Entries associated with the tag "Climate Change":

Really, if you want to govern halfway decently, all you have to do is ask yourself, "What would George W. Bush do?" and then do the opposite. So I can't beef too much about the Progressive States Network. Except when they're simplistic and Pollyannaish.

Simplistic, as when they tout state or regional "cap and trade" systems for controlling carbon dioxide emissions, without acknowledging why such programs need to be national and, probably, international -- namely, that it may be cheaper for CO2 emitters to move their emissions than to curtail them. (I should add that this willful blindness to Econ 101 when trying to "do something" is not unique to PSN.)

Pollyannaish, as when they do a drive-by on Illinois' trainwreck of a legislative session using the hilariously inappropriate headline, "Progress Amidst Conflict." Their summary gives equal space to a new law forbidding state pension funds from investing in companies associated with Sudan and to the transit situation (which account I quote in its entirety): "The legislature also failed to pass any fiscal relief for the ailing Chicago Transit Authority, causing likely fare hikes, layoffs, and service cuts." Progressives are better served by Oregon US Rep. Peter DeFazio's harsh words, front-paged by the Chicago Tribune: "The state and the governor are walking away from a minimal responsibility to maintain an existing system."

I don't know if this is ahead of the curve or behind it, but here are a few sites that can help you maintain a reality-based view of the world:

The Commonwealth Fund takes a first look at the presidential candidates' health care plans so far. The short version: Obama, Clinton, and Edwards would "expand coverage by building on the strengths of the current system--pooling risk in large groups, generating efficiencies through employer-based coverage, and building on the success of public programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). In contrast, Republican candidates Governor Romney and Mayor Giuliani would rely on tax incentives to induce consumers to purchase individual insurance coverage -- now the weakest part of the insurance market." Read the whole thing here.

Factcheck.org reviews the Democratic candidates' plans to get out of Iraq. Short version: the front-runners are in no hurry.

Public Agenda's a good place to find out if the people are behind you, or running the other way. It finds that "the American public sees climate change as a global problem that requires global cooperation—and U.S. leadership." Six in ten say global warming should be a top priority for U.S. diplomacy, and nearly two-thirds (65 percent) "say it's realistic to believe that international cooperation can reduce global warming."

What other sites in this vein have I missed?  

Like a good many professionals, Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward flies about twice a week. Unlike most, he asks the unaskable: Could air travel ever be green?

Short answer: not very, and not very soon. (And CO2 offsets aren't very credible.)

Makower has a different temperament and approaches the question in a different way than George Monbiot in Heat (relevant excerpt here), but their basic conclusion is surprisingly similar: There is no easy fix. Find another way, or don't go. 

"Affected species have three possible responses to global climate change," write Robert Sullivan of Argonne National Laboratory and Milt Clark of USEPA's Region V in the March issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal: "change, move, or die."

They admit they can't answer their article's title question, "Can Biodiversity Survive Global Warming?" because ecosystems are complex and different climate models predict different degrees of warming. But "it is believed that the net effects of global climate change will favor invasive species -- those opportunists that can quickly exploit the new ecological niches that will open up as native species ...cannot adapt.... The additional stresses on ecosystems (along with higher temperatures) will also likely favor vector-borne diseases such as the mosquito-spread West Nile virus that has devastated populations of many bird species in the Chicago area."

Dying is as easy as ever, but moving isn't. Roads, cities, suburbs, and farms have broken up habitats, so that "species that could once move long distances freely to seek more favorite habitat are now faced with numerous man-made barriers," increasing the invasives' advantage. "Habitat fragmentation also reduces the genetic pool from which species can draw to evolve new mechanisms to cope with change."

The article is heavily footnoted to the scientific literature, some of which is accessible on-line free, including a thorough 35-page 2006 review, "Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change" by Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, who notes that "documented rapid loss of habitable climate space makes it no surprise that the first extinctions of entire species attributed to global warming are mountain-restricted species," specifically frogs in the Costa Rican cloud forests. On a mountain, the only way to stay cool is to move up, and pretty soon you run out of mountain.

As bad luck would have it, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced his goals for reducing the state's greenhouse-gas emissions during a February blizzard. The goals themselves are ambitious: back to 1990 levels by 2020, and 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. By comparison, two years ago California's Governator proposed the same 2020 goal and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. President Bush has proposed . . . nothing.

