A continuation of Fun with Gov't Meddling, and Fun with Global Warming - Part Deux!

Post as you see fit.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

To get things going:

Ouch...

A Report from the Global Warming Battlefield
By Roy Spencer : 15 Aug 2007

In case you hadn't noticed, the global warming debate has now escalated from a minor skirmish to an all-out war. Although we who are skeptical of the claim that global warming is mostly manmade have become accustomed to being the ones that take on casualties, last week was particularly brutal for those who say we have only 8 years and 5 months left to turn things around, greenhouse gas emissions-wise.

I'm talking about the other side - the global warming alarmists.

First, NASA's James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States - 1934 is. The temperature adjustment is admittedly small, yet there seemed to be no rush to retract the oft-repeated alarmist statements that have seared "1998!" into our brains as the rallying cry for the fight against global warming.

Then, the issue of spurious heat influences on the thermometers that NOAA uses to monitor global temperatures has reared its ugly head. Personally, I've been waiting for this one for a long time. Ordinary citizens are now traveling throughout their home states, taking pictures of the local conditions around these thermometer sites.

To everyone's astonishment, all kinds of spurious heat sources have cropped up over the years next to the thermometers. Air conditioning exhaust fans, burn barrels, asphalt parking lots, roofs, jet exhaust. Who could have known? Shocking.

Next, my own unit and I published satellite measurements that clearly show a natural cooling mechanism in the tropics which all of the leading computerized climate models have been insisting is a warming mechanism (Spencer et al., August 9, 2007 Geophysical Research Letters).

We found that when the tropical atmosphere heats up from extra rain system activity, the amount of infrared heat-trapping cirrus clouds those rain systems produce actually goes down. This unexpected result supports the "Infrared Iris" theory of climate stabilization that MIT's Richard Lindzen advanced some years ago.

No one in the alarmist camp can figure out how we succeeded with this sneak attack. After all, there isn't supposed to be any peer-reviewed, published research that denies a global warming Armageddon, right?

But these volleys have not gone unanswered. From the other side of the battlefield, Al Gore and Newsweek coordinated an assault on a few skeptics with all kinds of guilt-by-association accusations. They allege that a few scientists were offered $10,000 (!) by Big Oil to research and publish evidence against the theory of manmade global warming.

Of course, the vast majority of mainstream climate researchers receive between $100,000 to $200,000 from the federal government to do the same, but in support of manmade global warming. Apparently, that's okay since we all know that the federal government is unbiased and there to help, whereas petroleum companies only exist to force us to burn fuels that do nothing more than ruin the environment.

Little damage was done by the Gore-Newsweek assault, though, since the attack amounted to little more than a verbal "Well, your mama wears Army boots!" It didn't help matters that the magazine's own columnist, Robert Samuelson, published a follow-up article saying the allegation of bribes offered to scientists "was long ago discredited" and that "the story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading."

Next, I'm happy to report that we skeptics have been getting a steady stream of new recruits. In the last year or so, more and more scientists have been coming out of the closet and admitting they've had some doubts about this whole global warming thing.

In fact, chances are that your favorite TV weather person is a closet skeptic (unless it's Heidi Cullen). But please observe the "don't ask - don't tell" rule. Most broadcast meteorologists are not ready for the public embarrassment that would accompany their outing.

And lastly, I have been heartened by new scientific intelligence that we skeptics have been gathering. I can predict there are more surprises to come, with some pretty powerful tactical weapons yet to be deployed. Climate scientists are beginning to question long held assumptions - which is almost always the first step toward a major scientific discovery. So stay tuned.

Oh, and by the way, in the interests of a fair fight, the next time someone sees Al Gore, could you ask him to stop calling us "global warming deniers"? I don't know of anyone who denies that the Earth has warmed. I'm sure this has just been an honest misunderstanding on Mr. Gore's part, and he'll be more than happy to stop doing it.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Double Ouch...

Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder

The Toronto Star: TheStar.com

Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble
August 14, 2007
DANIEL DALE
STAFF REPORTER

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math.

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are "not necessarily material to climate policy."

But the revisions have been seized on by conservative Americans, including firebrand radio host Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that climate change science is unsound.

