John Tierney, New York Times
Hundreds of skeptics in the global-warming debate are convening in New York today and tomorrow. The meeting, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, is an assortment of climate scientists, economists and free-market think-tankers - some who have impressive credentials, some of whom are listed in the conference program simply as “Scientist” or “Meteorologist.” Sorting out the wheat from the chaff will not be easy, but here’s one way to start: Check out this report being presented at the conference today.
It’s a critique of the report last year from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new report, which accuses the I.P.C.C. of “errors and misstatements,” is from a group of scientists calling itself the N.I.P.C.C. - the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. The report was edited by S. Fred Singer, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. It comes with an introduction from Frederick Seitz, a physicist and past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, who writes that the report shows “we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes.”
That conclusion, of course, is hardly the majority view among scientists who study this issue. But what, specifically, is wrong in this new report? What’s right in it? I welcome substantive comments - by which I don’t mean denunciations of “deniers” or “ecoNazis,” or lazy ad hominem attacks and conspiracy theories about who’s being paid off by whom. Let’s stick to the science, or lack thereof, in this particular critique. There are plenty of specific claims and charts to analyze. Have the authors identified genuine problems in the I.P.C.C. report, or are they cherry-picking data? See story here.
By Jeffrey A. Tucker in the Mises Institute Website
Once again, for the umpteenth time this month, I arrive at work soaking wet. Just getting from the car to the front door of the Mises Institute is like going through the rinse cycle - and umbrellas just aren’t my thing. What’s striking is how this weather pattern follows a year of dire warnings from government officials about the deadly drought that is destroying the region, as you can easily see from the government’s own US Drought Assessment maps. Actually, these are interesting maps. They give the impression that the whole of the nation is a parched land that vacillates between persistent drought and improving droughts. Nowhere is listed as “soaked” or “just the right amount of rain.” And if you reflect on government announcements of these things, all places seem to fall into one of three categories: catastrophic flooding, catastrophic drought, or forgettable.
Some years ago, the head of the local bureaucracy in charge of the distribution of water was quoted in the newspaper along these lines: “If these conditions persist, rationing will certainly become necessary.” If these conditions persist? That’s quite the assumption. We could say during the next rainfall: “If these conditions persist, it will become necessary for everyone to build an ark.” Conditions never persist. They change. Bureaucrats really hate that. One suspects that these same people love droughts. Droughts give them power, not just over the aggregate use of water. They enjoy pressing people on the smallest details of life. They get to tell you that you must take short showers. They tell you that you must flush less. They impose a profound sense of guilt on your for watering the basil growing in your window box.
Droughts can turn the most innocent public employee into the moral equivalent of a Gestapo agent, issuing dictates and imposing fines, ferreting out the water thieves, all in the name of the public interest. Droughts turn neighbor against neighbor, and force the whole of everyone into the criminal class, reduced to sneaking around at night to water tomato plants. Droughts make everyone feel dependent on the state. We must read their rules, such as, “Even-numbered houses may water their lawns from 4am to 6am, Monday, Thursday, and Sunday.” So rain, rain, go away. That’s their theme. Read more here.
By Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal
There’s snow in Baghdad, and global temperatures have seen their biggest one-year change - in this case, downward - in recorded history. So is global warming kaput? It’s cooler outside the beltway. Cooler weather has the blogosphere alight with speculation about the climate’s real changes. Short-term temperature moves fire up both camps. From Planet Gore: “Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.” Environmental Defense says one month does not a trend make: “Global warming is a process that occurs over decades. It can’t be proven or disproven by a single month’s temperature.”
There are theories for all tastes. Daily Tech started it all, arguing that last year’s nippy weather “wipes out a century of warming.” Energy Outlook pored through the data and points at the sea. Maybe it’s the sun? Environmental Economics did the heavy lifting, parsed all the sunspot data from Goddard, and concluded that’s not to blame: “The current downturn in temperatures may be caused by a valley in the sunspot cycle. But that doesn’t mean that global cooling is taking place. It just means that temperatures are likely to be more variable until sunspot activity increases again.”
Whether it’s sunspots, La Nina, or something else altogether, the timing couldn’t be better for the Heartland Institute, set to host a global warming skeptics powow Monday on Broadway. Friends in high places? Read more here.
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post
Climate change could be the problem. Under climate theory, as we know, all weather can be explained as part of the global-warming scare. Extreme weather events, such as frost on the Nile or wherever, are exactly the kind of weather developments we should expect from global warming. If it gets really cold suddenly, that’s because of global warming. This explanation was offered up by a World Meteorological Organization official on CBC Radio. How cold is it? It’s so cold it’s getting hotter. Above all, however, under no circumstances are we ever to begin to think that evidence of a cooler climate or colder weather (different things) are a sign that the great climate change theories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore might be weak or even wrong.
As reassurance on this, on Wednesday night CBC Television’s The National brought in Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria and a lead author on IPCC reports, for the following exchange with reporter Kelly Crowe, introduced by host Peter Mansbridge: Crowe: “It’s a question Andrew Weaver hears all the time as a climatologist and a lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Weaver: “It’s always fascinating when we have a cold snap or a cold-weather event that everybody suddenly believes that global warming has somehow gone away.” So there’s Mr. Weaver decrying the ignorance of people who might suspect that when it gets cold outside it might mean something more than the mere fact that it’s getting cold. But then, a few minutes later, Mr. Weaver makes the same assumption in the other direction: Crowe Even as we shiver through this winter, there is mounting evidence of climate change. Weaver: “Whether it be through temperature, sea ice melting much more rapidly than we thought before, precipitation extremes, increased likelihood of drought, you know, pine-beetle infestation, forest fires and on and on and on and go.” So when it gets hot or when pine beetles infest forests, that’s a sign of man-made climate change. But if it gets cold or the ice caps return, that’s not a sign of anything. Whatever the facts are, Mr. Weaver and climate activists cannot have it both ways. Read more here.
