From the World of Unintended Consequences

FROM-Reuters

Africa mulls biofuels as land grab fears grow



Large land acquisitions for biofuel alarm hungry continent

* Sierra Leone farmers say Addax project threatens rice crop

* U.N. says well managed biofuel projects could work well
By Simon Akam

YAINKASA, Sierra Leone, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Farmers in this iron-roof village in Sierra Leone say they didn't know what they were getting into when they leased their land for a biofuel crop they now fear threatens their food harvests.

Addax Bioenergy, part of privately-owned Swiss Addax & Oryx Group, says it went through long consultations with locals when it won a lease for around 50,000 hectares (123,600 acres) for ethanol sugarcane in the poor West African country's centre.

Despite that, a land dispute has flared up, one that highlights a major obstacle to efforts to tackle climate change by growing fuel in some of the world's poorest places.

"We were tricked. We feel the way we're being treated is not in line with our agreement," said rice farmer Alie Bangura, 68. "They promised things when we gave up our land that didn't happen."

Addax says a large share of a competitive $12 per hectare goes directly to farmers, rather than via landlords or officials, and that a development programme to help farmers improve yields will ensure all villages have enough to eat.
Proponents of biofuel crops in rural Africa say they will help fight climate change, meet Africa's own chronic energy shortages and give badly needed income from under-used farmland; critics say they take food out of hungry mouths by turning arable land over to feed cars, stoking tension with communities.

As environment ministers gathered in the Mexican resort of Cancun on Sunday for U.N. talks aiming for agreement on steps to slow down global warming, biofuels are likely to get little attention as doubts grow about whether they are realistic.

By one estimate, satisfying the EU's biofuel targets alone will require an additional 4.5 million hectares of land by 2020, an area the size of Denmark. [nLDE65T15G]


"ALARMING ACQUISITIONS"

Environmental groups have become alarmed at the pace with which vast tracts in Africa are being bought up for fuel crops.

A study by Friends of the Earth in August said biofuel demand was driving a new "land grab" in Africa, with at least 5 million hectares (19,300 sq miles) acquired by foreign firms to grow crops in 11 countries it had studied.

Ethiopia has earmarked 700,000 hectares for sugarcane and up to 23 million for jatropha. In Tanzania, rice farmers have been forced off their land to make way for sugarcane, the group says.

Kenya and Angola each have received proposals for the use of 500,000 hectares for biofuels and a plan for 400,000 hectares of oil palms is underway in Benin. Environmentalists are worried.
"The rush is definitely still ongoing. It is quite alarming the rate of land acquisitions by large companies," Greenpeace Africa director Olivia Langhoff told Reuters by phone.

"It's doubtful that Africans will see any benefits. There's very little involvement from local communities or farmers."

Langhoff said that in many cases promises are made that only fallow or marginal land will be used, but the plantation expands into good land as demand increases, squeezing out food crops.

Residents near the Addax plantation, many of whom signed away their land with thumb prints because they can't write, say they thought the farm wouldn't affect their fields in what they call "bolilands", seasonally waterlogged areas suitable for rice growing, because the sugarcane is being planted in drier areas.

But irrigation channels dug up by the company have drained some of the bolilands, they say, damaging their rice fields. Other food crops of theirs such as cassava and wild palm trees used for cooking oil were razed when it developed the land.

"Even if Addax leaves the bolilands we will not be able to work," said farmer Abdulai Serry in Lungi Acre village. "They have dug up canals and the water is no longer settling."


"NO SILVER BULLET"

Addax, which negotiated the lease directly with local people for its Sierra Leone plantation, says the villagers were consulted about the projects impacts and a local lawyer represented them, a rare example of a truly grassroots deal.
"Some of those who complain, it's out of ignorance," Addax social affairs manager Aminata Kamara told Reuters. "When they see outside people, they don't see the benefits they will get."

But on a continent where most people in rural areas live off subsistence farming and soaring populations compete for dwindling earth, conflicts over arable land are common. Adding foreign buyers in the mix can be explosive.

In 2008 high food prices prompted countries like China, and Saudi Arabia to seek farmland abroad, sparking protests. A lease by South Korea's Daewoo for nearly half of the arable land in Madagascar, an island bigger than France, triggered a wave of protests that eventually ousted President Marc Ravalomanana.

And, as in Indonesia, natural forest might be cleared to grow fuel, making net carbon emissions bigger than fossil fuels.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, home of the world's second-biggest tropical forest, China's ZTE Agribusiness plans a million hectare palm farm. Environmentalists fear massive deforestation.

Biofuel produced this way is also likely to fall foul of European environmental rules. [ID:nLDE65919H]

Most environment experts think biofuels do have a future in Africa, but only if properly managed.

"Biofuels can in Africa improve access to fuels ... and contribute to reducing greenhouse emissions, but biofuels are certainly not the silver bullet," said the United Nations' Environment Programme spokesman Nick Nuttall. "Africa needs to be careful about the choices it makes with biofuel production."

(Writing and additional Reporting by Tim Cocks; Editing by Alister Doyle)

Dead Green Treaty Stinks Up The Room

FROM-The American Interest
Walter Russell Mead

What a difference a year makes. Last year at this time, the Great Green Delusion — that the United Nations process could deliver a treaty that would stop global warming dead in its tracks — was the hottest idea in town. Those who dissented were scorned and despised; the environmental movement and its army of press loyalists were the Great and the Good who knew how to solve the world’s problems. 120 country heads dropped whatever they were doing to catch a flight to Copenhagen: who could miss a historic moment like this?

Now, a year and two high-profile international negotiating fiascoes later, the next scheduled meeting in the UN process in Cancun, Mexico isn’t getting nearly the same kind of attention. The New York Times will not even be sending a reporter for the full event; “What will there even be to cover in Cancun in terms of public policy or reader interest?” asks the chief climate reporter of the Washington Post. The BBC sent 20 reporters to Copenhagen; only one will go to Cancun.

It is not just that the Cancun meeting isn’t expected to produce much. The whole UN treaty process is increasingly being seen as a colossal and humiliating blunder. Embarrassed environmentalists are finding it harder and harder to pretend that this particular parrot is only, as the Monty Python skit put it, ‘pining for the fjords.’ Worse, some of the smarter greens out there are realizing that the UN process is not going to disappear just because it is a dead end.

Most people have long stopped following the tortuous saga of the collapse of the UN process to fight climate change by adopting a treaty to be signed by all 192 members of the United Nations. The treaty was intended to be the successor to the ineffective and expiring Kyoto Protocol, and was conceived of as a ‘grand bargain.’ The US Senate had in effect rejected Kyoto 95-0 because the Protocol limited US emissions without placing restrictions on the rapidly growing economies of the developing world. Son of Kyoto (call it SOK for short) would get around this by placing limits of some kind on all the world’s countries. The geniuses behind SOK framed the problem this way: how do we get the developing countries to sign on to carbon limits strict enough that the US Senate would ratify the next global treaty?

You Can Stop Paying for Al Gore's Mistake

FROM-RCP


By Debra Saunders

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

Sure, he meant well, but as Reuters reported, Gore also said, "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

In sum, Gore demonstrated that politicians are lousy at figuring out which alternative fuels make the most sense. Now even enviros like Friends of the Earth have come to believe that "large-scale agro-fuels" are "ecologically unsustainable and inefficient." That's a polite way of saying that producers need to burn through a boatload of fossil fuels to make ethanol.

Gore also showed that most D.C. politicians can't be trusted to put America's interests before those of Iowa farmers. But there is one pursuit in which homo electus excels: spending other people's money.

