"Every political movement ultimately expires from an excess of its
own principles." -- Statesman Thomas Macaulay
****************************
1. Perhaps the greatest threat to the US
economy: EPA’s ANPR: The carbon police
lay out their plans for your future. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121642309337666613.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
3. A climate of deception – by controlling the
data
4. Energy policy at the mercy of
environmentalists
5. Why some industries like Cap & Trade: The
US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP)
7. Climate computer models fail the test: The use of the IPCC model
predictions as a basis for policy making is invalid and seriously misleading.
*****************************************
NEWS YOU CAN USE
The UK has been living under a delusion over its
claim to be cutting greenhouse gases, because of funny accounting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7536421.stm
Consumer-based GHG emissions are 49% higher than Kyoto-reported emissions
Trends show that between 1992 and 2004, Kyoto GHG
emissions report a decrease of 13%, while consumer-based GHG emissions
increased by 13%.
******************************
Fast natural climate changes without any human
input: Ice core records have shown that substantial changes can happen very
rapidly. Steffensen et al. (p. 680, published online in 19 June Science mag;
see also the Perspective by Flückiger) employed sophisticated analytical
methods to measure multiple climate proxies in a single, high-resolution ice
core from Greenland. Some attributes of climate were observed to change in as
little as a single year during two abrupt warmings within the last
deglaciation.
UNDER THE BOTTOM LINE
"Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape
Dying Planet" -- The Onion
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/al_gore_places_infant_son_in?utm_source=onion_rss_daily
############################################
1. THE LAWNMOWER MEN
WSJ Editorial, July 19, 2008
Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that
"our very way of life" is imperiled if the U.S. doesn't end "the
carbon age" within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even
remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this
means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the
instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.
In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA
lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they'd like to shackle the
whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA's
nana-management. Thankfully none of it has the force of law -- yet. However,
the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on
new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore's, and previewing what Democrats have in
mind for next year.
The mess began in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled
5-4 in Mass. v. EPA that greenhouse gases are "air pollutants"
under current environmental laws, despite the fact that the laws were written
decades before the climate-change panic. The EPA was ordered to regulate if it
decides that carbon emissions are a danger to the public. The 588-page
"advance notice of proposed rulemaking" lays out how the EPA would
like it to work in practice.
Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent that
under the Court's "pollutant" standard "everything airborne,
from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies," which the EPA appears to have
taken literally. It is alarmed by "enteric fermentation in domestic livestock"
-- that is, er, their "emissions." A farm with over 25 cows would
exceed the EPA's proposed carbon limits. So would 500 acres of crops, due to
harvesting and processing machinery.
But never fear. The EPA would regulate "farm
tractors" too, plus "lawn and garden equipment." For example, it
"could require a different unit of measure [for carbon emissions] tied to
the machine's mission or output -- such as grams per kilogram of cuttings from
a 'standard' lawn for lawnmowers."
In fact, the EPA has new mandates for everything
with an engine. There's a slew of auto regulations, especially jacking up
fuel-efficiency standards well beyond their current levels, and even
controlling the weight and performance of cars and trucks. Carbon rules are
offered for "dirt bikes and snowmobiles." Next up: Nascar.
The EPA didn't neglect planes and trains either,
down to rules for how aircraft can taxi on the runway. Guidelines are proposed
for boat design such as hulls and propellers. "Innovative strategies for
reducing hull friction include coatings with textures similar to marine
animals," the authors chirp. They also suggest "crew education
campaigns" on energy use at sea. Fishermen will love their eco-sensitivity
training.
New or modified buildings that went over the
emissions limits would have to obtain EPA permits. This would cover power
plants, manufacturers, etc. But it would also include "large office and
residential buildings, hotels, large retail establishments and similar
facilities" -- like schools and hospitals. The limits are so low that they
would apply to "hundreds of thousands" of sources, as the EPA itself
notes. "We expect that the entire country would be in nonattainment."