The governor's Climate Change Advisory Group has been digging deep into the issue. Its 40 members include representatives from the AFL-CIO, the Environmental Law and Policy Center, US Steel, Waste Management, and many more. Its meetings are wide open, alternating between Chicago and Springfield. 

We're still in the pregame here. And so far the usual interest groups have shown little awareness of the nature of the game. One proposal being floated, for instance, would impose performance standards on power plants' CO2 emissions. The United Mine Workers commented that it opposes "extreme measures that would undermine economic growth, harm particular sectors, or [place] ourselves at a disadvantage to other nations." This of course is a recipe for doing nothing. Better the planet should fry than one coal miner go out of work!

Bear in mind that right now the Advisory Group is far from actually making proposals -- it's still discussing which proposals to consider for modeling, to see how they might actually work if implemented. The Advisory Group's proposals for action are due July 30. What will Blago then endorse? And how hard will he fight for it?

Everyone's jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon these days, and they all want to steer.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, says "Smart environmentalism has three key elements. First, policies should be targeted toward the biggest environmental threat: global warming. Second, our resources and political capital are limited. This means we must weigh the benefits of each intervention against its costs. Third, we must anticipate unintended consequences, where being green in one place leads to decidedly non green outcomes someplace else."

I love the way economists think. If every policy wonk were legally required to reflect on trade-offs and unintended consequences, the world would be a better (and quieter) place. But when you're good with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Glaeser adds, "The most effective way to reduce emissions [of greenhouse gases] is to charge people for the social costs of their actions with a carbon tax."

Unfortunately he stops there. Like today's generation of best-selling atheists, who repeat David Hume and Bertrand Russell without noticing that their arguments persuaded few, Glaeser repeats the standard economic prescription without acknowledging its political difficulty. Everyone hates traffic congestion too, and it's been well known for years that the way to cure traffic congestion is to tax it by charging time-of-day tolls, but it never gets done.

What's the second-best strategy when you know perfectly well that the best one's a nonstarter? Remember, Ed, you're an environmentalist now, so shrugging your shoulders and going off to teach your next class is not an option.

(Good discussion on some points at Mark Thoma's Economist's View. And George Monbiot's new book Heat popularizes and refines a potentially nifty idea for a carbon-rationing system. I don't know if Monbiot's right, but the last writer I read who made it seem so easy to combine deftness, personality, and sheer intellectual energy was named George Orwell.)

Peter Montague's "Rachel's Democracy & Health News" is a good window on the left wing of the environmental movement, and that's where I picked up on historian David Noble's "The Corporate Climate Coup" and its companion piece, Denis Rancourt's "Global Warming: Truth or Dare?", both originally housed at Rancourt's blog Activist Teacher.

They're enormously long; fortunately Rancourt's a good summarizer:

"I argue: (1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world....

"By far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and...the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized."

Noble elaborates:

"If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen in the midst of the world-wide global justice movement, it has restored confidence in those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations end their myriad agencies and agendas; the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market."

Rancourt and Noble do draw on some right-wing denialist material, and the underlying logic is eerily similar: since the commonly proposed solutions to climate change don't involve undoing world capitalism ASAP, then the problem must not exist. (The right-wingers reach the same conclusion from the opposite worry, that the commonly proposed solutions might indeed undo world capitalism.)

Quite aside from some factual questions -- did Al Gore really just prevent a "world-wide global justice movement" from taking power? -- Rancourt and Noble have the same problem that has bedeviled the left since the collapse (first moral, then physical) of any credible alternative to capitalism. No matter how bad the current system is, what goes in its place? One of the commenters on Rancourt's article gave a revealing answer to this question:

"If I were the benevolent dictator of planet Earth, I would remove all subsidies to the polluting industries, make towns and cities responsible for their own energy and food production, take from the rich to give to the poor equalizing wealth among all peoples, make it illegal for anyone to earn 7 times the amount the most poorly paid person makes, give Aboriginal peoples ten times the land they have now and a huge apology for the injustices done to them, only allow democratic free presses to operate, implement a 1-child per couple law, ensure all farm animals are well-treated and can roam freely, reforest the planet, reuse metals instead of mining, and so on. What a beautiful world it could be!"

Uh huh. No such utopia could exist without a centralized power that would make previous totalitarianisms look wimpy. Better the capitalist devil I know, thank you.