Beware politicians when they promise you "the jobs of the future." Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about a federal grant program in Florida designed to retrain the unemployed for jobs in the growing clean-energy sector. Except clean tech isn't growing as promised. Officials told the Post that three-quarters of their first 100 graduates haven't had a single job offer.

In May, President Obama came to a Fremont, Calif., solar plant where he announced, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra." This month, Solyndra announced it was canceling its expansion plans. The announcement came after voters rewarded the green lobby by defeating Proposition 23 -- which would have postponed California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law AB32 -- because voters bought the green-jobs promise.

Back to Gore. There is a movement in Washington to end Gore's mistake. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have proposed ending the 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy on corn ethanol, which is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress extends it.

As DeMint explained in an e-mail to the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, "Government mandates and tax subsidies for ethanol have led to decreased gas mileage, adversely effected the environment and increased food prices. Washington must stop picking winners and losers in the market, and instead allow Americans to make choices for themselves."

That's what free-market types who oppose corporate welfare -- like me -- have been saying for years.

So the question is: Will this new batch of Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to buck the farm lobby and agribusiness by weaning them from the public teat? Or are they no better than the farm-lobby-pandering Al Gore?

The Cancun Climate Capers

FROM-American Thinker


By S. Fred Singer


Today, Nov. 29, marks the beginning of the Cancun COP (Conference of the Parties [to the Kyoto Protocol]). This is the 16th meeting of the nearly 200 national delegations, which have been convening annually since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 at COP-3.


This conference promises to be another two-week extravaganza for some 20,000 delegates and hangers-on, who will be enjoying the sand, surf, and tequila-sours -- mostly paid for by taxpayers from the US and Western Europe. For most delegates, this annual vacation has become a lifetime career: it pays for mortgages and their children's education. I suppose a few of them actually believe that they are saving the earth -- even though the Kyoto Protocol [to limit emission of greenhouse (GH) gases, like CO2, but never submitted for ratification to the US Senate] will be defunct in 2012 and there is -- thankfully -- no sign of any successor treaty.

But never fear: the organizers may ‘pull a rabbit out of a hat' and spring a surprise on the world. They will likely announce that they have conquered the greenhouse gas hydrofluorocarbon (HFC). Now, HFCs are what replaced HCFCs, which in turn replaced CFCs, thanks to the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This succession of chemical refrigerants has reduced ozone-destroying potential; but unfortunately they are all GH gases. So now HFCs must be eradicated, because a single molecule of HFC produces many thousand times the greenhouse effect of a molecule of CO2. What they don't tell you, of course, is that the total forcing from the HFCs is less than one percent of that of CO2, according to the IPCC [see page 141]. So ‘slaying the dragon' amounts to slaying a mouse -- or something even smaller. But you can bet that it will be trumpeted as a tremendous achievement and will likely invigorate the search for other mice that can be slain.

From the World of Unintended Consequences

FROM-I Stock Analyst

Biofuel and bobwhites


By Spencer Hunt, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

The push to produce more corn and soybeans for biofuels might help lower gas prices and fight global warming, but it also could wipe out as many as two-thirds of the bird species that nest near farms.

On the flip side, if farmers grow grasses, the number of birds that nest near farms could double in parts of Ohio and other Midwestern states, researchers say.

Species that nest in the grassy "margins" around farms have the most to lose or gain, said Tim Meehan, a University of Wisconsin ecologist.

"I think the biggest concern is there are so many grassland birds that are already in danger," said Meehan, lead author for a study recently published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

"Take what you've seen so far over the last 100 years or so in bird trends and extend it," he said. "If you continue to annualize landscape, then expect more of the same and certain species to disappear."

Bird species that nest in prairies and fields of tall grasses can't compete with farming. Corn, soybean and wheat fields offer no shelter or food for grassland birds.

Truth in observation

FROM-Quadrant Online




by Alex Stuart



Satellites show there’s been no global warming for 12 years



On 1 November, the widely-respected Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) published its satellite-derived average temperature of the lower atmosphere for October. The smoothed running average for October was level with the 1998 figure – showing that for the past 12 years, there’s been no global warming. Yet in those same years carbon dioxide in the air rose by 6%. So what’s going on? Either the warming influence of man-made CO2 has been offset by unspecified cooling – or the man-made global warming theory must be questioned.


A few days earlier, an important conference - the A-Train symposium - was held in New Orleans. It refers to the ‘afternoon train’ of satellites - Aqua (launched 2002), Aura (launched 2004), CloudSat (launched 2006) and CALIPSO (also launched 2006) - that cross the equator at around 1:30 p.m. local time each afternoon, giving the formation its name. Together, these four satellites carry 15 instruments that survey an identical slice of Earth’s surface and atmosphere as they pass overhead. Leading the train, Aqua measures temperature, water vapour, and rainfall; then CloudSat and CALIPSO track clouds and aerosols; flying last, Aura logs greenhouse gases in the air.


Data from these satellites should answer a key question that would settle the climate debate: how much warmer would it really get - not just in theory - if CO2 were doubled? In its 2007 Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change handled this question of ‘climate sensitivity’ with computer models. IPCC assumed that a theoretical temperature rise from CO2 alone would be theoretically amplified by water vapour, in a ‘positive feedback’, by a factor of between 2.0 and 4.5. It’s logical: if it gets warmer, there’ll be more surface evaporation, more water vapour in the air - and a warmer surface. But has it been proven that water vapour causes further warming? In fact, it hasn’t.

Nevertheless, all sides in the debate have much to agree on: that climate has always changed and always will; that the ‘greenhouse’ keeps the Earth’s temperature about 34oC warmer than it would otherwise be; that water vapour and clouds account for about 95% of greenhouse gases; that CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas at 3.5% of all greenhouse gases and 0.039% of the air; that warming from a doubling of CO2 by itself would, in theory, be perhaps 1°C; that since the Little Ice Age of around 1450 to 1850, it’s been getting warmer; that since around 1850, CO2 in the air has been increasing and now stands at 390 parts per million; that CO2 comes from many sources, natural and man-made; and that CO2 from man-made sources accounts for 7 billion tonnes of the 220 billion tonnes of carbon equivalent emitted each year - or about 3%. But the question of whether man-made CO2 causes unprecedented and dangerous global warming - the notion behind so much social and political angst about ‘carbon’ - remains in serious dispute.

With observational data now becoming available from high-resolution instruments flown on specialised satellites, we could soon have a resolution to the key question of whether water vapour amplifies or attenuates temperature rises from CO2 alone. Recent peer-reviewed research in leading journals suggests the assumption that water vapour feedback adds to temperature rises from more CO2 - and leads to climate catastrophe - may simply be wrong. Among recent papers, two stand out

In August 2009, Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT and his collaborator Dr. Yong-Sang Choi inferred from satellite data that feedback isn’t positive at all. Using observations from the ERBE instrument on the ERBS satellite (launched in 1984), they analysed the relationship between tropical sea-surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere heat radiation - and concluded that feedback is far lower than the positive 2.0 to 4.5 times assumed in IPCC’s models and is in fact negative. The Lindzen-Choi results were denounced as flawed by Dr Kevin Trenberth, the IPCC scientist who, in the Climategate emails, asked why global warming has stopped. Responding to Trenberth’s criticism, Lindzen and Choi analysed data from the CERES instrument on the Terra satellite (launched in 1999) as well, which only reinforced their original finding. They pegged climate sensitivity at 0.7, meaning higher temperatures from more CO2 wouldn’t be amplified, but would be reduced.

