News & Commentary October 18, 2010

 

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5

In the face of so many daunting near-term challenges, U.S. government and industry are letting the crucial strategic issues of U.S. competitiveness slip below the surface. Five years ago, the National Academies prepared Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a book that cautioned: "Without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position." Since that time we find ourselves in a country where much has changed--and a great deal has not changed.

So where does America stand relative to its position of five years ago when the Gathering Storm book was prepared? The unanimous view of the authors is that our nation's outlook has worsened. The present volume, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited, explores the tipping point America now faces. Addressing America's competitiveness challenge will require many years if not decades; however, the requisite federal funding of much of that effort is about to terminate.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited provides a snapshot of the work of the government and the private sector in the past five years, analyzing how the original recommendations have or have not been acted upon, what consequences this may have on future competitiveness, and priorities going forward. In addition, readers will find a series of thought- and discussion-provoking factoids--many of them alarming--about the state of science and innovation in America.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited is a wake-up call. To reverse the foreboding outlook will require a sustained commitment by both individual citizens and government officials--at all levels. This book, together with the original Gathering Storm volume, provides the roadmap to meet that goal. While this book is essential for policy makers, anyone concerned with the future of innovation, competitiveness, and the standard of living in the United States will find this book an ideal tool for engaging their government representatives, peers, and community about this momentous issue. (NAP)

 

Don't Give Trial Lawyers This Booster Shot

Anyone who thinks the vaccine case now before the Supreme Court is merely a matter of giving injured plaintiffs their day in court has misconceived the stakes for those who reap the benefits of vaccines.

The U.S. Supreme Court has just heard oral arguments in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, in which the parents of a severely disabled child wish to sue the manufacturer of a childhood vaccine for causing their child’s disability. At this stage, the dispute is over a purely legal issue: the scope of federal preemption. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act largely removed childhood vaccines from the tort liability system, channeling injury claims through a specialized court that focuses on science and provides no-fault compensation for injuries actually caused (or probably caused) by vaccines. The question before the court is whether this law barring ordinary injury suits applies to “design defects,” such as when the manufacturer allegedly could have offered an alternative vaccine with the same benefits and lower risk—even though the law does not explicitly mention design defects. (John E. Calfee, The American)

 

Britain strikes back at "compensation culture"

LONDON - The British government has pledged to strike a blow at the so-called compensation culture which has left some individuals and groups so afraid of being sued that even traditional activities like school trips and throwing snowballs are under threat.

It will ease safety rules for office workers and clamp down on advertising for "no win, no fee" injury lawyers.

More than 800,000 claims for compensation were made in Britain last year, fueled by aggressive advertising promising no-risk litigation for injury victims.

The result was that employers, schools and voluntary bodies had become overzealous in curbing risks, tying themselves down in red tape and unnecessarily abandoning many activities, said veteran politician David Young in a review of health and safety laws.

"Today, accident victims are given the impression that they may be entitled to handsome rewards just for making a claim regardless of any personal responsibility," he said

"It is hardly surprising that many organizations seek to mitigate their liabilities with excessively risk-averse policies." (Reuters Life!)

 

Chinese Drywall Maker Held Accountable without Congressional Meddling

Posted by Daniel Griswold

This summer, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill that would require foreign companies that import goods to the United States to appoint a legal representative in the United States who could be sued if their products caused injury. Exhibit A in the push for the bill was the case of contaminated drywall from China.

Advocates of the bill, titled the “Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act,” say it is necessary to ensure compensation for American consumers injured by faulty foreign-made products. Without a designated domestic agent, foreign companies could escape liability by dodging efforts to serve them with papers in a lawsuit. Hearings earlier this year highlighted the case of the drywall, in which damaged homeowners were finding it difficult to sue the Chinese producer.

The trouble with this approach, as my colleague Sallie James and I pointed out in a recent Cato Free Trade Bulletin, is that it would impose an additional burden on importers without adding significantly to the ability of consumers to gain compensation. We argued that sufficient remedies exist without adding a new law that looks suspiciously like a non-tariff trade barrier designed to protect U.S. manufacturers from foreign competitors. (Cato at liberty)

 

Eye-roller: Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease, Controversial Study Claim

Is the common nature of cancer worldwide purely a man-made phenomenon? That is what some researchers now suggest.

Still, other specialists in cancer and in human fossils have strong doubts about this notion.

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for roughly one in eight of all deaths in 2004, according to the World Health Organization. However, scientists have only found one case of the disease in investigations of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, researcher Rosalie David at the University of Manchester in England said in a statement. (The researchers did not reply to repeated queries made via phone and e-mail.) (Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience)

 

Science may have found silver bullet for common cold

Richard Gray
October 18, 2010

Scientists are hailing a breakthrough that could lead to one of medicine's holy grails - a cure for the common cold.

Researchers have found they can attach tiny studs of silver to harmless bacteria, giving them the ability to destroy viruses. They tested the silver-impregnated bacteria against norovirus, which causes winter vomiting outbreaks, and found they leave the virus unable to cause infections.

The researchers believe the same technique could help to combat other viruses, including influenza and those responsible for causing the common cold.

