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Restoring Once-Vibrant Economy Hinges On Repeal Of ObamaCare One has to congratulate President Obama and his advisers on their success. Rahm Emanuel's quip about "never let a crisis go to waste" in late 2008 was a prelude to
the administration's attack on U.S. economic growth.
How Nutritious And Natural Is Your Protein Bar? This week's HND piece takes a brief look at protein bars. Although this class of products is widely touted as a "health food," some of the stuff in this category is probably less nutritious than the average candy bar. You're advised to read the labels, but even then, it also pays to know a little about sugar alcohols. Yes, sugar alcohols. How's that for a nice purposely confusing term? Check out the complete article. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
30. August 2010 European particle physics research center CERN located near Geneva, Switzerland has gotten its budget cut by 6% over the next five years. Europe no longer has the money to fund it. 
CERN's budget gets the axe as Europe pisses away all its money on climate research.
It was just a question of time. With so much money being pissed away on bogus climate research and save-the-world projects, eventually you run out of funds to pay for real science and research. How many billions have been poured into researching the non-problem of climate change? The IPCC? Hansen’s GISS surface station folly? Green subsidies? The list is endless. What benefit have we gotten? I’d say we’ve gotten a lot more damage than benefit, especially if you consider what could have been done with the money instead. Lost opportunities. Swiss radio has a report (German): CERN budget cut and writes:
Here’s my advice to CERN employees who fear losing their jobs: Call your elected officials and tell them stop wasting so much on bogus climate science. (No Tricks Zone)
I blame global warming: Once-In-A-Century Salmon Run Hits Canada's West Coast Every year Vancouver resident Stephen Ottridge takes hamburgers or steak to his street's annual summer block party.
Recycled junk: Mile-Wide Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2019 Worried about American imperialist adventures abroad, or the rising deficit, or erosion of American democracy? None might matter much longer. (NewsHoggers)
Star names try to beat slump in eco-clothing Can Chrissie Hynde buck the downward trend?
Is Genetically Altered Fish OK? U.S. To Decide U.S. health officials are set to rule on whether a faster-growing, genetically engineered fish is safe to eat in a decision that could deliver the first altered animal food
to consumers' dinner plates.
Independent Audit Panel Slams U.N.'s Climate Group Acknowledging flaws in its reports and growing public skepticism toward the theory of manmade global warming, the United Nations hired an independent review panel in March to audit its climate-science arm. The group found plenty of problems. (Jeremy A. Kaplan, FoxNews.com)
Report: Climate Science Panel Needs Change At Top Scientists reviewing the acclaimed but beleaguered international climate change panel called Monday for a major overhaul in the way it's run, but stopped short of calling
for the ouster of the current leader.
IPCC feels the heat as it is told to get its facts right about global warming The powerful international body set up to advise governments on the effects of global warming needs a major overhaul if it is not to repeat errors that damaged its credibility and gave succour to climate change sceptics, an independent investigation has concluded. (Independent)
IAC verdict on IPCC: leadership shouldn't work on 2nd report
BBC: IPCC needs reforms, IAC review recommendsRajendra Pachauri was elected in 2002 and re-elected for his second term in 2008. However, when asked whether the one-term IAC recommendation also implies that Pachauri should resign, Princeton's ex-president Prof Shapiro answered that it was too difficult a logical problem for him to solve so he has to leave the "interpretation" to others. Well, that's how the Tuesday son puzzle would end up if I allowed the solution to be open to "interpretations" instead of logic, too. When Shapiro discussed the IPCC errors such as GlacierGate that are dedicated some chapters in the IAC review, a lady from Al Jazeera asked whether he was not afraid that it could be interpreted as that he thinks that the IPCC has made some errors. Her eyes hinted that her Islamist and leftist friends could perform a terrorist attack against the IAC. But Shapiro didn't quite collapse although he clearly tried to appease the PC lady a bit. In the IAC panel's opinion, the errors occurred because the IPCC did not obey its own guidelines - so the guidelines might be enough in their opinion. Completely different words sounded an hour later At 11 a.m. New York Summer Time, Pachauri has glorified himself, making catastrophic climate science look more worshiped than ever. He has read some comment from a jerk or two who has worship him. When Pachauri was asked whether he would respect the IAC recommendation and resign, he said that his interpretation was that it was forward-looking and for Pachauri personally, it's a mission he can't leave so "we will see". ;-) Another IPCC apparatchik said that the IAC review - that has previously claimed that the scandals have dented the credibility of the IPCC has - shown that the IPCC's credibility is stronger than ever. :-) That's the "interpretation" by the IPCC logic. Key fresh links (explanation below):Older text written before the press conference » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
Release Of The Report “Climate Change Assessments, Review of the Processes & Procedures of the IPCC” The report “Climate Change Assessments, Review of the Processes & Procedures of the IPCC“ has been released today. An initial discussion of the report is posted at Report of the IAC Review of the IPCC The news media are reporting on this and CNN’s report “U.N. climate body needs ‘fundamental reform’” presents an effective single statement of what is needed for future assessments (i.e. a fundamental reform]. There remain conflicting conclusions in the IAC report, however, such as the finding that
The IAC report expands on this statement in their following text to the above sentence where they write
If their assessment process really “has been successful overall and has served society well”, however, there would be no need for the recommendation that “fundamental changes to the process and the management structure are essential“. Nonetheless, despite this one inconsistency, the report recommendations are very insightful and valuable. The deficiencies of past assessment, including that of the 2007 IPCC report, have been documented in depth on my weblog as well as by others (e.g. see , see and see). I have discussed the serious flaws in the IPCC process, for example, in weblog posts, testimony and public statements: Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”. 88 pp including appendices. Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2008: A Broader View of the Role of Humans in the Climate System is Required In the Assessment of Costs and Benefits of Effective Climate Policy. Written Testimony for the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing “Climate Change: Costs of Inaction” – Honorable Rick Boucher, Chairman. June 26, 2008, Washington, DC., 52 pp. My concerns were summarized in the submission of comments as part of the IAC review process; see My Comments For The InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC The recognition of the serious conflict of interest associated with the IPCC process is refreshing, and hopefully, will be built on in order to finally obtain inclusive, balanced climate science assessments. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Dump the IPCC Process, It Cannot Be Fixed
In a recent opinion piece, Ross McKitrick has argued that the IPCC process needs to be fixed. He correctly points out that, “There is too much conflict of interest built into the report-writing process”. But I say the process cannot be fixed. DUMP the IPCC process. The reason why is because the IPCC process was never created to achieve what the U.N. claims, and what most people believe it exists for. The IPCC was created to use the scientific community to build a case for regulating CO2 emissions. Period. While you might believe otherwise, climate scientists back in the 1980s did not get together and decide “let’s create the IPCC and investigate the evidence for and against manmade climate change”. Instead, politicians and politically savvy opportunists saw global warming as the perfect excuse for instituting policies that would never have been achieved on their own merits. Maybe some scientists thought they helped dream up the IPCC to help save humanity from itself. But the process was instigated by politicians and U.N. bureaucrats who misrepresented what they were trying to accomplish. Some people are gifted in their ability to get others to think that they came up with an idea, when in fact they were artfully guided into it. As someone who watched from the sidelines as a U.S. government employee, I witnessed the mindset, and a few of the central players in action. These are people who think it is their gift to humanity to decide how others should live. I’m NOT saying that most of the scientists involved in the IPCC effort are of this mindset…although I do find government employees and government-funded researchers (of which I am one) to be rather clueless about what helps, versus what hurts, the human condition. Darn those pesky unintended consequences! I am claiming this is the mindset of that handful of politically powerful people who saw a way to accomplish personal goals, and maybe even save humanity in the process. These people never expect that they will ever be required to live under the restrictions placed upon the rest of humanity. They are too important to the process. Sound familiar? To believe otherwise is to have one’s proverbial head in the sand. I hate to sound so cynical, but this is how I saw the IPCC process play out. I would personally dread having to be part of that process, because it is only using science and scientists to achieve policy and political goals. I don’t like to be asked to contribute my time when I know I am being used. In stark contrast to me, John Christy (my boss) has valiantly attempted to change the process from within the IPCC. I think this is a valuable effort, and am glad someone is willing to try. But I do not see the ultimate goal of the IPCC ever being changed as long as the United Nations and politicians who look favorably upon the UN’s long-term goals are in control of the process and the purse strings. It is as simple as that. (Roy W. Spencer)
Should Rajendra Pachauri Resign?
I spoke with a lot of reporters today in the US and UK about the IAC IPCC Review report. An overwhelming focus of their interest was on Rajendra Pachauri and his future with the IPCC. The speculation comes from the following statements in the IAC report (PDF, p. 41): A 12-year appointment (two terms) is too long for a field as dynamic and contested as climate change. . .When asked for a specific comment about Pachauri by Seth Borenstein of the AP I said: "It's hard to see how the United Nations can both follow the advice of this committee and keep Rajendra Pachauri on board as head"I followed this statement by emphasizing that the reforms of the IPCC go well beyond one individual. Removing Pachauri and doing nothing else would do little to fix the IPCC. Conversely, doing everything else recommended by the IAC and leaving Pachauri in place would go a long way to improving the organization. So in many respects I see the focus on Pachauri as a distraction. (Somehow those comments did not find a place in the AP story!) That said, as I've detailed before (e.g., here and here and here), Pachauri has many issues of potential conflict of interest. He would all but certainly be found to have conflicts of interest under the WMO and UN guidelines that the IPCC is exempt from following. The IAC Review finds the fact that the IPCC has no such guidelines to be unacceptable, recommending: The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all individuals directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports, including senior IPCC leadership . . .Should Pachauri be deemed exempt from the recommended one-term term limit (as some have suggested) then it would not only make a mockery of the report, but also set the stage for a damaging battle over developing conflict of interest guidelines and how those should be applied to existing IPCC officials. The IPCC could of course decide that Pachauri's conflicts do not disqualify him from the position. Any such efforts to circumvent the IAC recommendations would risk further damaging the IPCC. The bottom line? The IAC Review has unambiguously recommended that the IPCC Chairman serve only one term. Rajendra Pachauri has now served more than one term. On this basis alone he should go. However, even if an exception were made for him, he faces significant issues of conflict of interest that would result in his potential disqualification as the IPCC chair (should the IPCC implement policies anything like those of the WMO or UN or NRC). If the IAC Review recommendations are to have any meaning at all then Pachauri should go. Talk of retroactive application and grandfathering of the rules are a slippery slope back to the same sort of ad hocracy that got the IPCC into trouble in the first place. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
IPCC and CRU Rewrite Facts But Can’t Rewrite History This week two events provide opportunities to understand the political influences on climate science and the real influence of climate on politics (Tim Ball, CFP)
Since when was Lomborg a climate skeptic? With his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming. But his answers are unlikely to satisfy all climate change campaigners (Guardian) Certainly not in Lomborg's mind: Bjørn Lomborg: in his own words Quotes from Dane seen as climate change sceptic show he has always accepted 'the reality of man-made global warming' but now sees practical ways to tackle it (Guardian) Like all Socialists he's seduced by a global tax scheme: Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change Exclusive 'Skeptical Environmentalist' and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world (Guardian) So, what could we hope to achieve, assuming anyone was stupid enough to give in to a global taxation scheme?
Typically clueless: Leading article: Three degrees is at least one too many It is fittingly ominous that 2010, year of the next big climate change conference, has been the hottest in recorded history. The heat rises inexorably yet the world dithers and looks away. None of the excitement that surrounded the opening stages of the climate summit at Copenhagen last year looks like materialising this November at Cancun in Mexico. (Independent)
Sigh... Revealed: why failure of climate summit would herald global catastrophe The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits. (Independent)
The Crone's decline accelerates: The Urgent Islands If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? That is a question about which the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral
atolls — is now seeking expert legal advice. It is also a question the United States Senate might ask itself the next time it refuses to deal with climate change.
Let’s Stop Playing the Climate-Change Blame Game (Extreme weather alarmism unfounded) by Chip Knappenberger There has been renewed talk in recent weeks about whether this summer’s scattering of extreme weather events is linked to anthropogenic climate change. True, humans have altered the radiatively active portions of the atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases and aerosols. We’ve also altered the planetary landscape. These alterations are now part of the integrated global climate system that produces daily weather events—both extreme and benign. So can our influence change the intensity of weather events? Yes. Can it cause an event to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have? Conceivably. Does it always act to make the weather more severe? No. Are the changes detectable? Hmmm. It seems that it is this issue of detectability that we often get hung up on. Otherwise, how do we know that human changes are having any impact? Well, we know because, like I said, we’ve altered the active system. “Detectability” is really just about trying to determine whether our alterations have produced a loud enough signal that it can be heard through the collective natural noise. At least that is the purely scientific/statistical aspect of detectability. There is a social/political aspect as well. For once detectability is established, then blame can be meted out, and with blame comes calls for retribution and regulation. The latter is the reason why the issue has become front page news. And why there are comments and speculation in seemingly every news story about the role that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions may have played in every severe weather event. Folks are looking for someone to blame. Acts of God are typically exempt for retribution. But acts of man? By God, someone is going to have to pay! Once detectability has been established, this will open the door to blaming everything on anthropogenic climate change, and to a disregard of the fact that weather (including severe events) existed previously. After all, if you are going to sue someone for your Gulf Coast beach house being destroyed in a hurricane, are you only going to sue for 5% of the damage? Or even consider whether you should have built your beach house there in the first place? Probably not. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Is Temperature Spinning Out of Control? Written by Dennis Ambler As we are told of yet another "hottest year on record," our daily news reports are full of "hot testimony," for example the heatwave in Moscow, Russia is described in this report: “The heat has caused asphalt to melt, boosted sales of air conditioners, ventilators, ice cream and beverages, and pushed grain prices up. Environmentalists are blaming the abnormally dry spell on climate change. On ‘black’ Saturday, temperatures in Moscow hit a record high of 38 degrees Celsius with little relief at night, making this July the hottest month in 130 years. The average temperature in central Russia is 9 degrees above the seasonal norm.” He fails, of course, to say what caused the previous heat wave of similar magnitude 130 years previously, as was mentioned in the report. Such is the nature of environmental reporting these days, that such questions equally do not arise in the minds of those willing reporters who swallow every crumb of global warming thrown to them. Never ever mentioned are historical instances such as the seven month long European heatwave of 1540, when the River Rhine dried up and the bed of the River Seine in Paris was used as a thoroughfare. Read more... (SPPI)
Watching the colossal and implosive decline of the once mighty green movement to stop global warming has been an educational experience. It’s rare to see so many smart,
idealistic and dedicated people look so clueless and fail so completely. From the anti-climax of the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most
unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held, the movement has gone from one catastrophic failure to the next.
Environmental groups face their future in climate-change debate On Thursday, some of the country's most respected environmental groups - in the midst of their biggest political fight in two decades - sent a group of activists to
Milwaukee with a message.
CBI to host climate change 'clash of the titans' debate Former government chief scientist Sir David King, in the green corner, to take on arch-sceptic Lord Lawson in public showdown
Not carbon offsets, but carbon upsets Cap-and-trade has had the perverse effect of subsidising politically dominant industries. We should try something else (Douglas Kysar, Guardian)
The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange Plagued by a free fall in carbon emissions prices and the perennial failure of Washington to pass any binding Cap and Trade Bill, it seems that the Chicago Climate Exchange is on its last leg, announcing that it will be scaling back its operations. (Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire)
Japan Plans To Bind Large Firms To CO2 Caps: Draft Japan's compulsory emissions trading scheme is set to start in April 2013 and cover large CO2 emitting companies, a draft of the government's proposals showed on Monday, but
several issues are still open to debate.
Judge quashes Cuccinelli subpoena of U-Va. records An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related
to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann.
Phytoplankton Are Not Starving (Correction) 30. August 2010 Ed Caryl likes to research, and a short time ago wrote an essay about phytoplankton, see here. Some readers pointed out a flaw, and so Ed has insisted on posting a correction – as is appropriate in science. Happens to the best of us. (We’re not Penn State or CRU here). =========================================================================== In a comment to the original article, The Phytoplankton are Starving, R. de Hann made the following comment:
Continue reading “Phytoplankton Are Not Starving (Correction)” (No Tricks Zone)
The Effect of Clouds on Climate: A Key Mystery for Researchers As climate scientists wrestle with the complexities of how the planet will react to rising greenhouse-gas levels, no variable is more difficult to decipher than the impact of clouds. But thanks to new satellite data and other technologies, clues are emerging that may help solve the puzzle. (Michael D. Lemonick, e360)
Well duh! Dramatic climate change is unpredictable The fear that global temperature can change very quickly and cause dramatic climate changes that may have a disastrous impact on many countries and populations is great
around the world. But what causes climate change and is it possible to predict future climate change? New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen
shows that it may be due to an accumulation of different chaotic influences and as a result would be difficult to predict. The results have just been published in Geophysical
Research Letters.
11 Year Cycle in Hot Summers
By Joseph S. D’Aleo, CCM We have seen hot summers in 1933, 1944, 1955, 1966, 1977, 1988, 1999, 2010. Notice a pattern? The years are 11 years apart. This 11 year cycle may be a coincidence but if so a 1 in 256 chance one. In some years the heat was concentrated in one month (1966 it was July), in others it was throughout. What else has an 11 year cycle? - the sun of course. The solar cycles average 11 years. When new solar cycles begin the new spots are in higher solar latitudes and gradually move equatorward. During transitions you typically have old cycle spots near the equator and new cycle spots at higher latitudes. The 11 years above have been during these transitions. A coincidence? We’ll leave it to our solar expert readers to speculate whether this is solar driven and possible mechanisms. Other common elements in some of the years include an El Nino winter giving way to a La Nina summer and strong rebound from a very negative winter negative Arctic Oscillation (AO) pattern.
Compositing those years gives you this warm summer signal.
In July, a negative NAO means a hot southeast. By winter, it means cold. A continuation of this blocking may make the upcoming La Nina winter more interesting. The winters tend to be cold in the west and north, warmer in the southeast. See more here. (Icecap)
New Paper On Climate Variability and Trends In The Southwest USA By McCabe Et Al 2010 There is a very interesting new paper with respect to climate trends in the southwestern United States (h/t to ICECAP and World Climate Report ). It is McCabe, G. J., D. R. Legates, and H. F. Lins. 2010. Variability and trends in dry day frequency and dry event length in the southwestern United States, Journal of Geophysical Research, 115, D07108, doi:10.1029/2009JD012866. The abstract reads
The conclusion contains the text
This paper reinforces two issues that have repeatedly been made on my weblog: The multi-decadal IPCC global climate models, which have predicted more-or-less perpetual drought in the southwestern United States, are failing in their regional prediction. These predictions, for example, are discussed in the post and The dominance of the regional climate feature of ENSO, as reported in the McNabe et al 2010 paper, further documents why the use of a global average surface temperature trend (or global average radiative forcing) is a grossly inadequate metric to diagnose climate variability and change.(Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Terrible! Few air travellers offset carbon emissions, study finds Only 7% of air passengers are funding green energy projects and offsetting the carbon emissions of their flights, a Civil Aviation Authority survey at Stansted airport has found (Tim Webb, Guardian)
Risk-Taking Rises as Oil Rigs in Gulf Drill Deeper In a remote reach of the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 200 miles from shore, a floating oil platform thrusts its tentacles deep into the ocean like a giant steel octopus.
Last week the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy released its Annual Energy Review for 2009. [Read More] (Geoffrey Styles, ET)
New study shows that oilsands mining and processing are polluting the Athabasca River Edmonton—Inorganic elements known to be toxic at low concentrations are being discharged to air and water by oilsands mining and processing according to University of
Alberta (U of A) research findings being published this month in one of the world's top scientific journals.
Obama’s EPA: School Marms R Us by Marlo Lewis The Obama Administration’s EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTSHA) are proposing new rules “labeling each passenger car with a government letter grade from A to D based on its fuel efficiency and emissions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. The new rules “would be the most substantial changes in 30 years to the familiar price and mileage labels afixed to new cars on sale at dealership,” the article continues. Only in the make-work world of bureaucrats would the addition of the letters A, B, C, or D to product labels be considered “subtantial changes.” The WSJ goes on to point out the obvious: “Currently the labels must show how many miles per gallon a car gets and its estimated annual fuel costs. Under… Read the full story (Cooler Heads)
Wind Energy: It’s Not Cheap or Clean
Much of the justification for subsidies, tax credits, and mandates for increasing wind energy production in the U.S. is that it will create jobs and help cool our planet’s fever. We’ve explained in detail how subsidized green jobs destroy jobs elsewhere, but it also turns out that increased wind power decreases carbon emissions much less than previously thought, and in some instances, could increase emissions. The Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce explains why in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. First, wind power displaces power from natural gas more than it does coal, and coal combustion emits almost double what natural gas does. Second, the intermittency of wind forces coal and gas-fired plants to operate inefficiently and actually increase emissions. Coal plants run most efficiently when continuously running, so the ramping up and down of conventional coal plants to make up for intermittent wind pumps out more carbon dioxide. Bryce likens it to the efficiency of an automobile: “An automobile that operates at a constant speed—say, 55 miles per hour—will have better fuel efficiency, and emit less pollution per mile traveled, than one that is stuck in stop-and-go traffic.” Continue reading... (The Foundry)
German Ministers Clash On Nuclear Report Two key German ministers took different positions on Monday on the length of time that nuclear power plants should be extended after Chancellor Angela Merkel reduced
expectations for a long extension.
Biofuel Demand Driving "Land Grab" In Africa: Report Biofuel demand is driving a new "land grab" in Africa, with at least 5 million hectares (19,300 sq miles) acquired by foreign firms to grow crops in 11 countries,
a study by an environmental group said on Monday.
Backlash over China curb on metal exports China's draconian export curbs on rare earth minerals needed by the rest of the world for frontier technologies is escalating into a serious diplomatic and trade clash with the United States and other leading powers. (TDT)
Exclusive Video: Gov. Mitch Daniels on Obamacare’s Devastating Consequences
Editor’s Note: On the right, please watch our exclusive interview with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and then below, please read an original guest blog to The Foundry from the Governor himself. We’ve been through a global recession. Now we’re fighting through a stalled recovery. Revenues are the lowest they’ve been in half a century. Their finances a wreck, many states have effectively sunk into bankruptcy. Indiana is still afloat. In fact, we’ve fared better than most. We continue to meet our obligations without raising taxes, and the reserves we carefully built and protected will get us through the downturn. But as if we did not already have enough on our plates, the passage and implementation of Obamacare presents us with a whole new set of challenges and a costly to-do list. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
EU regulator reviews safety of GSK swine flu jab LONDON - Europe's drug regulator is reviewing the safety of GlaxoSmithKline's Pandemrix swine flu vaccine, which has been given to more than 30 million people in Europe, to
examine possible links to a sleep disorder.
Surgery for obesity increases 10-fold in England LONDON - Use of weight-loss surgery has increased 10-fold in hospitals in England since 2000 and those who have gastric bands fitted can reduce their risk of early death and
cut health service costs, scientists said on Friday.
Drink and obesity behind 60 per cent rise in liver death toll Binge drinking and obesity are fuelling a surge in deaths from liver disease, experts have warned.
The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism.
Part 1: The Green Swindle - Video - FoxNews.com
Green Police Becomes a Reality in Cleveland
Remember Audi’s absurd “Green Police” Super Bowl commercial where green cops arrest citizens for using plastic bags, plastic water bottles and sort through the community’s trash cans to ensure they’re recycling? Well, the absurdity is about to hit the streets of Cleveland. Cleveland.com reports: (The Foundry)
The increasingly senescent Crone: The Price of Wheat Agricultural experts say they’re not worried about the recent jump in wheat prices, caused largely by the drought in Russia and the ban on Russian wheat exports. The
Department of Agriculture is predicting that world wheat production will reach the same level this year — 645 million metric tons — that helped bring prices down from their
astonishing $13.50 a bushel peak in February 2008. At present, prices for December wheat are about $6.95 a bushel, down over 50 cents from a month ago, but up nearly 55 percent
since early June.
Oh... Demand for food is costing the Earth The fight is on over how to solve the global crisis in resources, says Rose Prince. (TDT)
Canpotex and the cartel bureau August 27, 2010 – 7:16 pm Canpotex might have been called the Organization of Potash Exporting Companies. That reminds us that cartels are meant to be ‘bad,’ except … when you are
doing the colluding
Improving Crop Yields One Plant at a Time It used to be that farmers were concerned about the health of their fields as a whole. New technologies now enable them to care for plants on an individual basis. From
fighting fungus to adjusting soil acidity, smart tractors can do it all.
Spikelet of Chinese Spring wheat, Triticum aestivum. Photo: E.J.M. Kirby
Last night the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council made available online a draft of the largest genetic code of an organism ever tackled – the genome of wheat, which is five times larger than the human genome and more than 30 times larger than that of rice, revealed back in 2002. But well worth the effort, for a crop with virtues that have shaped human history since its domestication more than 10,000 years ago. Chinese Spring wheat is the variety now read. Leading the work is the British team of Neil Hall and Anthony Hall at the University of Liverpool, Keith Edwards and Gary Barker at the University of Bristol. and Mike Bevan at the John Innes Centre. Most of the actual gene-reading was done with a “platform” developed in the USA by a subsidiary of Swiss company Roche. The implications are big. Although the genome isn’t yet organised into its chromosomes, plant breeders now have access to 95 per cent of all wheat genes. That should shorten by some years the time required to develop viable new varieties of wheat that can thrive in marginal conditions – adapted for example to face drought, salty soil, or disease. Here’s the most relevant extract from the story in Magic Universe called “Cereals: genetic boosts for the most cosseted inhabitants of the planet.” Read the rest of this entry » (Calder's Updates)
Canada Letter Says Concerns Re EU GM Crop Proposal The Canadian government has voiced concerns about a European Union proposal to allow member states to decide whether to ban genetically modified (GM) crops.
Will the 2013 solar flare return us to the Stone Age? Fox Business News Channel brought the "top physicist" (right after Al Gore, Lee Smolin, and Joe Romm) Michio Kaku who explained
that we're doomed in 3 years: Every 100 years, we're thrown back 100 years just by the solar storms, we're told. Because there are dozens of types of similar catastrophes, it is clear that every 100 years, we're thrown back several millennia. ;-) It sounds scary, doesn't it? One year after the Earth collapses because of the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 and after another doomsday prescribed by Nostradamus, we will face yet another Armageddon. Fine. You may buy insurance from me. What is going on? » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
EPA Surrenders on Lead Bullet Ban Paul Bedard reports:
The NRA's chief lobbyist Chris Cox says: “It’s outrageous that this petition even went this far.... We applaud the EPA for its understanding of the law and its common sense in this situation — both of which were totally missing in the petition filed by these extreme anti-gun and anti-hunting groups.” EPA press officials did not return phone calls or emails from THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Thursday. (Weekly Standard)
ONE day in early 1970, a cross-country skier got lost along the 46-mile Kekekabic Trail, which winds through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota.
Unable to make his way out, he died of exposure.
Run Like A Deere From Cap-And-Trade Junk Science: Deere & Co., a major player in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, drops out, saying the group's legislative strategy is no longer a foundation for moving
forward. Is cap-and-trade dead?
Obama Administration: The Courts are the Wrong Place for Climate Policy
The Obama Administration has issued a remarkable brief siding with energy companies over whether they should be liable for the effects of their greenhouse gases as a "public nuisance." The arguments in the brief, should they come to be accepted, would appear to put an end to effort to use of the US judicial system to force regulations of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenwire reports that the administration's position has come as a shock to some environmental advocates: Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general's office on June 24, it seemed they had "a lot of friends in the room," he said.The brief itself reads as a more general argument against seeking to implement climate policies -- those focused on controlling greenhouse gas emissions -- through the courts. The brief states that the scope of potential harm from greenhouse gas emissions is so broad as to render the issue more appropriate to the legislative and executive branches (pp. 13-14, PDF): [P]laintiffs proceed without relying on any statutory right or statutory cause of action, and have sued a handful of defendants from among a broad array of entities that emit greenhouse gases. Moreover, the types of harms they seek to redress could potentially be suffered by virtually any landowner, and to an extent, by virtually every citizen, in the United States (and, indeed, in most of the world). Prudential standing principles counsel in favor of leaving resolution of such claims to the representative Branches.The brief also explains that the complexity of sources of greenhouse gas emissions also points toward a remedy outside th judicial process (pp. 14-15): Parallel breadth and complexities also characterize the range of potential defendants in such common-law claims, because the categories of those who emit carbon dioxide (and thus contribute to global warming in the way plaintiffs allege) are equally capacious. Plaintiffs’ complaints name a few entities that operate power plants in 20 States. But the electric-utility industry alone is far larger, to say nothing of many other sectors of the economy that are responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions . . .The brief states bluntly that (pp. 16, 17): Courts—when no statute is in place to provide guidance—are simply not well-suited to balance the various interests of, and the burdens to be borne by, the many entities, groups, and sectors of the economy that, although not parties to the litigation, would be affected by a grievance that spans the globe. . .A question that I have for constitutional scholars: How does the argument in this brief also not undercut MASS vs. EPA? Has the Obama Administration effectively ended climate litigation in the US? It sure looks that way. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
The Battle for America 2010: Special Election Candidates Promise to Stop Lame-Duck Agenda Races to fill the unexpired terms of Biden and Obama might make the difference in thwarting Harry Reid's plans to ram through a big government agenda during the lame-duck
session after the elections.
<chuckle> Lefties have trouble with the idea people won't vote for a great big new tax: Aggression pays in king hits on Labor CLIMATE change can be a killer. This has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with its impact on political leaders. Look at the list of those who have felt
its sting in the past three years: John Howard, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd. And Julia Gillard?
More frantic spin about down-under elections: Climate change delays cost Labor election - says a poll by the Climate Institute LABOR could have won two extra seats and perhaps the election had it not deferred its carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), a new poll suggests.
The Clean Development Mechanism delivers the greatest green scam of all Even the UN and the EU are wising up to the greenhouse gas scam, "the biggest environmental scandal in history", says Christopher Booker. (TDT)
Cancun climate summit: Pachauri asks Mexico to be realistic New Delhi, Aug 19 With hopes of a consensus eluding the Cancun climate meet, IPCC chairman R K Pachauri has urged host Mexico to be realistic and work hard in pushing rich
nations to put climate funds on the table. "There will be least expectations (of a consensus) this time (at Cancun).
August 27, 2010 – 7:20 pm
UN hopes science review eases climate scepticism A review due on Monday (US time) can help restore public faith in the United Nations panel of climate scientists and its finding that global warming is man made despite
errors in a 2007 report, the UN's environment chief said.
Pachauri likely to get away with mild rap Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chief Rajendra Pachauri’s fate will be known Monday with the release of the findings of an investigation into charges that the
panel grossly inflated the impact of global warming. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon had in March asked Inter Academy Council
UN climate change panel to be warned over reports The United Nation's climate change organisation faces a warning over how it uses scientific facts in its influential reports, following the discovery of a series of embarrassing errors in its work. (TDT)
My holiday is being ruined by global cooling. But try telling that to the 'scientists' I’m writing this in Salcombe, Devon on a rainy, miserable summer’s day which, I fear, may be all too symptomatic of the climatic rubbish we can all expect for the next
30 years as – thanks to changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation combined with a solar minimum – we enter a period of global cooling. Let’s hope I’m wrong, eh?
 cartoonsbyjosh.com
You can’t buy the truth, but you can buy a committee interpretation of it. One year ago a group of eminent scientists wrote a letter to congress provocatively titled “You are being deceived.” 
Click to read the full article
Now, in a similar vein, but with all the gory details, John McLean has put together a 66 page compilation of the modus operandi and history of said deception. It’s a story of how small committees of activists cite their own work, ignore contradictory information and dissenting reviewers, use the peer review system to lock out opponents, and blithely acknowledge crippling uncertainties (but only in tracts of text that few will read, and never in summation when it matters). When your favourite prancing-horse-committee — the IPCC — is failing to impress the crowds, it’s time to distract them with dressage from another source. In this case, the IPCC is being reviewed by the brand new InterAcademy Council (IAC). Expect their somber pronouncement to discover some minor flaws of process, posit a few proceedural improvements, and then declare that above all, the science is sound, rigorous, and that carbon dioxide will surely kill millions if we don’t allow the guys at Goldman Sachs to save us all with complex derivative triple A packages of CDM’s. Amen. There’s a cyclical nature to the lifecycle of committees. Long ago The International Science Union (ICSU) was pushing the greenhouse effect scare, they ran the conferences and subcommittees and programs that helped create the IPCC.
More » (Jo Nova)
by Robert Bradley Jr.
There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate. And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized. And perhaps no one more than Gerald North of Texas A&M epitomizes this lost opportunity. For North is a middle-of-the-roader who inexplicably went Left after Climategate, a story that I documented here at MasterResource. Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle, whom I have previously identified as a straight shooter in the climate debate, recently posted an interview he did at his blog SciGuy with Professor Curry that is reprinted below (with permission). I also attach an appendix of another Curry interview. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
All four of them? Standing by Mann: Small but punchy protest blasts Cuccinelli’s ‘climategate’ inquest As global temperatures rise, so does Charlottesville’s profile in a worldwide debate. Two events last Friday highlighted the anger and frustration felt on both sides as
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli continues his quest to peek at the early musings of Michael Mann, the former UVA climate professor and creator of the doomsday-invoking
“hockey stick graph.”
