A little roundup of global warming news that should perk some interest. First there is Christopher Bookers editorial in The Telegraph about the fraud known as James Hansen:
There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Hansen has been for 20 years the world’s leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore’s closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.
First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.
Two sets of data, from satellites, go back to 1979: one produced by Dr Roy Spencer, formerly of Nasa, now at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the other by Remote Sensing Systems. Their figures correspond closely with those produced by the Hadley Centre for Climate Studies of our own Met Office, based on global surface temperature readings.
Right out on their own, however, are the quite different figures produced by GISS which, strangely for a body sponsored by Nasa, rely not on satellites but also on surface readings. Hansen’s latest graph shows temperatures rising since 1880, at accelerating speed in the past 10 years.
The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see “Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?” by Steven Goddard on The Register website.)
Bill Hennessey has a few points of his own on Hansen:
- Hansen’s monthly temperature reports are wildly out of line with every other global temperature measure, and the delta increases each month
- Three of the four global temperature measures have shown world temps flat or cooling since 2001, with Hansen the exception
- Hansen’s NASA rejects satellite temperatures, relying instead on ground-based mercury systems, while the other three would kill for the NASA satellite data
- Satellite data–of both temperature and ocean levels–increasingly disagree with Hansen’s reports
- Hansen, unlike the leading scientists of the other three bodies, stands alone in calling for international dictatorship to combat global warming
- Hansen is the most politically active of the leading scientists in the field
- Hansen has a lifetime’s reputation to lose if he’s wrong
In Australia the debate over a proposed Emission Trading System is fast becoming one on the cost of the program, and if its worth it to do if the worlds worst polluters are not doing it also:
DESPITE breathless expectations to the contrary, Malcolm Turnbull will not turn this week’s two-day Liberal Party debate on the shape of an emissions trading system into a defacto leadership contest with Brendan Nelson.
If Turnbull loses the fight inside the shadow cabinet over Nelson’s bid to make the introduction of an Australian ETS conditional on the big emitters China, India and the US committing to a global ETS framework first, the shadow treasurer will fall into line. The word committing is important. Nelson will only be demanding timetables – not action from the global giants – as his price for introducing an Australian ETS.
~~~Meanwhile furious work is under way behind the scenes ahead of Tuesday’s shadow cabinet meeting and then a gathering of the full party room on Wednesday to find a compromise between the position being argued by Turnbull and environment spokesman Greg Hunt on one side, and Nelson on the other.
Turnbull and Hunt want a 2012 start-up date for an ETS with no conditions, the original position recommended in the Shergold report commissioned by former prime minister John Howard.
But there is a fall-back option for the Coalition: an in-principle acceptance of Nelson’s conditionality regarding the US, China and India, but tempered by the introduction of a slow-track ETS in Australia with both low carbon pricing and implementation trajectories as the trade-off for the big emitters not making the grade post Copenhagen 2009.
Nelson is prepared to consider this option, but only as one among others. Hunt, wanting to avoid a splintering confrontation between Turnbull and Nelson, will be pushing this hard.
The search for compromise marks a dawning recognition inside the Liberal Party that Nelson may have instinctively read the politics of the issue better than Turnbull; that while his condition-based stance on an ETS may be opportunistic it may also be more in tune with community sentiment than the hairy-chested approach taken by Kevin Rudd: an ETS by 2010 and damn the torpedoes.
~~~Former CSIRO scientist Dennis Jensen has been leading the charge against an ETS inside the Liberal Party room during the past few weeks. Jensen isn’t just opposed to an ETS. He doesn’t believe climate change necessarily exists.
“First, on the science,” Jensen told me. “The data on global temperatures, sea ice extent, tropical upper tropospheric heating and ocean temperature suggests the danger to these do not match with predictions made by the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Having said that, even if you agreed with the IPCC position, Australia going it alone, or becoming involved in an ETS without India, China and the US is pointless.
“The danger for us becoming involved in this scheme is that we will damage our relative trading and economic position compared with those nations that continue to emit. Even if our industry does not go offshore, the economic competitiveness of our industries will be reduced due to increased costs. I am not in favour of sacrificing Australian industry, and Australian jobs and economic competitiveness, on the basis of dubious science, potential increases in the emitted carbon dioxide ‘problem’ and certainly any improvement in the overall ‘global warming’ situation, even accepting the orthodoxy.”
Then there is the news that the corn boom for ethanol has lessened interest in sustainable farming and is resulting in a increase of fertilizer and pesticide use:
MES, Iowa – Most farmers would be pleased with the yields Matt Liebman can get from his corn field – 200 bushels an acre or more.
The average yield last year in Boone County, where Liebman’s head-high corn is growing this summer, was 181 bushels per acre. The national average last year was 151 bushels.
