billion) shortfall in the health budget in 2008, Woerth said he expected the deficit to hit 10 billion euros this year and 15 billion next, with the economic downturn denting social security contributions. (Reuters)

An essay that appeared in Science magazine back in the 1960's explains clearly and concisely the self-destructive path we're on in our country today.

The essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons", showed how individuals, rationally pursuing their self-interest, could unintentionally destroy their own common existence.

A simple problem is put forth: A common grazing field is available to a community of herders. Everyone brings his or her cows there. Because there is no clear ownership, the only incentive each herder has is to bring all of his cows to graze and consume as much as possible.

With everyone doing it, and no one having any incentive to consider the implications of their behavior beyond consuming as much as possible, the final result is obvious. The field is destroyed.

Only when there is ownership and private property do individuals working in their own self-interest also make everyone else better off. When it's yours and you have responsibility for it, you think about tomorrow and how to make best of use of resources.

Today's equivalent of the common field is what we call the public sector -- government. And our grazers are politicians and interest groups.

Whereas a businessman will be out of business in short order if he delivers a poor product or mismanages his firm, politicians just graze in the public pasture doling out other peoples' resources. (Star Parker, Townhall)

It didn’t take long for tobacco companies to try to evade tough new restrictions on their ability to market to young people. Less than three months after a landmark federal law granted the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate tobacco products, several of the industry’s biggest companies filed suit in tobacco-friendly Kentucky. They contend that the law’s marketing provisions infringe their commercial free-speech rights. (NYT)

Van Jones, the President’s designated “Green Jobs Czar,” resigned his post after his ties to a 9/11 “truther” group and use of a vulgarity to describe Republicans began attracting unwelcome scrutiny. Fair enough. Barack Obama cannot condemn any lack of civility among his political opponents while he harbors a rhetorical bomb-thrower like Jones.

But far more disturbing than the revelations about word choices or conspiracy theories that resulted in his ouster are Jones radical views – views that could not have been unknown to The White House. Simply put, Jones is a Marxist who, by his own admission, intended to use his government job to further his ideological agenda. By installing him in a “czar” position of enormous power – but requiring no formal appointment process or legislative oversight – President Obama has damaged not only himself, but the environmental movement as a whole. (Carol Platt Liebau, Townhall)

GENEVA - The world is waking up to huge economic benefits of investing in nature, from forests to coral reefs, after one of the "great oversights" of the 20th century, the head of the U.N. Environment Program said on Friday.

Achim Steiner told Reuters that governments had long placed too much faith in technology to fix problems such as global warming, water pollution or erosion, instead of looking to natural solutions.

"At the beginning of the 21st century we are being thrown back onto nature because you can't fix all these problems with technology," he said. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS - The United Nations should set up a war chest to help process the billions of dollars poor countries will be paid to slash their greenhouse gas emissions, the European Union has proposed.

The facility would sit separately from an existing "Adaptation Fund," which aims to soften the impact of climate change on crops and water sources, the executive European Commission added in a draft report, seen by Reuters on Monday.

The EU hopes to find unity on its financial support for the developing world in coming weeks to boost the chances of success at international climate talks in December in Copenhagen, where countries aim to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The paper is one of the first attempts to deal with the practicalities of collecting and distributing the billions of dollars poor countries say they will need before signing any such deal. (Reuters)

Climate change is everywhere. Not only is the physical climate changing, but the idea of climate change is now active across the full range of human endeavours. Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one, in the process reshaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth.

I am primarily a climate scientist who has worked with climate data, models and scenarios. But I am now more interested in how we think and talk about climate change, how we use the idea to support various projects, and how – paradoxically – we could use it to make the world a better place. I argue that just as we need to understand the physical changes that are sweeping the planet, we also need to understand climate change as a cultural and psychological phenomenon.

And it is a phenomenon. Just as the transformation of the physical climate is inescapable, so the idea of climate change is now unavoidable. It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.

Yet in each of these spheres the idea of climate change carries quite different meanings and seems to imply different courses of action. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has constructed a powerful scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world’s climate. This is a reality that I believe in. But there is no comparable consensus about what the idea of climate change actually means. If we are to use the idea constructively, we first need new ways of looking at the phenomenon and making sense of it. (Mike Hulme, Resources for a sustainable future)

A controversial tribunal decision that some company practices can discriminate against employees with strongly held views on climate change will be challenged in the courts.

Senior executive Tim Nicholson claimed he was unfairly dismissed by a property investment company because his views on the environment conflicted with other managers' "contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions".

In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a "philosophical belief in climate change", allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs. (The Guardian)

President of the British Science Association, Lord May, says faith groups could lead policing of social behaviour. (Ian Sample, The Guardian)

Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis (Robin McKie, The Observer)

A super typhoon stronger than the deadly Hurricane Katrina that devastated the southern United States in 2005 could hit Japan in the latter half of this century if global warming continues, according to a study by a Japanese research team made available Monday.

Typhoons packing winds of at least 241.2 kph are often called super typhoons, but the one feared by the researchers could blow as strong as 288 kph on the ground, the team from Nagoya University and the Meteorological Research Institute said.

Several super typhoons may also develop between 2074 and 2087 due to a projected 2-degree rise in sea temperatures in the Western Pacific south of Japan, the study showed, based on a scenario drawn up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in which average global temperatures will rise about 3 degrees from preindustrial levels by the end of the century. (Kyodo News)

Climate change is not only about rising temperatures. It may alter the geology of the Earth dramatically, scientists say. (CoP15)

PARIS — Climate change will disrupt Earth's precious ozone layer, boosting ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the deep southern hemisphere and reducing UV in far northern latitudes, a study warned on Sunday.

By century's end, UV levels in Antarctica could rise by up to 20 percent at seasonal peaks while average exposure in northern Scandinavia, Siberia and northern Canada could fall by almost a tenth.

The shift could have worrying impacts on human health, as high exposure to UV is linked to cancer, cataracts and crop damage just as low exposure causes vitamin D insufficiency. (AFP)

The Maldives archipelago, threatened by rising sea levels blamed on climate change, said on Monday it would introduce a new environment tax on all tourists who use its resorts and provide its economic lifeline. (Reuters)

GENEVA - The world can still cap global warming at far lower levels than widely expected if nations "bite the bullet" and slash greenhouse gas emissions, the chairman of the U.N. climate panel says.

Rajendra Pachauri told Reuters that an appeal last month by the world's poorest nations and small island states to cap global warming at a 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) temperature rise over pre-industrial times should be taken "very seriously."

"I don't think it's beyond human capability to achieve," he said in an interview for a Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit on September 8-10.

"But we'd have to prepared to bite the bullet ... It would require major efforts," he said. Pachauri's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore.

A 1.5 Celsius target is far more ambitious than a 2 Celsius rise set by the Group of Eight industrialized nations and major economies such as China and India at a summit in Italy in July. Many climate experts say warming is already set to exceed 2 C. (Reuters)

“Probably,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1957, “we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” Today, however, we have something like an answer: We are living in an age of catastrophic thinking. Our social and cultural discourse on any number of subjects—the environment, the economy, public health, technology—is defined by a vocabulary and a worldview that can only be described as apocalyptic. The world, we are constantly told, is in a state of mortal crisis, and unless we act fast enough to stop it, we are all facing disaster and oblivion. Everything, it seems, is swiftly accelerating toward a terrible end.

While catastrophic thinking has become ubiquitous on any number of issues, it is nowhere more apparent than on the subject of the environment, especially the topic of global warming. Of course, this appears most explicitly among the various groups specifically dedicated to the cause of environmentalism, but the sentiment has already become a worldwide phenomenon. Perhaps its most famous exponent, former United States vice president Al Gore, used explicitly apocalyptic language to describe the problem in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth. (Benjamin Kerstein, Azure Online)

HOLLYWOOD loves a movie full of dire predictions about the end of the Earth. Of course global warming has been all the rage with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth winning an Oscar. Although I did prefer The Day After Tomorrow in which a climatologist, played by Dennis Quad, tried to save his son in New York from an ice age.

There is a new movie due for release on October 18, Not Evil Just Wrong, which explores society’s interest in Armageddon-type scenarios with a particular focus on the cost, and potential costs, of the policies following concerns about DDT and AGW [anthropogenic global warming].

I was lucky enough to be given a sneak preview of the feature length documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney last week.

The movie is an exploration of the fears and aspirations of an ordinary small town American woman – Tiffany McElhany from Vevay – and her quest to get a message to Al Gore. Interwoven with this story are interviews with some of the most famous climate scientists of our time including James Hansen and Richard Lindzen.

Like McAleer and McElhinney’s earlier documentary, Mine Your Own Business, Not Evil Just Wrong is politically incorrect, compelling and spans several continents including Africa while exploring its subject matter with harshness and humour.

Those unfamiliar with the controversies behind the banning of DDT and push to phase out coal as a source of electricity, may find parts of the documentary unbelievable. Hopefully it will move them to follow up with more of their own research. (Jennifer Marohasy)

From the beginning, the premise of man-made or anthropogenic global warming was part of a political movement designed to increase government regulation and to push tax dollars toward special interest groups. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out many years ago, the environmental movement is the new home of socialism, although we’re seeing that philosophy being practiced by many outside the movement in the U.S. government…

In the mid to late 1970s we heard about global cooling and scientists were certain that the next ice age was about to begin. You may not recall this, but the cooling was also blamed on man, but not because of CO2. At that time it was particulate, dust, smoke, etc. that we were putting into the air. It was supposed to be dimming the incoming sunshine leading to colder ground, colder air, more snow and ice and a rapid shift into the next ice age, and the cold winters of the 1960s and 70s were a sure sign that the ice age had begun…not quite. A change to warmer summers and winters began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s, but that didn’t deter the people with a mission to restrict our freedoms, attack capitalism and infuse the American culture with an increasing array of Marxist – Socialist policies.

Climate change and the propaganda supporting it was part of the new “Green Movement”, the next home for the 1960s radicals after the war protests started to fade away in the early 1970s…though the change began on April 22, 1970 during our first “Earth Day”. Not surprisingly, it was a government official that proposed Earth Day and kicked started the environmental movement which has expanded in so many directions today. (Rich Apuzzo, Examiner)

Curbing a string of pollutants other than carbon dioxide, such as methane, would enhance the prospects of a global climate deal and benefit health and other factors as well, UNEP said on Friday. (CoP15)

OUR present approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically, because negotiations to reduce CO2 emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the present approach is also flawed technologically.

Many countries are now setting ambitious carbon-cutting goals ahead of global negotiations in Copenhagen this December to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Let us imagine that the world ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say we decide to reduce CO2 emissions by three-quarters by 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies the technological problem: to meet this goal, non-carbon-based sources of energy would have to be an astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than the level of total global energy consumption was in 2000.

These figures were calculated by economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana of McGill University. Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requires nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking this challenge seriously. If we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near significant enough to make non-carbon-based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness.

In Copenhagen this December, the focus will be on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting emissions are sufficient to achieve the goals.

Politicians will base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly - and dangerously - misplaced. (Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian)

Congress is returning to work after its August recess with two blockbuster issues on its plate, health care reform and climate change, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce Aug. 31.

One of these, the climate change "cap and trade" bill passed by the House of Representatives and now in the Senate, would impose big costs on Alaska, she said.

Climate change may get bogged down, however.

Health care reform will be taken up first, and if Congress gets into extended wrangling over health care in the new few weeks there may not be an appetite to take on a second contentious issue, cap-and-trade, this year, Murkowski said.

"If we get mired down with health care for a couple of months, it may be December before we get to climate change," the senator said. There are further complications is the issue gets pushed into 2010, an election year, she said.

"We're not ready for prime time on this," the senator said. The cap-and-trade bill was rushed out of the House by the Democratic leaders with little debate and the allocations of free carbon credits among various industries as House leaders rushed the bill showed Congress at its logrolling worst, the senator said.

"The cap and trade mechanisms in the House bill are untested and there is great potential for abuse" in the allocation of carbon credits, she said.

"To this point, the allocations went to who was barking the loudest," the senator said. (Alaska Journal of Commerce)

WASHINGTON - Environmentalists hope the push in Congress for climate change legislation is not overwhelmed by the debate dominating Capitol Hill over changing the U.S. healthcare system. But it might be.

Already two months behind schedule and unsure whether enough Democrats will play along, Senate leaders still aim to pass a bill by December when a United Nations summit convenes in Copenhagen to set worldwide goals for reducing carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

But as the debate over healthcare legislation rages and with President Barack Obama due to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to try to rescue the faltering plan, it was unclear whether rattled lawmakers will have the time -- or the inclination -- to take on climate change.

"It's not an impossibility, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk and never has been," said Frank O'Donnell, president of the activist group Clean Air Watch.

The healthcare debate, O'Donnell added, "has basically sucked all the oxygen out of the room." (Reuters)

FOR an organisation that claims to be committed to tackling climate change, Greenpeace seems strangely suspicious of new technologies designed to do just that.

Last week Britain's Royal Society - one of the most prestigious scientific bodies in the world - published a report arguing that it is "feasible" to "engineer the Earth" in order to offset the worst impacts of climate change.

For example, we might inject a swarm of mirrors into space over the next 30 years to deflect some of the sun's rays from the Earth. Or we could build a "space parasol" made of super-fine aluminium mesh to keep our planet cool. Or we might erect giant "CO2 scrubbers" that would clean the Earth's air on a daily basis.

The Royal Society said there are uncertainties about the effectiveness and the costs of such geo-engineering projects. But many of them are "technically possible", and research funding should be made available immediately.

How did Greenpeace react to the report? It rubbished the whole idea. (Brendan O'Neill, The Australian)

JAKARTA - Confusing and conflicting regulations are scaring away investors from Indonesia's fledgling forest carbon credit scheme aimed at curbing deforestation, lawyers said on Monday.

A U.N.-backed scheme called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) could potentially unlock billions of dollars in annual carbon credit sales for developing nations that protect their forests from illegal logging and other threats.

Indonesia in May became the first country to issue a legal framework for REDD, anticipating the scheme's inclusion in a broader U.N. climate pact during a major gathering in Copenhagen this year.

However, project developers will struggle for up to five years to attract necessary volumes of private investment to sustain REDD projects without public funding, said Martijn Wilder, a partner at Baker & McKenzie. (Reuters)

The cause of and the solution to global warming explained by Futurama in this short film. In the style of filmstrips created for classroom presentation. (MilkAndCookies)

There has been a development over the last 10-15 years or so in the scientific peer reviewed literature that is short circuiting the scientific method

What the current publication process has evolved into, at the detriment of proper scientific investigation, are the publication of untested (and often untestable) hypotheses. The fourth step in the scientific method “Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment” is bypassed.

This is a main reason that the policy community is being significantly misinformed about the actual status of our understanding of the climate system and the role of humans within it.

Auroop R. Ganguly, Karsten Steinhaeuser, David J. Erickson, III, Marcia Branstetter, Esther S. Parish, Nagendra Singh, John B. Drake, and Lawrence Bujad, 2009: Higher trends but larger uncertainty and geographic variability in 21st century temperature and heat waves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. www.pnas.org cgidoi 10.1073 pnas.0904495106

“Generating credible climate change and extremes projections remains a high-priority challenge, especially since recent observed emissions are above the worst-case scenario. Bias and uncertainty analyses of ensemble simulations from a global earth systems model show increased warming and more intense heat waves combined with greater uncertainty and large regional variability in the 21st century. Global warming trends are statistically validated across ensembles and investigated at regional scales. Observed heat wave intensities in the current decade are larger than worst-case projections. Model projections are relatively insensitive to initial conditions, while uncertainty bounds obtained by comparison with recent observations are wider than ensemble ranges. Increased trends in temperature and heat waves, concurrent with larger uncertainty and variability, suggest greater urgency and complexity of adaptation or mitigation decisions.”

“Statistically Higher Warming Trends. First, we show that the global average temperatures from the middle to end of the 21st century
are likely to be higher than previously believed …. “

“Here we compare A1FI-driven CCSM 3.0 … model projections and NCEP Reanalysis … observations for 2000–2007, when both are available, and develop grid-based estimates for model bias and standard deviation. We use the results to generate bias-corrected ‘‘most likely’’ projections and corresponding confidence bounds based on three standard deviations at each grid cell. Grid-based decadal averages are calculated for three time periods: The current ‘‘2000’’ decade, the mid-century ‘‘2050’’ decade, and the end-century ‘‘2100.’’

“The globally averaged intensity of heat waves at decadal scales shows that the observed intensities are higher than the worst-case model projections in the current decade, which implies further exacerbation of heat waves compared to what has been already suggested by previous researchers.” [Note: The use of the term "observed" in this sentence is clearly an error as these later decades have not even occurred yet!].

While such studies provide useful exercises on the sensitivity of the model results to different climate forcings, their use to provide definitive forecasts (even as an ensemble of best and worst case scenarios) is misleading policymakers and others on the actual lack of skill in such multi-decadal global climate predictions.

The Gangulya et al 2009 paper, no matter how well intentioned, is yet another case of short circuiting the science. (Climate Science)

HOLDEN, W.Va. — The chief executive of coal mining giant Massey Energy blasted supporters of climate-change legislation and other environmental issues affecting the coal industry at a free Labor Day concert and rally in southern West Virginia.

CEO Don Blankenship said he wanted to show people at the event how government regulation is hurting the coal industry, driving up energy prices and making the country less competitive. (AP)

It’s time for the United States to establish a national climate change policy that ensures substantial reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, while taking every step possible to contain consumer costs.

Yes, consumer protection is an essential component of climate change legislation. In fact, strong consumer protections are crucial to building the public support necessary to sustain U.S. climate policy over the long haul, particularly with so many Americans and businesses focused on the economy.

One big way to moderate electricity price increases in Michigan and around the country is to ensure that utilities — and their customers — don’t have to pay Uncle Sam for emission permits or “allowances.”

While some have proposed that the government auction off allowances and use some of the revenues for tax breaks, we believe Congress should simply leave the money in consumers’ wallets from the beginning. This will help contain costs for customers of all types — large and small, rural, urban and suburban — without compromising environmental goals. We commend the U.S. House of Representatives for adopting this approach and urge the Senate to do the same. Tom Kuhn, FREEP)

Building the gallows on which they'll be hanged... Arguing From the Inside - As new energy policies are hammered out, business leaders are scrambling to make sure they are part of the discussion

Here's a thing you don't see very often: the head of one of the world's dirtiest industries making common cause with climate-change campaigners.

Lars Göran Josefsson is chief executive of Vattenfall AB, Europe's fifth-largest electricity producer. His company is hardly the cleanest on the planet: Four of its plants feature in the dirty 30, a list of Europe's biggest carbon-dioxide emitters, compiled by the European Union's executive branch.

But that hasn't stopped Mr. Josefsson, 58, from becoming one of Europe's most influential voices on global warming. In June he was appointed an adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on energy and climate change. He was also climate adviser to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, during Germany's presidency of the European Union.

For Mr. Josefsson, business is now in a "paradigm shift." For too long, CEOs took a back seat, leaving it to politicians to "design the future," he says. Those days are over. "Business will have to be much more proactive, take much more responsibility for the rules of the game," he says in an interview in Vattenfall's Stockholm headquarters. That's why he has committed Vattenfall to carbon-neutrality by 2050.

Eco-warriors dismiss his rhetoric as "greenwashing." (WSJ)

HOUSTON — The natural gas industry has enjoyed something of a winning streak in recent years. It found gigantic new reserves, low prices are encouraging utilities to substitute gas for coal, and cities are switching to buses fueled by natural gas.

But its luck has run out in Washington, where the industry is having trouble making its case to Congress as it writes an energy bill to tackle global warming.

For all its pronouncements that gas could be used to replace aging, inefficient coal-fired power plants — and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process — lawmakers from coal-producing states appear committed to keeping coal as the nation’s primary producer of power.

Those influential lawmakers, from both parties, say that new technologies under development to capture and bury emissions of coal are a better bet than gas for long-term solutions to climate change. (NYT)

Let me guess... Delta Flies Empty Planes Across Atlantic - Environmental campaigners attack Delta Air Lines over 'ghost' flights to meet Australian quarantine regulations

A major US airline has been attacked by environmental campaigners for flying empty planes across the Atlantic to be disinfected.

Delta Air Lines has admitted running "ghost" flights from the US to Heathrow to meet Australian quarantine regulations. Authorities in Australia require inbound aeroplanes to be sprayed with insecticide to ward off malaria and dengue fever. Delta is not allowed to carry out the treatment in the US and the nearest airport with facilities sanctioned by the Australian quarantine and inspection service (AQIS) is Heathrow, requiring the carrier to make a number of trips to the airport over the past two months.

A Delta spokeswoman said: "Materials used for this process are approved and available for use in the United States; however, according to US regulations, these treatments must be carried out at designated AQIS locations outside the United States." (Buzzle)

The UK is facing a tipping point over the next few years in its ability to generate enough power to satisfy an ever-increasing demand. (Daily Telegraph)

The next generation of nuclear reactors is on its way, and supporters say they will be safer, cheaper and more efficient than current plants. Here's a look at what's coming -- and when. (WSJ)

Massive inventory buildup and Chinese competition could put half of all solar manufacturers out of business next year, according to a market research firm.

The report from The Information Network said inventory is averaging 122 days in 2009 versus 71 days in 2008.

Further, it reports that production has dropped to 27.9 percent of potential capacity in 2009 from 48 percent in 2008.

"As many as 50 percent of the more than 200 solar manufacturers, mired in red ink with current selling prices above $2 per watt, may not survive," the report said. Making matters worse, lower cost products from China are projected to drop to below $1 per watt in 2010 and 50 cents in 2011.

A number of solar panel manufacturers have reported losses in recent weeks including Energy Conversion Devices Inc., JA Solar, LDK Solar Co., Q-Cells, ReneSola Ltd., Solar Power Inc., and Yingli Green Energy Holding Co. Ltd. (San Jose Business Journal)

The combination of electric motors and diesel engines has worked well in locomotives and heavy trucks for years, but carmakers haven't been successful in getting beyond the concept car stage for light duty vehicles. Five years after I started writing about the potential for diesel hybrids, the passenger vehicle market is still relatively quiet -- but that at last may change. (John Gartner, Reuters)

The flu season has barely begun and yet the panic is already in full swing with 186,933 media stories about H1N1 and 47,159 news stories about the swine flu currently at Google News.* Do you know what is missing among the widespread pandemic alarm in the media and coming from government agencies, pharmaceutical and other stakeholders?

The scientific evidence being reported by medical professionals and in the medical literature.

The September 3 issue of the British Medical Journal published an analysis from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) about how public health responses to flu pandemics have not followed the scientific evidence and that public strategies, which are based on catastrophic epidemic scenarios, risk doing more harm than good.

BMJ even sent out an EurekaAlert press release — Eureka is the global news service provider of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that goes to mainstream media reporters and freelancers and even makes the original studies available to them free. Usually, stories written for reporters on Eureka are plastered across the media but a diligent search for this one found only three articles even mentioning it on Google News, among more than a quarter million news stories about the flu pandemic. (Junkfood Science)

On August 14th, mainstream media was reporting that osteoporosis-linked fractures have dramatically increased over the past decade. Among 723 news stories, not one questioned the study behind the news. The public not only lost an opportunity to learn the facts, but a valuable take-home lesson.

According to a syndicated Reuters Health story, the number of Americans hospitalized for osteoporosis-related fractures and other injuries have increased 55 percent since 1995, accounting for 254,000 hospitalizations in 2006. According to a study by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), such hospitalization rates had been 55/100,000 people in 1995 and 85/100,000 in 2006. "This is a fairly alarming increase," Anne Elixhauser, Ph.D., a social science analyst with the AHRQ, was quoted saying.

Most of the osteoporosis-related hospitalizations were among older women, with 89 percent of the patients women and 90 percent over age 65. The news article negated aging of the population as fully accounting for the increase, however, and instead suggested that lack of exercise and inadequate calcium and vitamin D intake, as well as medications to treat high blood pressure, such as diuretics, were the “culprits.”

Professor Elixhauser said everyone should start thinking about osteoporosis prevention and adopt healthy lifestyles, eating more calcium and vitamin D in foods, and using supplements as necessary, exercising, not smoking and drinking only in moderation. “Doing so may also make a difference in terms of healthcare dollars,” the story said, adding that osteoporosis-related injuries carried a price tag of $2.4 billion in hospital costs in 2006.

Notice how readers were led to view the elderly victims as being to blame for costing society billions of dollars and to believe that, had the women adopted healthy diets and lifestyles, they could have prevented their problems? (Junkfood Science)

NANTUCKET, Mass. — In the annals of animals linked to human disease, there is surely a place for Old Buck of Nantucket.

Spotted in 1922 deer-paddling in the ocean, he was scooped up by a fishing sloop and brought to Nantucket, an island then without a single deer. And since the animal, nicknamed Old Buck, was single, Nantucket took pity on him. With help from a summer resident, a diplomat who had helped create the League of Nations, two does were imported from Michigan in 1926, greeted at the wharf by a cheering crowd.

Nantucket became so sweet on its deer that when Old Buck was killed by a car in 1932, a newspaper editorialized: “he deserved to live to a good old age, that he might see his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and a lot more grand progeny, thrive happily in the swamps and moors of Nantucket.”

Now that progeny, island-bound with no apparent swimmers among them, is the focus of Nantucket’s attempt to grapple with diseases caused by ticks that feed on deer blood. Not just the familiar Lyme disease but also babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, which are less common, can be debilitating or fatal.

Last year, Nantucket had 411 laboratory-confirmed cases of tick diseases, up from 257 in 2007. And health officials say some cases are not reported, some Lyme disease diagnoses are made clinically, and some visitors’ ailments are diagnosed off-island.

“We recognize that it’s a big problem here,” said Michael Kopko, chairman of the Nantucket Board of Selectmen, whose wife and daughter have had tick illnesses. “Those of us who live here all know someone or are related to someone or have ourselves had a tick-borne disease.”

After prodding from summer residents, Mr. Kopko said, the town appointed a committee, which will make recommendations this fall. It is looking at options including trimming brush in backyards and installing feeders that coat deer with insecticide.

Most controversial is whether to allow more deer hunting. (NYT)

Arnie might want to rethink this one. In a classic case of a perverse incentive, California state law actually encourages homeowners to build in brushy canyons prone to massive wildfires like the "Station fire", which burned over 350,000 hectares and destroyed dozens of homes near Los Angeles this month.

In 1968, the state legislature mandated that every property owner must be able to buy affordable fire insurance, no matter how risky their location. An industry-sponsored syndicate, the California Fair Plan, serves as insurer of last resort for those deemed too high-risk for conventional fire insurance. Some 17,400 owners of brushland property now obtain insurance through this route, says Mike Harris, a spokesman for the plan.

That may be a bad idea, because coastal brushland, or chaparral, is naturally prone to infrequent but very intense fires. Unlike in forest, where planned fires can clear out dead wood and keep wildfires small, fire managers can do little to prevent massive fires in chaparral. (New Scientist)

Right on cue, CBS news 60 minutes is expected link the recent California fires to “global warming”. Never mind that the fire was caused by arson, or that the area hadn’t burned in 40-60 years, leading up to a collection of dry dead underbrush which is part of the natural fire cycle. Never mind that La Nina made for a dry couple of years exacerbating the problem. Never mind that we get fires in California about this time every year. No, its the “Age of Megafires”:

UPDATE: WUWT reader Jason writes to tell us that this story is a rerun, and originally aired in 2007. See it here. I’ll bet the intro will mention the California fires though. They may have even “freshened up” the report a bit for the current situation.

I wonder if CBS borrowed the title from the Christian Science Monitor 2007 report?

Here is a top 20 report from CDF, note that they poo-poo 1932. Note also that there were quite a number of 100,00+ acre fires more than 10 years ago, directly contradicting the interview in the CBS trailer. (WUWT)

COULD wind farms hasten the local extinction of an endangered vulture in southern Spain?

Studies have so far focused on the short-term effects of wind turbines, looking at the number of bird collisions per turbine per year. Martina Carrete of the Doñana Biological Station in Seville and colleagues took a new approach. They recorded the number of Egyptian vulture carcasses with collision injuries found around 675 wind turbines in southern Spain between 2004 to 2008. They then plugged this information and data on wind turbine locations and vulture nesting sites across Spain into a computer model to predict what will happen to the entire population of Spanish birds over the next 100 years. The results suggest that if the number of wind turbines stays the same as it is today, the population will go extinct 10 years sooner than if there were no wind farms. (New Scientist)

WITH "hormone-free", "cage-free" and "antibiotic-free" becoming common labels on our supermarket shelves, might "pain-free" be the next sticker slapped onto a rump roast?

As unlikely as that may seem, progress in neuroscience and genetics in recent years makes it a very real possibility. In fact, according to one philosopher, we have an ethical duty to consider the option.

"If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused," says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative. (New Scientist)

Scientists have genetically engineered several biofortified food plants to tackle a scourge of developing countries—micronutrient malnutrition. The crops have yet to be planted on a wide scale, but that may be about to change. (The Scientist)

BRUSSELS (IDN) - Rich industrialised countries owe a ‘climate debt’ for causing global warming that is mostly impacting the poor and vulnerable of the world. This view is gaining ground as the international community heads for the United Nations climate change conference Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen.

The concept of a debt related to climate change has been advanced by Bolivia and other countries in several rounds of United Nations climate negotiations. It is finding support of an increasing number of heads of state, government ministers, officials, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements -- representing indigenous peoples, development and gender activists, organised labour – as well as environmental and social justice groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America.

The climate debt of developed countries comprises ‘emissions debt’ and ‘adaptation debt’. They have run up an emissions debt to developing countries for over-using and substantially diminishing the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (GHGs), denying it to the developing countries that most need it in the course of their development.

The industrialised nations have also accumulated an adaptation debt to developing countries for the adverse effects of excessive GHG emissions contributing to the escalating losses, damages and lost development opportunities confronting developing countries. (IDN-InDepthNews Service)

In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the German government's climate protection adviser, argues that drastic measures must be taken in order to prevent a catastrophe. He is proposing the creation of a CO2 budget for every person on the planet, regardless whether they live in Berlin or Beijing. (Der Spiegel)

In his previous life, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber used to be a fairly good theoretical physicist. For example, he would solve the Schrödinger equation with an almost periodic potential in 1983. He has spent a year or so as a postdoc at KITP in Santa Barbara (1981-82).

But the times have changed. For a couple of years, he has been the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main German government's climate protection adviser. What he has just said for Spiegel, in

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."

Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought. (Fred Pearce, New Scientist)

... For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We've been told to trust the computer models -- the models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I've trusted the scientists telling me this.

Below you'll find the computer model forecasts for the 21st century temperatures from the most recent IPCC summary for policymakers, which call for a 1.8°C to 3.8°C rise in global temperatures by 2100:

It seems pretty clear that the models forecast a steady upward trend in global temperatures as long as carbon dioxide levels rise. (Which they have). Yet according to satellite and surface temperature measurements the global average temperature has essentially remained flat for the last 12 years. This strikes me as somewhat curious.

When An Inconvenient Truth came out I believed the movie to be scientifically accurate. Carbon dioxide levels were rising and so were temperatures. And hurricane activity, especially after the disastrous 2005 season, was out of control.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the world: hurricane activity on the global scale is near historical lows. And the Earth seems to have, at least temporarily, stopped warming.

This, despite the fact that some of the country's leading climate scientists say there is unequivocally a link between major hurricanes and climate change. And despite the fact that other leading climate scientists predicted 2009 or 2010 will go down as the warmest year in recorded history. Either prediction, if true, would be alarming.

If we can't have confidence in the short-term prognosis for climate change, how can we have full confidence in the long-term prognosis?

But I am confused. Four years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli. Humans were unquestionably warming the climate and changing the planet forever through their emissions of carbon dioxide.

Uncertainties like: maybe there isn't a linear relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, and maybe the planet will cool for a couple of decades even as carbon dioxide emissions accelerate.

For the last few years some scientists and environmentalists have been telling us a lot about what "will" happen in the future if carbon dioxide emissions continue unabated. It perhaps would have been a lot better if they talked about what "may" happen. (SciGuy, Houston Chronicle)

In a victory for Republicans and the Obama administration’s conservative critics, Van Jones resigned as the White House’s environmental jobs “czar” on Saturday.

Controversy over Mr. Jones’s past comments and affiliations has slowly escalated over several weeks, erupting on Friday with calls for his resignation.