Millions are suffering and thousands have died from flooding in Pakistan and China. An extraordinary heat wave in Russia sparked fires causing dreadful pollution and wiping out swathes of the wheat crop. Are these weather-related disasters caused by global warming? Do they portend to worse catastrophes? What can be done? Should Pakistan get more aid? (Julian Morris, Daily News)
New El Niño type: worse than we thought From the Jet Propulsion Lab: 
Deviations from normal sea surface temperatures (left) and sea surface heights (right) at the peak of the 2009-2010 central Pacific El Niño, as measured by NOAA polar orbiting satellites and NASA's Jason-1 spacecraft, respectively. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels were located in the central equatorial Pacific. Image credit: NASA/JPL-NOAA - Click for a larger image A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting. Continue reading (WUWT)
Tisdale rebuttal to JPL’s “Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger” On Lee and McPhaden (2010) “Increasing intensity of El Niño in the central‐equatorial Pacific” Guest post by Bob Tisdale
As happens all too often, the press release for a paper has an incorrect title and begins with an unfounded claim. The JPL press release for Lee and McPhaden 2010 “Increasing intensity of El Niño in the central‐equatorial Pacific” is no exception. The title of the press release “NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger” is wrong. The paper discusses the increase in strength in Central Pacific El Niño events, but does not conclude that El Niño events in general have increased. In fact, as will be illustrated in this post, the strengths of NINO3 and NINO4 based El Niño events, when combined, have actually decreased over the period of the Lee and McPhaden study. And the press release begins with, “A relatively new type of El Niño…”
Temperature variations are not increasing
Temperature variations.nb (Mathematica notebook)  Typical month-on-month jumps of the temperature anomaly in °C in Boston between 1943 and 2009. The details will be explained later. I somewhat randomly took 48 of the world's large cities. For each of them, I looked how many years into the past I can go to see uninterrupted monthly average temperature data. For many cities, it was 37 years - since the beginning of 1973. For some cities and their weather station, it was longer. Boston had 67 years. » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Anthony has highlighted a study by Coughlin and Butler. Their study says that there is little or no urban warming (urban heat island, or UHI) in the temperature record from the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. They say:
Why is Armagh important? And is there really no UHI in Armagh? The Armagh record is very valuable because it is one of the longest well-documented temperature series in existence. Here is the monthly mean temperature record from Armagh. (NOTE: I have replaced the earlier Figures 1 and 3, which only went up to the year 2004, with updated figures which now include 2005-2010. My thanks to those who wrote in with the location of the post-2004 data.)
Figure 1. 209 years of monthly temperatures at Armagh, Ireland. Pale blue is monthly surface air temperatures. Dark blue is Gaussian average of the temperature. Photo is noctilucent clouds over Northern Ireland. My conclusions from Figure 1?
Glaciers – The Dark Side. It’s Not the CO2 Carbon 27. August 2010 Ed Caryl has become a regular contributor here, and today he presents insights on the causes of glacial melt. Here he discusses how absorption of solar energy by soot and
Black Carbon contribute significantly to glacial melting and that CO2 is a minor factor. The global warming “hockey stick”, invented by Dr. Michael Mann, has been proven to be a distortion. [i] But if carbon dioxide is not significantly warming the planet, then why are most northern glaciers shrinking? Since the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago, glaciers have been receding, dramatically in the first few thousand years of warming when the oceans rose by 120 meters. The remaining glaciers have been receding since the end of the “Little Ice Age” in the early 1800s. This is normal. Compared to an ice age, it is warm. There is evidence that this retreat has stopped and even slightly reversed in the last ten years for some glaciers; those on Mount Shasta in California are examples. These have increased in mass because of greater snowfall. Glaciers in Alaska, California, Europe, and South Greenland are still receding. Some of the melt of South Greenland is because of the Atlantic Ocean. [ii] The following temperature plots are of the sea off the west coast of Greenland. For a full resolution, better quality graphic go to the link.
The years shown are 1992 to 1999.
Our JGR Paper on Feedbacks is Published After years of re-submissions and re-writes — always to accommodate a single hostile reviewer — our latest paper on feedbacks has finally been published by Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). Entitled “On the Diagnosis of Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing“, this paper puts meat on the central claim of my most recent book: that climate researchers have mixed up cause and effect when observing cloud and temperature changes. As a result, the climate system has given the illusion of positive cloud feedback. Positive cloud feedback amplifies global warming in all the climate models now used by the IPCC to forecast global warming. But if cloud feedback is sufficiently negative, then manmade global warming becomes a non-issue. While the paper does not actually use the words “cause” or “effect”, this accurately describes the basic issue, and is how I talk about the issue in the book. I wrote the book because I found that non-specialists understood cause-versus-effect better than the climate experts did! This paper supersedes our previous Journal of Climate paper, entitled “Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration“, which I now believe did not adequately demonstrate the existence of a problem in diagnosing feedbacks in the climate system. The new article shows much more evidence to support the case: from satellite data, a simple climate model, and from the IPCC AR4 climate models themselves. Back to the Basics Interestingly, in order to convince the reviewers of what I was claiming, I had to go back to the very basics of forcing versus feedback to illustrate the mistakes researchers have perpetuated when trying to describe how one can supposedly measure feedbacks in observational data. Researchers traditionally invoke the hypothetical case of an instantaneous doubling of the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere (2XCO2). That doubling then causes warming, and the warming then causes radiative feedback which acts to either reducing the warming (negative feedback) or amplify the warming (positive feedback). With this hypothetical, idealized 2XCO2 case you can compare the time histories of the resulting warming to the resulting changes in the Earth’s radiative budget, and you can indeed extract an accurate estimate of the feedback. The trouble is that this hypothetical case has nothing to do with the real world, and can totally mislead us when trying to diagnose feedbacks in the real climate system. This is the first thing we demonstrate in the new paper. In the real world, there are always changes in cloud cover (albedo) occurring, which is a forcing. And that “internal radiative forcing” (our term) is what gives the illusion of positive feedback. In fact, feedback in response to internal radiative forcing cannot even be measured. It is drowned out by the forcing itself. Feedback in the Real World As we show in the new paper, the only clear signal of feedback we ever find in the global average satellite data is strongly negative, around 6 Watts per sq. meter per degree C. If this was the feedback operating on the long-term warming from increasing CO2, it would result in only 0.6 deg. C of warming from 2XCO2. (Since we have already experienced this level of warming, it raises the issue of whether some portion — maybe even a majority — of past warming is from natural, rather than anthropogenic, causes.) Unfortunately, there is no way I have found to demonstrate that this strongly negative feedback is actually occurring on the long time scales involved in anthropogenic global warming. At this point, I think that belief in the high climate sensitivity (positive feedbacks) in the current crop of climate models is a matter of faith, not unbiased science. The models are infinitely adjustable, and modelers stop adjusting when they get model behavior that reinforces their pre-conceived notions. They aren’t necessarily wrong — just not very thorough in terms of exploring alternative hypotheses. Or maybe they have explored those, and just don’t want to show the rest of the world the results. Our next paper will do a direct apples-to-apples comparison between the satellite-based feedbacks and the IPCC model-diagnosed feedbacks from year-to-year climate variability. Preliminary indications are that the satellite results are outside the envelope of all the IPCC models. (Roy W. Spencer)
Article In Nature “Cold Empties Bolivian Rivers Of Fish” By Anna Petherick Nature has published an excellent news article by Anna Petherick [h/t to Dan Hughes for alerting us!] Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish which illustrates that even when the global average surface temperature is above average (for whatever reason) regional cold waves can occur which have major environmental consequences. The article starts with the text
and includes the text
This extreme event also further illustrates why a bottom-up, resource-based perspective (in this case on ecological function on the regional scale) as presented in A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resourse-Based Perspective is needed. (Roger Pielke Jr., Climate Science)
Carbon Capture Companies Want Protection If Acid Leaks Into The Sea Saturday, 28 August 2010 08:49 Robin Pagnamenta, The Times
Climate-Control Failures May Send Coal Trading to Record: Energy Markets Coal trading is poised to rise to an all-time high this year as prices at less than half their 2008 peak stoke demand, defying government efforts to phase out the
most-polluting fossil fuel.
Wind Energy Gets Huge Subsidies. So Where Are The CO2 Reductions?
Over the last few years, the wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the industry’s claim that using more wind energy will result in major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There’s just one problem with that claim: it’s not true. [Read More] (Robert Bryce. ET)
Wind Turbine Projects Run Into Resistance BARSTOW, Calif. — The United States military has found a new menace hiding here in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California: wind turbines.
Rules For Enviro-Radicals: Pick The Landscape, Mechanize It, Desecrate It 28. August 2010
H/T EIKE Just days ago, Germany’s leading, renown political daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) had a piece on the dark side of alternative energy sources, writing:
Continue reading “Rules For Enviro-Radicals: Pick The Landscape, Mechanize It, Desecrate It” (No Tricks Zone)
Electricity prices set to soar as a result of government policy THE chief executive of one of the country's biggest energy retailers has warned that power prices are set to increase dramatically.
Though the wrong headed “cap and trade” bill has been derailed in the US Senate, the specter of energy legislation is once again rising. As the energy debate heats back up, the journal Science has dedicated its August 13, 2010, issue to the subject of alternative energy. Writing in the introduction, David Malakoff, Jake Yeston, and Jesse Smith identified the heart of the alternative energy problem:
Case in point, the US government's plan to reduce the nation's dependence on oil by scaling up cellulosic ethanol is in deep trouble. The complex technical, economic, and political forces involved in efforts to create viable alternatives to fossil fuels have proven close to insurmountable. Domestic biofuel production is only kept flowing with liberal application of government dollars. “In the current financial climate, existing federal policies are simply not enough to encourage the investments that will make these fuels a reality,” says Jeremy Martin, a chemist with the Clean Vehicles Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), in a news article in Science. According to Robert F. Service, a writer for Science, the plan to build an American biofuels industry on cellulose has stalled out after a promising start. In 2005, the US Congress approved new rules mandating a steady ramp-up in biofuels use. By 2022, cars were to be burning up to 36 billion gallons (136 billion liters) of biofuel a year, equivalent to one-quarter of today's US gasoline consumption. Early on, this was to come from “first-generation” biofuels, primarily ethanol made from corn. Corn ethanol production has grown steadily from 3 billion gallons in 2005 to 12.1 billion gallons this year. Most is blended with gasoline in a 10% ethanol to 90% gasoline mix, since higher proportions of ethanol can cause damage to car engines and fuel systems not specifically designed to run on alcohol.  Energy legislation from 2007 mandates an increasing share of cellulosic ethanol (dark green). But even the US Congress is incapable of turning corn ethanol into a positive proposition. Investigations by the US EPA, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the EU's joint Research Council all reported that biofuels pollute more than the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace, leading researchers to conclude that it would be better to simply burn the crops rather than convert them to biofuels. Add to that excessive water use in creating biofuels and the green luster of these fuels fades significantly. Again, according to Service:
Part of cellulosic ethanol's problem is technological—converting cellulose into alcohol is simply not as easy or efficient as brewing up a batch using corn or sugar cane. When starting with a feedstock rich in simple sugars, such as Brazilian sugar cane, making ethanol is a mater of using yeast to convert sugar to alcohol—a process similar to making beer or wine. In the US, where corn it the feedstock of choice, the process is slightly more complex. Enzymes must be used to break down the starch in corn kernels into its component glucose molecules, which yeast can then digest. The task becomes even more difficult when using cellulosic feedstocks such as switchgrass, corn stalks, or wood chips. The sugars in these materials are locked in cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin, which are polysaccharides like starch but much harder to break down, and lignin, which crosslinks different plant polysaccharides. Breaking these biopolymers into simpler compounds that can be converted into ethanol remains a difficult problem. While fermentation converts about 90% of the energy in simple sugars to ethanol, converting cellulosic feedstocks to ethanol yields just 40% of total energy content. That means cellulosic ethanol plants need far more raw material than first-generation plants do to make the same amount of ethanol.  While researchers are confident that the yield for cellulosic conversion will be improved in the future, it remains uncertain that better yields can revive the moribund ethanol market. The US uses a total of about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year. Mixed with gasoline at a 10/90 ratio, the demand for ethanol is only about 14 billion gallons. First-generation plants are already making 12.1 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually, and idled plants are capable of boosting the total to 15 billion gallons. The result is that the industry has reached a “blend wall.” In the words of Wally Tyner, an agricultural economist at Purdue University: “There is no room for cellulosic ethanol.” Cellulosic ethanol costs are equivalent to oil at $120 a barrel, well above oil's recent price around $75 a barrel. At these prices, there is no motivation to ramp up cellulosic ethanol production. The ethanol glut and economic problems not withstanding, the EPA is considering increasing the required amount of ethanol in blended fuels to 12% or even 15%. Since such fuel could damage older cars, the idea doesn't have much appeal. Another idea is to mandate that future autos be able to run on an 85% ethanol blend, so called E85 fuel. Neither step would raise demand above existing corn ethanol production capacity in the near term. Currently, the ethanol tax credit pays fuel blenders a flat $0.45 for each gallon of ethanol they use. Another proposed “solution” would be to offer larger credits for cellulosic ethanol. Most of the existing $6 billion a year in ethanol subsidies and tax credits are currently up for renewal by Congress. Lawmakers have already allowed one tax credit for biodiesel to lapse, adding to investors' worries that ethanol subsidies could be next. The prospect of radical belt tightening by Congress could be a deathblow for cellulosic and corn ethanol fuel subsidies—and it wouldn't come a moment too soon. Also in the special issue of Science, Richard A. Kerr, writing in an article titled “Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition?” notes that during past energy transitions humanity has always moved to a better fuel. “Never has the world so self-consciously tried to move toward new sources of energy,” he states. “But the history of past major energy transitions—from wood to coal, and from coal to oil and gas—suggests that it will be a long, tough road to scaling up alternatives to fossil fuels that don't stoke greenhouse warming.” In the 1800s, wood and animal feed provided more than 95% of humanity's energy. Since then world energy use has increased twenty fold. Replacing even half of the coal, oil, and gas consumed today would require 6 terawatts of renewable energy. Plus, the transition from coal to oil in developed nations took more than half a century—there is little reason to expect the move away from fossil fuels will take less time. This is complicated by the fact that wind, solar and biofuels in particular are demonstrably inferior energy sources than oil and coal in terms of transportation, convenience and energy density.  Fossil fuels each took half a century to dominate energy production. “We are confronted with a society built on high-quality energy, dense forms of energy, fossil fuels especially,” states ecological economist Cutler Cleveland. “Could you have the same standard of living with renewables? I don't think we really know. Things might have to change very fundamentally.” The question we have to answer as a society, as a civilization, is does perusing renewables like biofuels make sense or are we headed down the road to ruin? This is not to say we should ignore other forms of real pollution or the world's looming energy gap. But trying to avoid the global warming boogieman may be causing bad decisions that will leave things in worse shape for our children and grandchildren. The world is not yet running short of fossil fuels, the US alone has 200 years of coal and almost 100 years of gas reserves. Oil will not “peak” until 2030, if then—all past predictions have proven wrong. As we said in The Energy Gap, fossil fuels will be needed by our energy hungry world for the foreseeable future. Even though humanity will eventually need to transition from fossil fuels, what is needed is a better source of energy, not a poor substitute like biofuels. It is a confusing challenge, trying to sort the good from the bad alternatives, which is why we wrote TEG. Pick up a copy and find out how to solve the world energy crisis, preserve the environment and save civilization. In the mean time, tell our political leaders to kill biofuel subsidies—they are a bad deal for everyone. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.  (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
Trying to find emissions greenies will appreciate? Canadian Firm Really Goes Green With Hemp Car Canadian developers are plotting a small revolution in the still-tiny market for electric cars, with a concept vehicle made from hemp set to debut at a specialized auto show next month. (Reuters)
Tidal turbines: Alex Salmond hits a low ebb 'Overseas investment' to generate electricity on Orkney came courtesy of the British taxpayer, says Christopher Booker (TDT)
The Report on Stimulus CBO Wishes Would Go Away
Pity the poor Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director. Congress passes and the President signs the most massive fiscal stimulus program in history, spending more money on Keynesian stimulus than has been spent so far on the Iraq war. But, unlike the Iraq war, the stimulus has been a complete bust. Rather than launch a recovery, the stimulus managed only to launch a jump in the national debt. The economy enjoyed a mild bump late in 2009 as businesses rebuilt their inventories—a development completely unrelated to the stimulus—and then slid back to anemic growth in the second quarter and now appears to have stalled out entirely. As part of the stimulus legislation, Congress mandated CBO report regularly on how well the stimulus is doing. Money spent, economy faltering, Congress wants happy news about their stimulus, and in response all CBO can do is continue to run their antiquated models telling us that down is up and slow is fast. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
An unsupportable American dream August 26, 2010 – 7:37 pm Obama remains blind to causes of housing crisis One of the great paradoxes of the U.S. economy is how something as personal and individualistic as home ownership — a core value at the heart
of the American dream — could have been turned into one of the world’s biggest socialist disasters.
Trial Lawyers Should Stick to Real Problems There’s a great new report from the Manhattan Institute emphasizing the role of tort law as a supplement (and alternative) to regulation. If fishermen in the Gulf coast had a right to be free from pollution, perhaps BP would have invested more in preventing the recent disastrous spill. Unfortunately, as the MI piece points out, trial lawyers have tended to focus not on these genuine – and objectively verifiable – harms but instead on hypothetical and highly subjective concerns. A series of class action suits resulting in essentially arbitrary payouts has enriched the trial lawyers but done little if anything to protect individuals or the environment from harm. Indeed, arguably these suits have been counterproductive as they have often led to the elimination of beneficial substances, while diverting resources to lawyers and plaintiffs and away from more productive uses. (Julian Morris, Big Government)
Howard Stern: 'Bring back DDT!' Stern argues that New York's bedbug problem is nothing compared to the millions dying from malaria in Africa, quoting extensively from an article by CFACT's Paul Driessen.
CDC backs away from decades-old flu death estimate CHICAGO - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is backing away from its decades-old estimate of the number of people who die annually from seasonal flu,
instead saying deaths vary widely from year to year.
Are allergies associated with heart disease? NEW YORK - Common allergies that bring on wheezing, sneezing and watery eyes could be next to join the list of factors linked to heart disease, suggests a large new study.
Several countries petitioning Mediterranean diet be listed as cultural heritage The Mediterranean nations of Italy, Greece, Morocco, and Spain are petitioning to have their staple diet listed as a cultural heritage item by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (MercoPress)
Drink till you drop: A magic elixir is shown to promote weight loss CONSUME more water and you will become much healthier, goes an old wives’ tale. Drink a glass of water before meals and you will eat less, goes another. Such prescriptions
seem sensible, but they have little rigorous science to back them up.
Weight loss surgeries in England jump tenfold LONDON — The number of weight-loss surgeries in England jumped more than tenfold from 2000 to 2007, a new study says.
Survey shows alarming levels of obesity among Indian children 18% of children below seven years of age are obese or overweight
African police seize 10 tonnes of fake medicines PARIS - Police seized about 10 tonnes of counterfeit medicines and arrested 80 people in a sweep across eastern Africa, international police agency Interpol said on
Thursday.
FDA ties chicken feed to salmonella in egg recall WASHINGTON - Chicken feed contaminated with salmonella bacteria could have caused the outbreak at two Iowa producers that sparked a recall of more than a half billion
contaminated eggs last week, U.S. regulators said on Thursday.
Decoding of genome hailed as most significant breakthrough in wheat production in 10,000 years
Stalin's Harvest: Russia's and Ukraine's food panic is the result of outdated farming policies. Poor wheat harvests in Russia and Ukraine, along with devastating wildfires in Russia, have resurrected fears of a global food crisis. Some have blamed global warming for
inducing a severe drought. But the real blame rests with poor agricultural performance over the long term in a region still hampered by communist experimentation. To react by
banning exports, as Moscow has done and Kiev is considering, would be counterproductive. Combined with restrictions on the use of modern agricultural technologies imposed in
the European Union and being proposed in the U.S., such bans really could lead to a global food crisis.
Ecological Footprints – a good idea gone bad Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In “Another day, overshot to hell” Anthony Watts commented on the “Overshoot Day” promoted by Mathis Wackernagel and the Global Footprint Network (GFN). This is based on the idea of the “ecological footprint”. Your “ecological footprint” (EF) is how many acres (hectares) of land it takes to support you, to grow the grain for your bread and the timber for your house and so on. It’s a simple and visual way to measure our impact on the planet. Unfortunately, the particular form of the EF as advanced by Mathis Wackernagel and the GFN contains three fatal flaws. It wildly underestimates the available rain-fed cropland. It assumes that people in Britain farm like people in Africa. And it arbitrarily assigns huge weighting to CO2.
Figure 1. The effect of CO2 on the Wackernagel version of the “Ecological Footprint”. Image from Bambi meets Godzilla, a cartoon worth watching. Here’s the stern warning from the Global Footprint Network folks:
First, the mandatory disclosure of personal interests. Continue reading (WUWT)
"Flexible" green ethics: Enviro Groups Cheer as Scientist Bombards Agribusiness With Profane E-Mails It sounds like fodder for a PR flap that might benefit the leading producer of the controversial herbicide atrazine: reams of explicit, taunting e-mails sent to company
employees by a professor whose research on the health risks of their product had won nationwide notice.
VENABLE: Texas fights global-warming power grab Lone Star state won't participate in Obama's lawless policy
Obama Administration: The Courts are the Wrong Place for Climate Policy
Greenwire reports that the administration's position has come as a shock to some environmental advocates: Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general's office on June 24, it seemed they had "a lot of friends in the room," he said.The brief itself reads as a more general argument against seeking to implement climate policies -- those focused on controlling greenhouse gas emissions -- through the courts. The brief states that the scope of potential harm from greenhouse gas emissions is so broad as to render the issue more appropriate to the legislative and executive branches (pp. 13-14, PDF): [P]laintiffs proceed without relying on any statutory right or statutory cause of action, and have sued a handful of defendants from among a broad array of entities that emit greenhouse gases. Moreover, the types of harms they seek to redress could potentially be suffered by virtually any landowner, and to an extent, by virtually every citizen, in the United States (and, indeed, in most of the world). Prudential standing principles counsel in favor of leaving resolution of such claims to the representative Branches.The brief also explains that the complexity of sources of greenhouse gas emissions also points toward a remedy outside th judicial process (pp. 14-15): Parallel breadth and complexities also characterize the range of potential defendants in such common-law claims, because the categories of those who emit carbon dioxide (and thus contribute to global warming in the way plaintiffs allege) are equally capacious. Plaintiffs’ complaints name a few entities that operate power plants in 20 States. But the electric-utility industry alone is far larger, to say nothing of many other sectors of the economy that are responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions . . .The brief states bluntly that (pp. 16, 17): Courts—when no statute is in place to provide guidance—are simply not well-suited to balance the various interests of, and the burdens to be borne by, the many entities, groups, and sectors of the economy that, although not parties to the litigation, would be affected by a grievance that spans the globe. . .A question that I have for constitutional scholars: How does the argument in this brief also not undercut MASS vs. EPA? Has the Obama Administration effectively ended climate litigation in the US? It sure looks that way. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Alaska Primary Shows That Energy Taxes Can Be Toxic Joe Miller has a narrow lead over Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a surprising Alaska Senate primary. If the absentee ballots break hard for Murkowski she may narrowly escape, but at
the moment it looks at least as likely that Miller will pull the upset. If he does, Murkowski’s support for energy taxes may be one of the major reasons.
In Alaska, Doubts About Climate Change Rise With a New Politician Alaska's cliffhanger primary is poised to propel a climate skeptic toward the U.S. Senate, observers say, likely bolstering the number of nominations achieved by
conservative candidates who challenge manmade global warming.
Global warming: Can the San Bernardino flying squirrel be saved? Environmentalists have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the San Bernardino flying squirrel, a nocturnal glider native to Southern California mountains,
as an endangered species, threatened by climate change.
Oh dear: Analysis: Climate Aid Reaches $30 Billion Goal, But Is It New? Aid promises from rich nations to help poor countries slow global warming are reaching the $30 billion goal agreed in Copenhagen but analysts say much of that is old funding
dressed up as new pledges.
by Robert Bradley Jr. Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:
And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality. Here is the latest stanza on the death spiral as reported earlier this month in ClimateWire. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Nothing like the words “Arctic” and “oil drilling” to get the environmental campaigners excited.All of the protests in the world will add up to very little without a practical, politically feasible alternative way forward. The lack of wide open debate on climate policy options -- and indeed efforts to squelch such debate -- is why most climate activism is simply empty exhortation. Perhaps such exhortation is at least therapeutic for those involved. Simply adding intensity to a political debate is a recipe for all sorts of problems -- including policy gridlock. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Australia's capital sets 40 pct carbon cut law CANBERRA Aug 26 - The government of an Australian territory said on Thursday it will enact tough carbon cutting laws, a step that comes after a national election that
punished the ruling Labor party over lack of action on climate change.
EU Sees Limit On Industrial Projects In CO2 Scheme The European Union's top climate official proposed on Wednesday new limits on the use of carbon offsets from industrial gas projects, under fire by green groups, in the EU's
emissions trading scheme after 2012.
MIT Professor Can’t See Forest For Trees; Confuses Meteorology – Climate – Weather Recently Kerry Emanuel said, “Why would anybody ask weather forecasters about their opinion on climate? I think it is because there is a hope that I don’t think is
justified that ordinary people will confuse weather forecasters with climate scientists.”
Oh boy... Am I an activist for caring about my grandchildren's future? I guess I am Concerted action to tackle climate change will happen only if the public demands it for the sake of future generations (James Hansen, Guardian)
Donna Laframboise has moved to a shiny new Wordpress blog, and is straight back into the groove with a rather damning look at Alistair Woodward, the man who is in charge of the health chapter of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. Some of his publications look, ahem, interesting.
Business as usual by the looks of it. Read the whole thing. (Bishop Hill)
Think they'll have much success with indoctrinating the gray vote? New rules of engagement for older people and climate change A new study by researchers in the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York calls for better engagement of older people on climate change issues.
Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffin Photon-hoggish humanity set for orgy of illumination
Now they are really trying to cause panic: Spurred by Warming Climate, Beetles Threaten Coffee Crops Coffee production has long been vulnerable to drought or excess rains. But recently, a tiny insect that thrives in warmer temperatures — the coffee berry borer — has been spreading steadily, devastating coffee plants in Africa, Latin America, and around the world. (Erica Westly, e360)
Poor Johann, wouldn't recognize "proof" if it was bighting him: Johann Hari: How much proof do the global warming deniers need? Everything the climate scientists said would happen - with their pesky graphs and studies and computers - is coming to pass. This is proving the hottest year ever (Independent)
Interesting nuances in IPCC groups treatment of New Zealand temperature data We have all seen the news that The New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust, a newly registered arm of the Coalition, has filed a claim in the High Court seeking a declaration to invalidate the NZ Temperature Record, currently promoted by NIWA, and featured on its website. It is fascinating the the Jones et al global temperature compilations which date from the 1980’s and are the series that fathered “Global Warming” – did NOT
incorporate adjustments/corrections anything like those warming tweaks of NIWA.
NRL scientist seeing clearly the effects of pyrocumulonimbus (WASHINGTON, DC • Aug. 26, 2010) – Wildfires can wreak widespread havoc and devastation, affecting environmental assets lives, property and livelihoods. Meteorologist
Mike Fromm of the Naval Research Laboratory, in collaboration with several national and international laboratories, is now discovering that changes in the frequency of
occurrence and intensity of wildfires has substantial consequences for a variety of important problems including atmospheric change.
Another Human And Natural Climate Forcing – Pyrocumulonimbus Storms As we learn more about the climate system, we continue to discover additional humans and natural climate forcings occur. The August 17 2010 issue of EOS has an excellent article by Randy Showstack titled Researchers Focus on Fire Clouds That Reach to the Stratosphere which reports on such a climate forcing. Excerpts from the paper read
The sources of these fires are from both natural events (e.g. a forest fire from lightning) and from human caused events (e.g. biomass burning for land clearing). The recognition that the aerosols associated with these thunderstorms can be ejected into the stratosphere and persist there for months clearly shows that pyrocumulonimbus have a significant climate effect both on the regional and global scales. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Shrinking atmospheric layer linked to low levels of solar radiation Large changes in the sun's energy output may drive fluctuations in Earth's outer atmosphere
Actually not: Large CO2 release speeds up ice age melting LIVERMORE, Calif. — Radiocarbon dating is used to determine the age of everything from ancient artifacts to prehistoric corals on the ocean bottom.
Ice Core evidence — where is carbon’s “major effect”?
The ice cores are often lauded as evidence of the effects of carbon dioxide. Frank Lansner asks a pointed question and goes hunting to find any effects that can be attributed to carbon. Where is the data that actually shows a strong and important warming effect of CO2? If CO2 has this strong warming effect, would not nature reflect this in data? He has collected together the data from the last four warm spells (the nice interglacials between all the long ice ages) into one average “peak”. The common pattern of the rise and fall has already been recorded in many scientific papers. Orbital changes trigger the temperatures to rise first and about 800 years later (thanks to the oceans releasing CO2), carbon dioxide levels begin to climb. At the end of a patch of several thousand warm years, temperatures begin to fall, and thousands of years later the carbon dioxide levels slowly decline. No one is really contesting this order of things any more. What is contested is that those who feel carbon is a major driver estimate that the carbon dioxide unleashed by the warming then causes major amplification or “feedback”, making things lots warmer than they would have been if there was no change in carbon. Since most skeptics (but not all) agree that there is probably some warming due to extra CO2, the real question is “how much”. Lansner points out that counter to the amplification theory, temperatures return most of the way back to their starting level (ice age temperatures) even while CO2 levels are elevated. If the CO2 can’t prevent the temperatures falling, it’s effect is anything but major. Estimates of climate sensitivity and support for the “feedbacks” comes from models which depend on water vapor increasing high over the tropics. The radiosondes show that the models are wrong. Frank graphs the change in temperatures and CO2, and finds a slight positive trend which is predictable (we know oceans release CO2 as they warm, so there would be a correlation). But then he plots the changes in CO2 against changes in the rate of temperature change, and finds no correlation at all (if CO2 was a major forcing, it would force or accelerate temperature change, which would show as the rate of temperature change). The data is limited to 1500 year blocks, so the time-frame is less than ideal, but the best available in the Petit data. Thanks to Frank for his work Jo More » (Jo Nova)
UHI study of the UK Armagh Observatory  Click image for
interactive panorama take from the top of the meteorological tower
Via Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. and with a h/t to Erik, I found this most interesting, because it demonstrates the even small things like hedges can influence temperature readings. This paper originally had only 1 diagram, but I’ve added photography to help you visualize the site.
Is urban spread affecting the mean temperature at Armagh Observatory? A.D.S. Coughlin (1,2) and C.J.Butler (2) 1 Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Coleraine, N.I. 2 Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, N.I. 1. Introduction Meteorological observations have been made at Armagh Observatory (Butler and Johnston, 1996) since 1795. The records include one of the longest single-site instrumental temperature series in the UK and, indeed, Europe. Continue reading (WUWT)
The storage of water or ice on land—the presence of large bodies of water or glacial ice sheets—affect the Earth's gravitational field. This effect is detected by the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. Twin satellites were launched in March 2002, to make detailed measurements of Earth's gravity field. Since then, GRACE has been used to study tectonic features, estimate ground water volumes and calculate the amount of ice contained in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. However, other factors can contribute to the GRACE measurements than just the volume of ice in an ice sheet. These factors include the response of Earth's crust (the lithosphere) to past changes in ice load.  Antarctica was found to be rising, but not as fast as previously thought. As the weight of covering ice varies, the underlying surface rock can be pushed down or rise up, buoyed by the magma that the crust floats on. This would obviously impact efforts to measure the height of terrain, including glaciers. Compensating for the rise and fall of bedrock is termed glacial isostatic adjustment, and it can have a significant impact on estimated ice-mass losses. Changes in the spatial distribution of the atmospheric and oceanic masses can also enter into the picture. Correctly assessing these different factors is the key to accurately calculating ice-sheet mass balance. Xiaoping Wu and colleagues have proposed a new method for untangling these factors from GRACE measurements. In a News and Views commentary on the work by Wu et al., David H. Bromwich and Julien P. Nicolas sum up the problem:
The method used by Wu et al., in “Simultaneous estimation of global present-day water transport and glacial isostatic adjustment,” estimates ice-mass changes and glacial isostatic adjustment simultaneously, instead of estimating the latter separately from deglaciation models as had been done before. The problem is expressed in terms of a single matrix equation, with the observed surface-height changes decomposed into their different contributions. The equation is then solved for ice-mass changes using matrix inversion. While the glacial isostatic adjustment that results is not directly generated by deglaciation models, the inversion method still requires a first-guess estimate to begin the calculations.  Ice loss in Greenland has been significantly overestimated. In describing their work, Wu et al. state: “Here we combine gravity measurements and geodetic data of surface movement with a data-assimilating model of ocean bottom pressure to simultaneously estimate present-day water transport and glacial isostatic adjustment. We determine their separate contributions to movements in the geocentre, which occur in response to changes in the Earth’s mass distribution, with uncertainties below 0.1 mm yr−1.” They further describe their methodology as follows:
Here PDMT stands for present-day surface mass trend and GIA for glacial isostatic adjustment. Those interested in the theoretical framework—including the relevant measurement equations, data sets and uncertainty assessment—should look in the Methods section of the paper and the Supplementary Information pdf. What is really interesting here is the resulting trend data for the change of bedrock height—the geoid height trend. The new method found that estimates used in the past were significantly in error. Antarctica was found to be rising, but not at as fast a rate as previously thought. Greenland, on the other hand, is actually sinking, particularly in the center of the ice sheet. Previous change estimates had Greenland rising everywhere. “The negative GIA geoid trend in Greenland could be new evidence for additional net past ice accumulation (∼100–300 m of ice depending on rheological properties and onset time) in comparison with the a priori model,” the researchers state, noting that past accumulation over certain parts of Greenland has been suggested before by other models. The study results can be seen in the figure below, taken from the report.  Unfiltered GIA geoid height trends. In the figure a, shows rates estimated in the study, and b,those predicted by the ICE-5G/IJ05/VM2 model. While Wu et al. report that both Greenland and Antarctica are loosing ice-mass, they are doing so at a much lower rate than previous estimates and that both are gaining ice in their interiors. “The mass loss in Greenland is concentrated along the coastal areas, and is particularly heavy in the west, and in the southeast with the large Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim glaciers,” they state. “In contrast, the interior of Greenland shows significant positive mass balance.” Bottom line on the new work is that ice-mass loss has been overestimated by previous studies. “These findings confirm the ongoing shrinkage of the polar ice sheets,” state Bromwich and Nicolas. “However, and most importantly, the newly estimated ice-sheet mass losses represent less than half of other recent GRACE-based estimates for the same time interval: −230 ± 33 Gt yr−1 for Greenland2 and −132 ± 26 Gt yr−1 for West Antarctica.” According to Wu et al. “We conclude that a significant revision of the present estimates of glacial isostatic adjustments and land–ocean water exchange is required.” Perhaps this technique could be applied to the previous GRACE results for Himalayan glaciers as well. So, when the more exact measurement separation methodology of Wu et al. is applied to the GRACE geoid data, ice sheet shrinkage, which has been systematically overestimated, is cut in half. “The differences between the work by Wu and colleagues and earlier studies may reflect errors in present deglaciation models with respect to the ice-load history and response of the Earth's mantle,” conclude Bromwich and Nicolas. According to Wu et al. “significant revision” is required. The general result—the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets will be with us for a long time to come. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
U.S. Urged To Ensure Deepwater Drilling Safety The Development Driller III, which is drilling the relief well, is seen at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana, May
11, 2010.