I lost my copy of John Brunner's 35-year-old apocalyptic sci-fi The Sheep Look Up a few moves ago, but as I recall, in it he foresaw an activist anticar group (called Trainites after their shadowy leader Austin Train) whose members regularly marked commuters' stalled cars with their slogan, "Stop, you're killing me!"

Megan Tady's February report in the New Standard (since picked up by Alternet and by Rachel's Health & Environment newsletter) reminded me. She finds a number of environmentalists arguing that Greenpeace is way too conservative, maybe even holding back environmentalism by merely calling for "various regulations and market-based actions to reduce greenhouse-gas output by 60 to 80 percent over the next 43 years."

For some environmentalists (she names and quotes David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Brian Tokar of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, and journalist Mark Hertsgaard), "making the urgent call for lifestyle changes – from something as tame as driving less to more radical changes like adopting a vegetarian, localized diet – should go hand in hand with the push for larger, system-wide greenhouse-gas reductions and energy efficiency. They say radically scaling back consumption is needed to ensure global environmental sustainability and equity." Mere technological changes, they say, won't get the job done before the planet's setting gets stuck on "deep fat fry."

Yes, these modern-day would-be Trainites are the people who cause global-warming denialists like Avery and Singer to lose key brain synapses and conclude that a problem with such a drastic solution must be one that doesn't actually exist. But I can't quite tell what the environmentalists to the left of Greenpeace are proposing. What exactly do you do the morning after you've made your "urgent call" and your neighbors drive off to work and play as usual?

Lobby to double or triple the gas tax? Is there a single member of Congress who will even talk about the possibility of such a thing? That would do more than any number of "urgent calls" to get people to cut back. Ironically, it would also spark the inventions necessary for us to continue our mobile lifestyle without exuding so much carbon. If the radicals win, they lose.

Is nuclear power the best way to get energy while putting less carbon into the atmosphere?

No, but perhaps not for the reason you think. There are probably lower-priced alternatives that will replace more coal. The excellent David Roberts at Gristmill picks up on Mark Clayton's Christian Science Monitor story:

"The question is not whether nuclear power is 'acceptable' or 'good' by some subjective standard -- economic, moral, or otherwise. It's not even whether investments in nuclear power could lead to emission reductions. The question is: what is the maximum amount of climate change mitigation we can get for a given dollar of investment? Nuclear fails that test."

OK, I don't know if it fails the test or not. According to one study quoted by CSM, "Just improving a nation's energy efficiency would produce far less CO2 than a new nuclear plant (5 grams vs. 32 grams per kilowatt-hour), the study found. And it would do so at lower cost (4.8 cents vs. 5.2 cents per kilowatt-hour)."

One study isn't the whole story. But this is surely the standard by which we should judge nukes, and ethanol, and conservation, and sequestration, and solar/wind power.

We'll need conservation in the short run, but some potential long-range global warming solutions are an environmental Luddite's nightmare:

"Solar photons can be converted into chemical fuel more resourcefully by breeding or genetically engineering designer plants, connecting natural photosynthetic pathways in novel configurations and using artificial bio-inspired nanoscale systems."

That's from an Argonne National Laboratory press release based on a sober assessment of solar technology potentials just published in Physics Today by George W. Crabtree of Argonne and Nathan S. Lewis of Cal Tech.

Read the whole thing for progress in artificial photosynthesis (and the lack of progress on batteries), but here's the big picture from the article itself:

"There is plenty of room for improvement [in gathering and using solar energy], since photovoltaic conversion efficiencies for inexpensive organic and dye-sensitized solar cells are currently about 10% or less, the conversion efficiency of photosynthesis is less than 1%, and the best solar thermal efficiency is 30%. The theoretical limits suggest that we can do much better" by improving on nature in various ways.

"Solar conversion is a young science. Its major growth began in the 1970s, spurred by the oil crisis that highlighted the pervasive importance of energy to our personal, social, economic, and political lives. In contrast, fossil-fuel science has developed over more than 250 years, stimulated by the Industrial Revolution and the promise of abundant fossil fuels. The science of thermodynamics, for example, is intimately intertwined with the development of the steam engine. The Carnot cycle, the mechanical equivalent of heat, and entropy all played starring roles in the development of thermodynamics and the technology of heat engines. Solar-energy science faces an equally rich future, with nanoscience enabling the discovery of the guiding principles of photonic energy conversion and their use in the development of cost-competitive new technologies."