Said Limbaugh last Thursday: "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data."

However Stephen McIntyre, who set off the uproar, described his finding as a "a micro-change. But it was kind of fun."

A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures.

This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average.

Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations.

McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review.

"They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces."

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Receding Arctic ice reveals unknown islands

REUTERS

August 21, 2007

NY ALESUND, Norway – Previously unknown islands are appearing as Arctic summer sea ice shrinks to record lows, raising questions about whether global warming is outpacing U.N. projections, experts said.

Polar bears and seals have also suffered this year on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard because the sea ice they rely on for hunts melted far earlier than normal.

“Reductions of snow and ice are happening at an alarming rate,” Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy told a seminar of 40 scientists and politicians in Ny Alesund, 750 miles from the North Pole.

“This acceleration may be faster than predicted” by the U.N. climate panel this year, she said. The U.N. panel of 2,500 scientists said in February that warming in the past 50 years was “very likely” the result of greenhouse gases caused by fossil fuel use.

“There may well be an ice-free Arctic by the middle of the century,” said Christopher Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey.

The thaw around Svalbard has revealed several islands not on any maps. “Islands are appearing just over the fjord here” as glaciers recede, said Kim Holmen, research Director at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “We're already seeing adverse effects on polar bears and other species.”

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me@rescam.org

Surprise, surprise...

UK 'may fail 2020 target for CO2'
By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analyst

A think tank with a track record in forecasting government failure on greenhouse gas targets is warning that further energy promises by the government look likely to be broken.

Cambridge Econometrics were one of the first to forecast that the government would miss its CO2 target for 2010 - a prediction that ministers rejected for several years before finally conceding.

Their latest report on Thursday looks at the long-standing government target of cutting CO2 by 20% before 2010.

The report says at the current rate of progress this target will not even be reached by 2020.

By then, the government is theoretically striving to cut CO2 by a minimum of 26%.

The report says achieving this will need much stricter policies - particularly to tackle emissions from homes and from transport.

There is a gloomy forecast too on renewable energy - that the government will fail to meet its targets in both 2010 and 2015.

But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the UK had a "good record" on tackling climate change and was on target to "meet and exceed" greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Kyoto protocol.

The government's Energy White Paper and other measures meant the country was on track to meet the 2020 goal relative to 1990 levels, it said, even though the UK economy will have doubled in size in the same period.

A spokesman added: "This report does not take account of a number of these measures, such as the carbon reduction commitment and the zero carbon homes initiative, which will help us meet this target.

"We intend to put the 2020 target into legislation through the Climate Change Bill, and the Energy White Paper provides a strong foundation for a range of policies and programmes that will help us reach it."

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/6959589.stm

Published: 2007/08/22 23:45:48 GMT

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Study links climate to cooperative behavior

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

August 23, 2007

In uncertain times, it's nice to think that people band together to help one another.

While the verdict may be out on the human race in this regard, African starlings are a different matter. Some starling species exhibit remarkable cooperative behavior, and a new study shows one factor that has influenced its evolution: climate uncertainty.

The behavior is cooperative breeding, in which some individuals delay their own breeding to help raise the offspring of others, who may or may not be relatives. Among the 45 African starling species, some breed cooperatively and some do not.

Dustin R. Rubenstein, now at UC Berkeley, and Irby J. Lovette of Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology undertook a genetic analysis of all 45 species and used it to build a family tree showing evolutionary patterns. Then they used rainfall data, in some cases going back more than 140 years, from across Africa to determine how predictable the weather is in various starling habitats.

Their findings, published in Current Biology, show that cooperative-breeding species largely inhabit semi-arid savannas, where rainfall is highly unpredictable from year to year. In forests, where rainfall was more consistent, noncooperative breeders were more prevalent.

In studying the family trees, the researchers found much evidence that cooperative breeding evolved at various times as starling species moved to savanna habitats. Cooperation would be expected to confer an evolutionary advantage, because in very dry years, when food and other resources are scarce, it helps ensure that more offspring survive.