ANALYSIS-China clean energy plan hinges on coal price BEIJING, Aug 27 - China's $736-billion push to harness nuclear, wind, solar and biomass energy hinges on making the cleaner fuels competitive with cheap and CO2-intensive
coal without derailing surging industrial growth.
Who expects China to reduce CO2 emissions anytime soon? Gridlock is a way of life for Chinese For 10 days, drivers on the Beijing to Mongolia expressway have been stuck in a 60-mile tailback. Is this the world's longest queue? A combination of road works and the huge volume of coal trucks that daily rumble along this main route is said to have caused the problem.
Shell Tests Method To Reclaim Oil Sands Waste Royal Dutch Shell Plc said on Thursday it was starting up a demonstration project to test a new method of speeding up reclamation of toxic waste ponds at oil sands operations, a source of tension between oil companies, environmentalists and regulators. (Reuters)
According to a press release, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money directed toward solar-power will cut solar power costs in half by 2015. It’s a grand sounding prediction, but his own Energy Information Agency projects that electricity from solar cells will cost nearly five times as much as electricity from natural-gas-fired power plants. And that’s without any adjustment for the unreliable nature of solar power or for the additional transmission costs. Forcing those higher costs on taxpayers and ratepayers, spells bad news for the economy in terms of lost income, lost jobs, and higher electricity prices. Families could see their incomes drop thousands of dollars per year as the labor market loses a million jobs. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Merkel Seeks More From Utilities For Renewables German utilities should make more of a contribution toward encouraging the development of renewable energy in addition to paying a planned nuclear fuel tax, Chancellor
Angela Merkel said on Thursday.
Side Effects: College Students May Lose Health Care Option Under Obamacare
Health care isn’t something most students worry about. Government stats show about 80 percent of college students are covered under a parents’ plan. For them, Obamacare may mean they can keep the insurance they already have for a few years beyond college, but it won’t affect the coverage they carry during school. But what about kids without parental coverage? The new law’s requirement that insurance cover children up to age 26 won’t make any difference for them. Currently, college students without coverage can enroll in low-cost student health plans offered through universities. These plans may include limits to keep costs down, but are often designed around to complement university health services to provide comprehensive coverage. Affordability is further achieved by rating student health plans on a campus-wide basis rather than according to the whole individual market. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Where innovation and science suffers from seriously bad government: CEOs Speak Up The Economy: Everyone keeps asking: When will America's businesses start expanding and hiring again? Funny thing is, no one listens when they tell us.
Employment: We try not to comment on opinions expressed on our own op-ed page, but Wednesday's On The Left column asserting that small businesses are not major job-creators
mustn't go unanswered.
NYT Article Admits DDT Ban as a Cause of Bedbug Outbreak By P.J. Gladnick (Bio | Archive)
Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate. Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary. However, your humble correspondent has speculated that the MSM would eventually have to change its position on the DDT ban due to the fact that so many of its members are being assaulted by bedbug attacks which keep increasing despite the use of other pesticides. Well, it now appears that New York Times writer, Emily B. Hager, has had a revelation about DDT. While its not an outright call for a lifting of the DDT, consider it an important pit stop on the way to demanding the ban be lifted:
Yes, the MSM meme seems to have shifted from the claim that DDT would be ineffective against bedbugs to the admission that the current outbreak is due to a decline in its use. And the New York Times is not alone in admitting that the lack of DDT is a cause for the bedbug outbreak. Business Week is now also admitting that the ban on DDT as a cause for the bedbug outbreak:
And now that media outlets are willing to admit that the ban on DDT helped caused this bedbug outbreak, a demand for the EPA to at least temporarily lift its ban can't be far behind. Annoyance over lack of sleep due to biting bedbugs should trump tree-hugging political correctness over continuing the DDT ban. —P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog. (NewsBusters)
Study links severe drug reaction to herpes virus LONDON - A rare and dangerous reaction to a range of common medicines including antibiotics and anticonvulsants may be caused by a severe immune response to reactivated
herpes virus, scientists said on Wednesday.
Antihistamine use linked to extra pounds NEW YORK - People who use prescription antihistamines to relieve allergy symptoms may be more likely than non-users to carry excess pounds, a new study suggests, although
the significance of the connection is not yet clear.
FDA to give restaurants more time on calorie counts WASHINGTON - U.S. health regulators plan to give restaurant companies more time to comply with new rules that require clear calorie and nutritional information on menus.
The New York Times and Lies about 'Acid Rain' by William L. Anderson
Actually not, and I think I know, given that I had a major article in Reason about this whole affair and also wrote part of my doctoral dissertation on the subject, and published another paper in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology about it. I can say what the NYT says in that editorial is categorically untrue, all the way to Moynihan’s becoming "a believer." If there is an Orwellian Memory Hole, it definitely lives at the "Newspaper of Record." (Lew Rockwell)
Ripping off consumers -- but with the best of intentions :) Dramatic fall in number of plastic bags given out by supermarkets The number of "single-use" plastic bags given to customers by leading UK supermarkets has fallen for the fourth year in a row.
Fuel treatments reduce wildfire severity, tree mortality in Washington forests A study conducted by U.S. Forest Service and University of Washington (UW) scientists has found that fuel treatments—even of only a few acres—can reduce fire severity
and protect older trees desirable for their timber, wildlife, and carbon-storage value. The finding is part of a three-year study of the 175,000-acre Tripod Fire and is
published in the August issue of Canadian Journal of Forest Research.
by Bill Muehlenberg
British man claims to have bred indestructible bees A British man claims to have bred a strain of bee capable of protecting itself from a deadly parasite that is wiping out the environmentally vital insect. (TDT)
Financial speculators have discovered agricultural commodities, and the result has been skyrocketing prices for wheat, barley and other grains. SPIEGEL spoke with agricultural economist Joachim von Braun about how to curb such speculation and the dangers for the world's poor. (Spiegel)
Drought Tolerant Maize To Hugely Benefit Africa: Study Distributing new varieties of drought tolerant maize to African farmers could save more than $1.5 billion dollars, boost yields by up to a quarter and lift some of the
world's poorest out of poverty, a study found.
U.S. Rejected Hen Vaccine Despite British Success Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens
against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.
Commercial road would disrupt world's greatest migration The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are requesting that the Government of Tanzania reconsider the proposed construction of a commercial road through the world's best known wildlife sanctuary—Serengeti National Park—and recommend that alternative routes be used that can meet the transportation needs of the region without disrupting the greatest remaining migration of large land animals in the world. (Zoological Society of London)
Obama Admin Urges Supreme Court to Vacate Greenhouse Gas 'Nuisance' Ruling The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change. (Greenwire)
Just say "No!" to carbon scams: U.N. Carbon Funding Key For China Clean Coal Developers Developers of clean-coal power plants in China fear for the viability of their projects after a U.N. carbon-credit scheme denied funding for a similar plant in India at the
end of July.
Nothing runs like a Deere – company bails on cap and trade 
Image from ioffer.com - click for details
By Bob Tita Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- Deere & Co. (DE) has quietly dropped out of a coalition of large companies that has supported a cap-and-trade program for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of farm machinery, opted to leave the U.S. Climate Action Partnership in May because the group’s legislative strategy “no longer served as a foundation for moving forward” with climate change regulation, Ken Golden, a spokesman for the company said Tuesday. Continue reading (WUWT)
Undeniable Global Warming and Climate Models Written by Dennis Ambler Wednesday, 25 August 2010 Government Agencies from the US and the UK have recently joined forces in a major exercise, (NOAA–MET Office, State of the Planet 2009), to influence proposed climate legislation in the US, support costly and highly unpopular legislation in the UK and hopefully (for them), prepare the way for a global, legally-binding agreement on emissions control at the UNFCC Climate Conference in Cancun, Mexico, in December. Read more... (SPPI)
Oxford Union Debate on Climate Catastrophe Source: Climate Conservation Group  The lovely
old Oxford Union building. It’s nice to know that there are still places where reason and intellect roam free.
Science 135, global warming scare 110 For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes. Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC. Read the rest of this entry » (SPPI)
Putin encounters a tiger and an environmentalist
AFP: German scientist hands Putin frosty climate rebuke (click)In the fast Eastern region of Yakutia, he dared to mention his opinion that 10,000 years ago, the mammoths started to die out. This was linked to a warming of the climate, a rise in sea levels, a reduction of pastures. All this happened without human influence.He primarily meant that no industrial CO2 emissions were involved in the decline of mammoths. But that was too courageous a thing for him to say. Ms Inken Preuss, a wild German environmentalist (second from the left), immediately reacted: (The Reference Frame)
25. August 2010 Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrived Monday on Samoilovsky Island in the western Siberian Arctic to visit a joint Russian-German scientific expedition, Lena-2010. Lena 2010 is conducting studies on the Russian Arctic permafrost, which is 1.5 km thick at the Samoilovsky Island location and estimated to be 40,000 years old. The German page of Ria Novosti has a video up (sorry – only in German) which reveals an interesting
comment, one not reported in the western media. The video shows Putin visiting the study site, and even helps the scientists bore into the permafrost. At the 1:15 mark of the video, Putin is reported to have asked each scientist the same question:
To which the video gives the reply at the 1:24 mark, the reporter says: Continue reading “Video: Putin Asks Each Scientist Point Blank: Is Climate Change Caused By Man? Answer: We Don’t Know!” (No Tricks Zone)
Nude Socialist: Time to blame climate change for extreme weather? IT IS time to start asking the hard questions. Countless people in flood-stricken Pakistan have lost families and livelihoods. Who can they hold responsible and turn to for reparations? (NS)
Climate policy has been hamstrung for many years by the notion that the influence of greenhouse gas emissions on society (and the environment) through climate change can be
precisely assessed, and that such attribution can be used to guide the policy response. But what happens when the policy community asks the impossible from the science
community? Bad policy and bad science can result.
Read that last paragraph again. The ability of developing countries to access UN funds for adaptation depends upon their ability to attribute specific events to
human-caused climate change from greenhouse gas emissions. Because such attribution is not possible, this makes the entire policy basis of the fund flawed. Just
imagine the absurd notion of well-meaning UN officials coming to Africa explaining that they have the resources to help, say, malaria victims who have the disease as a result
of human-caused climate change, but not any of the other victims of the disease.
Met office pushes a surface temperature data “do over” The effort has started, and a website has been setup at http://www.surfacetemperatures.org They write: Surface temperature datasets for the 21st Century To meet 21st Century requirements it is necessary to reconsider our analyses of historical land surface temperature changes. This is about much more than simply re-engineering existing datasets. These datasets were adequate for assessing whether climate was changing at the global scale. This current exercise should not be interpreted as a fundamental questioning of these previous efforts. But these pre-existing datasets cannot answer all the questions that society is now quite rightly asking. They do not constitute a sufficiently large sample to truly understand our uncertainty at regional scales. At monthly resolution they are also of limited utility in characterising extremes in climate and their changes. Continue reading (WUWT)
Comments On The Ecomonist Article “Green View: Could Temperature Be Less Intemperate?” I was queried on Monday of this week by the Economist regarding the September Exeter meeting regarding the project surfacetemperatures.org which I posted on in My comment to the Economist when asked
My response was
The article has now appeared [August 25 2010] Green View: Could Temperature Be Less Intemperate? and my response to it is given below. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Poor getting ripped off in carbon scam [gasp!]: Poorer nations hit with 'exorbitant' consultancy fees for carbon offset projects Nepalese government has paid a Norwegian consultancy €150,000 (£123,000) to get UN certification for biogas projects (Guardian)
Blaming climate skeptics for green failures is convenient but wrong It’s not been easy being green since the revelations of Climategate and mounting evidence that the science behind man’s influence on climate change is far from accurate, let alone settled. No wonder then that many greens chose to vent their frustration at skeptics and blame their ideological opponents for their troubles. (Paul Wornham, Examiner)
As we have covered in previous essays, global warming alarmists insist that the southwestern United States is getting drier and will get substantially drier in the future
due to the buildup of greenhouse gases. They bolster their claims by results from a relatively large number of articles in the professional scientific literature and countless
comments in various UN IPCC reports. Throw in pictures of declining water levels at Lake Mead, some fountains in Las Vegas and golf courses in Phoenix, and just like magic, a
scary scenario is produced.
In our paper Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union. we presented evidence that the human role on the climate system is much broader than just that from the addition of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. There is a new paper that provides further evidence of the role of aerosols (which in this study is a combination of natural and human effects) on the climate system. The paper also documents how this effect is transported across thousands of kilometers. This new research further confirms what was concluded in 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 that
The paper is Ben-Ami, Y., Koren, I., Rudich, Y., Artaxo, P., Martin, S. T., and Andreae, M. O. 2010: Transport of North African dust from the Bodélé depression to the Amazon Basin: a case study, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 7533-7544, doi:10.5194/acp-10-7533-2010 with the abstract
As the climate system is investigated further, the shortcomings and incompleteness of the 2007 IPCC WG1 report become increasingly evident. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Should read: "Plain stupid": Nine Plane Stupid activists fined for Aberdeen airport stunt 'The Climate9', who were arrested after chaining themselves to a cage on the tarmac, have each been fined between £300 and £700 (Guardian)
Complete idiot of the day: Yes, we broke the law as climate change activists. And this is why We're not terrorists, we're people who believe delivering our message on climate change is worth being charged and fined (Dan Glass, Guardian)
Jobs Knowingly Killed And Destroyed Unemployment: A damning memo shows the administration knew its oil drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico would kill tens of thousands of jobs but did it anyway. We're
the ones getting drilled.
The Catastrophe That Wasn’t: The Gulf Oil Spill in Perspective by Paul Schwennesen Picture your neighbor’s pool. Unless you live in Malibu, it’ll contain about 6,000 gallons. That’s the “Gulf” for purposes of discussion. Now go to your garage, get a quart of oil and pour it in when he’s not looking. Pretty good sense of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, right? Nope, not even close. Put a drop of that oil onto a sheet of paper and carefully cut it in half. Now do it again and toss that quarter of a drop into the deep end. Even this quarter droplet (about the size of the comma in this sentence) is about 10% too large, but NOW you have a sense of what 4.9 million barrels of oil in the Gulf looks like. Now that we’ve grappled with the issue of scale, let’s look at the aftermath of this ‘catastrophe.’ According to the government scientists, seventy-five percent of that sliver of a droplet has now evaporated, been eaten by microbes, skimmed or burnt. (This estimate is in dispute, but every day the released oil is being reduced to get to that figure, if not beyond it.) Now, you’re going to need to borrow your kid’s microscope for the rest of this exercise…. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Major Media Too Lazy To Check Sources: Outdated Observations Passed On As “News”
It appears that major media outlets took reports based on old observations and passed it on to the public as breaking news last week. H/T: Reader Dirk H. Last week a number of major media outlets reported on how a large plume of oil had been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, insisting that the BP oil spill was not naturally disappearing, as claimed by BP and US officials. Well, it turns out that last week’s reports were based on oil plume observations made way back in June and junk science. Here are some of the headlines we saw last week in the land of angst, Germany: Sueddeutsche Zeitung on August 18: All these reports claimed that BP and officials were premature in calling off the emergency, and that the oil slick was far greater than the public was led to believe. There’s much more oil out there and the problem is still an environmental catastrophe, they all insisted last week. What did these enviro-bedwetting journalists base their stories on? They were based on a study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute describing an undersea oil cloud observed June 19 to 28. Here’s the Wood Hole press release. These media outlets were too lazy to check out the source. So is there still lots of oil out there? No. The Washington Post wrote yesterday on a Study: Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume that according to the newest findings by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, the oil plumes are today practically gone, and on how microbes and bacteria have…
The Washington Post also mentions how the Woods Hole study was based on observations from June. The WaPo writes:
And so the mystery of the missing oil is explained:
The oil is gone. The WaPo report also shows that the feared oxygen depletion catastrophe is also all hype:
There it is folks. Another bout of incontinence by the German media. Listening to them last week, you’d think the Gulf of Mexico was sloshing with crude. Bad reporting is a great way to wrongly scare away tourists at a time the Gulf coast needs them the most. (No Tricks Zone)
Oil and Gas Industry Tax Incentives: How do they Compare?
Federal politicians mislead the public when they preach about the need to revoke the “special subsidies” given to US oil and natural gas firms. In contrast to these overused sound bites, consider the following graph -- an excerpt from a July 2010 Tax Foundation’s report, “Who Benefits Most from Targeted Corporate Tax Incentives?” [Read More] (Michael J. Economides, ET)
US mounts global push for shale gas WASHINGTON — The United States has offered to help major economies such as China and India develop shale gas, a rapidly growing sector in North America which US officials
bill as a clean alternative.
Fishing Concerns Dominate Cape Wind Hearing with the final event last night in Boston. A few things became quite clear at Wednesday night’s public hearing on the draft environmental impact statement on the Cape Wind
project.
Czech government adopts plan to rein in renewables The Czech government approved a renewables energy framework plan on Wednesday aimed at curbing the kind of subsidies that have led to a solar boom that ranks as Europe's
third largest.
Electricity collected from the air could become the newest alternative energy source BOSTON, Aug. 25, 2010 — Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ― much like solar cells capture sunlight ― and using them to light a house or recharge an
electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may sound, scientists already are in the early
stages of developing such devices, according to a report presented here today at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
End Environmental Experiments on Africans! Written by Fiona Kobusingye I wish I had a shilling for every time someone told me spraying homes with DDT to prevent malaria is like using Africans in evil experiments. I would be a rich woman. That claim is a blatant falsehood. Even worse, it hides the many ways poor Africans really are being used in environmental experiments that cause increased poverty, disease and death. Read more... (SPPI)
New mouse virus found in chronic fatigue patients WASHINGTON - Researchers have linked a second type of mouse virus to a baffling condition called chronic fatigue syndrome, but said their findings do not yet prove that any
virus causes the symptoms.
Vitamin D tied to cancer, autoimmune disease genes LONDON - Scientists have found that vitamin D influences more than 200 genes, including ones related to cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis -- a discovery
that shows how serious vitamin D deficiency can be.
Radiologists call for curbs on overuse of imaging CHICAGO - Doctors are ordering too many unnecessary imaging tests, raising the cost of healthcare and exposing patients to excess amounts of radiation, imaging experts said
on Tuesday.
Simply propaganda: Acid Rain 30 Years On Just over 30 years ago, a skeptical Daniel Patrick Moynihan persuaded his Senate colleagues to approve a major study to see whether a relatively unknown phenomenon called
acid rain was worth worrying about. The study, completed in 1990, showed that pollution blowing eastward from coal-fired power plants was killing off aquatic life. One-quarter
of the Adirondacks’ 3,000 lakes and streams had become too acidic to support fish life, or were headed that way.
New York most bedbug infested U.S. city - survey PHILADELPHIA - New York has more unwanted nocturnal guests than other urban areas and has been named the most bedbug infested city in the United States.
Following an earlier post, I have received several email queries about global
trends in earthquake damages, and how they compare with those related to weather, prompting this post. . . . why the knowledge of 9,000 years of city collapse in earthquakes, and a known cumulative death toll of more than 10 million people, has not led to safer construction everywhere.In his paper he explains that large earthquake disasters are relatively concentrated in a small part of the Earth's surface: [T]he odds of a city being damaged by an earthquake are not evenly distributed on our planet (McGuire 2004; Dilley 2005). Twelve percent of all fatal earthquakes are found along the margins of the eastern Pacific, and fully 85% of the world’s earthquake fatalities have occurred in the Alpine/Himalayan collision belt between western Europe and eastern Asia. This comparison is based on earthquakes since 1570, i.e. since the earliest historically recorded earthquakes in the Americas. Since then roughly 1,100 people have died in earthquakes each year in the western Americas and Carribean, compared to 8,900/year along the southern edge of the Eurasian plate. This concentration of most of the world’s fatal earthquakes occurs in less than 12% of Earth’s surface area—a 150◦ longitude band between London and Tokyo, between the equator and 45◦N.Bilham explains that the world still has a long way to go to adapt to the known threat of earthquakes: [W]e still live in a world where deaths are expected to accompany large earthquakes near cities. Within 30min of a damaging earthquake we can quantify the number of fatalities and injuries anticipated in settlements surrounding the epicentre, before news of actual deaths are known on the ground. That this is possible admits that we have a problem in our cities that needs to be fixed. The time to have undertaken this fix was in the era of construction that started in about 1950.We have a further 30 years left in this global building boom, but it is unlikely that earthquake resistance will occur where the structures are going up most rapidly. The focus of earthquake resistance efforts should clearly be in the places where fatalities have been historically the worst—in the western Americas and in the Alpine/Himalayan/Indonesian collision belt. Given the present recession of world economies, the cost of the fix is likely to prevent the expenditure of funds where it matters most, at a time when it matters most. This suggests that urban populations will continue to be killed by earthquakes in the foreseeable future, and in greater numbers than in the documented past.The story is similar when looking at economic damage in the United States, as the figure below shows. 
References: Bilham, R., 2009. The Seismic Future of Cities, Twelth Annual Mallet-Milne Lecture., Bull. Earthquake. Engineering, 1-49, 10.1007/s10518-009-9147-0 Bilham, R. 2010. Lessons from the Haiti earthquake, Nature 463, 878-879 (18 February 2010) doi:10.1038/463878a Vranes, K., and R. A. Pielke, Jr. 2009. Normalized Earthquake Damage and Fatalities in the United States: 1900 - 2005. Natural Hazards Review 84-101, doi: 10.1061/ASCE1527-6988200910:384 (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Climate Change Lawsuits Heat Up, Led By An End Run In Connecticut While the United States Senate tries to decide what to do about proposed global warming legislation (the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act), Connecticut's attorney
general and Democratic nominee for the Senate, Richard Blumenthal, is working to get courts to declare "cap and trade" regulations the law of the land.
Will Cap and Trade Put Mom and Dad on an Allowance? Perhaps you have never considered becoming a solar panel installer.
PATTERSON: Al Gore's global-warming crusade shrinks Eco-autocrats are exposed as frauds
Rent Seeking with Global Warming: From Enron to California AB 32 by Tom Tanton
The mainstream media has perpetuated a misperception that the Proposition 23 to suspend AB 32 is the work of, and funded by, sinsiter out-of-stater parties. That’s neither a real issue (what happens in California affects everybody) nor factually correct. I can attest to the homegrown nature, having been involved for over four years—essentially since AB32 was first passed in 2006, as have others. The funding for opposition to the initiative has gotten very little attention by MSM, a phenomenon Mr. Coupal begins to correct in his featured column, reproduced below with permission, on the popular website FlashReport. His editorial links Enron to regulating carbon dioxide (CO2). In fact, Enron had seven profit centers tied to pricing CO2 via cap-and-trade. Enron, as the following quotations attest, was vitally interested in what became AB 32. Here is some history of Enron, climate alarmism, and CO2 regulation (prominently including cap-and-trade):
Jon Coupal is quite Californian and quiet critical of AB32. His article is thus reprinted in full. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Texas Response to EPA "Tailoring Rule" for Greenhouse Gas Regulation Written by Bryan W. Shaw, Ph.D and Greg Abbott Dear Administrators Jackson and Armendariz, In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency's recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations - regulations that are plainly contrary to United State Law. 75 Fed. Reg. 31,514, 31,525 & 31,582 (June 3, 2010) (hereinafter, the "Tailoring Rule"). To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions. Read more... (SPPI)
Even as the Obama administration seeks to negotiate an international treaty to cap manmade greenhouse gas emissions, many of the world’s most egregious producers of
greenhouse gasses cannot accurately estimate how much gas they currently emit, according to a recent report from Government Accountability Office.
<GUFFAW!> Analysis: Australia's "Green" Poll May Accelerate Climate Action Australia could accelerate action on climate change, possibly resurrecting an emissions trading scheme, after independent and Greens MPs won the balance of power in
elections that left a hung parliament.
On Australia's potential minority government: Independents wobble before winds of climate change The three independent amigos of the House of Representatives plus their new best friend from the Greens have made a New Age pitch for a multi-party, multi-faceted,
multi-dimensional approach to politics, all consensus, co-operation and listening to the people.
Ruling on global warming professor coming CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - A ruling is expected in a week on a demand by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli that the University of Virginia release research records of
a well-known climate change researcher, according to The New York Times.
Corruption for dinner anyone? The Carbon Market Scandal All round the world thousands of greenonomists recommend a “free market solution” to our so called pollution problem. But as I keep saying: this “free market” isn’t free. It’s a pale pathetic imitation: a “managed market”. In Europe, if a factory produces CO2 (what factory doesn’t?) it can pay people in China and India to not produce an-equivalent-amount-of-CO2. Sounds sort of fine in intent except that paying people to not do something they were-going-to-do depends on knowing the future (and reminds us of a process known as extortion). That’s loophole number one. Officially it’s called “additionality”, which is a fancy way of saying people wouldn’t do something-in-particular to reduce emissions unless they got paid in carbon credits. The Chinese and Indians, not being stupid, immediately gamed the system. Why wouldn’t they? The irony of unintended consequences. Here’s how it goes:
To put it in perspective: In 2009 European installations surrendered 46 million HFC-23 CERs, worth an estimated €550 million. These CERs constitute the majority of offsets used by European companies (59% in 2009). [Source] More » (Jo Nova)
Morano: 'Cameron let his friends in the environmental community spook him out of this debate. When he was warned that he was probably going to lose and lose badly, he ran like a scared mouse.' (Marc Morano, Climate Depot)
James Cameron should have debated Marc Morano Apparently Joe Romm advised James Cameron not to debate climate skeptic Marc Morano. Which just proves that Joe Romm is capable of being as stupid with the rich and famous
as he is with his regular readers.
By Jim Treacher, Daily Caller
Submissions to the InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC Written by Gordon Hughes, Ross McKitrick and David Henderson I am writing because I have accumulated a lot of experience of economic work on climate change over the last two decades that is, I believe, relevant to the review being undertaken by the InterAcademy Council. Originally I joined the World Bank to serve as a co-author of the World Development Report on Environment and Development published in 1992. In particular, another member of the team and I were responsible for writing Chapter 8 on Global Environmental Issues, which provided one of the earliest quasi-official reviews of the economics of climate change. Since 1992 I have directed or participated in a large number of studies that have examined economic issues surrounding climate change at national, regional and global levels. In particular, I would highlight three major groups of studies: Read more... (SPPI)
Shelley Gare’s Quadrant essay “Death by Silence in the Writers’ Combat Zone” and her online audio conversation with Keith Windschuttle told me that the Totschweigentaktik, this same “tactic” – to use the English word – is as used by other groups wishing to push a particular agenda.
Although the translation of the verb “totschweigen” is given as “to be silent, to hush up,” and hence to “ignore,” it describes, as in the literary world, the tactics used to prevent the person targeted from expressing his or her opinion and to kill their book and reputation. This immediately took my line of thinking to the methods used by the alarmist Anthropogenic Global Warming (AWG) people to prevent those who reach different conclusions – often called Sceptics – having any say in the matter or having their work published. The Climategate files revealed how they operated and the methods used, confirming the suspicions of many who came into conflict with them. Again showing up the closed minds of many who try to gain political control at many levels. In her article, Shelley Gare make reference to “a famous maxim which is sometimes attributed to the American philosopher William James, and I’ve also seen a version attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. It describes how unwelcome ideas, and their proponents, are treated: ‘First they ignore you; then they mock you; then they attack you viciously. Finally they say, oh we knew that all along.’" When delving into the Climategate material I found PDF files of promotional pamphlets prepared by a communications agency intended to help UK government departments influence public debate. One of them with the title The Rules of the Game sets out a broad plan with “Recommendations to the Climate Change Communications Working Group ... Evidence base for the Climate Change Communications Strategy ... The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it.” (Quadrant)
Further Information On Tree Ring Proxy Data – A Research Paper García-Suárez Et Al 2009 In response to the post Comment On Tree Ring Proxy Data and Thermometer Type Surface Temperature Anomalies And Trends we have been alerted to an interesting paper on tree ring proxy data (h/t to Erik W!). The paper is García-Suárez et al, 2009: Climate signal in tree-ring chronologies in a temperate climate: A multi-species approach. Dendrochronologia 27 (2009)183–198 and the abstract reads
The conclusion has the text (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
BP Aftermath Fuels Skepticism Over Global Warming Impact By: David A. Patten
UF study shows carnivore species shrank during global warming event GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study indicates extinct carnivorous mammals shrank in size during a global warming event that occurred 55 million years
ago.
Always assuming enhanced greenhouse is actually a problem: Geoengineering won't curb sea-level rise Space mirrors and 'volcanic' blasts are not an easy fix for the rise in sea levels.
From CO2 Science Volume 13 Number 34: 25 August 2010 Editorial: Subject Index Summary: Journal Reviews: Carbonate Chemistry Effects on Coral Calcification Rates: Our imperfect knowledge of the biological component of calcification in corals and related organisms is hampering our ability to properly analyze the effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on this important process. Interactive Effects of Nutrients and CO2 Concentration on Coral Calcification: Are they positive or negative? ... or both???? Effects of Ocean Warming and Acidification on Sea Urchin Larvae: How hard might they be hit by the awesome double whammy? The Fate of Juvenile Sea Stars in an "Acidified" Ocean: How bad could it be? Not bad at all, apparently. Plant Growth Database:
Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume: Study A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP's broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes,
scientists reported on Tuesday.
Poland's Power Plans Worry Environmentalists Poland's plans to give away tens of millions of carbon emissions permits to new power stations are drawing criticism from environmentalists, but the European Union's climate
chief says she is not worried.
Hmm... Can the world be powered mainly by solar and wind energy? BOSTON, Aug. 24, 2010 — Continuous research and development of alternative energy could soon lead to a new era in human history in which two renewable sources — solar and wind — will become Earth's dominant contributor of energy, a Nobel laureate said here today at a special symposium at the American Chemical Society's 240th National Meeting. (American Chemical Society)
Wind Power Won't Cool Down the Planet Often enough it leads to higher carbon emissions.
Exclusive: Will wind farms pick up the tab for new nuclear? Wind farm developers fear National Grid proposals designed to accommodate nuclear power plants will lead to a huge increase in backup costs
Germany's Merkel Rejects Calls To Drop Nuclear Tax Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday dismissed calls by business leaders to drop plans for a nuclear tax, saying threats usually backfired.
Brazil Taps Small Farmers For Biofuels Campaign With its biofuels business increasingly dominated by giant corporations, Brazil is seeking to extend its biofuels sector to include farmers like Lucas Scariot, who makes
around $10,000 per year from selling grain.
Has ObamaCare’s Unpopularity Caused ‘Abject Panic at the White House’?
Politico has obtained and published a confidential messaging-strategy presentation that essentially admits ObamaCare supporters are losing the battle for public opinion. The presentation was delivered to professional leftists by the left-wing Herndon Alliance, based on public opinion research by Democratic pollsters John Anzalone, Celinda Lake, and Stan Greenberg, in a forum organized by the left-wing group Families USA, “one of the central groups in the push for the initial legislation.” It is a stark admission that the public has not warmed to the new health care law, despite predictions that they would do so. (Cato at liberty)
My latest HND entry includes a brief look at water ionizers. These devices apply electrolysis to tap water, yielding so-called alkaline and acidic water. Many health claims are proffered for alkaline water, although they seem to run contrary to basic human biochemistry. Ultimately, the choice is up to the individual. Good uses are also promoted for the acidic water, although it is normally not taken internally. Bear in mind that within conventional allopathic medicine, the exact mechanism of action of perhaps the majority of pharmaceutical drugs is not well understood. And, substances which should have no effect or sometimes even harmful effects can become well-accepted as legitimate therapies. Indeed, the deadly botulism toxin, was reborn as Botox. It should also be noted that several drugs—including some of the most popular such as statins—do not actually make any true therapeutic claims, per se. Rather, they are FDA approved because they "optimize" the concentrations of certain blood components. The optimum concentrations are widely assumed to offer health benefits, but in point of fact, this has hardly ever been proven. As you can see, this "logic" is not terribly different from individuals claiming therapeutic benefits for water treated in a particular manner. The piece gives some coverage to one company in the ionizer space that really tries to do things right, and has compiled more test results on more ionizers than just about anyone else. Read the complete article. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
Revealed: how vitamin D can protect us from cancer Scientists discover how substance controls actions of genes
Body clock mouse study suggests new drug potential LONDON - Scientists have used experimental drugs being developed by Pfizer to reset and restart the body clock of mice in a lab and say their work may offer clues on a range
of human disorders, from jetlag to bipolar disorder.
Experts find gene variants for stomach cancer HONG KONG - Scientists have identified genetic mutations that appear to be associated with both esophageal and stomach cancer in two studies in China, suggesting they may
share similar triggers.
