Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong by William D. Nordhaus. The threat of climate change is an increasingly important environmental issue for the globe. Because the economic questions involved have received relatively little attention, I have been writing a nontechnical book for people who would like to see how market-based approaches could be used to formulate policy on climate change. When I showed an early draft to colleagues, their response was that I had left out the arguments of skeptics about climate change, and I accordingly addressed this at length. But one of the difficulties I found in examining the views of climate skeptics is that they are scattered widely in blogs, talks, and pamphlets. Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”
This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. . • Is the planet in fact warming? • Are human influences an important contributor to warming? Greenland Research Station Reveals Past and Future of Climate Change Impacts. Second in a three-part series. SUMMIT STATION, Greenland -- At first glance, this research station on the highest point of Greenland's vast ice sheet doesn't look like much. A scattering of trailers perch on stilts high above the snow, with a neat grid of small yellow tents off to one side. There's a tall metal tower, a few outhouses. A pile of fuel bladders stands in stark contrast next to the carefully groomed ice runway.
But this nondescript outpost is a magnet for scientists trying to answer some very big questions. Do clouds and tiny aerosol particles help warm or cool Greenland's ice and the air above it? How fast is the climate here changing? Researchers established the first camp here in 1989, at the start of an international effort that drilled the 3,053-meter-long Greenland Ice Sheet Project-2 ice core, retrieving a record of climate over the previous 110,000 years. That project ended in 1993. That's where Morris and her assistant, John Sweeny, come in. Columbus Blamed For Little Ice Age. MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended.
Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle. Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated.
Reign Check: Abundant Rainfall May Have Spurred Expansion of Genghis Khan's Empire. The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan carved out the largest contiguous land empire history has ever witnessed, reaching at its apex from Asia's Pacific coast to eastern Europe and down into Persia and southeastern Asia. Although conventional wisdom suggests drought may have pushed them across the steppe to conquer more bountiful lands, ancient, long-dead trees discovered in a forbidding lava field in Mongolia give evidence that unprecedented rains might actually have helped fuel their expansion. The Mongols took the Old World by storm in the 13th century. Their invasions and expansion are often attributed to the unstable climate they experienced on the steppes, "with them preying on others because they did not have a constant set of resources," says geographer Amy Hessl at West Virginia University.
"Now, we agree they experienced a variable climate. All in all, the research team of U.S. and Mongolian scientists sampled 17 trees. Farmers May Have Kicked Off Local Climate Change 3,500 Years Ago. Iron-rich dust fuelled 4 million years of ice ages - environment - 03 August 2011. DUST is all that's needed to plunge the world into an ice age. When blown into the sea, the iron it contains can fertilise plankton growth on a scale large enough to cause global temperatures to drop. The finding adds support to the idea of staving off climate change by simulating the effects of dust - perhaps by sprinkling the oceans with iron filings. Iron-rich dust falling on the ocean has long been known to spark blooms of plankton, and researchers suspect the process could have intensified the ice ages that have occurred over the past few million years. The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth.
That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet's orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms - particularly in central Asia - and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean. More From New Scientist Promoted Stories. Can Fracking and Carbon Sequestration Co-Exist? Natural gas production and carbon sequestration may be headed for an underground collision course.
That is the message from a new study finding that many of the same shale rock formations where companies want to extract gas also happen to sit above optimal sites envisioned for storing carbon dioxide underground that is captured from power plants and industrial facilities. The problem with this overlap, the researchers found, is that shale-gas extraction involves fracturing rock that could be needed as an impenetrable cover to hold CO2 underground permanently and prevent it from leaking back into the atmosphere. "Shale gas production through hydraulic fracturing can compromise future use of the shale as a caprock formation in a CO2 storage operation," said Michael Celia, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Princeton University and a co-author of the study.
"There is an obvious conflict between the two uses," the study says. Shale gas production also has not reached full scale. Malcolm Bull reviews ‘A Perfect Moral Storm’ by Stephen Gardiner · LRB 24 May 2012. For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. Climate change sceptics are an assortment of cussed old men, mostly without relevant scientific training, who disagree with one or more of these answers.
That said, even though Chinese industrialisation was well advanced in the 1980s, its influence on the climate was not widely anticipated, and anyone looking back at the 1990 IPCC projections on global warming can see that they overestimate temperature rises in the 2000s by some margin (though not the associated environmental impact). Although they often have to give ground on the science, the sceptics have correctly spotted that there is something odd about the discourse around climate change. Are these demands reasonable? Climate Skepticism Not Rooted In Science Illiteracy. The Battle Over Climate Science.
There's no police tape across Michael Mann's office doorway this morning. "Always a good start," he says, juggling a cup of coffee as he slides his key into the lock. Mann, a paleoclimatologist, wears a sport coat over a turtleneck. As he takes a seat at his desk, a narrow sunbeam angles through the window, spotlighting a jumble of books, journals and correspondence. Behind him, a framed picture of his six-year-old daughter rests near a certificate for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared in 2007. Propped into a corner is a hockey stick, a post-lecture gift from Middlebury College, which Mann jokingly says he keeps "for self-defense. " Mann directs Penn State University's Earth System Science Center. For someone describing an anthrax scare, Mann is surprisingly nonchalant.