These technical fixes will alarm both environmentalists who want to attach their pre-existing "stop being so materialistic" feelings to the climate change issue, and those denialists who are committed to exaggerating the costs of dealing with climate change, or even maniacally denying its reality. But they should look pretty good to everyone else.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and the Economist magazine explain why buying "carbon offsets," like paying someone to plant trees to make up for your airplane flights or electricity usage, aren't as wonderful an idea as they may sound. (von at Obsidian Wings refutes wingnut attempts to exaggerate the point.)

There's a lot of wonkery involved, but here's the gist:

"Many readers profess puzzlement as to how carbon offsets could fail to reduce one's carbon footprint.  The answer is that they probably do reduce one's carbon footprint, but by nowhere near the one-for-one ratio that seems to be implied by the extraordinarily low price of carbon offsets.  Unless they are implemented under a cap-and-trade system [where there are legal limits on the total amount of carbon emitted], these sorts of environmental efforts are plagued by something called the rebound effect, which is to say that using more efficient technologies causes the price to fall, which causes people to use more of the carbon-emitting substances in question." (Economist)

It gets worse:

"Furthermore if you simply buy less of a non-storable good such as electricity, price to other demanders will go back down and social quantity consumed will not change." (Cowen)

There really is no substitute for some kind of collective action to start reducing carbon consumption. That can take either command-and-control forms like regulating and subsidizing, or market-based forms like cap-and-trade systems or a carbon tax. That discussion is about to heat up on both federal and state levels, as David Greising reports in Friday's Tribune.

Some friends, both blog readers and nonreaders, have forwarded me two articles arguing -- contrary to the consensus view of hundreds of qualified climate scientists worldwide embodied in the new IPCC report -- that climate change and global warming aren't truly problems. Their arguments are unfounded and palpably dishonest to boot.

One comes from Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor writing in the Canada Free Press, a publication whose other causes include promoting hatejock Michael Savage for president. Ball remembers the 70s media scare about global cooling and quotes Lowell Ponte, who back then called global cooling "the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years." Ponte, it turns out, is a radio personality, not a scientist. There was no scientific consensus on global cooling; the best thinking at the time was that we didn't know enough about climate to make any predictions at all. This business of deliberately confusing popular scares with science-based warnings would be silly if it weren't reprehensible, since it falsely demeans the best way our species has of learning about the world and foretelling trouble ahead.

The other is J.H. Huebert's review of Richard Posner's 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Huebert has some good criticisms of the book, but also is dogmatic enough that he can refer to "University of Chicago court intellectuals advocating bigger government" with a straight face. He thinks to dismiss Posner on global warming by quoting him (accurately) as saying, "I am not a scientist and have no authority to make judgments on disputed scientific questions." However, Huebert doesn't mention that Posner then remedies his deficiency -- just as any intellectually honest skeptic with limited time might do (now quoting from my review of Posner in the Reader on March 4, 2005): "He analyzed a random sample of recent articles from the 20 most influential peer-reviewed atmospheric-sciences journals. He observes that of 55 articles, only 2 expressed any doubt that human-caused global warming is real and will have adverse consequences." Huebert gives every sign of having read Posner's book, in which case he read this and chose not to mention it. Such deception is unworthy of a journal that purports to represent a noble strand of political philosophy.

Quite aside from their lack of scientific evidence or credibility, neither Ball nor Huebert is arguing in good faith. I have yet to see any material from this side that meets basic standards of argument or evidence. Having spent some time looking, here, here, and here, I have to wonder whether it's a good use of time and energy to point out the denialists' lies one at a time while they are not ashamed to continue producing them in bulk.

UPDATE: The excellent So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog does the necessary demolition work on Mark Steyn as well. 

Federal appellate judge Richard Posner's decision-making is way too conservative (as in unfair) for my taste, but he's no wingnut. Consider this entry in the Becker/Posner Blog: "The global-warming skeptics are beginning to sound like the people who for so many years, in the face of compelling evidence, denied that cigarette smoking had serious adverse effects on health." (Still in denial is Chicago's own "belief tank," the Heartland Institute.)