Professor Willy Verstraete, a microbiologist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who unveiled the findings at a meeting of the Society for Applied Microbiology in London last week, said the bacteria could be incorporated into a nasal spray, water filters and hand washes to prevent the spread of viruses. (TDT)

 

When Drugs Cause Problems They Are Supposed to Prevent

In the past month, the Food and Drug Administration has concluded that in some cases two types of drugs that were supposed to be preventing serious medical problems were, in fact, causing them.

One is bisphosphonates, which is widely used to prevent the fractures, especially of the hip and spine, that are common in people with osteoporosis. Those drugs, like Fosamax, Actonel and Boniva, will now have to carry labels saying they can lead to rare fractures of the thigh bone, a surprising new discovery that came after another surprise — that they can cause a rare degeneration of the jawbone.

The other is Avandia, which is widely prescribed for diabetics, whose disease puts them at risk for heart attacks and heart failure. Two-thirds of diabetics die of heart problems, and a main reason for taking drugs like Avandia is to protect them from that.

But now the F.D.A. and drug regulators in Europe are restricting Avandia’s use because it appears to increase heart risks.

In the case of bisphosphonates, the benefits for people with osteoporosis still outweigh the risk, bone experts say. And no one has restricted their use.

But the fact remains that with decades of using drugs to treat chronic diseases, the unexpected can occur.

Something new is happening, said Daniel Carpenter, a government professor at Harvard who is an expert on the drug agency. The population is aging, many have chronic diseases. And companies are going after giant markets, huge parts of the population, heavily advertising drugs that are to be taken for a lifetime.

And the way drugs are evaluated, with the emphasis on shorter-term studies before marketing, is not helping, Dr. Carpenter said.

“Here is a wide-scale institutional failure,” he said. “We have placed far more resources and requirements upon premarket assessment of drugs than on postmarket.”

Dr. Jason Karlawish, a University of Pennsylvania ethicist who studies the ways new treatments are developed and disseminated, expressed a similar concern.

“The point is not that the drugs are bad, but that drugs for these chronic diseases present a novel set of challenges about how to assess their safety,” he said. (Gina Kolata, NYT)

 

Harvard: our elixir of youth for stem cells was bogus

There have been various examples of (alleged) scientific misconduct - e.g. "Copygate" affecting Mr Wegman. I find this one interesting.

In January 2010, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) announced a nice discovery: the aging of the stem cells could be reversed by signals from insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1):

Blood tells old cells to act young: HSCI scientists uncover clues toward treating age-related conditions via the blood

---

Systemic signals regulate ageing and rejuvenation of blood stem cell niches (full paper, PDF, Nature).

Well, it turns out that the discovery was almost certainly bogus:

3 Harvard Researchers Retract a Claim on the Aging of Stem Cells (NY Times)

---

Stem cell papers under suspicion (Nature News)

» Don't Stop Reading » (TRF)

 

HWGA: Study: Obesity care costs twice previous estimates

ATLANTA -- Nearly 17 percent of U.S. medical costs can be blamed on obesity, according to new research that suggests the nation's weight problem may be having close to twice the impact on medical spending as previously estimated.

One expert acknowledged that past estimates likely low-balled the costs and said the new study - which places obesity-related medical costs at around $168 billion - probably is closer to the truth. (Associated Press)

 

Push for junk food tax gains weight

MORE public health experts have joined the call for a tax on junk food, saying the existing focus on "individual behaviour change" will do little to curb surging rates of obesity.

Ms Holly Bond, PhD candidate at the Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights, said more than 60 per cent of Australian adults and one in four children were now either overweight or obese.

Obesity had overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness, and yet government had so far resisted calls to adopt the same approach it championed for tobacco and alcohol. (AAP)

Seems to be more a case of the "push" gaining a few more noisy advocates than any community desire for Twinkie taxes.

 

Controversy in New Zealand: what is cheaper: bottled water [or] cask wine?

Alcohol, mainly wine has become cheaper than bottled water in New Zealand, a study showed Friday, with researchers warning there could be major implications for public health. However an independent television news investigation questioned the report. (MercoPress)

 

Jaguar Listing and Habitat Designation Based on Junk Science

A Freedom of Information Act inquiry has revealed that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) decision to declare portions of Arizona and New Mexico as “Critical Habitat” for the jaguar has no basis in fact. USFWS based its decision on unsubstantiated anecdotal stories that did not meet the Endangered Species Act definition of minimum scientific standards. The inquiry also found possible collusion between an employee of the Arizona Fish and Game Department and the Center for Biological Diversity. The report of the inquiry was written by Biologist/Attorney Dennis Parker. Here is the press release: (Jonathan DuHamel, Tucson Citizen)

 

The World Bank’s Palm Oil Mistake

Lagos, Nigeria

WHEN the World Bank held its annual meeting last weekend, there was much discussion of trade imbalances and currency wars, but nothing about Nigerian palm oil. That’s a shame, because the bank’s loans for plantation agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions — some $132 million of which have gone to palm oil cultivation — have been humanitarian and economic triumphs. Yet now, under misguided pressure from environmental groups, the bank is turning its back on the program.

Palm oil, which is extracted from the pulp of the oil palm, is an essential food in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor regions. Accounting for almost 40 percent of the world’s vegetable oils, it is an indispensable source of vitamins and calories. The developing world is heavily reliant on palm as a source of nutrition because the plant thrives in tropical climates and yields significantly more fats and calories than other options. It gives the developing world — where hundreds of millions of men and women still live on a few dollars a day — the most caloric bang for the buck.