In August 2010, Dr Roy Spencer and Dr. William Braswell of UAH published a paper, also based on observational evidence, from CERES and the AMSR-E instrument on the newer Aqua satellite. Spencer and Braswell likewise demonstrated that real feedback falls far below the theoretical levels built into IPCC models and must be negative. They showed that changes in the reflectivity of clouds are causes of constant adjustment in temperature, rather than effects hitherto believed to be positive feedback. They concluded that a doubling of man-made CO2 would raise average temperature by a net 0.6oC - minimal in historical, seasonal and even daily terms.


If this foundational assumption - that water vapour amplifies a greenhouse-induced rise in temperature - turns out to be wrong, then the notion that man-made CO2 is a source of catastrophe for mankind is also wrong. And if the man-made CO2 scare is mistaken, as these results suggest, then natural drivers of climate are at work. Meanwhile, urgent environmental issues threaten millions of people today but, tragically, aren’t given the priority they deserve - because so much focus is misplaced by so many on something so theoretical and long-term as man-made climate catastrophe. We should focus instead on real, urgent, life-threatening issues like preventable disease, lack of fresh water, degradation of the oceans, deforestation and species extinction, while we wait to see what real observational data - not just theory - tells us about the drivers of our changing climate.





Alex Stuart is Chairman of the Australian Environment Foundation

Two sides to the same lump of coal.

Over at Real Science Steven Goddard has explained the Met Office "having it both ways" policy on China's Coal powered electric plants. However it is always interesting and amusing to point out how the climate science community is always contradicting itself.


First from the Met Office via the UK Telegraph, the headline and the lead:

Global warming has slowed because of pollution
Global warming has slowed in the last decade, according to the Met Office, as the world pumps out so much pollution it is reflecting the sun’s rays and causing a cooling effect

Pretty straight forward right? They explain that it isn't warming as they said it would because of plain old air pollution:

But in a new report the Met Office said the reduced rate of warming can be easily explained by a number of factors. And indeed the true rate of warming caused by man made greenhouse gases could be greater than ever.

One of the major factors is pollution over Asia, where the huge growth in coal-fired power stations mean aerosols like sulphur are being pumped into the air. This reflects sunlight, cooling the land surface temperature. Dr Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice, said pollution may be causing a cooling effect.

“A possible increase in aerosol emissions from Asia in the last decade may have contributed to substantially to the recent slowdown,” she said. “Aerosols cool the climate by reflecting the sunlight"

.
So the warming caused by the CO2 pumped out by the coal power plants is being offset by the pollution of the same power plants, got it? They have used this little device many times in many ways over the years when what should have happened based upon their hypothesis...didn't. You could say that air pollution is the last refuge of environmentalist...except  when it isn't.


Which brings us across the Atlantic to the good old New York Times. Here we have other esteemed climate scientists contradicting what Dr. Pope just said, in a catchy little article titled:

To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air

Now as we all know the global warming in the UK Telegraph story is the same as the climate change in the NY Times story, so the headline in the Times could just have easily read "To Fight Global Warming, Clear the Air", in fact the article is in large part about that very subject, fighting global warming by fighting the very pollution that Dr Pope said was artificially keeping us cooler than we would be!

Who is making such claims? Why it is Veerabhadran Ramanathan a professor of atmospheric physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and David G. Victor, a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California.

Here it is what they have to say about Dr. Popes pollution:

Soot likewise offers an opportunity to marry local interests with the global good. A leading cause of respiratory diseases, soot is responsible for some 1.9 million deaths a year. It also melts ice and snow packs. Thus, sooty emissions from Asia, Europe and North America are helping to thin the Arctic ice. And soot from India, China and a few other countries threatens water supplies fed by the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers.

New air pollution regulations could help reduce soot. Such laws in California have cut diesel-soot emissions in that state by half. In China and India, a program to improve power generation, filter soot from diesel engines, reduce emissions from brick-making kilns and provide more efficient cookstoves could cut the levels of soot in those regions by about two-thirds — and benefit countries downwind as well.

Reducing soot and the other short-lived pollutants would not stop global warming, but it would buy time, perhaps a few decades, for the world to put in place more costly efforts to regulate carbon dioxide. And it would help the major economies demonstrate credibility on climate change, which has been in short supply in the diplomatic talks so far.

Now everything they say about soot is true and a serious and well founded reason to control soot. However why would "Reducing soot and the other short-lived pollutants .....would buy time, perhaps a few decades, for the world to put in place more costly efforts to regulate carbon dioxide..."?  If reducing soot and the other pollutants associated with coal burning are "causing a cooling affect" as Dr. Pope and the Met office claim how would reducing it "buy time"?

For one outcome to be correct, the other has has to be wrong. Either the pollution resulting from coal burning in Asia has a net cooling affect or it has a net warming affect. Yet here we have scientist in the same week  making the case that the same pollution has  contradictory affects on the same climate they claim to be experts about.

Just another example of a science where no matter what happens is what they knew would happen even if it is the opposite of what they predicted would happen, and if you don't believe them you're an idiot.

Cancun Party Time!

United Nations climate talks in limbo

FROM-Politico
By: Darren Samuelsohn

For eight years, the world waited for a U.S. president to help stop global warming and save the planet.

So far, Barack Obama hasn't lived up to the job.

Cap-and-trade legislation Obama promised two years ago on the campaign trail is dead and buried, and his administration is attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions and cover billions of dollars in pledges without majority support in Congress.

Internationally, heading into the U.N.-led climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, next week, prospects for a multitrillion-dollar transocean carbon market are in tatters and a new binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol remains years away.

Obama won't be going to Mexico for the conference that starts Nov. 29, and neither will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or many of the other members of Congress who went to ice-cold Copenhagen for last year's U.N. negotiations.

The State Department's Todd Stern will be the face of the Obama administration during the two-week meeting that starts Nov. 29. His job is to sell Plan B: A suite of Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations and billions of dollars in renewable energy stimulus bill spending that the White House says would curb domestic emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

“People respect that the president wants to do this," Stern told reporters last week after preliminary negotiations in Arlington, Va. "It’s night and day as compared to the previous administration. But having said that, no question we’d have been in a markedly stronger position had we gotten our domestic legislation done.”

The outsize expectations for Obama on climate change came in no small part because of how George W. Bush handled the climate issue. For eight years, Bush battled Democrats, environmentalists and much of the rest of the world by resisting calls to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

On the international stage, foreign diplomats often tagged the United States as an enemy. At a 2007 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, officials from Europe, South Africa and Papua New Guinea blasted Bush officials and prompted the entire conference to boo them. Former Vice President Al Gore pleaded with negotiators to "save a large, open blank space" for the next president.

But by the much-anticipated Copenhagen conference in December, Obama still didn't have a climate law in hand, forcing him and 120 other leaders to skirt the sort of treaty deal many had envisioned when he was sworn into office.

"The expectations for Copenhagen were unrealistic," U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said last week. "It's not possible to come to one agreement that's going to magically solve every problem that we have on climate change, which was, unfortunately, the expectation that was up there in the air."


Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), co-author of several unsuccessful cap-and-trade bills over the past decade, suggested an under-the-radar approach could yield results.

"Perhaps what Copenhagen has contributed to this moment, pre-Cancun, is low expectations," Lieberman said. "As a result, we may be surprised by what happens."

Much of Washington seems oblivious to Cancun. Several top Democrats who normally are in the middle of the international climate debate were unprepared last week for questions about the next stage of the U.N. process, including Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman.

Republicans, meanwhile, are gloating at the current state of the international process and relishing the opportunity to undo even more of Obama's domestic climate agenda next year.

