Paul

Searched for by mariners since the 15th century, the legendary Northwest Passage across the Arctic Ocean appears to have opened up again, according to satellite pictures from the European Space Agency. Satellite measurements of Arctic sea ice began less than 30 years ago. The Northwest Passage is a shipping route between Europe and Asia. The route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is shorter than using the Panama Canal.

To some this will be seen as more evidence of man-made global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. To others it is more evidence of natural climate variability – the route was open during previous warm periods when man was not burning fossil fuels.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amunsden proved that the route was navigable in 1906, after a 3-year expedition. Since that time, only ice breaking ships have been able to get through.

A word of caution though for anyone planning an historic solo trip from this article in Australia’s Herald Sun:

Ice blocks British solo sailor

A BRITISH yachtsman attempting the first solo Arctic sea passage across northern Russia was examining his options after heavier than expected ice blocked his route, his manager said.

Adrian Flanagan is discussing with Russian authorities the possibility of using a nuclear-powered icebreaker to lift his boat out of the water and carry it round the most icebound stretch of Russia’s Northern Sea Route.

“Basically it just means we’re putting plan B into operation so if the worst comes to the worst and there isn’t a break in the weather, we’ve got a plan,” Louise Flanagan, his manager and ex-wife said from Britain.

The 46-year-old entered the eastern end of the treacherous sea route that stretches from Asia to Europe across northern Russia in late July.

He had hoped that his 11m reinforced yacht would be able to get all the way to Europe due to lighter ice conditions observed in recent years, thought to be a result of global warming.

Thanks to Marc Morano for alerting us to the article in the Los Angeles Times ‘Can you buy a greener conscience?‘

A budding industry sells ‘offsets’ of carbon emissions, investing in environmental projects. But there are doubts about whether it works.

By Alan Zarembo

September 2, 2007

The Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” touted itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral documentary.

The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production — from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks — was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn’t contribute to the problem.

Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film’s distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.

According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village.

As it turned out, both projects had already been designed and financed, and the contributions from Native Energy covered only a minor fraction of their costs. “If you really believe you’re carbon neutral, you’re kidding yourself,” said Gregg Marland, a fossil-fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has been watching the evolution of the new carbon markets. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”

Read more.

According to Senator James Inhofe of the US Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, the “global warming consensus” continues to melt away:

“We are witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media-driven “consensus” on man-made global warming. In May, I released a report detailing scientists who were former believers in catastrophic man-made climate change but who have recently reversed themselves and are now skeptics.

“I will also be releasing a list of the hundreds of scientists, many of them affiliated with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process, who have spoken out recently to oppose climate alarmism. It is ironic that the media’s climate hysteria grows louder as the latest scientific reports grow less and less alarming. Even the alarmist UN has cut sea level rise estimates in half since 2001 and has reduced man’s estimated impact on the climate by 25%. Meanwhile, a separate UN report found that cow emissions are more damaging to the planet than all of the CO2 emissions from cars and trucks.

“The New York Times is now debunking aspects of climate alarmism. An April 23, 2006, article in the Times by Andrew Revkin stated: “few scientists agree with the idea that the recent spate of potent hurricanes, European heat waves, African drought and other weather extremes are, in essence, our fault (a result of manmade emissions). There is more than enough natural variability in nature to mask a direct connection, [scientists] say.” The Times is essentially conceding that no recent weather events are outside of natural climate variability. So all the climate doomsayers have to back up their claims of climate fears are unproven computer models. Of course, you can’t prove a prediction of the climate in 2100 wrong today.

Read the rest of the article in the latest issue of Power magazine here. Click on ‘Commentary.’

“Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he’s worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs “in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars.” He thinks a Herculean effort and great sacrifice is required to get the world down to zero net increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, an effort he compares to that which the Allies undertook in their all-out war against Nazi Germany and Japan .

“Recall World War II, where everyone was making a sacrifice: gas rationing, tire rationing, no new car production, food rationing,” he explains. “I don’t think the people of the world are ready or prepared to make such a level of personal sacrifice. Perhaps when the consequences of climate change become more apparent that will change. But by that time, there will be irreversible changes in climate.”