Appointed as a special adviser for “green jobs” by President Obama, Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.” (NYT)

The Carbon Sense Coalition based in Australia today accused western politicians of creating a man-made disaster by destroying the ability of the world to cope with real natural disasters.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that an invading enemy could hardly do more damage to our ability to cope with future natural disasters than we are inflicting on ourselves.

Forbes continued:

“We are being forced to waste our savings and investment capital on futile political gestures such as the Cap-n-Tax Schemes, on horrendously expensive and wasteful ideas like carbon capture and burial, and on costly and totally inadequate and unreliable energy sources such as solar and wind. And in Australia, a leading world food supplier, our policies on woody weeds, water conservation, carbon forests and bio-fuels are deviously destroying our ability to produce food.

“All of this stupidity is based on two fallacies. Firstly, the Cap-n-Tax Schemes rely on some totally unproven theory that man can control the climate. Secondly, the urgency is justified by doomsday global warming forecasts from computer models that have never produced a correct forecast for even two years ahead, let alone for the 50-100 years they are projecting.

“Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on computer models, international junkets and climate “research”, not one of the computer models or greenhouse theories predicted the last 10 years of global cooling in the face of rising carbon dioxide levels.

“The world has always suffered from recurring natural disasters such as droughts, floods, bush fires, water shortages and crop failures. But never before have we faced a man-made energy and food disaster with the destructive potential of the current policies.

“Only rich societies with plenty of tools, machinery, food stocks and savings can cope with natural disasters. When disaster strikes it is not Cuba, Zimbabwe, Somalia or Bangladesh who send ships, helicopters, trucks, generators, refrigerators, medical supplies, tents, manpower and food to the stricken area. In our corner of the world, what the refugees see arriving are US naval helicopters, Canadian fire fighters, Australian aid workers or bags of rice from Japan.

“In the past, government policies have always encouraged Australians to save their money and invest it in efficient machinery, tools, food capability and energy sources. Such a policy best equips us to be able to cope with whatever disaster the future may hold.

“A study of climate history shows clearly that we are at least as likely to face global cooling with destructive frosts, snow, drought and crop failures, as the opposite and more benign scenario of global warming, with more precipitation and better plant growth.

“If the current cooling trend continues or accelerates, the world will need every bit of food and energy we can produce. Money wasted on futile attempts to predict and control future climate would be better spent on improving our mines factories and farms, and building machinery, tools, roads, dams, railways, airstrips, helicopters and efficient modern power stations.

“Our ancestors coped with mammoth ice ages, droughts which depopulated whole countries, spreading deserts of Saharan magnitude and floods of biblical proportions. Those who sat and sacrificed their substance on fantasies such as “Global Warming” perished and left no descendants. Those with the sense to adapt to the changed climates by migration, new food sources, better technology and more productive lifestyles survived.

“None of our ancestors were led to survival by high priests in green robes with computer models chanting anti-energy and anti-food slogans.

“Never before have we seen a whole generation of western leaders in politics, media, education, academia and big business so cushioned by prosperity, and so mesmerised by pagan nature-worship that they have lost sight of what created and maintains human existence.

Viv Forbes
info@carbon-sense.com
www.carbon-sense.com

Ralph Alexander’s new book is a timely reminder that in spite of all the shrieking, man-made carbon dioxide might not be the showstopper it is portrayed to be.

When we write about environmental funds that harp on about global warming, we are talking to fund managers and not qualified scientists. Many of these financiers declare an abhorrence of global warming -- possibly because it is a theme around which a profitable product can be draped. Saying that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming is known to even infants. It's a fact, isn't it? If you don't agree with it, you are a pariah. "Oh, so you like global warming do you?"

However, many scientists, none of whom are anti-Mother Earth, say this hypothesis is not true, and it's a fake science that has been hardwired into our brains by a programme of propaganda worthy of Josef Goebbels.

The conclusions are belying the evidence according to scientist Ralph Alexander (brother of Jakarta-based private equity financier Patrick Alexander). He has written a book entitled Global Warming False Alarm (sub-titled 'The bad science behind the United Nations' assertion that man-made CO2 causes global warming').

He casts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the problem. He points out that were the IPCC an organisation of scientists, its pronouncements might be more believable, but it includes an army of budget-seeking ministers, bureaucrats and government representatives (all presumably getting high taxpayer funded wages and keen for first class flights to the next climate change summit), who are hell-bent on validating the original hypothesis that global warming is man-made.

It has become political, not because the thesis is necessarily true, but because politicians love causes and power, and then being able to tax people to support them. (Though you have to wonder how much of the green taxes they charge go to cleaning up the planet, compared to cleaning up their banking systems and paying their political expenses.) (Simon Osborne, Asian Investor)

It was probably only a matter of time, but the oil lobby has taken a page from the anti-health-care-reform manual in an effort to drum up opposition to climate change legislation in Congress. Behind the overall effort — billed, naturally, as a grass-roots citizen movement — lie the string-pullers at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade organization and a wily, well-funded veteran of the legislative wars. (NYT)

SYDNEY - Australians Lesley and Doug McGrath have for decades battled ocean swells that have eaten away at the backyard of their multi-million dollar Sydney home.

They bought an old beach shack on Collaroy Beach in 1976 and replaced it with a two storey home anchored to the land by 12 meter (35 feet) long piers, a concrete slab, and an underground seawall of giant boulders.

Even with all that protection, the fury of the ocean has at times torn up their backyard, large chunks of prime real estate disappearing under waves. With scientists predicting a 90cm (3 feet) sea level rise in Sydney by 2050 due to climate change, the house itself may yet be in danger.

The McGrath home is one of an estimated 700,000 plus coastal properties in Australia alone that are threatened by rising seas.

Around the world, owners of prized seaside properties face the prospect of not just losing their homes but receiving no compensation as insurance policies may not cover climate change losses in the future. (Reuters)

If you like a tasty slab of meat, make sure you place your orders soon. Pork chops will become soggier and paler as the world warms, say veterinary scientists, and steaks could become blander, leaner, darker and more prone to spoilage.

This is all because the quality of our meat depends on whether or not animals experience heat stress during transport to the abattoir. (New Scientist)

Countries could speed up their action against climate change if they tackled air pollution as well as carbon dioxide emissions, the UN Environment Program says.

UNEP executive director Achim Steiner says there's strong evidence that the world's climate is changing faster than initially expected, adding to the urgency for concrete measures against global warming.

"It is... becoming clear that the world must also deploy all available means to combat climate change," Steiner said on Friday.

"At this critical juncture, every transformative measure and no substance contributing to climate change should be overlooked." (AFP)

Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, said religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.

Speaking on the eve of the association’s annual conference, the committed atheist said he was worried the world was on a “calamitous trajectory” brought on by its failure to co-ordinate measures against global warming.

He said that no country was prepared to take the lead and a “punisher” was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken.

The former Government chief scientific advisor said in the past that was God and it might be time again for religion to fill the gap. (Daily Telegraph)

Greenhouse gas emissions reportedly fell about 4 per cent across Australia's eastern states over the winter.

The Climate Group's Greenhouse Indicator Report has found a drop of more than 3 million tonnes compared with the same period last year.

The figure is the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road for the season.

The Climate Group's Australian director, Rupert Posner, says the warmer conditions over winter reduced demand for fuel.

"We haven't had our heaters on quite as much, and that's had a substantial impact on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

"The downturn or the less robust economy has probably stopped emissions growth being much higher than they would have been otherwise as well." (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

If a traveler on Continental Airlines pays an optional $5 surcharge to plant a tree as a “carbon offset” how much difference will it make to the planet? Traveling Americans are paying millions of dollars to plant hundreds of thousands of additional trees. Many of these new trees are being planted in the tropics; where tree-planting does the most good in cooling the earth.

It seems a well-intended way to spend the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger. But is it the best way to make a difference? The World Agroforestry Centre has just discovered that the earth has billions more trees then we knew about - so how much good will it do for the Americans to finance the planting of a few million more?

The Agroforestry Center used detailed satellite imagery to survey a billion hectares of the farmlands around the world - about half the cropland total. To their surprise, they found that about half the farmland surveyed contained at least 10 percent tree cover. Since a hectare is about the size of two football fields, the “end zones of a billion football fields” are sustaining many billions of trees.

This tree-rich farmland is fabulous news for the planet: the trees not only prevent soil erosion and fertilize the fields with extra nitrogen, but their harvests offer the farmers fruits, nuts, fodder for livestock, timber, fuel wood, medicines and such cash crops as coffee, rubber, nuts, gums and resins.

However, trees don’t do nearly as much to combat global warming as most of us think. Trees planted north of Florida won’t cool the earth. Above the Canadian border they absorb enough extra heat to warm the planet. Ditto for trees planted south of the Amazon rain forest. Tropical trees supposedly cool the earth by about 0.7 degree C. But the trees in the Amazon are already cooling that region, which in any case is the most-forested part of the earth. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are tree-rich too. (Dennis T. Avery, American Daily)

“Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change,” President Obama has asserted. “We will make it clear that America is ready to lead.”

The President and Al Gore are certainly ready to lead. But how many will follow?

Even in America, and certainly on the world stage, the two increasingly look like Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. As they tilt for windmills, and against a “monstrous giant of infamous repute” – climate disasters conjured up by computer models and Hollywood special effects masters – their erstwhile followers are making politically correct noises, but running for the hills. (Paul Driessen, Townhall)

Japan's incoming prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has pledged that his government is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, despite growing opposition from the business community. (Daily Telegraph)

TOKYO - The greenhouse gas emissions target for 2020 set by Japan's incoming Democratic Party government is based on the premise that there will be an international agreement including China and India, a party executive said on Friday.

The party, promising a more aggressive green policy than the outgoing government, has called for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, although the target faces resistance from industries.

"This is not something Japan will do on its own," party secretary-general Katsuya Okada said in an interview with Reuters. "The premise is an agreement that includes other countries such as China and India." (Reuters)

According to The Times of India, a draft paper by ministers from the world's largest economies (G-20) meeting today aims at committing major developing countries to impose carbon taxation. (CoP15)

LONDON - Differences between rich and developing countries prevented G20 finance ministers from agreeing measures on Saturday to curb global warming, casting more doubt on U.N. efforts to agree a new climate treaty.

Industrialized nations sought progress on climate change financing at a meeting of G20 finance ministers but met resistance from emerging nations including China and India, who fear the proposals could stifle their economic growth, two G20 sources said. (Reuters)

Finance ministers from the Group of Twenty were unable to reach a common stance on climate change funding ahead of US summit on September 24-25. (CoP15)

Should the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change fail to agree this December, it could have severe harmful effects on international trade, warns the World Trade Organisation chief. (CoP15)

BEIJING -- The United States and China are likely to sign a new bilateral agreement to combat climate change during President Barack Obama's visit to Beijing in November, Washington senator Maria Cantwell said on Friday.

Cantwell, who is in Beijing to discuss clean energy and intellectual property issues with Chinese officials, said a deal between the world's two biggest CO2 polluters would also help build global confidence in the efforts to curb global warming.

"If you are producing 40 percent of emissions - which is what China and the United States are together - what a legacy, and what a great relationship you could create by saying that's what these two great countries stepped up to do," she told reporters at a briefing. (Reuters)

IT defeated Napoleon and Hitler, but the legendary Russian winter is facing a formidable new challenge from the Mayor of Moscow, who wants to stop it from snowing.

Yuri Luzhkov has said that snow should be banished from Moscow in winter to save money and improve life in the city. He claimed that farmers outside the capital would enjoy more abundant harvests if his cloud-seeding program was adopted.

Mr Luzhkov noted that city authorities already used such techniques to break up rain clouds and guarantee good weather on important public holidays, such as the annual May 9 parade celebrating victory in World War II.

"Why don't we keep this snow outside the Moscow city limits?" he said. "For the countryside, this means more moisture and bigger harvests. And for us, less snow."

A snowless Moscow would be hard to imagine for anyone raised on romantic images of fur-clad Russians in winter-white landscapes. Mr Luzhkov, however, has had a habit of getting his way in Moscow as mayor since 1992.

Russian newspapers reported that his idea had provoked panic among residents in outlying regions, worried that they would be flooded out of their homes. Vladimir Litvishkov, a land management official, told reporters: "On those holidays when they clear the clouds over Moscow the surplus precipitation becomes a problem for us."

A program to manage the weather would cost only a third of the amount spent on snowploughs and round-the-clock clearance operations. City authorities send 2500 snowploughs into action to clear snow, and employ an army of 50,000 workers to clear Moscow's streets and pavements.

As many as a dozen cargo aircraft are sent into the skies over Moscow before major public events, scattering silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder into rain clouds to encourage precipitation. However, scientists warned that cloud-seeding throughout the winter could have serious environmental consequences. (The Times)

It has been awhile since I’ve looked at the Ap Index. The last time was April of 2009.

From the data provided by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) you can see just how little Ap magnetic activity there has been since. Here’s my graph from September 2009 SWPC Ap data:

Click for a larger image

For a longer perspective, David Archibald, has a graph of the Ap Index back to 1932. The solar average geomagnetic planetary index, in Dec 2008, Ap was at its lowest level in 75 years:

Click for a larger image – I’ve added some annotation to the graph provided by Archibald to point out areas of interest and to clarify some aspects of it for the novice reader.

The last time the Ap index was this low was 1933. The December 2008 Ap value of 2,, has never been this low. (Note: Leif Svalgaard contends this value is erroneous, and that 4.2 is the correct value – either way, it is still lower than 1933) Further, the trend from October 2005 continues to remain low, though some signs of a slight rebound are showing.

This Ap index is a proxy that tells us that the sun is now quite inactive, and the other indices of sunspot index and 10.7 radio flux also confirm this. The sun is in a full blown funk, and your guess is as good as mine as to when it might pull out of it. So far, predictions by NOAA’s SWPC and NASA’s Hathaway have not been near the reality that is being measured.

As Leif Svalgaard points out, Ap is just one of several indices that describe geomagnetic activity. There are several others [aa, am, IHV, ...] that go much further back in time [to the 1840s]. You can get more info from:

For those that follow the sunspot number (SSN) I’ve graphed the Ap and SSN together. As you can see, we’ve been in a reduced state of solar activity now for quite some time. It has been almost 4 years since the prominent drop in Ap in October 2005. SSN mirrors the decline of the Ap index since then.

Click for a larger image

As many regular readers know, I’ve pointed out several times the incident of the abrupt and sustained lowering of the Ap Index which occurred in October 2005. The abrupt step change seemed (to me) to be out of place with the data, and since then the data seems less “active”, with reduced amplitudes. And then we have the fact that the sun seems to have reestablished at a lower plateau of the Ap index after that October 2005 step change and has not recovered now in almost 4 years. It seems to me to be a noteworthy event.

UPDATE: Thanks to Leif Svalgaard, we have a more extensive and “official” Ap dataset (NOAA’s SWPC has issues, see comments) that I’ve plotted below. The step change in October 2005 is still visible and the value of 3.9 that occurred in April of this year is the lowest for the entire dataset.

Click for a larger image

And I’ve also plotted the 1991 to present data from BGS/Svalgaard to compare against the NOAA SWPC data:

Click for a larger image (WUWT)

The Arctic is experiencing its warmest temperatures in 2,000 years, even though it should be cooling because of changes in the Earth's orbit that cause the region to get less direct sunlight. (CoP15)

There new articles that claim the Arctic is rapidly warming. These articles are an excellent examples of the cherrypicking of particular published papers to promote the very narrow perspective of the journalists.

“The most recent 10-year interval, 1999-2008, was the warmest of the last 2,000 years in the Arctic, according to the researchers led by Darrell S. Kaufman, a professor of geology and environmental science at Northern Arizona University.

Summer temperatures in the Arctic averaged 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) warmer than would have been expected if the cooling had continued, the researchers said.

The finding adds fuel to the debate over a House-passed climate bill now pending in the Senate. The administration-backed measure would impose the first limits on greenhouse gases and eventually would lead to an 80 percent reduction by putting a price on each ton of climate-altering pollution.”

Revkin reinforces this extreme view in his September 3 2009 article with his figure of 2000 years of Arctic surface temperatures, with each decade having the same temporal resolution as the last 10 years.

The publication of these news articles are clearly meant to influence the political process, as evident in the last paragraph, where Schmid writes “The finding adds fuel to the debate over a House-passed climate bill now pending in the Senate.”

The documentation of their biased reporting is easy to show. For example, they do not report on observational data which does not show this rapid recent warming; e.g. see that the current high latitude temperatures are close to the longer term average since 1958

There are also peer reviewed papers which show that the Schmid and Revkin articles are biased; e. g. see

i) the areal coverage of the coldest middle tropospheric temperatures (below -40C) have not changed radically as shown in the Revkin figure; see

ii) there is a warm bias in the Arctic surface temperature measurements when they are used to characterize deeper atmospheric warming; see

At least the news Editors of the newspapers are starting to recognize that these journalists are presenting slanted news. The Schmid article appeared only on page 12 of my local newspaper. (Climate Science)

Click for a larger image

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) recently added the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) Ocean Heat Content (OHC) dataset to their Climate Explorer website, allowing users to download data based on user-defined global coordinates.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
This OHC dataset was presented in the Levitus et al (2009) paper “Global ocean heat content(1955-2008) in light of recent instrumentation problems” [GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L07608, doi:10.1029/2008GL037155, 2009]
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf

There are differences in the presentation of the data. The NODC illustrates their OHC data in 10^22 Joules, but KNMI presents the data on an area-averaged basis, in units of Gigajoules (10^9 Joules) per square meter. The data is the same; the units in which the data is presented are different. Also, the NODC provides the data on a quarterly basis; that is, the data is grouped in three-month averages. KNMI presents the NODC OHC data on a monthly basis by listing the quarterly data for each of the three months. This is why the OHC data appears to be squared off in the graphs of monthly raw data. This can be seen in Figure 1.

http://i32.tinypic.com/29de5ow.png
Figure 1

Figure 1 is a comparison graph of the Global OHC anomaly data (NODC), scaled NINO3.4 SST Anomalies (HADISST), and scaled Sato Index (GISS) data. This is the same format used in the graphs of the subsets illustrated in this post. The NINO3.4 SST anomalies are used to illustrate the timing of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. The Sato Index of Mean Optical Thickness at 500nm are provided to illustrate the timing of explosive volcanic eruptions. I’ve also smoothed the data for each OHC anomaly subset with a 13-month running-average filter, Figure 2. As you will see later, some of the subsets are noisy in their raw form.

http://i32.tinypic.com/sno57l.png
Figure 2

In the following, I’ve provided links to the graphs of the raw data, for those who are interested in seeing it in that form, but I have only posted the graphs of the data smoothed with a 13-month running-average filter. It’s much easier to see the step changes when the data is in that form.

The Tropical Pacific OHC anomaly data is illustrated in Figure 3. A number of things to note: The tropical Pacific OHC anomalies fall during El Nino events, but then recharge during the La Nina. For the most part, when the El Nino events occur at the same time as volcanic eruptions, the recharge does not return the OHC anomalies to the value they were at before the El Nino, but if the El Nino occurs without the influence of a volcanic eruption, the La Nina recharges the Tropical Pacific OHC anomalies to the pre-El Nino level. And it does it quickly. Note also how the 1972/73 El Nino event causes an upward step in the OHC anomalies of the Tropical Pacific. The OHC anomalies then decrease gradually, being influenced by the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991, until they rise suddenly in 1995. In an earlier post, I illustrated how a shift in Tropical Pacific Total Cloud Amount may have caused the 1995 rise in Tropical Pacific OHC, providing fuel for the 1997/98 El Nino. Refer to my post Did A Decrease In Total Cloud Amount Fuel The 1997/98 El Nino?

http://i25.tinypic.com/wrz71x.png
Figure 3

However, the Tropical Indian Ocean OHC anomaly data reveals a sudden decline in 1995. Did a shift of warm water from the Tropical Indian Ocean to the Tropical Pacific also fuel the 1997/98 El Nino? I’ll investigate this in a future post. Note how the Tropical Indian Ocean OHC anomalies correlate with NINO3.4 SST anomalies over a large portion of the term of the data, but after 1995, the amplitude of the variations changes drastically.

http://i25.tinypic.com/atkaa8.png
Figure 4

In Figure 5, I’ve combined the OHC anomaly data for the Tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. The OHC anomaly data for this subset follows the base of the NINO3.4 SST anomalies remarkably well. The OHC anomalies of the Tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans follow the rise in NINO3.4 SST anomalies after the 1972/73 and 1997/98 El Nino events. In other words, like the Tropical Pacific, there also appears to be a 25-year decay after the upward step from the 1972/73 El Nino (also influenced by the 1982 and 1991 volcanic eruptions), until the 1997/98 El Nino causes another upward step.

http://i26.tinypic.com/2j60dfp.png
Figure 5

The step changes in the Tropical Atlantic OHC anomalies are obvious. The first occurred three years after the peak of 1972/73 El Nino, as the NINO3.4 SST anomalies rose from the secondary minimum of the two-year La Nina event. The same thing occurred with the next significant El Nino that was strong enough to generate a La Nina that lasted through two ENSO seasons, and that was the 1997/98 El Nino. Note also how the OHC anomalies of the Tropical Atlantic have been dropping quickly since 2005. Click on the link to the raw data (Figure 6 Raw) to see just how precipitous that drop has been in recent years.

http://i28.tinypic.com/1jnp87.png
Figure 6

The North Pacific OHC anomalies are like no other OHC subset. In 1967, there was a sudden drop in the North Pacific OHC anomalies. Twenty plus years later North Pacific OHC anomalies rebounded. I’ll have to investigate this dataset further in a later post, to try to isolate where the majority of that variability takes place.

http://i28.tinypic.com/f56pfm.png
Figure 7

As illustrated in Figure 8, the South Pacific OHC anomalies show a sharp upward step change following the 1997/98 El Nino. Between 1971 and 1996, the OHC anomalies oscillate at or near 0 GJ/sq meter. The cause of the small rise between the 1960s and 1970 is elusive, but it’s not a significant rise compared to the upward step after the 1997/98 El Nino.

http://i26.tinypic.com/xuhkn.png
Figure 8

The South Indian Ocean OHC anomaly data, Figure 9, shows a decrease from 1955 until the late 1960s. Then the 1968/69/70 El Nino caused a minor rise in OHC anomalies. This was followed by a major upward step from the 1972/73 El Nino. OHC anomalies in the South Indian Ocean remained relatively flat until the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, when the OHC anomalies dipped. The upward step change after the 1997/98 El Nino is hard to miss. The decay until 2006 almost returned the South Indian Ocean OHC anomalies to the pre-1997/98 values, but the El Nino of 2006/07 bumped it back up again.

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Figure 9

The North Atlantic OHC anomaly data, Figure 10, with its gradual climb, is clearly dominated by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The impacts of ENSO events are visible, however. In a future post, I may detrend the North Atlantic OHC anomaly data to emphasize the ENSO impacts on this dataset.

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Figure 10

There is a clear step change in the South Atlantic OHC anomaly data, Figure 11, following the 1972/73 El Nino. In this case, however, the response appears to be lagged an extra couple of years. The response is so long, it appears to result from the lesser El Nino of 1976/77. The South Atlantic OHC anomalies remain relatively flat until they appear to respond to the 1997/98 El Nino with an upward step that starts again many years after the peak of the El Nino. Why so long?

http://i30.tinypic.com/2n9xsv6.png
Figure 11

Could the variations in the South Atlantic OHC anomalies simply be lagged responses to the Tropical Atlantic OHC anomalies, with surface and subsurface currents transporting the waters from the tropics to the mid-to-high latitudes of the South Atlantic? Refer to Figure 12.

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Figure 12

I’ve provided the Arctic and Southern Ocean OHC anomaly data in Figures 13 and 14, without commentary, for those who are interested in seeing what those curves look like.

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Figure 13

It is clear that significant El Nino events can and do cause upward step changes in Ocean Heat Content. This indicates that ENSO events do more than simply release heat from the tropical Pacific into the atmosphere. Apparently, El Nino events also cause changes in atmospheric circulation in ways that impact Ocean Heat Content. If and when GCMs are able to recreate the variations in atmospheric circulation that cause these changes in Ocean Heat Content, GCMs may have value in predicting future climate variability. At present, they do not.

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 +0.412 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.231 +0.284 +0.179 +0.455

August 2009 saw a modest fall in the global average tropospheric temperature anomaly, from +0.41 deg. C in July to +0.23 deg. C in August. The tropical and Northern Hemispheric troposphere remain quite warm, but the Southern Hemisphere cooled by over 0.4 deg. C in the last month. (Roy W. Spencer)

There is a remarkable lack of understanding with respect to the sensitivity of the minimum temperature overnight to relatively slight changes in surface conditions. This post illustrates one example of this sensitivity. The implication of such influences is that the use of the minimum temperature as part of the construction of the global average surface temperature trend is seriously flawed, as we discussed in our paper

An example of this sensitivity is the strong effect on minimum temperature from the dry bulb temperature, T, and dew point temperature, TD, at sunset on clear nights with light winds and little horizontal temperature advection: see http://fawn.ifas.ufl.edu/tools/minimum_temperature/. This method uses the Brunt Equation as reported by Tom Oswalt, Larry Parsons and John Jackson of the University of Florida.

which is a 0.5 difference. Such a change in dew point can occur just due to the growth of vegetation around an historical climate reference network site, as we have seen in quite a few of the photographs compiled at Watts Up With That. The presence of more vegetation can elevate the dew point temperature at sunset as a result of the transpiration of water vapor into the atmosphere. This effect on dew point is one of a number of surface and atmospheric influences on the surface air temperatures. I will be weblogging on more of these effects in upcoming posts. (Climate Science)

The supporters of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) claim that they have science on their side. Time and again we are told that the debate is over, the science is settled and consensus among the world's scientists reached. If that is true, why are so many scientists coming forward to oppose and denounce the climate alarmist's theory? To understand the true nature of the climate change debate it is necessary to understand what a scientific theory is and how to judge a theory's validity.

The debate over global warming and its possible human causes has become the defining scientific controversy of our time. Opinions vary regarding the severity of the problem among both scientists and lay people, though there are some who claim the threat is so immense and so immediate that all doubters should be silenced. The arguments presented to the public are mostly simplistic and cursory, usually accompanied by images of calving glaciers, melting icebergs and smokestacks belching clouds of pollution. The public debate has become vicious and nasty, filled with personal attacks and insults.

As disturbing as this shift from reasoned scientific discourse to acrimony is, it is not the most troubling aspect of the global warming debate. The most troubling aspect of the global warming controversy is what it reveals about the level of scientific understanding among the general populace. There is a growing disconnect between the scientific community and the general population. This is a consequence of the ever-widening knowledge gap between scientists and non-scientists. Science and the technology it has made possible are the foundations of our modern civilization. Unfortunately, what science is, how it works and what scientists do is not well understood by the general public.

The public's perception of scientists has never been accurate and it certainly hasn't been helped by the popular media. Scientists are portrayed as intelligent bumblers, like the “Doc” in Back To The Future; cold, emotionless automatons like “Mr. Spock” on Star Trek; or crazed, power-mad villains like “Doctor Octopus” of Spider Man fame. In truth, scientists are just regular people with the same feelings, foibles and failings as everyone else on the planet—they just happen to have a lot of specialized knowledge about some facet of science.

So what is science? Science is based on the scientific method and scientists are practitioners of that method. According to the Miriam-Webster dictionary, the scientific method consists of “principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.” Or, as more succinctly put by Meg Urry, “Scientists observe nature, then develop theories that describe their observations.”

Science is both a body of knowledge and an approach to understanding nature by gaining more knowledge. It is based on gathering empirical evidence. Empirical means simply what belongs to or is the product of experience or observation. If you can touch it, smell it, feel it, see it or measure it, it's empirical. An important point is that, in order to be testable, a theory must make predictions about how nature behaves. A theory that makes no predictions can not be tested and is therefore useless to science. So what is a scientific theory? Most simply put a theory is an explanation of how nature works.

Often, people will dismiss a scientific idea by saying “it's just a theory,” as though a theory is just someone's opinion or something made up on a whim. This could not be more wrong. To be accepted as a scientific theory means that the ideas expressed have been examined and tested by many scientists, not just the one who first proposed it. Theories that have endured the test of time come as close to “fact” or “truth” as anything known to science. Scientists tend to shy away from absolute terms like fact and truth, because they would give the impression that a particular theory is absolute and never subject to change. In science, nothing is above challenge or immune to modification. When a theory has survived for several hundred years, and its author has departed this life, it may be elevated to being a law—but in science, even a law is subject to change.

In this way, the accumulated body of knowledge that is science continues to grow. New, better theories replace or supplement older ones. But always new theories must be in agreement with others that are accepted as valid. A new idea cannot contradict a large volume of accepted theory. Not because the weight of the old theories makes them inviolate, but because the new theory would have to offer satisfactory explanations of all the things the old theories had explained. As Marcello Truzzi put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

In 1988, the IPCC was established by two UN organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to evaluate the risk of climate change brought on by humans. Over the past 20+ years the IPCC has issued four major reports and dozens of lesser papers all promoting the theory of anthropogenic global warming. As written in the IPCC charter:

Not surprisingly, the IPCC has found that global warming is out of control and being caused primarily by human activity. Supposedly, all manner of disaster lurks just ahead because of humanity's nasty habit of burning fossil fuels. First we will examine the AGW theory itself before testing the theory by examining a number of its major predictions. As we shall see, the claims made by the IPCC and other global warming alarmists are indeed extraordinary, while the evidence is often lacking.

What is anthropogenic global warming? It is a scientific theory that claims human activity is responsible for increasing Earth’s average temperature over time. It is based on our limited understanding of Earth’s climate, imprecise measurements of historical temperatures using proxies, and derives its future temperature predictions from computer models. The statement we gave in our book, The Resilient Earth, is as follows:

The statement above summarizes the main points being made by those backing human-caused global warming. Some of the terms used sound technical and scientific, particularly the phrase “anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” Since science speak tends to put off the public and confuse the news media a simpler version was created that goes like this:

This statement glosses over an imposing amount of detail but is much more effective than an accurate description given our sound bite oriented society. Since this framing of the problem is missing the essential evidence actually supporting the AGW theory a simple argument was needed to quell any objections from non-supporters. That argument was the claim of “scientific consensus.” I will touch on the consensus argument at the end of this article.

The natural processes that create and regulate Earth's climate form a gigantic, extraordinarily complex heat engine powered by energy from the Sun. Earth's climate is perhaps the most complicated natural system science has ever tried to understand. The fundamental sciences—chemistry, physics and biology—are all intimately involved, along with a host of more specialized scientific disciplines. To gain an understanding of climate change requires knowledge of geology, archeology, anthropology, oceanography, meteorology, astrophysics, paleontology, glaciology and computer science. Practically every natural science has a role to play.

As stated previously, the cornerstone of modern science is the testability of theories. This means that a theory must make predictions about the way the physical universe behaves, so that it may be tested by investigators other than the theory's originators. When a prediction made by a theory is confirmed it helps to strengthen the theory’s claim to correctness. When a prediction made by a theory is shown not to be true it weakens the theory, possibly invalidating the theory all together. A number of claims have been made by the proponents of human caused global warming. We will now examine five of the major outcomes predicted by the global warming alarmists.

In the late 1990s, streams of ice flowing into the sea from the great Greenland ice sheet had begun speeding up. As the glacial ice faces receded global warming proponents pointed to the shrinking ice cap as proof that catastrophe lay just around the corner. But the evidence does not support that claim.

In 2009 glaciologist Tavi Murray and ten of her colleagues from Swansea University reported “Its come to an end… they’re not in runaway acceleration.” Glacial modeler Faezeh Nick of Durham University in the UK and her colleagues found similar behvior when they modeled the flow of Helheim Glacier. They reported: “Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland's outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”

The same seems to hold for the melting of Antarctica's glacial cap and claims of disappearing Arctic ice. Many experts were calling for a new record low for the Arctic ice pack this summer but that has not happened. “During the first half of August, Arctic ice extent declined more slowly than during the same period in 2007 and 2008,” states the August 18, 2009, ice report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It is now unlikely that 2009 will see a record low extent.” Much to the dissapointment of several scientific expeditions and commercial concerns so far this year, neither the Northwest Passage nor the Northern Sea Route has opened.