"What are you going to do in Cancun other than go swimming?" said Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, an outspoken climate science skeptic who spent about three hours in Copenhagen last December.

"It's amazing how little buzz there is about that meeting," said Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I just hear nobody talking about it. Like Copenhagen, that was a big deal. And so I just think the expectations are so low of Cancun that no one is really looking toward it."

In Copenhagen, closed-door negotiations between the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa produced the "Copenhagen Accord" — a nonbinding document that allows countries to make their own emission reduction and financial pledges. The voluntary agreement looked like something dreamed up by Bush officials on steroids, although the U.S. for the first time committed to significant reductions on its own, leading some of the world's emerging economic powerhouses to follow suit.

Next week in Cancun, diplomats will be trying to iron out the Copenhagen Accord's fine print, such as determining how to measure the reliability of countries' different environmental offers and the makeup of multibillion-dollar funds designed to help poor nations deploy low-carbon energy technologies and also cope with rising seas, heat waves, floods and droughts.


Even without being there, the White House could face some critical moments in Cancun.

The two biggest players in the room — the U.S. and China — continue to test each other's limits over how to monitor a country's emission pledges, and how that should be tied to access to billions of dollars in foreign aid.

Also tricky is where the U.S. will find its share of a $30 billion short-term commitment it made in Copenhagen for developing countries, as well as a $100 billion long-term promise. Clinton made those pledges with the hope an emissions auction would help generate the funds.

Figueres, a former top Costa Rican diplomat, said she's not concerned about Obama’s inability to get a climate bill signed into law. "The expectation of everyone is the United States will comply with its 17 percent" target, she said. "How they do it is completely a domestic affair."

Obama is expected to address the Cancun negotiations before the talks begin and several observers say he could hit the phones with other world leaders during the negotiations if the situation warrants, much like Bill Clinton did in the closing hours of the 1997 Kyoto summit.

But long-term prospects for the U.N. negotiations are in peril given the difficulties any White House occupant would face trying to get a binding climate treaty ratified by the Senate. Current struggles surrounding everything from nuclear arms reduction to trade don’t have many U.S. observers feeling optimistic.

"I don't know if we can pass dogcatcher appreciation day anymore," said Michael Levi, senior energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I think it's problematic."

Consensus seems to be emerging that the talks will continue beyond the end-of-the-year 2011 summit scheduled for South Africa. Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, suggested the U.N. climate process itself is on "probation."

Climate diplomats and veterans of the process have suggested a shift toward the Group of 20 nations and other bilateral and multilateral venues. Critics argue that such a move would leave out of the process many of the poor and island countries most vulnerable to global warming and who have no other forum to be heard.

Stern said that while Cancun won't be the make-or-break moment for the U.N.-led effort, people should certainly be on notice that they don't have much longer to wait.

"I wouldn't say it's a referendum," Stern said. "But I would say if the process can't make any progress this year, can't make any progress next year, there's going to be a point at which it's not going to work."

Can environmentalism be saved from itself?

FROM-The Globe and Mail


Margaret Wente

Maybe it was just a bad dream.

Just a year ago, 15,000 of the world’s leaders, diplomats, and UN officials were gearing up to descend on Copenhagen to forge a global treaty that would save the planet. The world’s media delivered massive coverage. Important newspapers printed urgent front-page calls for action, and a popular new U.S. President waded in to put his reputation on the line. The climate talks opened with a video showing a little girl’s nightmare encounter with drought, storms, eruptions, floods and other man-made climate disasters. “Please help the world,” she pleads.

After two weeks of chaos, the talks collapsed in a smouldering heap of wreckage. The only surprise was that this outcome should have come as a surprise to so many intelligent people. These people actually seemed to believe that experts and politicians have supernatural powers to predict the future and control the climate. They believed that experts know how fast temperatures will rise by when, and what the consequences will be, and that we know what to do about it. They believed that despite the recent abject failure of Kyoto (to say nothing of other well-intentioned international treaties), the nations of the world would willingly join hands and sacrifice their sovereignty in order to sign on to a vast scheme of unimaginable scope, untold cost and certain damage to their own interests.

Copenhagen was not a political breakdown. It was an intellectual breakdown so astonishing that future generations will marvel at our blind credulity. Copenhagen was a classic case of the emperor with no clothes.

Mercifully, nobody will pay attention to the climate conference at Cancun next week, where a much-reduced group of delegates will go through the motions. The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. The European Union’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions has been exposed as a giant fraud. (The EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990, if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it produced.) Public interest in climate change has plunged, and the media have radically reduced their climate coverage.

The biggest loser is the environmental movement. For years, its activists neglected almost everything but climate change. They behaved as if they’d cornered the market on wisdom, truth and certainty, and they demonized anyone who dared to disagree. They got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media, who parroted their claims like Sunday-school children reciting Scripture. No interest group in modern times has been so free from skepticism, scrutiny or simple accountability as the environmental establishment.

Perhaps some good will emerge from the wreckage. (Humility, for example.) Now that global warming has stopped sucking all the oxygen out of the room, some of those who care about the planet will turn to other – and more pressing – problems. There are plenty. Humans are encroaching everywhere on habitats and species. Don’t worry about the polar bears, which have survived hundreds of thousands of years of melting and freezing ice. Worry instead about the lions and tigers, which face extinction within our lifetime. Their problem isn’t climate change. It’s us.

A century ago, there were more than 100,000 wild tigers in Asia. Today there are just 3,200. Civilization is squeezing them, and poachers hunt them for their skin and body parts. This week, the unlikely team of Vladimir Putin and Leonardo DiCaprio headlined a 13-country tiger summit in St. Petersburg that is tackling the challenge of making live tigers worth as much as dead ones.

Then there are the lions. They’re not as scarce as tigers – yet – but their habitats are ideal for ranching, and they face increasing pressure from population growth. Or how about the bluefin tuna? This one is close to home – we catch them and sell them to Japan – and Canada is on the wrong side of the issue. If the World Wildlife Fund could whip up as much alarm over the bluefin tuna as it tried to whip up over fictitious drowning polar bears, I might even be persuaded to send them money again.

Before they were sucked into the giant vortex of global warming, environmentalists did useful things. They protested against massive Third World dams that would ruin both natural and human habitats. They warned about invasive species and diseases that could tear through our forests and wreck our water systems. They fought for national parks and greenbelts and protected areas. They talked about the big things too – such as how the world could feed another three billion people without destroying all the rain forests and running out of water. They believed in conservation – conserving this beautiful planet of ours from the worst of human despoliation – rather than false claims to scientific certainty about the future, unenforceable treaties and radical utopian social reform.

“How high a price must the world pay for green folly?” asked the thinker Walter Russell Mead. “How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigour, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?”

The answer is too high, too many and too much. Please grow up, people. You have important work to do.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak


FROM-National Post


There are three kinds of people on the internet you can’t have a conversation with: abortion activists, religious zealots and global warming activists.

Abortion activists, on both sides, are as polemical as polar bears and penguins. It doesn’t matter what side you might lean toward, the other side doesn’t want to hear. They believe so fervently in their cause they will judge you largely on how closely your own views align with theirs.

Next are the religious. The internet is a terrible place to go converting unbelievers, and thankfully few have tried. It’s only when the topic comes up as a point of contention that things can get ugly fast. The last thing anyone who believes in the man upstairs wants to be told is that the Chilean miners were freed by human technology rather than an act of omnipotent benevolence.
The last — and in my opinion the most fervent — believers are those who worship at the altar of anthropogenic global warming. These people are so obsessed with their cause you get the sense they would imprison unbelievers if they had the power. And that’s certainly been suggested by some of the high priests.