If this power grab wasn't enough, "EPA also
believes that . . . it might be possible for the Agency to consider deeper
reductions through a cap-and-trade program." The EPA thinks it can levy a
carbon tax too, as long as it's called a "fee." In other words, the
EPA wants to impose via regulatory ukase what Congress hasn't been able to enact
via democratic debate.
That's why the global warmists have so much invested
in the EPA's final ruling, which will come in the next Administration. Any
climate tax involves arguments about costs and benefits; voting to raise energy
prices is not conducive to re-election. But if liberals can outsource their
policies to the EPA, they can take credit while avoiding any accountability for
the huge economic costs they impose.
Meanwhile, the EPA's career staff is unsupervised.
In December, they went ahead and made their so-called "endangerment
finding" on carbon, deputizing themselves as the rulers of the
global-warming bureaucracy. The adults in the White House were aghast when they
saw the draft. EPA lifers retaliated by leaking the disputes of the standard
interagency review process to Democrats like Henry Waxman and sympathetic
reporters. Thus the stations-of-the-cross media narrative about "political
interference," as if the EPA's careerists don't have their own agenda. So
the Administration performed triage by making everything transparent.
At least getting the EPA on the record will help
clarify the costs of carbon restrictions. Democrats complaining about
"censorship" at the EPA are welcome to defend fiats about lawnmowers
and flatulent cows.
**********************************
2. HOW EPA GOT AWAY WITH IT
The Sirkin Letter
The Environmental Protection Agency has never said
the air is safe to breathe and never will--as clean-air expert Joel Schwartz
has pointed out--because the day it does, is the day it is out of a job.
EPA writes the regulations under the Clean Air Act
Amendments of 1990 for the six pollutants—seven, the Supreme Court having just
added another, carbon dioxide. Three
times EPA has declared new standards, each one tougher, for ground-level ozone,
first at 0.12 parts per million for one hour, then at 0.08 parts per million for eight hours, and
in March at 0.075 ppm for eight hours.
This latest change, declares EPA Administrator
Stephen Johnson, is “the most protective” in history from air “simply too dirty
to breathe.” (EPA defines as “unhealthy”
anything above its latest arbitrary standard.)
Each time the standard is changed, the new standard is always the most
protective in history, since it is always tighter than the standard it
replaces.
EPA declares that tightening the ozone standard will
prevent 1,300 to 3,500 premature deaths annually. But they have not found a single premature
death that was caused by air pollution (smog) or particulate matter (soot). (Meanwhile, in China, our Olympic athletes
are wearing masks to protect against Beijing’s polluted air.)
For years, authorities have been looking—without
successes—at data around Los Angeles, the elephant of American ozone, for
people whose chronic illness has been caused by air pollution. Acute health effects, which are interpreted
to affect smell or sight, are temporary, disappearing in 24 hours or less. Sensitive people can avoid them by avoiding
physical activity or remaining indoors during the few hours in hot sunny summer
afternoons when the ozone level is unusually high.
But this new ozone standard requires over a hundred
counties still out of compliance and hundreds more that are in compliance to
recalculate their State Implementation Plans to find more ways to clamp down on
emissions from autos, utilities, power plants,
manufacturing facilities, and whatever.
By so doing, they force states to spend billions of dollars more or
forfeit their customary Federal Highway funds.
Decisions on how to bring states into compliance depend on their local
areas. It is they that must devise more
ways, lawn mowers, barbecues, car-pooling, whatever.
The tightening of the 1996-7 ozone standard is
instructive because it shows the meticulous planning Administrator Browner had
to go through to get questionable standards accepted. She announced the change late one afternoon
in November, 1996, just before Thanksgiving, three weeks after the reelection
of President Clinton, and after 4:00 or 4:30 when the national media
leave. Congress had gone home and would
not be back till late January. There was
nearly no one around to ask or answer questions.
Why new standards?