Nigeria’s palm oil industry, which once led the world, was moribund by the end of the last century. But thanks to the World Bank program, it is now one of the world’s largest producers, after Indonesia and Malaysia. In addition to providing food, the palm oil sector offers jobs, employing tens of thousands of Nigerians who earn wages similar to those of college graduates. In a country where most people have limited education, this sector has been essential to helping the broader Nigerian economy grow.

The industry is also diverse, as both small-scale landholders and a growing number of industrial farms have used the World Bank loans to invest in more efficient harvesting and production techniques. The revival of the palm oil industry gives Nigeria hope that its economy will not be forever hostage to petroleum production — and the pollution and graft that inevitably accompany it.

But the bank’s legacy of success is now in serious jeopardy. Under the leadership of Robert Zoellick, a former United States trade representative, the bank has wavered from its poverty-reduction mission and is increasingly focusing on achieving fashionable political and social goals. As Mr. Zoellick put it, “We are all committed to ensuring that positive developmental outcomes — including environmental and social sustainability — are at the core of all our activities.”

This is a huge, and disturbing, change in direction. The World Bank was conceived out of the wreckage of World War II, and its mission has always been simple: extend low-interest loans from rich nations to support development projects in poor nations. Of necessity, many of these loans support agriculture-related projects. These projects do two crucial things. First, they help poor nations feed their populations. Second, they generate goods that can be traded in global markets, thus linking the developing world economically with the wealthy world.

The results have been extraordinary. According to the bank itself, since its inception, life expectancy in developing countries has risen by more than 20 years. Adult illiteracy in poor nations has been cut in half since 1980. And over the past two decades, the number of people living on less than $1 a day, while unacceptably high, has dropped for the first time.

But in many cases this progress has now run afoul of environmental groups that often put ideology ahead of the needs of the poor. And, unfortunately, these groups have persuaded Mr. Zoellick to suspend all loans for palm-related plantation agriculture indefinitely as the bank undertakes a review of its policies. (Thompson Ayodele, NYT)

 

Food Miles: The Local Food Activists’ Dilemma (a global warming inconvenient truth)

by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
October 15, 2010

October 16th is World Food Day, an annual event that was inaugurated in 1979 by the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to mark its founding date in 1945. This year’s theme, “United against Hunger,” harks back to the FAO’s original mission. So what exactly are the central food planners and the anti-industrial Left thinking about food-for-all these days?

Demonizing Capitalism’s Food Bonanza 

With the advent of the “foodie” fad and the rise of celebrity chefs, discussions about the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have increasingly fallen out of fashion among advanced economies’ food activists. Indeed, in a world where no good deed goes unpunished, the individuals most responsible for producing ever-growing amounts of food at ever more affordable prices – from large scale farmers, professional plant breeders, synthetic pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers to agricultural equipment manufacturers, commodity traders, logistics industry workers and packaging manufacturers – have increasingly been demonized as poor stewards of the Earth, if not outright public health threats.

What really motivates food activists these days are rather SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical) food initiatives whose aim is to “liberate” consumers and communities from the grips of Agri-businesses. And here the critics have it just about all wrong. [Read more →] (MasterResource)

 

Altered Images Depict Horrors Of Pollution

A Hungarian economist turned artist is using digitally manipulated photographs that create almost apocalyptic imagery from real life to promote environmental awareness.

Suzanne Nagy's series of photographs entitled "Polluters" features altered images that are embedded in an epoxy solution to create a three-dimensional effect. (Reuters)

She can't find any real problems so she has to fabricate them?

 

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National Association For Gun Rights

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
(The Unites States Constitution, Amendment 2 - Right to Bear Arms. Ratified 12/15/1791.)
The first ten Amendments collectively are commonly known as the Bill of Rights.

Censoring the decrease in global temperature

Video Spoofing Michael Mann Removed by YouTube - Bogus Reason Given

It's back: Hide the decline II, the sequel

 

 

It isn't the planet's climate that grows more threatening, just the superstitious climate cranks who now more resemble Aztec priests sacrificing unbelievers.

If 10:10's "blow up a skeptic" campaign disappears you can download or view our saved .flv or .mp4 formats.

Here's their "apology" for depicting teachers murdering students; bosses slaughtering workers...

Not that this is really anything new, of course, just watch the progression Greenpeace makes from this um, comment on people's vehicle choice to this menacing little feral. They did so despite the hostile reception of the first ad, noted here.

There is no tolerance in the Church of Green Zealotry.

Fox Coverage of 10:10 Global Warming Shock Video (Warning - Graphic)

 

Sony, Kyocera bail out of violent climate video outfit

Sony and Kyocera Mita are no longer listed as sponsors of the violence-advocating 10:10 climate group. (h/t Paul Chesser)

Click here to see the letter we sent the companies last Friday.

In addition to Sony and Kyocera leaving 10:10, Caterpillar, ConocoPhillips, Deere & Co., Xerox and Marsh & McClennan have abandoned the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP).

Is corporate support for the green agenda melting faster than the Arctic ice cap? (Green Hell Blog)

 

Climate/Climate change/Global warming

 

What Next for the Royal Society?

