The Environmental Protection Agency to decide by year’s end whether to let California set its own stricter vehicle emissions standards to fight global warming, but will not meet the state’s demand for a decision this month. – Reuters. What’s indicated as the title here is actually an excerpt of the article’s content. The headline is “EPA on Track to Act on Calif Emissions Waiver,” but that’s clearly misleading seeing as the real story is that the EPA will not meet Gov. Schwarzenegger’s demand for a waiver within 180 days after the state’s request. So, get ready – October 23rd, Gov. Schwarzenegger will be suing the Bush Administration. Smack!
Clinton Says She Would Shield Science From Politics – New York Times. Also, she “committed herself to a space-based climate research project to combat global warming and pledged to spend $50 billion on fighting climate change and finding energy alternatives to foreign oil.” While we’re on the subject of front-runners, you can read about Rudy Guiliani’s energy plans here.
Climate activists tipped for peace prize – Reuters. “Former Vice President Al Gore and other campaigners against climate change lead experts’ choices for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.” Stay tuned for the announcement from Oslo on October 12.
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Joe,
I think you missed an interesting report that should have been included in your roundup. It seems that NASA has found a possible cause for the melting Arctic ice that doesn’t depend on the ‘CO2 causes warming’ hypothesis that (we have discussed before).
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,” Nghiem said.
I know you like to say that the Arctic ice melt is proof of the hypothesis, since the melting was so far beyond what the climate change models were predicting, but I have repeatedly pointed out that a strangely-performing model isn’t proof of anything; I have repeatedly said that maybe something else is going on that wasn’t factored into the models. Well, here’s a ‘something else’.
Weirdly, this story didn’t get much play in the conservative-controlled media, but would you like to debunk this latest NASA report? Would Dr. Hansen care to comment? I’ve still been hoping that Hansen would comment on what I’ve been saying about the weak AGW hypothesis, but all I’ve heard is silence on that point.
If you truly care about the environment (and humans for that matter), you should be happy to learn (if this turns out to be the case) that humans are not the evil influence on the Earth that the de-populationists want us to believe.
The science isn’t settled, but wouldn’t that be a good thing to learn? Wouldn’t it be nice to find out for sure that we aren’t a ‘virus upon the Earth’ as some leaders of the new faith want us to believe? Some of them have even said they would like to see the world’s human population reduced below one billion! Rotting corpses emit greenhouse gases too, you know….
I know ‘unusual winds’ isn’t nearly as sexy as a runaway greenhouse effect, and won’t sell many books, movies, new taxes, or laws, but you owe it to your readers to comment.
A mere $50 billion?
Even per year that is nowhere near enough.
About 6 or 7 times that per year might be enough. (And everybody chips in.)
Actually, this looks to me to be more of a feedback — as the ice gets thinner it gets easier to push around. The interesting question is whether the winds have been generated by the warming itself. If so, than we are probably going to lose the ice in 10 years.
It sounded to me like he was describing an unusual downward pressure of the wind; I pictured it as the ice slip-sliding away toward warmer climes.
Could the “unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure” be caused by warming? Interesting question. Probably worthy of a good hypothesis. But whether these unusual winds are a global warming feedback, or something else entirely, remains to be seen. They were apparently not taken into account, or predicted, by the models. So far, at least.
David B. Benson,
These billions are tax dollars. If reducing CO2 is the goal, spending should be on implementing current C02 free energy technology. Every federal building should have PV cells on its light colored roof. Buildings should be built or retrofitted to LEED standards. Every government vehicle should be a hybrid. They are available from American companies. There will two years or more of political blathering before a comprehensive 40 to 50 year policy is in place. Joe says we have to get started immediately. There are many quick and painless actions we can and should take now.
Ron,
Global warming aside, what do you think about carbon based energy in general? Good thing? Bad thing? Need more? Need less? Would you support efforts to greatly increase carbon free energy production as long as no one brought up global warming?
Paul K,
Carbon based energy is, by and large, rather dirty energy; but it’s the energy source we have been using now for many thousands of years. We can dream of cleaner energy sources being in wide use, but one problem is in your word ‘support’.
I don’t support taxes to pay for the research and development. I don’t support taxes for any purpose.
Let’s get down to basics for a moment: How do you rationalize using robbery (albeit legalized robbery) to pay for research and development, even if you believe it’s in the best interests of the people you would rob? Or for any purpose? How do you rationalize the idea that ‘the end justifies the means’?
David B. Benson, for instance, would like to see $350,000,000,000 per year spent on the problem! That’s easy to say if you consider people to be nothing more than a resource to be exploited, cows to be milked, but those same people also need to be able to afford the new technology when or if it comes on line. If they can’t pay their bills, then the fix wasn’t really in their best interests after all. China, for instance, could shut down their coal plants – and then what? Burn the forests to cook food and heat their homes?
So tell me, really, before we move on – How do you rationalize that?
Another basic problem, of course, is that anthropogenic global warming is a long way from being proven real; it could be a real, serious problem, but it may very well turn out to be hype. Or the cause could be something else; something that your expensive fix might never address. What then?
And what of the other environmental problems that we do understand, like pollution, habitat loss, poaching, over-grazing, etc. – do these take a back seat to the sexier, but uproven, problem of AGW?
Throwing other people’s money at the problem certainly sounds like a relatively easy, painless way to proceed if you are a new-agey communist who wants to bring about the collapse of industrialized nations (like Maurice Strong) or if you dream of radically reducing the world’s population (like the Sierra Club’s Paul Watson) or if you know a lot of that money will end up in your own pocket (like Al Gore), but most of the rest of us would be wise to take a hard look at the science, the hype, the proposed ‘solutions’, and the motivations of the people behind the movement.
And then last week we had this new report come out, blaming Arctic ice loss not on global warming, but on unusual wind patterns, and very few journalists or bloggers took the time to consider it or comment. Sure, it might have something to do with warming, but it may be totally unrelated. And it shows how uncertain and unsettled the science really is.
And the folks who have been pointing to it and claiming it as some sort of proof of AGW now have some egg on their faces. At the very least, this should be ‘proof’ that the science is still not settled, in spite of the widely publicized ‘fact’ that there’s a scientific consensus.
The ‘CO2 causes global warming’ hypothesis is probably flawed; and taxing people to pay for the fix is wrong. That’s my point.
From
—- “Whether or not this strange atmospheric pattern that causes strange wind is a consequence of the global warming impact, we need more research to answer the question,” Ngheim said.
NASA began studying the ice covering the Arctic Ocean back in the late 1970′s. This March, scientists said they observed less ice in the Arctic than ever before. Because of the rapid decrease in the amount of perennial sea ice, NASA is urging a reassessment of climate and weather forecasts. —-
So three points about that -
1) Ngheim seems to agree that the science isn’t settled (but alas, ‘more research’ means more tax money.
2) 30 years isn’t really a very long time to have studied the ice. In other words, ‘less ice than ever before’ during a 3-decade study isn’t really saying a whole lot and only underscores my statement that climate science is in its infancy.
3) A “reassessment of climate and weather forecasts” simply means, in laymen’s terms, that the models aren’t performing as expected.
Sorry Joe. I screwed up the HTML tags. LOL