Both ground-level ozone and particulate-matter levels had been falling
for years. Over a hundred counties still
had not been able to comply with the existing standards. Hundreds more would be thrown into
non-compliance. There was no need for
tighter standards. What justification did EPA Administrator Browner have? EPA-watcher Bonner Cohen related the absence
of scientific method to the 16th annual meeting of the Doctors for Disaster
Preparedness in 1998.
EPA, ignoring the law, had failed to review the PM25
standard after five years. So EPA’s
friends, the American Lung Association,
the Natural Resources Defense Council, and others sued it. EPA always appreciates them for their added
pressure for publicity, and it gives
millions of dollars to them to maintain the public perception of fear. This lawsuit made it possible for EPA to say
it had to review the standards because it was under court order.
But not quite.
The order was to review PM2.5 standards, not ozone. EPA then argued that the sources for ozone
were the same as for PM, so it made sense for them to review ozone at the same
time.
How, when both PM and O3 were fast falling, could
Mrs. Browner justify tougher standards?
By premature deaths. And by children’s asthma cases, which Mrs. Browner
had to know had nothing at all to do with ozone. As ozone has been decreasing
over the decades, asthma cases have been increasing, both in the U.S. and in
Europe.
Are premature deaths a justification for tougher
standards? Where are they? Who has seen them? There were nearly no data. There were 86 studies on PM2.5, but only 12
of them related PM2.5 to mortality, and only one of those related
PM2.5 to premature deaths. Mrs. Browner
claimed that that study, which came out of Harvard, had been “peer reviewed,”
but no one including the peer-reviewers saw the underlying data. That was not permitted by author and former
EPA official Mr. Schwartz, “together with two other gentlemen, Dockery and
Pope.” EPA’s Mary Nichols asserted EPA
had not requested the data because they weren’t necessary. [She now heads CARB in Sacramento, CA]
Bonner Cohen suggests a reason for the change at
that particular time. In five months,
the Kyoto Protocol would be coming up for its initial agreement. The same sources were common to global
warming as to air pollution. As Vice
President Al Gore’s protege, Administrator Browner was offering what could be support
for Gore.
If the Clean Air Amendment law is rewritten,
Congress should remember a)
that ground-level ozone at a certain level provides protection against
ultraviolet radiation; b) that not just benefits but costs must be
allowed to be considered; c) that only
those risks that are unreasonable should be considered illegal.
************************************
3. A CLIMATE OF DECEPTION
A comment on Christopher Booker’s article in The
Telegraph (UK)
One of the interesting phenomena of our times is the
parallel between euro-scepticism and "global warming denial": those
that are antagonistic towards the European Union also tend to disbelieve the
hype on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
On the other side of the divide, there is also a close relationship
between europhilia and belief in AGW, the EU having enthusiastically embraced
the dogma of the warmist religion, not least because of the opportunities it
affords to pursue the integrationalist agenda.
But there is another link. As is the EU built on a
foundation of deception, so too is the global warming hype, so much so that it
has become not "climate change" but a climate of deception.
One strand of that deception is brought home to us
today in the Booker column, which highlights to extent to which the great
climate change guru James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS), is manipulating temperature figures to promote his own beliefs and to
pursue what is quite evidently a political agenda.
What is fascinating about this is that Hansen's data
manipulation brings home an essential truth about modern politics: he who
controls the statistics controls the high ground. It does not matter what the
reality it – what matters is how that "reality" is portrayed.
We actually saw this in graphic form right at the
beginning of the modern "scare" cycle, with the great
"salmonella in eggs" scare. Then, the public perception was greatly
influenced by the appearance of a new database on salmonella food poisoning, produced
by a certain Dr Bernard Rowe of the then Communicable Disease Surveillance
Centre.
Almost as a free-lance operation, in 1987, he
started producing his own weekly digest showing what appeared to be a massive
upsurge in food poisoning outbreaks, to which he – and he alone, in the early
stages – was able to attribute a cause. And it was that database which provided
the raw material which was to fuel the salmonella scare which dominated the
media through late 1988 and early 1989.