Better yet, Liebman gets his strong yields with far less fertilizer and pesticide than conventional growers use. Applying less fertilizer saves money and reduces polluted runoff.
But Liebman, a Berkeley-trained professor of agronomy at nearby Iowa State University, knows few farmers are going to pay attention to his methods. Not when corn is selling for $6 to $7 a bushel, triple what it did just three years ago.
Farmers are planting more corn than they have in decades, raising concerns that the heavy use of chemicals needed to produce the crop will worsen pollution in rivers and streams.
Following Liebman’s sustainable farming practices would mean a farmer could only plant corn every three or four years on the same ground. Other years, they’d have to plant soybeans and crops like alfalfa and red clover to replace the nitrogen the corn has sucked out of the soil.
“I don’t tell people this is what they should do. I tell them this is something they can do,” Liebman said. “We need to be cognizant of not just production but quality of life and quality of the environment.”
This is hilarious:
The eastern Colorado wind turbine tapped for the Democratic National Convention’s carbon-offset program has one problem: It doesn’t generate any electricity. Convention organizers are now being questioned for their eagerness to market those credits to delegates.
The DNC has contracted with Vermont-based NativeEnergy to offer delegates “Green challenge” carbon offsets to soften the environmental impact of convention travel. That money is then invested in carbon-free “green” energy sources around the country, including a wind turbine installed this year by the Wray School District RD-2. But a Face The State investigation reveals the district’s turbine has never produced marketable energy due to massive equipment malfunctions.
Environmentalists preventing the US from getting at energy sources….shocker:
Amid the rolling hills and verdant pastures of south central Virginia an unlikely new front in the battle over nuclear energy is opening up. How it is decided will tell us a lot about whether this country is willing to get serious about addressing its energy needs.
In Pittsylvania County, just north of the North Carolina border, the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the United States — and the seventh largest in the world, according to industry monitor UX Consulting — sits on land owned by neighbors Henry Bowen and Walter Coles. Large uranium deposits close to the surface are virtually unknown in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. And that may be the problem.
Virginia is one of just four states that ban uranium mining. The ban was put in place in 1984, to calm fears that had been sparked by the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island outside of Harrisburg, Pa. in 1979.
Messrs. Bowen and Coles, who last year formed a company called Virginia Uranium, are asking the state to determine whether mining uranium really is a hazard and, if not, to lift the ban. But they’ve run into a brick wall of environmental activists who raise the specter of nuclear contamination and who are determined to prevent scientific studies of the issue.
~~~James Kelly, who directed the nuclear engineering program at the University of Virginia for many years, says that fears about uranium mining are wildly overblown. “It’s an aesthetic nightmare, but otherwise safe in terms of releasing any significant radioactivity or pollution,” he told me. “It would be ugly to look at, but from the perspective of any hazard I wouldn’t mind if they mined across the street from me.”
The situation is rich with irony as well as uranium. While you can’t mine yellowcake, it is perfectly legal in Virginia to process enriched uranium into usable nuclear fuel, which is somewhat dangerous to handle. A subsidiary of the French nuclear giant Areva operates a fuel fabrication facility in Lynchburg 50 miles from Chatham. It has been praised by Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, as a good corporate citizen. The state is also home to four commercial nuclear reactors, which provide Virginians with 35% of their electricity. And, of course, the U.S. Navy operates nuclear ships out of Norfolk, Va.
Across the country, there are 104 commercial nuclear reactors. They consume 67 million pounds of uranium annually, the vast majority of which is imported from Australia, Canada and former Soviet republics. The 200-acre Coles Hill deposit (Mr. Coles’s family has lived on the spot since 1785) is thought to contain nearly twice that amount. For Messrs. Bowen and Coles, with the long-term price of uranium near $80 per pound, that means they are sitting on about $10 billion worth of ore. But for the rest of us, it means they are sitting on an opportunity to make the U.S. more energy self-sufficient.
And finally this letter to the editor in The Province is an excellent smackdown of the elitism shown by the man-made global warming crowd and Max Cameron in this editorial:
The earth’s climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, and there’s nothing he and his like-minded crowd can do to stop it.
But the earth has not warmed since 1998. We have entered a cooling phase, and all the warming of the past 100 years has been wiped out.
None of this showed up on any of the climate-change models.
For Cameron to insinuate that skeptics do not care about the environment or the future of our children shows an unbearable elitist’s arrogance.
Skeptics agree that we have to work hard to gain efficiency and become less reliant on oil, coal and gas. But they do not want to hear half-truths or pseudo-science trumpeted by eco-activists and gravy-train-riding scientists.
The single biggest enemy of the environment and planet Earth, Mr. Cameron, is poverty. Nothing else comes even close.
Just a few of the stories over the last few days that provide some fodder for discussion on the merits of AGW.
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