Sea levels could rise, they have changed significantly in the past. According to the IPCC AR4, it is estimated that sea level rise will be 7 to 15 inches (18-38 cm) in a low scenario and 10 to 23 inches (26-59 cm) in a high scenario. This is based on multiple models, which all exclude ice sheet flow due to a lack of reliable published data. With high confidence, the report predicts that coastlines will be exposed to increasing risks such as erosion and that “Many millions more people are projected to be flooded every year due to sea-level rise by the 2080s.”

But sea levels are always changing and scientists have had little success predicting change in the past. Mr. Gore has asserted that sea levels will rise up to 20 feet due to melting ice sheets “in the near future,” but then Gore is not a scientists and it is a mystery that anyone would listen to him in the first place.

According to the EPA, an estimated 50 to 60 years of data are required to obtain linear mean sea level trends having a 1 mm/yr precision with a 95 percent statistical confidence interval. Satellite data are not available for a multi-decadal time series needed to separate out medium-term variability from long-term change. In other words, all the predictions of rapidly rising sea-levels are based on insufficient data. The measurements are within the margins of error or not of sufficient duration to detect long term trends. According to the University of Colorado at Boulder Sea Level Change Analysis, sea level has actually flattened since 2006. Hydrographic observations demonstrate an apparent cooling of the ocean since 2002, which would imply up to a 2 mm drop in sea level (E. W. Leuliette & R. S. Nerem).

Nils-Axel Mörner, former head of paleo-geophysics at Stockholm University, has been studying the subject of sea-level rise for 35 years. He has been observing changes in ocean levels in the Maldives, one of the first places expected to disappear under the waves, and found no evidence that they are in peril. Satellite altimetry data collected over the past two decades tells the same story. His best estimate is for a rise of a couple of inches by the end of this century. Dr. Mörner says: “the sea level is not rising.”

The reason why Dr Mörner is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world.” Another scientist who has done just that is Cliff Oillier from the University of Western Australia's School of Earth and Environment. According to a 2009 paper by Dr Oillier: “ Graphs of sea level for twelve locations in the southwest Pacific show stable sea level for about ten years over the region. The data are compared with results from elsewhere, all of which suggest that any rise of global sea level is negligible.”

Global warming alarmists have predicted that there will be mass extinctions around the world because of the ravages of temperature rise. One of the species that has been used as a poster child for this hypothesis is the polar bear. An example of charismatic mega-fauna—attractive big animals—the polar bear is a popular creature from the remote and exotic Arctic. Though bears in their modern form have been around for at least 5 million years, the white bear of the Arctic is an even newer resident of planet Earth.

Our knowledge of the development of polar bears is well-documented by fossil transitions. Scientists theorize that between 100,000 to 250,000 years ago, during the mid-Pleistocene, a number of brown bears became isolated by glaciers. While many probably perished on the ice, they did not all die out. The survivors' offspring underwent a rapid series of evolutionary changes in order to adapt. Some think this was possible because of the small population, and extreme selection pressure. The end result was a new species of bear adapted to harsh Arctic conditions—the polar bear.

Now there are claims that polar bear numbers have been plummeting because of melting polar sea ice and that the polar bear will soon go extinct because of global warming. The US EPA was even cajoled into declaring the species as “threatened” by the eco-activist lobby. No TV special on global warming is complete without a few pictures of the “endangered” polar bear precariously balanced on a melting ice-flow.

In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it's 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25%.

Mitchell Taylor, a polar bear biologist with the Canadian government, confirms what Inuit hunters have said for a long time: polar bears who live along the southeast coast of Baffin Island, in northern Quebec, and the northern coast of Labrador are healthy, and growing in numbers. “The Inuit were right. There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears,” Taylor said, in an interview. Writing in the Toronto Star, in 2006, he stated: “Of the thirteen populations of polar bears in Canada, eleven are stable or are increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”

Global warming might actually be helping polar bears in that area. A reduction in ice cover creates better habitat for seals, which are the bears' main food, while on land blueberries, which the bears adore, become more plentiful. Taylor says he's seen bears so full of blueberries they waddle. “Life may be good,” said Taylor, “but good news about polar bear populations does not seem to be welcomed by the Center for Biological Diversity. It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”

Weather is caused by the exchange of heat among land, sea and air. The IPCC thinks it very likely that there will be an increased frequency of warm spells, heat waves and events of heavy rainfall due to global warming. They also call for an increase in areas affected by droughts, intensity of tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes and typhoons. These predictions have led to breathless news anchors attributing any storm activity to global warming, even though there has been no detectable trend in storm activity for over a hundred years.

Hurricane expert Dr. Bill Gray stated that historical records “indicate that Atlantic and global tropical cyclone activity over the last century and particularly over the last 30 years has not increased.” Gray, now retired, has publicly denounced attempts to link hurricane activity to global warming. According to him, “this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.”

NOAA's official paper on recent tropical storm activity states: “NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming.” Even so, global warming experts continue to confidently predict increasing tropical storm activity.

Historical records do not indicate a rising trend for either hurricane frequency or strength, as shown in the Illustration above. Moreover, a recent study of ships' logs and other records from the Caribbean have extended that lack of increase back over 318 years. It seems that the worst decade for hurricanes on record was the 1690s, during the depths of the cold period known as the Little Ice Age.

All of these natural catastrophes identified above are supposed to be due to rapidly rising temperatures. According to the IPCC 1998 was the hottest year of the past century and the 1990s the hottest decade. Recently NASA had to adjust its readings for the past century. After the “restatement” 1934 took over from 1998 as the hottest year on record in the US, and 1921 moved into third place above 2006. The 1930s became the hottest decade. Significantly this is not an isolated case.

The future according to climate change alarmists.

There have recently been adjustments to NASA IR satellite data and NOAA sea surface temperature readings. It seems the only thing less trustworthy than a politician's promise is official climate data. None the less, for decades this wonky data has been fed into massively complex climate models to produce “evidence” for future climate warming. In 1988, NASA’s in house climate alarmist James Hansen presented a prediction of steadily rising temperatures to Congress. How does that prediction match up with reality?

As you can see Dr. Hansen was just a bit off in his predicting. Indeed, none of the climate models used by the IPCC, NASA's GISS or any other climatologists managed to predict the current downturn in global temperature. Despite this well documented history of failure we are still told we must take immediate action to avoid the ravages of anthropogenic global warming.

Add to these embarrassing failures newly documented evidence that many of the temperature reporting stations used by NASA are missing. According to Steve McIntyre, writing on the Climate Audit website, a surprising number (97) of NASA stations included in their inventory appear to contain no information whatever in the actual NASA data set. It seems that NASA and NOAA continue to have data quality problems from both their satellites and from ground stations.

How is all this uncertainty reported it the popular press? As with recent new articles that claim the Arctic is rapidly warming, the media contains only selected reports that support the alarmist view. According to Dr Roger Pielke Sr. “These articles are an excellent examples of the cherrypicking of particular published papers to promote the very narrow perspective of the journalists.” The story in the media is that temperatures are rising, the world's glaciers are melting and polar bears are drowning. In reality the temperatures aren't going up outside of normal variation patterns, the same is true for glacial melting and the polar bear is doing just fine, thank you.

The predictions examined here are not the only ones made by the IPCC and their followers: plague, pestilence and famine, among other calamities, have also been prophesied by the global warming doomsayers. For an overview of some of the more ludicrous predicted maladies see “Shrinking Sheep, Kidney Stones and Bear Attacks.” The absurdity of the dire predictions made in the name of global warming seems to know no bounds. And what about that scientific consensus we have been told about over and over?

To quote my favorite passage from Michael Crichton: “The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics… In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” Or as my co-author Allen Simmons puts it “you don't get a bunch of scientists together and take a vote on the speed of light.” Science is not about opinions, not about polls, and certainly not about what is currently considered politically correct. In short, consensus science is bunk.

Recapping, five out of five predictions made by global warming alarmists, based on the theory of anthropogenic global warming, have been shown to be inaccurate or out right false. Greenland's glaciers are not about to disappear, sea-levels are not rapidly rising, polar bears are not going extinct, hurricanes have not become more frequent or more violent, and temperatures are currently going down, not up. The predicted outcomes of AGW simply are not coming to pass. As we stated in The Resilient Earth:

What do these failures portend for the science of the theory itself? As UK Scientist Dr. David Bellamy, a former global warming advocate, has said: “The science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it's not even science any more, it's anti-science. There is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do with any impending catastrophe.” There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from looking at the evidence for AGW—Anthropogenic Global Warming, as stated by the IPCC and in the media, is a failed theory.

[ The information in this post was taken primarily from our book The Resilient Earth and represents the second half of my presentation to the Scientists for Truth conference held during August 2009, in Springfield, Mo. For information from the first half of the presentation please see “The Grand View: 4 Billion Years Of Climate Change.” ] (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq — When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last year, the deal was seen as a test of Iraq’s willingness to open an industry that had previously prohibited foreign investment.

One year later, the China National Petroleum Corporation has struck oil at the Ahdab field in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad. And while the relationship between the company and the Iraqi government has gone smoothly, the presence of a foreign company with vast resources drilling for oil in this poor, rural corner of Iraq has awakened a wave of discontent here. (NYT)

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS — Two prominent academics gave members of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce a sneak peek at a recently completed study of the state’s coal industry on the last day of the organization’s annual meeting.

Making the presentation Friday at The Greenbrier were Dr. Tom Witt, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research and associate dean of the West Virginia University College of Business and Economics, and Dr. Cal Kent, vice president of business and economic research at Marshall University.

Their study shows the state reaps $862 million annually directly from the coal industry, Kent said. When personal income taxes paid by coal workers are included, that figure swells to over $1 billion.

“Coal revenue is absolutely vital to the ... economy of the state,” Kent said, adding, “Many West Virginia counties would simply discontinue to exist” if the coal industry were to shut down.

As examples of the impact of direct and indirect taxes attributed to the industry, Kent cited Boone County, where just over 64 percent of local revenue comes from coal, Logan County with 42 percent and Mingo with 33 percent. (Register-Herald)

BERLIN - A convey of 350 farm tractors rumbled through Berlin on Saturday to launch a mass anti-nuclear rally, designed to influence Germany's general election in three weeks' time.

About 50,000 opponents of nuclear power took part in the protest, which kicked off with an 8-km (5-mile)-long convey of tractors that passed in front of Chancellor Angela Merkel's offices and through the government quarter to the city's historic Brandenburg Gate.

Determined to make nuclear power a focus of the election campaign, the protesters criticised Merkel and her conservative party, which wants to scrap a 2001 law to shut down Germany's 17 remaining nuclear power plants by the mid-2020s. (Reuters)

HONG KONG/FRANKFURT - Fair competition or Save the Planet?

That could ultimately be at play as China and the West, long at odds over trade in steel, textiles and auto parts, risk being sucked into a row over protectionism in renewable energy equipment such as solar panels.

German solar firms Conergy and Solarworld have voiced strong concern about the pricing practices of Chinese panel makers -- who undercut their German peers' products by around 20 percent. Chinese modules sell in Europe at about 1.70 euros per watt, according to a UBS report.

Industry experts say U.S. firms share those German concerns. (Reuters)

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity. (Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday)

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration will spend an additional $2.7 billion to buy swine flu drugs and vaccines, just days after White House science advisers called the pandemic "a serious threat to our nation."

The money is on top of $1.8 billion the administration earmarked in July for tackling the virus, which is expected to worsen in the Northern Hemisphere's autumn as students return to school. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - The new H1N1 swine flu virus has killed 36 U.S. children, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

It said 67 percent of them had high-risk medical conditions putting them more at risk of severe disease, such as asthma, or were disabled with conditions such as cerebral palsy, but 22 percent of the children were under 5 and perfectly healthy.

"As of August 8, 2009, CDC had received reports of 477 deaths associated with 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) in the United States, including 36 deaths among children aged under 18 years," CDC researchers wrote in the agency's weekly report on death and disease.

"The results of that analysis indicated that, of 36 children who died, seven (19 percent) were aged under 5 years, and 24 (67 percent) had one or more of the high-risk medical conditions." (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers taking care of people infected with the new swine flu should wear special masks known as respirators, but need to protect themselves in other ways, too, according to a report released on Thursday.

The Institute of Medicine stressed that scientists still do not know much about how influenza viruses are transmitted, and that healthcare workers in general are bad at protecting themselves and their patients against such infections.

While recommending more research into how flu is transmitted and the best defenses against it, the expert committee said in the meantime workers should at least wear a special respirator in addition to washing hands and taking other measures against infection.

A N95 respirator covers the nose and mouth tightly, filtering out tiny particles that can carry viruses and bacteria. It is different from a surgical mask, a loose covering that lets air in at the sides and which is used to protect patients from the people treating them.

"Healthcare workers (including those in non-hospital settings) who are in close contact with individuals with nH1N1 (the new pandemic H1N1) influenza or influenza-like illnesses should use fit-tested N95 respirators," the report reads.

"Healthcare organizations and workers need consistent and clear nH1N1 guidelines that can be implemented across all healthcare facilities."

H1N1 swine flu, declared a pandemic in June, is spreading fast and experts expect it to infect more people as schools reopen and temperatures fall in the Northern Hemisphere's autumn. (Reuters)

Sweden is one of the countries at the forefront of restricting chemical use in Europe. It has a policy of making its environment ‘toxic-free’ by 2010 and the country led in the preparation of the European Commission White Paper “Strategy For a Future Chemicals Policy.” Yet as Bill Durodie notes, “Sweden has one of the highest levels of self-reported sensitivities to chemicals in the developed world. It would appear, then, that too much risk awareness can quite literally make you sick.”

As Helen Pilcher reports, “People who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk.” (2) You’ve heard of the ‘placebo effect’, the notion that a sugar pill can cure. But have you heard about the evil twin of placebo: the nocebo effect in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects?

The term nocebo, which means ‘I will harm,’ was introduced in the 1960s, and it is very real. Around 60 percent of patients undergoing chemotherapy start feeling sick before their treatment. The nocebo effect can also be catching. When we expect something to make us ill, we start looking for signs of illness, and studies have shown that if you hear of or observe a possible side effect, you are more likely to develop it yourself.

Researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium note that the nocebo effect typically occurred when a substance was foul smelling and not when it smelled pleasant. But when participants were given warnings about potential harm of chemical substances in the environment, reactions were much more nocebo-related, regardless of smell. The researchers concluded, “This suggests that warnings and campaigns against environmental pollution, while having important beneficial effects for the environment, many inadvertently facilitate acquiring symptoms to chemicals in the environment and promote the spreading of multiple chemical sensitivity, mass sociogenic illness and the like.” (Jack Dini, Hawaii Reporter)

The junk science behind the war on junk food - Rob Lyons is not convinced by Cancer Research UK’s justification for why it effectively outlawed fast-food outlets in a new building in London.

About a mile up the road from spiked‘s offices in central London, an office block formerly owned by BT, the telecoms giant, is getting a major facelift. Developers Derwent London are creating nearly 25,000 square metres of prime office and retail space in the bustling area around Angel underground station. But you won’t find fast-food outlets or tobacconists there, because the major tenant of the new building, Cancer Research UK (CRUK), seems to have put a block on them.

Sarah Lyness, executive director of communications and information at CRUK, told spiked that the charity had provided ‘guidance on the use of retail space at the base of the building’, adding: ‘Half of all cancers could be prevented by changes to lifestyle. A key element of Cancer Research UK’s work is to help people understand how they can reduce their risk of cancer. Factors such as stopping smoking, eating a balanced diet, maintaining a healthy body weight and avoiding sunburn all have an important role to play.’

Actually, it is far from clear that lifestyle changes, other than not smoking cigarettes, could have such a dramatic impact on health. For example, it is hard to believe that ‘junk’ food like burgers, fried chicken and pizza are fundamentally any worse for you than posh foods with similar make-up, like Kobe beef, foie gras or smelly French cheese such as Roquefort. Even if we accept the need for a balanced diet, whatever that might be, the offerings at McDonald’s or KFC could just as easily be part of that as any other kind of food. Along with the fragrant odour of the Colonel’s secret recipe of herbs and spices, there is a distinct whiff of snobbery in this demonisation of certain ‘junk’ food products.

More practically for CRUK’s new home, nearby Upper Street in Islington is jam-packed with fast-food outlets, restaurant chains and bars, and there are numerous shops where you can satisfy a craving for Lucky Strikes or Marlboros. Banning such outlets from the CRUK building is akin to urinating in the ocean, done more for show than effect.

But the block on undesirable fellow tenants is in keeping with the outlook of health professionals, charities and campaigners more generally: ‘we know what’s good for you’ is their message. They would like us to make ‘healthy choices’, which increasingly seems to mean not having any choice at all or being nudged (aka shoved) into doing what they think is best for us. (Rob Lyons, sp!ked)

A new study in mice suggests that it’s not just how much you eat, but when you eat it, that influences weight gain.

Researchers at Northwestern University wanted to test whether the timing of meals could influence body weight. Many diet books advise would-be weight losers to stop eating after 6 or 7 p.m. However, it’s never been clear if the strategy works as a behavioral change — we tend to overeat in the evenings in front of the television and the computer. Or is there some physiological reason late-night eating adds extra pounds?

To test whether time of feeding alone can affect body weight, the researchers studied two groups of mice who were fed identical diets of food that contained 60 percent fat. Mice are nocturnal, and they typically consume the vast majority of their calories at night and sleep during the day. For the study, half the mice were fed the diet during the daylight hours when they would normally be sleeping. The other half were given the same food on their regular eating schedule.

At the end of the six week study period, mice in both groups had consumed about the same amount of calories and performed the same amount of exercise. However, the mice who ate during normal sleeping hours posted an average 48 percent increase in body weight. The mice who ate on a regular schedule had an average increase of 20 percent of body weight. The findings will be published in the October issue of the journal Obesity.

Fred Turek, director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern and the study’s senior author, said human studies are needed to determine if timing of food intake influences body weight. The findings would be particularly important for shift workers, who are known to be at higher risk for obesity, diabetes and other health problems. But he notes that it’s not just shift workers who are eating late. Most people eat a large percentage of their calories in the evening and continue eating late into the night.

Dr. Turek notes that humans evolved from a situation where they ate and foraged between sunrise and sunset. “After sunset, there were no refrigerators, no food just hanging around,” he said. “You didn’t eat. But today, people eat most of their calories after sunset.” (NYT)

A pill that allows dieters to gorge on junk food without putting on a pound is being developed by scientists.

The couch potato's dream, it would allow people to eat all their favourite foods without worrying about their waistline.

The wonder drug would also protect against diabetes, liver disease and other debilitating conditions associated with unhealthy eating habits.

The breakthrough hinges on the discovery of a metabolism 'masterswitch' - a gene key to weight control.

Mice lacking the gene, known as IKKE, stay slim despite being fed a lard-based diet.

The 'knock-out' mice also free of the liver problems associated with a junk food diet and appear to be protected against diabetes, the journal Cell reports. (Daily Mail)

In clinical terms, extreme or severe obesity is defined as a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it has adverse affects on health and physical functioning. It is measured by Body Mass Index, or BMI, with Class 3 (morbid obesity) beginning at 40 kg/m2. In generalized terms, it is about 100 pounds over ideal body weight.

It is estimated that more than 9 million Americans are considered morbidly obese. The proportion of people with a BMI that exceeds 40 has increased by more than 50% in the past 20 years. (Examiner)

BMI may not be the best way to determine whether an elderly person is obese. According to a new UCLA study it may be more accurate to measure an elderly person's waist-to-hip ratio, not their BMI.

Researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA found that the waist-to-hip circumference ratio was a better yardstick for assessing obesity in adults between the ages of 70 and 80, presumably because the physical changes that are part of the aging process alter the body proportions on which BMI is based.

"Basically, it isn't BMI that matters in older adults — it's waist size," said Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, UCLA assistant professor of endocrinology and the study's lead investigator. (Examiner)

At a time when two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, health officials are correctly warning that most of us need to lose weight. But we may be setting ourselves up for a surge in eating disorders.

The two main types of eating disorders are food restricting (commonly referred to as "anorexia") and binge eating and purging (commonly referred to as "bulimia"). The disorders typically begin in adolescence and affect women much more commonly than men.

Statistics are tough to come by - partly because of under-diagnosis and incomplete reporting - but a recent review estimated that 500,000 women in the U.S. have anorexia and 1-2 million women have bulimia.

The National Eating Disorders Association has a higher estimate, with "as many as 10 million females and 1 million males" suffering from either one of the two disorders. Recent reviews have reported that 90 percent of patients with bulimia are female but the rate in men appears to be increasing in recent years.

A key feature of an eating disorder is the disparity between perception and reality. Over the past thirty years, obesity (BMI >= 95th percentile) in teenagers increased from 5.0 percent to 17.6 percent. While that rate has skyrocketed, it's still much lower than the perceived rate of obesity among students. Among children in grades nine through 12, 10 percent of females were obese and 15.5 percent were "at risk" for becoming obese (BMI >=85 percentile but <95th percentile). Yet 38.1 percent of women described themselves as overweight and 61.7 percent were trying to lose weight.

Put another way, more than half the women trying to lose weight were not overweight. (CBS)

A series of violent fridge explosions is believed to have been caused by leaks of 'environmentally-friendly' coolant.

Safety standards for manufacturers might have to be reviewed following the blasts, which have destroyed several kitchens.

At least four similar explosions have been reported in the last three years in the UK, two of them since May.

The problem appears to result from a widespread switch to 'Greenfreeze' technology over the past 15 years and the use of isobutane and propane hydrocarbon gases as refrigerants. (Chris Brooke, Daily Mail)

Government expenditures are not free. Economists know this and most others recognize it when they take the time to think about it. Unfortunately, it seems not everybody takes that time.

In a story fit for satire in The Onion, a renewable energy research group, bankrolled by a $1.1 billion subsidy from the Department of Energy, concludes that huge government subsidies for renewable energy don’t reduce employment after all. However, their reasoning works only so long as the subsidies don’t come out of anybody’s pocket—a practical and theoretical impossibility.

Two environmentalists at the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (see ASE brag about the billion it gets from Uncle Sam, here ) on contract to the National Renewable Energy Labs authored a research paper that tries to undermine the widely circulated research from a Spanish think tank.

The Spanish research, directed by economist Gabriel Calzada, at King Juan Carlos University, analyzed the subsidized expenditure necessary to create the green jobs in Spain. It compared those funds to the private expenditure needed to support the average conventional job. Supported by other data as well, they conclude that each subsidized green job in Spain eliminated over two conventional jobs.

While there are multiple problems with the ASE critique of Calzada’s work, the flawed foundation of their critique is best illustrated by the following statement:

That is, the environmentalists do not see government expenditure as having a cost. They employ the same free-lunch fallacy that underpins essentially all the analysis showing green-energy subsidies increase employment.

The first week of every principles of economics class goes over the problem with free-lunch assumptions. The labor and material used to make windmills or solar panels or to install insulation cannot simultaneously be used to make refrigerators and automobiles. When government spends more money, it necessarily diverts labor, capital and materials from the private sector.

Dr. Calzada simply calculated how many jobs, on average, would have been supported with these resources had they been left to the private market. The ASE critique doesn’t even recognize that the costs exist. Therefore, the ASE critique can hardly be used to undermine the credibility of the Spanish conclusion—subsidies for green technologies reduce overall employment. (The Foundry)

The “tax breaks” in question are expansions in the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. The Post story repeatedly calls the expansions “tax breaks” and “tax cuts.” The budget expert quoted in the story calls them “tax cuts,” and so does a House staffer and a spokesperson for the president.

But these are not tax cuts. They are expansions in the refundability of provisions in the tax code. That means that households that pay no federal income tax will receive larger welfare checks from the government under these Obama proposals.

Obama has proposed a slew of “tax cuts” that are partly welfare payments. The chart below shows the share of the 2010-2019 dollar values of these proposals that are actually increased federal spending, and not reductions in taxes. (Calculated from OMB’s May summary tables).

The Post reporter and the budget analyst quoted in the story are both fiscal experts, and they know that these “tax cuts” are not really tax cuts. But there is a growing problem in fiscal discussions that words are getting flipped upside down to mean the opposite of what a layman would understand them to mean. A classic example is how the dollar value of true tax cuts is nearly always referred to in news articles as a “cost” rather than a “saving.”

Compared with the time and money being spent on health and medical advances, research focused on adapting to global climate change has lagged. With climate change issues becoming more pressing, researchers are now making up for lost time.

For decades, scientists have worked to uncover the molecular pathways surrounding animal hormones. Hormone research has the potential to address the health concerns of an aging human population, although the looming threat of global climate change has led to a new application of this field: plant hormones.

Dr. Peter McCourt, professor in the Department of Cells and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Sean Cutler from University of California Riverside, along with an international team of researchers, recently identified several key receptors in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana involved in drought response. These receptors bind to abscisic acid, a plant hormone produced in times of stress, such as drought and extreme temperatures, which elicits other changes in the plant to help it survive.

Instead of using modern genetics, the team of researchers implemented a newer method termed chemical genomics. Predominantly used in the pharmaceutical industry, chemical genomics involves searching for specific compounds to influence cellular functions, and the use of genomics techniques to isolate gene function. (The Varsity)

There's been a lot of talk and media recently about feedbacks and climate amplifiers, what's it all about?

On the one hand you'll hear people saying it is of little relevance in the great climate shouting match while others say it highlights the diminishing role available for carbon dioxide emissions. so, who's right?

Surprisingly, this time just about everyone. Let's begin by looking at a couple of announcements for one of the modeling studies:

So that's it, right, even NCAR's PlayStation® Climatologists have now demonstrated that solar influences are much greater than the slight changes in simple solar irradience?

Actually, you need your beer goggles on to come to such a conclusion -- here's the precipitation observation versus model output that has caused such excitement:

Granted, this is an improvement on the previous models (which get, oh, about nothing right) since it does have some overlap with reality, albeit not much. To us this generated output demonstrates woefully inadequate solar sensitivity and the Pacific Basin shows enormous contrast in reality (roughly 4 feet/year annualized rainfall difference between the Coral Sea and Central Pacific during these events) while there's limited sensitivity demonstrated in the model output.

Bottom line: it's good to see modelers actually recognize that bright shining thing we orbit has something to do with local temperatures but they have one heck of a long way to go before process models even vaguely resemble prognosticators. Not a big advance but definitely an advance.

Meanwhile, the empiricists (sometimes known as climate realists) are correct in pointing out this sheds a little more light on the interaction of sun and climate, further opening useful lines of investigation into the complicated relationship of this planet with its nearest star.

Furthermore, as more mechanisms are exposed and examined there is less and less room for enhanced greenhouse to play a significant role in the estimated change in global mean temperature over the last 250 years. With ever increasing confidence [intervals] the IPCC claim anthropogenic climate forcing potential up to +2.4W/m² but with error bars for negative forcing from direct and indirect aerosol and land use change of minus 3.3W/m² (-3.3), for a potential net change of minus 0.9W/m² (-0.9). Consequently, given the Low Levels of Scientific Understanding (LLOSU) of a number of very important effects we still do not know whether humans have a net positive or negative forcing effect on global mean temperatures.

One thing is certain, there's absolutely no value in spending a dime on carbon dioxide emission reductions when we have no clear idea on whether we are warming or cooling the planet and absolutely everyone who bothers to calculate the potential difference we can make to global mean temperature over the next century by constraining carbon emissions concludes we couldn't actually measure such a trivial difference.

Carbon constraint is an example of target fixation and views just one side of Earth's energy balance equation. It is a losing strategy no matter how you view it and should be scrapped forthwith.

The US freezes on climate change - The stalled US climate change debate has killed the hope of reaching a final agreement at the Copenhagen summit

The prospects for an international agreement to tackle the causes of climate change are looking slim. They got even slimmer earlier this week, after the leading US senators crafting a climate bill announced that they're pushing back the release of their legislation indefinitely. While Barbara Boxer and John Kerry say the bill "is moving along well" and promise it will be ready for release "later in September", the delay makes the chances of passing it before the looming international negotiations in Copenhagen even less likely.

Without concrete action in the Senate, there will not be an actual deal ready to sign in Copenhagen. With no Senate action, there's no guarantee that the US will commit to binding targets. And with no US targets, there will be no firm agreement from China, India or other emerging powers. Ratification of an international treaty requires the consent of 67 senators – and right now, just getting to 60 just to vote on the climate bill is looking difficult.

With a realistic time frame, this delay means they won't release a bill until the end of September. Boxer, who chairs the Senate's environment and public works committee, has said she plans to hold hearings on the draft text, followed by markup of the full legislation. Her committee is not the only one likely to play a major role in the bill.

The finance committee, chaired by Max Baucus, is expected to author the pollution permit allocation portion of the bill, but is also at the centre of the debate over healthcare reform. They've only held one meeting on climate legislation this year, which Baucus could not attend due to commitments on healthcare. At least four other committees may want to weigh in.

No one expects the Senate to even move to climate until the healthcare issue is resolved – which, realistically, is probably going to drag out until the end of November. (The Guardian)

SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch are criticizing proposed federal legislation that calls for the nation's first limits on pollution linked to global warming.

The Republicans released a report Thursday that said the price of electricity in Utah would increase under the bill, which has already passed in the House.

"Cap-and-trade legislation has the potential to have a significant impact on our economy," said Herbert, who contends Utah's energy prices would be disproportionately increased under the bill.

Hatch and Herbert spoke at a forum in a state office building where critics in the energy industry assailed the bill. No environmental groups were invited to be participants at the forum, although it was open to the public.

Hatch contends that the costs associated with the bill outweigh any benefits achieved from a reduction in global warming. Herbert, meanwhile, still isn't convinced whether humans have an impact on global warming despite widespread acceptance in the scientific community that they do. (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON — Environmentalists and others supporting climate-change legislation are outspending the measure's opponents in the television advertising skirmish underway in advance of Senate action this month, new data show.

Supporters of the plan to curb greenhouse-gas emissions spent $2.9 million in August as they seek to renew interest in legislation overshadowed by the contentious battle over President Obama's health care initiative. That's $1 million more than what opponents spent, according to Evan Tracey, who tracks political advertising at the Campaign Media Analysis Group. (Fredreka Schouten, USA TODAY)

GENEVA - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Thursday for swifter work on a climate treaty, saying inaction could spell economic disaster and a rise in sea levels of up to 2 meters (6.5 ft) by 2100.

"We cannot afford limited progress. We need rapid progress," he told a 155-nation climate conference in Geneva of negotiations on a new United Nations deal to combat global warming that is due to be agreed in December in Copenhagen.

"Climate change could spell widespread economic disaster," Ban said, urging action to promote greener growth. (Reuters)

BEIJING - China might be warming to EU proposals aimed at imposing CO2 targets on its industries as part of a new climate change deal, but the two sides remain a long way from agreement, officials said at a meeting in Beijing.

At the unveiling of new research by Dutch renewable energy consultants Ecofys and China's Energy Research Institute, an influential think-tank under the National Development and Reform Commission, climate officials said reining in carbon emissions from the country's industrial sectors would be crucial.

"Sectoral emissions cuts are an important part of dealing with climate change. For China, they are the main focus of reducing greenhouse gases," said Jiang Zhaoli, director of international cooperation at the NDRC's climate change office.

But while China appears ready to agree in principle with sector targets, its negotiators are still holding out for more concrete financial support from industrialized nations, and they are unlikely to agree with EU attempts to impose absolute cuts.

"The issue is whether developed countries can provide help, including technology transfers, that will allow these industries to improve their ability to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Lu Xuedu, vice-chairman of China's National Climate Office. (Reuters)

Sept. 4 -- Western governments pushing China to use clean-coal technology may need to lower their expectations for the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases.

Costs will total as much as $400 billion over 30 years to install systems to capture carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks in China and bury it underground, said Richard Morse, a Stanford University research associate and author of a study on the technology. China has little incentive to invest because it will raise power prices and it’s unclear if wealthier nations will pick up the bill, Morse said in an interview.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and European nations have championed carbon capture for nations including China as vital to slowing global warming while keeping coal in the energy mix. China, the biggest producer of coal, gets about 80 percent of its electricity from burning the fuel, which spews more heat- trapping gases than natural gas or oil.

“The idea that carbon capture has to happen in China is a western idea,” said Morse. Proposals by developed nations that seek Chinese cooperation ignore the “staggering” costs of clean-coal devices, Morse and colleagues said in the new report. (Bloomberg)

The factory to the world says consumers, not poor countries, should pay to clean up the skies.

China has just laid out its negotiating position for the upcoming summit in Copenhagen, where diplomats will gather in December to try to hammer out an agreement on how to battle climate change.