In May this year, the UK’s science Academy, the Royal Society, announced that it was going to publish a “new guide to the science of climate change to help the public gain a better understanding of the issue.”

This announcement appeared to follow in the wake of a series of episodes that challenged the scientific basis of the arguments for political action on climate change. Email hacking, questions about the provenance of IPCC claims and the virtues of its chair seemed to make climate scepticism more respectable than it had been. This was in many respects grotesque. As I argued here, climate orthodoxy had not actually been challenged by an open public, technical debate about the conclusions of climate science, and neither had it been challenged by a debate about the premises of political environmentalism. Instead, it was the media’s desire for stories about sleaze and scandal which drove this issue into the limelight. Nonetheless, events at least allowed for climate orthodoxy to be challenged. Even the president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, now seemed to acknowledge that climate change anxiety had been over-egged.

Climate change is a hugely important issue but the public debate has all too often been clouded by exaggeration and misleading information.  We aim to provide the public with a clear indication of what is known about the climate system, what we think we know about it and, just as importantly, the aspects we still do not understand very well.

If the Royal Society aimed to clarify the issue for the public, by pointing out that the debate was ‘clouded by exaggeration and misleading information’, it had already failed. You can’t clarify a complex situation merely by pointing at the mess, and issuing ‘the facts’ about what it pertains to, especially since it had been the Royal Society under the stewardship of Martin Rees’s predecessor, Bob May, who had done much to add heat – rather than light – to the public debate. (Climate Resistance)

 

Andrew Revkin shocked that science is evolving

Andrew Revkin wrote about his exchanges with Hal Lewis:

A physicist’s climate complaints (Dot Earth)

The first observation that Revkin finds utterly shocking is that 20 years ago, Hal Lewis didn't quite understand that and why the opinions that the changing climate justifies expensive interventions was unsupported by science. I knew very little about the changing climate 20 years ago, too.

However, for Andrew Revkin, the fact that someone can learn something new in 20 years is a shocking news. I will discuss this point later.

» Don't Stop Reading » (TRF)

 

Climate Change Now Questioned At German Universities – Professors Speaking Up

By P Gosselin on 15. Oktober 2010

The AGW religion in Germany is in deep trouble. Consensus is crumbling. the science is coming under attack.

It’s taken a awhile, but slowly and surely, Germany, once the premier power in science, is beginning to ask questions again. When lectures and seminars questioning climate science take place within academic circles and at German universities, then you know something is afoot. (No Tricks Zone)

 

Consensus science...

 

Opinion: Global warming not worth the fight

The United States would gain little in trying to forestall climate change

Global warming is real. It is predominantly anthropogenic. Left unchecked, it will likely warm the earth by 3-7 C by the end of the century. What should the United States do about it?

Very little, if anything at all.

As economists, we are inclined to take the vantage point of the benevolent dictator, that omnific individual with his hands upon all of the policy levers available to the state. When placed in such a position, the question of how to respond to global warming is answered by performing a simple comparison: does x, the cost of optimally mitigating carbon emissions, exceed y, the benefit of that carbon mitigation? Where the answer is yes, the global carbon mitigation effort remains rightfully nascent, where the answer is no, it springs up and becomes law with a just and sudden force.

H.L. Mencken once wrote, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” Such is the economist’s explanation of climate change. (Keith Yost, The Tech)

 

Lawrence Solomon: Yale flunks global warming

If you aren’t confident that humans are responsible for warming the planet, you may be judged a dunce, according to a new Yale University survey entitled “Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change.”

Think that scientists “can’t possibly predict the climate of the future,” or that “scientists’ computer models are too unreliable to predict the climate of the future?” If you answer “Probably true,” to these two survey questions, Yale’s researchers mark you as ignorant.

Perhaps you think it probable that “Global warming is happening, but will be more beneficial than harmful.” Or that “The Earth is actually cooling, not warming.”  Dumb, dumb, decides Yale, which concluded “only 8% of Americans have knowledge equivalent to an A or B, 40% would receive a C or D, and 52% would get an F.”

In truth, if you did make these “mistakes,” you’d be in good company. Yale’s researchers would also have flunked Princeton’s Freeman Dyson, America’s best known scientist, Claude Allegre, France’s best known scientist , and World Federation of Scientists President Antonino Zichichi, Italy’s best known scientist, among thousands of others.

The researchers – a group at the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication — are wrong-headed in making assertions that no one can prove or disprove: All computer models to date have failed to predict the climate, as one example. The researchers are also too-often embarrassingly wrong. They believe that melting Antarctic ice has been raising global sea levels when satellite data from the European Space Agency – an authority in the field – shows the opposite to be true. They highlight ignoramuses who think that aerosol cans might have something to do with global warming, not realizing that credible peer-reviewed research at University of Waterloo shows otherwise: CFCs, the agent in aerosol cans, was indeed responsible for global warming, says Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy. They treat as myth the notion that the Sun could explain the global warming seen in recent decades.

The headline from Yale University’s press release: “Most Americans Lack Basic Knowledge of Climate Issues, Study Finds.”

My headline: “Yale University scientists lack basic knowledge of climate issues.”

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers. The Yale survey can be found here.