What to do? Posner notes that many experts are focused on the long-term consequences of warming, but it's very difficult to decide what we should spend to avert a catastrophe a century or more away. Regardless of the outcome of that argument, he urges immediate action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now, even though it's expensive. He lists three reasons:

"The first is that global warming is already imposing costs, and these will probably increase steadily in the years ahead. Discounting does not much affect those costs. They may well be great enough to warrant remedial action now.

"The second argument for incurring heavy expenditures today to reduce global warming is that there is a small risk of abrupt, catastrophic global warming at any time, and a small risk of a huge catastrophe can compute as a very large expected cost.  [Those who can read as fast as Posner can write will recognize this argument from his 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response.]  ...

Maybe he should be in Congress instead of on the court?

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward treats Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel with amused contempt. I'm just pissed.

Last week the Climate Action Partnership -- including corporate giants BP, Caterpillar, DuPont, and General Electric -- called for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions to combat climate change. (Their report, "A Call for Action," is here [PDF].) Strassel says they'll make money on the deal -- and therefore it must be a Bad Thing:

"The cap-and-trade climate program these 10 jolly green giants are now calling for is a regulatory device designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don't.... DuPont has been plunging into biofuels, the use of which would soar under a cap. Somebody has to cobble together all these complex trading deals, so say hello to Lehman Brothers. Caterpillar has invested heavily in new engines that generate 'clean energy.' British Petroleum is mostly doing public penance for its dirty oil habit, but also gets a plug for its own biofuels venture.... What makes this lobby worse than the usual K-Street crowd is that it offers no upside. At least when Big Pharma self-interestedly asks for fewer regulations, the economy benefits."

Strassel appears to be criticizing what economists, using 18th-century verbiage, call "rent seeking," which is trying to make money by influencing legislation rather than by making better products. An honest argument from this point of view would propose that all lobbying and political contributions by for-profit entities be universally banned. But Strassel isn't making an honest economic argument. She's OK with some companies' rent seeking and not others, because she assumes -- without even attempting to provide any evidence -- that deregulating Big Pharma has no downside and cutting CO2 emissions has no upside.

Strassel's column is considerably less intelligent than this summary makes it sound, veering wildly from the above "point" to criticizing proposals that CAP hasn't made, then criticizing what she predicts will be the inaction of the Congressional Democrats on this issue.

Makower, by contrast, is well worth reading in full. He includes links for investors smart enough to want to make money from a runaway climate train, as opposed to standing on the tracks claiming it'll never come. 

The Heartland Institute has been promoting Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's new book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, so I took a look. The book isn't just wrong -- it's systematically dishonest.

Singer and Avery keep starting to argue the science, then switch to contending that fears about global warming are exaggerated and that proposed remedies will be counterproductive. By page three they're hyperventilating: "Will people give up the scientific and technological advances that have added thirty years to life expectancies all over the globe in the last century?" (Later they call their adversaries scaremongers.)

At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it's actually a feature. Their implicit logic -- never stated outright for obvious reasons -- is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That's worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)

The book's explicit claim is that because there's a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow, and the initial premise is dubious.

Most of the book consists of throwing mud at the findings of peer-reviewed climate science and seeing what sticks. The mud is of low quality, but since this is a blog and not a book, I'll limit myself to four examples.

Page 36: "CO2 has been a lagging indicator [in the last three ice ages and subsequent warmings], its concentrations rising about eight hundred years after the temperatures warm ... additional evidence that CO2 is not the forcing agent in recent global climate changes." Singer and Avery quote a 2003 article (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Science to this effect. But they don't mention that the warming episodes in question lasted about 5,000 years! So the fact that CO2 didn't start the warming doesn't mean it had no role in the (much larger) warming that followed. It's as if they were arguing that gravity doesn't exist because someone pushed  a car that was sitting still at the top of the hill. Technical details here from a coauthor of the original paper. (For the record, honest disputants fully lay out the other side's arguments before attacking them and don't cherry-pick them to create a false impression.)

Page 132: "Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas ... have demonstrated" that there was a worldwide medieval warm period warmer than today, so there's no problem now. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, and the premise is questionable -- in fact, it has been questioned by several climate scientists, writing in Eos (behind a paywall, summary here if you scroll down to "Myth #2"). The climate scientists had serious criticisms: Soon and Baliunas counted as "warm" any place that appeared to be wetter OR drier OR warmer than it was in the 20th century; they took evidence scattered over a 500-year period (800-1300) as signifying a global change; and they compared their results to the 20th-century average, when the relevant comparison should be to the last part of the 20th century. CAVEAT: I haven't read the article or the criticism. My point is that when Singer and Avery present Soon and Baliunas as having "demonstrated" something -- and then fail to mention, much less address, professional criticisms of their work -- they're deceiving their readers, not engaging in reasoned dialogue.

