Harvesting the body heat of Svedes, cheesy floor and cars running on chocolate is some of the environmentally friendly energy alternatives in a recent Guardian article. Great story that shows how innovation happens between self-interested actors, rather than through government planning.
Science
Sometimes, nothing gets the message through as a barrage sometimes. The guys at Popular Technology have collected a barrage of videos on climate change, so check it out when you have time.
Some disease are plaguing camels, and the obvious culprit is… -Global warming… you got it!
I read this story in the Guardian, and I had a déjà vu experience, remember this spring when some virus was plaguing the bee population in North America, causing them to die in large numbers. We did not really know that it was a virus until this summer, but several someone's suggested global warming was behind that too, until we knew it was the virus.
Now however, global warming is killing camels, cause microbes, viruses, and bacteria does not mutate, as we all know. At least global warming will be the culprit until some microbiologists take a look at the thing.
Norwegian researchers have been very concerned about arctic melting the last year, because improvements in satellite data shows an unprecedented melting. The measuring systems have, of course, only been available since the cooling period in the 70's. During a conference on Arctic melting in Oslo, Norway last week, the more than 40 researchers from all over the world concluded that soot from industry and combustion in Eastern Europe and Russia has escalated the melting of arctic ice. Easter Europe and Russia are the poorest areas of Europe and Northern Asia. The industry is old and outdated, I am sure the people who live in these countries would love to be able to afford cleaner, more efficient technology, but the energy rationing instituted by Kyoto will make that dream much harder to achieve.
You've probably seen the latest tizzy over the Bush Administration's "censoring of science" (see here and here). The case against the Bush Administration this time is that it edited testimony presented to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The testimony, originally 14 pages, was cut to six.
However, the narrative of a scientific cover-up is overwrought to say the least. The hearing was on the potential impact of global warming on human health, an exercise in speculation. It appears, if press accounts are correct, that what the Bush Administration cut from the director’s testimony was more speculation than settled science.
The Center for Science & Public Policy has published a new report looking at the claims made in the portions of the testimony that were cut (as reported in the press) and concludes that in every instance, whether it be heat-related mortality, disease, extreme weather, etc., there is no link between climate change and harm to human health. In every case human health or conditions that affect human health are improving. The report concludes that the Bush Admininstration didn't censor settled scientific findings, but rather unjustfiable speculation by CDC experts.
There's a hoax going round, with a very convincing "study" that claims not only to find a link between "benthic bacteria" and temperature increases, but also has the authors say that they were intimidated into not publishing their findings. You can see this clever piece of inventiveness here. The author(s) have even made up past contents for the fake journal. There is no Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona, nor is there a Daniel Klein or Mandeep Gupta in the U of A directory. Neither is there an Institute of Geoclimatic Studies.
A quick whois lookup indicates that the site is registered to one David Thorpe of Powys, Wales, in the UK. There is a David Thorpe who claims to be a "prize-winning novelist and environmental journalist" there and who runs the company to whom the site is registered. He blogs as The Low Carbon Kid.
Congratulations to Mr Thorpe on his eye for detail and the work that must have gone in to producing such a convincing-looking study at first sight. I'm sure he'll fool lots of people who will find the "findings" extremely attractive, but globalwarming.org is not one of them. We are skeptics, after all…
WASHINGTON — Injecting synthetic "super" greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could raise the planet's temperature enough to melt its polar ice caps and create conditions suitable for sustaining biological life. In fact, a team of researchers suggests that introducing global warming on the Red Planet may be the best approach for warming the planet's frozen landscape and turning it into a habitable world in the future.
Margarita Marinova, then at the NASA Ames Research Center, and colleagues propose that the same types of atmospheric interactions that have led to recent surface temperature warming trends on Earth could be harnessed on Mars to create another biologically hospitable environment in the solar system. In the February issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union, the researchers report on the thermal energy absorption and the potential surface temperature effects from introducing man-made greenhouse gases strong enough to melt the carbon dioxide and ice on Mars.
"Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapt and proliferate on other worlds," Marinova said. "Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further."
The authors note that artificially created gases–which would be nearly 10,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide–could be manufactured to have minimal detrimental effects on living organisms and the ozone layer while retaining an exceptionally long lifespan in the environment. They then created a computer model of the Martian atmosphere and analyzed four such gases, individually and in combination, that are considered the best candidates for the job.
Their study focused on fluorine-based gases, composed of elements readily available on the Martian surface, that are known to be effective at absorbing thermal infrared energy. They found that a compound known as octafluoropropane, whose chemical formula is C3F8, produced the greatest warming, while its combination with several similar gases enhanced the warming even further.
The researchers anticipate that adding approximately 300 parts per million of the gas mixture in the current Martian atmosphere, which is the equivalent of nearly two parts per million in an Earth- like atmosphere, would spark a runaway greenhouse effect, creating an instability in the polar ice sheets that would slowly evaporate the frozen carbon dioxide on the planet's surface. They add that the release of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide would lead to further melting and global temperature increases that could then enhance atmospheric pressure and eventually restore a thicker atmosphere to the planet.
Such a process could take centuries or even millennia to complete but, because the raw materials for the fluorine gases already exist on Mars, it is possible that astronauts could create them on a manned mission to the planet. It would otherwise be impossible to deliver gigaton-sized quantities of the gas to Mars. The authors conclude that introducing powerful greenhouse gases is the most feasible technique for raising the temperature and increasing the atmospheric pressure on Mars, particularly when compared to other alternatives like sprinkling sunlight-absorbing dust on the poles or placing large mirrors in the planet's orbit.
The United Nations is trying to blame natural disasters on, of all things, people. President Bush, however, is standing in its way.
The U.N. is holding its second-ever "World Conference on Disaster Reduction" this week in Kobe, Japan. Scheduled for the 10th anniversary of the deadly January 1995 earthquake in Kobe and following in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, you might think that the conference's focus would be 'natural disasters.'
But the first indication that this isn't necessarily the case comes when you compare the titles of the current and previous U.N. disaster conferences.
The title of the U.N.'s first disaster conference, held in 1994, was the �World Conference on Natural Disaster Reduction, which, incidentally, occurred during the U.N.-proclaimed "International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction" (1990-1999).
Natural disasters, as far as the U.N. is concerned anyway, apparently are no longer 'natural.'
Behind the "1984"-like de-natural-ization of the disaster conference is, of course, the ongoing effort by the U.N. - a leading promoter of the unproven notion that humans are significantly altering global climate for the worse - to be able to blame people, as opposed to Nature, for deadly and costly occurrences such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and the like.
And the particular people that the U.N. would most like to pin the blame for global warming on would be deep-pocket Americans, American businesses and the American government. As the global warming alarmist community likes to point out, the U.S. is the largest single contributor to the alleged global warming, emitting 25 percent of all greenhouse gases while possessing only 4 percent of the world's population.
Toward the goal of blaming the U.S. for what used to be considered 'natural disasters' in order to eventually extract financial compensation, the U.N. conference's draft action plan is riddled with references to climate change [read, 'U.S.-made climate change'] as causing or contributing to 'disasters.'
The Bush administration rightly opposes the U.N.'s effort to de-naturalize disasters and has requested that the document's references to climate change be removed. But U.N. officials oppose such changes.
"I hope there will be a global recognition of climate change causing more natural disasters," said Jan Egeland, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
Weather disasters like hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, ice storms always have, and always will plague man. As far as we know, they are entirely natural occurrences. There is absolutely no credible evidence that humans � much less Americans in particular - have had have any discernible impact on the frequency and severity of - dare I say it? - natural disasters.
Given the media's new habit of linking virtually any extreme or unusual weather with global warming, some scientists now even feel compelled to go out of their way to reaffirm that global warming isn't causing natural disasters, as in the case of the string of hurricanes that hit south Florida last summer.