 

Michael Mann and Donald Kennedy

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

With Dr. Michael Mann out on the hustings selling his innocence, as I discussed a few days ago, I was pleased when I came across this clear explanation of some major issues in the so-called inquiry by Penn State into the Mann’s actions. I urge everyone to read it, and follow up on the citations therein. There are numerous other problems with the inquiry, but that hit the high points.

Figure 1. The effect of Michael Mann, as seen by Chris Bok. But I digress.

Here was the mind-boggling part to me. To my astonishment, other than Michael Mann, the people running the investigation of Michael Mann reported interviewing exactly TWO PEOPLE besides Mann himself. I was, as the lovely English expression has it, “Gob-smacked”.

Remember that Dr. Mann recently said:

My employer, Penn State University, exonerated me after a thorough investigation of my e-mails in the East Anglia archive.

I knew it was bad, but interviewing two people now constitutes a “thorough investigation” of alleged serious scientific malfeasance? The investigators didn’t even understand that the famous “Mike’s Nature trick“was a clever way of hiding adverse data, a big scientific no-no. They didn’t interview anyone who actually understood the issues.

Two interviews and close the books? That is a pathetic joke. Penn State was my father’s alma mater, Class of ’26, I’m glad he didn’t live to see how far they have fallen. Penn State should demand that its name be taken off the document.

However, because this is a story involving Dr. Mann, you know there’s gotta be more to it than that they just interviewed two people, there’s bound to be a further twist to the story.

Continue reading → (WUWT)

 

Why climate change isn't much of a campaign issue

When an economy is in the tank, it’s a lot tougher to sell what may be expensive environmental solutions whose benefits aren't seen for decades to people worried about their job today.

Coming into this year, conventional wisdom had it that if Democrats failed to get an energy and climate bill passed by this summer, a new attempt would have to wait until at least 2011.

Think longer-term than that. Maybe a lot longer. (CSM)

 

US Elections Could Kill Climate Legislation

Though most of the debate among US politicians preparing for the midterm elections on November 2 ^nd is about the economy, supporters of the warmist agenda are awakening to the fact that a sea change in the American Congress could leave climate change legislation high and dry. A list compiled by the left-leaning Wonk Room website suggests that 31 out of 37 Republican Senate candidates have recently disputed the science. This includes nine out of ten sitting senators and five of the remaining six actively oppose existing climate bills. If there was ever any doubt as to which end of the political spectrum belief in anthropogenic global warming lies on, this should make it clear that climate change is a political lever for the socialist left. There is scant support from conservatives for radical environmentalist notions. Indeed, skepticism about climate science has become a litmus tests for candidates backed by the resurgent right. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

 

Climate change apocalypse NOW

Analysis The long-running saga of drowning dogs and weeping rabbits finally drew to a close this week, with the pronouncement by Ofcom that last year’s "Act on CO2" advertising campaign was "not political".

Critics fear that this ruling now gives the green light to government "information" campaigns that otherwise look, sound and feel like state-sponsored politicking. (The Register)

 

EU holds off on decision to move to 30 per cent emissions target

Debate continues on whether to support Kyoto and upgrade emissions goals

EU environment ministers once again failed to reach agreement on whether to upgrade the EU's emissions reduction target for 2020 from 20 per cent to 30 per cent at a meeting in Brussels yesterday, although they agreed to revisit the issue early next year.

In a statement released at the close of the meeting, the European Council of member states said it welcomed the on-going debate on whether to upgrade the emissions target, but provided no update on the current state of the negotiations. (James Murray, BusinessGreen)

 

From the rubber room: Time is Running Out

"What we need more than anything else is a mass movement of young people," Peter Goldmark, director of EDF's Climate and Air Program, who recently announced his retirement at the end of the year. "In American culture, it is youth that sets the agenda. It's always been this way. Think who was driving change in the anti-Vietnam war movement, in the civil rights era. They have to mobilize, now, and demand action against global warming."

We are sitting in Goldmark's small, spare office at EDF's Manhattan headquarters. He has had a distinguished and varied career, which included stints as Director the Port Authority of New York, President of the Rockefeller Foundation and publisher of the International Herald Tribune. I've come to talk to Goldmark, as he prepares to leave EDF, about what he has learned during his tenure. He speaks angrily of the "shameful paralysis" of the U.S. Senate, and says his focus is now is almost entirely on the next generation.

"My generation has failed," he says flatly. "We are handing over the problem to our children. They—and their children—will live with the worst consequences of climate change. Make no mistake, global warming is happening right now. It is only going to get worse." (EDF)

 

Another eye-roller from the Nude Socialist: A warming world could leave cities flattened

EARTH is starting to crumble under the strain of climate change.

Over the last decade, rock avalanches and landslides have become more common in high mountain ranges, apparently coinciding with the increase in exceptionally warm periods (see "Early signs"). The collapses are triggered by melting glaciers and permafrost, which remove the glue that holds steep mountain slopes together.

Worse may be to come. Thinning glaciers on volcanoes could destabilise vast chunks of their summit cones, triggering mega-landslides capable of flattening cities such as Seattle and devastating local infrastructure.