The West is not going to like it. Essentially, China will argue that Western consumers buying Chinese-made goods should pay their fair share of the cost of cutting the pollution used to make the goods. (Robyn Meredith, Forbes)

NEW DELHI -- India is digging in against legally binding caps on carbon emissions ahead of December's climate-change talks with the U.S. and Europe in Copenhagen. (WSJ)

First statements from Prime Minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama suggest his government will stick to its campaign promises and reduce Japan’s carbon emissions by 25 percent. (CoP15)

TOKYO - Japan's biggest business group is set to lobby against greenhouse gas emissions targets pledged by the new ruling party ahead of an international climate conference, a Japanese newspaper said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Africa's climate negotiators led by Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, threatened to walk out of talks if the December climate summit in Copenhagen failed to consider Africa's position.

"If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent," he said.

Zenawi told Africa ministers and European partners gathered in Addis Ababa yesterday to consolidate the continent's position for the next global climate negotiations. (Business Daily)

ADDIS ABABA - Africa will veto any climate change deal that does not meet its demand for money from rich nations to cut the impact of global warming on the continent, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Thursday. (Reuters)

I like to see that: Miliband's new mayor poo-poos global warming 'scam' - Mayor Peter Davies has urged local residents to halt plans for wind farms 'blocking out sunlight' and encourages driving as we are 'in the age of the car'

The newly elected mayor of Doncaster has described global warming as a "scam", posing a direct challenge to the town's MP, climate change cabinet minister Ed Miliband.

While Miliband pursued international diplomacy in India, ahead of December's crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen, mayor Peter Davies urged local residents to use the law to halt the building of wind farms whose effects he said included "blocking of sunlight". On hearing of Davies's intervention, Miliband replied immediately on Twitter: "Disgrace given the science and the scale of the threat."

Davies's comments came in a statement issued earlier this week making clear to voters where he stood on forthcoming plans to erect wind farms in the Doncaster region. Davies, who represents the English democrat party, made clear neither he nor his council had a role in the decision-making process but said; "These [wind farm] developments have little or no benefit in terms of contributing to decreased energy consumption, nor do they have any beneficial effect on the planet's climate in response to the great global warming scam."

Davies went on: "I would certainly not want one of these monstrosities anywhere near my property, nor do I want to see them blotting the landscape of the English countryside and waterways and causing grief and concern to local people in terms of noise and the blocking of sunlight.

"I therefore urge the public to oppose these developments through legal means provided so that good old-fashioned English justice and common sense may prevail." (The Guardian)

Carny futures are down, the European Endarkenment has begun and the EPA introduced the world to the concept of extinction neutrality. If you have no idea what any of this means, then you need the weekly round-up. Coincidentally, here it is: (Daily Bayonet)

AN AUSTRALIAN company has been swept up in a $100 million carbon trading scandal in Papua New Guinea after claims fake carbon certificates were given to landowners to help persuade them to sign over the rights to their forests.

The scandal threatens to undermine efforts by the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, to win support at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen for a global carbon trading scheme to include forests in the likes of PNG and Indonesia. She declined yesterday to answer questions on whether the scandal had been raised at UN climate talks last month or whether she had discussed the matter with the PNG Prime Minister, Michael Somare, or his officials.

An investigation has begun and the head of PNG's Office of Climate Change, Theo Yasause, has been removed.

Dave Sag, the chief executive of the company involved, Carbon Planet, admitted yesterday that his PNG partner, Kirk Roberts, had used mocked-up carbon certificates signed by Mr Yasause as ''props'' when negotiating with landowners. But he denied media reports in PNG the certificates were stolen or were intended to mislead.

He said the documents, which purport to represent a million tonnes of ''voluntary carbon credits'' issued by the UN under the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation - or REDD scheme - were created by PNG officials simply to explain the scheme. ''Those certificates are worthless. … No one who knows anything about carbon would take them in any way seriously,'' Mr Sag said. ''They ended up in Kirk's hands because they would have been produced as a prop to be taken out and waved in front of people in order to provide some physicality to what is essentially an ephemeral thing.''

Carbon Planet, which has acquired a publicly listed company, told investors recently it had $100 million in potential REDD projects in PNG. Mr Sag said this figure was ''estimates based on contracts we have in place''. But as the scandal escalated, PNG's acting climate change director, Wari Iamo, warned landowners on Monday against signing carbon trading agreements over their forests. Dr Iamo said PNG had no laws or policy that covered carbon trading.

The talks in Copenhagen in December will decide whether the REDD scheme will get official recognition. The scheme, backed by Australia, is designed to allow developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by saving forests from logging. In exchange, landowners would earn ''carbon credits'' they could trade with greenhouse polluting industries for money.

But since discussion over the scheme began, scores of carbon traders, Carbon Planet among them, have been active in PNG and Indonesia trying to sign landowners. Tim King, from the Wilderness Society, said there had been ''a tsunami of carbon traders spreading across PNG. Carbon finance and REDD have triggered a 'gold rush' mentality.''

Environmental groups are increasingly concerned UN negotiations have failed to address the vexed issued of corruption and landowners' rights. (SMH)

BERLIN - Governments can help combat climate change by investing more in natural areas, including forests and mangroves, a European study said on Wednesday.

The paper pointed out that nations have natural assets worth trillions of dollars which could help fight global warming and save investment in industrial schemes for carbon capture.

"Natural systems represent one of the biggest untapped allies against the greatest challenge of this generation," said The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study, part of a global project, to be published next year.

Launched by Germany and the European Commission, the report is examining the economics of biodiversity loss.

An investment of $45 billion in protected areas could save nature-based services worth $4.5-$5.2 trillion a year, more than the value of the car, steel and information technology sectors, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told reporters. (Reuters)

While the U.S. Senate's sense of urgency on the climate change front wanes, a new campaign originating on the other side of rapidly warming pond is urging us all to get with the program by cutting our emissions sooner rather than later. This is obviously a good idea from a scientific point of view, but what are its chances of success?

The 10:10 campaign draws on the always-obvious-when-you-think-about-it, but until recently largely ignored, fact that it matters very much how quickly we reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping all the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans. A pair of papers in Nature earlier this year made it clear that there is a finite amount of carbon that the ecosystem can absorb before global average temperatures exceed a critical threshold beyond which the chances of maintaining a comfortable living environment dwindle precipitously. (James Hrynyshyn, Island of Doubt)

It turns out we’ve missed a trick in our articles about the fashion for what we have called ‘pastiche politics‘, the phenomenon by which environmentalists attempt to muster non-existent public support by comparing themselves to world-changing political movements of the past - the Suffragettes, JFK, the New Deal, anti-apartheid, that sort of thing. Because, writing at Comment Is Free about Franny ‘The Age of Stupid’ Armstrong’s 10:10 Campaign, which seeks to get us all to reduce our emissions by 10% over 2010, Brendan O’Neill has provided a handy quote from Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst:

(Which is also a rather nice counter to the watermelon theory, which holds that environmentalism is the reincarnation of socialism - red on the inside. But that’s another story.)

O’Neill’s piece is a ripple of dissent in a sea of sycophantic Guardian coverage of 10:10. Which is not entirely surprising, given that the Guardian is backing the campaign. It presents so much material from the green great and good on the subject that it’s hard to know where to start. Happily, many of its flaws are encapsulated in this wee video of Franny Armstrong confessing all to Guardian journalists:

But we don’t have to worry our pretty heads about that, because the good people at 10:10 will make sure the government will make us do it. And we already know that the government would like us to make them make us do it. As UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband said about the Heathrow protests:

Unfortunately for Franny, governments are far easier to persuade than the electorate.

Don’t we all, dear. The difference is that Franny is happy to escape the treadmill by insisting that everybody else keeps on pedaling - literally. Meanwhile, Franny gets to go in big shiny helicopters:

It is de rigeur for environmentalists demanding that the rest of us change our greedy, consumerist ways to ritually, and with faux embarrassment, confess the size of their own carbon footprint. But it is only so big, they say, shifting uncomfortably yet sincerely in their seats, because they have a planet to save. Over to Franny again:

Not paradoxically at all. What Armstrong has succeeded in demonstrating is that, if you want to actually get anything done around here, you have to make an impact.

Her argument will no doubt cut ice with the converted, however - the converted being those with nothing better to do than read the Guardian and work out how to reduce their emissions. For everyone else, which is almost everybody, there is stuff to do. As we’ve said before, saving the planet is just a way to pass the time.

Anyway, good luck to ‘em. They’ll need it. And congratulations in advance should their campaign actually manage to turn the heads of anything approaching a sizable chunk of the population. But we don’t believe for one minute that the public will go for this, like the public haven’t voted for green parties in the polls, like electoral turn-out has declined as all the mainstream parties have adopted mainstream environmental policies, like opinion polls repeatedly show that most people have little time for environmentalism, like ‘popular’ protests at energy plants and airports are anything but popular.

At the risk of indulging in a bit of pastiche politics ourselves, we would suggest that the real popular movement, the one that really is running counter to the mainstream and trying to change the world for the better, is the one that staunchly resists the political elites’ undemocratic push for a more sustainable, less aspirational world in which our only goal is to keep everything just how it used to be - forever. Because most of us, as (ahem) Martin Luther King once said, have a dream. (Climate Resistance)

What's the best way for humanity to reduce suffering from man-made global warming? No individual has been a stronger voice for rational cost-benefit analysis on this issue than Bjorn Lomborg, the head of Copenhagen Consensus Center, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It! On Thursday, September 3, 2009, Lomborg stopped by Reason's DC HQ to discuss the latest iteration of his ongoing project with Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center's expert panel of five top economists, including three Nobel laureates, has concluded that greater resources should be spent on research into climate engineering and green energy. They also concluded that the least cost-effective way to deal with climate change is carbon taxes. Such carbon taxes are the economic equivalent of cap-and-trade carbon rationing schemes like the Waxman-Markey bill being considered by Congress and which are being negotiated by the U.N.

The expert panel consisted of Nobel laureate economists Thomas Schelling, Vernon Smith, and Finn Kydland. They were joined by University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey and Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati. The panel considered and ranked 21 ground-breaking research proposals by top climate economists on the basis their benefits and costs in dealing with global warming. Ultimately they ranked only the 15 proposals below.

Approximately four minutes. Shot by Dan Hayes and Meredith Bragg; edited by Dan Hayes.

Next week, Reason.tv will run a longer version of Bailey's interview with Lomborg. (Reason)

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who found fame as the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has completed a study of the best ways to address the warming of the planet.

His chief finding: the most cost-effective and technically feasible approach is through geoengineering, the use of technology to deliberately alter the earth’s climate.

Specifically, Mr. Lomborg, along with the scientists and economists he has assembled, found that the most promising avenue is to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology.

The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Mr. Lomborg said he was relying on a paper, “An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change,” by J. Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, Austin, and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, for his conclusions.

He acknowledges that this sounds a bit like a salt-spray-in-the-sky solution to a vastly complex problem, but he is convinced that it holds more promise than the policies discussed or tried so far, including carbon taxes, global cap-and-trade programs and large-scale deployment of existing technologies like so-called clean diesel cars.

He also admits that any climate-altering plan could have dangerous unforeseen consequences. (John M. Broder, Green Inc.)

Top British climate boffins have said that the only practical hope for arresting global warming is the use of "geoengineering" - techniques intended to reduce the effects of CO2 emissions, as opposed to reducing the CO2 emissions themselves.

The scientists add that not only are large emissions cuts politically and diplomatically unfeasible, but that geoengineering would actually be cheaper and easier. (Lewis Page, The Register)

Geoengineering has so far been something of a taboo topic for climate scientists. Peter Cox and Hazel Jeffery explain why it is now time to take it seriously

The climate change we are experiencing now is caused by an increase in greenhouse gases due to human activities, most notably the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture and deforestation. Although global warming has been around in the scientific literature since a landmark paper by Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, it has only been in recent decades that our scientific understanding of the climate system has made it clear that a global warming of greater than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels may be dangerous and should therefore be avoided. (Physics World)

New survey ranks how 166 nations will be affected by climate change. Of 28 nations at “extreme risk”, 22 are in Africa. (CoP15)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Ribbon seals should be listed as threatened or endangered because global warming is quickly melting sea ice, which the seals depend on for several months each year, two environmental groups said in a lawsuit filed against the federal government in San Francisco Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December denied a listing under the Endangered Species Act for the seals found off the coasts of Alaska and Russia.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace sued in U.S. District Court, claiming the agency ignored the best science available on global warming. Shaye Wolf, a Center for Biological Diversity biologist, said her group had hoped NOAA officials would changes its conclusions with a change in presidents.

"We've seen no change here," she said. "The Obama administration is continuing the flawed and head-in-the-sand policies of the Bush years." (Associated Press)

SALMON, Idaho - The American West is losing its autumn colors as global warming begins to bite and there is far more at stake than iconic scenery.

Aspen, the white-barked trees with golden leaves that gave their name to the famed Colorado ski resort, have been dying off across the Rocky Mountain states. The die-off is puzzling but some foresters point to climate change.

This disaster coincides with beetle outbreaks that have laid waste to millions of acres of pine and spruce forest in the American and Canadian west. They too have been linked to warmer winters since extremely cold temperatures are needed to kill the insects. (Reuters)

Human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C., according to a new study published Thursday in the online version of the journal Science. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

Temperature claims 'contradict numerous previous Arctic studies'

The Washington Post is touting a new study purporting to show an Arctic temperature “Hockey Stick.” But the study appears to contradict numerous previous Arctic studies and scientists are already challenging the premise and claims of the new study. The study in under fire for basing key results and conclusions on Penn State Professor Michael Mann's discredited “Hockey Stick” temperature graph. (Editor's Note: Mann just recently attempted to invent a hurricane "Hockey Stick" as well. )

The new study claims to show “human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C.,” according to a September 3, 2009 article by the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. The study will appear in the September 3, 2009 online version of the journal Science. The lead author was Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S. Kaufman.

The Washington Post also saw fit to gave prominent play to the environmental group World Wildlife Fund's new dire Arctic study claiming a scary global warming caused “transformation” of the Arctic. (The study is getting the alarmist media promote. See: USA Today: 'Arctic temperatures hit 2,000-year high' - But Andrew Revkin of NYT has much more balanced coverage of the study.) The Post article on the new Arctic “Hockey Stick” completely glossed over years of contrary data and instead mostly gave the authors a scrutiny free ride. (Eilperin also misspelled the name of one scientist she quoted.)

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, “This looks like this week's "Hockey Stick" including many of Mann's collaborators.” [Editor's Note: Mann's has attempted multiple "Hockey Stick" inventions and his newest creation is the Hurricane "Hockey Stick.”.] (Marc Morano, Climate Depot)

Hmmm, yes they could. But the solar magnetic field could simply be in a cyclical downturn of which this is a part. We need an expert!

Note that of course, they don’t mention that this coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age. But that would be politically incorrect, wouldn’t it?

I’d love to know what those other indications are, because the prognostications of future solar activity have been startlingly poor from practically everybody.

I leave the last words to David Hathaway, who dares to speak the truth to solar science:

Persistent winds and a weakened current in the Mid-Atlantic contributed to higher than normal sea levels along the Eastern Seaboard in June and July, according to a new NOAA technical report.

After observing water levels six inches to two feet higher than originally predicted, NOAA scientists began analyzing data from select tide stations and buoys from Maine to Florida and found that a weakening of the Florida Current Transport—an oceanic current that feeds into the Gulf Stream—in addition to steady and persistent Northeast winds, contributed to this anomaly.

Impacts of the event were amplified by the occurrence of a perigean-spring tide, the natural timing of the season and month when the moon is closest to the Earth and its gravitational pull heightens the elevation of the water. The combined effects of this tide with the sea level anomaly produced minor flooding on the coast.

“The report is a good first assessment,” said NOAA Oceanographer William Sweet, Ph.D. “However, NOAA, with our academic partners, should continue to investigate the broader causes behind the event. Further analysis is needed to fully understand what is driving the patterns we observed.”

The full report, Elevated East Coast Sea Level Anomaly: June-July 2009, is available online.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. (WUWT)

While environmentalists and clueless politicans like CA Representative Linda Sanchez and not surprisingly Climate Progress’ Joe Romm sought to place the blame for the California wildfires on ‘global warming’. the massive California wildfires can be attributed to a cooling Pacific, two years of La Nina and environmental mismanagement.

You can see clearly from the following correlation chart of La Ninas (using the Southern Oscillation Index) with precipitation from CDC, that La Ninas favor dryness in the southwest.

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The basin wide Pacific multidecadal warming and cooling affects the frequency and strength of La Ninas and El Ninos. The cold PDO favoring more, stronger and longer lasting La Ninas and the warm PDO more, stronger and longer lasting El Ninos and fewer briefer, mostly weak La Ninas. The PDO turned cold in 1998 bounced some until 2006 when it began a significant decline. See the blue La Nina frequency increasing like it did when the PDO was last cold from 1947 to 1977.

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The rapid cooling in the Pacific in 2006 caused the El Nino winter of 2006/07 rains to fail in California. The La Nina that ensued became strong in the late winter and early spring of 2007/08 and came back again for a reprise in 2008/09 winter continued to produce sub normal rainfall.

Click for a larger image

Click for a larger image

Click for a larger image

A few years back McCabe, Palecki and Betancourt published a paper that looked at drought frequency across the United States related to both the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Mulitdecadal Oscillation. Droughts in the United States were more frequent when the Atlantic was in its warm mode. When the Atlantic was warm, and the Pacific was also in its warm mode, the dryness was more across the northwest and southeast and when the Pacific was cold more across the southwest. Red areas have enhanced drought probabilities.

Click for a larger image

We are currently still have a warm Atlantic mode and cold Pacific mode (D) and thus should expect the increased risk of dryness in the southwest. See these maps and read more here.

This natural cyclical lack of rainfall combined with unwise policy that Dr. Scott Campbell reported concerning the prohibition against clearing up accumulated brush from the areas surrounding housing developments that were instituted at the insistence of the Sierra Club and other environmental groups has left more fuel for the fires fanned by the Santa Ana winds. The JPL’s Dr Patzert indicated, in a release, were also more common in La Ninas. The risk is also greater because more people built homes in the cooler hills among the trees, putting more than trees at risk.

In addition, environmentalists have reduced the amount of water that can be used for agriculture. Farmers in the Central Valley are asking for a new canal to get water from the Sacramento River, as well as a relaxation of environmental restrictions resulting from a 2007 court ruling limiting the amount of water pumped south from the delta – a giant sponge that absorbs runoff from the wetter north. The ruling was in response to a suit by environmental groups that held that the water pumping through the delta endangered several species of fish, including smelt, green sturgeon, and winter and spring salmon. More here.

Given the current El Nino is in the cold PDO mode, it should be weak and tend to be brief. It may peak this fall and weaken this winter. The increased tropical activity in the eastern Pacific is favored in El Nino years (in some El Ninos they reach California in the early fall in a weakened state – e.g. Kathleen in 1976). The similar El Ninos in the cold PDO tended to produce normal to below normal wet season precipitation and another active fire season next year.

It is likely a La Nina will return next year. Expect another fire season. See more here. (WWUT)

UPDATE 5.11pm: BELIEVE it or not, the nation has just sweated through its hottest August on record ... but don't blame climate change.

The Bureau of Meteorology says August was almost 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than normal across the country.

The bureau boffins described it as most extraordinary'' as temperatures crept above 38 degrees in some areas.

And winter as a whole came within a whisker of being the warmest of record - it was just 0.01 of a degree cooler than the record-holder, 1996.

Blair Trewin, a climate scientist with the bureau, said the warm weather was caused by a lack of large frontal systems sweeping up from the southern oceans, which would have brought cool air.

Instead, persistent high pressure systems hung about the subtropics.

Dr Trewin said the heatwaves were caused more by natural variability than by climate change. (AAP)

“The more interesting and potentially controversial result is that our data indicate surface water temperatures during a part of the Medieval Warm Period that are similar to today’s…”

“Although there are significant uncertainties with our own reconstruction, our work raises the idea that perhaps even the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions need to be looked at more closely.”

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: News Release : New Temperature Reconstruction from Indo-Pacific Warm Pool

A map of the Indo-Pacific region indicates the locations of sediment cores used for the study. Station BJ8 marks the cores taken by Oppo and her colleagues. MD60 marks the site of published data. (Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

A new 2,000 year long reconstruction of sea surface temperatures (SST) from the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP) suggests that temperatures in the region may have been as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as they are today.

The IPWP is the largest body of warm water in the world, and, as a result, it is the largest source of heat and moisture to the global atmosphere, and an important component of the planet’s climate. Climate models suggest that global mean temperatures are particularly sensitive to sea surface temperatures in the IPWP. Understanding the past history of the region is of great importance for placing current warming trends in a global context.

In a joint project with the Indonesian Ministry of Science and Technology (BPPT), the study’s authors, Delia Oppo, a paleo–oceanographer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and her colleagues Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers State University and Braddock K. Linsley of the University at Albany-State University of New York, collected sediment cores along the continental margin of the Indonesian Seas and used chemical analyses to estimate water past temperatures and date the sediment. The cruise included 13 US and 14 Indonesian scientists.

“This is the first record from the region that has really modern sediments and a record of the last two millennia, allowing us to place recent trends in a larger framework,” notes Oppo.

Global temperature records are predominantly reconstructed from tree rings and ice cores. Very little ocean data are used to generate temperature reconstructions, and very little data from the tropics. “As palaeoclimatologists, we work to generate information from multiple sources to improve confidence in the global temperature reconstructions, and our study contributes to scientists’ efforts towards that goal,” adds Oppo.

Temperature reconstructions suggest that the Northern Hemisphere may have been slightly cooler (by about 0.5 degrees Celsius) during the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (~AD 800-1300) than during the late-20th century. However, these temperature reconstructions are based on, in large part, data compiled from high latitude or high altitude terrestrial proxy records, such as tree rings and ice cores, from the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Little pre-historical temperature data from tropical regions like the IPWP has been incorporated into these analyses, and the global extent of warm temperatures during this interval is unclear. As a result, conclusions regarding past global temperatures still have some uncertainties.

Sea surface temperature reconstructions from the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. Different colored symbols indicate data from different cores used in the reconstruction. A northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction from Mann et al. (2008) is shown in the black curve. The previously published data is from Newton et al. (2006). Colored lines are the average of the data points. Triangles at the bottom of the figure show where age control exists. The horizontal black line labeled 1997-2007 Mean Annual SST shows the value of the annual average sea surface temperature for the same time period. The Little Ice Age, which occurred around A.D. 1700, was a cool period, but its magnitude was only about 0.5 to 1˚C cooler than modern winter temperatures. Water temperature during the late Medieval Warm Period, between about A.D. 1000 to 1250, was within error of modern annual sea surface temperatures. (Oppo, Rosenthal, Linsley; 2009)

Oppo comments, “Although there are significant uncertainties with our own reconstruction, our work raises the idea that perhaps even the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions need to be looked at more closely.”

The marine-based IPWP temperature reconstruction is in many ways similar to land temperature reconstructions from the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Major trends observed in NH temperature reconstructions, including the cooling during the Little Ice Age (~1500-1850 AD) and the marked warming during the late twentieth century, are also observed in the IPWP.

“The more interesting and potentially controversial result is that our data indicate surface water temperatures during a part of the Medieval Warm Period that are similar to today’s,” says Oppo. NH temperature reconstructions also suggest that temperatures warmed during this time period between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1250, but they were not as warm as modern temperatures. Oppo emphasizes, “Our results for this time period are really in stark contrast to the Northern Hemisphere reconstructions.”

Records of water temperature from instruments like thermometers are only available back to the 1850s. In order to reconstruct temperatures over the last 2,000 years, Oppo and her colleagues used a proxy for temperature collected from the skeletons of marine plankton in sediments in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The ratio of magnesium to calcium in the hard outer shells of the planktonic foraminifera Globigerinoides ruber varies depending on the surface temperature of the water in which it grows. When the phytoplankton dies, it falls to the bottom of the ocean and accumulates in sediments, recording the sea surface temperature in which it lived.

“Marine sediments accumulate slowly in general — approximately 3 cm/yr — which makes it hard to overlap sediment record with instrumental record and compare that record to modern temperature records,” says Oppo. “That’s what is different about this study. The sediment accumulates fast enough in this region to give us enough material to sample and date to modern times.”

The team generated a composite 2000-year record by combining published data from a piston core in the area with the data they collected using a gravity corer and a multi-corer. Tubes on the bottom of the multi-corer collected the most recently deposited sediment, therefore enabling the comparison of sea surface temperature information recorded in the plankton shells to direct measurements from thermometers.

Oppo cautions that the reconstruction contains some uncertainties. Information from three different cores was compiled in order to reconstruct a 2,000-year-long record. In addition sediment data have an inherent uncertainty associated with accurately dating samples. The SST variations they have reconstructed are very small, near the limit of the Mg/Ca dating method. Even in light of these issues, the results from the reconstruction are of fundamental importance to the scientific community.

The overall similarity in trend between the Northern Hemisphere and the IPWP reconstructions suggests that that Indonesian SST is well correlated to global SST and air temperature. On the other hand, the finding that IPWP SSTs seem to have been approximately the same as today in the past, at a time when average Northern Hemisphere temperature appear to have been cooler than today, suggests changes in the coupling between IPWP and Northern Hemisphere or global temperatures have occurred in the past, for reasons that are not yet understood. “This work points in the direction of questions that we have to ask,” Oppo says. “This is only the first word, not the last word.”

The US National Science Foundation and the WHOI Ocean and Climate Change Institute provided funding for this work.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment. (WUWT)

Ignoring peak-oil Cassandras, BP has made another giant oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. We're not running out of oil. Our government just doesn't want us to look for it.

The world is running out of oil and good riddance. That's the environmentalists' mantra. But since the first well was drilled near Titusville, Pa., 150 years ago, the prophecy has gone unfulfilled. Trouble is, those darn greedy oil companies keep finding the stuff.

Oil has been produced in the Gulf of Mexico since the first well was drilled by Kerr-McGee Corp. in 1947. Some of the wells are pretty well played out by now, except that over the past two decades or so, oil explorers began to notice a curious thing. Shallower wells that were thought to be exhausted seemed to be filling up again.

This, and the discovery of vast natural-gas deposits at depths greater than 10,000 feet, mean that either (1) we haven't been drilling deep enough or (2) oil and gas are not finite resources deposited long ago, but rather the result of still-functioning processes deep within the earth. Either way, there's much more to be had.

MINNEAPOLIS - A coalition of environmental groups has filed a lawsuit challenging a U.S. State Department permit that allows an oil pipeline to be built in three Midwestern states.

Enbridge Inc. has already begun construction work on the Alberta Clipper pipeline, which will bring crude oil to the U.S. from Canada's oil sands. The pipeline will run between Superior, Wis., and Hardisty, Alberta through Minnesota and northeastern North Dakota.

The coalition filed the lawsuit Thursday in federal court in California. The groups argue the oil extracted from the oil sands is dirty, and refining it will release more pollutants and contribute to global warming. (Associated Press)

China is working on ways to encourage large-scale coal bed methane extraction in efforts to improve coal mine safety, a Chinese official said Thursday.

Zhang Guobao, deputy chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the measures would include higher subsidies for gas extraction.

He was addressing a national conference on prevention and control of gases in coal mines in Nanchang, capital of east China's Jiangxi province.

He said the government will implement a policy to subsidize power suppliers who used coal bed methane gas to produce electricity and sell it to power grids.

The State has set the goals of forming the capacity to extract 3.5 billion cu m of coal bed methane and produce 2 billion cu m by 2010. (Xinhua)

Renewable Energy, Meet the New Nimbys - Solar and Wind-Power Proposals Draw Opposition From Residents Fearing Visual Blight; a Dilemma for Some Environmentalists

Technology changes, but human nature doesn't. Environmentally friendly energy projects are running into the same cries of "not in my backyard" that stymied a previous generation of alternative-power efforts.

Even as Americans tell pollsters they are eager for alternatives to fossil fuel, some are fighting proposals for solar and wind projects and for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that would be needed to carry the cleaner energy to market. The protests echo the grass-roots opposition that has blocked nuclear plants and energy-producing trash incinerators for decades.

The new backlash is fueled by worries that renewable-energy projects would occupy vast amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power. Either renewable projects would have to be centralized and sprawling, covering many square miles apiece, or they would need to be distributed in pieces across millions of rooftops and lawns. (Jeffrey Ball, WSJ)

Horizons of Change - The Danes have been world leaders in wind energy, but it has not always been plain sailing

IT IS now nearly 30 years since the late George Colley, then minister for energy, stood on the west coast of Jutland looking at Denmark’s first two experimental wind turbines. Although he and his officials were impressed, they came home and did nothing – while the Danes went on to become world leaders in wind power technology.

Now, with Copenhagen hosting the crucial UN climate change summit in December, they’re keen to blow their own trumpet about what has been achieved by this relatively small EU member state. And so, we found ourselves back in Jutland after all these years, on a “power trip” press tour organised by Climate Consortium Denmark.

Over 5,500 wind turbines are now operating in Denmark, supplying more than 20 per cent of the country’s electricity demand. They include vast offshore installations like Horns Rev, up to 20km off the west coast of Jutland, where 80 huge turbines – with a 70m hub height – generate 160 megawatts (mw) of power at full production. Plans are being made for a much larger (4,600mw) offshore wind power project in the Baltic Sea that would link Danish, Swedish and German “wind parks” in an international electricity grid.

This project, Kriegers Flak, is estimated to cost €1.3 billion, partly funded by EU aid from the European Commission’s renewable energy budget. During a storm in 2005, wind power met 100 per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand, though it had to be shut down when wind speeds exceeded 25m a second, according to Lars Aagaard, managing director of the Danish Energy Association. When that happened, hydro power from Norway flowed in to keep the country supplied.

Energinet.dk, which runs Denmark’s national grid, exports cheap wind-generated electricity to both Norway and Sweden when the wind is blowing and imports more expensive hydro or nuclear-generated power when it’s not. The grid also has to be reorganised so that wind is “first in line”, meaning that other power sources are secondary. Peder Andreasen, Energinet.dk’s chief executive, told us about the “huge challenge” of integrating wind into a grid that was dominated by 16 fossil fuel generating stations. But external links are so strong that up to two-thirds of the country’s electricity can be exported or imported at the flick of a switch in its new control centre outside Fredericia.

Denmark aims to generate 30 per cent of the energy it needs from renewable sources by 2020 – a third more than the EU target. Lars Aagaard expects that most of this will come from wind and that more and more wind farms will be built offshore, mainly because public acceptance by Danes of onshore developments has “dissipated”. The world’s first profitable offshore installation is the Middelgrunden wind park, an arc of 20 Siemens 2mw turbines that can be seen from planes approaching Kastrup airport. (Irish Times)

Alternative energy sources have long been little more than an alternative to fossil fuel staples. With legislative models based on carbon offsets, solar energy may offer an intriguing option.

Never mind the collapse of Spain's solar energy subsidies, or the vast Gulf of Mexico oil field discovered by BP, modern energy solutions can be found among solar providers.

Part of the solar game is securing federal stimulus dollars. While U.S. Vice President Joe Biden continues to defend the success of the $787 billion stimulus program, it is clear that solar energy companies are well positioned for federal and state stimulus dollars.

But why should the government invest in solar over other alternative energies like wind and geothermal sources? (Digital Journal)

Nothing is more indicative of the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of solar energy applications than the Chinese photovoltaic (PV) industry.

China now leads the world in PV production, with about 26% of global production. Last year, China produced about 1.8 gigawatts of solar panels. And it appears that the vast majority of those panels are being exported. Suntech Power Holdings, China’s biggest solar panel producer, exports about 98% of the panels it produces. If that percentage is true for the entirety of China’s solar panel sector, then only about 40 megawatts (MW) of solar power was actually installed in China in 2008 (0.73% of the world total). And that solar capacity is miniscule when compared to the coal-fired power generation that was added last year: Some 65,750 megawatts of coal plants were brought online in China in 2008, or about 1,600 times as much capacity as was gained from solar. (Energy Tribune)

Audi of America President Johan de Nysschen dismissed GM’s upcoming plug-in hybrid, the Chevrolet Volt as “a car for idiots.” More specifically, he said that few consumers will be willing to pay $40,000 base price for a car that competes with $25,000 hybrids.

“No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a (Toyota) Corolla,” he said. “So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.” “They’re for the intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are,” he said.