Kudzu extract may treat cocaine addiction: study WASHINGTON - An extract of the kudzu vine being developed to treat alcoholism may also help treat cocaine addiction, researchers at Gilead Sciences Inc reported on Sunday.
People are significantly fatter in countries, states, and cities where car use is more common. Mass transit use, on the other hand, is correlated with lower obesity. But there has been scant evidence that public transportation actually causes widespread weight loss — until now. A study of residents in Charlotte, N.C., found that users of the city’s new light rail system were 81 percent less likely to become obese, and reduced their Body Mass Index by an average 1.18 points — the equivalent of 6.45 pounds for a person 5’5″ tall. The study appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (NYT)
Genes May Overpower Diet in Battle of the Bulge Weight gain is not just the result of an overly rich diet or genes that predispose someone to store fat, mounting research suggests. Rather, studies implicate a third, and more complex, factor – the interaction between our genes and what we eat. (Live Science)
Imported Foods Raise Obesity, Health Issues for Pacific Islanders The World Health Organization says obesity rates are rising in Pacific island countries. So, too, are health problems linked to being overweight.
Asparagus, garlic and artichokes 'could help fight obesity and diabetes' Eating vegetables such as asparagus and Jerusalem artichokes could hold the key to fighting obesity and diabetes, researchers believe.
But wait! Water might do as well: Could Drinking Water Before Meals Help You Lose Weight? People who drank two glasses prior to eating dropped more pounds, study found
They can't find a problem so there must be one: Ocean Garbage Patch Not Growing—Where's "Missing" Plastic? At first, it seemed like good news: Measurements of the "garbage patch" in the Atlantic Ocean showed that the amount of plastic trash there hasn't increased over
the past two decades.
Rate Reduction of Atrazine Could Have Same Effect As Ban An EPA safety advisory panel continues the agency's re-review in September of the 50-year old herbicide, Atrazine. Corn growers fear EPA action could undermine record yields
and global grain supplies. Kansas Corn Growers director and Triazine Network chair Jere White says some farmers might be able to withstand an EPA reduction in Atrazine
application rates. But others might already be applying at or near the maximum allowable rate.
Filmmaker Cameron, in Aspen, has harsh words for global warming skeptics ASPEN — James Cameron doesn't mince words when talking about people who are skeptical that humans are causing global warming.
Hide the Debate: Cameron ducks Climate Debate with Breitbart, Morano, & McElhinney
James Cameron—King of Hypocrites Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.
Global Warming Summit's Warm Welcome: Morano told to drive car into garage with engine running and then close the doors (Marc Morano, Climate Depot)
Friedman, Lovins wow crowd at Aspen AREDay | PostIndependent.com Takeway point: If your house is bigger than Tom Friedman's mansion (below), maybe you should consider a lifestyle change:
Secretary Clinton's Climate Con In a disaster bigger than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 20 million Pakistanis have lost their homes in Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years... View Enlarged Image
Crank of the Week - August 22, 2010 - Hillary Clinton
Clinton, in an interview with Pakistan’s Dawn TV, said that on top of the Pakistan floods, which have forced millions out of their homes, the forest fires in Russia are another example. After stating that there is no “direct link” between the disasters in Pakistan and Russia, Clinton did a verbal flip-flop, saying “when you have the changes in climate that affect weather that we’re now seeing, I think the predictions of more natural disasters are unfortunately being played out.” (The Resilient Earth)
“EXTREME WEATHER”? NOT YET!, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY Churchville, VA—The death toll from recent “extreme weather events” has been sharply declining since the 1920s, as my valued colleague Indur Goklany has valorously
pointed out. Air conditioning, flood control, earthquake proofing and better weather forecasting have all helped. Despite vast media coverage, extreme weather now causes only a
half-percent of global deaths. A large part of the gains came through crop production increases using fossil-fueled industrial fertilizers and irrigation pumps. This meant the
world had fossil-fueled food to share with countries suddenly caught by devastating (but short- term) drought or flood.
Disaster Losses and Climate Change
[UPDATE: The NYT's Andy Revkin covers the new article here.] Readers of this blog already know the answer to this question, and here is Bouwers' conclusion: The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters. Bouwers rightly acknowledges that there are uncertainties in such studies, and in particular, there will be a need to refine efforts to evaluate changing vulnerability and exposure in future such work, especially as the signal of greenhouse gas driven climate change is expected to become larger. However, such uncertainties are not presently so large as to undercut Bouwers' conclusion, e.g.,
A pre-publication version of the paper is available here in PDF. Bouwer, L.M. (in press). Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, doi:10.1175/2010BAMS3092.1. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
China’s Projected CO2 Emissions 23. August 2010 In my last post I wrote about China’s aggressive, yet legitimate, expansion of its energy supply. I wonder what the western climate hand-wringers think about the following graphic? Will they ask China about this in Cancun? 
China's projected CO2 emissions growth My bet is that they’re going to ignore it and focus instead on USA’s and Europe’s emissions. What I find particularly entertaining is that even if the USA did cut its CO2 emissions by 2o% by 2030 (to about 4.7 million tons annually), Chinese growth would wipe out the savings in just 1o years (2020) or less. Germany wants to put its entire country through economic hardship to reduce its CO2 emissions by 30% by 2020. That’s a drop of about 250 million tonnes. China’s growth would wipe out the alleged benefit of that in just a matter of months. And if small countries like Canada, Australia, Denmark or New Zealand all make their cuts, China’s emissions growth will offset their reductions in a matter of days or hours. (No Tricks Zone)
Supporters of Climate Camp action are 'useful idiots' The campaign of criminal damage in Edinburgh is targeting companies engaged in decent, lawful and worthwhile activities, says Alan Cochrane.
While China Opens The Throttle, Environmentally-Hypnotized USA Chokes Itself 23. August 2010 Greenie organisations and experts are hoping China will take steps to curb its voracious appetite for energy and wondering whether it will meet its emissions reduction targets. 
No EPA shackles in China, and it shows. Step aside America. The answer to that question is NO. China isn’t going to meet any CO2 targets. China is booming and on track to easily surpass the USA in economic might in as little as 15 years. In 50 years, it’s not even going to be close. That’s the one and only target – period. Not only will China soon dominate the world’s energy markets, but as its biggest creditor, it will have the USA on its knees. Why? Because China is fueling its economy, while the USA chokes its own. Nothing makes this clearer than a report of the Institute for Energy Research here: I) China is wheeling, dealing, and positioning itself globally- Continue reading “While China Opens The Throttle, Environmentally-Hypnotized USA Chokes Itself” (No Tricks Zone)
Oh dear... World-renowned experts to lead discussion with the chemistry community on climate change BOSTON, Aug. 23, 2010 — In response to doubts about the causes and potential extent of global climate change, a panel of four climate experts today will review the current
state of climate science and discuss observed and predicted changes.
Climate Scientists Just Don't Get It
While the desire to avoid future accusations is believable, what is needed here is not more “nuance” but better science. The editorial introduces two commentaries, one by a real climate scientist and one by a social anthropologist, which focus on the lessons learned from last winter's “media frenzy.” They argue that climate scientists must “root their efforts in the global (and not just the scientific) community.” In other words, all of the past problems were due to a lack of clear communication. Scientists must learn to relate to the common man.
Being a cultural anthropologist, Krauss is more about political correctness than scientific relevance. He summarizes climate science's fall from grace:
Openly admitting that the Copenhagen conference was a “crisis in climate policy,” he declares that attention needs to be shifted from “global goals to societally relevant, local and pragmatic countermeasures.” Countermeasures? Against global warming or its critics? Still, Krauss manages to identify at least part of the anthropogenic global warming alarmists' public relations problem:
Here is a not so subtle crack in the previously unbroken front presented by AGW believers. Some vocal climate change boosters are now pejoratively called “alarmists,” and likened to climate change skeptics. A more accurate comparison would have been to equate the alarmists to the climate community's favorite boogiemen—deniers. Still, it is progress when the existence of obsessed, doctrinaire alarmists is being publicly denounced in a peer reviewed, scientific journal.  The second commentary, entitled “The climate change game,” was provided by Klaus Hasselmann, Emeritus Director of the Max-Planck Institut für Meteorologie. I must admit that I was flummoxed by Prof. Hasselmann's essay. “A cursory glance at the interactions between the main players—climate scientists, the media and climate sceptics—immediately reveals the elementary feedbacks that produced the climategate spectacle,” he boldly proclaims. It is not climate science that is in question in his view; public perception and conflicts of interest have sidetracked the debate:
I had expected that most of the touchy-feely, sociological, politically correct dribble would come from the anthropologist's piece. Surprisingly, Hasselmann dips deep into the pseudo-scientific realms for a healthy dose of double-talk. Scientists “should now rise above the debate and help develop models of the coupled climate–socioeconomic system to advise policymakers,” he says, unabashedly.
“The societal goals of climate scientists and the media are broadly compatible,” he states. “However, there is clearly a fundamental incompatibility between those societal goals and the private media goal of producing interesting stories.” Imagine that, politicians want votes and media people headlines. Perhaps to those ensconced in the ivory towers of academia this news comes as a shock. So, who is to blame?
If Hasselmann is any indication, the climate science establishment has learned nothing from their recent trials and tribulations. “Climate scientists cannot take refuge from the sometimes unsavoury tactics of other players by fleeing into their ivory towers, but they can at least obtain moral support from other actors on the climate stage,” he states. Critics are “unsavoury” and scientists should seek support from “other actors.” Other actors means the current crop of eco-activists, the green lobby and professional fear-mongers like Al Gore. So there is the climate community's proffered solution—socio-babel, greater sensitivity to the needs of “other actors,” and, above all, more openness. Interesting, neither of the two commentary articles nor the editorial are openly available from the Nature Geoscience web site. So much for openness from the scientific community. Essentially, the response of the embedded climate science establishment is to speak more clearly, adjusting their message to the needs of the public, while continuing to believe that they have all the answers. As you can see, the climate alarmists' song remains the same—people are causing dangerous global warming. All the scandal and plummeting public belief is taken as an indication that they need to be more convincing, more sensitive, more connected to the societal needs of the public. If only they could get their message out! What utter balderdash.  It was not a lack of clarity in their message that has led to climate science's reversal of fortune—the belief in global warming was wide spread among both the public and the chattering classes (media and politicians). So enthralled were the masses that the Nobel prize was given to a failed American politician and a coven of UN bureaucrats. No, you blind fools. Belief in AGW began falling as people began to learn of the evidence behind your PR scare campaign. If you are a mainstream climate scientist here is what you need to know: It is not your lack of humility or the unsubtle presentation of your beliefs that has turned the public against you. It is the lack of good science that has brought climate science into ill repute. The case for global warming simply isn't compelling, and the more the public learns about it the less inclined they are to believe you. All the networking and getting in touch with local concerns in the world will not save climate science from its own half-assed, slipshod work. Climate science doesn't get it and probably never will. Judging from the sanctimonious drivel in the three Nature Geoscience essays, the climate science community remains insular and self deluding. In their careless hast to garner fame and grant money, climate scientists have become slaves to a lie. The only way to resolve the climate change debate will be to wait three or four decades and see what happens. Of course, by then all of the current crop of alarmists will have comfortably retired on their government and university pensions. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
Head of Australian Science Academy issues decree from Pagan Chieftains of Science An interesting story quietly slipped into the news last week during the election campaign. It crosses several new lines, none of which it acknowledges. Not only are the Western Climate Establishment sitting up and paying attention to skeptics, they’re slowly getting the hang of having the climate debate, and they have finally realized they can’t pretend the “science is settled” on climate feedbacks.  Australian
Academy of non-Science
* From: The Australian (my emphasis added)
Good news. They finally admit (by inference) that there is a debate. Since we amateurs are beating them in the debates and asking questions they can’t answer, they have finally acknowledged that they need to try to answer the questions, and they need to call us skeptics. (They can hardly pit expertise against “deniers” eh?)
Oh ha-de-ha… after all the other versions of the anti-science fake consensus didn’t win the crowd, do they really think that a petty Australian rendition looks any more convincing? More » (Jo Nova)
Putin Ponders Climate Change In Arctic Russia Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin traveled beyond the Arctic Circle on Monday to look into evidence for climate change after a record heatwave ravaged central Russia
this summer.
Planning for unlikely temperature ranges? Study offers historic buildings protection from climate change Some of the nation's most historic buildings and monuments may be better protected from decay in future, following a development by engineers.
Government report: Canadian climate data quality ‘disturbing’ From the “we told you so time and again department”, Canadian weather data is a mess. It took an FOIA to get the “fess up” out in the open. Anybody got a copy of the EC report? So far all we have is press reports. See our WUWT report below, it isn’t just Canada that is in the red with poor data. Though you can see a vast swath of red and lots of missing grey area in Canada. GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought
From the Financial Post Sustained cuts to Environment Canada weather-service programs have compromised the government’s ability to assess climate change and left it with a “profoundly disturbing” quality of information in its data network, says a newly released internal government report.
The stinging assessment, obtained through an access-to-information request, suggests that Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines. Key findings in the report: Continue reading (WUWT)
There is a meeting scheduled September 7-9 2010 in the United Kingdom in Exeter titled Surface temperature datasets for the 21st Century This meeting has a set of white papers to frame the meeting. However, at the very start of the meeting, it presents the bias of the organizers of this meeting as they write
The statement that “These datasets were adequate for assessing whether climate was changing at the global scale“, yet “They do not constitute a sufficiently large sample to truly understand our uncertainty at regional scales” is scientifically flawed. The global average trends are composed of the summation of the regional trends! The data cannot be adequate on the global scale (as an average) but not on the regional scale. While, we need to wait to see what they actually accomplish at this meeting, the above statement indicates the organizers are persisting in assuming any regional variations are random and that a clear signal emerges when the surface temperature data are globally averaged. More generally, they appear to be ignoring research that conflicts with their findings. The Chair of the organizing committee is Peter Thorne and the other members are listed here along with the agenda. This committee includes John Christy, so there will be some ability to present alternative views of the surface temperature trend data. However, a number of the attendees already have shown a bias in their viewpoints and even explicit successful attempts to suppress alternative viewpoints (e.g. Tom Peterson who is now President Commission of Climatology and NOAA NCDC Chief Scientist and Peter Thorne who is Chair of this meeting and now also works at NOAA NCDC). I propose a litmus test to ascertain if this meeting is just another exercise by these scientists to endorse the analyses that they have already reported on in the 2007 IPCC WG and the CCSP reports, or is finally an honest attempt to examine the existing biases and uncertainties. One test will be how they respond to the peer-reviewed issues we raised in our papers Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841. Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2010: Correction to: “An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841″, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D1, doi:10.1029/2009JD013655 Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229. Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2009: Reply to comment by David E. Parker, Phil Jones, Thomas C. Peterson, and John Kennedy on “Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D05105, doi:10.1029/2008JD010938. If they ignore these papers and others papers by our colleagues (e.g. McIntyre et al 2010), or dismiss them without a thorough rationale why, this will confirm that this meeting is just a self-justification exercise. If they seriously consider this other work, however, it would be an important step forward to achieving a more robust land temperature assessment. I am not optimistic, unfortunately. Finally, we will be reporting on several new papers in the coming weeks and months that will provide further documentation of the serious issues with the use of the land surface temperature data to assess multi-decadal trends. This will include the quantitative analysis of the well- and poorly- sited USHCN sites that Anthony Watts and volunteers have been instrumental in surveying. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Fire & Ice: Black Carbon vs Sulfate
In “Warming influenced by the ratio of black carbon to sulphate and the black-carbon source ,” appearing in the August 2010 issue of Nature Geoscience, M. V. Ramana et al. report on the results of the Cheju ABC Plume–Monsoon Experiment (CAPMEX) conducted during the summer, 2008. It provided observations for determining the dependence of the warming (or cooling) effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) on the sources of black carbon (BC), and on the BC-to-sulfate ratios. The campaign was in part motivated by the desire to reduce pollution in Beijing and surrounding areas during the 2008 Summer Olympics. The work, as explained in the paper:
The results suggest that the absorption efficiency is larger in fossil-fuel-based plumes, but these measurements are subject to large uncertainties. The fossil fuel contribution to total BC is about 60% over East Asia and only about 30% over South Asia on the basis of emission inventories. This blog has previously reported on “brown clouds” causing Arctic ice to melt and warming in general. This is important because, in climate models, the global-mean warming is determined by the balance of the radiative forcings—warming by greenhouse gases balanced against cooling by aerosols. Since a greater cooling effect has been used in climate models, the result has been to credit CO2 with a larger warming effect than it really deserves.  Air pollution at the 2008 Summer Olympics' site in Beijing. Some people are confused by that claim—that greater warming by black carbon implies less warming by CO2—but the logic is quite simple. In the IPCC AR4 report, each factor that influences global warming is assigned a radiative forcing value, given in Wm-2. Consider a simple equation for global warming: This says that the total forcing (FTotal) is made up of the sum of all the individual forcings for CO2, NOx, black carbon and all the rest. Note that we are talking about revisions to previous forcing estimates, not increases due to higher emissions in the future. Supposedly, each forcing should cause a portion of any observed temperature change in proportion to its forcing value. So, another way state this is in terms of temperature change: Scientists must also find a way to relate measurements they do have, such as the amount of a gas in the atmosphere or the density of particles in the brown clouds, to the forcing values. This, in turn, relates actual physical measurements to portions of the temperature change. These relationships, linking real world empirical measurements to changes in global temperature, are a way to describe how sensitive temperature change is to a particular factor. The next observation is the crucial one—the amount of temperature change in the past is a fixed value. It has been recorded over time and, though there is always some inaccuracy in measurements, changing any of the values on the right hand side of the temperature equation above cannot alter the total temperature change on the left. If global temperature rose 1°C last century and we suddenly discover that black carbon would have caused 50% more warming than previously though, the only way to balance the equation is to take some ΔT from one or more of the other forcings. In other words, if some forcings are found to cause more warming or less cooling (some factors are negative), then the impact of the remaining forcings must be diminished. When new factors are uncovered it makes sense to reduce the change attributed to CO2, since most of the warming is attributed to it. This not only reduces carbon dioxide's current contribution, it reduces the sensitivity of the climate to future increases in CO2 in climate model calculations.  Changing the size of the slices doesn't change the size of the pie. Why not take the increase from some other forcing? The IPCC wished to make CO2 the villain in the global warming horror show. For years, CO2 has been the catch-all for any warming that could not be attributed to other forcings. CO2 has had its importance inflated by low but uncertain values being attributed to other forcings. So, when better values are identified for factors like black carbon, CO2 must give up some of its influence—it's a zero sum game. Over the past decade, a huge number of new forcing values have been identified, including values for insolation, NOx, methane, stratospheric ozone and, as in the Ramana et al. report, black carbon and other aerosols. Yet many climate modelers cling to the fiction that CO2 is the primary and overwhelming driver of climate change. In fact, if you add up all of the temperature change attributed to other forcings there isn't any temperature change for carbon dioxide to cause! This is not because CO2 has no effect—it does. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but at current levels its effect is not large compared with other factors. Of course, it is really not that simple or scientists would have a better understanding of the whole climate system out by now. The climate system is nonlinear, meaning the response you get from an input change this time may not be proportionally the same as the last time or the next time. On top of its inherent nonlinearity, the climate system also contains many linkages and dependencies among factors, making it impossible to deal with any single forcing value in isolation. An example would be the linkage between black carbon and sulfate in the Ramana et al. study. Still the general principle holds, you cannot revise or introduce new causes for global warming without diminishing the importance of the existing ones, especially CO2 Now, consider that all existing climate models are validated against historical data, a processing called backcasting. The models are tweaked until they reproduce historical climate variations that have been previously recorded. Remember, science's “discovery” of a new factor does not mean that it has suddenly come into being—the new forcing values, either revised or newly uncovered, were present in the past. Introduce a new forcing value and all models are now tuned to produce results they should not have. Which, of course, also means that their predictions for the future are just so much dreck. This latest study is not the first report that black carbon has a more important impact on global temperature than it is usually credited with. A study led by Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that, in the high latitudes the impact of aerosols (sulfates and black carbon) may account for 45% or more of the observed warming which has occurred in at the poles over the past three decades. Over that time Arctic temperatures have risen by 1.7°C, while Antarctic regions have witnessed 0.35°C temperature increases. Others credit black carbon with accelerating the melting of Himalayan glaciers.  Black carbon may affect Himalayan glaciers. Ramana et al. came to the conclusion that black carbon and SO2 are closely interrelated when it comes to atmospheric warming. Reducing BC alone is not going to produce the results that might otherwise be expected. They summarized their findings this way:
As stated, there are other, more compelling reasons to reduce emissions. Emissions from internal combustion engines are particularly bad for the environment and human health. Rather than pursue a fools errand—trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all costs—we should reduce the use of dirty fossil fuels instead. Certainly, reduced dependence on coal for electricity generation and rapid development of hybrid and electric vehicles are good places to start. Far from preserving nature and helping humanity, climate change activism has had the opposite effect. In their bullheaded insistence on demonizing CO2, mainstream climate science has sorely damage the pursuit of reasonable and rational environment policy. Lying about global warming is no way to save the world. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
There is a seminar today [August 23 2010] by Anne Nolin of the Department of Geosciences, at Oregon State University, Corvallis The seminar is titled “Modeling Watershed-Scale Distributions of Snow for Present-day and Future Climate in the U.S. Pacific Northwest Monday, 23 August 2010, 2:00 PM David Skaggs Research Center, Room 1D403. After I present the abstract, I give several comments on this study, which is just one example of a type of climate study that has become common in recent years (i.e. one based on (unverifiable) multi-decadal global climate predictions). The abstract reads
Here are my comments: 1. Her evaluation of the snow distributions for the period 2000-2009 is solid science. 2. The extrapolation into the future using IPCC model predictions downscaled to the region of study, however, is not scientifically sound. First, even with current climate, the global climate models have shown no skill at predicting regional skill more than a season at most into the future. These global models are not able to skillfully simulate such regional circulation patterns as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and ENSO, which are known to have a major effect on the weather in Oregon. 3. The packaging of her results in time periods (i.e. 2030-2050) is inappropriate and misleading to policymakers. 4. Such unverifiable multi-decadal predictions based on the IPCC global models (as exemplified by this seminar) are being supported by the NSF and other agencies, and are being published in the literature. Such studies, where the results are presented as forecasts rather than climate process studies, were not funded before the last 10-15 years or so. 5. My recommended approach is to adopt the perspective that is summarized in the post A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resourse-Based Perspective where with respect to water resources the framework would read
This is a much more inclusive approach than the limited narrowly focused approach presented in the second part of Anne Nolin’s seminar. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
New model to explain away the inconvenient: Why Antarctic Sea Ice Is Growing in a Warmer World Models solve mystery, but suggest South Pole sea ice melt will soon accelerate.
Sheesh! Experts Urge Faster And More Relevant U.N. Climate Reports The U.N. panel of climate scientists should be more nimble at highlighting global warming trends and at fixing mistakes, experts said ahead of the planned August 30 release
of a review of the group's work.
Reflected Sunlight Shines On IPCC Deceptions And Gross Inadequacies By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, August 23, 2010
Incoming Energy Inadequacies It begins with measures of the amount of energy entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only consider changes in the irradiance portion of incoming solar energy (insolation). They claim that up to 1950 it explained over 50 percent of variation then CO2 became 90 percent of the cause of change. Part of the reason for downplaying irradiance is the low percentage of change in modern records. The earliest record from outside the atmosphere from a manned observatory was Skylab (1973 – 1979). Skylab showed a change of 0.14% in the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). An average over time shows a variation of 0.1% for an 11 - year sunspot cycle. This seems like a very small number and therefore of little consequence. The difficulty is by varying TSI by 6% in a computer model you can ‘explain’ all temperature change for the entire history of the Earth. There is also no agreement about the TSI at the top of the Atmosphere (TOA). As Raschke explained, “Solar radiation is the prime source for all processes within our climate system. Its total amount, the total solar irradiance (TSI) reaching the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), and its variability are now quite accurately known on the basis of multiple satellite measurements and extremely careful calibration activities (Fröhlich and Lean, 2004).”… “Computations, therefore, should be relatively easy.“ However, he shows there is no agreement. He compared 20 models and their input values for TOA. (Figure 1) He concludes, “It can be speculated that such different meridional profiles of the solar radiative forcing at TOA should also have impact on the computed atmospheric circulation pattern, in particular when simulations over periods of several decades to several centuries are performed. Therefore, related projects within the World Climate Research Program should take appropriate steps to avoid systematic discrepancies as shown above and to estimate their possible impact on the resulting climate and circulation changes.” IPCC are projecting climate change for the next 50 years or more. So we have problems with the amount of incoming energy, but there are more problems with what happens to the energy once it enters the atmosphere.
Outgoing Inadequacies One of these is change in albedo. Some believe it’s more important than CO2 in affecting balance. “The most interesting thing here is that the albedo forcings, in watts/sq meter seem to be fairly large. Larger than that of all manmade greenhouse gases combined.” When sunlight strikes a surface the color, texture and angle of the light (known as the angle of incidence) determines how much is reflected or absorbed. The difference between them, as a percentage, is called the albedo from the root Latin word albus for white. With a pure white shiny surface 100 percent of the light is reflected so the albedo is 100. On a matte black surface 100 percent is absorbed and the albedo is zero (Figure 2). A solar collector needs to absorb as much solar energy as possible so is matte black and set at right angles to the solar rays.
The moon’s albedo is 7, which means 93 units of 100 are absorbed and 7 units reflected. Earth’s albedo is 30 on average for the entire globe. The amount varies from a high of 75 to 95 percent for fresh snow down to 8 or 9 percent for coniferous forest. Seasonal variation in snow and ice cover is important as it affects global energy and therefore the from year to year. However, the major factor is variability in the type and amount of cloud cover. Thick cloud varies from 60 to 90 and thin cloud from 30 to 50. This variability explains most of the change in albedo shown in Figure 3. The right side scale shows changes in energy with a range of about 9 watts per square meter. Compare this with the 2.5 watts per square meter change estimated to be due to human activities.
IPCC Inadequacies IPCC reject irradiance as a cause of temperature change since 1950, but they also reject variations in sun/earth relationships, known as the Milankovitch Effect and the relationship between sunspots and temperature hypothesized by the Svensmark Cosmic Theory. The latter shows a relationship between changes in solar magnetism evidenced by sunspots. As the magnetism varies it determines the amount of galactic cosmic radiation reaching the Earth, which creates low cloud. As low cloud varies albedo varies. The Earthshine project of the California Institute of Technology that produced Figure 3 concluded in 2004. “Earth’s average albedo is not constant from one year to the next; it also changes over decadal timescales. The computer models currently used to study the climate system do not show such large decadal-scale variability of the albedo.” Sadly, there are many factors affecting climate change that the IPCC ignore or underplay to achieve the political result that human CO2 is the sole cause.
They only acknowledge “cloud albedo effect” (Figure 4), but correctly admit their level of scientific understanding (LOSU) is low. It is low or medium low for seven of nine items. Low means 2 out of 10 confidence level, medium - low is less than 4 out of 10. They incorrectly claim a high LOSU for CO2, or 8 out of 10, but that is politically necessary. So they ignore many variables and admit they know little about the ones they study. It is a total abrogation of scientific and social responsibility to let these results form the basis for draconian and destructive energy and environmental policies. They shouldn’t have won a Nobel Peace Prize. They couldn’t have won a Science Prize. (CFP)
UN inquiry into oil spills lets Shell off the hook LONDON: A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities which have long campaigned to force the company to clean up its spills and pay compensation. (SMH)
U.S. Research Vessel Sees Few Signs Of Spilled Oil Scientists above a U.S. research ship have started an around-the-clock search for elusive signs of oil lurking beneath the Gulf of Mexico's surface in what they jokingly
call "Operation Dipstick."
U.S. Officials Saw Drilling Ban Costing Jobs: Report Senior U.S. officials expected the deepwater drilling ban to cost about 23,000 jobs and hold up $10.2 billion in investments, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing federal documents. (Reuters)
The Danes didn't need live-fire gunnery practice? Danish warship blocks Greenpeace Arctic oil protest The Danish navy has warned that the Esperanza will be boarded by armed personnel if it breaches the exclusion zone
Carol Browner Knows the Drill (a surprising advocate of hydraulic fracturing of gas) by Chris Tucker In June 2004, EPA released a study examining the safety and performance of an energy technology known as hydraulic fracturing – particularly in the context of its use in coalbed methane wells, from which nearly 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas were produced in 2008 (latest numbers). The goal of the study was simple: Determine whether the fracturing of coalbed wells had the potential to adversely affect the quality and composition of underground sources of drinking water (USDW). EPA’s methodology: Research more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, and interview almost 100 different state regulators, environmentalists, and industry reps. EPA’s conclusion: No evidence linking the deployment of fracturing technology to drinking water contamination. Of course, since the study was released during the tenure of the previous president, its findings were rejected out-of-hand by environmentalists – never mind that the study itself was initiated during the Clinton administration by then-EPA administrator Carol Browner. Interestingly, Ms. Browner crops up a number of times in the looking back at the history of EPA involvement with hydraulic fracturing – and not necessarily in ways you’d expect. Here she is in 1995, for example, blinding a plaintiff’s attorney with some science in explaining the concept of geological separation, and why that’s an important part in assessing the safety of the fracturing process:
(emphasis added) Why is any of this important? Quite simply, if you’re looking to prove that fracturing activities contaminate groundwater – notwithstanding 60 years of evidence suggesting the opposite — first you need to prove the formations being fractured are communicating with the formations holding that groundwater. Problem is, if you can’t prove it’s happening in coalbed methane formations (which reside only hundreds of feet from the water table), the job of proving it’s happening in shale formations (which reside several thousands of feet from the water table) becomes all the more difficult to do. And shale, after all, is the big prize here. Remember how coalbeds produced 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2008 nationwide? According to one report, natural gas development from shale could yield 5 trillion cubic feet by 2020. Not nationwide; that’s in a single state (PA). Of course, plenty of folks have plenty of reasons to oppose the availability of reliable, low-cost energy – and they’re not about to let a silly thing like science to get in the way of tying the use of fracturing to the mass contamination of groundwater. A documentary airing on HBO right now called GasLand attempts to make that case in several scenes of the film – describing the process as a “blast” that induces a “mini-earthquake,” tearing apart the subsurface rock and creating massive chasms connecting formations below with much shallower strata carrying drinking water above. Of course, serious geologists have known since time immemorial that hydraulic fracturing doesn’t (and can’t) contaminate USDWs – a function of the fact that the two strata (energy and drinking water) are separated by thousands of feet underground, and millions of tons of impermeable rock. But thanks to the good folks over at Pinnacle Technologies, we now have some solid data to express this separation in quantitative terms. As reported by Pinnacle general manager Kevin Fisher in July’s edition of the American Oil & Gas Reporter, the following graphs plot actual field data from tens of thousands of fracturing operations conducted over the past decade – this first one in the Barnett Shale formation in Texas, which shows quite clearly that even the most shallow fissures created through the fracturing process remain separated from the water table by more than 3,500 feet: 
But that’s just the Barnett, right? Everyone knows there’s no problem down in the Metroplex. Isn’t the real area of concern the Mighty Marcellus – where activists continue to claim that gas, chemicals, salt, metals, and Lord knows what else regularly get dredged up from the depths and beamed into every well, sink and stream in sight? Well, Pinnacle ran the numbers on the Marcellus as well, and although the data set isn’t quite as robust as what you’d find in the Barnett (remember: we’ve been developing that one a bit longer), the story in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio is remarkably similar. To wit: 
Here we see an even greater separation between fractures in the underlying rock and sources of potable water above – with the closest the two shall meet clocking in at roughly 4,300 feet. In other words, the deepest formations holding drinking water and the most shallow depth at which you’ll find a fracture in the Marcellus Shale are still separated by the equivalent of three-and-a-half Empire State Buildings – or three Petronas Towers, for our Malaysian friends. And by the way: they’re not exactly separated by air either. Between the two, you’ll find millions of tons of solid, impermeable rock – rock that has for literally hundreds of millions of years acted as an immutable barrier preventing salty water below from communicating with fresh water above. But just to be sure we got this right, we sent these graphs and data up to Williamsville, N.Y. so that Ph.D. geologist Michael P. Joy might give them a gander and share some technical insights into what makes the phenomenon possible. Below is a (small) excerpt from the email he sent us in reply:
Right. What he said. Chris Tucker is a spokesman for Energy In Depth, an outreach and education campaign started by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 2008. (MasterResource)
Anthony Cordesman Busts the Myth of Energy Independence
About two and a half years ago, I published my third book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence,” which provided multiple arguments as to why the US cannot, and should not even attempt to, be independent of the world’s single biggest and most important marketplace: the global energy market. [Read More] (Robert Bryce, ET)
On Nuclear Energy, 'Merkel Did Things Backwards' Longer lifespans for nuclear reactors in Germany seems a foregone conclusion. But how much money will the energy industry have to hand over to Berlin for the privilege?
Chancellor Merkel has lost control of the debate, say German commentators.
200-fold boost in fuel cell efficiency advances 'personalized energy systems' BOSTON, Aug. 23, 2010 — The era of personalized energy systems — in which individual homes and small businesses produce their own energy for heating, cooling and
powering cars — took another step toward reality today as scientists reported discovery of a powerful new catalyst that is a key element in such a system. They described the
advance, which could help free homes and businesses from dependence on the electric company and the corner gasoline station, at the 240th National Meeting of the American
Chemical Society, being held here this week.