That is not to say that there was not a problem with salmonella at the
time, but it was the ability to shape the data which allowed Rowe, behind the
scenes, to turn a statistical phenomenon into a highly political agenda.
To demonstrate the power of the figures, while the
UK media in 1999-9 was dominated with scare stories about food safety, based on
statistics produced by the ever-willing authorities, back in Holland, which had
an even bigger problem with salmonella, there was no such diet of scares.
The way this was managed was breathtakingly simple
and ingenious. While, in the UK, salmonella food poisoning was a
"notifiable disease" which meant that all cases had to be reported to
the authorities, the Dutch authorities made sure that this did not happen.
What they did in fact was change the law on
diagnosing and reporting salmonella food poisoning, in a devilishly clever
series of moves. Firstly, while the laboratory service to doctors for
identifying the presence of salmonellas in patients was free, they introduced
swingeing charges for identifying the type of salmonellas involved. Then, they
introduced a rule that said salmonella notifications could not be included on
the official database unless the isolations had been typed.
The entirely predictable result was that, while
doctors continued to use laboratory services for basic diagnosis, to treat
their patients they did not need to know the type of salmonellas involved, and
stopped calling for typing information. The consequence was that, while the
reported incidence of salmonella food poisoning was rising everywhere in Europe
(and America), the Dutch authorities were able to show that their figures were
falling. And, with an apparently declining incidence, there was no material to
fuel a scare.
So it is with James Hansen. As long as he has control
of an apparently authoritative dataset which shows that global warming is
increasing, he can sustain the climate change scare. And, as Booker observes,
it is on his alarmist figures that our politicians are basing all their
proposals for irrevocably changing our lives.
Thus builds the "climate of deception",
based on a strategy that is now becoming completely transparent. But, as long
as the hard-core warmists, the media and politicians continue to give Hansen's
tarnished figures their credibility, this dangerous man will get away with it.
***************************************
4. A COUNTRY AT MERCY OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302217327198891
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS, July 29, 2008
Let's face it. The average individual American has
little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it's a
different story with groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club
and Nature Conservancy. When they speak,
Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded
with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman's worse
nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for
our nation.
For several decades, environmentalists have managed
to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and
drilling. They've managed to have the
Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction
impossible.
Similarly, they've used the courts and Congress to
completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy
prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security.
What's the political response to our energy
problems? It's more congressional and White House kowtowing to
environmentalists, farmers and multibillion-dollar corporations such as Archer
Daniels Midland.
Their "solution," rather than to solve our
oil supply problem by permitting drilling for the billions upon billions of
barrels of oil beneath the surface of our country, is to enact the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007. That mandates that oil companies
increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline.
Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized
that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of corn-fed
livestock, such as pork, beef, chicken and dairy products, and products made
from corn, such as cereal.
Ethanol production has led to increases in the
prices of other grains, such as soybean and wheat. Since the U.S. is the
world's largest grain producer and exporter, higher grain prices have had a
huge impact on food prices worldwide.
Congress and the environmentalists aren't through with
us. If you're bothered by skyrocketing food and energy prices, wait until
Congress reintroduces its environmentalist-inspired Climate Security Act,
so-called cap and trade. Cap and trade
is deceptively peddled as a free-market solution to the yet-to-be-settled issue
of man-made climate change. Under its provisions, companies would be able to
emit greenhouse gases only if they had a government allowance.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 15%
cut in emissions would raise the annual average household's energy cost by
$1,300. Since energy is an input to
everything we use, we can expect everything to become costlier, resulting in a
reduction in economic growth.
There's a hateful side to cap and trade that's
revealed by asking the question: How will it be decided who received how much
allowance to emit greenhouse gases?
Congress could sell the allowances and/or give them
away to favorite constituents. You can bet the rent money that a new army of
lobbyists, with special pleadings, will descend on Washington to lobby
Congress. And you can be sure that campaign contributions and favoritism will
play an important role in the decision of who receives what allowances.