For Earth this phenomenon is nothing new, but the last time it happened, few humans were around to witness it. Several studies have shown that around 10,000 years ago, as the planet came out of the last ice age, vast portions of volcanic summit cones collapsed, leading to enormous landslides. (New Scientist)

 

Some climate insanity for the weekend

While most people with at least traces of rational thinking or common sense have largely seen through the nonsense of "climate disruption", the AGW crusaders reacted in a simple way: they began to write bigger insanities than ever before, hoping that the low-to-nonexistent quality of their arguments can be compensated by their "intensity".

A couple of fresh examples:



Global warming flattens skyscrapers

New Scientist has figured out some new science: "Earth is starting to crumble under the strain of climate change." (This is a quote.)

Cities such as Seattle are going to be completely flattened soon. How does the Earth achieve this modest goal? It's simple. Climate change is, first of all, detonating the volcanoes above such cities, Kate Ravilious professionally explains. Once the volcanoes explode because of the 0.013 °C warming per year or so, they destroy all the skylines, too. No kidding. ;-)

» Don't Stop Reading » (TRF)

 

Sun & Volcanoes Control Climate

It is accepted that volcanic eruptions can have a major impact on short term climate. A new study in Nature Geoscience uses instrument records, proxy data and climate modeling to show that multidecadal variability is a dominant feature of North Atlantic sea-surface temperature (SST), which, in turn, impacts regional climate. It turns out that the timing of multidecadal SST fluctuations in the North Atlantic over the past 600 years has, to a large degree, been governed by changes in external solar and volcanic forcings. Solar influence is not surprising but that fact that volcanoes cause climate change lasting decades has some significant implications for those trying to model climate over the next century. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

 

Oh dear... Climate change may alter natural climate cycles of Pacific

While it's still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.

El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki is a Japanese term for "similar, but different").

Last year, the journal Nature published a paper that found climate change is behind this shift from El Nino to El Nino Modoki. While the findings of that paper are still being debated, this latest paper in Nature Geoscience presents evidence that El Nino Modoki drives a climate pattern known as the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).

"We've found that El Nino Modoki is responsible for changes in the NPGO,"said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "The reason this is important is because the NPGO has significant effects on fish stocks and ocean nutrient distributions in the Pacific, especially along the west coast of the United States."

The NPGO, first named two years ago by Di Lorenzo and colleagues in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, explained for the first time long-term changes in ocean circulation of the North Pacific, which scientists now link to an increasing number of dramatic transitions in coastal marine ecosystems.

"The ecosystems of the Pacific may very well become more sensitive to the NPGO in the future," said Di Lorenzo. "Our data show that this NPGO is definitively linked to El Nino Modoki, so as Modoki becomes more frequent in the central tropical Pacific, the NPGO will also intensify." (Georgia Institute of Technology)

In truth we do not know much about the El Niño Southern Oscillation, how its phases drift and change or at what part of longer term cycles we may be viewing it. We have no way of telling whether we are witnessing anything even slightly unusual or if enhanced greenhouse effect exists at all. We probably won't have sufficient observations to untangle the data for many decades and probably several centuries. Gorebull warbling is perhaps humanity's most absurd collective distraction. Silly game...

 

Does CO2 Drive the Earth’s Climate System? Comments on the Latest NASA GISS Paper

(edited for clarity at 2:45 p.m.)

There was a very clever paper published in Science this past week by Lacis, Schmidt, Rind, and Ruedy that uses the GISS climate model (ModelE) in an attempt to prove that carbon dioxide is the main driver of the climate system.

This paper admits that its goal is to counter the oft-quoted claim that water vapor is the main greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. (They provide a 1991 Lindzen reference as an example of that claim).

Through a series of computations and arguments, the authors claim that is actually the CO2, not water vapor, that sustains the warmth of our climate system.

I suspect this paper will result in as many opinions in the skeptic community as there are skeptics giving opinions. But unless one is very careful in reading this paper and knows exactly what the authors are talking about, it is easy to get distracted by superfluous details and miss the main point.

For instance, their table comparing the atmospheres of the Earth, Venus, and Mars does nothing to refute the importance of water vapor to the Earth’s average temperature. While they show that the atmosphere of Mars is very thin, they fail to point out the Martian atmosphere actually has more CO2 than our atmosphere does.

I do not have a problem with the authors’ calculations or their climate model experiment per se. There is not much new here, and their model run produces about what I would expect. It is an interesting exercise that has value by itself.

It is instead their line of reasoning I object to — what they claim their model results mean in terms of causation– in their obvious attempt to relegate the role of water vapor in the atmosphere to that of a passive component that merely responds to the warming effect of CO2…the real driver (they claim) of the climate system.

OUR ASSUMPTIONS DETERMINE OUR CONCLUSIONS

From what I can tell reading the paper, their claim is that, since our primary greenhouse gas water vapor (and clouds, which constitute a portion of the greenhouse effect) respond quickly to temperature change, vapor and clouds should only be considered “feedbacks” upon temperature change — not “forcings” that cause the average surface temperature of the atmosphere to be what it is in the first place.

Though not obvious, this claim is central to the tenet of the paper, and is an example of the cause-versus-effect issue I repeatedly refer to in the past when discussing some of the most fundamental errors made in the scientific ‘consensus’ on climate change.

It is a subtle attempt to remove water vapor from the discussion of “control” over the climate system — by definition. Only those of us who know enough of the details of forcing-feedback theory within the context of climate change theory will likely realize this, through.