Page 39: Antarctica is cooling. Another case of cherry-picking and twisting a peer-reviewed publication, well answered by its author Peter Doran (previously blogged here).

Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 -- allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade.  Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers -- including Chicago's own don't-think tank, the Heartland Institute -- aren't serious participants in the discussion of these issues.

BTW, over the years I haven't hesitated to call bullshit on environmentalists when appropriate, such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. His persistent refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong is intellectually corrupt in much the same way Singer and Avery's book is.

Global-warming denialism, June 11, 2005: "Professor Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project based in Arlington, Virginia ... told the BBC News there was no firm evidence of global warming. He claimed the data was contradictory and there was no consensus within the scientific community. He said: 'There is simply no consensus. That's a myth. Even if there were a warming, it's a question of how much. Obviously, the greenhouse effect is real; the problem is the data do not show a significant warming since 1940.'" (BBC News found at the SEPP Web site.)

Global-warming denialism, October 2006: "The Earth’s recent warming trend isn’t a product of human activity, but rather caused by a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless, naturally warmer temperatures approximately every 1,500 years, write Dennis Avery and Fred Singer in their controversial new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years." (Press release at Avery's Hudson Institute.)

I look forward to reading the book and finding what striking new research finding led to this dramatic turnaround.

More 2006 climate highlights and lowlights at Realclimate.

In August 18 top climate scientists filed an amicus brief (PDF) in a Supreme Court case over whether the EPA should regulate climate-changing gases. The agency claimed to have relied on the National Academy of Sciences 2001 report, Climate Change Science, in deciding against regulation, but it didn't really. Money quote:

"EPA misrepresented the findings of Climate Change Science by selectively quoting statements about uncertainty while ignoring statements of certainty and near-certainty, thus giving the appearance of far more fundamental uncertainty than stated in the NAS/NRC report. EPA then concluded that 'it is inappropriate to regulate GHG emissions from motor vehicles' 'until more is understood about the causes, extent, and significance of climate change,' implying that there is no risk in waiting for future research, a conclusion sharply inconsistent with the plain language of Climate Change Science."

If the Bush administration has its way, no citizen or state government will have standing even to bring a case against this kind of malfeasance, according to the Environmental Law Institute. 

You have no idea how big Africa is. Strange Maps does, though. 

The hype: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by professional denialists Fred Singer and Denis Avery. The facts: from computational ocean chemist David Archer of the University of Chicago, who attended a lunch talk Avery gave last week that was sponsored by the Heartland Institute. The gist, from Archer's post at RealClimate: "Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades can only be explained as a result of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005."

Sam Smith does not mourn for Milton Friedman: "We have paid a terrible price for this corruption of our culture by the new robber barons egged on by Friedman and his ilk. We so accept their foul standards that we don't even discuss or debate them. We have become prisoners of their lie." Read the whole thing.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a rhetorical question for those who can't abide public breast feeding: "What is your fucking problem? Do you like fussy babies disturbing the peace with their crying? There’s a lot of things that a baby stuck to a tit might be, but what she’s definitely not is a crying baby."

"We need to change the hearts, minds, values and behavior of Americans toward a culture of conservation."

That's not Al Gore or even Mayor Daley talking. It's John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., who added that debating the science of climate change is a "waste of time," and that it's time for action instead. "The nation needs a public policy." 

Whether Shell is putting enough money where its mouth is, I don't know. (A relevant piece of their Web site; they're in deep weeds in Nigeria.) But if Hofmeister was greenwashing, he picked a funny place to do it. He was giving a breakfast talk in Saint Louis, at

--sorry, I just fell on the floor laughing and drooling on myself--

Washington University's Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy.  Founded as the Center for the Study of American Business, the center features publications that study the costs of federal regulation. It's so "nonpartisan" that it never gets around to studying the benefits of federal regulation.