Much worse than that is the massive control
government would have over our economy and lives. Congress might decide that
since tobacco use is unhealthy, it might not issue allowances to tobacco
companies. While many Americans might
applaud that, how many would like Congress to refuse to issue allowances to
companies that produce food that some people deem unhealthy such as french
fries, sodas, canned soups and potato chips?
Congress might deny, or threaten to deny, allowances
to companies that in its opinion didn't hire enough women and minorities. The
possibilities for control over our lives would be endless and could include
nuisance-type edicts such a requiring us to buy a permit to barbecue in our
backyard.
The thirst to wield massive control over our economy
helps explain the near religious belief in man-made global warming and the
attacks on scientists and others who offer contradictory evidence.
*********************************************
5. CAP & TRADE AND THE UNITED STATES CLIMATE
ACTION PARTNERSHIP (USCAP)
by Thomas
J. Borelli
Al Gore, sensing
the political shift towards fossil fuels, generated national headlines last
week when he called for all of the nation’s electricity to be produced by
renewable energy sources in 10 years. “The idea that we can drill our way out
of this is just so absurd,” Gore told the annual meeting of the yearly
gathering of left-wing activists, Netroots Nation.
It’s tragic that
key corporate giants are on the wrong side of the energy debate. Rather than
recognize that our current economy is dependent on fossil fuels, too many CEOs
have been seduced by the notion that corporate responsibility is defined by Al
Gore’s view of climate science.
“Green” CEOs
naively believed that they could navigate the social and political terrain and
benefit financially by advocating for federal control of greenhouse gas
emissions. Over 20 corporations participated in the United States Climate
Action Partnership (USCAP) – a lobbying coalition of industry and environmental
special interest groups that sought cap-and-trade legislation to address global
warming. The USCAP lobbying effort produced Lieberman-Warner – a cap-and-trade
bill that, had it been adopted, would have increased energy prices and reduced
economic growth.
But many of the
USCAP members were unhappy with details of the legislation, so by the time
Lieberman-Warner approached the Senate floor for a vote, business support for
climate legislation had waned. Only six USCAP corporate members ultimately
supported the bill. USCAP membership had promised its corporate members a “seat
at the table,” that is, a role in the development of climate change policy, but
when every climate policy on that table raised energy prices and hurt the
bottom line, to many CEOs the seat must suddenly have seemed less appealing.
Some CEOs may have
learned their lesson and will steer clear of coalitions like USCAP in the
future, but not all will.
General Electric is
among the latter. GE stubbornly adheres to climate change alarmism because it
has placed a huge financial bet on carbon-free energy sources, such as wind,
that are threatened by domestic oil production. Climate change fears and tight
oil supplies are the driving force for renewable energy. Increasing the supply
of oil will reduce its price, making wind power even less competitive, even
with generous government subsidies.
GE CEO Jeff Immelt,
already in hot water for poor stock performance, can’t afford to lose his
gamble on renewable energy. Faced with
this threat, Immelt is shrewdly using his NBC news empire to promote climate
change fears and wind turbines as a sound energy alternative.
Al Gore was the
featured guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on July 20. For almost the entire
program, Gore spoke about climate change, bashed oil exploration, and touted
his idea to generate the country’s electricity needs from carbon-free sources,
including wind turbines. Gore did support the use of coal, but only if it was
associated with carbon capture and sequestration – another GE technology.
GE’s cable business
channel CNBC has also promoted wind energy in its news programming. T. Boone
Pickens was given air time on “Squawk Box,” CNBC’s early morning news program,
to present his energy plan. A major thrust of the Pickens plan involves a
significant increase in the use of natural gas and wind – two areas in which
Pickens has major investments. Indeed, Pickens is building the world’s largest
wind farm in Texas, and his company recently ordered about $2 billion worth of
GE turbines.
While Pickens has
said he is for all forms of domestic energy, including oil exploration, the
imagery in his TV ad campaign – burning oil fields contrasting with wind
turbines on green fields – clearly denigrates oil. During the commercial,
Pickens says “I'm T. Boone Pickens. I've been an oil man my whole life, but
this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. And I have a plan.”
