Monday, May 5, 2008

This week a federal judge in California ordered the Secretary of the Interior to decide by May 15th whether to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

This frenzied push to list the polar bear may be due to this graph. It appears that not only was this year’s Arctic ice maximum later than last year’s, but the ice extent has rebounded about 50% from last year towards the 1979-2000 average (but NSIDC won’t say that!) and appears to be increasing. It’s pretty hard to claim that the bears will die because of lack of ice if the ice extent is growing.

To cover their bases, an environmental pressure group, the Center for Biological Diversity, has also petitioned to list the ribbon seal as a threatened species because of global warming. But this sounds like cross-purposes, since polar bears eat seals….

Nature magazine published an article this week by a team of researchers from Germany that tries to explain why the last decade has seen no increase in the global mean temperature.  The authors have tweaked a computer model, so that it now predicts no warming since 1998.  Isn’t that amazing?  A global computer model can predict past temperatures accurately as soon as we know what those temperatures were!  This model goes on to predict that the current lull in global warming will last until 2015, but then watch out—global warming will return with a vengeance. 

Since no computer model predicted the last decade of flat temperatures before they occurred, I see no reason to put any trust in this new prediction.  The modelers would be much safer to restrict their models to predicting the past.

So would former Vice President Al Gore.  In his film fantasy, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore states categorically: “[T]here is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others, and it is this.  When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun.”  Well, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased more than four percent since 1997.  As a CEI video asks, “Where’s the warming, Al?”

If this Nature article is part of a political strategy to keep the global warming bandwagon going when global warming has stopped, I think it can’t possibly succeed.  Polls show that the public were resistant to paying any more for energy last week when we still had runaway warming, imminent catastrophic impacts, 150,000 already dying every year (I guess just because of being scared by the prospect of warming in the near future), and less than ten years to act or be doomed.  I think most people will now–quite reasonably–say, Let's wait until 2020 and see if the temperatures have been going up rapidly for the past few years.

Cliff May begins his NRO column, “The Hunger,” by retelling an old joke about astronomers discovering a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth and the Washington Post running a headline: “World to end tomorrow: minorities and poor to suffer most.” While it is fine to make light of the media’s tendency to paint any change in market conditions as a class issue, in this case the joke doesn’t work. When we are talking about substantial food price inflation, it is the poor who suffer. Rampant food inflation also increases the number of poor people.

Has there ever been a more timely natural catastrophe than climate change? I mean, here we all are worrying about the future of the American economy—too much debt, jobs and industries moving overseas, new competitors in Asia and India—when what merrily comes along is a perceived civilizational challenge whose solution will not only create a better environment but also—talk about luck!—millions of those high-paying "green-collar" jobs and innovative new industries of the future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been talking about. As Clinton said in one presidential debate, "This issue of energy and global warming has the promise of creating millions of new jobs in America. It can be a win-win, if we do it right."