The U.N. dramatizes the need for its 'action plan' by claiming that: economic damages resulting from 'disasters' have increased from about 1,500 disasters costing $200 billion during the 1970s to 6,000 disasters costing $700 billion during the 1990s; and the number of people 'threatened' by 'disasters' has increased from about 750 million people in the 1970s to about 2.5 billion people in the 1990s.
I don't know how accurate those estimates may be, but to the extent that natural disasters do wreak more economic havoc and threaten more people now than 30 years ago, that is most likely due to all the upscale development that has spread during that time to coastal regions and other areas more vulnerable to the whims of Mother Nature.
Participating in the U.N. conference is the German insurance company Munich Re, which issued a report -Megacities � Megarisks: Trends and challenges for insurance and risk management,- bemoaning the alleged impacts of global warming and other 'disasters' on insurers.
Munich Re claims, for example, that the urban heat island effect - the modern-day phenomenon where cities are warmer than surrounding rural areas due to increased heat trapping by concrete and asphalt - amplifies the effect of global warming to increase the number of deaths caused by heatwaves.
Despite any intuitive appeal, this assertion is unfounded since there is no scientific evidence that global warming - which involves a hypothesized few-degree rise in global temperatures over the course of a century - has anything to do with summer heatwaves - which involve sudden dramatic, short-term shifts in local temperature.
Weather, after all, is not climate.
The end-game of the insurance industry, like that of the U.N. , is to be able to blame natural disasters on global warming so that it also can eventually seek compensation for its losses from U.S. businesses and taxpayers.
Insurers, apparently, are more than happy to accept premiums for writing risky policies, but not too happy when Mother Nature and policyholders force them to make good on claims.
The Enviros are Depressed || December 7, 2005
Correction: First, let me correct a mistake in my first report from Montreal yesterday. I wrote that Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, in reply to a question said that yes, she thought it was correct that India and China had joined the U. S. in objecting to a new round of formal negotiations on what is to follow Kyoto after 2012. What she really said was that she agreed that yes it was wrong to think that was the case. Thanks to Katie Mandes of the Pew Center for correcting my misunderstanding, and my apologies to Eileen Claussen and the Pew Center.
There are many thousands (ten?) of people at this year's COP/MOP (the eleventh Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change–that is, the Rio Treaty–and the first Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which went into force in February) in Montreal. The Palais des Congres where it is being held is a huge and impressive building, and the whole show has been organized with admirable smoothness. Yet the total impression is underwhelming.
Nothing substantive is expected to be agreed to by the official delegates. The main energy at COPs is provided by the environmental NGOS and the endless series of side events that are held. But this year the viros are depressed. They have good reason to be depressed, of course. It has become apparent that the EU, Japan, and Canada are not going to meet their Kyoto targets. It's hard to see how another round of emissions cuts beyond 2012 can be agreed to by the current parties. Convincing major developing countries to join the energy rationing club seems hopeless. So there is good reason why the life has gone out of the Kyoto party.
Another reason for the lack of joie de vivre here in Montreal is that the COPs are being increasingly dominated by the new Kyoto technocratic establishment. There are now many thousands of people employed in implementing the mind-numbing details of the Kyoto Protocol. A substantial portion of them are in Montreal to give presentations at side events and to look for grants and contracts to fund their programs and projects.
I think this generally gloomy mood helps explain the curiously enthusiastic reception Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and ranking Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, received. Senator Bingaman appeared at an event late yesterday afternoon held in a large meeting room in the EU Pavilion sponsored by Resources for the Future and other groups. The room was packed and overflowing.
Senator Bingaman brought a message of hope from the U. S. Senate. The tide has shifted towards mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, according to Senator Bingaman. As evidence, he detailed his efforts to add climate provisions to the omnibus energy bill passed and signed into law this summer. Senator Bingaman developed an amendment based on recommendations from the self-anointed and so-called National Commission on Energy Policy. His amendment would set a very easy cap on emissions and set up an emissions credits trading system which would have the government sell additional credits whenever the price reaches a few dollars a ton.