Side Effects: What Obamacare and the Death Star have in Common
So far, 21 states have filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare. As they move forward, it’s worth pondering what would happen to the health care overhaul if they succeed. Could one lawsuit be the proton torpedo that blows up the Obamacare Death Star? Typically, courts can deem a legislative provision unconstitutional without it spelling doom for the entire piece of legislation. But Obamacare isn’t typical legislation. Ben Domenech explains: “Most laws of large size and scope have something called a “severability clause” attached to them. Essentially, this means that if one part of a piece of large legislation is ruled unconstitutional by a court, that unconstitutional portion is “severed” from the rest of the bill — the ruling doesn’t stop the rest of the law from being enforced.” Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Fast Track To Government Health Care While there is broad agreement there are problems in our health sector that must be solved, the American people consistently have said they oppose government control. Yet many of the decisions now being made in the bowels of the bureaucracy could lead to a government system that people fear. (Grace-Marie Turner, IBD)
Obamacare Proponents Running Scared
A new messaging strategy, based on public polling results from top Democratic pollsters, suggests that congressional lawmakers should wave the white flag when discussing Obamacare in their election campaigns. The PowerPoint presentation, released in a conference call organized by Families USA, encouraged officials to “keep claims small and credible: don’t overpromise or ‘spin’ what the law delivers.” In other words, abandon ship on claims that lawmakers made for months during the health reform debate—that the legislation would in any way reduce the nation’s deficit or lower health care costs (in fact, this was a recommendation in the presentation’s “not-to-do” list). Continue reading... (The Foundry)
When Economic Policy Became Social Policy The recent Treasury Department conference is further proof we will never get out of this housing mess until we are ready to face facts.
Study IDs 'alarming disparities' in child obesity NEW YORK - While the extent of obesity among kids overall seems to have peaked, it's still climbing among African American and Native American girls, new research from
California shows.
U.S. Farmers Oppose EPA's Proposed Dust Standard American farmers have been ridiculing a proposal by U.S. regulators to reduce the amount of dust floating in rural air.
Supermarkets lose heart in green war on plastic carrier bags Campaigners call for legislation as retailers fail to meet targets to cut one of the most visible signs of waste. Susie Mesure reports
Andrew Simms... We've gone into the ecological red On 21 August our environmental resource budget ran out. Now we're living beyond the planet's means to support us
IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes,
basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no
argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.
Judge to rule in 10 days on Cuccinelli climate case against University of Virginia CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into
whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth's temperature.
Defenders of Mann stage protest rally at UVA From NBC29: Protestors, angry with the way Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has tried to make his case, rallied on grounds at the University of Virginia Friday afternoon. Only one small problem….. 
click image to watch video Turnout was smaller than expected, as just a few people showed up. Organizers put the rally together to express the viewpoint of some students and faculty. They say the actions of Cuccinelli could have severe ramifications on the academic world. ============= The protest organizer, shown below, doesn’t inspire confidence, especially when you listen to what he has to say. Where’s Bill McKibben when you need him?
Full story here (WUWT)
The decision by congressional Democrats to not try to pass a major energy bill in this Congress, while receiving a modest amount of media attention, actually constitutes one
of the sharpest rebukes to a sitting president in recent memory.
White House web site has a disappearing Cap-and-Trade Act Remember how firmly committed President Obama was to passing a cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy reform bill this year? You don't? Well, don't go looking around on
the White House web site for evidence because it's been scrubbed, according to an energy and environment trade publication.
‘Think about What’s Happening in Countries like Germany . . . ‘ August 20, 2010 2:45 PM Okay, Mr. President. Let’s think.
Hey, I wonder if we’re actually following Germany’s lead and cutting the cascade of “green economy waste? From E&E Daily (subscription required, h/t American Energy Alliance) — or see WaPo‘s whining today here, aptly titled “Robbing Peter…”, if not for the reasons they intend:
That’s wonderful . . . so long as it comes with an admission of the boondoggle. Otherwise, we’ll be back here soon enough, claiming that mandating economic redundancies and expensive electricity will “grow the economy.” (NRO)
Surreal Environmental Regulations ? Even for California
This November, along with a host of anxious politicians, California’s own greenhouse gas law, AB 32, will be on the ballot. Those worried about the law’s potential economic consequences are pushing Proposition 23 that calls for freezing provisions of AB 32 until California’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5% or below for four consecutive quarters. Serious questions about apocalyptic global warming aside, one would expect California’s horrendous unemployment rate of 12.3% and the state’s near bankrupt status, to deter the golden – or rather green – state’s aggressive emissions regulatory agenda but such is not the case. Last Tuesday, the California Air Resource Board (CARB) released a report outlining preliminary emissions reduction targets for four major metropolitan areas – San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and the Sacramento region. The report calls for a 13-16% reduction of carbon dioxide by 2035. What is surreal even by California’s standards is that, at the same time CARB is preparing to ratchet down on greenhouse gas emissions, the agency is pushing California dry cleaners to adopt machines that actually emit greenhouse gases. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Another big spending center-left party loses its majority.
U.N. Panel To Review CER Request From 5th HFC Plant A United Nations panel will review a carbon offset request from a fifth greenhouse gas destroying plant, the UN said on Friday, a sign that all similar projects approved
under a Kyoto Protocol carbon finance scheme will be scrutinized.
The End Of Road For Climate Looting Russian heat and droughts and fire? Maybe it’s global warming. Pakistani (and Kashmiri) floods? Maybe it’s global warming. Likewise for the European heatwave of 2003, and pretty much any flood or drought Revkin, Romm and friends have ever been able to hear about in the news. Expect the law of diminishing returns to kick in quickly. Now, wouldn’t it make more sense to finally abandon the rather unpleasant rushing after the latest tragedies in the hope of being able to blame them on (anthropogenic) global warming? Rather than behaving like “climate looters”, it would be far more effective for AGW believers to figure out where in the world a “climate signal” might be materialising (eg where trends in disasters are present or on the edge of being detectable), in order to concentrate minds on forecasting what if anything might happen in those specific places also with the goal of pushing adaptation projects forward. This is not all too different from what vulcanologists already do. And it looks like a good litmus test to tell scavengers from the rest. (OmniClimate)
Oh, for goodness sake! Russian Heat Wave Dents Hopes of climate "winners" Russia's summer heat wave has dimmed prospects that northern countries will "win" from climate change thanks to factors such as longer crop-growing seasons or
fewer deaths from winter cold, experts say.
Another Perspective on the Russian Heat Wave
NOAA has this to say about the Russian heat wave of 2010: (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Is Climatology A Thing Of The Past? For an inordinately long time, one of the biggest troubles with Climatology has been its fixation with predicting the future, far before it will ever be able to understand the actual mechanisms of Earth’s climate in detail enough. This has several nasty consequences, including a predisposition on the part of the very scientists to describe the future as some kind of catastrophe, and to make do without professional niceties (what is the point of being gentlemanly when the world is risking a fiery end of ice or fire?) There are however indications that, in truth, the situation is the other way around, with the mainstream climatologist a prisoner of the past. One could look at the humorous suggestions by Italian scientist Vincenzo Ferrara on how to be right about climate change (always). More seriously, the 1972-1975 paradigm shift seems to speak loud and clear on the subject. As should now be understood by all, the scientific consensus in 1972 was that the world was cooling. Even Peterson, Connolley and Fleck state as much between the lines of their much-misunderstood (by its authors) paper. Things changed then with Damon and Kunen’s paper in 1975, the consensus became about a warming globe, and the rest as they say is history (more here). How intriguing then to find that the World’s temperature might have started going upwards (again) but when, between 1973 and 1975. Says who? Says Tamino. In a world they believed was cooling, climatologists found ways to explain why it was cooling. In a world they believe is warming, climatologists find ways to explain why it is warming. The fact that those beliefs are based on scientific data and theories means nothing more than current and past climate science have been scientifically feeling their ways through a very obscure dark. No sign any of us is any the wiser. This bodes nothing well about Climatology’s ability to tell us anything about our future, in terms of risk management or much else. Like WWI generals, mainstream climatologists constantly fighting the last war might actually end up becoming a policy hindrance, a litigious and politically untrustworthy source of continuousdistraction. The only surefire prediction we can therefore makeis that if for any reason the Earth’s temperatures will plummet, there will be no shortage of well-intentioned people, scientists and otherwise, ready to extend a trend of the recent past to next century and beyond. (OmniClimate)
by Jim Hollingsworth Many scientists are concerned about the future and continue to study various aspects of our environment, including the climate. But, for Dr. James Hansen there is no doubt. Our world is headed for disaster unless we take immediate and drastic action to control greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO2). You have to give the man credit: He actually believes what he preaches. He shows pictures of his wonderful grandchildren and his concern for them is certainly evident. There is only one problem with what he shares: There is little evidence to support what he says. Take this example:
Now, the one thing that Dr. Hansen is not going to share with us is the “clear evidence” of a coming crisis. In fact there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Dr. Hansen may understand some scientific principles but he seems to lack any common sense. He talks about plants becoming extinct because they cannot migrate because cities and farms are in the way. Yet, any person who has ever planted a garden knows that seeds find a way of getting where they want to go. Dr. Hansen, along with a number of other climate change alarmists (like Al Gore), believes that man is the chief cause of global warming, and that warming is generally harmful. In fact more people die from cold than die from heat. Not only that but increasing levels of carbon dioxide are generally beneficial to plants, enabling them to survive with less water. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Oh... Diary of a Dying Planet Killer heat waves. Melting glaciers. Floods that strand millions of refugees. Global warming is not some futuristic doomsday. It's already here - and the death toll is rising (Rolling Stone)
Joe Bastardi On Hurricanes: It’s Astounding How Quiet It’s Been – So Far 21. August 2010 At his latest video , Joe Bastardi gives his latest hurricane forecast. 
Tropical cyclone. Source: Wikipedia
Joe compares 2010 with 1950, a year the hurricane season started off late, but then did so with a vengeance. It produced 8 major hurricanes in 6 weeks. He sees 2010 having very similar conditions, and so he predicts the same pattern as 1950. Joe also explains his theory that with global warming, the tendency will be less tropical storm activity because there will be less of a need to redistribute heat and
pressure to the higher latitudes. That’s what hurricanes do.
Joe doesn’t expect it to stay quiet. He’s telling you to fasten your seatbelt, because we are very likely in for some rough riding. Continue reading “Joe Bastardi On Hurricanes: It’s Astounding How Quiet It’s Been – So Far” (No Tricks Zone)
Rising sea of irresponsibility What is the risk of sea level increases?
Heide Cullen has written a new book expressing her views about the world’s climate 40 years from now. You may recall that Cullen is the Weather Channel climatologist who suggested that other meteorologists and climatologists who express doubts about anthropogenic global warming be decertified by the American Meteorological Society. Her new book, “The Weather of the Future,” features an alarming computer generated image of Manhattan in a sea-level-risen, hurricane plagued world of 2050 on the front cover.
In the world of digital graphics you can create any reality you desire. In this case Cullen presents Manhattan underwater, presumably after 40 years of sea level rise combined with a category 4 hurricane storm surge. The following picture is a close-up detail of the buildings. The group of buildings in the foreground is Lower Manhattan and the group of buildings in the background is Midtown Manhattan. “The Village” area, Chelsea, the Garment district, etc., between Lower and Midtown Manhattan is conspicuously covered in water. Water surrounds the Empire State Building, and 250 foot tall buildings immediately south of it are submerged. (Climate Sanity)
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity? After all, the Earth is a planet. Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
The Phytoplankton Are Starving 22. August 2010 The reduction in phytoplankton is not due to oceanic warming, but instead to overfishing. Guest writer Ed Caryl digs into the subject of phytoplankton. 
Phytoplankton clouds shown in light green. Source: NASA
The Phytoplankton Are Starving A recent press release from Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, announced an article published in Nature (behind a pay-wall) that we’ve been losing 1% of our phytoplankton each year dating back to 1899, meaning 40% since 1950. The article blames it on ocean warming. The article was discussed in July on WUWT and here. Let’s pull our heads back a bit more and look beyond warming. Why are phytoplankton important? Phytoplankton or algae are single-celled, photosynthesizing creatures at the “bottom” of the ocean food chain. They take in sunlight and CO2 and produce carbohydrates, just like plants do on land. They are the source of the biomass that all larger animals and fish feed upon. Without them, life in the ocean would not exist. Yet, much of the literature makes no mention of any dependence in the other direction, i.e. phytoplankton depend on the creatures higher up in the food chain. Continue reading “The Phytoplankton Are Starving” (No Tricks Zone)
Sigh... Limiting ocean acidification under global change Emissions of carbon dioxide are causing ocean acidification as well as global warming. Scientists have previously used computer simulations to quantify how curbing of carbon dioxide emissions would mitigate climate impacts. New computer simulations have now examined the likely effects of mitigation scenarios on ocean acidification trends. They show that both the peak year of emissions and post-peak reduction rates influence how much ocean acidity increases by 2100. Changes in ocean pH over subsequent centuries will depend on how much the rate of carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced in the longer term. (NOC)
Ocean Acidification is a Misnomer BY JACK DINI–A good way to excite people is to tell them that something is becoming more ‘acid,’ as ‘the oceans are undergoing acidification and this is a potential
environmental catastrophe.’
Bremerhaven, 20th August 2010. The extent of the sea ice in the Arctic will reach its annual minimum in September. Forecasts indicate that it will not be as low as in 2007, the year of the smallest area covered by sea ice since satellites started recording such data. Nevertheless, sea ice physicists at the Alfred Wegener Institute are concerned about the long-term equilibrium in the Arctic Ocean. They have indications that the mass of sea ice is dwindling because its thickness is declining. To substantiate this, they are currently measuring the ice thickness north and east of Greenland using the research aircraft Polar 5. The objective of the roughly one-week campaign is to determine the export of sea ice from the Arctic. Around a third to half of the freshwater export from the Arctic Ocean takes place in this way – a major drive factor in the global ocean current system. (AWI)
Drought drives decade-long decline in plant growth Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to
a new study of NASA satellite data.
Daily Global Temperature Updates on the Discover Website: An Updated Tutorial I’m getting more and more questions about the daily global temperature updates we provide at the NASA Discover website. I suppose this is because 2010 is still in the running to beat 1998 as the warmest year in our satellite data record (since 1979). But also we have made a couple of significant changes recently, and there continue to be some misunderstandings of the data that are posted there. The bottom line is this: You can rely ONLY upon two channels at the Discover “Temperature Trends” page: (1) the “Aqua ch.5 v2” channel for global-average mid-tropospheric temperatures, from the AMSU on NASA’s Aqua satellite, and (2) the “Sea Surface” temperatures, which are averaged over the global ice-free oceans (60N to 60S), from the AMSR-E instrument on Aqua. Do not trust any of the other channels for temperature trend monitoring. This is because, while the Aqua satellite equatorial crossing time is kept very near 1:30 am and pm with periodic orbit maneuvers, the rest of the channels come from the NOAA-15 satellite whose equatorial crossing time has now drifted from its original 7:30 am/pm value in late 1998 to about 4:30 am/pm now. This orbital drift makes the NOAA-15 channels (4 and 6) unusually warm, and is why those of you who have been monitoring channel 4 and 6 at the Discover site are seeing such warm temperatures. Tropospheric Temperature Monitoring Note that even though NOAA-15 should not be used for trend monitoring, all of our global imagery at the “Recent Global Temperatures” page come from that satellite since the spatial patterns are not substantially affected by diurnal drift of the satellite orbit. If you scan through the global images for channels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 at the web site you will see how the surface and oceanic cloud water signatures change as you progress from the window channels (1, 2), to those channels more sensitive to oxygen emission at higher altitudes (3, 4, 5, etc.) The next image is a screenshot of the Aqua AMSU ch.5 portion of our “Temperature Trends” page. In order to plot daily values that can be compared to previous years
before the Aqua satellite was launched, we have intercalibrated the Aqua ch. 5 average annual cycle in daily global-average temperatures to the official UAH MT product during
their overlap period (June 2002 through December 2009). This also allows us to compute curves for daily maximum, minimum, and 1979-1999 daily averages: Most of the daily record high temperatures were set in 1998. As can be seen, 2010 has also been quite warm. For those who are wondering, the main reason why 1998 was warmer in the satellite record than the surface thermometer record is due to strong warming of the troposphere over the tropical east Pacific during the El Nino conditions in early 1998. These regions are not well represented in the surface thermometer data. Sea Surface Temperature Monitoring Because of AMSR-E’s through-cloud sensing, it provides a more accurate global average SSTs on short time scales compared to the traditional infrared measurements. We
download the binary gridded SST data from the RSS website once a day and compute global area averages, which are labeled “Sea
Surface” in the channel list on the Discover Temperature Trends page: Since the AMSR-E data are available only since mid-2002, our SST record only extends back that far. There are no Max, Min, or Avg traces provided for this web page. But another reason they diverge is because there are slight variations in the heat loss by the ocean to the atmosphere. These “intraseasonal oscillations” are usually in the tropics, and are only about +/- 1% variations in the average heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere. Nevertheless, they can cause substantial temperature swings, especially in the troposphere. This is why they produce opposing temperature signals. When there is above-normal ocean heat loss, the ocean surface cools below normal. Most of that heat loss is through evaporation. Meanwhile, the extra moisture in the atmosphere leads to above-normal rainfall, and so causes excess latent heating of the troposphere. The result is that SST cooling is accompanied by tropospheric warming, while SST warming is accompanied by tropospheric cooling. These events occur on time scales of around 1 month, and so there is usually no long-term climate change significance to them. These high-frequency signals are always riding upon a more slowly varying background of temperature variability, which I believe are mostly caused by natural variations in cloud cover changing the solar energy input into the ocean. (Roy W. Spencer)
Not Under My Backyard: One German Town's Fight against CO2 Capture Technology The next Chernobyl? A death blow to tourism? Poisoned drinking water? The residents of Beeskow, Germany worry that a planned CO2 storage facility under their town could end
in disaster and are fighting the project. Europe, though, hopes the technology will drastically reduce emissions.
Oil Plume Is Not Breaking Down Fast, Study Says New research confirms the existence of a huge plume of dispersed oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico and suggests that it has not broken down rapidly, raising the possibility
that it might pose a threat to wildlife for months or even years.
Deep plumes of oil could cause dead zones in the Gulf WASHINGTON— A new simulation of oil and methane leaked into the Gulf of Mexico suggests that deep hypoxic zones or "dead zones" could form near the source of the pollution. The research investigates five scenarios of oil and methane plumes at different depths and incorporates an estimated rate of flow from the Deepwater Horizon spill, which released oil and methane gas into the Gulf from April to mid July of this year. (AGU)
This paper provides a factual and objective view of the reality of the effects of some of the world’s greatest oil spills. It particularly deals with the geography of the
region in which the spill occurred, the climatic effects on the spill, the probable volume oil spilled, the cleanup actions that followed and the long-term environmental
effects.
Even sillier season: Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks Behind government dismissals of 'alarmist' fears there is growing concern over critical future energy supplies
Ministers to help UK energy firms win deals abroad David Cameron and other British ministers will "get out there" lobbying Russia and other oil-rich countries to give UK energy companies new business, according to Charles Hendry, the energy minister. (TDT)
The Great British Solar Scam (and the scourge of feed-in tariffs)
Every year millions of Britons join the birds and fly south for a vacation. The reason for the annual exodus is simple enough: guaranteed sun, guaranteed heat. I have yet to hear of a foreign tourist giving the same reasons for visiting British shores. [Read More] (Peter C Glover, ET)
Has the spark gone out of electric cars? With petrol prices sky-high and the Government offering inducements to go green, electric cars are being championed as the future of motoring. But as David Rose reveals, their real cost could give us a nasty shock... (Daily Mail)
US proposes wide changes in role fighting disease WASHINGTON - The U.S. government proposed big changes on Thursday to the way it works with companies to fight new disease threats such as flu, including reform at the Food
and Drug Administration and setting up centers to make vaccines quickly.
U.S. flu plan cuts red tape, rewards biotechs WASHINGTON - The U.S. government released a new plan on Thursday for cutting red tape and working more closely with companies to prepare for the next big biological disaster
-- be it a flu pandemic or nuclear attack.
More US teens get vaccinated, CDC finds WASHINGTON - More U.S. teens are getting recommended vaccines against certain cancers, meningitis and infectious diseases, government researchers reported on Thursday.
Study links pesticides to attention problems WASHINGTON - Children whose mothers were exposed to certain types of pesticides while pregnant were more likely to have attention problems as they grew up, U.S. researchers
reported on Thursday.
Kidney transplant revolution gives hope to dying patients Previously rejected kidneys get clean bill of health for donation as study embraces use of organs after cardiac death (Denis Campbell, Guardian)
How Marketplace Economics Can Help Build a Greener World Consumers now have little information about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. But that may be about to change, as new technologies that track supply chains are emerging and companies as diverse as Unilever and Google look to make their products more sustainable. (Daniel Goleman, e360)
Eye-roller: Giving Up Meat for a Better World Jonathan Safran Foer used to love his grandmother's chicken and carrots. But after his son was born, the bestselling American author decided to give up meat. Like German author Karen Duve, who is also writing a book about eating ethically, Foer is trying to make the world a better place. (Spiegel)
Canada Welcomes Court Suspension Of EU Seal Ban A European court has ordered the suspension of a EU import ban on seal products that was set to begin on Friday, according to a copy of the ruling provided by a Canadian
Inuit group.
Nick Clegg takes ‘parental determinism’ to a new low It is mad to claim, as the deputy PM does, that poor parenting is more important than poverty in screwing up children’s life chances.
The Sweet 'n Lowdown on GM Crops Farmers should be allowed to continue growing genetically modified sugar beets despite a recent flawed court decision.
Indonesian Envoy Laments Grim U.N. Climate Talks Nations face an uphill battle to reach agreement on a tougher climate pact by the end of 2011, a senior Indonesian climate change official said on Thursday, describing
progress to date as bleak.
PR hacks and flackery: Climate sceptics mislead the public over hacked emails inquiry Andrew Montford who is conducting an investigation into the UEA inquiry has a history of omitting evidence to suit his arguments (Bob Ward, Guardian)
Early reply: Glaring inaccuracies and misrepresentations ...but not mine. Firstly, one should always accentuate the positive first, so I am going to praise Bob Ward for eschewing the words "denier" and "denialist". This is a good thing and will help elevate the tone of the debate. I assume this was his idea rather than something that was forced upon him by the Guardian. Click to read more ... (Bishop Hill)
Trying to prop up hot air profiteering: Russia To Set 10 Euro Carbon Floor Price: Sberbank Russia has set a minimum price of 10 euros per tonne ($12.84) for Kyoto Protocol-backed carbon offsets generated in the country, according to a letter from Sberbank seen by
Point Carbon News.
Written by John Dawson Thursday, 19 August 2010 The Hockey Stick Illusion is the shocking story of a graph called the Hockey Stick. It is also a textbook of tree ring analysis, a code-breaking adventure, an intriguing detective story, an exposé of a scientific and political travesty, and the tale of a herculean struggle between a self-funded sceptic and a publicly funded hydra, all presented in the measured style of an analytical treatise. The hero of the story is Steve McIntyre, honourably assisted by fellow sceptics, especially by Ross McKitrick. The villain is Michael Mann, dishonourably assisted by global warming alarmists, especially by his “Hockey Team”. The bare bones of the Hockey Stick story are as follows. Read more... (SPPI)
Media Use Crazy Weather to Hype Global Warming, Despite Admissions Weather Isn't Climate From Associated Press to national newspapers, coverage of floods, fires, droughts, sinkholes make 'case' for global warming alarmism. ( Julia A. Seymour, Business & Media Institute)
NOAA on the Russian heat wave: blocking high, not global warming 
People walk along Moscow's Red Square with St. Basil's Cathedral and the mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin seen in the background through hazy
smoke from forest and peat fires nearby, August 2, 2010. (REUTERS/Alexander Natruskin) - click for more from Boston.com "Big Picture"
Draft Report by NOAA CSI
From the freezer to the stove, so have gone surface temperatures over Russia in 2010. Only recently, the concerns were centered on the hardship inflicted by one of the coldest winters in Russia since the mid-20th Century. The current heat wave is therefore all the more remarkable coming on the heals of such extreme cold. Continue reading (WUWT)
Climate change could significantly increase the risk of hurricanes and storms in the Caribbean and threaten future development in the region, concludes a new study released by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF). Damage from wind, storm surge and inland flooding already amounts to 6% of GDP per year in some countries, according to the study’s preliminary results. Under a high climate change scenario, annual expected losses could rise by another 1 to 3% of GDP by 2030.The statement is interesting because of the very large increase in projected hurricane losses to 2030, even under the most extreme scenario. So I took a look at the underlying report, which was produced by the intergovernmental CCRIF supported by reinsurance companies including Swiss Re. And like a lot that you find in the grey literature related to climate change, it does not hold up so well. Here are two reasons why, and they have nothing to do with the report's cherry picking of extreme scenarios or even the validity of those scenarios. My critique below takes the climate part of the methodology as given (I didn't even look at the climate part of the methodology, which has its own obvious problems). First, the report (here in PDF) combines projected future damage resulting from GDP growth and projected climate change and calls the total "climate change." Not good. You can see this in the figure below from the report. I have placed a red circle around the report's breakdown of the sources of future increases in damage, and you can see that a significant part is due solely to an "increase due to asset growth." 
Findings from the study indicate that annual expected losses from wind, storm surge and inland flooding already amount to up to 6% of GDP in some countries and that, in a worst case scenario, climate change has the potential to increase these expected losses by 1 to 3 percentage points of GDP by 2030.That is just wrong and misleading. Not good. The second problem with the report is that while it takes an extreme scenario for climate change, it takes a single apparently conservative scenario for GDP growth. For instance, the report assumes a 1.2% per year GDP growth for Jamaica, as compared to a 1.8%per year increase in damages due solely to climate change. If the report were to instead assume a 2% per year annual growth rate (as the Jamaican government does for 2001/12) then hurricane damage would decrease as a proportion of GDP by 2030, because economic growth would outstrip the independent effects of climate change. A better conclusion from this report would be that climate change -- even under the most extreme scenarios -- might increase or decrease future Caribbean hurricane damage relative to GDP, or even have no discernible effect, but the policy options that make sense in this region are insensitive to these uncertainties. I see that some in the media have already uncritically repeated the misleading conclusions from the report. Let's see if anyone else does. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Our complete list of things that cause global warming has now passed the 800 mark. The honour of being number 800 goes to the story that truffles are increasing. You can find it just after truffle shortage and truffles down; which just about says it all. Astonishingly, despite the general collapse of climate change as a scientific theory, amid the revelations about fiddling the books, glaring errors of measurement, faking the peer review process etc, the rate of production of these scare stories shows no signs of diminishing. That, dear reader, is a demonstration of the power of politics and money. ... ... and counting. (Number Watch)
They keep trying: Rising temperatures reducing ability of plants to absorb carbon, study warns Research shows warming over past decade caused droughts that reduced number of plants available to soak up CO² (Alok Jha, Guardian)
German Shock Readings: Climate Interest Barometer Plummets 19. August 2010 German public’s interest in climate protection dwindles. The German website Climate Seeks Protection, supported by the German Ministry of the Environment, presents its quarterly Climate Barometer Report. It measures German public interest on the topics of climate protection, climate change, the energy situation and interest in related projects. Here’s how it looks: 
German climate barometer: Index of public interest in climate protection
Source: http://www.klima-sucht-schutz.de/mitmachen/klima-barometer/klima-barometer-index.html This shouldn’t surprise anyone. People reading this website and looking at opinion polls around the world know that the public is sick and tired of all the hype about
so-called climate change.
Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Aug 19th 2010 A warmist wants to name natural disasters after skeptics, Hillary Clinton smuggled a climate weapon into Russia and the truth about the shameful satellite saga. (Daily Bayonet)
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 19, 2010 – In support of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA), the Department of State will provide $1 million to fund Peace Corps volunteer efforts that increase rural access to energy, mitigate the effects of climate change, and support the use of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies in Central and South American communities. (Press Release)
by Robert Bradley Jr.
The quotations above are what Gerald North privately believes–or believed prior to Climategate, an event that pushed him to the Left unlike his scientific colleague Judith Curry. I reproduce his quotations (there are many others) in light of a recent op-ed published by geophysicist and Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham in the Houston Chronicle , “Climate Change Alarmists Ignore Scientific Methods.” Cunningham makes a number of worthy points that should not be dismissed by the political “mainstream” climate scientists such as Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M. Cunningham can find support from many sources, from pollsters to economists to physical scientists. Consider all three in turn: Public Concern: The public is fatigued by and skeptical of sky-is-falling environmentalism when most objective indicators of environmental welfare are trending positive. (Even the worst-case oil spill by “beyond petroleum” BP has not turned into the disaster that anti-technology, anti-capitalism environmentalists had expected and hoped–the subject of a forthcoming post at MasterResource.) Political Economy: Programs to regulate CO2 are all pain and no gain. Compare the costs of any local, state, federal, or international climate program versus the associated temperature reduction. It is tears in the ocean of benefit versus economic waste and politicization–and a loss of freedom. We know more than ever before how government failure of regulating CO2 is as great or greater than the alleged market failure of not regulating CO2. International and national efforts to regulate CO2 smell so bad that more and more environmentalists are holding their nose. Physical Science: Cunningham’s case against high-sensitivity warming can find support from not only middle-of-the-roaders such as Gerald North of Texas A&M (see quotations above) but also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on close inspection. Here are two salient IPCC quotations that were part of John Droz’s recent post at MasterResource: [Read more →] (MasterResource)
I was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming Since time immemorial people have been inventing or exaggerating scares to gain power. I used to think carbon dioxide posed a real threat, and I even used to be an active member of the Australian Greens. Then I discovered all the things we weren’t being told (like this and this), and how much money was involved and I was shocked. There are many good people among the Greens who will be outraged when they realize how they have been used.
The most selfish aims are always cloaked in “good intentions” Some Greens really believe a market based trading system is the best way to deal with pollution. But this pollution is not a pollutant, and this “free market” is not free. Last year the carbon market reached $130 billion dollars. It’s projected to reach $2 Trillion, and you can be sure that “sub-prime” carbon is coming too. The market depends wholly on government mandate; it’s “fixed” from beginning to end. Who would buy a carbon credit if they weren’t forced to? In a free market, no one. Worse, funneling money through fake markets is like inviting corruption to a three course meal. More » (Jo Nova)
Still Cooling: Sea Surface Temperatures thru August 18, 2010 Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) measured by the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite continue the fall which began several months ago. The following plot, updated through yesterday (August 18, 2010) reveals the global average SSTs continue to cool, while the Nino34 region of the tropical east Pacific remains well below normal, consistent with La Nina conditions. (click on it for the large, undistorted version; note the global SST values have been multiplied by 10):
Anomalously High Oceanic Cloud Cover
The Big Valley: Altitude Bias in GHCN Foreword: The focus of this essay is strictly altitude placement/change of GHCN stations. While challenge and debate of the topic is encouraged, please don’t let the discussion drift into other side issues. As noted in the conclusion, there remain two significant issues that have not been fully addressed in GHCN. I believe a focus on those issues (particularly UHI) will best serve to advance the science and understanding of what GHCN in its current form is measuring and presenting, post processing. – Anthony  Tibet
valley, China. Image from Asiagrace.com - click for more info/poster
By Steven Mosher, Zeke Hausfather, and Nick Stokes Recently on WUWT Dr. McKitrick raised several issues with regard to the quality of the GHCN temperature database. However, McKitrick does note that the methods of computing a global anomaly average are sound. That is essentially what Zeke Hausfather and I showed in our last WUWT post. Several independent researchers are able to calculate the Global Anomaly Average with very little differences between them.
Comment On Tree Ring Proxy Data and Thermometer Type Surface Temperature Anomalies And Trends There was an interesting conclusion in a New York Times article on the relationship between tree ring proxy temperature trend analyses and thermometer type measures of temperature anomalies and trends. The article is British Panel Clears Scientists by Justin Gillis published on July 7, 2010 The relevant text is on page 2 it is written
There are, however, problems with this conclusion. Since the thermometers are not coincident in location with the tree ring data (in the same local area), it would not be surprising that they are different. Indeed, this is yet another example that implies unresolved biases and uncertainties in the surface temperature thermometer type data as we discussed in several of our papers (see and see), as the thermometers are measuring elsewhere then where the proxy tree data is obtained. This obvious issue has been ignored in the assessment of this so-called divergence between the two methods to evaluate temperature anomalies and trends. It is possible, of course, that the trees are responding differently due to the biogeochemical effect of added carbon dioxide and/or nitrogen deposition. Nonetheless, to accept the thermometer record as the more robust measurement of spatial representative temperatures is premature. I have discussed this issue further in the posts Comments On The Tree Ring Proxy and Thermometer Surface Temperature Trend Data December 2007 Session ‘The “Divergence Problem’ In Northern Forests A New Paper On The Differences Between Recent Proxy Temperature And In-Situ Near-Surface Air Temperatures (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Tisdale on Liu and Curry’s ‘Accelerated Warming’ paper
Image above courtesy Dr. Judith Curry The Liu and Curry (2010) paper has been the subject of a number of posts at Watts Up With That over the past few days. This post should complement Willis Eschenbach’s post Dr. Curry Warms the Southern Ocean, by providing a more detailed glimpse at the availability of source data used by Hadley Centre and NCDC in their SST datasets and by illustrating SST anomalies for the periods used by Liu and Curry. I’ve also extended the data beyond the cutoff year used by Liu and Curry to show the significant drop in SST anomalies since 1999. Preliminary Note: I understand that Liu and Curry illustrated the principal component from an analysis of the SST data south of 40S, but there are two primary objectives of this post as noted above: to show how sparse the source data is and to show that SST anomalies for the studied area have declined significantly since 1999.