In addition, he noted, the Volt is not a luxury car whose green-technology costs will be excused because it also delivers prestige or performance. (Car Dealer Reviews)

A Washington Post reporter describes the rigmarole Washington D.C. residents must endure to purchase a gun and keep it in one’s home for purposes of self-defense. Snippet:

It’s a fair-minded article–not only about the government regulations, but also the factors that play into the decision to keep a gun–risk of crime, risk of accident, the personal willingness to use deadly force (not to mention getting approval from the spouse!)

Cato Chairman Bob Levy, the prime mover of the landmark Heller ruling, discusses the next legal fight: Whether one can carry a firearm outside of the home for purposes of self-defense. Tom Palmer is suing the DC government on this. For more on the Second Amendment and gun control, check out the new Cato book, Gun Control on Trial, by Brian Doherty. (Tim Lynch, Cato at liberty)

Cato Adjunct Scholar and Pacific Legal Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Tim Sandefur published an excellent op-ed in the National Law Journal this week on the upcoming Supreme Court case Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection:

Despite the dreadful decision in the Kelo case several years ago, the fight to maintain the fundamental right to private property continues in our courts and legislatures. Tim and PLF have been doing yeoman’s work in the fight for property rights, and I am proud to team Cato up with them and the NFIB Legal Center in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the rightful property owners in this case. You can download the PDF of the brief here. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

WASHINGTON - Swine flu is spreading more quickly in the U.S. Southeast, where schools started back earlier than in other areas after the summer break, a U.S. health official said on Wednesday.

The pandemic H1N1 influenza virus has been active since March but officials have seen a clear "uptick" in activity in some areas in recent weeks, Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters.

"That little uptick we are seeing is all in the Southeast, in the school age children," Schuchat said.

Health experts say school age children and young adults are more likely than others to be infected with swine flu, and have said they expected the pandemic to become more active as schools started back and children mixed with one another. (Reuters)

GENEVA - H1N1 vaccines should offer broad protection even if the pandemic flu virus mutates as it spreads, a top World Health Organisation expert said on Wednesday.

Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO's vaccine research programme, said that health workers should get immunised first when the shots begin to be distributed, as early as this month. (Reuters)

Body mass in younger and older adulthood, and weight gain between these periods of life, may influence a man's risk for prostate cancer. This risk varies among different ethnic populations, according to results of a study in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. (ScienceDaily)

A combination of bad food, lax advertising rules and nowhere to play is why more children are becoming obese, according to a campaigner.

The most recent NHS figures showed that between 1995 and 2007 there was a rise in the number of children aged two to 15 classed as obese.

Two years ago three in ten youngsters were overweight or obese, and Government researchers predict that the proportion will continue to rise. They have said that half of boys aged six to 10 could be obese by 2050, and a fifth of girls. Among children aged 11 to 15, 23% of boys could be obese by that time and 37% of girls. (UKPA)

Thousands of children and adolescents are using anti-obesity drugs that in the UK are only licensed for use by adults. The number of young people receiving prescriptions for these drugs has increased 15-fold since 1999, but most stop using them before they could expect to see any benefit, according to a new study. (Wiley-Blackwell)

Adolescent and young children of obese mothers who underwent weight-loss surgery prior to pregnancy have been found to have a lower prevalence of obesity and significantly improved cardio-metabolic markers when compared to siblings born before the same obese mothers had weight-loss surgery. This new study has been accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). (ScienceDaily)

LOS ANGELES - Increasingly vocal calls for taxes on sugary drinks and junk food are fueling a behind- the-scenes battle that public health officials say is reminiscent of America's war on cigarettes.

The U.S. obesity epidemic has blossomed into a public health crisis and overweight adolescents are starting to suffer problems that used to plague middle-aged adults -- early heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

While restaurant operators and food and soda makers promote personal responsibility and moderation, backers of the taxes say levies on foods that quickly add extra pounds are a necessary part of any successful anti-obesity effort.

Backers suggest taxes could help offset the estimated $147 billion cost of treating obesity-related diseases and fund programs to battle the expanding girths of Americans.

Adding to the pressure is the fact that cash-poor state and local governments are scrambling to raise revenue. Junk food taxes give them an opportunity to boost taxes under the guise of doing good, says Bob Goldin, executive vice president at restaurant consulting firm Technomic. (Reuters)

FDA won't disclose brands; still has no standard for lead in lipstick

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 1 -- A study by the Food and Drug administration found lead in lipstick at levels much higher than those detected by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC) in a 2007 study that received international attention.

FDA found lead in all 20 lipsticks tested, at 0.09 to 3.06 parts per million - four times higher than the highest level reported in by CSC. FDA used a new method to analyze lipstick and concluded that earlier methods likely underestimated lead levels. (PRNewswire-USNewswire)

What really happened: FDA STUDY REAFFIRMS THE SAFETY OF LIPSTICK; AGENCY SAYS TRACE LEAD LEVELS IN LIPSTICK NOT A SAFETY CONCERN

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 25, 2009) — In an article published in the July/August edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmetic Science, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists report that they have developed, validated and employed a highly sensitive and rigorous testing method to analyze the total lead content in a broad selection of lipsticks sold in the U.S. and found the lead levels present to be safe and well below limits recommended by international regulatory and public health authorities.

The new FDA study of lead levels in lipstick was prompted by recurring and unfounded allegations that most recently surfaced in a report released in October 2007 by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC), an advocacy group that alleged it found unsafe lead levels in a variety of lipsticks marketed in the U.S. However, all of the lead levels the group identified were well below all established regulatory standards.

In response to the allegations, FDA scientists tested the lead content of the same selection of lipsticks evaluated by the CSC and found the lead levels present to be safe and lower than limits recommended by other public health authorities for lead in cosmetics, including the very conservative limit of 5 parts per million (ppm) set by California under Proposition 65, as well as the draft Canadian guidance of 10ppm. FDA was unable to determine if a method validated for the analysis of lipstick was used to generate the data in CSC’s 2007 report because the group did not provide the details of its analytic method. This is important because the determination of trace levels of lead requires considerable skill and expertise and adherence to rigorous, validated analytic protocols.

As expected, FDA found trace levels of lead in all of the lipsticks tested, ranging from 0.09 ppm to 3.06 ppm, with an average value of 1.07 ppm, and concluded that the lead levels found are within the range that would be expected from lipsticks formulated with permitted color additives and other ingredients that had been prepared under good manufacturing practices. FDA stated on its Web site that these results confirm that the low levels of lead found in the lipsticks are not a safety concern.

In conducting their study, FDA applied a method that determines the total lead content of each of the products tested, not the amount of lead to which a consumer who used the product would have been exposed. This rigorous method destroys the entire product and releases all of the lead present in the product for analysis. However, consumers who use lipstick ingest only a tiny fraction of the lipstick they apply, and much of the lead that is ingested in that tiny fraction of lipstick is not biologically available because it is trapped inside larger particles and excreted by the body.

Lead is never used as an intentionally added ingredient in or as an additive to lipstick However, because lead is found naturally in air, water, and soil, it may also be found at extremely low levels as a trace contaminant in the raw ingredients used in formulating cosmetics, just as it is in many thousands of other products.

Safety is the highest priority of personal care products companies. Cosmetic and personal care product manufacturers are required by law to substantiate the safety of all products and ingredients before they are marketed.

Council member companies employ and consult with thousands of scientists from multiple disciplines to perform sophisticated safety assessments. Those safety assessments take into account that products such as lipstick may be used daily and over the course of a lifetime.

For information on the FDA study of lead in lipstick, visit the FDA website: http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/ProductandIngredientSafety/ProductInformation/ucm137224.htm#ref1 .

For additional information about lead in lipstick or lipstick ingredients, visit www.CosmeticsInfo.org .

Based in Washington, D.C., the Personal Care Products Council is the leading national trade association representing the global cosmetic and personal care products industry. Founded in 1894, the Council's more than 600 member companies manufacture, distribute, and supply the vast majority of finished personal care products marketed in the U.S. As the makers of a diverse range of products millions of consumers rely on everyday, from sunscreens, toothpaste and shampoo to moisturizer, lipstick and fragrance, personal care products companies are global leaders committed to product safety, quality and innovation.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Rudolph Steiner, a founder of organic farming in the 1920s, started the “great organic nitrogen swindle” that threatens the world with hunger to this day. Steiner didn’t believe in nutrients, he believed in “vital forces.” He said a cow has horns to send into itself “astral-ethereal formative powers.” He claimed you could fertilize a whole farm by burying a handful of manure inside a cow’s horn for a year—so that the manure is “inwardly quickened.”

The organic movement is still trying to swindle the world into believing the world can get enough nitrogen from animal waste and green manure crops to produce our food. In 1978, two experts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded the U.S. had only 33 percent of the manure needed to support food production then. The rest of the world had far less pasture and manure per capita than the U.S. The world population was then 4.3 billion. Today, of course, human numbers are at 6.3 billion, on their way to 8 billion

Obviously, the world has only a small fraction of the organic manure needed to support food for today and into the future. We use all the manure we have. Commercial hog and poultry farms added tremendously to our ability to collect and use animal waste efficiently, no matter how ugly Greenpeace makes them sound. But we also add about 90 million tons per year of industrial nitrogen: natural nitrogen, taken from the air around us which is 78 percent N. About 60 percent of humanity is surviving and thriving today on that aerial nitrogen.

Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba claims an all-organic U.S. alone would need the manure from another billion cows. That would force the clearing of 4–6 billion acres of U. S. forest to make room for their pasture.

The organic movement, however, continues to claim that farmers don’t need fertilizer.

The UN led a recent big-tent effort to lay out a 50-year blueprint for global farming. Originally, universities, agribusiness, consumers, governments and eco-activists were all involved.

At the end of five-years, however, the activists had outlasted everybody else. The report director, Robert Watson, assured us that farm chemicals had “harmed the soil structure,” though he gave no evidence. He even claimed today’s food was “less healthy” than food 60 years ago. Never mind that today’s people are living longer and healthier lives while eating it and no nutritional differences have ever been identified. Watson’s previous job was also anti-science—leading the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 2007, the University of Michigan issued a report saying that “organic farming can feed the world.” Unfortunately, their data contained a massive, fundamental error on nitrogen. Geologist Catherine Badgley cited a single study claiming green manure crops had put 150 kg of organic nitrogen into the soil, and two-thirds of that had been delivered to the grain crop. But the Michigan report is wildly inconsistent with a century of farming and agricultural research. The nutritive value of nitrogen fertilizer is rated at only about 33 percent and a whole raft of studies have confirmed that the less-efficient green manure system gets only about 20 percent of its N to the grain seeds.

Getting only 20 percent of the organic nitrogen into the seed heads, instead of 66 percent as the Michigan report claimed, would mean massive waves of organic hunger, nutrition-related disease, wars, and global agony.

Why push organic farming past what it can realistically do? (CGFI)

As much as half of California could be occupied by new bird communities by 2070 according to a new study by PRBO Conservation Science (PRBO) and partners. The publication entitled "Reshuffling of species with climate disruption: A no-analog future for California birds?" is to be released in the open access peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE on September 2nd. (ScienceDaily)

GENEVA — The global need to cope with climate change is fueling a desire to make climate forecasts as common as weather forecasts, U.S. officials attending a U.N. conference said Wednesday.

Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration that creates weather forecasts for the United States, said the world needs better ways to share information about climate change.

"We're seeing now a convergence between what users are beginning to ask for and the ability of the scientific community to provide something on a scale and in a fashion that is relevant to what the users need," Lubchenco told The Associated Press.

There are no scientific forecasts to support the belief that emissions trading will benefit New Zealanders, says Wellington-based Monash University forecasting researcher, Dr Kesten Green.

“As I understand it, the espoused purpose of the legislation is to make a contribution to keeping global average temperatures from reaching levels dangerously higher than current levels during the 21st century. A proper regulatory impact analysis of the emissions trading legislation would require scientific (evidence-based) forecasts of global average temperature without the policy, forecasts of the effects of any changes in global mean temperatures, and forecasts of the costs and benefits of all of the effects of the proposed policy, and of other reasonable policies, on temperatures and on people.

In a paper to be published in the International Journal of Forecasting later this year, Dr Green and co-authors Dr Scott Armstrong, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr Willie Soon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using evidence-based procedures forecast that the global average temperature for the year 2100, and for every intervening year, will be the same as the 2008 temperature; plus or minus 0.5 degrees Celsius. In other words, the annual global average temperature is unlikely to change much, in either direction, over this century.

The authors, who are internationally known as experts in forecasting methods (Green and Armstrong) and climate (Soon), concluded that given the complexity of climate and uncertainty over why and how climate changes, a simple forecast that average temperatures will not change was appropriate. They further reasoned that it would be hard if not impossible to make forecasts that were more accurate than this benchmark. (Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition)

A photograph of a shrinking icecap that looks like 'mother nature in tears' is set to become a stark image of the dangers of global warming.

Marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan captured the pictures while on an annual voyage to observe the largest icecap in Norway Austfonna on July 16.

He said the image looked just like mother nature in tears, "as if she was crying about our inability to reduce global warming". (Daily Telegraph)

Standing on the vulnerable ice sheet, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he expected the 100 or so world leaders who will take part in climate talks in New York this month to "demonstrate their leadership". (CoP15)

A new report says Arctic climate change is happening faster than anyone anticipated and may soon be forcing more rapid warming on the rest of the planet.

"It is a tipping point," said Craig Stewart of the World Wildlife Fund, which was to release the report Wednesday in London. (CP)

It would be easy to assume that when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared in early 2007 that it was "very likely" that global warming was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, the scientific case on climate change was effectively closed. The evidence showed that when we add carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels or cutting down trees, those gases enhance the greenhouse effect and warm the planet. What else is there to figure out?

As it turns out, plenty. While the big picture on climate change has been virtually settled by decades of scientific work, the details of what exactly will happen in a warmer world are still fuzzy — and the climate devil will be in those details. Yet new updates on climate science come out only intermittently — the IPCC goes five or six years between releasing its massive assessments. That's far too infrequent for policymakers — especially as the world attempts to draft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol at the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit in December. "We all collectively have to share information about climate change in a way that will better inform ongoing decisions that people need to make," says Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "There's an urgent need for ongoing, relevant information about climate change — and there's no current mechanism for providing that." (Bryan Walsh, Time)

The Great Barrier Reef's chances of survival from even moderate climate change are poor and ''catastrophic damage'' may not be avoided, a report has found.

The Reef Outlook Report concludes that the rate of climate change backed by the Federal Government would result in ''severe mass coral bleaching'' and threaten the habitats of key species on the reef.

In a series of dire predictions for the World Heritage-listed natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority's report finds that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have to be kept under 400 parts per million (ppm) if important animal species and coral are to have a low to medium vulnerability to climate change. The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 387 ppm. (The Age)

A spending of around 1 percent of the world's GDP would allow developing nations to switch to economies with low carbon emissions while maintaining growth, the World Economic and Social Survey says. (CoP15)

The cost of reducing China's total greenhouse gas emissions is likely to reach $438bn a year within 20 years, and developed economies will have to bear much of that cost, according to a group of Beijing's leading climate economists.

The figure, equivalent to about 7.5 per cent of China's estimated gross domestic product in 2030, is likely to be deployed to support Beijing's argument at December's climate change summit in Copenhagen that industrialised nations must share the cost of cutting emissions in developing countries. (Financial Times)

Less than 100 days away from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, details concerning individual nations' needs are surfacing that are creating alarm. The dollar figures would be digestible if they were a one-time lump sum payment, but the figures being reported to be paid on an annual basis to 'developing nations' makes a deal in Copenhagen later this year highly unlikely. (John Guerrerio, Examiner)

The most experienced readers of The Reference Frame remember a Kyoto counter that used to be embedded in the sidebar. It was created by Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com and it was counting the dollars wasted for the Kyoto protocol, assuming that the annual cost of the carbon regulation was USD 150 billion.

He was - and I was - criticized from all sides of the alarmist movement. Let us omit the most vitriolic stuff and look in the comment section of Deltoid. Eli Rabett (whose real identity is known to us) wrote in 2005:

BERLIN (IDN) - An independent scientific group claims to have found a new approach to cutting the Gordian knot -- that the sluggish climate negotiations have come to symbolise -- and achieving a global climate treaty at the UN conference this December in Copenhagen.

The novel approach ties in with the vision of climate justice involving the long-term convergence of per capita emissions jointly formulated by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, say the authors of a new report.

The report was presented to the German Federal Government Sep. 1 by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) comprising eminent German and other European climate experts. It pleads for a "global budget" putting a ceiling on the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that may be emitted up to the year 2050 by all countries around the world.

This "innovative approach", says the WBGU, will enable not only the reduction targets of the industrialised countries up to 2020 -- when the peak year of worldwide CO2 emissions is to be reached -- to be based upon a systematic foundation, but also the increasing decarbonisation commitments that the newly industrialising and developing countries will be required to achieve.

The authors of the report point out that the Kyoto Protocol agreed in Dec. 1997 only made provision for emission reduction targets "for a minority of countries in a rather arbitrary manner".

The climate experts says in a 'summary for policy-makers': "The proposals made public by various countries and groups of countries in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference are not essentially more ambitious than their forerunners and hardly likely to bring about compliance with the 2°C guard rail." (IDN-InDepthNews Service)

Oh boy... A history of CO2 emissions - How are 'emissions debts' influencing the Copenhagen negotiations?

Scanning through the amount of carbon dioxide that countries put into the atmosphere over the past century might seem even irrelevant to modern climate change debates.

But historical emissions, like per capita emissions, are a bone of contention in haggling between countries trying to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen this December. Developing countries argue that any CO2 cuts agreed by developed countries at Copenhagen should incorporate the principle of historical responsibility. In other words, the rich should pay in the near future for its considerable past contributions to global warming. (The Guardian)

Europe's climate targets of cutting carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050 may not be tough enough to get developing countries into a worldwide global warming deal, John Prescott has warned.

In an interview with The Independent, the former Deputy Prime Minister, who brokered the current climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, said a 90 per cent cut might be needed in order to secure an agreement at December's UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

Countries such as India are likely to ask rich Western countries to cut back on atmospheric CO2 still further so that developing countries can continue to expand their economies and pull more of their people out of poverty, said Mr Prescott, who has taken on an influential new role as the rapporteur on climate change for the Council of Europe. (The Independent)

Millions will be condemned to poverty and homelessness if world leaders fail to reach an ambitious deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the climate change summit in Copenhagen later this year, Britain's Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, warned yesterday. (Daily Telegraph)

LONDON - People want to save the planet but are unwilling to make radical lifestyle changes like giving up air travel or red meat to reduce the effects of climate change, a straw poll by Reuters showed.

As leaders gear up for another round of climate change talks later this month in New York, motivating people to change their lifestyles will be crucial in ensuring cuts in planet-warming greenhouse gases, experts say. (Reuters)

The health care fight is the center of attention as Congress and the president return to the fray. One casualty appears likely to be the climate change legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives this spring.

Its fate in the Senate was always dicey, to be sure. But the extreme polarization shaping up on Capitol Hill over health care makes it even less likely that the climate bill can corral the necessary support in the Senate, where only 41 of the 100 senators can stop a bill in its track with a filibuster.

To a large degree, the split over the proposed health care overhaul is similar to the political divisions over climate change. The coalition of liberals, labor, lawyers and environmentalists are backing a larger government role both in overhauling health care and in requiring business to pay for pollution. Both measures face the same opposition of conservatives and business that want government to stay out of the economy.

Obviously the differences illustrate the Democratic/Republican split. But both issues also showcase divisions among Democrats who hold a majority in the House and Senate, as well as an almost unified opposition from Republicans that poses significant challenges to supporters of both measures.

Until recently, when the fate of the health care proposals became much cloudier, the betting line had been that it had a much better chance of enactment than did the climate change bill. And while the summer’s rage over health care has decreased the odds of a health care overhaul happening, it has also lengthened the odds against the climate change measure. (Peter Brown, WSJ)

Terms of 'Endangerment' - The EPA's anti-carbon rule is an admission that CO2 limits hurt the economy.

Cap and trade may be flopping around like a dying fish in Congress, but the Obama Administration isn't about to let the annoyance of democratic consent interfere with its climate ambitions. Almost as bad is the new evidence that it understands how damaging its carbon regulations and taxes will be and is pressing ahead anyway.

The White House is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency's April "endangerment finding" that as a matter of law CO2 is a pollutant that threatens the public's health and must therefore be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. Such a rulemaking would let the EPA impose the ossified command-and-control regulatory approach of the 1970s across the entire economy, even if Democrats never get around to passing a cap-and-tax bill.

Yet a curious twist is buried in the EPA's draft rule. The trade press is reporting that the agency thinks it enjoys the discretion to target the new rules only to major industrial sources of carbon emissions, such as power plants, refineries, factories and the like. This so-called "tailoring rule" essentially rewrites clear statutory language of the Clean Air Act by bureaucratic decree.

Because the act was never written to apply to today's climate neuroses, clean-air regulation is based on an extremely low threshold for CO2 emissions that will automatically transfer hundreds of thousands of businesses into the EPA's ambit. The agency is required to regulate sources that emit more than 250 tons of a given air pollutant annually, which may be reasonable for conventional pollutants like NOX or SOX.

But this is a very low limit for ubiquitous CO2, and so would capture schools, hospitals, farms, malls, restaurants, large office buildings and many others. To exempt these sources, the tailoring rule unilaterally boosts the rule for greenhouse gases from 250 tons to 25,000 tons, an increase of two orders of magnitude.

Well, well. In a speech in February, Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson ridiculed those of us who warned about these consequences, saying that it was "a myth" that "EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, your lawnmower and baby bottles. . . . Somebody said to me today, 'kittens,' I like that one." Her routine got a big laugh from the like-minded Georgetown audience, but the new draft rule is a flat-out admission that the critics are right.

The endangerment finding was prompted by the 5-4 2006 Supreme Court Mass. v. EPA decision, which relied on an extremely literal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to crowbar CO2 into the law. That decision has been a political windfall for cap-and-tax advocates because it has driven utilities and other businesses to the bargaining table as they've concluded that some carbon limits are inevitable.

Yet the Supreme Court said nothing that would let the EPA simply decide on its own to apply the law to some unfavored business while giving others a pass. And the Clean Air Act is explicit about the 250-ton threshold. Team Obama's real motive in "tailoring" this rule is to limit the immediate economic impact of carbon limits to head off a political backlash.

But even businesses that do get a pass shouldn't rest too easily. The green lobby will quickly sue to force the EPA to enforce fully its own rules and go after all carbon sources. And why not? The Obama Administration is deliberately flouting its own legal claims for political reasons. Its cynical political hope is that if Congress won't impose cap and tax, the courts will do it anyway.

President Obama claims that his "new energy economy" will jump start growth and jobs. The EPA endangerment rule repudiates that claim once and for all. If the green future is going to be so bright, why does the White House want to exempt so many businesses from its glories? (WSJ)

It is not a failure if the UN climate conference in December does not sign a final deal, says UN Development Chief Helen Clark.

UN Development Chief Helen Clark is toning down expectations for the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

"Copenhagen has to be viewed as a very important step. Would it be overoptimistic to say that it would be the final one? Of course," she says to the Financial Times. "If there's no deal as such, it won't be a failure. I think the conference will be positive but it won't dot every 'i' and cross every 't'."

According to the newspaper, her warning is a clear example of the fine line UN officials are treading as they try to press for greater urgency in the talks while tempering hopes for the outcome. (CoP15)

More than half of the host country’s citizens have little or no confidence that an ambitious and global climate agreement will be reached at the UN climate conference in December. (CoP15)

PARIS - France plans to set a proposed carbon tax at 14 euros ($19.9) per tonne of carbon dioxide starting from next year, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said in an interview to be published by Figaro magazine.

A special advisory panel, headed by former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard, had recommended billing 32 euros for every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted in 2010 and lifting the levy gradually to 100 euros per tonne by 2030.

"We have decided to apply the tax in a progressive manner. Starting with the price per tonne on the market, that is to say 14 euros," Fillon said in the article set to appear in the magazine's Saturday edition. (Reuters)

In two previous posts, “Green” China and CO2 Cap-and-Trade Meets the (China) Dragon, I described China’s rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a “one-country negation” to the Waxman-Markey climate bill (HR 2454). “The expected growth of coal-fired generation in China over the next 20 years will result in a net increase in CO2 emissions from their power sector of more than ten times that of reduced U.S. emissions due to coal constraints,” I concluded. (Donald Hertzmark, Master Resource)

NEW DELHI - India said it expects its greenhouse gas emissions to jump to between 4 billion tons and 7.3 billion tons in 2031, a report said on Wednesday. (Reuters)

The outcome of the election in Japan is “good news for the climate” and could “create momentum in the climate-change negotiations”, Swedish Environment Minister says. (CoP15)

Geoengineering is not a last resort, but the next necessary step to recalibrate the Earth's climate unless carbon emissions are significantly reduced in the near future, the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of sciences, announced Tuesday.

"It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing CO2 emissions we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future, and geoengineering will be the only option left to limit further temperature increases," John Shepherd, chair of the Royal Society's geoengineering study and a professor of Earth system science at the University of Southampton, said on behalf of the group.

The report "Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty" (PDF) urged carbon emissions reduction as the primary means of halting climate change. But it looked at geoengineering--engineering the environment on a large scale to purposely manipulate the world's climate--very seriously.

In past years, geoengineering has been thought of an as option of last resort, but the Royal Society asserted that some of the safer geoengineering techniques, like aggressively planting forests, could be implemented currently in conjunction with carbon reduction efforts.

Since geoengineering has the potential to affect people on a global scale, the group further recommended that an international organization like the U.N. Commission for Sustainable Development begin developing policies and a means for resolving anticipated geoengineering political conflicts.

"Assuming that acceptable standards for effectiveness, safety, public acceptance and cost were established, why should appropriate geoengineering options not be added to the portfolio of options that society will need and may wish to use to combat the challenges posed by climate change?" said the report.

With that in mind the group evaluated the safety, expense, effectiveness, and quickness of deployment for projects falling under two main classes of geoengineering: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar-radiation management (SRM).

CDR, efforts to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, included things like afforestation, encouraging plankton growth, and carbon capture and storage in the form of burying carbon-rich biomass or using biochar for fuel.

The group said it generally favored CDR projects over SRM because they involved processes closer to natural occurrences, while the side effects of SRM projects are unknown and therefore more dangerous. (CNET)

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail. (The Times)

DNV, authorities and major industry partners have developed the world’s first guideline for the transmission of CO2.

DNV, authorities and major industry partners have developed the world’s first guideline for the transmission of CO2. Its unified approach will ensure that CO2 is transmitted in offshore and onshore pipelines in a reliable, safe and cost-effective manner.

There is a growing awareness among authorities and in the industry of CO2 as a substance for transmission in large and geographically interconnected pipeline systems.

This was the motivation for Det Norske Veritas (DNV) initiating a joint industry project one year ago. Existing pipeline standards had to be extended to incorporate specific guidelines for the transmission of CO2. The joint industry project, named CO2PIPETRANS, has now made an important contribution in delivering the world’s first industry guideline for the safe, reliable and cost-effective transmission of CO2 in pipelines. (Scandinavian Oil-Gas Magazine)

From the new parody of DeSmog, DeSoggy Bog, some cutting truths are exposed about the active attack site that thinks it helps the planet by launching ad hominem attacks on scientists.

There will come a time when Jim Hoggan will regret the back-lash that comes against his PR firm Hoggan and Associates. So will David Suzuki, who gives his active approval of the illogical rude rants by appointing Jim Hoggan as Chair of his board of directors and linking to DeSmog (here and here) from his Foundation website. (Jo Nova)

On the other hand, there is some welcome news in the UK. Professor David MacKay of the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge is to be appointed as chief scientific adviser to Ed Miliband at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Professor MacKay has attracted considerable attention for publishing the book "Sustainable Energy: without the hot air".

In this – which can be bought in a bookshop but is also available as a free download at http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html – he uses objective reasoning to look dispassionately at the real contribution that different generating technologies and energy efficiency initiatives can make to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. MacKay is convinced of the need to mitigate climate change, but less convinced that politicians are going about it the right way.

So, for example, he is widely quoted on the topic of how much energy mobile phone chargers when not in use: he sees turning them off as making such a tiny difference that it should be low down our list of priorities. Equally, be presents a cool analysis of the costs, benefits and downside of wind power, nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage and other alternative technologies and allows the reader to see the facts for themselves. Exposure of a very influential politician to such advice can only be applauded. If it translates into sensible policymaking, even better. (Scientific Alliance)

GENEVA - Insurance is an under-used way for the tourism industry to manage the risks of climate change, with existing offers ranging from a "perfect weather guarantee" by Barbados to ski resorts promising deep snow, experts say.

"Insurance products...have a huge potential for tourism," Daniel Scott, chair of a team on tourism and climate for the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, told Reuters at a climate conference in Geneva.

"It's coming but it's been under-utilized. Many operators do not even know about it," said Scott, who works at the University of Waterloo in Canada. (Reuters)

AVONDALE, Pa., Sept. 2 -- In the paper, The Boundless Carbon Cycle, published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Vienna, Uppsala University in Sweden, University of Antwerp, and the U.S.-based Stroud(TM) Water Research Center argue that current international strategies to mitigate manmade carbon emissions and address climate change have overlooked a critical player - inland waters. Streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands play an important role in the carbon cycle that is unaccounted for in conventional carbon cycling models. The commentary comes just months before COP15, the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen where representatives from 192 countries will gather to decide upon a 2012 climate agreement that will succeed the "Kyoto protocol." (PRNewswire-USNewswire)

In the early 1980s, I presented my viewpoint on climate in an annual publication of Encyclopedia Britannica. I have decided to post on my early views to document how they have stood up over time. They are in

“Concern regarding the impact of the steady increases of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s atmosphere continued in 1983. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released reports in the fall which suggested that by 2100 the average global temperature could increase by 5°C (9°F) with an associated rise in global sea level of between 144 cm (4.8 ft) and 217 cm (7 ft) as a result of the increased levels of carbon dioxide and other trace gases put into the atmosphere primarily through the burning of fossil fuels. These gases act to reduce the emission of long-wave radiation out into space yet still permit solar radiation to teach the Earth’s surface. This mechanism of heat increase is referred to as the “greenhouse effect.” At about the same time the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) issued a somewhat more conservative report on the same subject, which emphasized the remaining uncertainties in estimating the effect of carbon dioxide and other trace gases on climate. The report concluded, for instance, that if deforestation has contributed significantly to the increase in carbon dioxide during recent decades, then existing models that project future atmospheric concentrations based on man-made sources may overpredict the fraction of carbon dioxide remaining airborne. The NRC report concluded that existing evidence does not support a change away from fossil fuels but did suggest that some priority be given to the enhancement of long-term energy options that do not involve the combustion of such fuels.

Increased levels of aerosols in the upper atmosphere and lower stratosphere that are associated with high levels of industrial activity could counter the greenhouse effect of high levels of carbon dioxide. This possibility was not adequately examined in either of the studies. These aerosols appear to be ejected into the upper atmosphere and stratosphere via deep cumulus clouds, a process that is referred to as cloud venting.”

“Concern continued with respect to the potential impact on climate of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Additions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as a result of the combustion of fossil fuel can retard radiational cooling to space, thereby causing a net warming at the Earth’s surface. Unless mitigated by other results of human activities, such as reduced sunlight at the ground due to additions of aerosols to the upper atmosphere, this warming could result in major changes in climate patterns. In 1984, as part of the continued study of this phenomenon, NOAA used aircraft to estimate how much carbon dioxide is transferred from the atmosphere into the North Atlantic during winter storms when the cold ocean waters are most efficient in absorbing carbon dioxide. “

What we know in 2009 is that the role of humans within the climate system includes the issues reported above. However, the effect of humans is even more diverse and significant than I reported in the 1980s. Aerosols are now recognized to have a large range of effects (e.g. see), while land use/land cover change has been demonstrated to be a first order climate forcing (e.g. see).

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

What does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation think about carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming?

“We don’t think about it,”Bill Gates said during last year’s Engineers Without Borders International Conference.On another occasion, he told Newsweek magazine: “The angle I’ll look at most is … What about the 4 billion poorest people? What about energy and environmental issues for them?”

The question, however, is not simply a matter of reprioritising limited resources. More fundamentally, the scientific case for catastrophic global climate change from increased atmospheric CO2 is substantially flawed.

After crunching data this week from two of our satellite-based microwave sensors, and from NOAA’s official sea surface temperature (SST) product ERSST v3b, I think the evidence is pretty clear:

The ERSST v3b product has a spurious warming since 1998 of about 0.2 deg. C, most of which occurred as a jump in 2001.