Just because water vapor responds quickly to temperature change does not mean that there are no long-term water vapor changes (or cloud changes) — not due to temperature — that cause climate change. Asserting so is a non sequitur, and just leads to circular reasoning.

I am not claiming the authors are being deceptive. I think I understand why so many scientists go down this path of reasoning. They view the climate system as a self-contained, self-controlled complex of physically intertwined processes that would forever remain unchanged until some “external” influence (forcing) enters the picture and alters the rules by which the climate system operates.

Of course, increasing CO2 is the currently fashionable forcing in this climatological worldview.

But I cannot overemphasize the central important of this paradigm (or construct) of climate change theory to the eventual conclusions the climate researcher will inevitably make.

If one assumes from the outset that the climate system can only vary through changes imposed external to the normal operation of the climate system, one then removes natural, internal climate cycles from the list of potential causes of global warming. And natural changes in water vapor (or more likely, clouds) are one potential source of internally-driven change. There are influences on cloud and water vapor other than temperature which in turn help to determine the average temperature state of the climate system.

After assuming clouds and water vapor are no more than feedbacks upon temperature, the Lacis et al. paper then uses a climate model experiment to ‘prove’ their paradigm that CO2 drives climate — by forcing the model with a CO2 change, resulting in a large temperature response!

Well, DUH. If they had forced the model with a water vapor change, it would have done the same thing. Or a cloud change. But they had already assumed water vapor and clouds cannot be climate drivers.

Specifically, they ran a climate model experiment in which they instantaneously removed all of the atmospheric greenhouse gases except water vapor, and they got rapid cooling “plunging the climate into an icebound Earth state”. The result after 7 years of model integration time is shown in the next image.

Such a result is not unexpected for the GISS model. But while this is indeed an interesting theoretical exercise, we must be very careful about what we deduce from it about the central question we are ultimately interested in: “How much will the climate system warm from humanity adding carbon dioxide to it?” We can’t lose sight of why we are discussing all of this in the first place.

As I have already pointed out, the authors have predetermined what they would find. They assert water vapor (as well as cloud cover) is a passive follower of a climate system driven by CO2. They run a model experiment that then “proves” what they already assumed at the outset.

But we also need to recognize that their experiment is misleading in other ways, too.

First, the instantaneous removal of 100% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere except for water vapor causes about 8 times the radiative forcing (over 30 Watts per sq. meter) as does a 100% increase in CO2 (2XCO2, causing less than 4 Watts per sq. meter), something that will not occur until late this century — if ever.

This is the so-called ‘logarithmic effect’…adding more and more CO2 has a progressively weaker radiative forcing response.

Currently, we are about 40% of the way to that doubling. Thus, their experiment involves 20 times (!) the radiative forcing we are now experiencing (theoretically, at least) from over a century of carbon dioxide emissions.

So are we to assume that this dramatic theoretical example should influence our views of the causes and future path of global warming, when their no-CO2 experiment involves ~20 times the radiative forcing of what has occurred to date from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere?

Furthermore, the cloud feedbacks in their climate model are positive, which further amplifies the model’s temperature response to forcing. As readers here are aware, our research suggests that cloud feedbacks in the real climate system might be so strongly negative that they could more than negate any positive water vapor feedback.

In fact, this is where the authors have made a logical stumble. Everyone agrees that the net effect of clouds is to cool the climate system on average. But the climate models suggest that the cloud feedback response to the addition of CO2 to our current climate system will be just the opposite, with cloud changes acting to amplify the warming.

What the authors didn’t realize is that when they decided to relegate the role of clouds in the average state of the climate system to one of “feedback”, their model’s positive cloud feedback actually contradicts the known negative “feedback” effect of clouds on the climate’s normal state.

Oops.

(In retrospect, I suppose they could claim that cloud feedbacks switched from negative at the low temperatures of an icebound Earth, to being positive at the higher temperatures of the real climate system. But that might mess up Jim Hansen’s claim of strongly positive feedbacks during the Ice Ages).

CONCLUSION
Taken together, the series of computations and claims made by Lacis et al. might lead the casual reader to think, “Wow, carbon dioxide really does have a strong effect on the Earth’s climate system!” And, in my view, it does. But the paper really tells us nothing new about (1) how much warming we can expect from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, or (2) how much of recent warming was caused by CO2.

The paper implies that it presents new understanding, but all it does is get more explicit about the conceptual hoops one must jump through in order to claim that CO2 is the main driver of the climate system. From that standpoint alone, I find the paper quite revealing.

Unfortunately, what I present here is just a blog posting. It would take another peer-reviewed paper that follows an alternative path, to effectively counter the Lacis paper, and show that it merely concludes what it assumes at the outset. I am only outlining here what I see as the main issues.

Of course, the chance of editors at Science allowing such a response paper to get published is virtually zero. The editors at Science choose which scientists will be asked to provide peer review, and they already know who they can count on to reject a skeptic’s paper.