However, this modest amendment wasn't offered on the Senate floor, because as Senator Bingaman admitted yesterday, they realized that it didn't have enough support to pass. So instead Senator Bingaman offered a sense of the Senate resolution that says the Senate should pass mandatory limits on emissions before the end of the year. This non-binding resolution was added to the energy bill with 53 votes.
–Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads Coalition
__________________________
The Team Arrives || December 6, 2005
CEI's team (Marlo Lewis, Richard Morrison, Isaac Post, and I) arrived in Montreal at 8:35 this morning and, after checking in to our hotel, reached the Palais des Congres just after 10. After registering, we immediately went to an NGO side event held by the Pew Center of Global Climate Change to discuss their report on the results of their "Climate Dialogue at Pocantico."
The dialogue was held on four occasions over thirteen days in 2004 and 2005 between 25 or so business, government, and "civil society" leaders. It was held at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Pocantico conference center in Tarrytown, New York. Participants included representatives from seven big corporations, from the governments of Australia, Canada, Mexico, Britain, Argentina, Japan, China, Germany, Tuvalu, Brazil, and Malta, and top staffers from the U. S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The dialogue was chaired by Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center, and Ged Davis, managing director of the World Economic Forum.
The purpose of the dialogue was to agree on recommendations for "International Climate Efforts Beyond 2012.". As far as I could tell, the most significant recommendation of the dialogue is that there needs to be a further high level political dialogue of fifteen to thirty key countries that would run parallel to new official negotiations within the Kyoto process.
Eileen Claussen said that the U. S. delegation's refusal to join a new round of Kyoto negotiations did not represent the American mainstream view. She expressed confidence that the next presidential administration (whether Democratic or Republican) would have a far more constructive position. Curiously, she also said that in the end countries will do what is in their national interests (which helps to explain why the Clinton and Bush policies have been remarkably similar despite their rhetorical differences). In reply to a question from Ron Bailey of Reason magazine, she admitted that India and China also appear to be blocking a new round of official talks.
Jim Greene of Senator Joe Biden's minority staff on the Foreign Relations Committee echoed Clausseen's views. He said that there was now a clear bi-partisan consensus in the Senate that President Bush' position is unacceptable. The official position of the U. S. does not represent the position of the Congress or state and local governments.
In reply to a question from my colleague Marlo Lewis, Elliot Diringer, director of the dialogue for the Pew Center, said that some of the dialogue's participants helped frame the Clean Development Partnership created by the U. S., Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Claussen said that the dialogue was interested by the partnership but was waiting to see how robust it would be. I think that means whether it will agree to mandatory emissions cuts.
A questioner gave four potential factors that contributed the America's rejection of Kyoto and asked the panelists to rank them. The factors offered were: the political power of the petroleum industry, the typical American attitude not to like what to be told to do, refusal to accept the science, and that Kyoto would be a job killer. Greene replied that there were very few "flat Earthers" left in the Senate, but many Senators were concerned about saving jobs in existing industries and were not focused on all the new jobs that would be created.
Claussen ignored the influence of big oil (perhaps because several big oil companies belong to her Pew Center), but she said that the American people recognize that the science is no longer in doubt. On the other hand, a lot of people believe that cutting emissions would be a job killer, even though reasonable people (even some in the Bush administration) know this isn't the case if it's done carefully and slowly. She also said that many Americans really didn't like government or the UN telling them what to do. To which my own reply is, thank God for the sturdy character and good sense of the American people and their abiding resistance to authoritarian government.
–Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads Coalition
Last summer we took issue with Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) when he sought to gain political advantage by taking on some climate scientists. I’d bet that the loud reaction to his “investigation” was one factor in Rep. Barton’s apparent decision not to follow up as yet. Such external oversight of science and politics can play a positive role in limiting the politicization of science and its negative effects on policy making. Now we have a case of Democrats playing politics through climate science, and a similarly loud reaction would seem to be appropriate from informed observers. Will we see a similar reaction?