By James A. Peden, Middlebury, Vermont Community Network
Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century, known as the Maunder Minimum. Before that came the “Medieval Warm Period”, in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily “global”. However, “Global Warming” in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that. But we’re hearing far too often that the “science” is “settled”, and that it is mankind’s contribution to the natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing “Greenhouse Effect”, which is the root “cause” of global warming. We’re also hearing that “all the world’s scientists now agree on this settled science”, and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global catastrophe. And last, but not least, we’re seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing. Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest. Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?
Sorry folks, but we’re not exactly buying into the Global Hysteria just yet. We know a great deal about atmospheric physics, and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy. The extreme haste with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic ( man-made ) Global Warming made us more than a little bit suspicious that no one had really taken a close look at the science. We also knew that the catch-all activity today known as “Climate Science” was in its infancy, and that atmospheric modeling did not and still does not exist which can predict changes in the weather or climate more than about a day or two in advance.
So the endless stream of dire predictions of what was going to happen years or decades from now if we did not drastically reduce our CO2 production by virtually shutting down the economies of the world appeared to be more the product of radical political and environmental activism rather than science. Thus, we embarked on a personal quest for more information, armed with a strong academic background in postgraduate physics and a good understanding of the advanced mathematics necessary in such a pursuit. This fundamental knowledge of the core principles of matter and its many exceptionally complex interactions allowed us to research and understand the foundations of many other sciences. In short, we read complex scientific articles in many other scientific disciplines with relative ease and good understanding - like most folks read comic books. As our own knowledge of “climate science” grew, so grew our doubts over the “settled science”. What we found was the science was far from “settled”.. in fact it was barely underway. Read the full analysis here.
By Patrick J. Michaels in the American Spectator
The Kansas Legislature has wisely written a proposed tax on carbon dioxide emissions out of this year’s energy legislation. That’s the good news: As originally written by the Committee on Utilities, the Sunflower Energy bill’s CO2 tax would have been a first, and a very bad precedent. The bad news is that the original bill will be copied and wind up before other legislatures that are more likely to pass it, like those of California and Oregon.
A CO2 tax will largely be levied on utilities that exceed modest limits on their carbon dioxide effluent, so consumers won’t “see” it—except in their electric bills. They’ll send in their monthly checks, quite unaware that the new tax revenues are likely to be shoved into a slush fund for solar energy, windmills, biodiesel, ethanol and other green gadgetry boondoggles.
Never mind that even the New York Times now acknowledges that biofuels add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the equivalent amount of conventional fuels, or that the diversion of a third of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production has driven world food prices up so much that we are now witnessing riots, including a major one in Jakarta last month. Let’s just consider the merits of this legislation vis-a-vis some pretty well-known (if poorly publicized) global warming science.
Further, we’ll cheat a bit and stipulate that the bill results in a 10% net reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and that global warming fever sweeps the nation, resulting in similar legislation passing in every other state. Based upon a widely accepted formula originated at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, if the entire United States adopted the original Kansas legislation, it would prevent a total of 0.11 degrees F of global warming per century. Read that again, because it’s not a typo: Eleven one-hundredths of a degree in 100 years. Read more here.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
UK Telegraph
Global warming sceptics are pointing to recent record cold temperatures in parts of North America and Asia and the return of Arctic Sea ice to suggest fears about climate change may be overblown. According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th century mean (-0.02F/-0.01C) for the first time since 1982. Although some areas of the Northern Hemisphere experienced record cold, other areas experienced recorded above average temperatures. Temperatures were also colder than average across large swathes of central Asia, the Middle East, the western US, western Alaska and southeastern China. The NCDC reported that the cold conditions were associated with “the largest January snow cover extent on record for the Eurasian continent and for the Northern Hemisphere”. In some parts of China and central Asia, snow fell for the first time in living memory, the NCDC noted.
“For the contiguous United States, the average temperature was 30.5F (-0.83C) for January, which was 0.3F (0.2C) below the 20th century mean and the 49th coolest January on record, based on preliminary data”. Much of North America was also hit by the heaviest snowfall since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre found the January 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, while below the 1979-2000 mean, was greater than the previous four years. And the January 2008 Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was significantly above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the largest sea ice extent in January over the 30-year historical period. Read more here.
Reuters, Detroit
General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a “total crock of s---,” saying his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles. Lutz, GM’s outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those “spewing virtual vitriol” at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were “missing the big picture.”
“What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is ... hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support,” he said in a posting titled, “Talk About a Crock.” GM, the largest U.S. automaker by sales and market share, has been trying to change its image after taking years of heat for relying too much on sales of large sport-utility vehicles like the Hummer and not moving faster on fuel-saving hybrid technology. “My thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors,” he wrote.
Lutz said GM was continuing development of the battery-powered, plug-in Chevy Volt and other alternatives to traditional internal combustion engines. GM is racing against Toyota Motor Corp to be first to market a plug-in hybrid car that can be recharged at a standard electric outlet. Lutz has previously said GM made a mistake by allowing Toyota to seize “the mantle of green respectability and technology leadership” with its market-leading Prius hybrid. A 40-year auto industry veteran who joined GM earlier in the decade with a mandate to shake up its vehicle line-up, Lutz is no stranger to controversy. Read more here.