DeSmogBlog describes itself as "the world’s number one source for accurate, fact based information regarding Global Warming misinformation campaigns." It takes the position that "An overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists agree that the globe is warming...and that the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels is to blame." (Einstein didn't think majority opinion decided scientific disputes, but that's another discussion.)

DeSmogBlog alleges that those who doubt global warming theory are part of a "a well-funded and highly organized public relations campaign" that is "trying to confuse the public, to forestall individual and political actions that might cut into exorbitant coal, oil and gas industry profits."

In this comic-book view of the world, environmental issues aren't complex matters involving imperfect tradeoffs, limited resources, and inadequate technologies. Nor is it necessary to consider ideas from multiple perspectives in order to understand them thoroughly.

In the DeSmogBlog universe, good guys and bad guys are readily identifiable and the way forward is clear. Although DeSmogBlog implies that its concern is with industry lobbying efforts, in reality anyone who disagrees with its perspective gets slimed. Satirist Rex Murphy, for example, is called "resolutely stupid" because his bracing commentaries on global warming contrast with the DeSmogBlog point-of-view.

Graphs of sea level for twelve locations in the southwest Pacific show stable sea level for about ten years over the region. The data are compared with results from elsewhere, all of which suggest that any rise of global sea level is negligible. The Darwin theory of coral formation, and subsidence ideas for guyots would suggest that we should see more land subsidence, and apparent sea level rise, than is actually occurring. Sea level studies have not been carried out for very long, but they can indicate major tectonic components such as isostatic rebound in Scandinavia. Attempts to manipulate the data by modelling to show alarming rates of sea level rise (associated with alleged global warming) are not supported by primary regional or global data. Even those places frequently said to be in grave danger of drowning, such as the Maldives, Tuvalu and Holland, appear to be safe.

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.

TV news and weather presenters are gloating lately as they report Australia’s “hottest winter ever”. I was traveling by car on the 27th August and Dr David Jones of the Bureau of Meteorology National Climate Centre was being interviewed by the ABC 666 just after 9am. I suppose “interview” is not quite correct, a mutual gush session might be more accurate. Dr Jones was talking up the notion of our “hottest winter” despite there being a few more days yet to run.

Anyway, the BoM now have a new media release which is slightly less trumpeting. They say we just missed the “hottest winter” label except for New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

To get a handle on our winter warmth you can make contour maps of maximum temperature anomalies and minimum temperature anomalies at this useful BoM webpage:
Maximum temperature anomalies
and at night time:
Minimum temperature anomalies

Remember from the above BoM media release that the state of Victoria is mentioned as actually experiencing its “warmest winter on record”.
Now check the state of Victoria on both maps I say Victoria has been too near average this winter to have a “snowball chance in hell” of having its “warmest winter on record”.

So I say to the BoM – if your maps are right or near right – then your claim that Victoria has just experienced its “warmest winter on record” has to be wrong. (Warwick Hughes)

The European Union's new ban on incandescent light bulbs violates simple economic principles and imposes substantial hidden costs on the economy. Fluorescent bulbs don't work as claimed and have considerable disposal problems. If the new bulbs were better, consumers would choose them naturally, and could be nudged to do so by a carbon tax.

The EU ban is an attempt to forward a policy goal -- combating global warming -- by statutory means. As such, it resembles the Corporate Average Fuel Economy restrictions, imposed on the U.S. automobile industry by Congress in 1975.

Such legislation imposes substantial costs on both consumers and the economy, but hides them so that legislators avoid blame. It often has perverse consequences; in the case of CAFE standards consumers switched to sport-utility vehicles, less fuel-efficient than comparable saloons but outside the scope of the initial law. The long-term cost of those standards arguably included a significant contribution to the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler. (Martin Hutchinson, breakingviews.com)

This week saw the next step in the phasing out of traditional tungsten filament lightbulbs; manufacturers and importers are no longer supplying 100 watt or any pearl bulbs in EU Member States. By 2012, manufacture or import of all such bulbs will be banned, and consumers will instead need to rely on the low-energy compact fluorescent lamp (CFL). And this is not just another example of Europe leading the pack on environmental issues. A number of other countries, including the USA, are set on the same course.

It is undeniable that CFLs use considerably less energy and that many of their original disadvantages have been overcome. These days, you do not have to spend £10 on an object much larger than a standard bulb and then wait five minutes for it to give a decent light. Modern bulbs are quite compact, available in a range of shapes and sizes, and produce a high output very quickly.

But they are not the same as filament bulbs or the increasingly common alternative of halogen lighting. And they are not universally popular. For many applications, they are excellent, especially if lights are to be left on for a long time. However, their disadvantages – well documented elsewhere – include requiring more energy to make, containing mercury (an end-of-life disposal problem which also makes clearing up a broken one more hazardous), their inability to be used with dimmer switches, the different quality of their light and their size making them too large for many existing fittings.

The drawbacks and lack of universal enthusiasm are perhaps not surprising. CFLs are, after all, just a different incarnation of the familiar fluorescent tube lighting: low energy and fine for some purposes, but not good for general domestic use. As well as the different spectrum of light they emit, some people are troubled by their inherent rapid flickering. In a free market, people make their own choices, and if lower electricity bills and longer bulb life are not enough to make them change, there must be some good reasons to stop them.

Although energy savings per bulb may be very significant, the direct impact on household and national energy use are more difficult to fathom. For a start, if people use low-energy bulbs, they are often more inclined to leave them on for longer. The same thing happens for other energy efficiency measures. Also, it will take a very long time to phase out use of filament bulbs once they are no longer available. It is clear that many people are stocking up, and their supply could last many years. So, the phasing in of actual CFL use in homes will be a long process.

EU statistics show that lighting accounts for just under 3% of domestic energy consumption (about 10% of electricity use, but remember that much of the energy used is for heating, and supplied by gas or oil). Looking at overall energy consumption, including transport and industry, domestic lighting represents 0.76% of the total used in the 27 Member States.

But this is not the whole picture. A study by VITO consultants showed the following breakdown of lamp use in European homes in 2007:

· 54% incandescent (down from 85% in 1995 and still decreasing)
· 18% low-voltage halogen (and increasing)
· 5% mains-voltage halogen (and growing)
· 8% linear fluorescent
· 15% CFL

So, if we assume that all remaining filament bulbs are replaced by CFL at some point in the future (unlikely, as use of halogen bulbs is likely to increase), that these bulbs are used to the same extent as those they replace and that the energy reduction per bulb is 80%, the total reduction in EU energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%. This figure is almost certainly an overestimate, particularly as the inefficiency of conventional bulbs generates heat which supplements other forms of heating in winter. Which begs the question: is it really worth it?

Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages. In the meantime, very efficient and flexible lamps are becoming available using light-emitting diode (LED) technology. Already, they are widely used in torches and for car brake lights. As their cost comes down, LEDs will probably become a preferred option for domestic lighting as well. A similar amount of energy would be saved and consumers would be happier. The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy. Like the furore over supermarket plastic bags, this is gesture politics. (Scientific Alliance)

British energy major BP has made a "giant" oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico after drilling one of the industry's deepest wells.

"BP announced today a giant oil discovery at its Tiber Prospect in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico," the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The Tiber well was drilled to a total depth of approximately 35,055 feet [10,685 metres] making it one of the deepest wells ever drilled by the oil and gas industry," it added.

The announcement sent BP's share price rising 3.4 per cent to 537.15 pence on London's benchmark FTSE 100 index, which was down 0.6 per cent nearing the close.

Implications for oil price

Iain Armstrong, analyst at Brewin Dolphin, said the discovery might have implications for long-term oil prices.

"It will ease concerns about peak oil because it shows there is life left in these mature areas," he said, adding that it could be the second half of the next decade before the find was producing.

The discovery also bodes well for other exploration in that part of the Gulf of Mexico, including at Royal Dutch Shell's nearby Great White field, said Jason Kenny, oil analyst at ING in Edinburgh. (Business Day)

Mayflies are, by scientific classification, not long for this world. They belong to the order Ephemeroptera which means, roughly, "short lived, winged creatures." In their adult form they live for a day. During that day, the Appalachian mayfly's primary function seems to be: Annoy hikers.

They may soon serve a second, far more annoying function if President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has its way. Emboldened by Obama's campaign pledge to "bankrupt" coal, EPA regulators have been aggressive of late. Bug protection may well give them an excuse to wreck coal mining in Appalachia.

Why? Because recent research suggests that discharge into streams of dissolved solids from surface coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains diminishes mayfly populations. That doesn't necessarily mean fewer bugs overall.

Interestingly, other research suggests that the total number of insects in affected streams is not substantially reduced. Hardier insect populations thrive in the absence of mayflies. Yet the EPA alleges that smaller mayfly populations are an "impairment" of "water quality." (William Yeatman and Jeremy Lott, IBD)

In 2008, China’s Environmental Protection Ministry made an unprecedented move: it halted two giant hydroelectric projects.

The two projects, located on the middle stream of the Jinshajiang River, were operated by two of China’s biggest power giants companies, Huaneng Group and China Huadian Corp. The combined output from the two projects was nearly 4 gigawatts. By stopping the two hydro projects, the EPM challenged a traditional way of doing business in the power industry – starting a project first and applying for environmental permission later. And even though the EPM ordered construction to stop, the two projects did not come to a halt until June.

The projects were permitted in 2007 by the local governments who have been eager to collect the huge taxes. With the easy passes from the local governments, the companies immediately started the projects. By the time the EPM stopped the projects, the companies had built the induction tunnels and intercepted the river, and a total of $4.3 billion had been invested. Under the pressure from the EPM, Huaneng and Huadian admitted that they had violated environmental protection laws and agreed to temporarily stop the projects. The companies then started to investigate the details of the project, start the environmental impact statements, and look at flood prevention and human migration. However, since so much work done and money spent, a permit from EPM will almost certainly be granted.

According to Ma Jun, the director of the Research Center for Public and Environment, an edict signed by the all-powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) indicated that the initiation of hydroelectric power plants, including construction of roads and even induction tunnels, only needs the permission from the local governments. Permission from EPM is needed only for water interception and dam construction. Many such power projects have not applied for environmental permission until the water interception was almost finished and all of them were permitted at later dates. Under such circumstances, EPM cannot do much and is powerless and meaningless, said Ma Jun. The promotion of EPM from the Environmental Protection Bureau hasn’t helped to build a stronger environmental protection agency. (Xina Xie, Energy Tribune)

LOS ANGELES - Geothermal startup AltaRock Energy Inc on Wednesday said it has suspended its demonstration project in California due to geologic anomalies.

The company, whose investors include Google Inc's philanthropic arm, Google.org, and top Silicon Valley venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said that despite the setback, it will keep developing its engineered geothermal systems (EGS) technology and is evaluating alternative well locations. (Reuters)

The economic illiterates in Washington are so impressed with the "success" of Cash for Clunkers that they're readying Cash for Clunker Appliances. The ludicrous "stimulus" bill gave $300 million to the Department of Energy to provide rebates for 10 types of appliances that have been rated energy efficient.

Before government extends Cash for Clunkers to more products, it might be a good idea to examine the original. The fact that Washington and the buyers who took advantage of Cash for Clunkers are gaga is hardly evidence that it was in the public interest. (John Stossel, Townhall)

CHICAGO - The new H1N1 virus appears to outcompete seasonal flu, making it less likely to mix with other circulating flu viruses into a "superbug" as some had feared, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

The H1N1, or swine flu, virus also spreads more quickly and causes more severe disease in animal studies, the team said, but it shows no signs of mixing with either of the two seasonal flu viruses to form a new, so-called reassortant virus. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Studies that have suggested that older men are more likely to father autistic children have seriously overstated the risk, conclude the authors of a large new analysis of parental age and autism risk.

During the past couple of decades, rates of autism skyrocketed, while fatherhood after 40 also became more common, Dr. Peter S. Bearman of Columbia University in New York City, who helped conduct the new study, noted in an interview with told Reuters Health.

In the prior studies, he explained, researchers looked at the past couple of decades as a single unit, rather than analyzing the relationship on a year-by-year basis. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - People newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes often resist taking insulin because they fear gaining weight, developing low blood sugar, and seeing their quality of life decline. Doctors also may be reluctant to start insulin right off the bat.

But a new study suggests that those fears are largely unfounded. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - A strongly worded report on child obesity released on Tuesday recommends that state and local governments tax junk food and soft drinks, give tax breaks to grocery stores that open in blighted neighborhoods and build bike trails.

The report from the independent Institute of Medicine and National Research Council also suggests that governments limit television and video games in after-school programs, require restaurants to list calorie counts on their menus and open school playgrounds and athletic fields to communities.

"Childhood obesity poses a serious threat to health in the United States," it reads. The problem cannot be solved by the federal government and communities need to act, it adds. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment may want to sip some red wine before treatment.

A study in women with breast cancer found that drinking red wine can help limit the toxic effects of radiation therapy.

"The possibility that particular dietary practices or interventions can reduce radiation-induced toxicity is very intriguing," Dr. Gabriella Macchia, of Catholic University, Campobasso, Italy, noted in an email to Reuters Health.

It's already known that some wine components may protect against the harmful effects of radiation. These components include polyphenols in particular, and the tannins. (Reuters Health)

Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis.

However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment.

Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields. (NAP)

It’s summer again, which means it is the time of year for the obligatory photos of wildfires in Southern California. This particular fire, known as the Station Fire, nearly doubled in size in the last 24 hours from 98 to 164 square miles. So far, it has burned at least 18 buildings and cost the lives of at least two firefighters.

The fire began in the Angeles National Forest, and Congress will no doubt respond by giving the Forest Service even more money to suppress such fires in the future. In fact, as I show in my Cato Policy Analysis, The Perfect Firestorm, the Forest Service has, in effect, a blank check to put out fires.

It freely uses that blank check. It has so far spent about $14 million fighting the Station Fire, which supposedly threatens 12,000 homes. But it has also spent $2.5 million on Oregon’s Canal Creek Fire, which is less than half a square mile in size and does not threaten any homes or other structures. Better safe than sorry — as long as you have a blank check.

Southern California forests are extremely fire prone — their natural fire regime is to completely burn over every 50 to 100 years. Building homes in such an area might seem foolish, so naturally there have been calls for “fire plain zoning,” similar to flood plain zoning, that would restrict such construction.

In fact, properly designed homes and landscaping can easily withstand such fires. Most homes destroyed by wildfires are ignited either by burning embers landing on flammable roofs or by the radiant heat from trees or grasses burning nearby. Building homes with nonflammable roofs and eves, and landscaping with well-tended lawns and a minimum of flammable trees essentially makes homes fireproof.

Most civilian deaths from wildfire take place during evacuations, not from the fire itself. Homes that are designed to withstand wildfires are known as “shelter-in-place” homes because the residents will be safer in the homes than trying to evacuate.

In 2007, CBS News reported that a fire swept through two San Diego suburbs built to shelter-in-place standards, and “not one home was even touched by flames.” Perversely, the reporter concluded that people should not be allowed to build to those standards because it would just encourage them to live in fire-prone areas.

In reality, the lesson is that it would be a lot less expensive to promote shelter-in-place construction standards and retrofitting and then simply let the fires burn at their normal frequencies. The homes would be safe, the forests would be “natural,” and fewer firefighters would be at risk.

Simple: money. The Forest Service gets a blank check for putting out fires, but almost no money for helping people fireproof their properties. So it continues to spend billions on fire suppression, mainly to protect people’s homes, when a lower-cost strategy is readily available.

Photo credit: MB Trama and DisneyKrazie on Flickr. (Randal O'Toole, Cato at large)

Just days before his White House appointment, Van Jones, President Obama's environmental adviser, used a forum at a major youth convention to push for what can easily be interpreted as a communist or socialist agenda.

As WND previously reported, Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is an admitted black nationalist and radical communist. (WorldNetDaily)

Toyota last week quietly announced it will shutter its famed NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif. This should be taken as a warning: The facility had all the features of the green economy the White House wants.

The White House likes some businesses better than others. In particular, it has pushed a battery of policies designed to favor the "right" sort of businesses.

First, they should be green. They should be locally sourced. They should be high-tech and use trendy consultants. They should be organic. They should do lots of volunteering and "service" to the community. Above all, they should use union labor.

Whole Foods, where President Obama once bought his arugula, employs plenty of these modern practices.

But it would be hard to find a more perfect model of this new world of commerce envisioned by the White House than the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) auto plant in Fremont, Calif., a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors.

Since 1982, the plant has cranked out more than 5 million vehicles, including the Toyota Corolla, Pontiac Vibe and Geo Prizm.

It employs only the greenest technologies. The environmentally advanced NUMMI plant has garnered 42 environmental awards — topping even its 32 product excellence awards.

And most of its 5,500 employees were members of the United Autoworkers Union, making an average of $65,000 a year.

But last Friday, Toyota announced that it would shut the plant and move its manufacturing operations to San Antonio, Ontario (Canada) and Japan. (IBD)

Saki (H.H Munro) said, “A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.” Today we have tons of inaccuracy and very little explanation. Most inaccuracies come from claims based on non-existent or inadequate historical data, extremely crude estimates, computer model projections, or are simply incorrect. It’s prevalent in environmental issues but particularly bad with climate and animal extinctions. The reason is because they’re the most politicized, which automatically takes them further from the truth. As Henry Adams said, “Practical politics consists of ignoring the truth.” (Tim Ball, CFP)

A bitter dispute is raging over whether the fallout zone is a wasteland or wonderland. Now, a team of scientists is heading back into the contaminated area to find out the truth. (Daily Telegraph)

This column was written by Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski (Professor Emeritus of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Warsaw Poland). It was commissioned by a group that received the draft in February and then took so long to review it that they missed the deadlines imposed by traditional media outlets for publication during the "attention period" surrounding the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. Though it may no longer qualify as "news" because it was a bit late, the information contained in the article is important, useful and interesting. Hope you enjoy it. (Atomic Insights)

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was "alarmed" by the rate at which the Arctic's glaciers were retreating as he visited the region ahead of key climate talks in December.

Mr Ban said world leaders had a "moral political responsibility" to safeguard the future of the planet.

"I am very much alarmed and surprised to have seen these glaciers all worn," he said as he visited the Ny-Alesund climate change research station in the Svalbard archipelago, located 1200km from the North Pole.

"Unless we take urgent action to stem this trend, we maybe virtually ice-free by 2037, even by 2030," he said. (AFP)

Do you really want to start messing with the atmosphere? If not, then stop emitting so much CO2. Or so argues the U.K.-based Royal Society, the same people who brought you Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. A new report by the Society analyzes so-called geoengineering—"the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," or consciously tweaking Earth's climate in an attempt to stave off global warming—and finds that it is feasible and worth studying carefully, but probably not something we want to get involved in. (David Biello, 60-Second Science Blog)

Contrail Web over the Central Rhône Valley, Eastern France

Astronaut photograph ISS004-E-11807 was provided by the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center.

Moonbat's propaganda promptly spanked: Not Even Wrong - We need a radical new approach to cutting greenhouse gases, and it might have arrived.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

At least – until a few months ago – government targets for cutting greenhouse gases had the virtue of being wrong. They were the wrong targets, by the wrong dates, and they bore no relationship to the stated aim of preventing more than two degrees of global warming. But they used a methodology which even their sternest critics (myself included) believed could be improved until it delivered the right results: the cuts merely needed to be raised and accelerated.

For release 1 Sept. 2009

TORONTO -- Heard about the environmental activist web site DeSmogBlog? Don't miss its parody site DeSoggyBog.

DeSoggyBog spoofs the real site with declarations such as: "You're a pack of miserable liars" and "If you disagree with us you're scum."

Like the tyrannical Dolores Umbridge in the fifth Harry Potter novel, DeSoggyBog thinks those with alternative points-of-view should be compelled to write: "I must not tell lies."

The parody site was created by Donna Laframboise, a former Vice President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. "DeSmogBlog is the ugly underbelly of the global warming movement," says Ms. Laframboise. "This is a website that repudiates free speech on every page - in the same breath that it accuses others of undermining democracy."

A paragraph-by-paragraph critique of DeSmogBlog's anti-free-speech proclamations appears here.

Adds Ms. Laframboise: "When global warming activists insist their cause is more important than other people's free speech, we all need to worry."

***

Ms. Laframboise is also the creator of NOconsensus.org, which she describes as working notes for her forthcoming book: Not So Fast: 10 Things You Need to Know About the Global Warming Debate.

Assuming there are no sunspots today, a 96-year record will have been broken: 53 days without any solar blemishes, giant magnetic disruptions on the sun's surface that cause solar flares. That would be the fourth-longest stretch of stellar solar complexion since 1849. Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientist call the Maunder Minimum -- a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 -- the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Of course, it could have been a coincidence. The Little Ice Age began before the onset of the Maunder Minimum. Many scientists think volcanic activity was a more likely, or at least a more significant, culprit. Or perhaps the big chill was, in the words of scientist Alan Cutler, writing in the Washington Post in 1997, a "one-two punch from a dimmer sun and a dustier atmosphere."

Well, we just might find out. A new study in the American Geophysical Union's journal Eos suggests that we may be heading into another quiet phase similar to the Maunder Minimum. (Jonah Goldberg, LA Times)

Update: a very small sunspot group of two specks formed on the sun in the final hours of the month Monday according to NOAA SWPC, their monthly sunspot number will be positive (though very small - likely 0.2 or 0.3, the lowest of this solar minimum but not a zero month). SIDC in Belgium, the official source said 28 observatories did not see a countable spot and had a preliminary 0 number for the month (here).

Sunday, August 30th marked the 51st straight day without a sunspot, one of the longest stretches in a century. One more day and we would have had a spotless month but like last August some observatories saw a spot on the sun for a few hours one day. It would have been either the first or second spotless month since 1913 depending on whether you count last August as spotless. It is unclear whether such small specks would have been seen in 1913.

In fact it rises into 4th place among all spotless periods since 1849 (first table here). Note: It is 5th place if you accept a spotless August 2008 which would have led to a stretch of 52 days. The total number of spotless days this transition from cycle 23 to 24 is now 704, exceeding the number for cycle 15 in the early 1900s (below, enlarged here).

We have had 193 spotless days this year (79% of the days). We are in the top 20 years in 16th place. We will very likely rapidly rise up the list in upcoming weeks and rival 2008’s 266 days and likely end in the top 5 years. 2007, 2008, 2009 will only have 1911, 1912, 1913 in the top 20 as string of 3 per transition (below, enlarged here).

The cycle minimum probably was December, 2008. January 2009’s 13 month average came up a bit due to slight bump in activity in June and July but if August should end up sunspotless and September low, we could have a double bottom. Still, the 12.7 years assuming December 2008 was longest in two centuries (below, enlarged here). Only cycles 4 (peaking in 1788) and 6 (peaking in 1816) were longer than cycle 23 (which peaked in 2000).

You can see on this chart, by 13 years after the solar minimum year, most of the last 5 cycles already had recovered, in one case already to the solar max of the subseuent cycle (below, enlarged here).

This cycle has continued to decline in the solar irradiance, solar flux, sunspot number and geomagnetic activity after 10 years. On the following chart produced by Anthony Watts, you can see the Total Solar Irradiance declining whereas the prior cycle was rebounding (below, enlarged here).

Also see the daily TSI which goes through short term cycles at the lowest point of the last few months as of the last plotted measurement.

Clilverd et al 2006 suggests using a statistical analysis of the various cycles (11, 22, 53, 88, 105, 213, and 426 years) shows the next two cycles will likely be very quiet much like those of 200 years ago in the early 1800s, the so called Dalton Minimum, the time of Dickens (with snows and cold in London like last winter) (below, enlarged here).

See what David Archibald shows what the result might be if Clilverd is correct here. Some have not ruled out an even stronger Maunder like Minimum.

This is the first of what might turn into a series of monthly updates of some maritime climate parameters monitored by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite. All monthly statistics have been computed by me from daily global gridpoint data produced and archived by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) under the direction of Frank Wentz, a member of our U.S. AMSR-E Science Team. Since Aqua was launched in 2002, the data are available only since June, 2002. A description of how these products were derived, and where they reside, is provided here.

There are 5 “ocean products”: sea surface temperature [SST]; near-surface wind speed; vertically-integrated water vapor; vertically integrated cloud water; and rain rate. I will present time series of monthly anomalies averaged over the global, ice-free oceans (56 deg. N to 56 deg. S latitude), and separately for the deep tropics (20 deg. N to 20 deg. S latitude). ‘Anomalies’ are departures from the average seasonal cycles in those parameters, which will be recomputed as each new month of data is added.

In the first figure below are plotted the 5 ocean products for the global ice free-oceans (56N to 56S). As can be seen in the top panel, SSTs in August cooled slightly from the unusually warm conditions experienced in July.

I have added linear trend lines to each time series, which you are free to misinterpret as you wish.

Since the AMSR-E period of record is only 7.25 years long, a calculated trend won’t have much meaning…although it will be interesting to see how long it takes before the climate system obeys the UN’s command to warm, and the SST trend line begins to go uphill again.

How these different variables change relative to each other is illustrated in the following lag-correlation plot of SST versus the other variables. “PDO” is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index, while “SOI” is the Southern Oscillation Index (negative for El Nino, positive for La Nina). A discussion of these curves is provided later, below.

The next figure shows the ocean product anomalies for just the deep tropics, 20N to 20S latitude….

Using the 20N-20S lag correlation plot as an example, you can see that total integrated water vapor is highly correlated with SST, which in turn is highly correlated with El Nino conditions (negative SOI values).

Also note that sea surface temperature tends to peak after months of anomalously low wind conditions, then falls as wind speeds increase.

Cloud water and rain rates increase as SST increases, reaching a maximum 1 to 3 months after the SST peaked. (Roy W. Spencer)

“A unique set of nocturnal longwave radiative and sensible heat flux divergences was obtained during the 1999 Cooperative Atmosphere–Surface Exchange Study (CASES-99). These divergences are based on upward and downward longwave radiation measurements at two levels and turbulent eddy correlation measurements at eight levels. In contrast to previous radiation divergence measurements obtained within 10 m above the ground, radiative flux divergence was measured within a deeper layer—between 2 and 48 m. Within the layer, the radiative flux divergence is, on average, comparable to or smaller than the sensible heat flux divergence. The horizontal and vertical temperature advection, derived as the residual in the heat balance using observed sensible heat and radiative fluxes, are found to be significant terms in the heat balance at night. The observations also indicate that the radiative flux divergence between 2 and 48 m was typically largest in the early evening. Its magnitude depends on how fast the ground cools and on how large the vertical temperature gradient is within the layer. A radiative flux difference of more than 10 W per meter squared over 46 m of height was observed under weak wind and clear-sky conditions after hot days. Wind speed variation can change not only the sensible heat transfer but also the surface longwave radiation because of variations of the area exposure of the warmer grass stems and soil surfaces versus the cooler grass blade tips, leading to fluctuations of the radiative flux divergence throughout the night.”

1. In Figure 3, the CASES-99 field campaign (October 1999) average nightime radiative flux difference between 48m and 2m differs by up to 20 Watts per meter squared depending on the location including an effect from landscape type as given in Table 1:

The Scientists Speak:
A Great Role for Coal: Developing countries need it now, to help lift them out of life-wasting poverty and body-breaking labor. Featuring Dr. Ross McKitrick, University of Guelph, Canada.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 726 individual scientists from 427 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from the Southern Swedish Scandes. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Drought (Europe): Have droughts become more frequent or severe in Europe in response to 20th-century global warming?

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: Bracken (Zheng et al., 2008), European Beech (Bruhn et al., 2000), Ladder Brake (Zheng et al., 2008), and Tomato (Takagi et al., 2008).

Journal Reviews:
"High-Performance" Algal Symbionts of Corals: It pays for new coral hosts to carefully choose -- and as quickly as possible -- the algal endosymbionts to whom they will rent their living quarters.

Burning fossil fuels creates so-called “external costs” because it contributes to ongoing climate change. This is a fancy way of saying that when I burn such fuels, other people become worse off than they would be otherwise, because I have increased the odds that they will suffer damages from anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This both seems unfair, and means that we will burn more fossil fuels than would seem to be socially optimal. It seems obvious to many people that we should therefore tax fossil fuels in order to prevent this. This is termed a Pigovian tax, and is sometimes referred to as “internalizing the externality”, or taxing fossil fuels to reflect the “social cost of carbon”.

It’s not so obvious to me that this is good idea. To implement it would be little more than a re-labeling of the kind of comprehensive planning that Hayek attacked sixty years ago. Here’s why.

Start with the point that we tax an activity, not a substance. Let’s take the example of burning a gallon of gasoline by driving to work rather than riding your bike. This action creates social cost in the form of AGW. But it also creates other social costs, such as, for example, local air pollution, congestion, noise and increased risk of accidents for others. Why would we privilege a unit of social cost created by AGW over that same unit of social cost created by any of these other effects? If I die from cancer because I inhaled some of your fumes or I die from flooding because of increased global temperatures, I am in each case equally dead. But it also creates social benefits. You spend less time travelling, get to work earlier and produce more output that day; because you can not capture all of the social utility of your labor, this creates incremental social benefit. You also have more time at home, and use this time with your kids to improve their educational outcomes, which creates social utility in later years. And so on, ad infinitum. In order to set the tax, we don’t just need to know the costs created by AGW (which is a pretty tall order), but rather all of the social costs and benefits created by the activity, which is far harder. (Jim Manzi, Daily Dish)

At this point in their presidency, which president -- George W. Bush or Barack Obama -- had made three climate science speeches or statements, including one lengthy speech, while the other had barely addressed it at all?

If you picked former President Bush, you are correct.

Are you surprised? Although Mr. Obama came into office pledging to chart a new course on climate science and policy, he has largely pitched climate change legislation on "clean energy" and "green jobs" grounds, and has not addressed the scientific reasoning behind his desire to enact new climate policies. This is a mistake that may cost the planet dearly, in addition to any political ramifications for the president. (Andrew Freedman, Capital Weather Gang)

The raucous debate over health care could thwart the Senate’s enactment of sweeping energy and climate legislation this year, say Democratic aides, energy lobbyists and environmentalists.

If Democrats fail to push through a health care bill — or get embroiled in even more contentious debate this fall — experts fear they’d lose much of the momentum necessary to get the controversial climate and energy legislation through the Senate.

“If health care ends up being very contentious, you may not be able to go back to the well again for climate votes,” said Scott Segal, a lobbyist for energy companies at Bracewell & Giuliani. “The debate will either take up too much time, too much political capital or both.”

A major worry is that Congress will be unwilling to take up such complex, divisive energy and climate legislation next year because moderate Democrats believe the issue would be toxic for them during the midterm elections, as Republicans have promised to make climate a top campaign issue. (Politico)

Regular readers of The Washington Times are all too familiar with the back-and-forth debate between those who favor federal legislation to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and those who view the measure as one thing and one thing only: a monstrous job killer.

I tend to fall on the side of those who see this "reform" as severely limiting our country's ability to dominate in an increasingly competitive global economy with virtually one hand tied behind our back. To expect countries like India and China to step up and "do the right thing" on their egregious and sickening environmental records (committed during both Republican and Democratic administrations) simply because we are setting a "strong example" is rosy optimism at best and naive geopolitical stupidity at its worst. (Armstrong Williams, Washington Times)

NEW YORK - Five states have asked U.S. Senate leaders to let them impose stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions than what would be permitted under the climate legislation working its way though Congress, saying both levels of regulation are necessary to fight global warming. (Reuters)

Since the flurry of activity surrounding its passage by the House in late June, little has been heard about the historic climate change bill aimed at curbing global warming. But the Senate will be tackling the controversial measure when it returns to Washington next week.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that public sentiment on the bill, which opponents claim will have a negative overall impact on the U.S. economy, is largely unchanged over the last two months.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of Americans favor the climate change bill, while 40% are opposed to it. However, the antis feel more strongly: Twenty-six percent (26%) Strongly Oppose the bill versus 10% who Strongly Favor it.

Nearly one-in-four adults (24%) are not sure whether passage of the bill is a good idea or not. These findings are virtually the same as in late June.

Women favor the bill more strongly than men. Older voters are more likely to oppose it. (Rasmussen Reports)

For weeks now, we’ve been hearing an odd refrain from the Democrats who are pushing hardest for the Waxman-Markey climate bill. They are determined, it seems, not only to have such a bill drawn up before Copenhagen, but to have it signed into law. At the same time, the EPA is widely expected to issue its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, triggering what will undoubtedly be a hotly disputed regulatory process.