Otherwise likable, ordinary folks can turn suddenly pretentious and indignant if you so much as joke that a cold snap in Vancouver means global warming went on vacation. This is an affront to their very belief system, and they will quickly remind you that global warming can result in more snow and cold just as readily as it can result in more drought, desertification, sand storms, windstorms, pine beetles, floods, forest fires, and earthquakes.

It isn’t that I’m surprised anyone would believe in man-made climate change. It’s a readily accepted theory by a majority of people and the scientific community. I would, however, caution that we continue to use the word theory in discussing the topic.

“I don’t believe in global warming, I believe in the facts,” the zealot will pontificate proudly.

Well, sure, but that depends on what sort of facts you’re presenting. It’s difficult for a lot of people to believe the hype about global warming when scientists consistently get their predictions wrong. And sometimes the scientific community doesn’t just get it wrong; they don’t even come close.

Scientists had been warning for years about the extinction of salmon in British Columbia. In 2007 senior fisheries biologists in Ireland predicted pink salmon stocks on the mid-coast could soon be expected to collapse into localized extinction because of sea lice infestations.

This year 34 million salmon returned to the Fraser River for spawning, turning science on its head and leaving the prognosticators running for their labs. Expert who had predicted 1.5 million salmon or less were left more than a little puzzled.

It’s now suggested many of the salmon extinction reports were spread by activists hoping to damage the concept of B.C. salmon farms for moralistic reasons rather than scientific ones.

The green fundamentalists who call for an immediate restructuring of post-industrialized civilization to cater to their theories are absurd individuals. They will shun you for disagreement, and even blacklist you for the audacity of unbelieving. I have met more humourless, fanatical, devoted environmentalist demagogues than I have of the religious equivalent.

Curiously, the punishment they promise unbelievers is death by flood, drought or starvation. It’s like reading the book of Revelation.

The best thing to do when somebody goes on about the Armageddon is to smile, nod approvingly, and change the subject. Otherwise you risk the possibility of being called a heretic and burned at the metaphorical stake.

I have a live and let live attitude. If you want to believe that glacial meltwater spells the doom of the planet, so be it. Just don’t force me to wear the uniform and march in the parades with you.


Adrian MacNair is a Vancouver writer and blogger

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Letters to the Editor and other People Speak



FROM-Napa Valley Register

Answering scientists’ criticism
Joseph Sabella


The Union of Concerned Scientists has criticized Mr. Gifford’s excellent summary of voting for or against failed Proposition 23, which would have delayed implementation of the legislative mandate (Assembly Bill 32) for Draconian reductions in carbon emissions (“Prop. 23 letter contained misinformation,” Nov. 1). The mandate is unattainable, but merely attempting to comply will skyrocket the cost of energy, and therefore everything.

Businesses are fleeing the state in alarming numbers. Choking our energy supply will convert the exodus to a stampede. Up to an estimated 200,000 high earners (including many small businesses) are leaving annually. Small wonder: the top 1 percent of taxpayers pays 50 percent of the state income tax. AB 32 will drive the final nail into California’s coffin.

First, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is a radical environmental organization commanding millions of dollars. Its lobbying expenditures were $500,000 in 2008 and 2009, and $480,000 this year to date. UCS has never met an anti-capitalist, anti-everything issue it has not embraced. These include, among many: green energy (preposterous), nuclear and fossil fuel generation, the horrors of methane from cattle dung, opposition to the Missile Defense Initiative, decreasing carbon emission from your garden, and on and on and on.

Its president, Kevin Knobloch, is not a scientist. He is a former director of CERES, which works with industry on green issues (translation: science-ignorant politicians giving ridiculous taxpayer subsidies to corporations). He was also legislative director for former Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.), who became Under Secretary of State for (environmental) Global Affairs. He worked closely with St. Albert of Gore (him again), chief alarmist and devotee of massages.

In short, Knobloch is a political hack.

Human CO2 emissions have nothing to do with climate change. The following are facts. The sun controls our climate (surprise!). The earth has been warming since the end of the “little ice age” in 1850. In 1998, a cooling trend began, and continues to the present — 12 years! It was warmer than now in the medieval and Roman warm periods. Arctic ice has increased, according a Jan. 10 article in the Washington Times, and polar bear populations have grown since Canada restricted hunting. Sea level rise was 1.8 cm per year from 1900 to 1980 (slightly over 1/2 inch), with no acceleration in the 20th century. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have grown (satellite measurements), and ice core drillings (57,000 ft.) show unequivocally that CO2 rises after temperatures rise, according to scientist Ian Plimer.

The oceans are the major sink for CO2; its solubility is inverse. Cooler water absorbs more CO2 and warming water releases CO2 (think of uncorking a bottle of warm club soda). Marine, unicellular, surface microorganisms (enormous mass) absorb CO2 to make shells, in a continuous cycle of reproduction, growth, death and settling to the bottom eventually to become limestone.

There are many ocean circulations such as EI Nino, La Nina, the northeastern Pacific decadal, the Arctic nine decadal, the Gulf Stream, and many others, in both the northern and southern hemispheres. These slowly oscillate ocean surface temperatures over long time periods.

Tectonic plate activity releases CO2, and continental drift has created worldwide sub-oceanic rifts with vents and volcanoes which release enormous (unmeasured) amounts of CO2 into the oceans. Surface volcano eruptions belch CO2, but their ash cools us. Corals are not about to become extinct. Warming temperatures increase evaporation (water vapor contributes 98 percent of the greenhouse effect), and water vapor condenses into clouds, most of which (the low ones) cool the earth. Ubiquitous cosmic rays from exploding stars create chemical nuclei in the atmosphere around which water vapor condenses to form clouds (more cooling), proven experimentally and summarized in the book “The Chilling Stars,” by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder.

None of the above factors are in the computer climate models on which the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change bases its ridiculous, hundred-year climate forecast. The models are useless. Nature does not play computer games.

The study of climate (or anything else in nature) is very complex. There is much and growing real science showing that man is not altering climate, but this forum precludes a deeper discussion. The media are not reporting the other side of this debate. Not scary enough. Despite the alarmists’ wailings, there is no scientific consensus that man-made CO2 has any effect on climate. Besides, scientific knowledge is not attained by voting. Discoveries require observations, measurements, experimentation, objectivity, reasoning and review of findings by peers.

Take heart, fellow Californians, you won’t perish by incineration. You’ll suffocate under the growing ooze of dung emanating from Sacramento. I recommend a book, “Heaven and Earth,” by Ian Plimer, a renowned Australian geologist. It is the most comprehensive summary I have read to date, and suitable for lay readers.

(Sabella, an M.D., lives in Napa.)

From the World of Unintended Consequences

FROM-The State

Global warming fix could threaten food chain


Researchers say plan could jeopardize oceans by introducing toxins into the food chain
By SAMMY FRETWELL


An experimental plan to fight global warming could cause blooms of poisonous algae in seafood-rich stretches of the open ocean, say researchers at the University of South Carolina.

For more than 20 years, scientists have discussed whether adding iron to the sea could effectively keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by causing the increased growth of phytoplankton, a tiny ocean plant that absorbs the greenhouse gas from air.

But recent research shows that putting more iron in the ocean also could cause an explosion in growth of toxic algae.

A recent report by researchers from USC, the University of California-Santa Cruz and LSU says they have documented the toxic algae in sections of the open Pacific Ocean, a finding believed to be the first of its kind. Previously, the toxin had been known almost exclusively along the immediate coast, near beaches and harbors.