Deep plumes of oil could cause dead zones in the Gulf WASHINGTON— A new simulation of oil and methane leaked into the Gulf of Mexico suggests that deep hypoxic zones or "dead zones" could form near the source of the pollution. The research investigates five scenarios of oil and methane plumes at different depths and incorporates an estimated rate of flow from the Deepwater Horizon spill, which released oil and methane gas into the Gulf from April to mid July of this year. (AGU)
The oil that saved your ungrateful life While the panicked sorts would have you believe that amid “climate chaos,” Mother Earth has become quite angry at us meddling humans, it turns out the data say otherwise. (Patrick McIlheran, Journal Sentinel)
Activists set up Climate Camp at Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters Hundreds of campaigners descend on RBS offices in Edinburgh in protest at bank's investments in oil industry (Severin Carrell, Guardian)
Many pundits may believe that the age of coal is over, but the investment bankers at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. believe there’s plenty of money to be made by buying certain coal stocks. [Read More] (Robert Bryce, ET)
Merkel Tries to Regain Upper Hand in Energy Debate Before the financial crisis, Angela Merkel liked to present herself as the "climate chancellor," pushing for CO2 cuts and posing with glaciers. Now, with nuclear energy dominating the energy debate in Germany, Merkel has sought to turn back the clock. (Spiegel)
Renewables Investors Fear Withdrawal of Subsidies European Governments Are Finding Themselves Forced to Scale Back Amid Budgetary Pressures and High Power Prices (WSJ)
Death Panels Begin As Reform Takes Shape Medicine: After the recess appointment of a Medicare and Medicaid head, an FDA panel drops its endorsement of a widely used cancer drug. Another FDA-approved cancer therapy
may not be paid for. It begins.
Health reform spurs change for big employers WASHINGTON - Many of the biggest U.S. companies are removing spending limits from their employees' health plans and taking other steps to comply with the new healthcare law,
according to a report released on Wednesday.
Bad bumps to head could kill years later: U.S. study WASHINGTON - Scientists reported on Tuesday they have some of the best evidence yet to support long-held theories that repeated blows to the head may cause
nerve-degenerative diseases like Lou Gehrig's disease and Alzheimer's.
Low vitamin D levels tied to pregnancy complication NEW YORK - A new study finds that women who develop a severe form of pregnancy-related high blood pressure tend to have lower blood levels of vitamin D than healthy pregnant
women -- raising the possibility that the vitamin plays a role in the complication.
Lifestyle factors linked to teens' headaches NEW YORK - Teenagers who are overweight, get little exercise, or smoke may be more likely than their peers to have recurrent headaches, researchers reported Wednesday.
Obesity top threat to children's health: poll NEW YORK - Adults consider obesity the number one threat to children's health in the United States and many believe the problem is getting worse, according to a new poll. (Reuters Life!)
Spat over health effects of atrazine escalates.
Gosh and The Indy offered 5K for the study too: Mystery of the vanishing sparrows still baffles scientists 10 years on Reasons behind the decline in house sparrows range from an increase in predators to a lack of insect food
Pigeon disease kills one in three greenfinches Britain's greenfinches are threatened by a disease which has 'jumped the species barrier' from pigeons and doves
Food Supplies Most At Risk In Afghanistan And Africa Afghanistan and nations in sub-Saharan Africa are most at risk from shocks to food supplies such as droughts or floods while Nordic countries are least vulnerable, according
to an index released on Thursday.
Environmentally friendly mini-cows latest trend in US farms They have become the latest trend in United States farms and an estimated 20.000 miniature cattle, weighing less than 300 kilos, are believed to be successfully breeding and could be indicating the future for environmentally-friendly beef. (MercoPress)
ACLU, others file brief in U.Va. vs. Cuccinelli Four groups filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the University of Virginia’s request to set aside Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation into the
records of climatologist Michael Mann, a former U.Va. professor.
Gotta lovit ;) Hot button: GOP candidates knock global warming Fueled by anti-Obama rhetoric and news articles purportedly showing scientists manipulating their own data, Republicans running for the House, Senate and governor’s
mansions have gotten bolder in stating their doubts over the well-established link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
USTAR official says jury still out on climate change Around $100 million has been pledged by the U.S. Energy Department and others to test a Utah research team’s idea that carbon dioxide can be stored underground to help
address global climate disruption.
UN climate panel head expects no climate deal at Cancun NEW DELHI — The head of the UN's climate science panel said Wednesday there was little prospect of a breakthrough in efforts to forge a global agreement on climate change at a world meeting in December. (AFP)
Ah, the things you hear when you haven't got your gun! Gillard open to a carbon tax Prime Minister Julia Gillard has left open the door for a future carbon price or emissions trading scheme.
In Junior's opinion: Going the Wrong Way
Last week, the US Department of Energy released preliminary estimates of 2010 US
carbon dioxide emissions (h/t Joe
Romm). The data, along with preliminary
data on 2010 US GDP allow for a preliminary look at the rate of decarbonization of the US economy (see figure above). Decarbonization refers a reduction in the ratio
of carbon dioxide
emissions to GDP. Forecast economic growth combined with increased use of coal and natural gas is expected to contribute to increases in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions of 3.4 percent in 2010 (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Projected coal-related CO2 emissions increase by 6.0 percent in 2010 primarily a result of increased electricity sector coal usage. Higher natural gas consumption in the industrial and electric power sectors is expected to lead to a 3.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions from natural gas.With coal and natural gas consumption increasing at a rate faster than economic growth, the result is a recarbonization of the economy. Hopes that the economic downturn or various stimulus investments have lead to an acceleration of decarbonization were always dubious, that should now be fairly certain (for an earlier discussion see this post). If this data does not indicate to advocates of action on climate change that a radical new direction is needed, then I'm not sure what would. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Philip Stott: Global Warming - A Mammoth Insult To Our Ancestors One can only laugh uproariously as the latest research, carried out at Durham University by the excellent Professor Brian Huntley and his colleagues, indicates that the poor old woolly mammoth did not die out by flint and spear at the hands of us despicable humans, but because of natural global warming at the end of the last Ice Age, when, as a result of warmer, wetter conditions, and rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, trees and forests emerged at the expense of the grasslands and pastures to which the mammoths were so-well adapted. Just think of the scenario; here we have a scientifically-attested warming with rising carbon dioxide which favoured the spread of trees, woods, and forests over grasslands. So why then do so many people think that planting trees and forests is the best way to halt global warming? Could we have some ecologic, please? Perhaps it is time to join up the dots a tad better. This is a prime example of highly-significant environmental change, only around 14,000 to 4,000 years ago, when the last mammoth found life too hairy to survive, but which did not result in the ‘End of the World’, nor of the human race, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with aeroplanes or SUVs. The present funk over climate is a mammoth insult to the men and women - and indeed to the rest of living things - from the past. We commit the sin of presentism. (GWPF)
Ol' kibbles is at it again: Why has extreme weather failed to heat up climate debate? The world is experiencing the hottest weather on record but politicians have failed to respond. They need a wake-up call (Bill McKibben, Guardian)
Oh dear... Pakistan -- a Sad New Benchmark in Climate-Related Disasters UNITED NATIONS -- Devastating flooding that has swamped one-fifth of Pakistan and left millions homeless is likely the worst natural disaster to date attributable to climate change, U.N. officials and climatologists are now openly saying. (ClimateWire)
Climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute is interviewed in Spiegel. The interviewer even tries a few challenging questions: (Bishop Hill)
We Have Been Conned - An Independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Written by John McLean The IPCC is a disgrace to science. In its desire to fit the square peg of science into the round hole of politics it has abandoned the "scientific method" and replaced it with a desperate search for data and other material that might support a specific hypothesis. Read more... (SPPI)
Look at these prats trying to frighten the punters and pad their grant stream: Humans affect climate change THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate.
German Die Welt Newspaper: Enough With The Panic! 18. August 2010
Meanwhile the rest of Germany relaxed on their long holidays and yawned. So it’s only fitting that somebody step up and offer a message of calm to the bedwetters. German online Die Welt has a piece by Ulli Kulke titled Enough with the Panic Slogans of Climate Chaos. It’s an attempt to deliver a message of calm and reason, one that is sorely needed by Germany’s irrational media. First he explains that this year was a warm one, but so was 12 years ago - 1998, due to a strong El Nino effect. And he points out that the blazing heat in the northern
hemispehere strangely could not stop Arctic sea ice from increasing in size compared to the years before. The Antarctic sea ice is growing too.
Points for imagination: On the frontline of climate change It's the burning issue Australia's leaders dare not confront, even on the eve of a general election
"There is nothing new under the Sun" an article about 20th century global warming - my point of view Posted July 30th, 2010 by shaviv After a long lull in activity, I decided it's about time I write an update about my thoughts on global warming. Here it is.
New Paper on Australian Bushfires
I am a co-author on a new paper on Australian bushfires, just accepted for publication in the journal Weather,
Climate and Society of the AMS. Here is the abstract and citation: ABSTRACTWhile it is certainly interesting that we do not find any signal of long-term climate change in the loss record, that finding certainly is not entirely unexpected given the growing body of research in this area. The more significant findings of this paper have to do with issues of land-use planning and the relationship of bushfire damage to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole phenomena. In due course I'll post up a pre-publication version of the paper. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Last week another alarmist story appeared in the Guardian quoting Richard Alley, professor at the once great Penn State University in which it reported on the natural
calving of a large chink of the Petermann glacier in Greenland. They noted "Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even
grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.
South Pacific sea levels – Best records show little or no rise?! Are the small islands of the South Pacific in danger of disappearing, glug, under the waves of the rising ocean? Will thousands of poor inhabitants be forced to emigrate, as desperate refugees, to Australia and New Zealand? Has any of this got anything to do with man-made emissions of CO2? By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones. The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993. 
Sea levels: The El Nino / tropical storm anomaly in 1997-1998 is clear. A long sustained rise is not.
Take the infamous Tuvalu for example. It’s sea level rise was reported as 5.7 mm/year back in 2008. Now it’s calculated as 3.7mm/year. But look at the Seaframe Graph – its flat. It is universally forecast to disappear by 2050. New Zealand has even agreed to accept the “inevitable” rush of refugees, yet the best records available show that sea levels have not risen at all since 1993. More » (Jo Nova)
A super duper virtual world: New computer model advances climate change research BOULDER—Scientists can now study climate change in far more detail with powerful new computer software released by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Paper On Martian Dust Storms That Is Relevant For Earth’s Climate – Rafkin Et Al 2009 I was alerted to a paper on Martian weather that is relevant for the weather and climate on Earth. It involves the role of dust, as a diabatic heat source, in affecting atmospheric circulations. On Earth, dust comes from a variety of sources, including deserts and degraded semi-arid landscapes. Biomass burning and industrial aerosol emissions are other sources. As emphasized om my weblog and in our papers (e.g. see), the heterogeneous heating by aerosol clouds is a major under appreciated human and natural climate forcing, as was reported in NRC (2005). The Mars paper is Rafkin, S. C. R. (2009), A positive radiative-dynamic feedback mechanism for the maintenance and growth of Martian dust storms, J. Geophys. Res., 114, E01009, doi:10.1029/2008JE003217. The abstract reads
(Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
China Awaits Proof To Back Carbon Capture: Officials China's plans for energy are unlikely to offer direct support for carbon capture technologies as Beijing remains wary about their cost and feasibility, industry officials said on Wednesday. (Reuters)
Obama Gives Oil and Gas a Cold Shoulder (Ducking Houston on his recent visit) by Robert Bradley Jr. President Obama did not include Houston on his visit to Texas last week rallying his base and raising funds for Democrats for the November elections. The President was originally expected to be here but ended up in Austin and Dallas. Was this bypass a duck-out? After all, Congressman Kevin Brady (R. Tx.) pointedly invited the president to meet face-to-face with Houston energy workers on the other Gulf Crisis—the federal offshore drilling moratorium that threatens tens of thousands of jobs here and in much of the Gulf Coast region. Sure, Obama’s Texas visit was not about helping Republican candidates or hosting a Tea Party event. But why couldn’t the president reserve an hour to talk to workers whose livelihoods depend on Houston’s largest industry – an industry that is being victimized by the President’s everyone-is-guilty drilling policy? “I have seen enough to know that people are hurting,” said Michael Bromwich, Obama’s hand-picked moratorium advisor, recently. Surely the president needs to talk to the oil and gas workers in order to share that understanding—and to know that time is of the essence when it comes to lifting the moratorium. Obama’s cold shouldering of the industry is no accident. It is an open secret that the White House intelligentsia (called by some the “‘green’ dream team”) does not like oil or even natural gas. They like solar, wind, and other esoteric energies that just happen to be more expensive and less reliable—and, on close inspection, environmentally suspect. For a president interested in job creation, and at least nominally in favor of energy affordability, Obama is proving to be his own worst enemy and at odds with the average American. The polls reflect public concern with the explosive growth in government being driven by the party in power. From health care to energy, most Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Were Warmist Scientists Set To Do Arctic Oil And Gas Exploration Under The Guise Of Arctic Research? 
Polarstern exploration vessel.Source: Alfred Wegener Institute 18. August 2010 The German online Die Zeit reports that a Canadian court has ruled in favour of the Inuit Indians, forbidding a planned Arctic expedition by Germany’s alarmist Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in the Lancaster Sound. The AWI’s Polarstern research vessel was ordered to pack up and leave. Now it’s off the coast of Greenland. Die Zeit writes:
For the German research team, which was in the Baffin Bay getting ready to start its studies when the ruling was made, it’s the first time in 28 years that it has been forbidden to conduct research there. Last year the Inuits had protested a Polarstern expedition, but were unsuccessful. Continue reading “Were Warmist Scientists Set To Do Arctic Oil And Gas Exploration Under The Guise Of Arctic Research?” (No Tricks Zone)
Disappearing Gulf Oil and Dirty Canadian Crude
The NIC assembled a number of inter-agency expert scientific teams to estimate the quantity of BP Deepwater Horizon oil that has been released from the well and the fate of that oil. One team, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and United States Geological Survey (USGS) Director Marcia McNutt, calculated the flow rate and total oil released. This team announced on August 2, 2010, that an estimated total of 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released from the BP Deepwater Horizon well. A second team, led by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) developed a tool called the Oil Budget Calculator to determine what happened to the oil. Using the 4.9 million barrel estimate as its input, along with both direct measurements and scientific estimates, the OBC calculated what happened to the spilled oil. It was found that almost three quarters of the oil spilled by the Deepwater Horizon accident has vanished from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The results are tabulated graphically in the figure below, take from the report.  About 45% of the oil either evaporated, dispersed naturally or was burned at the well head. Another 26%, nearly 53 million gallons, of the oil is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, possibly, cause further ecological damage. The remaining oil—around five times the amount spilled in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez—remains a threat to sea life and Gulf Coast marshes, said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But the spill no longer poses a threat to the Florida Keys or the East Coast, according to the report by NOAA and the Interior Department. The implication of the report, which claimed that most of the oil that leaked into the gulf could be accounted for, was that future damage might be less than had been feared. Part of the disappearance was caused by stormy weather in the gulf, which caused surface turbulence that speed the breakup of the oil into small droplets. The small drops tend to sink and are easier for microscopic plankton to attack and digest. This has caused an eruption of criticism from both the eco-left and conservative bloggers. “The Obama administration today filed an injunction in federal court which would require an immediate halt to cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico currently under way by the forces of nature,” read one tongue-in-cheek story. The other major factor was the early and continued use of chemical dispersants to aid in the breakup. Ecological activists have claimed that the dispersants could do more damage than the spill itself. The EPA, however, released peer reviewed results from the second phase of its independent toxicity testing, performed on mixtures of eight oil dispersants and Louisiana Sweet Crude. The EPA conducted the tests as part of an effort to ensure that future decisions would be based on “the best available science and data.” According to the EPA press release:
Though environmentalists are still wailing about the use of the “toxic” dispersants, the EPA report effectively destroyed the news value of the dispersant story. It looks like BP and the NIC actually did a good job in what was obviously a very bad situation. A with nature showing how resilient the ecosystem can be, the great gulf spill of 2010 is fading from view. This, of course, does nothing to help the people of the gulf region rebuild their lives. What is more interesting than the apparently quick recovery of the gulf is the impact of President Obama's ill-advised ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been widely stated that about 30% of US domestic production comes from the oil wells in the Gulf. The US gets more of its oil from Canada than any other exporter, accounting for 22% of total use. The next four sources—Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela—provide just 11-12% each.  On the face of it, importing more oil from Canada is a great alternative—it doesn't risk a tanker spill at sea, supports no embarrassing despotic regimes and doesn't channel funds to terrorists. Canada’s 179 billion barrels of oil and gas reserves rank second in the world, so supplies should be stable for many years into the future. But there's a catch—much of Canada's oil comes from tar sands, and dirty, filthy stuff it is. Tar sands are an extremely dense and thick form of petroleum. A mixture of water, sand, clay and bitumen, which usually must be melted before it can be extracted and refined. It takes up to four barrels of water to extract one barrel of crude, and mining the sands also strips the land and creates vast ponds of toxic byproducts. According to America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), producing Canadian tar-sands oil generates 82% more greenhouse-gas emissions than does the average barrel refined in the United States. An estimated 20% of Canada’s natural gas is used to produce oil, instead of being used to generate energy directly. This seems a perverse way to use natural gas, a relatively clean source of fossil fuel energy. According to the Economist: “Transforming tar sands into crude is costly as well as dirty: the process only becomes profitable with oil prices in the $60-85 range or higher. Indeed, the recession put 70% of proposed investment there on hold, although half of that has since restarted, according to Jackie Forrest of IHS CERA, an energy-forecasting firm: “With just a modest fall in oil prices, the sands’ production would start to go.”  Extracting oil from tar-sands is a dirty, filthy business. As reported in the same article, “Tarred with the same brush,” Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and someone I seldom agree with, calls oil from tar-sands “the dirtiest source of transportation fuel currently available”. This year he was one of 50 lawmakers who complained to Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, about the environmental impact of a proposed pipeline extension that would more than double imports from Canadian sands. The EPA has recommended that the US State Department, which must approve international pipelines, consider alternatives to Canadian crude. In fact, Canadian natural gas is inadequate to supply the anticipated expansion in oil sands output and its use has major carbon emissions implications. External energy equivalent to almost 20% of the energy in the oil is required to produce it, and about 80 kg of carbon dioxide released per barrel. Various proposals have been made to use nuclear power to produce steam for extraction of the bitumen from these deposits and also to produce electricity for the major infrastructure involved. If using up your nations supplies of natural gas to extract oil from tar-sands is illogical, using nuclear power seems crazy. While the nuclear option would be cleaner in terms of emissions, why not use the power directly—Canada already exports copious amounts of electricity to the US. Donald Kennedy, Editor Emeritus of Science, has written a commentary on energy policy, appearing in the August 13, 2010, issue. “Remember some years back, when British Petroleum claimed that its initials stood for "Beyond Petroleum?" he asks: “Its competitors were furious at the suggestion that it was leading the push toward renewable energy. "Beyond Petroleum" could be the right slogan for the policy changes needed to end the U.S. national addiction to oil. ” His remedy for America's energy problems is as follows:
This sounds like advice similar to that offered in The Energy Gap, Al and my latest book. Perhaps common sense and an engieer's approach will eventually win the day. After all, the oil industry has been drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for more than four decades. There are some 30,000 wells in the gulf, providing a third of US and much of Mexican oil production. These wells produce low sulfur “sweet” crude, less polluting and easier to refine than oil from many other regions and leagues ahead of the filthy gunk found buried in the Canadian oil-sands. Further more, it is estimated that the Obama drilling ban may cost 150,000 high paying jobs in an area of the US that has already been hard hit by the oil spill disaster. This is insanity. President Obama needs to lift the drilling ban immediately. For all this administration's talk about fixing the economy, restoring jobs and addressing future energy problems it seems to be doing exactly the wrong things. Build nuclear power plants, encourage electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles and drill for the oil we will need until we can be weaned from our fossil fuel dependency. The current policy stand is bad for energy production, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)
Editorial: Coal is the fuel of today -- and tomorrow For all the talk of electricity produced by windmills and solar arrays, the Department of Energy has seen the future of electric power generation and it's coal.
A Resurgence of Coal Power in the US
The AP describes the continuing presence of coal power in the United
States: Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.But like everything related to the energy and climate, it is useful to have a sense of proportion. So have a look at the figure above, which comes from a US DOE presentation earlier this year (PDF). The figure shows the coal power build rate - actual and planned -- for the US and China. The red parts of the bars for 2008 and 2009 (and perhaps part of the yellow for 2010) are what the AP article is describing. The broader context are the blues and greens. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy Those keenest to be green are most ignorant - survey
Germany To Postpone Nuclear Tax Decision: Minister German Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen said on Wednesday that he believes the government will postpone a decision on a contentious nuclear power tax until the end of September. (Reuters)
Mozambique Approves $2 Bln Hydroelectric Dam Mozambique has approved the construction of a $2 billion hydro-electric dam in a bid to increase power generation and attract foreign investments, the state-run Noticias
daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Vestas Posts Surprise Loss And Cuts Outlook World No.1 wind turbine maker Vestas posted a surprise second-quarter loss and unexpectedly cut its 2010 earnings outlook as customers delayed orders in the wake of the credit crisis. (Reuters)
Denmark Starts to Trim Its Admired Safety Net COPENHAGEN — How long is too long to be paid to go without a job?
Ministers consider cuts to winter fuel allowance Coalition nears its 100th day in office with tensions rising in Westminster over reductions in benefits for the elderly
Could selling cheap malaria drugs in private stores harm children's health? In a guest contribution, Oxfam's Mohga Kamal-Yanni argues that the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria has chosen the wrong way to tackle the problem of malaria drug shortages in poor countries (Guardian)
Measles complacency allows deadly surge in Africa LONDON - The worst outbreaks of measles in years are infecting thousands and killing hundreds across Africa and offer tragic evidence of what happens when health authorities
drop their guard on this highly contagious disease.
Can The International Science Community Find The Balance Between Cooperation And Competition? Science has a long history of crossing borders, bridging cultures and balancing the public good with private gain. That tradition, the focus of the upcoming Kavli Prize Science Forum, may face a more challenging future. (Kavli Foundation)
ADHD diagnosed by mistake in young Nearly 1 million American children may have been misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, not because they have real behaviour problems but
because they were the youngest in their kindergarten, researchers say.
Vitamin D not behind UVB's psoriasis benefit NEW YORK - Ultraviolet light therapy lessens the symptoms of psoriasis and simultaneously raises vitamin D levels, a new study shows. However, increased vitamin D is
probably unrelated to light therapy's benefits for psoriasis, the researchers say.
Docs writing veggie vouchers to combat obesity PORTLAND, Maine — Physicians have long told patients fighting obesity to eat their fruits and vegetables. Now they’re writing prescriptions for it.
Population panicking Suzuki acolyte and all-round gibbering nitwit Bob Carr: The need for fast-food reform The writing is on the wall for the fast-food industry.
Fast food forum to address obesity THE fast food industry will meet with the NSW Government and public health experts for talks today, triggered by concern over the community's rising level of obesity.
Argentine Glacier Protection Bill Could Shut Mines An Argentine bill to protect glaciers by banning mining in ice zones could hinder a new multibillion-dollar gold mine, shutter some projects and slow investment, although
some mining provinces seeking to circumvent the measure are passing their own laws.
Julie Burchill: So the Prince of Green Hypocrites is going on tour. Thank God I'll be abroad Green is the first socio-political movement in which every single leader and spokesperson is filthy rich (Independent)
Is GOP Opposition to Cap-and-Trade Self-Contradictory? by Marlo Lewis Barring the trickery of a lame duck conference committee, cap-and-trade is dead in the 111th Congress. Some blame President Obama for not taking a more hands-on role. Others blame environmental groups for waging a $100 million lobbying campaign without winning a single GOP convert to the Kerry-Lieberman bill. Others blame the allegedly “well-funded denial machine,” even though proponents, who include major corporations like BP as well as Big Green, must have outspent free-market and conservative advocacy groups by more than 100 to 1. The August 11 edition of Climatewire (subscription required) featured interviews with Exelon Corp. VP Betsy Moler and Resources for the Future President Phil Sharp, who lament that Republican lawmakers, the “inventors” of “market-based” environmental policy, turned against their own “invention.” Moler and Sharp are trying to spin GOP opposition to cap-and-trade as self-contradictory, hence as unstable, hence as reversible. As Climatewire reports, Moler is not ready to “throw in the towel” and Sharp entertains the hope that a “new kind of coalition” will emerge in the next Congress. Now, let’s look at this notion, peddled by Moler and Sharp, that Republicans flip-flopped and trashed their own legacy by nixing cap-and-trade. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Al Gore: the Gift that Keeps on Giving by Myron Ebell Former Vice President Al Gore is the gift that keeps on giving to opponents of global warming alarmism and energy rationing policies. He leads what I think of as the Dream Team: Gore is the public leader; James Hansen is the go-to scientist; Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) pushed through a cap-and-trade bill in the House that killed cap-and-trade; Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was the main promoter in the Senate; when he dropped the ball, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) was in charge for awhile; and she has now been replaced by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) with help from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). I used to think that we were just incredibly lucky that the alarmist movement was… Read the full story (Cooler Heads)
<chuckle> Gore calls for major protests on climate change inaction Former Vice President Gore is calling for major rallies to protest congressional inaction on climate change.
INTERVIEW-Host Mexico aims to save global climate talks MEXICO CITY, Aug 16 - Mexico hopes to "rescue" global climate change talks by hosting a successful summit later this year that ends in concrete actions to control
greenhouse gases, its chief negotiator said on Monday.
Mexico down-to-earth on Cancun climate summit NEW DELHI: Pragmatism is a key word for the Mexican hosts of the next major United Nations conference on climate change this December.
Extreme Weather Unlikely To Help Climate Talks Extreme weather in 2010 will spur more strident calls for action to combat global warming but is unlikely to break a deadlock at U.N. climate talks about sharing the burden
between rich and poor.
Green taxes could treble by 2020, costing taxpayers more than £16billion a year Taxes to pay for contentious climate change policies are set to treble over the next decade, soaring to more than £16billion a year.
Three China HFC Projects Face U.N. CO2 Offset Probe A UN panel will review carbon offset issuance requests by three Chinese greenhouse gas destroying projects, a UN spokeswoman said on Tuesday, a sign the most lucrative projects under the Kyoto Protocol may face more scrutiny. (Reuters)
Dutch IPCC Assessment: Climate Science Underexposed To Dissent, Give Sceptics More Say 17. August 2010 The Klimazwiebel blog run by Prof. Hans von Storch brings our attention to a newly released Dutch report on the IPCC. The report is published by the Rathenau Institute and is titled: Room for Climate Debate: It is written by Jeroen van der Sluijs, Rinie van Est and Monique Riphagen. It’s lengthy, but the abstract sums it up. You can read the abstract in full at von Storch’s
site.
Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow: scientist MOSCOW - Several thousand Muscovites are thought to have died in July alone from this year's unprecedented heat wave and August could add more fatalities to the grim
statistics, a Russian scientist said on Tuesday.
Can a rare heat wave in a big city occur by chance? The short answer is Yes. What about the long answer? July 2010 was unusually warm in Western Russia - and Moscow. It actually turns out that a bigger portion of Russia was below the normal temperature than the portion of Russia above it. But that can't change the fact that Moscow et al. was really warm. I picked Mathematica and used the WeatherData function to find out that the average July 2010 temperature in Moscow was 3.5 standard deviations above the mean temperatures for July 2010 - that can be extracted from the record available via Wolfram's software. By a standard deviation, I mean the root mean square of the differences of July temperatures in the past from their overall average. » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
So, Al's just been providing cover for a covert weapons program? Russian Scholar Warns Of 'Secret' U.S. Climate Change Weapon By Ashley Cleek
More from the rubber room: 'We Received a Kick in the Pants' German physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is one of Angela Merkel's advisers on climate change. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he discusses extreme weather events, global warming's winners and losers, and the effects of the crisis of confidence in climate research. (Spiegel)
Why conservatives shouldn't believe in man made climate change My friend and colleague Ed West has written a catch-comment piece entitled Why Shouldn’t Conservatives Believe in Man Made Climate Change. I’ve no objection to catch-comment pieces (I really must do an anti-Obama one soon to catch up with Nile Gardiner: after all I did write the book on the subject). And I’ve even less objection to Ed West himself, a delightful fellow and brilliant writer who is right about almost everything. (James Delingpole)
South Pacific Sea Level: A Reassessment Written by Vincent R. Gray Abstract The SEAFRAME sea-level study on 12 Pacific islands is the most comprehensive study of sea level and local climate ever carried out there. The sea level records obtained have all been assessed by the anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began in 1993 until the latest report in June 2010. In almost all cases the positive upward trends depend almost exclusively on the depression of the ocean in 1997 and 1998 caused by two tropical cyclones. If these and other similar disturbances are ignored, almost all of the islands have shown negligible change in sea level from 1993 to 2010, particularly after the installation of GPS leveling equipment in 2000. Read more... (SPPI)
The argument that carbon dioxide is plant food and that we should welcome increased concentrations of the stuff as leading to bumper crop yields is one that is not given much credence by the other side of the global warming debate. Perhaps they should think again, as this article, recently published in the Royal Society's Phil Trans B, suggests that there is much truth in it.
You could almost get the impression that the biggest threat to the food supply is coming from government. (Bishop Hill)
Monthly CO2 Report - July 2010 Written by Christopher Monckton Tuesday, 17 August 2010 The authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for July 2010 explains that recent extreme weather is of natural origin and that the influence of Man is too small to have played a significant part. Read more... (SPPI)
Of Ice And Science: Curry And Half-Knowledge 17. August 2010 The dreamers of global warming calamity always have to find imaginative explanations for inconvenient truths and paradoxes. Today’s German papers are reporting on the recent study by Judith Curry and Jiping Liu, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The paper is an attempt to provide an explanation for the paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate. You see, there’s a simple explanation for everything. The latest explanation is a brainstormed hypothesis at most, and nothing more. Hypotheses are important in science of course, but they are only its very raw trial material. They are not fact. Yet today, in climate science, we are expected to accept half knowledge and computer-generated scenarios as ”finished” science. Folks, it’s a farce.
Dr. Curry Warms the Southern Ocean Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Anthony has posted here on a new paper co-authored by Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, entitled “Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice”. Having obtained the paper courtesy of my undersea conduit (h/t to WS once again), I can now comment on the study. My first comment is, “show us the data”. Instead of data, here’s what they start with:
Kinda looks like temperature data, doesn’t it? But it is not. It is the first Empirical Orthogonal Function of the temperature data … the original caption from the paper says: Figure 1. Spatial patterns of the first EOF mode of the area-weighted annual mean SST south of 40 °S. Observations: (A) HadISST and (B) ERSST for the period 1950–1999. Simulations of CCSM3 (Left) and GFDL-CM2.1 (Right): (C, D) 50-year PIcntrl experiment (natural forcing only), Given the title of “Accelerated warming”, one would be forgiven for assuming that (A) represents an actual measurement of a warming Southern Ocean. I mean, most of (A) is in colors of pink, orange, or red. What’s not to like? Continue reading (WUWT)
From CO2 Science Volume 13 Number 33: 18 August 2010 Editorial: Subject Index Summary: Journal Reviews: Forty Years of Morphological Change at a Great Barrier Reef Island: Do the observed changes portend the island's imminent demise in response to rising sea levels? Storms, Fires and Insect Pests: Bad for Trees in a Warming World?: ... maybe not!!! Elevated CO2 Protects Trees from the Ravages of Heat Stress: How good a job does it do for aspen and birch trees? The Projected Response of a Swiss Grass-Clover Sward to Increasing CO2 and Climate Change Over the 21st Century: The dual threats of predicted warming and drying are considered, both with and without an increase in the air's CO2 content. Plant Growth Database:
Soot and Climate Change – A New Article By Jacobson 2010 The article is Jacobson, M. Z. (2010), Short-term effects of controlling fossil-fuel soot, biofuel soot and gases, and methane on climate, Arctic ice, and air pollution health, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D14209, doi:10.1029/2009JD013795. The abstract reads
As Bill pointed out in an e-mail, this paper is further confirmation that hypothesis 2a in Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union. is the correct one. Hypothesis 2a reads
and that
There is an AGU press release on this article, and excerpts from the release are reproduced below:
There is another summary of this article that Bill alerted us to with a model simulation graph: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/soot-control/ This is yet another peer reviewed study that highlights the incompleteness of the 2007 IPCC assessment reports. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Deepwater Drilling Gets Tougher, Time to Get NEPA Right
The Department of Interior and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM) announced that blanket environmental exemptions, such as the one granted to BP, will not be given until “it undertakes a comprehensive review of its National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) process and the use of categorical exclusions for exploration and drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.” The government should use this time to enact smarter regulations, not unnecessary regulations that make it too costly for projects to move forward. The NEPA process was originally set up to increase productive activities but at the same time address environmental concerns. But over the years it has evolved into a burdensome procedure and a political tool for environmental activists to stop projects built on federal land. Unfortunately, NEPA has evolved into an onerous and costly process that slows progress on critical public and private activities. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
AP Enterprise: Old-style coal plants expanding WYODAK, Wyo. — Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of
climate-changing gases for years to come.
Are we facing a second ‘Battle of Kingsnorth’? The Lib-Cons are finally realising that green rhetoric is all well and good, but it doesn’t keep the lights on. August 17th, 2010
The U.S. should stop wasting billions to subsidize unreliable wind energy projects. By Robert Bryce They like everything big in Texas, and wind energy is no exception. Texas has more wind generation capacity than any other state, about 9,700 megawatts. (That’s nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.) Texas residential ratepayers are now paying about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state’s urban centers. It’s time for those customers to ask for a refund. The reason: When it gets hot in Texas and it’s darn hot in the Lone Star State in the summer the state’s ratepayers can’t count on that wind energy. On Aug. 4, at about 5 p.m., electricity demand in Texas hit a record: 63,594 megawatts. But according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s wind turbines provided only about 500 megawatts of power when demand was peaking and the value of electricity was at its highest. Read the rest of this entry » (SPPI)
More than half of Britain's wind farms have been built where there is not enough wind It's not exactly rocket science – when building a wind farm, look for a site that is, well, quite windy.