Many of us have already been there, done that. (Roy W. Spencer)

 

Drilling for Black Gold in Eastern Germany

Could there be enough oil in the eastern German state of Brandenburg to start a small boom in black gold? A Canadian company believes there might and is about to commence test drilling. But will they have any more luck than the former communist government? (Spiegel)

 

Extreme Makeover, Natural Gas Edition

One of the paramount questions facing mankind, I am told by many in politics and the media, is “What’s the ‘fuel of the future?’” [Read More] (Mac Johnson, ET)

 

More Fuel Ethanol - And More Trouble - On The Way

by Ben Lieberman
15 October 2010 @ 3:27 pm

Adding ethanol to the gasoline supply raises the cost of driving, boosts food prices, gobbles up subsidies, and has failed to live up to its environmental promise. But there’s good news – the Environmental Protection Agency may let us use more of it.
EPA recently announced that E15 – gasoline with up to 15 percent ethanol blended in - has been approved for use in cars and trucks built since 2007. Until this decision, no more than 10 percent ethanol was allowed. The federal government is still conducting testing to determine whether older vehicles can use E15 without problems, and until that decision is made gas stations will be reluctant to carry it. Beyond cars and trucks, a coalition of producers…

Read the full story (Cooler Heads)

 

Laughably, US upset by green subsidies: U.S. to launch inquiry into China's subsidies for clean-energy firms

The Obama administration is launching a broad investigation into whether the Chinese government improperly supports its alternative energy companies, one of the sharpest challenges yet to Beijing's alleged efforts to seize world leadership in particular industries. (Washington Post)

 

Renewables will add £880 a year to bills

Trying to meet our EU renewable energy target would cost more than we currently spend on our entire electricity production, says Christopher Booker.

Is there any subject on which more nonsense is talked and written than the mindblowing proposals being bandied about by the Government for meeting our EU target of generating, within 10 years, 30 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources? (That is roughly six times the current total, meaning that we have by far the most challenging target of any country in Europe.)

For instance, the industry regulator, Ofgem, recently announced that by 2020 we will need to have spent £40 billion on connecting up our new renewable energy sources to the national grid – £4 billion a year. Alistair Buchanan, the head of Ofgem, blithely claimed, on the BBC Today programme and elsewhere, that this would only add £6 a year to the average electricity bill of Britain’s 25 million households. Yet ten seconds with a calculator shows that the cost per household of that £4 billion a year works out to £160.

On top of this, the Government wants us to have, by 2020, offshore wind farms with a capacity of 33 gigawatts (1 gigawatt = 1,000 megawatts). At the current capital cost of £3 million per megawatt of capacity, this would cost another £100 billion (£10 billion a year, or £400 a year for each household), to be paid for through our electricity bills. However, even if they could all be built, they would produce on average only around a quarter of that amount of electricity.

Add in £8 billion a year (or £320 per household) which, the Government forecasts, we will be paying by then through its ludicrously generous feed-in tariff for solar power and, for these measures alone, our total annual bill for the dream of meeting our EU renewables target would be at least £22 billion. That’s considerably more than the entire wholesale cost of Britain’s electricity generated from all sources last year, at £18.6 billion.

In other words, these measures alone would much more than double our electricity bills, for producing on average – and very unreliably – barely as much energy as we get from a handful of conventional power stations.

In reality, there isn’t the faintest chance that any of the Government’s targets will be met. But the massive diversion of resources that it is doing its best to encourage will not help when it comes to filling the looming 40 per cent gap in our electricity supplies, as 17 of the older nuclear and coal-fired power stations are forced to close. There is virtually nothing, then, in these plans to ensure that we can keep Britain’s lights on. (TDT)

 

Quangos working on renewable energy no longer a 'priority'

Renewables Advisory Board and Office for Renewable Energy Deployment among bodies axed

Two renewable energy quangos have been axed, with a leaked letter describing the function delivered by one of them as no longer a "priority". The government, which the prime minister pledged would be the "greenest ever", also radically reformed its key environmental bodies, the Environment Agency and Natural England, leaving campaigners asking how it would receive the independent advice needed to make effective policy. (Guardian)

 

One of the few projects that might have yielded useful power: Huhne drops Severn barrage to invest in wind power

Wildlife activists welcome decision to halt £30bn energy scheme in favour of exportable technologies, as new nuclear plants also get the green light.

Ambitious plans to harness the power of the Severn estuary to light up one in 20 of the UK's homes are to be abandoned as a result of the Government's attempt to address the nation's deficit.

Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy, will tomorrow jettison the world's largest tidal energy project, rather than make the taxpayer foot an estimated bill of £10bn to £30bn for the untested technology. (Independent)

 

Wind-Park Proponents Advocate Suspending Democracy

By P Gosselin on 17. Oktober 2010

Over at Sweden’s sceptic The Climate Scam, Jonny Fagerström writes how pro-wind-park organisation Swedish Wind Energy is lobbying to abolish the municipal veto in order to bypass public refusal of windparks. The public, whose landscape would be ruined, should not be allowed to have a say on whether or not a wind-park is to be installed in their area, read here: Wind Power Industry Threatens Democracy

Wind-park builders and operators find it a nuisance that pesky, stubborn residents refuse to have their local landscape industrialised and property values ruined. For the wind industry, permitting is proceeding much too slowly, and populations should just accept having the windmills forced down their throats, without any further ado. (No Tricks Zone)

 

Chris Huhne to announce eight sites for new generation nuclear plants

A new generation of nuclear power stations will go ahead on eight sites in Britain, Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, is expected to announce this week (TDT)

 

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