President Obama, it is reported, wants to sign climate legislation before the critically important Copenhagen climate conference in December. And Senate Majority leader Harry Reid wants the President to sign a climate bill this fall as well.

They both have plenty of company in the “act first, think later” brigade. (Kenneth P. Green, Master Resource)

The European parliament's environment committee is sending a delegation to Washington later this month to explain the EU's decision to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. (CoP15)

As an agreement that will keep global warming below two degrees C can probably not be found in Copenhagen, instead the EU should see December’s UN conference as a starting point, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt says. (CoP15)

The Swedish EU Chairman Fredrik Reinfeldt is criticized for lowering expectations for the outcome of the UN climate conference. (CoP15)

LONDON - A patchwork of unilateral actions by a few European Union nations to prevent suspected tax fraud in carbon permit trading could serve only to push the activity into neighboring states.

A Reuters investigation into suspected carousel tax fraud exposed a mix of tax loopholes, lack of regulatory oversight and easy market access that could open the EU's $90 billion emissions trading scheme to abuse.

Investment banks and brokers said they are worried they may have to foot unpaid tax bills left after any fraud or face legal action for having traded unknowingly with anyone charged.

"It's put the innocent intermediaries in a very awkward position of responsibility and liability, which isn't fair," said David Bates, a director at emissions broker CarbonDesk. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS - Emerging economies such as China should cut their greenhouse gas emissions to nearly one third below current forecasts, a top European Union climate negotiator said on Tuesday.

Developing nations as a whole should be more ambitious about tackling climate change, although the poorest will need financial help, Swedish environment minister Andreas Carlgren said.

Sweden, which holds the European Union's rotating presidency, is keen to keep the pressure on big polluters in the run-up to global climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

"For some very big polluters, emerging economies, I expect much more -- for the biggest ones, up to 30 percent deviation from business as usual," Carlgren told reporters.

He did not specifically name China, but an adviser said this was one of the countries to which he was referring.

With its fast-rising emissions, China's stance is crucial at the Copenhagen talks to create a new pact to succeed the current Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. (Reuters)

TOKYO - Japan's Democratic Party, set to take power after a landslide election win on Sunday, has promised deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and more renewable energy use.

But some promises, such as a plan to end a surcharge on gasoline, have sparked doubt among environmentalists over the party's commitment to dramatic change. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS - Car makers will not be granted a delay to an agreed 2011 European ban on climate-damaging chemicals in the air conditioners of new car models, European Parliament officials said on Tuesday.

Automakers say they will need to invest an extra 40-200 euros ($57-287) per vehicle to meet the refrigerant standards, which would be difficult to pass on to consumers in the current tough economic climate.

The car sector's campaign has aroused strong opposition from environmentalists and suppliers of greener engineering systems.

The European Union decided in 2006 that from 2011 it would ban the use of fluorinated chemicals, such as the industry standard known as R134a, which have a powerful climate-warming effect when released into the atmosphere.

The EU closed a legal loophole in April after learning that car makers were planning to use it to avoid the ban for new car models until 2017.

But car industry lobby group ACEA said auto manufacturers still needed two to three extra years.

European Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen told a meeting in the European Parliament on Tuesday that a delay would not be granted, according to two officials present at the meeting. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - A U.S. ethanol industry group is pushing lawmakers to craft legislation requiring fuel companies to inform customers what country their fuel came from in hopes of increasing awareness about money spent on oil imported from overseas. (Reuters)

Drill, Comrade Drill? - Why are Cuba and Canada exercising more common sense on drilling than the United States? And how come they're doing it right in our own backyard?

If we won't drill into the vast energy reserves just off our shores, others will.

A year after public anger over $4 per gallon gas led President Bush and Congress to repeal the oil-drilling restrictions in 85 percent of America's waters, the Obama administration has shut the door on any such new domestic production. The Department of the Interior, which handles offshore leasing, hasn't issued a single lease allowing exploration and drilling in these newly opened areas, and is in no hurry to do so any time soon.

But communist Cuba isn't hesitating on offshore drilling. Thanks to a 1977 treaty, the U.S. and Cuba split control of the waters between them right down the middle. And Cuba is working with energy companies from Russia and other countries to explore for oil and natural gas.

Since the Florida Keys and the closest point in Cuba are only 90 miles apart, some of these potentially energy-rich waters belong to America, but no exploration or drilling is allowed to happen on the U.S. side. It may even turn out that some of the oil and natural gas Cuba produces could have been extracted from American-controlled waters, like two straws on either side of a milkshake.

This myopia extends to the north as well. Canada is in negotiations with Chinese companies over projects to produce oil from Alberta's vast deposits of oil-containing sands. Yet federal laws are making it harder for that same oil to be used in the U.S., based on global warming fears.

Why? Because each barrel from oil sands supposedly contributes more to global warming than a barrel of conventional oil. And the Waxman-Markey global warming bill, which recently passed the House and awaits consideration in the Senate, could really shut the door on these Canadian oil imports.

Thus, we have the Chinese and Canadians to the north, the Cubans and Russians to the south, and a big no-energy zone in between. (Heritage)

The debate over medical care has commanded most of the public's attention this summer, but another important domestic policy issue is quietly taking shape — new energy taxes.

When lawmakers return to Washington, the Senate will take up legislation that would impose $31.5 billion in new taxes on America's energy producers.

These taxes will harm every aspect of our domestic energy industry, from producers to refiners and every supporting business in between.

They will not only cost American jobs. They will also raise global carbon emissions and reduce U.S. energy independence — in opposition to stated goals of the administration. Here's how: (Bernard L. Weinstein, IBD)

The British government committed the nation to its Low Carbon Transition Plan in July, an idea that hopes wind and solar can produce enough electricity to power the entire country. Renewable energy is a green dream that will turn into a nightmare for families facing sudden power cuts or scheduled brown-outs.

In the 21st century, the idea that a nation cannot provide enough power for its people and industries should be unthinkable. There is no coal shortage, no oil shortage and no Uranium shortage. The only shortage is plants that convert these fuels into power. But why?

The perfect storm of a spineless political class and a somnolent public faced with aggressive green lobby groups has brought the UK to a point where it is a country without an energy future. No one listens to voices of reason, preferring to pretend that renewable energy can fill the gap and ignoring that ‘green’ alternatives require the industrialization of the open countryside:

What will happen in 8 years when the lights start to go out across Britain? Here’s two predictions that will drive greens nuts, because the unintended consequences of their blinkered knee-jerk activism will result in bad outcomes for the environment:

British people are waking up to a major problem that threatens to negatively impact their everyday lives. Politicians will pay a heavy price for their part in the fiasco, the only question is whether there will be a backlash against the idiot greens that pushed the country to the brink and perhaps over it.

Whatever happens, the situation in Britain is a canary in the coal mine for other countries blindly following the green path. If you live in the USA, Canada, Australia or any other country where carbon has been demonized by eco-hysterics, this could happen to you. Get involved and stop the rot, before your lights go out. (Daily Bayonet)

We balk at importing "dirty" oil from Canada, but others aren't so reluctant. Exempt as a "developing" nation from Kyoto-like agreements, China has decided to help Canada develop its energy-rich oil sands.

The Financial Post reports that PetroChina International Investment Co. has struck a deal to buy a 60% interest in Athabasca Oil Sands Corp.'s McKay River and Dover projects for $1.9 billion.

China has been establishing energy beachheads around the world in its quest to keep its growing economy fueled. With possible conflict brewing between Israel and Iran, Beijing recognizes the need for reliable suppliers like Canada in an unstable world. It also shows no reluctance to include fossil fuels in its — what's the phrase? — all-of-the-above approach to energy. (IBD)

The environmental movement’s “climate change” campaign is mainly an effort to phase out coal-fired electrical generation. This social movement also conducts a much publicized decades-old campaign against nuclear power. Almost forgotten is environmentalism’s first victim – hydro-electricity. When the social movement now called “environmentalism” surged forth in the 1960s it did so just in time to cripple North America’s remarkable and ambitious hydro engineering industry. What follows are seven articles discussing the promise of river development and its nemesis. (William Walter Kay, Environmentalism is Fascism)

NEW YORK - The boom in shale gas drilling has raised hopes the United States will be able to rely on the cleaner-burning fuel to meet future energy needs, but concerns about its impact on water quality could slow industry's ability to tap this relatively new resource.

Natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel, emitting about half as much carbon dioxide as coal. For more than a decade it has been the fuel of choice to heat homes and for businesses to generate power.

Many now see gas as a bridge fuel that can drive growth as the economy transitions to cleaner alternatives like wind and solar. But fears that drilling techniques used to fracture the gas-bearing rock could contaminate local drinking water threaten to slow development. (Reuters)

HONG KONG — China is set to tighten its hammerlock on the market for some of the world’s most obscure but valuable minerals.

China currently accounts for 93 percent of production of so-called rare earth elements — and more than 99 percent of the output for two of these elements, dysprosium and terbium, vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.

Deng Xiaoping once observed that the Mideast had oil, but China had rare earth elements. As the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has done with oil, China is now starting to flex its muscle.

Even tighter limits on production and exports, part of a plan from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, would ensure China has the supply for its own technological and economic needs, and force more manufacturers to make their wares here in order to have access to the minerals.

In each of the last three years, China has reduced the amount of rare earths that can be exported. This year’s export quotas are on track to be the smallest yet. But what is really starting to alarm Western governments and multinationals alike is the possibility that exports will be further restricted. (NYT)

As European countries start to wind down their car-scrapping schemes, hopes of slashing transport emissions while stimulating the economy are being dashed by reports of illegal exports of old European cars to the third world. (EurActiv)

A huge solar panel placed 36,000 kilometers away in space beaming power supply to 294,000 average Tokyo homes.

That is the science fiction sounding goal of a new research group in Japan representing 16 companies. The group will during the next four years focus on how to send electricity without cables in the form of microwaves.

“It sounds like a science fiction cartoon, but solar power generation in space may be a significant alternative energy source in the century ahead as fossil fuel disappears,” says Kensuke Kanekiyo, Managing Director of the Institute of Energy Economics, a government research body, to Bloomberg.net.

Japan hopes to have the four square kilometer solar panel up and running in three decades. The project has – so far – a budget of 21 billion dollars. (CoP15)

People over 60 who consume moderate amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, according to a large review of studies.

The analysis, which appeared in the July issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, reviewed 15 studies that together followed more than 28,000 subjects for at least two years. All the studies controlled for age, sex, smoking and other factors. The studies variously defined light to moderate drinking as 1 to 28 drinks per week.

Compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent. (NYT)

NEW YORK - Drinking and exercise go hand in hand, a new study hints.

Researchers found that people who enjoy a beer or glass of wine regularly seem to exercise more often than teetotalers, and those who average more than a drink or two a day may be the most active.

Using data from a government health survey of U.S. adults, researchers found that in general, the amount of time people devoted to exercise tended to inch up along with the number of alcoholic drinks they had each month.

Compared with abstainers, those considered heavy drinkers -- at least 46 drinks in the past month for women, and 76 or more for men -- exercised for an average of 20 minutes more per week.

Meanwhile, moderate drinkers -- which included women who had 15 to 45 drinks in a month, and men who had 30 to 75 -- got 10 extra minutes of exercise each week.

Both moderate and heavy drinkers were also more likely to report vigorous exercise, like jogging, than either light drinkers or abstainers, the researchers report in the American Journal of Health Promotion. (Reuters Health)

Steve Milloy's Green Hell Blog makes for very interesting reading—and not only for the direct postings. The comments can be pretty cogent, as well.

In nearly any business or industry, when political lobbying is used as a shortcut to fair competition, innovation and sensible business practices, it is a sure sign of failure. The government has increasingly been asked to intervene with labor disputes at the airlines and auto industries, and as we know both of these industries and their corresponding unions are hanging by a thread. The film, and more so record industries have lobbied heavily for stricter anti-piracy laws. Nonetheless, anyone who has ever made a mix tape knows that piracy is nothing new or suddenly rampant. Fact is these industries have failed to remain relevant, and the Internet has offered new and better alternatives.

As for GE, I've said before and I'll say again, GE is an embarrassment. This news all but proves their new "save the world" mission statement is a front for "save our company". And their shamelessness about their inability rescue their company through any means of their own should be a HUGE warning sign for investors. For a company with a history and name like GE has built, their current position should be a disgrace to them. But instead they are talking up their new government-welfare business plan with all the adjectives usually reserved for celebrations and grand openings. It's absolutely pitiful, and I like many investors have run like hell from any long positions in GE. If nothing else, I would feel too guilty making money off a stock whose price was supported by poorly directed taxpayer funds.

The only shame is that GE was once the poster boy for American manufacturing and quality. Now that they are taking a proud place in the welfare line, what does this say about America itself. GE is one of those rich corporations who we were going to tax to pay for our social programs. Now that they look to become recipients themselves, what is the plan?

The Federal Building in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, features an extensive use of natural light to illuminate offices and a white roof to reflect heat.

It has LEED certification, the country’s most recognized seal of approval for green buildings.

But the building is hardly a model of energy efficiency. According to an environmental assessment last year, it did not score high enough to qualify for the Energy Star label granted by the Environmental Protection Agency, which ranks buildings after looking at a year’s worth of utility bills.

The building’s cooling system, a major gas guzzler, was one culprit. Another was its design: to get its LEED label, it racked up points for things like native landscaping rather than structural energy-saving features, according to a study by the General Services Administration, which owns the building.

Builders covet LEED certification — it stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — as a way to gain tax credits, attract tenants, charge premium rents and project an image of environmental responsibility. But the gap between design and construction, which LEED certifies, and how some buildings actually perform led the program last week to announce that it would begin collecting information about energy use from all the buildings it certifies. (NYT)

Bottled-water makers have stepped up a months-long price war this summer to win back customers who have turned on the tap to save money and reduce environmental waste.

This month, PepsiCo Inc.'s Aquafina brand sold at some grocery stores for as little as $2.99 for a 24-pack of half-liter bottles -- less than a penny an ounce and about half of its typical price. Still, that wasn't as cheap as the private-label brand at supermarket chain Kroger Co., on sale for $2.49.

"It used to be $6.99 for a 24-pack, then $5.99," said Michael Bellas, chief executive of New York consulting firm Beverage Marketing Corp. "But $2.49? That's the lowest I've seen."

In the first quarter of 2009, bottled-water brands sold for an average of $1.35 a gallon in the U.S., down more than 30% from $1.94 in 2001, according to the consulting firm. It isn't clear whether beverage and bottling companies make any money on bottled water at these prices, beverage analysts say. (WSJ)

If there's any doubt Ecuador's $26 billion lawsuit against Chevron is nothing but a scam to shake down Big Oil, check out a new video of Ecuadorean operatives who prove how justice works in that country.

Chevron, which has been battling the most expensive lawsuit in history from Ecuadorean environmental radicals, released a video Monday showing the "political coordinator" from Ecuador's ruling party telling a couple of contractors that he'd be glad to get them contracts to remediate rain forest pollution — for a $3 million fee.

See, the fix was already in that an Ecuadorean judge would rule against Chevron on a $26 billion lawsuit. After that, the "remediation" gravy would flow. Nevermind that Ecuador's state oil company created the pollution. It was already in the bag that the judge would make Chevron pay.

The $3 million the "political coordinator" of Ecuador's ruling party tried to extort would be divided three ways: $1 million for the judge, $1 million for "the presidency" and $1 million for the plaintiffs — a radical group known as the Amazon Defense Coalition.

But little did the Ecuadoreans know, their mafioso way of getting paid so repelled the two contractors, Wayne Hansen and Diego Borja, that they recorded it.

We understand why — their 22-minute video showing the shakedown plays like a sleazy knockoff of "The Godfather." One of the contractors, who had done work for Chevron in the past, gave it to the company. The film can now be seen by anyone who cares about the facts of the case (or who just likes mafia movies) at chevron.com/ecuador. "If this was in the Onion, it would be funny," Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson told IBD.

But the tapes confirm three serious things: the Ecuadorean judge has already decided to rule against Chevron later this year, even before he's heard the evidence; that he can no longer preside over this case; that the government, though not a party to the lawsuit, will benefit from the $26 billion jackpot; and that the judge can no longer credibly preside over the case; and that any appeal of the court's decision would be, in the judge's words on the video, "a formality."

Whatever this is, it's not justice.

The merits of Chevron's case are irrelevant to Ecuador, whose judge is internationally recognized as the arbiter of the case. And the U.S. government's passivity in this case is foolish. Chevron's fate should be a lesson: Ecuador's crooks will shake down American corporations for everything they have — and then some. (IBD)

Gentoo penguins are returning to the Falklands in record numbers, after their best breeding season in more than ten years. Kings, too, continue to thrive, making this season’s Seabird Monitoring Programme one of the healthiest undertaken. Falklands Conservation officer Pierre Pistorius has produced this special report for the Penguin News… (Merco Press)

John Beddington is the UK’s Chief Scientific advisor and Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College, London. On Monday, the soothsayer’s foresight was the subject of a BBC feature.

The ‘coming together’ of all these trends, amounts to a ‘perfect storm’, set to arrive in 2031.

The professor links climate change, resource abundance, agricultural productivity, and water management with a cataclysmic event situated 20 years in the future.

It doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that more people will create more demand for water, energy, food, and planning. It doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that if you fail to make plans for the future, you will likely face some sort of problem. So far, so not rocket science, and not applied population biology.

But what sort of planning is needed to cope with life in 2030? Why, at this point in humanity’s history is the provision of water, energy, and food so difficult and dangerous? We’re better at creating all of these things than at any point in the past. Just a few generations ago, mechanised water, and instant light in homes were an impossibility, never mind an inconceivable luxury. It wasn’t much before that that people were just getting used to the idea of using steam to propel machines, never mind splitting the atom to power computers, satellite links, and heart and lung machines.

In our advanced economies, subsistence is not a day-to-day concern for the vast majority of people, and this is rapidly becoming true for an increasing number of the world’s population living in developing economies. Western standards of living are on the horizon for people in all continents, who had been deprived of it. Just as in the West, there is no reason why, in just a few generations, water, electricity and cheap, good quality food can all be taken for granted.

Except, that is, for the opinion of the scientist John Beddington and his ilk. For them, human progress of this kind is ‘unsustainable’. He is concerned that 8 billion people will be unable to produce the water, energy and food they need. But might it not be possible that 8 billion people are better at meeting their needs than 6 billion? After all, the industrial revolution was not a response to the needs of a growing population, but was made possible by it. Have you ever tried building your own iPod, powered by your own handmade generator, in a house you built yourself, whilst growing your own food, fed with water from a well that you sunk yourself?

There is an attempt being made to ground politics in the ethics not merely of ’sustainability’, but the harsh reality of mere subsistence. Accordingly, this diminishes the potential of politics, and our expectations of it. We are being asked to be thankful for every moment of heat, light, food, and warmth, rather than demanding of more, better, faster, higher. This is because politicians cannot conceive of any other notion of progress than mere survival. Their horizons are so low, and imaginations so limited, that they cannot conceive of attempting to organise public life around the possibility of a better future.

It is this pessimistic outlook within the political establishment that has misconceived human progress and how it is achieved. Paradoxically, it is scientists such as Beddington who are engaged to give their politics the appearance of legitimacy. But this is because Beddington’s science is expedient to their political aims, not because Beddington’s science can produce a robust analysis of the future, such that he can tell you what the year 2030 will look like if you haven’t listened to him. ‘Applied population biology’ is the science of the day because it is the most convenient to the politics of the day, just as Kennedy’s lunar project made heroes out of rocket scientists. But at least rocket scientists looked upwards, and their project broke boundaries. Beddington’s science is expedient because it allows politicians to set boundaries.

What this says to us is that politics is prior to the science. Beddington’s appointment is political. Beddington’s science has developed in an era which demands it. It is predicated on an understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as being ultimately limited by what nature provides, rather than what humanity develops (or is capable of developing) in order to overcome such limits. That makes an ethic out of limiting progress and development to that which nature provides. But this ethic is, again, prior to the science.

An anti-GM protester is arrested in Dorset. Britain's biggest supermarkets are considering reversing their ban on GM food as the price of non-GM ingredients soars

Britain's food giants have privately warned that they are struggling to maintain their decade-long ban on genetic modification and called for the public to be educated about the increasing cost of avoiding GM, The Independent reveals today.

As major producers such as the US and Brazil switch to GM, supermarkets are now paying 10 to 20 per cent more for the dwindling supplies of conventional soya and maize, according to a report by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Somerfield, Aldi and Co-op met civil servants to explain their problems in finding non-GM supplies. (The Independent)

Fifty-five million years ago, the world was a much warmer place. The poles were ice-free year-round. Palm trees grew in Alaska. Forests stretched right into the Arctic Circle.

There, swamps like those in today’s southeastern United States hosted alligators, snakes, and giant tortoises.

Scientists call this time in Earth’s history the Eocene, the dawn of the age of mammals. And climatologists have naturally taken a keen interest in how it began.

They know that a dramatic spike in carbon dioxide associated with rapid climate change kicked off the epoch – called the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” (PETM). But what scientists don’t understand about the PETM may hold the most relevant lessons for where the world’s climate is headed today.

So far, scientists have been unable to reproduce the PETM in a climate model. In order to get the climate they suspect existed, they have to crank up carbon dioxide far beyond what they think was actually the case.

They’re missing something – and that something may be key to understanding what happens after atmospheric CO2 increases beyond an unknown threshold. At some point, rising CO2 may trigger something else that further warms the climate. In other words, we may have significantly underestimated the effects of the CO2 now being released into the atmosphere. If the Eocene is any indication, the world is probably in for more warming than suspected. (Christian Science Monitor)

German climatologists are pushing for the creation of a "world climate bank" which would allow industrialized countries to purchase emission rights from less-developed nations. The revenues would enable poor countries to finance environmentally friendly economic development.

A new study by advisers to the German government has revealed that industrialized nations must radically reduce their CO2 emissions if they want to reach the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The climatologists are proposing setting up a "world climate bank" to allow countries to trade emission rights. (Der Spiegel)

To dissent on the man-made global warming ‘consensus’ is seen as evidence of mental deficiency

Dealing with acolytes of the Al Gore school of climate change (that is, virtually every government on earth, plus the chattering classes of the entire Western World) has always reminded me of a classic series of illustrations by Australian-born British cartoonist H. M. Bateman.

Mr. Bateman’s “Man Who…” series depicted people falling about, jaws dropping and eyes popping, while the surrounding buildings literally shook as some poor fool made a monumental social gaffe. They included “The Man Who Missed the Ball on the First Tee at St. Andrews,” and “The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Royal Toast.”

If one were to think of current candidates for the most disastrous of faux pas, surely none could be greater than “The Man Who Expressed Skepticism About Catastrophic Man-made Global Warming.” Not merely do mouths gape, but eyes roll at any dimwit’s failure to grasp that there is “consensus” on the issue. Indeed, to dissent is seen not merely as evidence of mental deficiency but moral turpitude. (Financial Post)

LONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard - United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on world leaders on Monday to take urgent action to combat climate change for the sake of "the future of humanity."

Ban, on a tour of Svalbard, the remote Norwegian-controlled Arctic archipelago, said the region might have no ice within 30 years if present climate trends persisted.

He is trying to drum up support for a comprehensive accord to limit emissions of greenhouse gases at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December. The accord will be a successor to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

"I would like to draw the attention (of) the world, for urgent action to be taken at Copenhagen ... We do not have much time to lose," Ban told reporters aboard a Norwegian coastguard vessel. (Reuters)

Are there any right answers to the questions posed by climate change? This is not an exam question, but a thought which must enter most people's minds from time to time. The official line from the IPCC and most governments is that the only answer, and the one which must be put into effect rapidly, is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to limit the peak atmospheric concentration of what is considered to be the major driver of global warming. There are, of course, plenty of credible scientists and others who doubt that the situation is as clear-cut as this, but for the sake of argument, let us take the received wisdom as a given and look at the policy solutions being proposed. (Scientific Alliance)

Democrats including U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin are risking a trade war over climate change.

That's the wrong approach.

Tariffs are not the answer to global warming or to Wisconsin's manufacturing woes -- especially now, when the economy is showing signs of recovery.

Encouraging more trade will boost U.S. exports and grow the American jobs of the future. (Wisconsin State Journal editorial)

Carbon dioxide will soon be declared a dangerous pollutant - a move that could help propel slow-moving climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said today.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal "endangerment finding," which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would "happen in the next months."

Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September. (SF Chronicle)

On August 25, the United States Chamber of Commerce, which claims to represent some three million large and small businesses in the United States, filed a 21-page request with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hold a public debate on climate-change science or face litigation in federal court.

The Chamber’s concern originates with an April 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts et al. v. EPA, wherein the court sided with the 12 states that had sued the EPA for its lack of regulation of four greenhouse gases — including CO2 — from the transportation sector. The EPA, in a (wink, wink) defense somehow reminiscent of Br'er Rabbit’s admonition to Br'er Fox about the briar patch, argued that Massachusetts and the other states did not have standing to file the lawsuit. In a five-to-four decision the court ruled otherwise, finding the EPA’s refusal resulted in “actual” and “imminent” harm to the State of Massachusetts, primarily from rising sea levels along the state’s coast. The EPA didn’t bother refuting this with numerous studies that have found no detectable sea-level rise to be occurring there or anywhere else in the world for the last decade or more, Al Gore’s obituary on the Maldives to the contrary notwithstanding.

In April 2009, after the EPA performed an alleged scientific review, which ignored important findings of their own scientist/economist, Alan Carlin, the EPA issued a proposed “endangerment finding” claiming greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare. During the 60-day comment period that ended on June 23, 2009, some 300,000 comments were received showing a great deal of public interest in the subject. (Ed Hiserodt, New American)

Should the Environmental Protection Agency be required to publicly defend its finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare?

In April, the EPA released a proposal concluding that carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants cause health problems. Now the agency is poised to release the final version of that ruling. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues that before the decision is finalized, EPA should be required to defend its scientific conclusions in front of an administrative law judge. Chamber officials and other critics claim that the Obama administration is suppressing internal agency studies that disagree with the proposed endangerment finding.

Should the climate change data be reviewed in a public administrative law hearing? Would a public hearing make any difference? Or is the hearing request just an excuse to delay the agency's climate change decision? (National Journal)

The chief Senate sponsors of a bill aimed at curbing global warming have pushed back its introduction from next week until later in September.

Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts, in an e-mailed statement today, cited Kerry’s hip surgery this month, the death of Senator Edward Kennedy and the debate over health-care legislation as reasons for the delay.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in July that he wanted the committees with jurisdiction over the measure to complete their work by Sept. 28. Boxer, the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said earlier this month that she would introduce her plan next week so it could be approved by the committee before the end of September. (Bloomberg)

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senate Democrats announced on Monday a new delay on climate change legislation, which could make it more difficult for President Barack Obama to win progress on that front before a global environmental summit in December.

Already facing a tough fight in the Senate and dwindling time before the summit to pass a bill, Democrats said they would not be able to unveil their legislation until "later in September."

Initially, the plan was to introduce a Senate bill to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming by around late July -- a timetable that had already slipped to early September before the latest delay. (Reuters)

Lookee here, the Senate has put off introduction of their “global warming” legislation again, after having just thumped their breasts about procrastinating no longer and announcing a September 8 introduction.

But don’t worry, they plan “to consider this comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation before the end of the year.”

One thing we do know: This delay is due to the fact that the public ain’t buying what the rationers are selling. If they were, this baby would be on the floor so fast it would make your head spin. After all, for six years the mantra was “We know the problem we know the solution. WE. MUST. ACT. NOW!”

So, drafting their desired bill isn’t the problem. The problem is that it’s the same as (or worse than) the House bill (worse in that it might sell more or all of the ration coupons, as the president sought — and, it turns out, is still assuming for budget purposes).

My guess is that we’ll have fun with this statement when whatever pooch of a bill they agree on finally emerges: “In a statement, Reid said Boxer and Kerry 'are working diligently to craft a well-balanced bill.'”

Man, that’s rich. The Left and Far Left will announce they’ve bridged their differences, reaching an historic agreement in which San Francisco’s Boxer comes to terms with Côte de Massachusetts’s Kerry — just as when Beverly Hills’s Waxman reached out to Massachusetts’s Markey.

And we’ll have fun, too, juxtaposing their current promises about a balanced bill with what an attentive electorate thinks of their Left/Far Left compromise — and with their inevitable reluctance to allow a floor vote. The Democrats can’t afford that after the two months they’ve had. (Chris Horner, Planet Gore)

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, today said that he was not surprised to learn that Senate Democrats were forced once again to delay introduction of their global warming cap-and-trade bill. Throughout hearing after hearing in the EPW Committee this summer, it became apparent that Democrats were a long way off from reaching the votes necessary in the Senate to pass the largest tax increase in American history. (EPW blog)

Check out the great new TV ad from the National Association of Manufacturers on the true cost of the cap and trade legislation passed by the House and being pushed in the Senate.

About 2,500 decision makers and scientists from 150 nations are attending the third World Climate Conference, which aims to help nations cope with the worst effects of climate change. The five-day meeting, organized by the World Meteorological Organization, will draft a plan to provide nations with the accurate and timely information they need to adapt to the extreme weather conditions that are expected to occur with global warming. (VoA News)

All great causes involve a tension between collective belief and individual action. A shared agreement that something must be done is not enough to win the battle if people do nothing. This is especially true of the fight against climate change, which must involve all of humanity over many decades, working together to achieve something that none can see or touch and that can only be measured by scientists: an end to the rapid increase of climate change gases in the atmosphere. Faced with this, even the most generous-spirited of people could be forgiven for feeling daunted – surrendering, perhaps, to the hope that someone else will solve the problem. (The Guardian)

Just for a moment, suspend any semblance of critical thought and accept the cataclysmic version of anthropogenic climate change advanced by the likes of Penny Wong, Tim Flannery and Al Gore.

Ignore too, the tens of thousands of scientists who disagree with the political agenda of the IPCC and just accept the claims of those who have made increasingly alarmist predictions, yet have been proved wrong time and time again.

As you lie awake at night worried by the mere thought of ocean front land in Wagga Wagga, you realise that something needs to be done before it is too late. Australia needs to act now and introduce an emissions trading scheme because climate change is "the greatest moral issue of our time."

As an acquiescent disciple of the new religion, to save the planet you concoct a scheme that will tax every business and every family in the country. Sure, it will raise the cost of food, electricity, construction and transport but that is a price you are prepared for others to pay. You condemn any opponents of your plan as sceptics and heretics, while trying to convince the community that it won't hurt them too much.

In fact, so desperate are you to facilitate the introduction of your multi-billion dollar wealth redistribution system, that you promise to compensate some of those affected by more than it is going to cost them. Surely everyone can see the sense in taking from the wealthy and giving to those who pollute just as much but aren't as well off. Just think of it as spreading the socialist love to save the planet.

Despite the rejection of your scheme by farmers and environmentalists, businesses and families, you plough on regardless. What does it matter if hundreds of thousands of jobs are going to be lost and industries closed if it means we will have less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Desperately looking for support, you enlist those notorious polluters in the investment banking, legal and financial markets to support your cause, conveniently forgetting only months ago you were blaming their excessive culture of greed for the failure of the world financial system. Ignore too, the billions of dollars they stand to make from the creation and administration of the unwieldy bureaucracy and carbon trading scheme you propose. Surely the opportunity to profit wouldn't be the reason they endorse your scheme, would it? (Cory Bernardi, Quadrant)

My previous post described what I called “smoking gun” evidence of a spurious drift in the NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) product when compared to SSTs from the TRMM satellite Microwave Imager (TMI). The drift seemed to be mostly confined to 2001, almost a ’step’ jump. The moored buoy validation statistics of the TMI sea surface temperatures from Frank Wentz’s web site (SSMI.com) suggested that the TMI SSTs had good long-term stability.

But 2001 was also the year that the TRMM satellite was boosted into a higher orbit, which concerned me. I asked Frank about the effect of this event on the TMI SSTs (which also come from his web site). Frank couldn’t remember the details, but said he spent quite a bit of time correcting for the altitude change on the retrieved SSTs since the microwave emission of the sea surface depends upon the TMI instrument’s view angle with respect to the local vertical.