Providing ample evidence that the politicization of science by politicians is a bipartisan pastime, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and 150 fellow Democrats have introduced a rarely used “resolution of inquiry” to explore whether the Bush Administration has been hiding evidence that the current hurricane season has been caused by global warming. Kucinich said in press release last week:
“”The American public deserve to know what the President knew about the effects climate change would have, and will continue to have, on our coasts. This Administration, and Congress, can no longer afford to overlook the overwhelming evidence of the devastating effect of global climate change. It is essential for our preparedness that we understand global climate change and take serious and immediate actions to slow its effects.”
According to an InsideEPA.com news story, which Rep. Kucinich introduced to the Congressional Record (PDF), the “Resolution of Inquiry” is part of a strategy to try to divide moderate Congressional Republicans from the party. According to InsideEPA.com,
“A novel effort by 150 House Democrats to require that the White House turn over documents showing what it knows about climate change effects on U.S. coastal regions may force key Republican moderates to choose party loyalty over their environmental records, or risk leaving themselves open to attacks from conservative opponents in upcoming primaries, sources say… Kucinich’s resolution does not specifically mention hurricanes, but congressional staffers familiar with the effort say Congress is growing more concerned that climate change may have increased hurricane severity in light of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. ”This has been a brutal hurricane season and many think climate change will be the defining problem of our generation. We want to know what [President Bush] knew,” according to one staffer.”
InsideEPA.com describes the Democrats strategy as one that seeks to place a few congressional Republicans in a tight spot,
“Observers say the ROI will present House Science Committee Chairman SHERWOOD BOEHLERT (R-NY), Rep. VERNON EHLERS (R-MI) and Rep. WAYNE GILCHREST (R-MD) with a critical choice between siding with their party in deflecting attention from the president’s climate policies and their environmental records, which have won them praise and endorsements from environmental groups. Their decisions on the matter may prove crucial during their 2006 primaries, where at least one is expected to face a tough fight against a more conservative GOP candidate.”
The InsideEPA.com article goes into some details about why it is that Congressmen Boehlert, Ehlers and Gilchrest are ripe for a squeeze.
What to make of this? Congressional Democrats are playing politics, trying to gain some advantage in the upcoming congressional election, which is what they are supposed to do. With respect to the climate issue, because the Democrats are the minority party they don’t have the power to call hearings or otherwise set the agenda, so it might be appropriate to use the “Resolution of Inquiry” to access information. (For details on the congressional “Resolution of Inquiry” see this report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service at the Federation of American Scientists website.)
No matter where one comes out on the climate issue, it is obvious that the Democrats are playing their politics through science. The tone of his inquiry smacks of black helicopters and the trilateral commission. As a close observer of the hurricane research community in NSF, Navy, and NOAA over the past 10 years, I know that there is no hidden smoking gun waiting to be discovered in the bureaucracy that shows that the Bush Administration had forewarning that this year’s hurricane season would be particularly bad, and kept that information under wraps to appease their oil and gas friends. Perhaps the Bush Administration would do such a thing, but in this case it did not, for the simple reason that such information does not exist. It doesn’t.
The playing of partisan politics by Democrats through the science of climate change and hurricanes may come at a price in policy effectiveness. As we have stated here many times, there is simply no evidence to suggest that policy makers can modulate hurricane behavior, much less their impacts for the foreseeable future through energy policies. Representative Kucinich and his 150 colleagues risk focusing attention on bad hurricane policies and, as a consequence, overlooking good ones.
This would be a good time for leaders in the scientific community to discuss the policy issues associated with hurricanes and climate change. Is there a smoking gun on the science of hurricanes in the bureaucracy? Can energy policies be an effective tool of disaster mitigation? This would also be a good time for the “war on science” crowd to burnish their alleged bipartisan credentials. Call me a jaded cynic, but my guess is that both groups will be stony silent, reflecting their own committed partisanship. If so, then you will be seeing a very real consequence of the politicization of science – the abdication of oversight.
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