What funnier place to showcase the fact that corporate leaders are far ahead of conservatives and libertarians--let alone the current Keystone Kops administration--in thinking about the country's real problems?  Including, perhaps, the possibility that regulation might be part of a solution?

(Hat tip to Treehugger.) 

Over at Gristmill, John Tirman of MIT's Center for International Studies notes the bogosity of one particular piece of mud the right-wing anti-science machine has been flinging: a petition supposedly signed by more than 17,000 scientists stating that there's "no convincing scientific evidence" for human-caused global warming. Read the whole thing. (If it were what it purports to be, that fact would be reflected in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, which it is not.) But don't hold your breath waiting for Chicago's own Heartland Institute to apologize for its role in spreading this disinformation.

Those who harp on the supposed uncertainty of global warming rarely mention that uncertainty runs both ways, thus there's a possibility that the mainstream view of climate scientists might be unduly optimistic. Florida State University oceanographer Jeff Chanton and colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Russia, just published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature [if there's a link I haven't found it] reporting how one potential positive-feedback loop actually is contributing to warming. As Siberian permafrost melts into lakes, it releases methane--a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent but shorter-lived than carbon dioxide. "My fellow researchers and I estimate that an expansion of these thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, a period of regional warming, increased methane emissions by 58 percent there," says Chanton in an FSU press release. This methane dates from the Pleistocene. More melting leads to more methane which leads to more melting. Best story so far is at Seed.

At the other end of the earth, Antarctic ice cores dating back 800,000 years have been analyzed now (the last 150,000 years' results apparently haven't been published yet), according to a BBC report quoting Dr. Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey. Current levels of carbon dioxide are outside the natural range seen in that time, and today's rate of change is unprecedented: "In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.  The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years.  We really are in the situation where we don't have an analogue in our records."

Appalachian State University economist John Whitehead scribbles on the back of the envelope at Environmental Economics:

"According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generates almost 6,000 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. At four dollars per metric ton, the cost of reducing carbon emissions by 70 percent, about what scientists say needs to be cut to avoid climate change problems, is $16.8 billion, about 0.14 percent of annual GDP. Not too costly with the help of market forces, right? My guess is that this is a case of low hanging fruit and the marginal cost is increasing."

Note #1:  $16.8 billion is very roughly one-twentieth of what has been spent so far on the Iraq war.

Note #2:  where did Whitehead come up with the four-dollars-per-metric-ton figure?  Well, from the Chicago Climate Exchange, where 175 participants (corporations and governments) pay real money for the "right" to emit defined amounts of greenhouse gases.

The New York Times profiled Chicago Climate Exchange founder Richard Sandor July 30 (in an article not available for free online).  The exchange describes itself as "North America’s only, and the world’s first, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission registry, reduction and trading system for all six greenhouse gases (GHGs). . . . Members make a voluntary but legally binding commitment to reduce GHG emissions. By the end of Phase I (December, 2006) all Members will have reduced direct emissions four percent below a baseline period of 1998-2001."

So how do you actually make the reductions so as to have something to trade on the exchange? Writing in National Journal, Margaret Kriz lays out the means we have at hand. According to the best expert opinion, these are all we've to to work with to avoid disastrous climate change, and none of them is a silver bullet.  They are:

• Energy Efficiency: could handle "15 percent, possibly more, of your overall [electric] generation load," according to an industry researcher.  (Most of the solutions now being pushed by the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center fall into this category.)

• Nuclear Power: expensive, and there's nowhere to put the waste. (Questions raised elsewhere: is there enough uranium or cooling water?)

• "Clean" Coal: it's about time for a new generation of power plants, and the question is, will they use new technology?

• Hybrid Vehicles: Plug-ins would save more.  (So would more politicians like Jimmy Carter, the kind who can set a good example.)

• Wind Power: benefits from a federal production tax credit, but needs high-power transmission lines to get the electricity from the Great Plains (where the wind is) to where the people are.

• Biofuels: ethanol from corn is the biggie, but it cuts CO2 emissions by only about 10 percent, "once you factor in the petroleum used in the farm equipment and the fertilizer used to grow and harvest the corn." Duh.

• Sequestration: capture the carbon dioxide and stuff it underground or under the ocean. Feasible but not cheap.