South Carolina professor Claudia Benitez-Nelson, a member of the research team, said adding iron to the sea might help curb global warming — but not without a potentially caustic side effect.

“This study has shown that when you add nutrients to the ocean, sometimes you have organisms grow that are really bad for you,’’ Benitez-Nelson said.

While many species harvested for seafood come from near shore waters, others can be found in the deep ocean. Anchovies, for instance, are harvested well out to sea off the coast of Mexico, Central America and California.

The concept of adding iron to the ocean dates to at least 1990. The idea is that since iron stimulates plant growth, ocean plants, which use carbon dioxide, could draw it into the sea, rather than let it rise into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps to trap heat, which causes earth’s temperatures to rise.

The research paper, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the first to look at algae blooms far offshore. Much of the field work was done hundreds of miles out at sea, and included areas off South America and Antarctica where iron has been introduced as an experiment.

“This is one of the first studies to convincingly prove one of the detrimental impacts of marine iron addition,” Benitez-Nelson said. “It shows that one solution you think may work, in the long term, it may even be worse than your original problem.’’

Carolina researcher Emily Sekula-Wood joined Benitez-Nelson on the team of scientists. The research was headed by Santa Cruz professor Mary Silver.

Benitez-Nelson said putting iron in the ocean raises ethical questions about “tinkering with mother nature.’’ Adding iron on a large scale could prove dangerous if the neurotoxins get into the food chain, the research team said.

The algae of concern is pseudo-nitschia, which produces a toxin called domoic acid. The toxin can make sea life sick.

In the past, the toxin has gotten into the food chain in coastal waters near shore, poisoning shellfish and other seafood. People eating seafood containing the toxin can get upset stomachs, suffer memory loss and become dizzy. In extreme cases, people have died from eating seafood that contains the toxin.

Generally, toxic algae are not only a threat to seafood, but to people who swim in areas infested with the plant material. Rashes and breathing problems can develop when people are exposed while swimming.

ODE TO JOY!

As if the title of this article from the Vancouver Sun was not exciting enough:


Climate-change agency winds down as federal funding ends

The first two paragraphs are enough to make you want to jump for joy:

OTTAWA — A Canadian climate-change research foundation is celebrating its 10th anniversary, but has already begun winding down its operations after failing to get new funding from the Harper government.

The budget crunch at the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences comes on the heels of revelations that the government is leasing out the Amundsen, a coast guard icebreaker equipped to monitor climate change in the North, to a pair of fossil-fuel companies for oil exploration in the region.

Oh the irony! The government making money from the fossil fuel industry while shutting down the climate change industry.

Meanwhile, the 10-year-old foundation, which has received about $110 million in federal grants since it was created in 2000, is closing the books on all of its research projects at the end of December, but will continue to operate its office in the meantime through interest collected in its bank account.

Until further notice climate change will no longer occur do to a lack of funding.

Coal Is the Future?

FROM-The American Spectator

By William Tucker

Three weeks ago I wrote about the Weekly Standard'spublication of an Amory Lovins anti-nuclear tract represented a low point in lack of understanding about nuclear power.

That record didn't stand for long. This month the Atlantic Monthly has topped everything with a cover story by senior editor James Fallows, "Dirty Coal, Clean Future." This will probably stand as an all-time monument to the American intelligentsia's lack of curiosity about nuclear energy.

Fallows, you may remember, started in the 1970s as a Naderite before becoming President Jimmy Carter's principal speechwriter. Then blazing a trail that has become well worn, he jumped ship and wrote an exposé of Carter's ineptness. (It was he who confirmed that Carter spent time scheduling the White House tennis court.) In any event, Fallows landed on his feet, becoming a senior editor at the Atlantic where he has reinvented himself as an expert on computers, China's economic development, and flying his own airplane.

In all these years, however, Fallows has never quite lost his 1970s mentality. Nor has he shed an annoying Thomas-Friedmanesque habit of making points by dropping the name of the latest high government official with whom he chatted. (Unlike Friedman, he does spare us the details of what they were eating.) Without these inflections, he probably never could have written the 8,000-word tome in which he tells us, "Sorry, folks, wind and solar energy are never going to make it. We're just going to have to live with 'clean coal'":

To environmentalists "clean coal" is an insulting oxymoron.… But for now, the only way to meet the world's energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal -- dirty, sooty, toxic coal -- in more sustainable ways… because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic and social cataclysm, the world's unavailable energy demands.

Is nuclear energy anywhere in sight? Fallows does mention it four times, always in passing. The longest reference notes that France has "much heavier reliance on nuclear power to generate electricity. Nuclear plants are expensive and obviously create waste-disposal problems, but they emit practically no greenhouse gases." This, however, appears in parentheses and stands aside from the main argument. Fallows has not the slightest curiosity or information about how nuclear power is developing in the world, or what it is even about.

Siberian Methane: The Latest Eco-boogeyman

FROM-New American

For those who have tracked the development of the theory of manmade climate change in recent years, it seems as if its adherents thrive on a succession of purported crises. It is as if every study which is debunked, every scandal which discredits the prophets of doom, and every economic failure associated with the climate change theory has sparked two more crises to take their place.

Now, climate hypochondriacs have found something new to worry about: methane frozen in the Siberian permafrost. An Associated Press article (“Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue”) announced the doom which awaits us all:

Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

Presumably readers are not to take notice of the fact that these 1.5 trillion tons of carbon were drawn out of the atmosphere in the first place, most likely during a pesky ice age which has still not freed Siberia from its chilly grasp. Even if the gas reserves are as large as purported, their release would simply be part of a natural cycle.

But the “news” about Siberian methane is not really all that new to the scientific community. Nature published an abstract (“Methane bubbling from Siberian thaw lakes as a positive feedback to climate warming”) in July 2006 which noted:

Large uncertainties in the budget of atmospheric methane, an important greenhouse gas, limit the accuracy of climate change projections. Thaw lakes in North Siberia are known to emit methane, but the magnitude of these emissions remains uncertain because most methane is released through ebullition (bubbling), which is spatially and temporally variable.

If the issue of Siberian methane has been known to the climate science community for years, why the sudden media interest? In the words of the AP article:

Climate change moves back to center-stage on Nov. 29 when governments meet in Cancun, Mexico, to try again to thrash out a course of counteractions. But U.N. officials hold out no hope the two weeks of talks will lead to a legally binding accord governing carbon emissions, seen as the key to averting what is feared might be a dramatic change in climate this century.

Most climate scientists, with a few dissenters, say human activities — the stuff of daily life like driving cars, producing electricity or raising cattle — is overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that trap heat, causing a warming effect.

It is quite telling that the "demons" enumerated by the environmentalist fringe now include the most basic elements of the agricultural — let alone the industrial — age: Not only “driving cars” but also “producing electricity” and “raising cattle” are threatening the planet? Are we actually to believe that "saving the Earth" implies a return to a hunter-gatherer society?

Apparently so, for we are also told by the AP:

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

"In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump," said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist.

Independent reviewers have used words other than “seminal” to describe the IPCC’s 2007 report, and when grading that report, they awarded it an “F” for its stunning lack of peer-reviewed studies to back up its claims. However, given the precipitous decline in the credibility of the entire field of anthropogenic climate change since the Climategate revelations, let alone the credibility problems which have confronted the IPCC in particular in the past year, the notion that the 2007 report is now to be seen as "too conservative" strains credulity.