The scheming of
Immelt and Gore undermine our national interest. For economic and national
security reasons Americans desperately need natural resource development in our
own backyard.
-----------------------
Thomas
J. Borelli, PhD, editor of FreeEnterpriser.com,
shareholder
activist and senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy
Research. The opinions expressed are his own.
********************************************
6. THE US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FOUNDATION ENERGY
PLAN
Exerpt from www.energyxxi.org:
Between 2005 and 2030, worldwide demand for energy
is expected to increase by 50 percent, and the U.S. demand could increase by as
much as 18 percent. Yet, today a substantial amount of our nation's
resources beneath federal lands and in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are
off limits. For many years, Congress and the White House representing
both political parties have prohibited exploration in about 85 percent of the
OCS acreage offshore the lower 48 states.
In the OCS, the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) estimates proven reserves at
8.6 billion barrels of oil and 29.3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural
gas. However, there could be significantly greater amounts according to
DOI estimates: the OCS may contain as much as 420 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas and more than 85 billion barrels of oil.
There is also limited access to vast federal lands, with resources totaling 231
trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 30 billion barrels of oil. DOI
found in a congressionally-mandated study that only 8 percent of onshore
federal oil and 10 percent of onshore federal gas are accessible under standard
lease terms.
Untapped oil and natural gas resources off America's shores and beneath our
land could yield 116 billion barrels of recoverable oil and more than 650
trillion cubic feet of natural gas for the American people. Accessing
these onshore and offshore resources using environmentally responsible
technology could provide enough oil to replace U.S. oil imports for 23 years
and enough natural gas to warm all American households, heated with natural
gas, for well over a century.
This month, President Bush took positive action and lifted the Executive Branch
ban on more offshore exploration and production. But Congress must now
act to allow access to these resources and allow for the exploration and
development of taxpayer-owned oil and gas resources.
Additionally, the U.S. Geological Survey reported this week that the area north
of the Arctic Circle has an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered,
technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically
recoverable natural gas. The Arctic accounts for about 13 percent of the
undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas in the
world. It is fact-based analyses such as the USGS work and the
anticipated November report by the International Energy Agency that will detail
known reserves in existing fields that should inform our policymaking.
*********
7. COMPUTER MODELS
FAIL THE TEST: CLIMATE IMPACT STUDIES LEAD TO 'FAULTY CONCLUSIONS'
Using More Than One Model Leads to Entirely
Different Results' - Study finds
http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/470578
[Note: For good
background reading on why computer models predictions of nature are suspect,
see: Scientists Claim Computer Model Predictions are 'Useless Arithmetic' 2007
Book entitled Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict
the Future - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/science/20book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
]
Excerpt: "What we've shown is if you use more
than one model, you can get entirely different results, so (based on studies that
used only one model) maybe we have no view at all of what the impacts are going
to be." [] Of the 65 studies that have used the IPCC models since 1994,
only about one in five used more than one model, the report found. []
Many biologists who are studying the potential
impacts of climate change on different species and the environment could be
coming to faulty conclusions unless they widen the scope of their research, a
new Canadian study suggests. The report, published in the journal Global
Change Biology, suggests biologists often use only one of the 31 different
climate-change models provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. []
Co-author Jonathan Newman, a professor of
environment biology at the University of Guelph, was researching the impact of
climate change on the swede midge, an invasive insect that has been affecting
canola crops in the United States since 1996 and has now migrated to southern
Ontario. Newman's team used two models and expected some level of variation in
the results. But they did not expect contradictory data. "We basically got
opposite answers when we should have gotten the same answer," Newman said.
"What we've shown is if you use more than one model you can get entirely
different results, so (based on studies that used only one model) maybe we have
no view at all of what the impacts are going to be."
A Canadian climate model found the swede midge could
expand across Ontario and into northern and western regions of Canada and the
United States due to warmer and moist conditions brought on by climate change.