Unfortunately, picking the right combination of technologies is harder with the Cheney administration bollixing things up. Here's David Talbot introducing a special issue of Technology Review:

"Cleaner technology--in which carbon dioxide could be captured and sequestered--is ready to go into new coal plants now (see 'The Dirty Secret,' by David Talbot). Similarly, improved versions of today's nuclear power plants await construction (see 'The Best Nuclear Option,' by Matthew L. Wald). Unfortunately, implementation of cleaner technologies has been thwarted by federal aimlessness. The Energy Department keeps changing its nuclear-research strategy, and a 'FutureGen' zero-emission coal demonstration project announced three and a half years ago by President Bush hasn't yet picked a site."

In January 2002 Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a four-page article in Nature.  A  contribution to Antarctic climatology, after almost five years it's still newsworthy enough that he wrote about it in the July 27 New York Times. (A fuller free version is available here .)

"My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report . . . found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent [58 percent] had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change."

That's how science works:  a theory (or model) makes predictions, researchers check them out and report the results.  When they don't fit, it's time to check the research findings, and if they seem valid, to revise the model.

This patient iterative process is too slow for the mainstream media, and too impartial to suit climate-change denialists.  Writes Doran, "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear' and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'"

Chicago's Heartland Institute, which purports to champion "sound science," joined this company with an article in 2002 that overgeneralized Doran's findings and linked them to unrelated studies, in order to create the impression (well known to be false) that the globe as a whole isn't warming.  Much as creationists take any revision in evolutionary theory (no matter how slight) as proof that the whole theory of evolution by natural selection is worthless, these special pleaders misread the very process of science in order to deny its results. 

The media echo chamber continues to resound with these misrepresentations.  A newspaper in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, fabricated a Doran quote to suit its purposes on June 25.  In the on-line comments section June 29, Doran denied ever saying or thinking it, and asked that it be removed.  It's still up.

(Which reminds me -- has any denialist outfit ever explained Doran's actual findings and apologized for misrepresenting them?)

Of course, science has been plodding on meantime.  Writes Doran, "Climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet."

Doran includes a fuller version of his Times op-ed and additional materials at his UIC web site.  One of his side comments pretty much summarizes the whole sorry business:

"It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they 'thought' supported their argument."

Twenty-one years ago I kicked off my job at the Reader with a monstrously long profile of the then-newborn Heartland Institute and the philosophy of libertarianism.

For years now, Heartland has been frittering away its credibility, wasting its resources, and discrediting libertarian thought in general by claiming there's no such thing as climate change--and that if there is, people have nothing to do with it.

Libertarians pride themselves on dealing with the economic world as it is, not as do-gooders wish it was. Why should it be different where other sciences are involved? Real climate scientists agree that there's a problem here that we need to deal with. Hell, even Lloyd's of London has figured that out. There are ways of dealing with climate change that will enhance government power, and ways that will harness the power of the market to improve matters. Those are the issues worth debating, instead of presenting Michael Crichton--a fiction writer with a flimsy conspiracy theory--as if he were some kind of authority on the planet's climate system.

A good deal of my writing over the years has been influenced by libertarian thinking, much of which I learned at Heartland. These days I find myself hesitating to mention their good stuff because of their crackpot position on climate change. It gives the impression that libertarianism really is a right-wing philosophy, lined up with anti-science Republicans who think evolution is some kind of dubious hypothesis. What possible reward could be great enough for intelligent people to seek such company?

“Much of the latest science suggests that climate change will take place faster than we thought,” says Lloyd’s of London in its new 360 Risk Project report, “Climate Change: Adapt or Bust.” (PDF)

“The industry must take a new approach to underwriting, looking ahead and not simply basing decisions on historical patterns," reads the report. "Insurer pricing and capital allocation models must be updated regularly--and not just in extremis--to reflect the latest scientific evidence.” Lloyd’s suggests that insurers need to reconsider their portfolios as well as their underwriting policies--and that people need to quit moving to hazardous areas (i.e. the coasts) and to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

Now why do you suppose Lloyd’s is far more worried about climate change than the U.S. government or a number of “think” tanks that profess devotion to the free market? Maybe it has something to do with the fact the Lloyd’s faces real consequences in the market if it disregards a pressing danger. And maybe, just maybe, it's because the current Republican administration and the “think” tanks are subject to some incentives that encourage them to take mediocre fiction writers more seriously than the overwhelming weight of peer-reviewed climate science.

(Hat tip to Joel Makower.)