After the debacle of last year’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, conference organizers are, no doubt, facing a tremendous credibility deficit as they prepare for next week’s conference in Cancun, Mexico. At the very least, delegates should find it somewhat easier to push their agenda in this year’s comparatively balmy surroundings than they did during the cold and snow they confronted last year. Given the fact that the UN’s agenda concentrates more on economic redistribution than the environment, means that climate change theorists have not yet begun to restore their credibility.

'Cool it' with all the research dollars

FROM-Washington Times

Solution to climate change is planning, not spending
By Robert Carter and Paul Driessen


Bjorn Lomborg is avidly courting publicity for his new film, "Cool It." He correctly observes that public discussion about global warming is largely between two entrenched camps of opinion. He's also right about our needing a "Plan B" climate policy that defuses the current rancorous and unproductive debate about "the man-made climate problem."

Mr. Lomborg's first camp is inhabited by warming alarmists, supported by the majesty of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Most major institutions in Western society have joined their funereal fugue (and funding pipeline) in supportive chorus.

In the other camp, empiricists (including a majority of independent scientists) argue implacably that we still await actual, factual evidence that our planet is still warming at all - let alone dangerously, let alone because of human carbon dioxide emissions.

Reality, of course, is a lot more nuanced, and it is simply incorrect to say, as Mr. Lomborg does, that most independent scientists argue that "global warming was a fabrication."

Gore's Important Admission

FROM-The American Spectator

 By Andrew Cline

It may not seem like much, but Al Gore's recent admission that ethanol subsidies are bad policy is a really big deal.

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," Reuters reported Gore saying during a green energy summit in Athens. "First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small."

This is hardly likely to change U.S. energy policy overnight. As Gore said, "It's hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going." Though that is one more reason to oppose such programs, it is almost beside the point. Gore's admission has much more important implications, namely the revelation of two important truths: 1. Policies to prop up ethanol are environmental frauds; and 2. So is Al Gore.

Al Gore's doomsaying has turned him into the world's famous environmental prophet. He is the sage in the green robe. His words are truth -- undisputable and indispensable. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

"Knowledge," they wrote. And "needed" measures to counteract the change. Until this week, one of those needed measures, according to Gore, was to turn corn into fuel.

"I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress -- at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it," Gore said during a Dec. 1, 1998, speech to a Farm Journal conference. "The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be."

The first part of that statement is true. The second is not.

On Aug. 4, 1994, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save the EPA's ethanol mandate. The fight was between farm state politicians, who wanted to mandate ethanol use, and others who thought methanol would work just as well. Gore broke the tie in favor of the farm state lobby. Though he claimed it was for the planet, Gore's support of ethanol really was to buy the votes of farmers. He admitted as much in Athens:

One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.

Al Gore? Put politics before the planet? Pshaw.

But it is true; he has admitted it.

This is important because Gore's ethanol exploits duplicate the entire global climate change debate in miniature form.

To gain votes, Gore pushed an idea that was widely thought to be environmentally beneficial, but which skeptics claimed was actually the opposite. The Heritage Foundation at least as far back as the early 1980s was warning that ethanol subsidies were bad energy policy. By the mid-1990s, the mandate was being attacked as a sop to the corn lobby that had no environmental benefits. And by the late 2000s, the broadly accepted view had changed entirely. Scientists had come to believe that grain-based biofuels like ethanol were driving up food prices, causing food shortages, and possibly making global warming worse.

Al Gore, though, boasted that ethanol was helping save the planet. From Gore there was no doubt, no uncertainty, no scientific argument. It was his way, the green way, or the path to planetary destruction. There were no other options.

But there were, and the people offering them -- not Al Gore -- were right. And that leads to the obvious question: If the Enviro-Oracle got ethanol wrong, then what else might he have gotten wrong?

The point is not that Gore is entirely wrong. It's that he is wrong enough (remember the errors in An Inconvenient Truth) to merit skepticism. But law doesn't take skeptics' views into account. Environmental regulations compel compliance. Only in the market does the skepticism of the minority become an important player. If Al Gore bases his personal financial investments on faulty science, it matters to no one but Al Gore, and perhaps his wife. But if states base environmental regulations on faulty science he pushed, we are all harmed.

The great ethanol error would've been corrected quickly had the market been left in control. It was only the misguided hand of government that grew this problem to global proportions, and perpetuates it still.

This fall the EPA approved a waiver allowing gasoline to contain up to 15 percent ethanol for cars made since 2007. Congress has mandated that 13.95 billion gallons of renewable fuels (mostly ethanol) be produced in 2011, up from 12.95 billion gallons this year. (Can you imagine how much worse it would be had Gore been president?)

The bottom line is this: If we cannot base our environmental policies on the pronouncements of Al Gore, should we really be passing costly, far-reaching mandates that force people to behave as Al Gore would want them to? Wouldn't it be better to let the market decide, and leave Al Gore to investing heavily in biofuel companies?

Cutting Carbon Emissions-one job at a time

FROM-USA TODAY

Study: lower carbon emissions linked to recession

Carbon dioxide dioxides, widely considered the chief cause of global warming, decreased from 2008 to 2009, largely because of the global economic slowdown, says a study released Sunday.

"There is a close link between the world's gross domestic product and emissions of carbon dioxide," says study lead author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, according to a story by USA TODAY colleague Doyle Rice.The emissions drop of 1.3%, the first since the lat 1990s, included significant regional differences. The largest decreases occurred in Europe, Japan and North America: 6.9% in the United States, 8.6% in the U.K., 7% in Germany, 11.8% in Japan and 8.4% in Russia.

In contrast, emissions jumped in emerging economies, including 8% in China and 6.2% in India. China remains the top emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, followed by the USA, India, Russia and Japan.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, projects that if the economic recovers as expected, global fossil fuel emissions will increase by more than 3% in 2010. It's part of the annual carbon budget update from the Global Carbon Project, a group of emissions experts from international environmental organizations

Wake up, Washington. Energy independence is close at hand

FROM-Washington Examiner


Washington's political class often seems impervious to changing facts. Case in point is the nation's current and probable future access to essential energy resources, especially fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal. This trio of carbon-based fuels accounts for the vast majority of the nation's electrical and other forms of power, and will continue to do so through at least 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States is the world's largest consumer of energy, but is also the world's most productive economy, so demand here for energy resources is going to continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

According to the conventional wisdom, supplies will soon peak and then the nation will experience severe declines in the supply of oil and natural gas. Thus, the U.S. should invest billions in the development of renewable energy resources and use the power of government to create artificial consumer demand for them by imposing mandates for their use. Energy costs "will necessarily skyrocket," to use President Obama's memorable words, but that's the price the nation must pay in order to achieve energy independence and protect the environment.

When the price of a barrel of oil hit $147 per barrel in July 2008 and Americans were paying as much as $4 per gallon for gas, that scenario seemed reasonable. But it turns out that in the years since, the energy market has experienced profound changes that negate the conventional view. As the New York Times recently reported, "Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation."

The significant news wasn't restricted to oil. The Times also noted that "another wave of natural gas drilling has taken off in shale rock fields across the United States, and more shale gas drilling is just beginning in Europe and Asia. Add to that an increase in liquefied natural gas export terminals around the world that connected gas, which once had to be flared off, to the world market, and gas prices have plummeted." The result, according to the Times, is that energy experts now predict decades of residential and commercial power at reasonable prices."

In other words, the nation can look forward to abundant oil and natural gas supplies at affordable prices for decades to come. As Institute for Energy Research President Thomas J. Pyle puts it, "We can improve our economy, create jobs, and increase our supply of affordable, reliable energy in one fell swoop if the government allows businesses to look for and produce American energy." Consumers should ask how much longer Washington will continue policies meant to restrict access to these resources.