Ontario’s Power Trip: Power without the people How a tiny group of vested interests — the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association — holds sway By Parker Gallant In the political power corridors where the Ontario government’s green energy regime is legislated, regulated, discussed, manipulated, twisted, turned and imposed on the people, one group keeps cropping up: the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association (OSEA). Among other things, the OSEA claims prime responsibility for the Ontario Green Energy Act, the 2009 legislation that introduced massive subsidies to green energy and triggered multibillion-dollar spending on wind and solar power and new transmission infrastructure. OSEA’s political clout scored another victory last Friday when the Ontario government reversed itself on a plan — announced July 2 — to cut the massive subsidy price paid for small-scale solar electricity to 58¢ for each kilowatt hour from 80¢. The cut, to be imposed on 16,000 solar project applicants, would have saved $1-billion. But now, under lobbying from OSEA, Ontario Energy Minister Brad Duguid has reversed himself. The new price would be 64¢ but the old price of 80¢ would be paid on all projects for which applications had been received as of Aug. 13.
In my recent post Thoughts on an Ethanol Pipeline, I described what I feel would be a more rational approach to ethanol policy than some of the policies that have been pursued over the years. [Read More] (Robert Rapier, ET)
England's green and pleasant land may have to change to feed our thirst for fuel As we look for alternatives to oil, our familiar pattern of meadows and pastures could become interspersed with biofuel plantations (Guardian)
Nuclear Waste Issue Could Be Solved, If... Nuclear energy offers several advantages: It's clean, powerful and relatively cheap. But it also yields hazardous waste, a fact that terrifies a public haunted by memories
of accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear reactors.
Ocean Waves Can Power Australia's Future, Scientists Say Waves crashing on to Australia's southern shores each year contain enough energy to power the country three times over, scientists said on Tuesday in a study that
underscores the scale of Australia's green energy.
Quick! Put on your Woohoo Hat! Canada Tracks BPA Exposure, Finds In Most People Bisphenol A, a widely used chemical that Canada is banning from baby bottles, is present in the bodies of 91 percent of Canadians, according to a report that shows just how
prevalent the controversial chemical is in daily life.
A single senator — Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri — is blocking a bill that would ensure a reliable supply of medical isotopes while reducing the risk of
nuclear terrorism. The Senate leadership needs to pry it loose.
Immune system gene linked with Parkinson's: study CHICAGO - A gene linked with the immune system may play a role in developing Parkinson's disease, researchers said on Sunday, marking a possible advance in the search for
effective treatments.
A supersized attack on McDonald's Happy Meal toys Concern about childhood obesity is driving calls to ban toys that have kids clamoring for a McDonald's Happy Meal. But it is not government's role to decide the dinner menu. Consumers have the power to demand more "healthy" choices, and food producers and retailers are responding. (CSM)
LEED Building Standards Fail to Protect Human Health LEED certification has emerged as the green standard of approval for new buildings in the United States. But the criteria used for determining the ratings largely ignore factors relating to human health, particularly the use of potentially toxic building materials. (John Wargo, e360)
Just for laughs: Mankind is using up global resources faster than ever The growing world population and increasing consumption has pushed the world into ‘eco-debt’ a month earlier this year, according to the latest statistics on global resources. (Louise Gray, TDT)
Charlie goes wailing: Prince of Wales to tour the country to promote 'sustainable living' The Prince of Wales is to embark on a tour of the country to meet the guerrilla gardeners, ethical fashion designers and eco-conscious pensioners doing their bit to tackle climate change. (TDT)
Why Development Aid for Africa Has Failed A commentary by Kurt Gerhardt
Arsenic in Field Runoff Linked to Poultry Litter Arsenic in food supplements passes through chickens, then passes through the field
This gets trotted out from time to time: Artificial meat the answer to feeding the world in year 2050 GROWING artificial meat in vats could be the solution to the looming problem of how to feed the world's booming population, according to a group of leading international
scientists.
Looks better & better: California landmark global-warming law under fire SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A November ballot measure that would suspend California's landmark global-warming law could also end up rolling back some of the state's other sweeping
environmental standards - including rules that require utilities to generate a third of their electricity from renewable sources and programs requiring oil refineries to make
cleaner-burning fuels.
Top Climate Scientists Speak out on the Satellitegate Scandal US Government admits global warming satellite sensors “degraded” - temperatures may be out by 10-15 degrees. Now five satellites in controversy. Top scientists speak
out.
Zombie Hockey stick dies again Just when you think it’s too dead to kill: along comes a new paper in a top ranking statistics journal by McShane and Wyner. It’s worth taking stock. It’s a damning paper: …we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.
But in the big scheme of things the Hockey Stick Graph was already dead. Each one of these points is enough to cast grave doubts on the Hockey Stick.
If there is a single icon for 'global warming,' it is the "Hockey Stick" (HS) created by Dr. Michael Mann. 
"The Mann multiproxy data, when correctly handled, shows the 20th century climate to be unexceptional compared to earlier centuries." In other words, the temperatures we are experiencing now are not higher than those of 900 years ago! If today's temperature levels have been previously reached naturally, before humans started driving up atmospheric concentrations of CO2, then the certainty that today's temperatures are due to CO2 goes away. It also tends to falsify the IPCC's hypothesis that CO2 is the driving force behind changes in climate. As you can imagine, this finding created a firestorm in the climate 'science' community. I put science in scare quotes in this instance because of the behind-the-scenes efforts (revealed in the Climategate emails) to keep McIntyre and McKitrick's work from being published -- efforts which were the antithesis of science. (Meteorological Musings)
Say what? Drowning Today, Parched Tomorrow HARD as it may be to believe when you see the images of the monsoon floods that are now devastating Pakistan, the country is actually on the verge of a critical shortage of
fresh water. And water scarcity is not only a worry for Pakistan’s population — it is a threat to America’s national security as well.
Stefan Rahmstorf, again: Will this summer of extremes be a wake-up call? This decade has been marked by a number of weather extremes – which show how vulnerable our societies are (Guardian)
Why Rare Events are a Certainty The Russian heat wave has finally broken, but people will be talking about it for a long while. In this post I am going to discuss the statistics of rare events.Consider the following statement: Meteorologist Rob Carver, the Research and Development Scientist for Weather Underground, agrees. Using a statistical analysis of historical temperature records, Dr. Carver estimates that the likelihood of Moscow’s 100-degree record on July 29 is on the order of once per thousand years, or even less than once every 15,000 years — in other words, a vanishingly small probability.How rare is a 1 in 15,000 year event? It is not as rare as you might think, and here is why. Imagine if you have a fair coin (50-50) and you flip it three times. Suppose that you want to know what the chances are that you will observe one or more heads in that sequence. The odds can be calculated by determining that the only sequence with no heads it tail-tail-tail, which will occur, on average only 1/8 of the time. So the odds of observing at least one head in that series of three flips is 7/8 or 87.5%. You can generalize this approach such that you can consider coins with different odds and for many flips. The generalized formula is called the binomial probability distribution, and there are many useful calculators for the distribution on the web (e.g., here). (Technical note: The binomial distribution can be approximated by other distributions, such as the Poisson distribution, which has been shown to well approximate the occurrence of certain weather extremes.) We can use the binomial probability distribution to evaluate how rare the Russian heat wave was under a variety of assumptions. But to do so we need two numbers. One number that you need to know is the odds of an event. In this example I'll use the 1 in 15,000 year event provided by Rob Carver. Whether that number is accurate or not doesn't really matter for this example. If you'd like to use another, you can, and below I'll show you how. The second number that you need is the number of relevant events. This is a bit tricky, and it is not at all clear to me what an "event" is according to Carver. One possibility would be to use the number of meteorological stations in Russia or the number of grid points in a spatial reanalysis. But this has some problems as the "event" that we are discussing is not just an extreme at a point, but a more systemic event associated with a persistent atmospheric pattern. So we could ask how many high pressure systems typically occur in the northern hemisphere over a summer season. I asked my father this question and he suggested perhaps 10-12 per season at the latitude of Moscow. Again, if you don't like this number you can alter it to your liking. So next, open up the Vassar binomial probability calculator. We can use it to answer a few questions. 1) What are the odds of at least one 1 in 15,000 year heat wave event occurring over a 1,000 year period (picked because Russian meteorologists say that nothing of this magnitude has been observed over the past 1,000 years)? To answer this enter the following into the calculator: n = 10,000 (1,000 years * 10 high pressure systems per year) k = 1 event p = of probability 0.00006667 (that is, 1/15,000) The odds of such an event occurring over 1,000 years are 48.7%! Given these statistics, it is not at all surprising to see one such event in Moscow over the past 1,000 years. 2) Part of the problem of course is that the Russian heat wave has already occurred, and this can create a form of hindsight bias in our consideration of rare events. So looking forward, what are the odds of another such event occurring in Russia over the next decade, assuming these same odds (which, again may or may not be accurate). To answer this enter the following into the calculator: n = 100 (10 years * 10 high pressure systems per year) k = 1 event p = of probability 0.00006667 (that is, 1/15,000) The answer is 0.7%, pretty small, but not zero. If you were laying odds in order to bet on such an occurrence they would be about 143 to 1. A longshot, but not impossible. 3) With weather there are all sorts of events that can be classified as extreme -- floods, hurricanes, drought, temperature, and so on. I have no idea how many such weather "events" there might be in a year. But for fun, lets assume that there are 1,000 weather "events" in a year. We might ask, what is the probability of seeing a 1 in 15,000 year event (of any type) over the course of a year? n = 1000 (1 year * 1,000 events) k = 1 event p = of probability 0.00006667 (that is, 1/15,000) The odds of at least one 1 in 15,000 year event is 6.4% for one year. How about over the next 10 years? 28.3%!! If you want to test out different numbers than I used above, it is easy to do so. But whatever numbers you use, you'll find that individual rare events are not so rare when considered over time and space. This is one reason why the issue of attribution of causality is so frustratingly difficult (it is also difficult because of uncertainties in both "n" and "p" in the calculations above). More specifically, there are three reasons why the question of whether extreme events are increasing due to specific causal factors is difficult to answer with certainty: (1) a short data record, (2) specific extremes occur infrequently and (3) a range of legitimate methodological approaches to the issue. In such circumstances it would be easy to be fooled by randomness and black swans. The good news is that the best policies in these conditions do not require certainty about causality, they instead emphasize robustness to uncertainty and ignorance. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Weather or climate? It's a question of time Recent news stories have raised the temperature of global warming rhetoric, comparing extreme weather events in Russia and Pakistan to Biblical predictions of planet-wide
doom and a fear that even if mankind halted all industrial activity today it’d still be too late to save Earth from a fiery death.
It's your fault, apparently: Mexican Butterflies Threatened By Severe Storms Fabled monarch butterflies are facing a new threat from severe storms that have devastated some sanctuary forests in Mexico, conservation groups said on Monday.
Eye-roller. Read on to see how invulnerable they really are: Iconic coral species the most vulnerable The Great Barrier Reef's dominant coral species are among the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming, a new study has found.
We can cut emissions while conserving our landscapes and ecosystems Fighting climate change is not only about energy – it's about how we want our landscapes to look, work and be worked
Hmm... Resolving the paradox of the Antarctic sea ice While Arctic sea ice has been diminishing in recent decades, the Antarctic sea ice extent has been increasing slightly. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology
provide an explanation for the seeming paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate. The paper appears in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science the week of August 16, 2010.
Paper: Sea Level Rise Not Accelerating A paper published yesterday in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans, confirms other studies of tide gauge records which show that there has been no statistically significant acceleration in sea level rise over the past 100+ years, in contrast to statements of the IPCC and Al Gore. Sea levels have been rising naturally since the peak of the last major ice age 20,000 years ago, and the rate of rise began to decelerate about 8,000 years ago: 
Sea Level Curve in black
(Hockey Schtick)
DESPITE warnings that New Orleans was unprepared for a severe hit by a hurricane, America was blindsided by Hurricane Katrina, a once-in-a-lifetime storm that made landfall
five years ago this month. We are similarly unready for another potential natural disaster: solar storms, bursts of gas on the sun’s surface that release tremendous energy
pulses.
Last week we were attacked by the sun. For real. Huge solar eruptions sent a blast of radiation toward Earth. Thankfully, the planet’s natural magnetic shield warded off the worst effects. Life went on uninterrupted. That won’t always be the case. In 1859, Richard Carrington recorded what is now called the “Carrington Effect” — intense solar activity that can disrupt modern life dramatically. In Carrington’s day, there were few electromechanical systems for intense solar radiation to mess with. The new fangled telegraph systems suffered the most. Solar-induced power surges knocked some operators from their chairs and set fire to the paper rolls used to record dashes and dots. Fortunately, no Carrington Effect has occurred since the whole world became electrified. But scientists worry about what might happen when a real solar tsunami hits. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Lebedev Physics Institute: Solar Maximum May Be Postponed Again 16. August 2010
Last Friday the German edition RIA NOVOSTI Russian news agency reported that there were five clusters of sunspots on the sun, leading some scientists to believe that the sun’s unusual lull may be over for good. Scientists have been observing sunspots for hundreds of years. Many believe solar activity has a major impact on the earth’s climate on a decadal scale. As a rule, the number of sunspots is considered to be the main criteria for solar activity: the higher the number of sunspots, the higher the activity. But Sergei Bogatchov of the Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences says that this correlation is not exact. Continue reading “Lebedev Physics Institute: Solar Maximum May Be Postponed Again” (No Tricks Zone)
Measuring salt shine to improve climate understanding From 14 - 25 August 2010, scientists from around the world will gather in Southern Turkey to measure the spectral reflectance of a few square kilometres of salt. These
measurements will have a major impact on the future of satellite based Earth observation, and will ultimately improve our understanding of the Earth's climate.
Paper “Water Vapor And The Dynamics Of Climate Changes” By Schneider Et Al 2010 There is a recent paper on the role of water vapor in the climate system which presents an much needed broadening beyond the role of carbon dioxide as the dominant climate forcing, as is emphasized in the 2007 IPCC WG report [and thanks to Faisal Hossain for alerting us to it!] .The paper is Schneider, T., P. A. O’Gorman, and X. J. Levine (2010), WATER VAPOR AND THE DYNAMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGES, Rev. Geophys., 48, RG3001, doi:10.1029/2009RG000302. The abstract reads
The finding that
reinforces what we have reported on; e.g. see What is the Importance to Climate of Heterogeneous Spatial Trends in Tropospheric Temperatures? that it is the atmospheric and ocean regional circulation patterns [rather than a global average of any climate metric] that matters in terms of such societally and environmentally important events such as droughts, floods etc. While the Schneider et al 2009 paper still emphasizes a global perspective (since they use an idealized global circulation model), their conclusion regarding atmospheric circulations is a message that the new IPCC assessment needs to heed. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Interior Department Limits Use Of Environmental Waivers The U.S. Interior Department said on Monday it would limit the controversial practice of allowing environmental waivers for deepwater drilling projects and instead subject
all such drilling to detailed analysis as it evaluates its review process.
The Economic Costs of an Offshore Drilling Moratorium: A Summary of the Mason Study by Eric Lowe In his highly relevant study, Dr. Joseph R. Mason, chair of banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University, offers a sophisticated estimate of the economic impacts of a federal moratorium on exploratory offshore oil drilling. The new moratorium, issued by the Obama administration after federal judge Martin Feldman issued an injunction banning the government from enforcing the original moratorium, freezes some 33 current exploratory drilling operations and places a six-month ban on the issuance of exploration permits by the MMS (now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement). Dr. Mason begins by identifying the “phases” of drilling that support local economies. Exploratory drilling and the development of offshore facilities, the extraction process, and the refining of the crude oil are all identified as impacting Gulf of Mexico economies. Additionally, those services and industries that support the offshore oil drilling sector provide jobs and economic investment in the area. Some of the service industries that Dr. Mason identifies are the chemical, platform construction, drilling services, transportation, gas processing, helicopter construction, and consumer goods industries. Also, the refining phase is likely to create an economic “spillover,” as refining capacity exists in many states outside the Gulf region. As expected, all of these industries comprise a large section of the overall Gulf economies. In the state of Louisiana, 2005 figures estimate 15.4 percent of total household earnings could be traced back to these earnings, amounting to some $12.7 billion dollars. The moratorium will lead to a cessation of worker training, as well as job losses among those already employed in these industries. One estimate by a consulting firm places total job losses by 2014 at 120,000. Many of these job losses would be outside the “big” oil companies that have become synonymous with the area, as Gulf oil exploration was essentially pioneered by smaller energy companies. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Wood to Coal to Oil to Natural Gas and Nuclear : The Slow Pace of Energy Transitions
In the wake of the Macondo well blowout, we are hearing renewed claims that we must quit using oil, that we must win “the oil end game.” In addition, there are the continuing calls for drastic reductions in carbon-based fuel consumption, and those calls are being amplified thanks to the drought and record-setting heat that has affected parts of the globe in recent weeks. [Read More] (Robert Bryce, ET)
Stupidity: UK Needs Clean Coal For New Energy Policy: Government New UK coal-fired power plants will need to fit carbon removing technology to comply with the upcoming Emission Performance Standard (EPS), energy and climate change
secretary Chris Huhne said on Monday.
Better: Coal-fired power stations win reprieve Exclusive: Government's decision to put pollution standards 'on hold' raises possibility of dirtiest coal plants going ahead
The coalition is watering down a commitment to tough new environmental emissions standards, raising the possibility of dirty coal-fired power stations such as Kingsnorth going ahead.To understand why the Coalition is appearing to slow down, one needs to understand the policy context of decisions about energy policy. A new report out by Arthur D. Little, a consultancy, clearly and concisely spells out the practical realities facing UK policy makers. The issue of decarbonization is not so much about rhetoric and good intentions, but about the facts on the ground related to technology, costs and implementation. The report first explains the nature of the challenge: The report then explains the practical realities shaping efforts to reach the emissions reduction targets set forth in UK law: All of these measures, combined with reductions from many other initiatives in a range of sectors, are designed to help reach the Government’s ambitious targets. But governments in general tend to over-estimate the level of take-up of different policy measures. The growth in large-scale renewable generation, for example, has not been anywhere near as fast as successive government estimates have predicted, and has focused heavily on one technology, namely wind generation. This slow take-up is likely to continue, at least in the near term, and each year that passes without significant construction makes it more and more difficult to reach the 2020 targets. Recent estimates are that 7,000 offshore turbines will need to be constructed between now and 2020, nearly two per day every day of this decade. Even investors in this activity doubt that such a level of activity is achievable.The report explains that costs of all of these proposed actions are high and may not even deliver the promised emissions reductions. The report argues that new wind power costs 6 times as much as equivalent gas-fired energy (or as much as 18 times more, depending on the methods used, capital costs only). The report has this bottom line: What is really needed now will be a bitter pill for many to swallow: a slow-down in the drive for low carbon solutions.A slow-down in UK decarbonization policy with respect to the targets of the 2008 Climate Change Act is inevitable. I do the math in this paper. In that paper, written in early 2009, soon after the Act was passed as law, I wrote that the UK would need to achieve the 2006 carbon efficiency of France by no later than 2015 if it was going to be on track to meeting its short-term emissions reduction target (France was at 0.30 in 2006, compare with implied decarbonization of the UK economy shown in the figure from the paper below). I concluded that: The failure of the UK Climate Change Act is yet to be broadly recognized, but when it is, it will provide an opportunity to recast carbon policies in a more effective manner. 
We may now be at a point where the inevitable failure of the Act is being recognized and discussed. If so, then UK energy policy today stands at a critical juncture. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
A 'Bizarre Situation' as Nuclear Operators Threaten Shutdown Germany's leading energy producers have threatened to shut down some of their nuclear reactors if a fuel-rod tax goes into effect as planned. Yet the threat comes as the
companies lobby for reactor lifetimes to be extended. Commentators on Monday are confused.
Bypassing Resistance, Brazil Prepares to Build a Dam ALTAMIRA, Brazil — For Raimunda Gomes da Silva, the impending construction of a huge hydroelectric dam here in the Amazon is painful déjà vu.
Ontario’s Power Trip: Solar see saw By Parker Gallant In a major energy policy reversal that will cost Ontario electricity consumers as much as a $1-billion, the province’s Energy Minister Brad Duguid last Friday took back a plan to cut solar power subsidies. The subsidies, based on paying 80-cents for a kiloWatt hour of solar power, were to be cut to 58 cents on all projects approved after July 2. But on Friday, under pressure from green energy lobbyists, Mr. Duguid reversed that decision. The new price for solar would be 64 cents–but only on projects submitted after Aug. 13. All proposals that have been submitted before that date–whether approved or not–would receive the 80 cent price. This is another electricity policy bungle on the part of the Liberals, part of a series that date back more than a year. Here’s part of the history. Read More (Financial Post)
Crisis! New York Style vs. the Real Thing “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” is no longer a fashionable good-night wish for Big Apple kids, even in the city’s high-rent districts and posh hotels. Growing
infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New Yorkers annoyed, anguished, angry about officialdom’s inadequate responses, and “itching” for answers.
Mike Mahler--Not your typical personal trainer Mahler's passion for kettlebell training, hormone optimization, and living life aggressively—as he puts it—inspired my latest HND piece entitled "Health Fads, Hormones, and Balance." If you've been around health care or exercise and fitness for any length of time, you have probably noticed that most of what goes on is a fad. Indeed, joining a health club as a New Year's resolution might be the biggest fad of them all. The joke is that most of the resolution crowd disappears by Groundhog Day, presumably going back into their respective holes. Kettlebells are nothing new, of course, and are making somewhat of a comeback, although for various reasons that Mahler details are still not seen too much in health clubs. Mahler is a big proponent of hormone optimization—again not a new concept—but Mahler frowns on supplementation. Rather, he points out that the biggest factor in throwing off hormone levels is chronic stress. Seems like we've talked about that in the past, right? As to living life aggressively, let's just say he that he is no sentimentalist, and has little patience for memes like having a positive attitude. Read the complete article. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)
Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities
and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s
disease in the human brain.
Apparently not a joke piece: Burger and a statin to go? Or hold that, please? NEW YORK - Fast food outlets should hand out free cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to their customers to "neutralize" the heart risks of eating fatty foods like
burgers and fries, British scientists suggested on Thursday.
Another book -- hopefully not another fad: If today’s dietary advice is so good, then how come obesity is such a problem? A new book will turn conventional diet advice on its head as Zoe Harcombe examines the causes of the worldwide obesity epidemic. Health Editor Madeleine Brindley spoke to
the Welsh author about her findings
Childhood obesity rates level off among some groups in California Despite the dire warnings about high obesity levels in this country, some recent studies show that U.S. obesity rates may be leveling off. A new study finds that among
children in California, obesity rates are evening out in some ethnic and racial groups, but not all.
Obesity Link to Diabetes Found in White Blood Cells, Australian Study Says Immune-system cells that cause inflammation in fat tissue may explain why Type 2 diabetes mostly occurs in people who are overweight, Australian researchers said.
Has some physiological plausibility: Aussies losing sleep due to rising obesity AUSTRALIANS are losing sleep because of their expanding waistlines.
Workplace smoking bans spark obesity? Smoking bans in the workplace may lead to more obese employees, suggests an international team of economists.
Call to repeal law on bicycle helmets ALMOST 20 years after Australia became the first country to make it illegal to ride a bike without a helmet, two Sydney University researchers say the law does not work and
we would be better off without it.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a stricter nationwide health standard for smog-causing pollutants that would bring substantial benefits to millions of Americans. With a final rule expected by the end of this month, crucial senators, mainly from industrial and oil-producing states, are pushing back. They say investments required to produce cleaner air are too expensive and not scientifically justified. (NYT)
LOIS HENRY: Independent thought not wanted at UCLA I know you're going to wonder why you should care about some brainiac getting the boot at UCLA. So let me start by explaining why it matters, then we'll get to the nitty
gritty of what happened.
Prize-winning piece of gibbering nitwittery: As It Stands: Atrazine threatens public health like another Agent Orange Once upon a time, Agent Orange (AO) and all of its synthetic peers were widely sprayed to kill weeds throughout the land, and overseas where Americans fought in Vietnam. The
manufacturers of AO assured the people that all was well. So everyone smiled.
Taxes, Dust, and Oysters: Feds Busy but Wrong GreeenIsm piece by Guest: Dennis T. Avery
The Incandescent Bulb Ban: Another Regulatory Overreach
Is the modern incandescent light bulb ready to retire from society and find its final resting place in the halls of the American History Museum? Politicians seem to think so, but consumer behavior indicates otherwise. According to an article in The New York Times,
The government solution to replace incandescent bulbs is to regulate them out of the marketplace and forcefully restrict consumer choice. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 placed stringent efficiency requirements on incandescent bulbs in an attempt to phase them out between 2012 and 2014 and replace them with more expensive but more energy-efficient bulbs, the most popular being compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). Continue reading... (The Foundry)
How Obama Is Locking Up Our Land Have you heard of the "Great Outdoors Initiative"? Chances are, you haven't. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with
environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It's another stealthy power grab through executive
order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.
Plan to sell off nature reserves risks 'austerity countryside' Sweeping cuts to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' budget challenge coalition's green credentials
Price of red meat likely to push more people towards vegetarian diet Fish is likely to become a larger part of the British diet because it is one of the few foodstuffs that has fallen in price in recent years, research suggests. (TDT)
Farmers face losing thousands of pounds in environmental subsidies Farmers face losing thousands of pounds in public subsidies for protecting Britain's wildlife. (TDT)
U.S. Judge Bans Planting Of Genetically Engineered Beets A federal judge on Friday banned the planting of genetically modified sugar beets engineered by Monsanto Co in a ruling that marks a major setback for the biotech giant.
Like a dog with a Frisbee: A changed climate on climate change Progress in climate change talks remained stalled in Bonn, but there is hope for the upcoming Cancun round (Guardian
Terence Corcoran — The climate climate: cool and getting colder August 13, 2010 – 9:02 pm From Washington to Cancun to British Columbia, the climate issue is heading for the deep freeze And now for the climate weather: It may be hot outside, but the political environment for climate science is in a deep freeze. In Washington, plans for a national carbon-trading system are colder than the ice in the mint juleps at the Round Robin Bar. The economy comes first in the U.S. Senate, where a new climate bill ran into a brick wall, putting an end to environmentalists’ hopes for a national cap-and-trade system any time in the next few years. “We fell victim to much broader politics that were beyond our control,” said a leading green activist. In Bonn last weekend, climate politics got so cold that negotiators working on a new global climate treaty to replace the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol walked away from the talks, saying that the policy direction was going backward rather than forward. As part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Control, the Bonn talks were aiming at recovering from last year’s Cop-out in Copenhagen. “These negotiations have if anything gone backwards,” said Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s climate action commissioner. The world is still divided over — among other issues — carbon-emission reduction targets, without which any convention would be useless. Another attempt to regroup will take place in China in October in preparation for a grand Meeting of the Parties in Cancun, Mexico, in December. Read More (Financial Post)
Czech speaker of the House against AGW panic Cool reason. No commanding of the wind and rain, Ms Němcová recommends concerning warming » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
Climate Change In Germany Has Become “A Loser Topic” 15. August 2010 I couldn’t help but to relish the story that follows. The German European Institute For Climate and Environment (EIKE) brings our attention to a report by the publicly funded NDR German television news show Panorama concerning the state of climate science and politics today in Germany. If you’re a climate activist, things just couldn’t be worse.
In summary the topic of climate change in Germany has gone far beyond its shelf-life. It is used up and no longer draws a bit of interest from the public. As the clip shows, the German public has grown tired of the constant barrage of climate alarmism, and is now über-bored by it. Editors have since taken climate news off the front pages. The public doesn’t want to hear it anymore, editors fret. At 0:36 of the clip, normal citizens are asked about climate change. The reaction: they couldn’t care less about it. Indeed some even say warmer is better.
Climate change? No worries at all!
CO2 is Not a Pollutant but a Huge Benefactor By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow There is a wild debate in the skeptic community on whether CO2 plays a role in climate changes over time and if so how much. I am going to avoid getting embroiled in that discussion because no one knows, including the IPCC, which starts with the basic assumption that it does, that we understand the forcing and proceeds from there. They back into the forcing in their models which are seriously flawed with very poor understanding of the clearly important factors of water in all its forms in our atmosphere and in the role of the sun and oceans. Even with seriously contaminated surface observation data, their models are failing miserably even just a decade or two into the runs. There was a very similar divisive argument in the meteorological community in early to middle part the last century as Dr James Fleming of Colby College documented in the book “Historical Perspectives on Climate Change”. The pertinent chapter was on the web and can be found here. This was before models and was based on theory as the write-up documents. As a Synoptic Meteorologist and Climatologist over the years I have let the data do the talking. The data says that CO2 plays little or no role in climate change -
which is cyclical and relates far better with the cycles in sun and ocean.
The Russian scientists Klashtorin and Lyubushin (2003) found a similar alternating pattern comparing GLOBAL temperature trends and World Fuel Consumption. They found a +0.92
from 1861 to 1875, a -0.71 from 1875 to 1910, +0.28 from 1910 to 1940, -0.88 from 1940 to 1975, +0.94 from 1975 to 2000. In the paper they projected a reversal post 2000 which has verified. This on again, off-again correlation suggests that CO2 is not the primary climate driver. Since the solar TSI and ocean multidecadal cycles are much better correlated, they are more likely candidates.
CO2, The Gas of Life As opposed to be a pollutant or an agent of harm, CO2 is a blessing, a plant fertilizer that has supported an agricultural revolution. Nurseries use CO2 to boost plant growth in greenhouses, pumping it in at levels maybe 3 times ambient levels. Just the increase in the last century has improved crop yields as shown by NASA greening studies and the UN’s own graph.
More CO2 means more plant growth. Yale professor Robert Mendehlson testified to congress in 2000, climate change as projected then by IPCC would result in benefits of up to $23B/year to agriculture and forestry CO2 enriched plants are more drought resistant and have lower water irrigation needs. CO2 benefits crops under moisture stress most! This eases water supply issues in semi-arid regions and in Mediterranean climates like California, an added benefit. Ironically California greenies are all too anxious to negate that benefit under the delusion they are saving the planet. We should be rewarding producers of CO2 not taxing them out of existence. Taxing them becomes a value-added tax as it affects of prices of all goods and services on the way to consumers. It is a highly regressive tax, hurting the poor and middle class the most. But we know the real motive is not to save the planet but to address or generate revenues to pay for other issues that the administration favors. NOAA’s Lubchenko when she was president of AAAS in 1999 said: “Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.” The government has delivered to the tune of $79B so far to support the big lie. We hear this week, the UN with the administration’s help is said to be seeking to tax the world $100B/year for 10 years to help fight climate change (a George Soros idea). That is $1 trillion the next decade - a redistribution to a totally corrupt and ineffective global organization. The right US move would be to kick their collective corrupt butts out of New York City and turn off the spigot. And get off the carbon kick. Address real issues like the economy and jobs. Your wacky enviro friends may not appreciate it but the vast majority of real Americans would. (Icecap)
Bull spit! Firms Falling Short On Climate Action: Norway Fund Companies in energy-intensive sectors such as oil production, chemicals and transport are doing too little to combat climate change, Norway's $455 billion sovereign wealth
fund said on Friday.
This carbon scheme is a fiasco in the making Telegraph View: There are major concerns about the bureaucracy involved in a plan to force companies to cut their energy use.
<chuckle> World 2009 CO2 Emissions Off 1.3 Percent: Institute Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2009 fell 1.3 percent to 31.3 billion tonnes in the first year-on-year decline in this decade, German renewable energy institute IWR
said on Friday.
Paper: Fake random data are better predictors than Mann proxies One of the examples showing that the existing composition of the climate science community makes it impossible to achieve "collective" progress even in the
elementary scientific questions is the hockey stick controversy. » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
BREAKING: New paper makes a hockey sticky wicket of Mann et al 98/99/08 Sticky Wicket – phrase, meaning: “A difficult situation”. Oh, my. There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick. Now, there’s a new look to the familiar “hockey stick”. Before: 
Multiproxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature variations over the past millennium (blue), along with 50-year average (black), a measure
of the statistical uncertainty associated with the reconstruction (gray), and instrumental surface temperature data for the last 150 years (red), based on the work by Mann et
al. (1999). This figure has sometimes been referred to as the hockey stick. Source: IPCC (2001).
After: 
FIG 16. Backcast from Bayesian Model of Section 5. CRU Northern Hemisphere annual mean land temperature is given by the thin black line and a smoothed version is given by the thick black line. The forecast is given by the thin red line and a smoothed version is given by the thick red line. The model is fit on 1850-1998 AD and backcasts 998-1849 AD. The cyan region indicates uncertainty due to t, the green region indicates uncertainty due to β, and the gray region indicates total uncertainty. Continue reading (WUWT)
Niwa's data accuracy challenged The country's state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.
The New “Skeptical Science” Website: What is Going On Here? by John Droz Jr. I was recently informed of a website called “Skeptical Science” run by a Mr. John Cook. As a scientist (physicist), I decided to check it out to see what I could learn. I started with the assumption that Mr. Cook was a competent and well-intentioned person. After some looking around there, here’s what I found out and concluded. The first red flag is the fact that Science (by definition) is skeptical, so why the repetition in the name? It’s something like naming a site “The attractive fashion model”. Of more concern is the fact that (contrary to what one might be led to believe by the title) the site is actually focused against skeptical scientists — specifically those who have the temerity to question anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Hmmm. Mr. Cook says he’s motivated by his young daughter’s future. Great — all the more reason he should want to get it right. I was fascinated by his site’s supposedly comprehensive list of 119 reasons given by “AGW skeptics,” as well as his rather cursory dismissal of each of these. For instance, his answer to the consensus matter (#3) is that “97% of climatologists support AGW.” Well that in itself is debatable, but nowhere do I see any discussion that addresses the larger issue: the fact that science is not decided by consensus. What was the consensus of 99% of the “experts” about the solar system in Galileo’s time? Twenty-five years ago what was the consensus of 99% of the “experts” about the cause of ulcers? In both cases (and in many others) 99% of the experts were 100% wrong. That is exactly why science is not decided by consensus. Another example is item #94: “Over 31,000 scientists signed the OISM Petition Project” and his response is “The ‘OISM petition’ was signed by only a few climatologists.” Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought that this was a scientific matter (remember the website title?). Is he really saying something so elitist as “physicist, chemists, biologists and other scientists are not qualified to assess the scientific legitimacy of AGW”? Apparently so. Oops — if so then that means that Dr. Hansen’s theories should be discarded, since he is a physicist! [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Revkin: greenhouse effect is at best a tertiary wild card
Building Resilience on a Turbulent Planet (Dot Earth)It's a generic interview with an environmentalist, Robert Verchick, but what's remarkable in my and Tom Nelson's eyes is Revkin's comment #5: » Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
Monckton: Why current trends are not alarming Since there has been a lot of discussion about Monckton here and elsewhere, I’ve offered him the opportunity to present his views here. – Anthony
At www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org I publish a widely-circulated and vigorously-debated Monthly CO2 Report, including graphs showing changes in CO2 concentration and in global mean surface temperature since 1980, when the satellites went on weather watch and the NOAA first published its global CO2 concentration series. Since some commenters here at Wattsup have queried some of our findings, I have asked Anthony to allow me to contribute this short discussion. We were among the first to show that CO2 concentration is not rising at the fast, exponential rate that current anthropogenic emissions would lead the IPCC to expect, and that global temperature has scarcely changed since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001. Continue reading (WUWT)
The State of Earth’s Climate 2009: How can so many people be
so wrong?