But a British model, one of the most commonly used by researchers, found that
ideal conditions for the swede midge would disappear significantly with climate
change, which surprised Newman. "That was worrying as a biologist engaged
in the business of trying to elucidate biological impacts," he said.
"What we need is a whole array of models that all make different
assumptions and then we look for conclusions that are reasonably robust."
Of the 65 studies that have used the IPCC models
since 1994, only about one in five used more than one model, the report found.
It doesn't mean that the existing research is wrong, Newman said, but
scientists should be working with multiple models so they can be certain about
their research. "I certainly would hope that (the study) spurs more
research like we've been doing in our lab," he said.
============================================
More IPCC Model Failure? Bangladesh gaining land,
not losing - 'contradicting forecasts' it will be 'under the waves by the end
of the century'
Excerpt: New data shows that Bangladesh's landmass
is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be
under the waves by the end of the century, experts say. Scientists from the Dhaka-based
Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied
32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20
square kilometres (eight square miles) annually. [...] The United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that
impoverished Bangladesh, crisscrossed by a network of more than 200 rivers,
will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to
global warming. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million
Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will
lose some 30 percent of its food production. Director of the US-based NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even
grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end
of the century.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080730/sc_afp/bangladeshenvironmentunclimatewarming_080730134111;_ylt=Ai1fEIqHFVyfguECUfbGjKvPOrgF
=================================================
On the credibility of climate predictions
Koutsoyiannis, D., A. Efstratiadis, N. Mamassis, and
A. Christofides, 2008:, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 53 (4), 671-684.
Abstract:
“Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained
through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other
disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the
output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from
eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The
results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale.
Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that
models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.”
Conclusion: “At the annual and the climatic (30-year)
scales, GCM interpolated series are irrelevant to reality. GCMs do not
reproduce natural over-year fluctuations and, generally, underestimate the
variance and the Hurst coefficient of the observed series. Even worse, when the
GCM time series imply a Hurst coefficient greater than 0.5, this results from a
monotonic trend, whereas in historical data the high values of the Hurst
coefficient are a result of large-scale over-year fluctuations (i.e.
successions of upward and downward ‘trends’. The huge negative values of
coefficients of efficiency show that model predictions are much poorer than an
elementary prediction based on the time average. This makes future climate
projections at the examined locations not credible. Whether or not this
conclusion extends to other locations requires expansion of the study, which we
have planned. However, the poor GCM performance in all eight locations examined
in this study allows little hope, if any. An argument that the poor performance
applies merely to the point basis of our comparison, whereas aggregation at large
spatial scales would show that GCM outputs are credible, is an unproved
conjecture and, in our opinion, a false one.”
***************************************
8. “THE ARIA OF PRINCE ALGORINO”
John Tierney’s hilarious spoof: www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/earth/17tier.html
[Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,”
first a film and then a book, is becoming an opera. Officials of La Scala in
Milan say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to
write it for the 2011 season, The Associated Press reported.]
Dear Mr. Gore,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my draft of
“Verità Inconveniente.” Rest assured that I and the management of La Scala are
committed to a serious presentation of your scientific work. I will try to
adopt some of your suggestions, but I hope you appreciate the constraints faced
by the composer of an opera that is already five hours long.
I agree
it would “round out the résumé” of Prince Algorino in the opening scene if he
were to sing about his creation of a communications network. But the “Mio
magnifico Internet” aria you propose seems to me a distraction — and frankly
out of place in an 18th-century Tuscan village. I believe the peasants’ choral
celebration of Prince Algorino’s wisdom suffices to establish his virtues.
I will ask
our technicians about the feasibility of producing “stinky smoke” to accompany
the entrance of Petroleo, but it may be unnecessary. Doesn’t the wizard’s
evilness become obvious once he beguiles the Minemaidens into relinquishing
their buried treasure? (Note: I will try changing “treasure” to “fossil fuels,”
but it will not be an easy rhyme.)