A 21st Century Energy Source?

The answer to this is obvious. Put all the cows in rooms and collect their discharged methane to be burned off to create a new renewable energy source! Anyone know a good patent attorney?

Cows wear a nozzle that collects methane and other gases discharged near the nose to be measured.

WILLEM DE ROOIJ/BUREAU TYPOGRAFIA BV 

FROM-Toronto Star

A new beef with role of cows in global warming

Alex Horkay

Statistics have been giving us a bum steer when they state how much cattle methane emissions contribute to global warming, a new study shows.

That's because mathematical equations used to predict cows' methane emissions are inaccurate and don't take into account factors such as dietary changes, said Jennifer Ellis, lead author of the study and a PhD student at the University of Guelph.

When cattle burp up their cud, they discharge methane with it, due to microbial fermentation occurring in their complex stomachs.

“Diet can change CH4 (methane) emissions quite a lot. For example, between two and 12 per cent of the energy a cow consumes will be lost as CH4,” she said.

“As a crude comparison, a typical dairy cow will produce as much in (carbon dioxide) equivalents per month as a mid-size car does travelling 800 kilometres per month. Changes (of) two to 12 per cent of the energy intake can be the difference between that cow being a compact car and an SUV or truck,” she added.

Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide among gases implicated in global warming.


When an equation calculates the quantity of methane emissions on one farm, it can't be used to accurately determine how much greenhouse gas is created worldwide because there is so much difference in cattle diet around the world and from farm to farm.

“CH4 is actually the biggest on-farm contributor to the greenhouse gas effect, so it is very important to get right,” Ellis said.

The study did not determine whether cattle produce more or less methane than had been believed previously.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates cattle are responsible for 18 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.Two methods are used to measure cattle methane production, 98 per cent of which is belched up.

In the most reliable method, “essentially you put the cow in a small room-size chamber and measure the exchange of gases in and out of the chamber for a period of 24 hours,” Ellis said.

In the other method a nozzle is placed right beside the animal's nostril and mouth that sucks up the gases discharged.

The amount of food eaten, the amount of forage relative to grain and the fat content of the diet are all factors in cattle methane production. More hay and grass tends to increase emissions while some dietary supplements and high-fat diets tend to reduce it.

As for the math, more complex equations with a better description of the animal and diet would help, she said.

The study was co-authored by livestock researchers at the University of Manitoba and in the Netherlands. It appears in the December issue of the journal Global Change Biology

Denying Americans Their Own Energy

FROM-Warning Signs

By Alan Caruba

What kind of government deliberately denies its citizens access to the energy they need to live, to conduct business, to transport goods, to travel, and to just turn on the lights? Answer: The United States of America.
In a letter to members of the G-20, the finance ministers and central bankers of leading industrial nations, President Obama said, “We should make sustained effort to carry through with our groundbreaking Pittsburgh commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

The result of such action would give international energy companies in other nations a large competitive advantage while penalizing U.S. oil and natural gas companies.

read article here

Saving chicken scratch for the Royal EPA

I came across this article today, "EPA gives nearly $400,000 grant to OCC to monitor Barnegat Bay's wetlands".  As Judith A. Enck, the EPA’s Region II administrator commented while handing out your hard earned taxes “That is not chicken scratch, that is a lot of money,”. I doubt Ms Enck really believes that since it is just spare change for the bloated Federal beuracracy, but it was nice of her to point it out to us, her employer.

The reason that the story caught my attention was that it was, surprise surprise about studying the effects of  climate change on wetlands:

Scientists say New Jersey’s coastal marshes could be an early casualty of climate change and sea level rise, if the wetlands cannot keep up a natural accretion rate that stays ahead of rising tides.

Now it seems to me that if the EPA was the least bit interested in saving a few bucks they might check on previous studies on the subject. It is not like academia has not spent billions of dollars determining the effects of climate change on...everything. Amazingly I did not even have to use Google to determine if Ms Enck of the Royal EPA could have saved the taxpayers money, I commented on an article about just this subject awhile back.

Amazingly this study was not done in some distant land or even across the country but just down the road a bit from New Jersey near Annapolis Maryland. It was also not some flash in pan study by nefarious individuals who might be skeptical of global warming climate change, it was actually a long term study under the auspices of another government agency:

For the past 23 years, Bert Drake and other scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Shady Side have been monitoring the growth of marsh grasses and plants encased in the clear plastic bubbles on the fringe of the Rhode River. Those patches have been fed a steady diet of air enriched with carbon dioxide - the gas scientists say is driving our climate toward irrevocable change as human activity spews more of it into the atmosphere.

Once you get past the spewing, you wonder why Ms Enck would not just save some chicken scratch and instead rely upon a 23 year long study, but of course the Royal EPA must spend that money mustn't it? Or perhaps this long term study down the road from Jersey Shore was not giving the answers Royal EPA wanted to hear. More from the Smithsonian Study:

Scientists have known for quite a while that plants generally grow better when exposed to air with higher-than-normal concentrations of carbon dioxide. But some shorter studies suggested that the plants' growth spurt would tail off after a few years. With funding at first from the Department of Energy and more recently from the U.S. Geological Survey, Drake and colleagues tested the long-term effects by piping carbon dioxide into chambers enclosing the marsh plants. The clear plastic allowed sunlight to penetrate, so plants' photosynthesis was not affected. The researchers enriched the air inside to double the level of CO2 in the open air outside - about how concentrated the gas might be in the Earth's atmosphere by the end of the century, Drake notes, given current increases from burning fossil fuels.

Not only the Smithsonian, but the Department of Energy and  the U.S. Geological Survey, have been involved with this study over the decades. You would think that with all these Royal Federal agencies involved in such an important long term study we would have heard quite a bit about it, huh? Have you heard quite a bit about this study? No? Maybe that is why Ms Enck needed to spend the chicken scratch she probably never heard of it. Let's see what else they discovered in this study:

Now, after more than two decades of tracking in the longest-running field study of its kind, Drake can say, "The bottom line is these plants have taken up a lot more carbon over the course of the study." And they don't become saturated.

Scientists have found similar responses in other plant communities. Drake and others have monitored a tract of scrub oak forest near Kennedy Space Center in Florida for more than a decade, and found the bushy trees also took off with a boost in carbon dioxide. Drake has been working recently with researchers setting up a parallel experiment in Norway on the edge of the Arctic.

Wow! plants take off with increased CO2, who'd a thunk it, huh? But obviously what Ms Enck and the Royal EPA are after is a study on wetlands and rising seas and all that climate disruption

But Megonigal and colleagues have learned that the same carbon dioxide believed to be fueling rising sea levels might also help salt marshes outgrow rising waters - for a time, anyway. The extra greenhouse gas stimulates root growth, building up the surface of the marsh. Kirkpatrick Marsh apparently has managed to survive in this spot for thousands of years even though sea level has been slowly rising

"It's one of those silver lining stories," says Megonigal, 50, a senior scientist. He notes that probes sunk into the muck beneath the marsh have found evidence it has risen in elevation by about 15 feet in the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age

Four years on, they've found, as Drake's longer study did, that giving the plants more carbon dioxide boosts the elevation of the marsh above sea level.

So it seems that if  Ms Enck had just contacted the Smithsonian or Googled or she could have just asked me, she could have saved all that chicken scratch. Because I doubt that measly $400,000 is going to establish any more information on the subject of global warming climate change and its effect on wetlands in Jersey than the decades long one did in Maryland. But what do I know I'm just a taxpayer.