Guest SEPP editorial by Sherwood Idso, Keith Idso, and Craig Idso In a “Highlights” report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s State of the Climate in 2009 document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the document describes as the work of “more than 300 scientists from 48 countries.” Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report’s first paragraph, is that “global warming is undeniable,” and the Report goes on from there to describe “how we know the world has warmed.” But this, and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter. The Report next states, for example, that “recent studies show the world’s oceans are heating up,” which is fine; but then—as if hoping no one will question them—the Report says the oceans are warming, “as they absorb most of the extra heat being added to the climate system from the build-up of heat-trapping gases,” which contention is far from a proven fact, and is—in fact—merely an hypothesis .... and a bad one at that, as we shall soon see. Another fault of the Report is its hyping of “melting Arctic sea ice,” while it remains silent on the state of Antarctic sea ice, which has been doing just the opposite as it has grown in extent. Likewise, a major inconsistency of the Report is its stating, with respect to temperature, that “a particular year can experience record-breaking highs and lows in any given location,” while, “as a whole, global climate continues to warm.” This is very true; and it can also do so while, as a whole, global climate cools or remains unchanged. And it implies the same thing for all types of weather phenomena (such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc.), which means that the occurrence of any unusually dramatic weather phenomenon in any “particular year” should imply nothing about the long-term trend of that phenomenon or the presumed trajectory of the global climate within which it is embedded. Yet the Report goes on to describe six such extreme events that occurred in the “particular year” of 2009, which would have to have been done for no other reason than to imply that these weather extremes were caused by global warming, which flies in the face of their earlier contention that record-breaking low temperatures in any year say nothing about the long-term thermal tendency of the planet. Last of all, the Report states that “people have spent thousands of years building society for one climate and now a new one is being created—one that’s warmer and more extreme,” which leads us to wonder .... How could more than 300 scientists from 48 countries possibly be so wrong? Any student of history and palaeoclimate well knows that earth’s climate has changed dramatically over the past “thousands of years.” During the central portion of the current interglacial period, for example, many parts of the planet were a few to several degrees Centigrade warmer than they currently are. And only a thousand years ago, the Medieval Warm Period was holding sway. Although many of the scientists of Climategate infamy tried mightily to make that period of warmth “go away,” the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has for quite some time now posted a review of a different research project every single week that testifies to the reality of the Medieval Warm Period. And that ever-growing body of research is demonstrating beyond any doubt that there was a several-hundred-year interval of warmth back then that was at many different times (stretching from decades to centuries), and in numerous places (throughout the entire world), significantly warmer than the Report’s highly-touted first decade of the 21st century, and at a time when the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration was far less than it is today. What makes this particular failure of the Report so doubly damning is the fact that it claims that each of the “more than 30 different climate indicators” it has analyzed “is placed into historical context.” That is obviously not true. And for a parameter so central to the core of the global warming discussion as temperature to not be put into proper long-term context is inexcusable, although quite understandable, especially when one realizes the implications it would hold for the Report’s unfounded contentions about the present state of earth’s climate. Sign up for the weekly SEPP Newsletter for a compilation of stories from many sites. See PDF.
Climate change alarmists ignore scientific methods When it comes to global warming, the public at large doesn't know what to believe anymore. Global warming alarmists have been hammering at us for years; the media is made up
mostly of true believers; and politicians, who, in the absence of understanding and knowledge about climate science, have put themselves out on a limb from which it is
difficult to retreat. Given the economic interests and the political powers involved, this dilemma will not go away quietly.
Oh... Climate scientists in race to predict where natural disaster will strike next Conference in Boulder will step up world's efforts to establish an early warning system for extreme weather events
Indur M. Goklany: Global Death Toll From Extreme Weather Events Declining Sunday, 15 August 2010 16:39 Indur M. Goklany
At least in the virtual realm: Ocean’s Color Affects Hurricane Paths WASHINGTON—A change in the color of ocean waters could have a drastic effect on the prevalence of hurricanes, new research indicates. In a simulation of such a change in
one region of the North Pacific, the study finds that hurricane formation decreases by 70 percent. That would be a big drop for a region that accounts for more than half the
world’s reported hurricane-force winds.
“Is Jim Hansen’s Global Temperature Skillful?” Guest Post by John R. Christy Guest Post By John R. Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville
The three warm-color time series are taken from Hansen’s published testimony in June 1988 in which global surface air temperatures were projected under three scenarios by his global climate model. The red curve follows a scenario (A) of continued emissions growth based on the previous 20 years before 1988 (which turned out to be an underestimate of actual emissions growth.) The orange represents a scenario (B) of fixed emissions at the rate achieved in the 1980s. The yellow curve portrays a scenario (C) in which “a drastic reduction” in GHG emissions is assumed for 1990-2000. The observations are global tropospheric temperatures adjusted to mimic the magnitude of surface temperature variability and trends according to published climate model simulations (i.e. a reduction in satellite anomalies by 0.83.) After tying all time series to a 1979-83 reference mean, one can see the significant divergence in the results. (Notes: 1. observed 2010 is Jan-Jul only; 2.) tropospheric temperatures are used as the comparison metric due to many uncertainties and biases in the surface temperature record, i.e. Klotzbach et al. 2009, 2010 ; 3.) both models and observations included the 1982 eruption of El Chichon while B and C scenarios included a volcano in the mid 1990s – not too different from Mt. Pinatubo.) The result suggests the old NASA GCM was considerably more sensitive to GHGs than is the real atmosphere since (a) the model was forced with lower GHG concentrations than actually occurred and (b) still gave a result that was significantly warmer than observations. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes. If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.This neatly sums up the first of two reasons why I think that the current debate over whether greenhouse gas emissions caused/exacerbated/influenced recent disasters around the world is a fruitless debate. It is not a debate that can be resolved empirically, but rather depends upon hunches, speculation and beliefs. Debates that cannot be resolved empirically necessarily involve extra-scientific factors. There is nothing unusual such "post-normal" situations, as they are common, but like Gavin Schmidt we should be clear about when we are in such a context. While I have no illusions that the inane debate over causality of specific physical events will continue as long there is weather, there should be no ambiguity in the fact that researchers who have looked for a signal of increasing GHGs in increasing disaster losses (whether measured in dollars or in lives) have yet to see such a signal. It would be scientifically incorrect to claim that GHGs have been shown to account for any portion of the damage or suffering resulting from recent events. The second reason that the present debate is fruitless is that it has no practical significance. Consider the options. Imagine that there was a scientific consensus that no signal of greenhouse gases could be seen in today's weather extremes. In such a world would we be able to forget about mitigation and adaptation? Absolutely not. The reasons why action makes sense on decarbonizing the global economy and building resiliency have a much broader basis. Similarly, if there was a scientific consensus that a clear signal greenhouse gas emissions could be seen in recent events, it not would support a reordering of policy priorities for exactly the same reasons. The simple fact is that any action on greenhouse gases would be a horribly slow and indirect way of trying to modulate disasters, as the effects could not even be seen for many decades. This is not an argument against trying to stabilize greenhouse gases, but it is an argument against suggesting that reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be an effective tool of disaster mitigation. The debate over global warming and extremes has been well characterized as "climate porn." And like porn it is not going away anytime soon (the image of the top of this post is from five years ago), and perhaps nor should it, as everyone really seems to like it. However, at the same time, it is important to recognize that the enjoying of and participating in the making of climate porn does nothing (and maybe less) to advance climate policies. But it is sure hard to look away. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Big, hot, shiny orb in sky caused by 'climate change' says UK Met Office Is “climate change” to blame for the smog in Moscow and the peat fires which have swept across Russia and devastated 30 per cent of its wheat harvest? (James Delingpole)
Heat Wave In Russia – Is It From Global Warming? There has been considerable discussion of the heat wave in Russia and of the floods in Pakistan and China as to whether these events are from global warming. Examples of this in the media include Will Russia’s Heat Wave End Its Global-Warming Doubts? By Simon Shuster / Moscow Climate change whips up floods, fire and ice by Brian Sullivan and Madelene Pearson The second article starts with the text
and includes the statements
A new article in the Economist Green View: A taste of things to come has a more complete discussion for these weather events. Excerpts from the article includes the text
The attribution of the heat wave to atmospheric blocking this summer is a scientifically sound conclusion. The heat can occur from
[for a discussion of warm core anticyclones, see Pielke Sr., R.A. 2002: Synoptic Weather Lab Notes. Colorado State University, Department of Atmospheric Science Class Report #1, Final Version, August 20, 2002.] However, the statements that the tropics have expanded in recent years and the probabilities that such heat waves are becoming more common has not yet convincingly been made. Indeed we looked at this issue for the heat wave in Europe in 2003 in the paper Chase, T.N., K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool, 2006: Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context? Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L23709, doi:10.1029/2006GL027470 where we found that the 2003 heat anomaly was particularly extreme near the surface (perhaps due to dry soil) but less anomalous in the rest of the troposphere. Our conclusions were confirmed in Connolley W.M. 2008: Comment on “Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?” by Thomas N. Chase et al. Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L02703, doi:10.1029/2007GL031171. We updated our analysis in Chase, T.N., K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool, 2008: Reply to comment by W.M. Connolley on ‘‘Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?’’Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L02704, doi:10.1029/2007GL031574. In the Chase et al 2008 paper we reported that
and
Tom Chase will be updating this analysis through August 2010 in early September when the data becomes available. Then, instead of qualitative claims about an expanding tropics and a greater frequency of heat waves, actual climate data will be available to quantify whether or not the claims made concerning the tropospheric temperature anomalies are robust or not. We have certainly seen a warm troposphere this year. The July lower tropospheric temperature anomalies were presented in my August 5 2010 post and the global spatial plot is reproduced below
The heat wave in western Russia is clear in the data along with a substantial warm anomaly in eastern Russia and part of China, as are smaller warm anomalies in other locations worldwide. Only Antarctica has a large negative anomaly [although interestingly, Pakistan has a modest below average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly] This warmth presents an opportunity in the coming months to assess whether this is really related to a long term global warming related effect, or is due to some other aspects of the climate system (perhaps as modified by spatially heterogeneous forcing due to human activity including land use change and aerosols). If it is a long term global warming signature, than the global average tropospheric warm anomaly will persist when the blocking pattern is removed. If, however, the lower tropospheric temperatures cool to or below their long term average and this heat cannot be found in the oceans, long term global warming cannot be the culprit. I will report on this early in 2011. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Arctic Armageddon or Methane Madness?
The UN Taxman: Could It Tax Your (Airplane) Seat?
It is billed as a “panel of the world’s leading economists… to fight climate change.” I am not sure what kind of economists they are, but the ones that have been meeting in Bonn, Germany seem to ignore what any undergraduate student in business or engineering can readily conclude: the net present value of carbon dioxide fossil fuels is positive and huge; the net present value of any “green” alternatives is negative to hugely negative. [Read More] (Michael J. Economides, ET)
This seems somewhat incongruous: Obama: Mission Accomplished Standing in front of a Jeep Grand Cherokee in Chrysler's Jefferson North Detroit assembly plant Friday afternoon, President Obama Friday declared that Chrysler "was
building the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow." Come again?
August 13, 2010 – 8:58 pm
Electric cars are likely to remain green status symbols, affordable only by households making $200,000 a year By Charles Lane It’s official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost US$41,000 — that’s a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a US$7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to US$33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil-price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price. Some will pay a premium for the frisson of going green or being the first “early adopter” on the block. Still, this little runabout is a rich man’s ride. And that’s my problem with the Obama administration’s energy policy, or at least with his lavish subsidies for the Volt, Nissan’s all-electric Leaf (likely sticker price US$33,000), and Tesla’s US$100,000 all-electric Roadster: Where does the U.S. federal government get off spending the average person’s tax dollars to help better-off-than-average Americans buy expensive new cars? Read More (Financial Post)
Another one: A Battle in Mining Country Pits Coal Against Wind LORELEI SCARBRO’S husband, Kenneth, an underground coal miner for more than 30 years, is buried in a small family cemetery near her property here at the base of Coal River
Mountain. The headstone is engraved with two roosters facing off, their feathers ruffled. Kenneth, who loved cockfighting, died in 1999, and, Ms. Scarbro says, he would have
hated seeing the tops of mountains lopped off with explosives and heavy machinery by mining companies searching for coal.
Climate Laws Won’t Affect Burning of Thermal Coal, AME Says Aug. 16 -- Laws aimed at combating climate change won’t reduce the burning of coal to fuel electricity generation, Michael Dixon, manager of business development at AME
Mineral Economics, said at a conference in Brisbane today.
Britain is struggling to power the nuclear revolution About 40km south of Beijing, some of the world's most exciting science is splitting atoms in pursuit of the nuclear physicist's Holy Grail – the tiny, cheap reactor.
Ontario Sets New Lower Rate For Some Solar power Ontario, Canada's most populous province, announced on Friday a new lower rate for power it buys from some small solar systems under its much-vaunted clean energy incentive
program.
Renewable energy is the cash crop of the future for British farmers There's a new beast on the loose in the countryside.
USA Today Abets ObamaCare Supporters’ Misinformation Campaign Posted by Michael F. Cannon
An article in today’s The USA Today titled, “With Many Still in Dark, Groups Shed Light on Health Care Law,” aims to correct misinformation about ObamaCare. Ironically, the article is itself a monument to misinformation. (Cato at liberty)
Are you ready for a world without antibiotics? Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we're going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it's going to get nasty (Guardian)
Radioactivity Concerns Grow as Blazes Continue With fires continuing to blaze across Russia, many are concerned that radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl disaster could be released into the air. The Kremlin, however, has played down the risk. (Spiegel)
Few Chernobyl radiation risks from Russia fires LONDON - Fears that fires scorching forests near Chernobyl may reawaken dangerous amounts of radioactive fallout and propel it into the air are overblown, scientists say,
and the actual health risks are very small.
Obesity linked to lower risk of glaucoma in women NEW YORK - A recent study found that heavier women were less likely to get one type of glaucoma than their thinner peers - the first time this association has been shown,
the authors report.
Is obesity contributing to high c-section rates? NEW YORK | Thu Aug 12, 2010 2:18pm EDT - The larger a pregnant woman is when she checks in on delivery day, the greater her risk of having a cesarean section, suggests a large new study. (Reuters Health)
Ground control to Major Tom: Scots scientists developing protein pill to tackle obesity Scottish scientists are working on pill to combat obesity epidemic.
The word from a couple of balloonatics: Are Plastics Making Us Fat? Health gurus claim chemicals—not calories—are the cause of obesity.
Mercury poisoning: dark side of Colombia gold boom BOGOTA - Colombia's gold bonanza has a dark side, U.N. experts said on Tuesday: mercury poisoning spreading from miners to the population of a northwest state where they use
mercury to extract the precious metal.
Farmers Lean to Truce on Animals’ Close Quarters WEST MANSFIELD, Ohio — Concessions by farmers in this state to sharply restrict the close confinement of hens, hogs and veal calves are the latest sign that so-called
factory farming — a staple of modern agriculture that is seen by critics as inhumane and a threat to the environment and health — is on the verge of significant change.
Biggest relocation in China since Three Gorges China's growing thirst for water is driving one of the world's biggest mass relocations, with 440,000 people leaving their homes to make way for a huge man-made canal
project to channel water to drought-prone Beijing.
EPA Proposes Rules On Greenhouse Gas Permits The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed new rules to ensure factories and power plants will be able to obtain permits they will need to emit greenhouse
gases starting next year.
Texas Fight! What Other States Can Learn from Texas vs U.S. EPA by Daren Bakst Texas is fighting back against the heavy hand of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). All Americans should be proud of–and other states should take note of—not just the spirit but the technical arguments of the Lone Star revolt. A recent letter to the EPA by both the state’s Attorney General and the Chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality made it absolutely clear that the state is not going to comply with the EPA’s regulations on the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions. From the letter:
Background [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Hot air trade collapsing? Whadda shame... ICE cuts staff at Chicago Climate Exchange-sources LONDON, Aug 11 - Market operator Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is laying off staff at newly acquired U.S. environmental bourse the Chicago Climate Exchange, industry
sources told Reuters, citing a lack of U.S. action on climate change.
Aiding and abetting the scammers: Interagency Task Force Releases Report on ‘Clean Coal’ Technology An interagency task force looking at long-term federal strategy for so-called “clean coal” technologies released
its final report today. The verdict? There are no “insurmountable” barriers to commercial-scale deployment of the technology.
Obama panel boosts bid to put greenhouse gas emissions underground An Obama task force Thursday said that carbon capture – in which greenhouse gas emissions would be stored underground – is feasible. It's seen as a promising way to combat global warming. (CSM)
Oh boy... Carbon pricing called key to coal pollution plan WASHINGTON (AP) — The key to developing technology to store coal plants' pollution underground is charging them for the carbon dioxide they release into the air, an
administration task force says.
UN economists propose fast-track green taxes for $100 billion climate fund LONDON, UK, Aug. 12, 2010/ Troy Media/A leading group of economists advising UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for a raft of new green taxes to raise the US$100 billion a year committed by the 110 participant nations who signed December’s Copenhagen Accord. The call won’t come as music to the ears of taxpayers globally – and particularly Canadian taxpayers. (Peter C. Glover, Troy Media)
It is all very well for us to talk light-heartedly about the silly season and the preposterous claims of its denizens, but meanwhile the enemy within are pushing the western world steadily towards a lunatic economic suicide, while the enormities they commit are conveniently given cover by the prevailing frivolity. The US Presidency, for example, having largely failed to recruit Congress into its war on industry, resorts to undemocratic methods by permitting the out-of-control EPA to wage it unconstrained. The mostly sympathetic media report it as just another thread in the rich tapestry of modern life. In the UK, the Telegraph has appointed Louise Gray as Queen of the season and almost daily reports of mostly old scares pour out: so this one did not seem all that different. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is, however, a major frontal attack on the core of British industry, involving not only onerous tax increases and draconian fines, but equally importantly it imposes an enormous administrative burden, just at a time when it can do most damage to business and the national economy. Its history is replete with the nastiest characteristics of the genre. Arising from undemocratically evolved EU diktats, it was formulated by the monumentally failed Labour government and has all the hallmarks of the Brownian love of complexity. Then it has been adopted unchanged by the coalition in a covert way. Rather than give fair warning of the pain to come, the Government has treated the whole ghastly affair as a state secret, so that most of the victim companies have no idea of the nightmare that is about to hit them. It has now been exposed in the middle of the silly season, when the victims are supposed to register for fleecing by the end of next month. One part of the Government is looking to industry to get it out of the current mess, while another part is shackling that industry so that it is even more immersed in a fight for survival. The incredible fact is that the whole thing turns on a preposterous theory based on maligning a wholly benign rare gas that is in fact essential to the existence of life on earth. On the basis of the myth the British have, for example, passively allowed Indians to take over their steel industry, close it down and move it to India. This is just part of a massive migration of industry from the western nations to the Asian ones, no doubt to the satisfaction of the UN administration. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. (Number Watch)
UK government urged to evaluate biochar potential with trial schemes First official report says burying charcoal in the soil has potential to cut greenhouse gases but scientific uncertainties remain (Guardian)
What the Chinese really think of 'Man Made Global Warming' One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal,
environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden
prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a
few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.
Flying thick & fast: Global warming blamed for weather disasters doubling in 30 years THE number of weather-related disasters has more than doubled in the past 30 years.
Several regions of the world are currently coping with severe weather-related events: flash floods and widespread flooding in large parts of Asia and parts of Central Europe while other regions are also affected: by heatwave and drought in Russian Federation, mudslides in China and severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. While a longer time range is required to establish whether an individual event is attributable to climate change, the sequence of current events matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.Even though the IPCC report can be parsed in many ways, I await the textual exegesis that supports the claim that the "sequence of current events matches IPCC predictions." This will be difficult given that the IPCC didn't even make projections for 2010. I welcome in the comments efforts to justify the claim by the WMO. I am coming to the conclusion that there is something about the climate issue that makes people -- especially but not limited to academics and scientists -- completely and utterly lose their senses. The WMO statement is (yet) another example of scientifically unsupportable nonsense in the climate debate. Such nonsense is of course not going away anytime soon . But because various unsupportable and just wrong claims are being advanced by leading scientists and scientific organizations, it would be easy to get the impression that on the issues of extreme events and climate change, IPCC science has a status similar to interpretations of Nostradamus and the Mayan calendars. (Roger Pielke Jr.)
Time to calm down everybody.
Past Errors to Blame for Russia’s Peat Fires ELEKTROGORSK, Russia — For two weeks, soldiers with chain saws felled every tree in sight.
The Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 The longer and deadlier the heat wave in western Russia becomes, the more frequently it is being linked to anthropogenic global warming. But global warming theory doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining why it’s so darn hot this summer in Moscow. Long-term observations suggest a more basic cause—an unusual and unprecedented (at least since 1950) confluence of several naturally-occurring atmospheric circulation patterns that together combined to set the stage for extreme warmth. Add to that urbanization, changing forestry practices, and perhaps throw in a dash of global warming for good measure, and you take a situation that would otherwise be “very hot” and up it a notch to “record hot.” The driving force of the 2010 heat wave has been a stationary weather system that has remained locked in place over western Russia since mid-June. The atmospheric is termed to be “blocked” when atmospheric circulation patterns remained fixed in place, instead of being progressive. The prolonged snow and cold in the eastern half of the U.S. last winter was caused by an atmospheric block which locked in a pattern which allowed arctic air to slide southward and storm systems to track up the east coast. The heat in Russia is caused by a blocking pattern which has locked in high pressure over Moscow and environs which favors southerly (warm) flow, a lot of sunshine, and little rain. (WCR)
Frozen jet stream links Pakistan floods, Russian fires Raging wildfires in western Russia have reportedly doubled average daily death rates in Moscow. Diluvial rains over northern Pakistan are surging south – the UN reports
that 6 million have been affected by the resulting floods.
Lord Monckton is under attack, a sure sign that he’s winning on warming. Monckton fights back and refutes Prof. Abraham.
Have you noticed the kicking around that CFACT Advisor Lord Christopher Monckton's been getting lately?
BBC to issue correction on rice yields story From: Richard Black Dear Anthony, Thanks for your email. You are correct – I am mistaken – a correction will be made to the news story shortly. Best regards, …my letter follows Continue reading (WUWT)
Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Aug. 12th 2010 A Democrat wants skeptics put on ice, NOAA nuked Wisconsin and the Chinese are pretty sure global warming is a Western plot against the developing world. (Daily Bayonet)
SST Anomalies In The Hurricane Nursery
By Steve Goddard Thanks to Dr Klotzbach for his excellent post describing his thinking behind the CSU hurricane forecast. A number of readers asked about SSTs in the hurricane nursery. So I took the most recent Unisys SST anomaly map, removed all colors between -0.5°C and +0.5°C, and overlaid the most recent tropical storm map on it. Continue reading (WUWT)
There was an interesting preprint P5.16 from the 2005 16th AMS Symposium on Global Change and Climate Variations titled “Water vapor trends and variability from the global NVAP dataset” [extended abstract] by Thomas. H. Vonder Haar, John M. Forsythe, Johnny Luo, David L. Randel and Shannon Woo. The preprint includes the text
This is quite an interesting and provacative finding, if substantiated, as an increase of water vapor in the atmosphere has been claimed in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report. We have discussed this issue on our weblog (e.g. see). In the 2007 IPCC SPM, it is stated that
The Vonderhaar et al 2005 finding reported in their preprint conflicts with the conclusion in the 2007 IPCC report. However, this was reported only in a preprint, not a peer reviewed final paper. In a recent query regarding this paper, we were told that an updated accurate NVAP data analysis will be available in 2012 or 2013 and they have set up a website to communicate the latest information. The Statement is reproduced here.
Since this is such a fundamental climate metric to compare with the IPCC multi-decadal global model predictions (which project a continued increase in tropospheric water vapor), the achievement of an updated (through 2010) accurate analysis of the NVAP data should be of the highest climate science priority. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
Interview Of Kevin Trenberth and Roger Pielke Sr. Update 8/12/2010 am): I e-mailed the following to Kevin
Following is Kevin’s response
Original Post Kevin Trenberth and I were interviewed by the Weather Channel on Monday August 9 by Eric Fisher on the issue of does global warming equate to extreme weather. Eric’s questions were excellent. Unfortunately, the interview is not on-line at the Weather Channel, but they have promised to send a DVD with this show which we will plan to convert and post. In the interim, I wanted to comment on one statement that Kevin made (paraphrased below) that
This is an interesting conclusion. First, we need a basis for this number, and I have e-mailed Kevin to respond to this request. Second, if we accept this as true, it still means that the devastating floods would still likely have occurred even with 5-10% less rainfall. The Economist has an informative article on the floods in Pakistan titled “Swamped, bruised and resentful” [subscription required]. With respect to the reasons for the flood damage, the article writes
Clearly, there is a climate component in terms of where the anomalous rainfall fell. However, the failure to reduce the region’s vulnerability from foods by adequate water resource management (the lack of infrastructure development) and the environmental damage from deforestation (the accelerated runoff) significantly magnified the seriousness of this disaster. This is why we need the bottom-up, resourse-based perspective that I mentioned in my answer on the Weather Channel, and in my papers and blog posts; e.g. see A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resourse-Based Perspective In our paper Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union we wrote
(Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
The Worst Federal Disaster Response in Our Nation’s History
President Obama wishes everyone would stop talking about the oil spill. His federal government’s response has been incompetent at best, malevolent at worst. Yet, lacking any evidence of a credible response, Obama still sent Carol Browner to the Gulf on a victory lap last week after oil stopped appearing on beaches and the water’s surface. But while the Obama administration is doing victory laps, more news of their botched efforts are coming to light. Case in point: reports out today show that the government tried to silence scientists from the University of South Florida who had discovered a 6-mile-wide plume of oil in the deepest recesses of the Gulf. USF Marine Sciences Dean William Hogarth told the St. Petersburg Times: “I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil.” He further said that government officials told him to retract any public statements and compared it to being “beat up” by the government. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
The world's first really green oil deal Ecuador's $3.6bn scheme to save its rainforest from exploitation could point the way to sparing other threatened landscapes
Paymasters not too happy with this, eh Raj? Analysis: India Plant's Carbon Status Denial Upsets Investors A U.N. carbon credit scheme's rejection of a huge Indian coal power plant deprives the project of revenue running into hundreds of millions of euros and rings alarm bells
for investors developing similar plants.
Exercising Britain's nuclear options Chris Huhne insists Britain's new nuclear power stations will be built on time, but scepticism remains
Analysis: Rare Earth Monopoly A Boon To Chinese Clean Tech Firms In the race to build hybrid cars and wind turbines to feed growing demand for green technology, China has one clear advantage, it holds the world's largest reserves of rare
earth metals and dominates global production.
If you're in search of solar flair, forget about looking in Victoria THE beauty about solar power stations is that you just have to promise them. Never mind that you won't deliver. After all, the new green faith is about seeming, not doing,
right?
Oh dear... How to be fully renewable in 10 years AUSTRALIA could switch completely to renewable energy within a decade by building a dozen vast, new solar power stations and about 6500 wind turbines, according to a major
new study.
Driving across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, it's impossible not to be struck by the dominance of corn cultivation in this part of the Midwest. Those "amber waves of grain" in the song look more like amber waves of corn tassels, here. [Read More] (Geoffrey Styles, ET)
Analysis: Indonesia Forest Moratorium To Stymie Palm Oil Firms Indonesia's plans to halt forest clearing will slow the aggressive expansion of plantation firms in the world's top palm oil producer, leading to higher costs as firms will
need acquisitions or improved yields to boost growth.
A Bipartisan Vote on the Obamacare Road to Repeal
Tucked away in the legislation that made Obamacare into law is a tax provision that will be a compliance nightmare for small businesses if it ever goes into effect. The provision calls for all businesses to file 1099 forms with the IRS for all transactions with other businesses over $600. Businesses are not like individuals. They purchase lots of items in large quantities. As a result, if the Obamacare reporting requirement goes into effect as scheduled in 2012, it would create an enormous compliance burden on businesses. Businesses would have to file millions of new forms with the IRS. Small businesses would be especially hard hit, because they do not have large accounting departments that can absorb more bureaucracy like larger businesses. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Antibiotics' efficiency wanes due to global spread of drug-resistant bacteria Gene giving high levels of resistance to drugs found in increasingly prevalent intestinal bacteria
Heart attacks linked to cold weather, study claims Very cold temperatures thought to affect heart by increasing blood pressure and chances of blood clotting
Toward safer plastics that lock in potentially harmful plasticizers Scientists have published the first report on a new way of preventing potentially harmful plasticizers from migrating from one of the most widely used groups of plastics. The advance could lead to a new generation of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics that are safer than those now used in packaging, medical tubing, toys, and other products, they say. Their study is in ACS' Macromolecules, a bi-weekly journal. (ACS)
What do food allergy labels really mean? NEW YORK - While you might be tempted to ignore those "made in a facility that processes" (something you're allergic to) labels in the supermarket, new research
suggests products with these labels are in fact more likely to be contaminated with peanuts, milk or eggs than unlabeled foods.
Stop smoking or your children will die The redefinition of smoking in cars as ‘child abuse’ is about guilt-tripping parents into changing their behaviour. (Rob Lyons, spiked)
Obesity linked to lower sperm count in young men NEW YORK - Young men who are obese may have a lower sperm count than their normal-weight counterparts, a new study suggests.
Scientists use salmonella bug to kill cancer cells LONDON - Treating tumours with salmonella bacteria can induce an immune response that kills cancer cells, scientists have found - a discovery that may help them create
tumour-killing immune cells to inject into patients.
Texas petrochemical emissions down, but still underestimated, says study A thick blanket of yellow haze hovering over Houston as a result of chemical pollution produced by manufacturing petroleum products may be getting a little bit thinner,
according to a new study.
Every once in a while an e-mail goes around petitioning for the ban of dihydrogen monoxide, a dangerous chemical. The reader is aghast to learn that dihydrogen monoxide is “the main ingredient in acid rain” and “capable of causing suffocation if encountered in large quantities” and often will sign the petition and forward it to friends. However, closer examination soon reveals two things: (1) dihydrogen monoxide is nothing other than water, and (2) the petition is, in fact, a jest. Recently, however, the EPA seems to be working along a similar vein and has proposed tighter standards on a common pollutant: particulate matter. Particulate matter pollution can dirty the air and water, limit visibility, and spur breathing problems. When EPA regulations were first applied to particulates in 1971, they were created to target soot. However, another form of particulate matter that the EPA intends to regulate is … dust. If only this, too, were a jest. Continue reading... (The Foundry)
KALEITA: Environmentalist turns to e-bullying Researcher proves he types faster than he thinks
Should we really risk ignoring an asteroid? Nasa's cost-cutting measures could literally cost the Earth, warns Maggie Aderin-Pocock. (TDT)
European policy makers and environmental groups want to restrict imports—but not in order to save the planet.
Indonesia APP Says Audit Shows Deforestation Claim Untrue Indonesian paper firm Asia Pulp a |
Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.
Readers may recall
some months ago that the Met Office planned to “do over” the surface temperature data sets:
Posted
by 
It was only a matter of time before
American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to say something so preposterous that she would win the coveted Crank of the Week award. That day has come with her
conflation of the tragic floods in Pakistan and global warming. In a move that aligns the Obama administration with the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Secretary,
using typical bureaucratic doublespeak, managed to say that the disastrous floods in Pakistan cannot be blamed on global warming while at the same time hinting that climate
change was to blame. “You can’t point to any particular disaster and say, ‘it was caused by,’ but we are changing the climate of the world,” she said, in remarks
labeled “nutty” by critics.
The Nature Geoscience 
The 
To Hasselman, both politicians and
the media are the willing dupes of climate skeptics. “If policymakers fail to realize the aspirations of climate scientists and the green lobby, it is not so much owing to
their exposure to disinformation as to the conflict between their societal responsibility to balance the interests of present and future generations and their individual desire
to become re-elected,” he opines. “They are thus strongly dependent on pressures from interest groups and, more importantly, on the interests and beliefs of the public (as
they should be).” And the fourth estate is no better.
Moonlight
is not light generated by the moon, but reflected sunlight. First astronauts on the moon were amazed by the brightness of Earth when it appeared over the lunar horizon. What
they saw was Earthlight, which is also reflected sunlight. It’s sunlight that does little to heat the Earth because it goes directly back out to space. The amount reflected
varies with changes to the surface and atmosphere. These changes are significant yet poorly measured or understood and pushed aside by the fanatic focus on CO2. Global
warming due to humans is based on the hypothesis that our addition of CO2 has changed the balance of energy entering and leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. There are a multitude
of factors that can change this balance, many ignored or underplayed by climate science. They get away with this because the public is unaware.
Guest
post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