Perhaps,
as you complain, Petroleo does exude a certain glamour in his patter song
promising magic lanterns and horseless carriages and flying machines. But when
he seduces the chief Minemaiden, the music darkens with a menacing crescendo as
they embrace, singing “Combustione! Combustione!” There is no mistaking the
unholiness of their union, nor its catastrophic consequence once their daughter
Carbonia is born.
I grant
you it would be more chemically precise to give Carbonia twin siblings named
after oxygen. But this would dilute the role and doom our chances of getting Anna Netrebko for Carbonia, and
she is essential for the scene on Olympus. If it is to be credible, we must
have a Carbonia with the sinister beauty to inflame the passions of Zeus,
Poseidon, Aether and the other weather gods.
You ask
for a detailed revelation of how Petroleo prevents Prince Algorino from
becoming king. I understand your interest and desire to introduce another
villain. (Incidentally, the translation of “Bush” would be “Arbusto,” not
“Shrubulo.”)
But no
narrative purpose is served by Algorino’s singing about his “stolen throne” as
he wanders in exile, particularly not in the glade where he encounters the
earth goddess Gaia languishing near death. Instead of interrupting her “Molto
caldo” aria, he should be focused on Gaia’s mysterious fever.
Nor, I
believe, is it necessary for him to “gather data” from Gaia before setting out
on his quest to save her, or to involve a new weather goddess named Katrina in
the hurricane he encounters on the way to the Isle of Seers. I assure you that
the numerical category of the hurricane was omitted only for dramatic purposes
— not, as you suspect, because of any doubts raised by your scientific critics
of the link between global warming and
strong hurricanes.
During
Algorino’s instruction in the Weather Seer’s castle, you again accuse me of
“caving” to the critics by omitting your famous chart correlating rising
temperatures and rising carbon dioxide over the past 600,000 years. But it is
of no consequence to me which came first, the carbon dioxide or the
temperature. As an artist, I simply felt it would be jarring to interrupt the
Seer’s aria with a PowerPoint presentation.
I did plan
to use a simpler chart etched on the castle wall for the duet we originally
planned for Algorino and the Seer. I loved your idea of matching the musical
notes with the graphs of temperatures and CO2 concentrations, but the resulting
melodies were unfortunate. I was unable to find any tenor or baritone able to
sing either of the graphs. A pity — as you said, the High C0 Duet would have
been “an opera first.”
I don’t
share your fear that audiences will expect Prince Algorino to “offset his
travel footprint,” so I don’t see the need for the tree-planting scene you
suggest. Once the Weather Seer has explained Poseidon’s passion and shown him
the rising seas, Algorino should immediately rush back to save Gaia. And why,
with his lover in peril, would he pause en route to rescue a drowning polar
bear?
I’m sorry
you were so saddened by the battle scene and the finale. I agree it would end
more happily if Algorino vanquished Petroleo and reburied the Minemaidens’ treasure.
No doubt we could create a fine aria for Carbonia as she is “sequestered”
underground (although we might be accused of copying the “Aida” entombment
finale). As you suggest, we could end with an ensemble celebration of
Algorino’s marriage to Gaia.
But would
a happy ending truly satisfy your devotees — or La Scala’s? Better to stay with
tradition. I feel sure that audiences, like the earth goddess, will be moved to
tears by the “Ciao, Gaia” aria of the mortally wounded Algorino, and then riveted
as she feverishly wanders the stage. With the right soprano, I believe “Basta
con la temperatura!” could be an unforgettable Mad Scene.
You
complain that it’s a “cliché” for Gaia to collapse and die alongside her lover.
Perhaps, as you suggest, we could have her first drape a medal around his neck
(although I think the Nobel would be anachronistic). But as much as I admire
your other idea for an “outside the box” death scene, I cannot accept it — and
again, despite your accusations, this has nothing to do with the scientific
criticism of your work. Whether your predictions for sea level rise are correct
or not, it would be logistically impossible to end the opera by drowning the
village under 20 feet of water.
Sincerely,
Giorgio Battistelli