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me@rescam.org

Climate change in our labor force

By Lawrence Fitch

August 29, 2007

Global warming is on the world's policy radar. This was not always so. In the face of scientific warnings decades ago, world leaders either didn't believe the evidence or believed that the evidence overstated the problem. Yet, as the polar ice caps begin to melt, as stronger storms brew over the Gulf of Mexico, as England floods, as fisheries decline or disappear, an international consensus has begun to form.

Similar warnings about our labor force have been made for many years by writers such as Peter Drucker, publications like The Harvard Business Review, and by groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable and the World Health Organization. Today, that labor crisis is real in California as a whole, and in San Diego in particular. This latest form of “climate change” is hurting our economy, our competitiveness and our quality of life.

Like global warming, it is not going away and must be faced squarely to avert pending disaster. On multiple fronts, and in multiple economic clusters, we see evidence of this crisis. Here are just a few:

Education. Business leaders, educators and policy-makers have recognized that the levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, taught in the education system of the United States is significantly lower than that in other nations. Worse, U.S. students are not acquiring high enough STEM skills, and not enough U.S. students are pursuing education in these critical areas. The result? A shortage of STEM-skilled people and the outsourcing of high-wage, high-skilled jobs overseas, or the need to import skilled professionals from other countries into our nation's research programs and high-technology companies.

According to a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California (Can California Import Enough College Graduates to Meet Workforce Needs?), even though California is 12th in the nation in the percentage of adults who are college graduates (30 percent), we still can't meet the needs of our state's businesses and industries, because, as the report predicts, 41 percent of our state's jobs will require college degrees by 2025. How will we increase our number of college graduates to meet this growing need? We cannot even meet this skill need by continuing to import college graduates at current rates.

Cost of living. The good news is that we have low unemployment in San Diego, thanks to continued growth in our services, life sciences, high tech and tourism clusters. Contributing to the work-force climate change is that few workers in San Diego can afford housing, even though the housing bubble appears to have burst nationally. Adding to that, few workers can afford the ever-increasing costs of gasoline, energy and food. Higher wage jobs are available in the region, but without better educational results, San Diego residents won't be qualified to fill them.

Health care. Leaving aside the challenges faced by businesses trying to keep up with the increasing costs of health insurance, our region, as well as the nation as a whole, is confronting a health care labor shortage of mammoth proportions. This shortage is fueled by two conditions: (1) few young people are aware of the number and variety of occupations in the industry, as well as the career paths and opportunities that are present. And, (2) even if more of our youth decided to pursue health care careers, our community colleges, four-year universities and private schools are already operating beyond capacity and are without the resources to prepare more individuals for these important jobs.

Immigration. Two labor climate-change issues face us in the immigration arena, one at the bottom of the wage scale and the other near the top. Easily the most divisive political issue today is what to do about the millions of undocumented workers performing many of our most low-wage and low-skilled jobs. San Diego is at the front lines of this dilemma by virtue of its location on the border with Mexico. While Congress has chosen to put this issue off to the future, it will remain a hot topic until some resolution is reached.

Perhaps more pressing from a work-force standpoint is the import of high-wage, high-skilled workers, mostly into our high technology and life sciences industries. These workers come to the United States on special, time-limited visas granted to a specified number of foreign workers with particular skills. And ever since their inception, these visa programs have been mired in controversy.

Business leaders chafe at the limited number of visas granted, stating that they are unable to find enough skilled workers to fill their open positions and keep their companies operating. Labor leaders and employee associations contend there are enough skilled workers, and that employers are using the visas to import workers at lower wage levels.

When Congress established the visas, the time limits were designed to help companies meet an immediate need, while U.S. residents acquired the skills necessary to fill the positions. Now, it appears, that industry leaders themselves are arguing over whether the visa period should be used as a time to help those with very specialized skills gain a permanent right to work in the United States, or as a revolving door to use and release workers as needed.

Aging work force. Finally, as baby boomers age, and as labor shortages loom, workers will be working well past “retirement age,” either by choice or by necessity. There are many issues around workplace safety, managers who are younger than their staff, increased benefit costs, and accommodation of schedules that employers face with a mature work force. When mature workers do retire, many experts worry that there will not be a skilled young work force to replace them.