I know from our many years of work together on the AMSR-E Science Team that Frank is indeed a careful researcher, yet it seemed like more than a coincidence that the TMI and NOAA sea surface temperatures diverged during the same year as the orbit boost. So, I went back to see what might have caused the problem. I went back and thought about the different ways in which one can compute area averages from satellite data.

To make a long story short, because the orbit boost caused the TMI to be able to “see” to slightly higher latitudes, the way in which individual latitude bands are handled has a significant impact on the resulting temperature anomalies that are computed over time. The previous results I presented were for the 40N to 40S latitude band, which is nominally what the TMI instrument sees today. But before 2001, the latitudinal extent was slightly smaller than it was after 2001.

As shown in the following figure, if I restrict the latitude range to 38N to 38S, which was always covered during the entire TRMM mission, I find that the divergence between the TMI and NOAA average SST measurements essentially disappears.

Even though I was processing the NOAA and TMI datasets in the same manner, I should NOT have been. This is because there were not as many gridpoints over cooler SST regions going into the ‘global’ averages before the satellite altitude boost as after the boost. So, for example, one must be very careful in computing a latitude band average, say from 39N to 40N, to make sure that there has been no long-term change in the sampling of that band.

Based upon the above comparisons, I would now say there is no statistically significant difference in the SST trends since 1998 between TMI, the NOAA ERSSTv3b product, and the HadSST2 product. And it does look like July 2009 might well have experienced a warmer SST anomaly than July 1998, as was originally claimed by NOAA. (Remember, TMI can not see all of the global oceans, just equatorward of about 40 deg. N and S latitude.)

In the bottom panel of the above figure, I also have a comparison between the TMI and AMSR-E sea surface temperatures, which are available only since June of 2002 from the Aqua satellite. As can be seen, there is no evidence of a calibration (or sampling) drift in that comparison either.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Always question your results…even after finding the obvious errors. And maybe I should eliminate the term ’smoking gun evidence’ from any results I describe in the future.

Having now submitted a review of the empirical support for weakening of the Walker circulation to the Journal of Geophysical Research, I can get back to the “Is the sea level rise accelerating?” article. The abstract is below:

It was interesting to find a reservation in the post at RealClimate today about projections for the future — something you won’t find in the published articles.

In other words, this is an admission that the models are based on speculative assumptions. When we stick to the facts, it will become clear, there is no basis for belief in non-linearity (aka acceleration) either over temperature or time. (Niche Modeling)

Dr. Syun Akasofu has provided us with a guest weblog based on a translation from Japanese of an article he wrote. I pleased to use my weblog to communicate viewpoints on climate science issues from credentialed climate scientists.

The so-called “global warming” issue viewed in the context of politics and the economy of the world.

1. The US must have decided to drop the making of cars as their primary manufacturing activity and gave it to Japan. The Obama administration and the US public believe that enough has been done for the ailing car makers, and hope that they will be able to survive by making good electric (not fossil fuel powered) cars.

2. What does this mean? In the history of manufacturing, there has been a trend in which advanced countries lose their primary manufacturing capabilities one after another to developing countries. The textile industry in the UK was taken over by the US, then by Japan, then by China and others. The iron manufacturing industry in the UK was taken over by the US, then by Japan, and then China and other ‘catching-up’ countries. The car manufacturing industry in the UK was taken over by the US (mainly by GM), then Japan (Toyota and Honda), and some day perhaps China. This historical trend cannot be stopped. (The US tried to take over the world’s financing activities from the UK, which had lost interest in manufacturing altogether, but failed miserably in the recent days and caused the current economic recession.)

3. Then, the question is what kind of primary manufacturing industry is the US going to choose to work on in the future? It is likely that the Obama administration has chosen the construction of atomic power plants as the next great US manufacturing effort.

4. The reasons for choosing atomic power plants are obvious. First of all, the US has to secure future electric power because electricity is needed for everything, including future electric cars. The US wants to get away from its reliance on oil (and the unstable oil-producing countries), which will undoubtedly either diminish or become very expensive within the next 50 years. Reducing oil imports will reduce the great deficit. It should be noted that the primary purpose of changing from carbon power to atomic power is not necessarily to reduce the release of CO2 and global warming. It is an excuse. This will become clearer as we look into the related issues.

5. How is global warming related to atomic power? In order to understand this question, it is important to learn how the global warming issue was born. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then the British Prime Minister, came to the conclusion that the UK needed atomic power energy for their future, but she faced strong objections by her people. It was also about the time when the first crude computer simulation of the greenhouse effect of CO2 was made, and it predicted a great disaster and catastrophe due to the expected temperature rise, unless the release of CO2 could be greatly reduced.

     Margaret Thatcher must have taken this result into account in promoting atomic power, asking her people to choose either atomic power or global disaster/catastrophe, which would require a great sacrifice in their standard of living in order to avoid it. Without her strong endorsement, the IPCC would not have been established. She also established the Hadley Climate Research Center for further study of the effects of CO2. Until that time, climatology was a rather quiet science (not something dealt with in newspaper headlines), but Thatcher put a great spotlight on it for her political purposes. Therefore, although the CO2 hypothesis is appropriate as a hypothesis in science, the IPCC was related to atomic power from its birth and its destiny was to predict a great disaster/catastrophe. This, in spite of the criticism that the IPCC is predicting the end of the world, although we are not doing very well at even predicting the next day’s weather or the severity of the next winter. Science was used for political purposes. At the same time, the world news media was looking for something exciting to report on because the Cold War was ending. Global warming and reporting on imaginary disasters/catastrophes caused by CO2 has become one of their major headline topics.

6. How is the history of global warming and the IPCC related to the Obama administration’s interest in atomic power plants, making the construction of atomic power plants as the new primary manufacturing industry of the US? This is because if they proposed atomic power plants by singling the issue out, they will face fierce opposition of the people. Since the Three Mile Island plant accident, there has been no atomic plant built on US soil. Therefore, the Obama administration, like Thatcher, will ask the people to choose between atomic power plants (maintaining or improving their present standard of living) or a great disaster/catastrophe caused by CO2 (actually, reducing drastically the present living standard, including not being able to drive (electric) cars).

7. For these reasons, from the perspective of the Obama administration, the greater the disaster/catastrophe predicted due to CO2, the better it is for the purpose of promoting atomic energy. As a first step toward the goal of switching to atomic power, the Obama administration states that atomic energy is “green” (meaning no air pollution), that atomic energy is “non-carbon”, and even that CO2 is “unhealthy”. Note also that Obama uses the words “climate change”, not “global warming.”

    The physics of CO2, absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation is clear. On the other hand, geophysicists must find how much heating CO2 will cause when a given amount of it is released into the complex earth system. Thus, in this situation it is meaningless and useless for the real science of global warming/climate to face off against the political decisions and propaganda for the planning of atomic power plants.

8. One problem in this particular discipline of science is that scientists who base their research on computer simulations have become too arrogant, saying that they can predict the temperature in 2100, although too much is still unknown about the earth system. Ignoring natural causes of climate change and even unknown aspects of cloud physics, they rely on computer work in predicting the temperature rise in 2100. However, a computer is like a robot. It can perform only what it is instructed to do by the programs produced by the human brain. If a computer program is incorrect or inaccurate, the output will also be incorrect or inaccurate. In science, incorrect programs or hypotheses (produced by one or a group of scientists) are criticized by other scientists and can thus be improved. That is the way science should progress. However, the IPCC regards those who criticize them as “skeptics”, or “deniers”, etc., and brought this newborn and immature science to the international stage. They stated in 2007 that scientists have done all they can and that the science is settled, and the rest of the task should be in the hands of policy makers. Such a statement is very irresponsible.

9. However, even if the US decides that its next primary manufacturing industry is the construction of atomic power plants, there will be fierce competition between the US group (US, Japan, Russia) and the French group, which has more experience than the US, at last in the safety of operation. (A further problem is that Toshiba owns much of the Westinghouse stock.) There will eventually be uranium wars in the future; energy securing wars will continue forever.

10. The Obama administration is promoting wind power and solar power. However, there is no way to supply more than 10% of the US power needs (Obama says that they should try for 20%, but has he estimated the cost involved?) It is only about 2.5% at present. In any case, 80-90% of future electric power has to be found.

11. The US has to rely on coal power plants (at present 40%), until a large number of atomic power plants can be built, perhaps about 15-20 years from now. Thus, there is no way for the US to agree on any international agreement on a near-future CO2 reduction at the present time. The US has been saying that unless China and India agree to a significant reduction of the release of CO2, any agreement is useless. On the other hand, the US has made China its factory, and furthermore the US owes a great debt to China. Unless China can remain healthy, politically and financially, and with sufficient energy, the US will have a serious problem. Therefore, the US cannot force China to reduce its CO2 emission. On the other hand, in spite of the fact that China is now “richer” than the US, it continues to claim that it is still one of the developing countries and that the developed countries should reduce their release of CO2 first. The US and China must surely understand each other, so that the above statements are only rhetorical. The IPCC chairman has stated recently that India will not agree to a “cap”. Further, global capitalism is such that the rest of the world relies on the US buying power (even if they are using credit cards), so that the US economy has to be healthy. EU officials have had a large number of conferences on the reduction of CO2, but they have not reached any conclusion they can agree on.

12. For the above reasons, is it useful to have any more conferences on global warming? How many international conferences with the heads of nations have been held in the past? There has been no substantive agreement on the amount of release of CO2 by individual countries, in spite of the fact that protecting the earth from the CO2-based disaster/catastrophe should be the most solemn duty of the heads of nations (although environmental destruction caused by global capitalism is conveniently forgotten). So far, all the past conferences ended with a “fight” between rich nations and poor nations. The latter trying to snatch money from the former using the so-called “cap and trade” as an excuse, and the former trying to protect themselves from such an assault, in spite of the fact that the “cap and trade” negotiations have no effect on reducing the overall release of CO2. It is suspected that the heads of nations do not really believe in the global disaster/catastrophe scenario caused by CO2. However, they stated they believe in the IPCC, so they cannot publicly say that they do not believe in the disaster scenario, because they and their countries would be called enemies of humanity, like George W. Bush.

13. It has been said that the only thing they agreed on at the past conferences is to decide on the time and place for the next meeting. Such conferences are useless, although they are better than a world war. It is suggested that they should postpone future meetings until the science of global warming will advance farther. It is not too late, as the proponents of global warming advocate, since there has been no predicted disaster/catastrophe after the release of CO2 increased rapidly in 1946. In the tropics and middle latitude, there has been no discernible disaster/catastrophe so far. This is why the world media flocks to the Arctic and reports on erroneous global warming effects. None of the phenomena and changes they reported are related even remotely to the CO2 effects. A good example is glacier calving at the terminus. Nevertheless, the world media reports that the changes are caused by the CO2 effect.

14. In Japan, they are overjoyed by the statements of President Obama, saying that he is quite serious about “global warming” (actually, he says “climate change” instead of global arming). They interpret his statements as a sign that the US has finally become serious about the release of CO2, and that Obama is different from George W. Bush.

15. It is very unfortunate that science is being used for political purposes. Global warming is an imaginary product used for promoting the atomic power industry. When the truth will eventually become apparent, the credibility of science will be seriously damaged, since so many scientists (not only climatologists, but also many scientists in general) blindly trusted the IPCC and accused their opponents as “skeptics” and “deniers”, etc.

16. Actually, judging by what has been described earlier, the IPCC is NOT a scientific research organization, although they skillfully mobilized 2500 “world experts in climatology”; they were used by the IPCC, some probably unwittingly. The IPCC skillfully created the impression of “consensus” among 2500 scientists. Their contribution, a large volume of publications, is conveniently used for the IPCC publication, “Summary for Policy Makers”, as an apparent back-up document, although the IPCC charter clearly states that they are not supposed to make recommendations to policy makers.

    The IPCC has tried to emphasize that global warming began unexpectedly and abruptly after 1900 because of the enhanced release of CO2. However, global warming began as early as 1800-1850s at the same rate as the present (0.5°C/100 years), namely about 100 years earlier than the beginning of a rapid increase of CO2 release, as the earth began to recover from the Little Ice Age (1400-1800). The recovery from a cold period is warming. Actually, the warming until 2000 and the present cooling trend can reasonably be explained as natural changes. The IPCC has ignored natural changes as at least a partial cause of global warming, in order to promote their CO2 hypothesis.

17. The IPCC tried to ignore the fact that the earth experienced the Little Ice Age by using the co-called “hockey stick” figure, because it is not convenient to know that the global warming began in 1800-1850, and not as they claim in the 20th century. The recovery from the Little Ice Age (a cold period) is warming. How many of the 2500 scientists trust the hockey stick figure? Perhaps only very few. Is this then the “consensus” of 2,500 experts in climatology? Unfortunately, the IPCC and the world media have presented this hypothesis as a fact.

18. There is another reason for proposing the postponement of future global warming conferences. After 1998 or 2000, global temperature has stopped rising and shows a sign of cooling, in spite of the fact that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still rapidly rising. This is an observed fact. Therefore, their temperature prediction for the year 2100 has already failed during the first 10 years. However, IPCC scientists have not recognized it, saying that it is just a temporal change; but 10 years of consistent change is considered climate change.

19. The world political leaders should be able to decide to postpone future conferences until scientists could find the causes for the present halting of global warming. Temporary or not, there must be unknown forces and causes to suppress the CO2 effect or even overcome it.

20. We should bring back the science of climate change to a basic science, avoiding interferences by policy makers and the world mass media. Only then can this particular science proceed in a scientifically healthy way. Only then can we discuss any global warming hypothesis as proponents and opponents (instead of as “believers” and “skeptics” or “deniers” in the religious sense), regardless of one side being in the majority or minority. In science, unlike in politics, a minority can be right. (Climate Science)

From the abstract of the lead paper by Martin Wild: Recent evidence suggests that solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface has not been constant over time but has undergone substantial variations on decadal timescales. The available observations suggest a widespread decrease in surface solar radiation between the 1950s and 1980s (popularly referred to as “global dimming”), with some more recent evidence for a partial recovery (”brightening”).

“Global dimming and brightening” – The role of solar radiation in climate change

A special volume of the “Journal of Geophysical Research” reviews the growing research field of “global dimming” and “global brightening” in over 20 articles. These phenomena, supposedly human-induced, control solar radiation incident at the Earth’s surface and thus influence climate.

Clouds and aerosols influence the solar radiation on the earth’s surface and therefore the climate. (Photo: flickr/Schrottie)

Special instruments have been recording the solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface since 1923. However, it wasn’t until the International Geophysical Year in 1957/58 that a global measurement network began to take shape. The data thus obtained reveal that the energy provided by the sun at the Earth’s surface has undergone considerable variations over the past decades, with associated impacts on climate.

Investigating which factors reduce or intensify solar radiation and thus cause “global dimming” or “global brightening” is still very much a nascent field of research in which especially scientists from ETH Zurich became renowned. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has now published a special volume on the subject which presents the current state of knowledge in detail and makes a considerable contribution to climate science. “Only now, especially with the help of this volume, is research in this field really taking off”, stresses Martin Wild, senior scientist at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of ETH Zurich, who is a specialist on the subject.

The initial findings, which revealed that solar radiation at the Earth’s surface is not constant over time but rather varies considerably over decades, were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s for specific regions of the Earth. Atsumu Ohmura, emeritus professor at ETH Zurich, for example, discovered at the time that the amount of solar radiation over Europe decreased considerably between the 1950s and the 1980s. It wasn’t until 1998 that the first global study was conducted for larger areas, like the continents Africa, Asia, North America and Europe for instance. The results showed that on average the surface solar radiation decreased by two percent per decade between the 1950s and 1990.

In analyzing more recently compiled data, however, Wild and his team discovered that solar radiation has gradually been increasing again since 1985. In a paper published in “Science” in 2005, they coined the phrase “global brightening” to describe this new trend and to oppose to the term “global dimming” used since 2001 for the previously established decrease in solar radiation.

Only recently, an article in the journal “Nature”, which Wild was also involved in, brought additional attention to the topic of global dimming/brightening.

In this study, for the first time, the scientists examined the connection between global dimming/brightening and the carbon cycle. They demonstrated that more scattered light is present during periods of global dimming due to the increased aerosol- and cloud-amounts, enabling plants to absorb CO₂ more efficiently than when the air is cleaner and thus clearer. According to the scientists, this is because scattered light penetrates deeper into the vegetation canopy than direct sunlight, which means the plants can use the light more effectively for photosynthesis. Consequently, there was around 10 percent more carbon stored in the terrestrial biosphere between 1960 and 1999.

The special volume, which appears in the AGU’s renowned “Journal of Geophysical Research”, provides an overview of the current state of knowledge. Almost half of the publications in the volume were either completely or partially written by ETH Zurich scientists. Wild is the guest editor, and author or co-author of ten of these articles.

The articles provide the first indication of the magnitude of these effects, how they vary in terms of time and space and what the possible consequences might be for climate change. They also discuss in detail the underlying causes and mechanisms, which are still under debate.

It is particularly unclear as to whether it is the clouds or the aerosols that trigger global dimming/brightening, or even interactions between clouds and aerosols, as aerosols can influence the “brightness” and lifetime of the clouds. The investigation of these relations is complicated by the fact that insufficient – if any – observational data are available on how clouds and aerosol loadings have been changing over the past decades. The recently launched satellite measurement programs should help to close this gap for the future from space, however.

“There is still an enormous amount of research to be done as many questions are still open”, explains Wild. This includes the magnitude of the dimming and brightening effects on a global level and how greatly the effects differ between urban and rural areas, where fewer aerosols are released into the atmosphere. Another unresolved question is what happens over the oceans, as barely any measurement data are available from these areas.

A further challenge for the researchers is to incorporate the effects of global dimming/brightening more effectively in climate models, to understand their impact on climate change better. After all, studies indicate that global dimming masked the actual temperature rise – and therefore climate change – until well into the 1980s. Moreover, the studies published also show that the models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fourth Assessment Report do not reproduce global dimming/brightening adequately: neither the dimming nor the subsequent brightening is simulated realistically by the models. According to the scientists, this is probably due to the fact that the processes causing global dimming/brightening were not taken into account adequately and that the historical anthropogenic emissions used as model input are afflicted with considerable uncertainties.

“This is why at ETH Zurich we are working with a research version of a global climate model, which contains much more detailed aerosol and cloud microphysics and can reproduce global dimming/brightening more effectively”, says Wild. For him, the studies so far constitute “initial” estimates that need to be followed up with further research.

Unfortunately, there are many good (and sad) examples of Uncle Sam’s insatiable desire to regulate the smallest aspects of our lives. Legislators can’t even let us decide which light bulbs to buy. Government believes that it knows best, and is banning the venerable incandescent bulb.

Lighting consultant Howard Brandston makes a plaintive plea for lighting that serves people rather than politics:

He hopes for a congressional reversal of the ill-considered prohibition. If that doesn’t work, people do have one more option: stock-piling bulbs for future use. Of course, that probably would lead to the creation of a federal light bulb police, tasked with wiping out the black market in incandescent bulbs. “Use a bulb, go to jail” may become the newest law enforcement slogan! (, Cato at liberty)

100 is the wattage of incandescent lamps the importation of which is, from now, illegal throughout the EU. Even by EU standards this is monumentally insane piece of legislation. It owes its existence solely to the principle of religious sacrifice. They are to be replaced by fluorescent mercury vapour lamps that are inadequate and a health hazard. That it is a gesture of token enforcement is illustrated by the fact that both forms of illumination are soon to become obsolete, to be replaced by technologies such light-diodes and electroluminescent panels. People who have failed to put by a hoard of real lamps will be stuck with illumination that flickers (precipitating migraines) is slow to start (possibly causing the elderly to fall down the stairs when they have to get up in the night) and produces UV radiation (which is a potential hazard to some, such as those on drugs that promote photosensitivity).

The craziest part of it all is that it shortly succeeds the banning of mercury. Not only has this destroyed traditional industries such as barometers, it has removed from medical surgeries mercury based sphygmomanometers. These are absolute and accurate instruments that have now been replaced by machines based on unreliable semiconductor pressure sensors and naïve digital algorithms. The people who most need the traditional form are the ones who will be put at most risk, those with cardiac arrhythmia. Human operators used to be able to dwell at the critical pressures to achieve accuracy in determining them. The machines simply sweep linearly through pressures and make a grossly crude estimate. Because this then appears as numbers on an LCD panel it is accorded a provenance that it has not earned.

Mercury, though a poison, is relatively safe to handle as it is a non-wetting liquid of low volatility. In contrast, the vapour is dangerous as it can be inhaled or condense on food. Not the least mad part of all this madness is that no mechanism has been put in place safely to dispose of these wretched new devices. They also contain electronic components, such as semiconductor devices and chokes, which are allegedly unsafe to incorporate in landfill. The advantages of the new devices are exaggerated (for example, for half the year in the temperate zone the power they consume comes off the heating bill, minuscule a proportion though it is). They are almost universally loathed, the exceptions being those who joyfully sacrifice convenience for their so-called ecological faith. Many of us now have a hoard of incandescent light bulbs, perhaps sufficient to see us through to the next stage of technological development.

This is typical of the way EU bureaucracy works. Secretive committees prepare legislation, taking advice from various groups of zealots, which the EU funds to lobby itself. They do not seek advice from independent scientists and engineers. The legislation is not subject to democratic monitoring, as the EU Parliament is a powerless charade. It is passed unexamined through national parliaments, which have ceded their powers and anyway are populated by their own zealots and idle representatives of the new political class. The result is onerous and frequently contradictory. Almost an entire continent is sinking into industrial and economic decline. It is no consolation that newly socialist America is now heading in the same direction. (Number Watch)

The Government is putting its green credentials ahead of the health of Britons as old-fashioned and 100W lightbulbs are phased out under EU rules which come into force this week, campaigners have said.

Energy-saving lightbulbs which will replace the old-fashioned incandescent bulbs can trigger migraines, exacerbate skin conditions and lead to other serious health problems, they warned.

But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it was working closely with organisations representing the 36,000 people in the UK who have a "special health interest" and only "a small percentage" of these would need specialist bulbs. (Press Association)

BERLIN - Germans, who sometimes see themselves as guardians of the environment, are hoarding energy-guzzling incandescent light bulbs ahead of a looming European Union-wide ban, the GfK market research agency said.

The Nuremberg-based GfK reported sales of incandescent bulbs had soared about 35 percent in the first half of the year ahead of a ban that starts Tuesday -- even though it was proposed by German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel in 2007.

Some German retailers said they have seen sales of 100-watt incandescent bulbs soar 600 percent since the end of July.

The EU is planning to phase out use of the incandescent bulbs as part of its push to save energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change. From Tuesday the light bulbs above 75 watts can no longer be produced or imported in the EU. (Reuters)

In 2005, Fidel Castro easily switched his Freedom Island from incandescent light bulbs to the postmodern fluorescent ones. Castro was 4 years ahead of the camp of peace. In 2009, his European comrades followed the example of their great role model. Well, they're not quite the second ones in the world: the second pioneer after Fidel Castro was Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. ;-)

Starting from Tuesday, September 1st, 2009, the EU companies won't be allowed to produce and the shops won't be allowed to sell any conventional light bulbs with a milky or otherwise obscured surface as well as the transparent classic 100-Watt incandescent light bulbs - or any light bulbs above 80 Watts: see e.g. UPI. In one or two years, the cutoff will be lowered and new light bulbs will be banned, and so on. In 2012, only "efficient" light bulbs will be allowed and by 2016, they want to ban even the halogen lamps.

While Fidel Castro had some rational economic justifications for his decision (well, he simply wanted to reduce recurring blackouts), the reason behind the same policy in Europe is that the Eurocratic wise men think that American imperialist Thomas Alva Edison is causing a catastrophic global warming. ;-) Well, there are cases in which Fidel Castro looks relatively sensible, moderate, friendly to America, and pragmatic.

It's pretty clear that the total "warming" that classic light bulbs may have contributed since the birth of Edison was less than 0.01 °C, i.e. also less than a one-day fluctuation. Only a relatively small portion of the "man-made" CO2 comes from electricity production; only a very small portion of electricity is used for light (most are electric motors): this reduces the figure by more than an order of magnitude; only a part of light came from these light bulbs; only a part of the electricity is produced in coal-burning plants.

Is this 0.01 °C per century enough to justify the extermination of a technology that may turn out to be more environment-friendly and pleasant for our eyesight and general health (the new ones may lead to fatigues, migraines, and worsening skin conditions)? The "unfair ban" will also reduce the fun in the U.K., The Sun notes.

The ban is considered an aesthetic calamity by artists. Claims about their luminosity are exaggerated, The Telegraph says. And I am really puzzled why the same greens - who are often so negative about all kinds of new technologies and unusual chemicals (besides GMOs and similar things) - don't have any problem with the mercury that no one can cheaply recycle, with the flickering light, and with other things. Groupthink and the current predominant obsession with CO2 are the two only explanations I have.

Czech President Václav Klaus introduced his new book, "A Blue Planet In Danger" ("Modrá planeta v ohrožení"), today: Czech Press Agency, picture. It is an expanded version of his "Blue Planet in Green Shackles": much of the stuff will be new. Klaus means the book summarizing his opinions that have become "mainstream" as a small contribution to the Copenhagen conference. I was also invited but a lot of work with a garden, a cat, staircase cleaning, shoppings, and many other things had a higher priority today. ;-)

As the agency that will ultimately decide whether or not the US moves forward with more oil and natural gas exploration in the OCS, we need to show the Mineral Management Service (MMS) that there is true grassroots support for this sound energy policy.

Obama and Company have made no secret about their desire to see less oil, gas, and other tried-and-true fossil fuels on the table and their plans to limit energy production will increase prices and threaten our energy supply. Submit your comments in support of the Draft Proposed Program for 2010-2015 and take a stand for US Energy Security! (Freedom works)

Britain is facing the prospect of widespread power cuts for the first time since the 1970s, government projections show.

Demand for power from homes and businesses will exceed supply from the national grid within eight years, according to official figures.

The shortage of supplies will hit the equivalent of many as 16 million families for at least one hour during the year, it is forecast.

Not since the early 1970s when the three-day week was introduced to preserve coal has Britain faced the prospect of rationing energy use.

The gap between Britain’s energy needs and demand throws fresh doubt on the Government’s assertion that renewable energy can make up for dwindling nuclear and coal capabilities. (Daily Telegraph)

The Brazilian government is set to unveil on Monday a sweeping reform of regulations covering the oil and natural gas industries Monday. The regulatory framework will delineate how recently discovered offshore sub-salt oil deposits should be developed, who will develop them and who will reap the rewards. (Merco Press)

Abstract:

Concern over climate change has led the U.S. to consider a cap-and-trade system to regulate emissions. Here we illustrate the land-use impact to U.S. habitat types of new energy development resulting from different U.S. energy policies. We estimated the total new land area needed by 2030 to produce energy, under current law and under various cap-and-trade policies, and then partitioned the area impacted among habitat types with geospatial data on the feasibility of production. The land-use intensity of different energy production techniques varies over three orders of magnitude, from 1.9–2.8 km2/TW hr/yr for nuclear power to 788–1000 km2/TW hr/yr for biodiesel from soy. In all scenarios, temperate deciduous forests and temperate grasslands will be most impacted by future energy development, although the magnitude of impact by wind, biomass, and coal to different habitat types is policy-specific. Regardless of the existence or structure of a cap-and-trade bill, at least 206,000 km2 will be impacted without substantial increases in energy efficiency, which saves at least 7.6 km2 per TW hr of electricity conserved annually and 27.5 km2 per TW hr of liquid fuels conserved annually. Climate policy that reduces carbon dioxide emissions may increase the areal impact of energy, although the magnitude of this potential side effect may be substantially mitigated by increases in energy efficiency. The possibility of widespread energy sprawl increases the need for energy conservation, appropriate siting, sustainable production practices, and compensatory mitigation offsets (PLoS ONE 4(8): e6802)

Carbon capture and storage technologies pushed by Western governments may or may not work, but ...

We can’t continue to use the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide emissions, say governments concerned about global warming. Rather than storing this colourless, odourless, tasteless gas way up there, they reason, let’s store the carbon dioxide way down here, buried under ground or in the oceans.

And since burial solves the carbon dioxide problem, they then conclude, we can with a clear conscience crank up our use of coal. (Financial Post)

Ed. Note: This article first appeared on Geoffrey Styles' blog, Energy Outlook.

Even before the advent of partially- or fully-electric cars, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the old fuel economy metric of miles per gallon isn't as useful for measuring energy consumption in vehicles as when it was first codified in the original Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard in the 1970s. That is due in part to the proliferation of new fuels--E85, LPG, LNG, CNG, methanol, and hydrogen--but also because expressing the relationship between distance and volume in this way obscured the diminishing returns to higher levels of fuel economy. As a Wall St. Journal column earlier this week put it, adding electricity into the mpg mix, "risks giving consumers inaccurate information about the financial and environmental costs of driving." But if we need a new metric, what should it measure? (Geoffrey Styles, Energy Tribune)

The $3 billion cash-for-clunkers program that ended last week worked well as a jolt of economic stimulus. Nearly 700,000 people used the rebate to buy new cars in July and August — adding about 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points to economic growth in the third quarter, at an annual rate.

But there’s also another lesson in the cash-for-clunkers experience: such rebates are a spectacularly inefficient way to implement environmental policy. Sure, the new cars deliver about nine miles per gallon more than those traded in, on average. But the benefits — measured in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions — come at inordinate expense.

On average, cars are driven 12,000 miles per year, according to government statistics. Considering that the traded-in clunkers had an average fuel economy of 15.8 m.p.g. while the new ones deliver 24.9 m.p.g., a swap saved some 278 gallons of gas per year — which would have released almost 2.8 tons of carbon dioxide when burned.

Assuming the clunkers would have been driven four more years, the $4,200 average rebate removed 11.2 tons of carbon from the atmosphere, at a cost of some $375 per ton. If they would have been driven five years, the carbon savings cost $300 per ton. And if drivers drive their sleek new wheels more than they drove their old clunkers, the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere will be even higher.

To put this in perspective, an allowance to emit a ton of CO2 costs about $20 on the European Climate Exchange. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a ton of carbon would be valued at $28 under the cap-and-trade program in the clean energy bill passed by the House in June.

The program might have been more efficient with modifications, like a smaller rebate. But even if the new cars bought under the program had zero emissions, the price of removing the clunkers’ carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would have been nearly $140 per ton.

The best tool to induce Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars would be a gas tax that provided rebates for low-income drivers. Another, though inferior, alternative — if Congress couldn’t face the political risks of a gas tax — would be a program that provided a rebate for drivers of clean cars while imposing a fee on drivers of gas hogs.

In any case, as environmental policy, it’s just too expensive to buy clunkers to take them off the road. (NYT)

A new program offering cash rebates on renewable energy investments is sparking interest in wind farms. A worker atop a windmill in Maine.

After nearly a six-month lull, Wall Street is getting back into the business of financing new wind farms.

Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. have invested $100 million each to finance separate wind farms this month, taking advantage of a brand-new federal program that is paying substantial cash grants to help cover the cost of renewable energy investments.

Bankers say this is the beginning of an active pipeline of new wind-farm financing, as well as investment in large solar installations and geothermal facilities. Project developers and Wall Street appear to be viewing the federal cash grant program as such a good deal, industry experts say, it may grow much larger than its Washington creators expected.

"The money is coming back," says Ethan Zindler, head of North American research at consultant New Energy Finance Ltd. (WSJ)

LOS ANGELES - The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods.

That makes Toyota's market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world's dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells.

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine slated to reopen in California by 2012.

Among the rare earths that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Focus, as well as in generators for wind turbines. (Reuters)

Ed. note: This item originally ran in Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog.

Reality Begins to Sink In

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this past week:

U.S. Biofuel Boom Running on Empty

A few pertinent excerpts:

This all boils down to something I have said on many occasions: You can't mandate technology. Just because you mandate that 36 billion gallons of biofuel are to be produced by 2022 doesn't mean that it has a remote chance of happening. This is not a hard concept to understand, but it seems to have eluded our government for many years. The government would probably understand that they couldn't create colonies on the moon in 10 years via mandate. They know they can't cure cancer via mandate. But in the area of biofuels, they seem to feel like they can just conjure up vast amounts of hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol, or algal biodiesel. (Robert Rapier, Energy Tribune)

For more than 40 years, scientists have dreamed of collecting the sun’s energy in space and beaming it back to Earth. Now, a host of technological advances, coupled with interest from the U.S. military, may be bringing that vision close to reality (Michael D. Lemonick, Yale E360)

References

Full stories: