2008

It’s been a bad week for China’s global image. French police had to extinguish the Olympic torch three times due to “Free Tibet” agitators, who harried the torch’s passage through Paris to protest the “cultural genocide” that China, the host of this year’s Games, has allegedly perpetrated against Tibet.

It was a stunning humiliation for Chinese officials that regard the Beijing Olympics as a coming out party for the world’s newest great power. China pushed hard to land the Olympics because it wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer a developing country.

These same officials are fast learning that there are drawbacks to joining this elite club of sovereign nations. When China was a mere “developing” nation, its poverty was a shield, and no one cared about things like Tibet or China’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, China is important enough to host the Olympics, which means that it is rich enough to be criticized. Today, it’s the “Sinefication” of Tibet. But tomorrow, it will be global warming. After all, China is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Before, Chinese officials were spared the obloquy heaped upon the world’s #2 emitter, the United States, because they were “developing.” After the Olympics, that argument won’t work anymore.

This revolution in public relations has profound consequences for the diplomacy of climate change. To date, no country has been willing to “do something” about global warming because no rational leader would put his or her no country at a disadvantage by adopting costly emissions controls alone while all other states go on emitting. In practice, this means that Europe is loathe to act without the U. S., which is loathe to act without China.

So far, the U. S. has been the odd man out. The EU could point the finger at America, and China could point a finger to its “right to development.” The U. S., however, had no excuse.

The Olympics changes all that, because “developing nation” and “Olympic host” are incompatible modifiers for China. You can’t have your cake, and eat it, too.

As a result of the Beijing Olympics, China, which overtook the U. S. as the world’s #1 emitter only last year, will also overtake the U. S. as the global climate scapegoat.

Hans’ blog post draws attention to unrest in Egypt caused by inflation in the price of food caused by ethanol production quotas enacted by rich country governments.

Now, for the tooting of my own horn: I predicted ethanol unrest in Egypt last September, in a piece I wrote for National Review Online’s “Energy Week.”

So now that I’ve built up credibility as a seer, here’s another prediction: America will suffer a drought sometime in the next five that will cause the price of a bushel of corn on the international market to pass $10 (now, it’s at an all time high of $6).

In China, the price of pork, a politically sensitive commodity, will skyrocket, because pigs are fed corn. The Communist government will step in and try to ration swine. That will create a robust black market in “the other white meat,” which will allow the rich will buy up all the pork. The poor will be reminded of China’s gross inequality and they will start to agitate.

One of the striking features of how concern over global warming has risen to the top of our political agenda is the extraordinary unanimity with which it has been taken up by our political establishment.

Imagine, there is a UN climate conference, and hardly anybody seems to note or care. This is what appears to have happened with the latest round of post-Kyoto negotiations that ended in Bangkok last Friday. While delegates from more than 160 nations met at yet another United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confab in the Thai capital, much of the media seemed indifferent to its deliberations or did not bother to report about it.

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

Wheat production is down in the world’s breadbaskets, like the United States, as farmland shifts away from wheat to ethanol production.  Ethanol production has increased because of government ethanol mandates and costly ethanol subsidies.   In Egypt, a major wheat importer, the fall in worldwide wheat production has triggered bread shortages and unrest as poor people find it difficult to get enough to eat.  The unrest is strengthening support for Islamic extremists opposed to Egypt’s relatively pro-American government.

From ICECAP.us

The BBC, UK Met Office and UN IPCC had to acknowledge that global temperatures have at least for the time being decoupled from the CO2 rise and levelled off or fallen (6-7 years). They are blaming the cooling on La Nina. They are of course correct, La Ninas global cooling just as El Ninos brings global warming. It must have pained them to do so as they have previously discussed these factors as being secondary to greenhouse gases and with impacts that were mainly regional in nature.

They promise once this event ends, their predicted warming will resume. It is likely that temperatures will bounce as the La Nina weakens but the real key as to where temperatures go over the next few years and decades is not increasing greenhouse gases but whether the multidecadal cycle in the Pacific (PDO) has transitioned back to the cold mode it was in when the earth cooled from the 1940s to the 1970s (and what happens with solar cycles 24 and 25, which many solar scientists the world over feel will revert back to the quiet modes of the so called Dalton Minimum in the early 1800s or possibly worse.)

The PDO warm phase from 1977 to 1997 was dominated by mostly El Ninos (see why here) and since they correlate with warmer global mean temperatures, it is not surprising global temperatures rose. Alarmists blamed greenhouse gases but it was likely the PDO and the Grand Maximum of the longer term solar cycles.  The prior three decades had mainly La Ninas with cold temperatures like this year in more years than not and solar cycle 20 which peaked around 1970 was relatively weak and longer in length. Not surprisingly global temperatures declined.

Wolter’s Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI). Red spikes with magnitudes >0.5 are El Ninos, dips in blue with magnitudes in excess of -0.5 La Ninas.  See larger graph here

Then with the Great Pacific Climate Shift in 1977, the Pacific warmed and PDO turned positive. El Ninos dominated. You can see how the El Ninos in the satellite era since 1979 have been associated with global warmth.

Note how El Ninos are invariably warm globally and La Ninas cool. Major volcanism in the early 1980s and 1990s are also seen producing cooling. See larger graph here

The PDO and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) have also been implicated in drought probabilities in an excellent paper done by Gregory J. McCabe, Michael A. Palecki, and Julio L. Betancourt in 2004. They found More than half (52%) of the spatial and temporal variance in multidecadal drought frequency over the conterminous United States is attributable to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Recent droughts with broad impacts over the conterminous U.S. (1996, 1999-2002) were associated with North Atlantic warming (positive AMO) and northeastern and tropical Pacific cooling (negative PDO) (the bottom right map in the figure below). That is the case this summer.

Warm Atlantic (warm AMO) tend to favor drought, the PDO determines where. See larger image here

The Washington Post still can’t bring itself to openly address the reality of greenhouse gas emissions vs. the rhetoric. Instead, they obsess with serially nasty editorials complaining specifically about our lack of European-style promises, all of which pieces (and their news articles) have consistently ignored how the U.S. has led the world in growing the economy while reducing the rate of growth of emissions.

Sunday’s story went with the following: “Even developed countries are not cutting greenhouse gases as fast as they had anticipated.”

The obvious implication is that, unlike the U.S., these countries are cutting greenhouse gas emissions, if not as fast as they had anticipated. Actually, not one developed country is actually cutting emissions at all since making the Kyoto promise a decade ago. The U.S. approach – in practice – has shown far superior to Europe’s “cap” approach, Japan’s various efforts, Canada’s…well, Canada hasn’t done a whole lot policy-wise but they have increased emissions quite a bit, but without the economic downsides of a more interventionist policy.

But in typical Washington fashion, the Post reveals a dogma that “doing something” has nothing to do with what is actually done, by the wealth-creating private sector of the economy, but about how deeply the regulators insert themselves. This is why journalists should stick to things other than governance; getting back to the basics of journalism is a good place to start.

As if on cue, the New York Times also weighed in today with the editorial “It’s about laws, not light bulbs,” with the risible construction:

“As it has for years, America's inertia remains in sharp contrast to the work by Europe, which took an early lead in efforts to curb global warming by establishing the world's most comprehensive carbon management system. Recently, Europeans pledged to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”

Again, notice how they cleverly elide actual discussion about who is doing what in favor of obsessing about who is saying what. This would put “America’s inertia in sharp contrast to the work by Europe,” indeed, but in a more accurate light. And we can’t have that.