However, as with global warming, no single organization or single approach can solve the problem. It will take industry, educational institutions, community-based organizations, foundations and government agencies – and the media – to take on these issues and develop collaborative solutions. The climate change that is the work-force crisis will take new policy approaches, new funding and a commitment by stakeholders recognizing that this is not a “social problem,” but an economic problem, to grow our region's well-paying jobs and prepare our residents to fill them.

The first step, as with global warming, is recognizing the crisis and not being afraid to face the changes in behavior and attitudes demanded by the times.

Fitch is president and chief executive officer of the San Diego Workforce Partnership.

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me@rescam.org

Russian blames global warming on 1908 Tunguska Event
Tue, 2006-03-14 06:10 — BJS

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.

Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

The Tunguska Event, sometimes known as the Tungus Meteorite is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. The event released as much energy as fifteen one-megaton atomic bombs. As well as blasting an enormous amount of dust into the atmosphere, felling 60 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres. Shaidurov suggests that this explosion would have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere and change its structure." Such meteoric disruption was the trigger for the subsequent rise in global temperatures.

Global warming is thought to be caused by the "greenhouse effect". Energy from the sun reaches the earth's surface and warms it, without the greenhouse effect most of this energy is then lost as the heat radiates back into space. However, the presence of so-called greenhouse gases at high altitude absorb much of this energy and then radiate a proportion back towards the earth's surface. Causing temperatures to rise.

Many natural gases and some of those released by conventional power stations, vehicle and aircraft exhausts act as greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide, natural gas, or methane, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are all potent greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide and methane are found naturally in the atmosphere, but it is the gradual rise in levels of these gases since the industrial revolution, and in particular the beginning of the twentieth century, that scientists have blamed for the gradual rise in recorded global temperature. Attempts to reverse global warming, such as the Kyoto Protocol, have centred on controlling and even reducing CO2 emissions.

However, the most potent greenhouse gas is water, explains Shaidurov and it is this compound on which his study focuses. According to Shaidurov, only small changes in the atmospheric levels of water, in the form of vapour and ice crystals can contribute to significant changes to the temperature of the earth's surface, which far outweighs the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.

The role of water vapour in controlling our planet's temperature was hinted at almost 150 years ago by Irish scientist John Tyndall. Tyndall, who also provided an explanation as to why the sky is blue, explained the problem: "The strongest radiant heat absorber, is the most important gas controlling Earth's temperature. Without water vapour, he wrote, the Earth's surface would be 'held fast in the iron grip of frost'." Thin clouds at high altitude allow sunlight to reach the earth's surface, but reflect back radiated heat, acting as an insulating greenhouse layer.

Water vapour levels are even less within our control than CO2 levels. According to Andrew E. Dessler of the Texas A & M University writing in 'The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change', "Human activities do not control all greenhouse gases, however. The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour, he says, "Human activities have little direct control over its atmospheric abundance, which is controlled instead by the worldwide balance between evaporation from the oceans and precipitation."

As such, Shaidurov has concluded that only an enormous natural phenomenon, such as an asteroid or comet impact or airburst, could seriously disturb atmospheric water levels, destroying persistent so-called 'silver', or noctilucent, clouds composed of ice crystals in the high altitude mesosphere (50 to 85km). The Tunguska Event was just such an event, and coincides with the period of time during which global temperatures appear to have been rising the most steadily - the twentieth century. There are many hypothetical mechanisms of how this mesosphere catastrophe might have occurred, and future research is needed to provide a definitive answer.

From University of Leicester

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Hopefully the cosmos is not trying to reverse the charges.
Moderation in all things.

Where are all the Super Hurricanes that we were warned about 2 years ago? For the past two years, the pre-season hurricane forecast has been downgraded at least once and some times thrice. Isn't it cheating to change your prediction in mid stride? That's like me betting on the outcome of a game and then changing my bet after the game is concluded.

Also, why was one of the tropical storm Chantal considered a tropical storm. it formed in the Atlantic off the coast of North Carolina. When did North Carolina move to the tropics?

We may have global warming but the jury is still out as to who or what is causing it.

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Hopefully the cosmos is not trying to reverse the charges.
Moderation in all things.

When climate patterns line up and 'beat' in sync, it can change everything

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me@rescam.org

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=b35c36a3-802a-23ad-46ec-6880767e7966

SURVEY: LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

Michael Asher
August 29, 2007 11:07 AM
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.

Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.

By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.

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Brits 'addicted' to cheap flights

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Britons are "addicted" to cheap flights and confused about the climate impact of flying, according to research.

In a government-funded study, even people living generally "green" lives said they were reluctant to fly less.

The Exeter University team that carried out the research says cheap flights have become a lifestyle choice.

Aviation accounts for about 7% of the UK's emissions, and research suggests Britain will not meet its climate targets without curbing the industry.

The government raised air passenger duty in February, and the European Union is set to include aviation in its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which could increase costs further.

But the Exeter research suggests price hikes would have a minimal impact.

"Until you have politicians giving us some clear messages, people will be confused." --Brenda Boardman

"We found that flying is quite embedded in peoples' lifestyle choices," said Stewart Barr from the university's Department of Geography.

"And it's not people on lower incomes taking these flights, it's middle class people taking more flights to go on city breaks, and they can afford to pay higher prices."

Fixed habits

The findings come from a series of focus groups run in Devon in 2005, and from a prior questionnaire.

Researchers found that as many as one-fifth of the population regarded themselves as committed environmentalists, who would routinely take measures such as composting, recycling, and curbing water and electricity consumption.

"This group is the most receptive to arguments about reducing flights and most knowlegable about the issue, but even they don't feel they can reduce flying because it's part of their lifestyle," observed Dr Barr.

"All groups said the state of knowledge about flying compared to other forms of transport is very confusing; you might have in a tabloid newspaper, for example, an article saying flying is bad next to a massive advert for Ryanair saying (Gordon) Browns's duty increase is wrong."

In July the Advertising Standards Authority ordered Ryanair not to repeat advertisements claiming that aviation accounted for just 2% of carbon emissions, because the company did not explain the figure was based on global rather than UK statistics.

Runway growth

The government maintains people are keen to reduce their carbon footprints.

"We know that more and more people are already taking steps to reduce their impact on the planet and there are a wide range of ways they can do this," said a spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which commissioned the Exeter research.

"Our role is to give them the information to make greener choices that are right for their circumstances."

But some observers believe there is an inherent contradiction within a government that wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while expanding airport capacity.

Expansion plans are lodged for many airports including Heathrow, Stansted, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Liverpool and East Midlands.

"I certainly wouldn't advise expanding them," said Brenda Boardman from Oxford University, "because the more you build them, the more people will use them.

"I'm not at all surprised that people are confused, because you have Tony Blair saying it's unreasonable to ask people to stop flying; until you have politicians giving us some clear messages, people will be confused."

Dr Boardman's Environmental Change Institute (ECI) published research last year showing the government could not achieve its long-term goal of a 60% cut in national greenhouse gas emissions without curbing the aviation sector.

She also believes the increase in flying may be hurting the national economy, with Britons choosing to spend money holidaying overseas rather than in the UK.

Away from Britain, aviation is growing at spectacular rates, with India recently seeing a 45% increase in passenger numbers within a single year. It is the fastest-rising source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Exeter research was unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society's (RGS) annual meeting in London.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

An inconvenient fact
Patrick Moore, Special to The Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth according to Dr. Patrick Moore as a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver.

It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting.

When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts.

Here's a key piece of information DiCaprio, collaborator and long-time activist Tzeporah Berman and the leadership of my old organization Greenpeace are ignoring when it comes to forests and carbon: For British Columbians, living among the largest area of temperate rainforest in the world, managing our forests will be a key to reducing greenhouse gases.

As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world's sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood.

Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre.

North Americans are the world's largest per-capita wood consumers and yet our forests cover approximately the same area of land as they did 100 years ago. According to the United Nations, our forests have expanded nearly 100 million acres over the past decade.

The relationship between trees and greenhouse gases is simple enough on the surface. Trees grow by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, through photosynthesis, converting it into sugars. The sugars are then used as energy and materials to build cellulose and lignin, the main constituents of wood.

There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon that was fixed hundreds of years ago.

Berman, a veteran of the forestry protest movement, should by now have learned that young forests outperform old growth in carbon sequestration.

Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.

When a tree rots or burns, the carbon contained in the wood is released back to the atmosphere. Since combustion releases carbon, active forest management -- such as removing dead trees and clearing debris from the forest floor -- will be imperative in reducing the number and intensity of fires.

The role of forests in the global carbon cycle can be boiled down to these key points:

Deforestation, primarily in tropical forests, is responsible for about 20 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This is occurring where forests are permanently cleared and converted to agriculture and urban settlement.

In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.

The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.

DiCaprio's movie, The 11th Hour, is another example of anti-forestry scare tactics, this time said to be "brilliant and terrifying" by James Christopher of the London Times.

Maybe so, but instead of surrendering to the terror, keep in mind that there are solutions to the challenges of climate, and our forests are among them.

This film should be a good, clear reminder for us to put the science before the Hollywood hype.

Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

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Study predicts warming will increase strength of storms

ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 31, 2007

WASHINGTON – As the world warms, the United States will face more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes, a trailblazing study by NASA scientists suggests.

While other research has warned of broad weather changes on a large scale, such as more extreme hurricanes and droughts, the new study predicts that smaller events such as thunderstorms will be more dangerous because of global warming.

The basic ingredients for whopper U.S. inland storms are likely to be more plentiful in a warmer, moister world, said lead author Tony Del Genio, a NASA research scientist.

And when that happens, watch out.

“The strongest thunderstorms, the strongest severe storms and tornadoes are likely to happen more often and be stronger,” Del Genio said in an interview yesterday from his office at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The paper he co-authored was published online this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Some scientists caution that this area of climate research is too difficult and new for this study to be definitive. But some upcoming studies also point in the same direction.

With a computer model, Del Genio explores an area that most climate scientists have avoided. Simple thunderstorms are too small for their massive models of the world's climate. So Del Genio looked at the forces that combine to make thunderstorms.

A unique combination of geography and weather patterns already makes the United States the world's hottest spot for tornadoes and severe storms in spring and summer. The large land mass that warms on hot days, the contours of the atmosphere's jet stream, the wind coming off the Rocky Mountains and warm moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico all combine.

Del Genio's computer model shows global warming will mean more strong updrafts, when the wind moves up and down instead of sideways.

“The consequences of stronger updrafts are more lightning and bigger hail,” he said.

The Southeast and Midwest lie in the path of most of the most dangerous of these storms.

However, the new study also forecasts danger for the Western United States. It predicts lightning will increase about 6 percent.

Previous studies have shown that the West will get drier, making it a tinderbox for more wildfires. This study shows that there will be more matches in the form of lightning strikes to start those fires, Del Genio said.

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me@rescam.org

'GREEN' GORE GOES GULFSTREAM
VIDEO CATCHES ECO-WARRIOR ON LUXURY PRIVATE JET

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me@rescam.org

'GREEN' GORE GOES GULFSTREAM
VIDEO CATCHES ECO-WARRIOR ON LUXURY PRIVATE JET

Nice!

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Hopefully the cosmos is not trying to reverse the charges.
Moderation in all things.

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

I'd be willing to settle for free gasoline.

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me@rescam.org

From the NYT:

September 11, 2007

‘Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate

By JOHN TIERNEY

After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.

It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.

Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.

The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.

The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg’s new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.”

The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.

The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.

The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.

But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland — we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”

Dr. Lomborg, who’s best known (and most reviled in some circles) for an earlier book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which gathers economists to set priorities in tackling global problems. In his new book, he dismisses the Kyoto emissions cuts as a “feel-good” strategy because it sounds virtuous and lets politicians make promises they don’t have to keep. He outlines an alternative “do-good” strategy that would cost less but accomplish more in dealing with climate change as well as more pressing threats like malaria, AIDS, polluted drinking water and malnutrition.

If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.

The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.

But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today — and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.

“No historian would look back at the last two centuries and rank the rising sea level here as one of the city’s major problems,” he said, sitting safely dry and cool inside the Bridge Cafe. “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Wow, Carbon offsets are cheap

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