"Weird" is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. Is Earth Nearing an Environmental "Tipping Point"? Human activities are pushing Earth toward a "tipping point" that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns. There are signs that a toxic brew of climate change, habitat loss and population growth is dramatically reshaping life on Earth, an international team of researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature. Those pressures are greater than the natural forces that caused the end of the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago, a time when half the planet's large mammal species went extinct and humans migrated out of Africa. "We are doing enough to cause one of these tipping points," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"The question now is, how close are we? Is it inevitable? What are the changes that we see coming down the road that we should be aware of in order to make the best of it, essentially. " The idea isn't new. The Climate Extremists - Bjørn Lomborg. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space COPENHAGEN – Extreme weather is often said to be one of the main reasons for taking firm action on global warming.
Nowadays, no hurricane or heat wave passes without a politician or activist claiming it as evidence of the need for a global climate deal, like the one that just got postponed until the end of the decade in Durban, South Africa. Such claims merit close scrutiny. Despite this error, the IPCC has long been a fairly reliable source of sensible and responsible estimates in an otherwise histrionic debate. The media similarly misrepresented the findings of the IPCC’s 2010 report on climate extremes. The IPCC report did indeed state that global warming would mean more extreme warm temperatures, but it also pointed to fewer extreme cold temperatures.
The IPCC clearly states that hurricane-damage costs have increased steadily because more people, with more expensive property, now live where hurricanes strike. NOconsensus.org - Global warming info you deserve to hear. Not Too Hot to Handle - By Charles Kenny. It's a great time to be depressed about the fate of the planet. The last United Nations confab on climate change, a November meeting in Durban, South Africa, suggested we're unlikely to see any new deal on greenhouse gasses having an impact before 2020.
And it was over less than a day before Canada withdrew from what is the only current legally binding treaty on climate change -- the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. The United States never signed up for Kyoto in the first place, of course -- and Barack Obama's administration has hardly been leading the charge for a replacement. Meanwhile, we're less than three months away from the next big environmental summit, Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, and it would be fair to say expectations for the event are modest.
But for all international diplomats appear desperate to affirm the self-worth of pessimists and doomsayers worldwide, it is important to put climate change in a broader context. The Authoritarian Impulse and Climate Change « NoFrakkingConsensus. March 13, 2012 at 4:18 pm Remember that old adage – The road to hell is paved with good intentions? I wish there was a short YouTube video that made this point clearly, persuasively, and humorously.
I’d direct folks to it all the time. Because some truly monstrous proposals are being advanced by people who seem to think that anything goes in the fight against climate change. David Suzuki, Canada’s equivalent to Al Gore, wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post last week titled Deny Deniers their Right to Deny! If Suzuki can’t think of a way to save the world that doesn’t involve trampling on other people’s liberty that tells me everything I need to know about the world we’d all be left with. In an eye-opening piece about UN-accredited NGOs, Hilary Ostrov points out that the UN has a Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. Promoting the role of criminal law in protecting the environment… Over in Australia, an Independent Media Inquiry report was released a few weeks back.
NoFrakkingConsensus. When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ A December 18 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.” Nor is the poll an outlier. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable). Many of the doubt-inducing climate scientists and their media acolytes attribute this rising skepticism to the stupidity of Americans, philistines unable to appreciate that there is “a scientific consensus on climate change.” One of the benefits of the recent Climategate scandal, which revealed leading climate scientists manipulating data, methods, and peer review to exaggerate the evidence of significant global warming, may be to permanently deflate the rhetorical value of the phrase “scientific consensus.”
The Emperor’s New Climate-Change Agreement - Bjørn Lomborg. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space COPENHAGEN – Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception. Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided with hard political reality.
So as negotiators – and a handful of government ministers – arrived in Durban, expectations could not have been lower. Yet, by the end of the talks, the European Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, was being applauded in the media for achieving a “breakthrough” that had “salvaged Durban,” and, most significantly, for achieving the holy grail of climate negotiations, a “legally binding treaty.” Let’s take a look at the actual agreement reached in Durban that generated all that congratulatory back-slapping. India was not alone. Hot Air: The EU's Emissions Trading System Isn't Working - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.
In the perfect world of economic liberals, every commodity has its price. Limited supply makes goods more expensive and vice versa. That's how markets work -- at least in theory. In practice, things often look different, and this is especially true when it comes to emissions trading, a business subject to a very different mechanism: laws dictated by the European Union. Economists have generally praised the trading scheme as a nearly ideal instrument for reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions. In this system, businesses purchase pollution permits, with prices determined according to supply and demand, in an efficient and self-regulating process. But for the last half year, prices for CO2 certificates have dropped almost continuously, decreasing by about half, to around €8 ($10.60) per metric ton. Michael Kröhnert, an emissions trader in Berlin, refers to the plunging prices as a slaughter. 'The System Isn't Working' The EU is alarmed.
Losing Purpose and Incentive. "Carbon Emissions’ Friendly Skies" by José Maria Figueres. Will the EU ground its flying carbon tax? India Balks at Greenhouse Gas Emission Cuts. The Climate Threat We Can Beat. A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming. Climate politics: hockey-stick to hamster-wheel. "Green Unilateralism" by Simon Zadek. "The High Stakes of Rio+20" by Achim Steiner. "When Democracies Collide" by Volker Perthes. Mexico puts climate change action into law - environment - 25 April 2012. "The Particle-Emissions Dilemma" by Henning Rodhe. Beijing Emission Cuts May Underestimate Use of Coal.