“Few scientists speak with more conviction, or lay out the potential consequences of inaction more starkly. Yet Stephen Schwartz, senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, chief scientist of the Atmospheric Science Program of the United Stated Department of Energy, and author of the study some credit with spurring acid rain legislation in the 1990s, is also Al Gore’s worst nightmare. He knows the science on global warming is not settled, as Gore claims. He knows society has antidotes to carbon dioxide — aerosols — that could postpone the day of reckoning far into the future. And although he dreads a reliance on the aerosols, he knows respected scientists are pursuing aerosol-abatement strategies, and that they could be cost effective and environmentally benign.

Read the rest of the article by Lawrence Solomon in The Financial Post here.

We have benefited enormously from scientific advance and its practical applications. Humans are the ultimate generalists and highly adaptable because they observe and learn. The scientific method takes this one stage further: we put forward hypotheses and do experiments to validate them. If the hypothesis doesn’t fit the observations, we reject it. But if it does fit the facts, that doesn’t prove it’s right. Science should continually test theories so that we become more certain of their correctness, but we can never be absolutely sure.

Post-modern thinking teaches that there are no hard truths, that scientific ‘facts’ are social constructs. In one sense, that’s true, since we can never provide absolute proof of any theory. But, taken to the extreme, this school of thought is essentially anti-science and leads to the dangerous tendency we see today of decisions being made on the basis of people’s feelings rather than any objective basis. That leads to belief- rather than evidence-based policy. It also leads us away from the Enlightenment.

But science also is not a perfect, foolproof system; neither is it perfectible. The scientific method, for all its advantages as a basis for decision-making, and for all the benefits it has undoubtedly brought us, is only an overlay on human nature.

The pronouncements of post-modern philosophers may be anathema to scientists, but scientists are also human, with the same nature and tendency to judge. After all, scientific investigation only provides evidence based on the question asked and the experiment carried out. Asking the question in a different way may give a subtly (or not so subtly) different set of data. The data itself is subject to analysis by human intellect, and individuals may place different weights on particular facts. So, from seemingly the same question or data, different people may draw different conclusions. And, although a scientific approach requires us to try to disprove a theory, in practice human nature leads us to ask the sort of questions, and collect the sort of data, which supports the views we already hold. Research then becomes a game of amassing evidence to support a dearly-held view while finding ways to explain away conflicting results.

This tendency to establish ‘proven’ theories which ‘everyone’ believes means that important scientific advances are often made only in the teeth of opposition. Most people behave more according to their human nature than their scientific discipline. There are numerous examples of theories now considered effectively to be established fact which were initially scorned by the scientific establishment: the circulation of blood, plate tectonics, atomic structure, to name but three. In most cases, this is just the result of intellectual inertia and scepticism, but there is also an element of belief. The current debate about the drivers of climate change is a modern case in point.

The terms global warming or climate change have a very specific connotation in today’s society. They are shorthand for anthropogenic climate change, the root cause of which is the increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused primarily by the industrial use of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas.

The great majority of the scientific establishment adheres firmly to this hypothesis, on the basis of which highly prescriptive and centralised policy changes are proposed to fundamentally reduce the carbon-intensity of modern society. Thus, this is not just a bitter scientific controversy: it’s a debate which has the potential to shape the future direction of society. What is more, it’s a debate where apparently the majority of scientists are aligned with environmentalists.

The received wisdom is that the warming trend over the past century bears the unmistakable imprint of Mankind’s activities, is unprecedented and could have catastrophic consequences if allowed to continue. The basis for this is a belief that the effects of all natural climate drivers are understood and that changes which cannot be explained by them must be due to human influence. This is a plausible hypothesis, and one which should be tested, but there remain large gaps in our knowledge and a number of pieces of seemingly contradictory evidence.

The point is that an apparent majority of scientists have seen enough to convince themselves that humans are the primary driver of current climate change, and that something must be done about it. Having reached this conclusion, they rightly continue to amass evidence, but there is an inbuilt bias both in the questions asked and the way that data is viewed. There will equally be some critics of this view who will focus only on the evidence which supports their view, rather than trying to be objective.

This is normal human behaviour in both cases. If you think that someone is wrong, the natural tendency is to bring forward your own arguments rather than look at areas of agreement. The debate gets more polarised and more subjective. Science takes second place.

Since there remain large areas of uncertainly the scientific method should mean that we continue to make observations until the evidence becomes compelling. But the majority of people now believe global warming – human induced global warming – to be an established truth. And the reason for this is typical crowd behaviour: when enough establishment scientists make their views known, have them amplified by the media and supported by the environmental movement, the majority of people take this as the truth. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes once again. Those who play the role of the little boy pointing out that the Emperor is in fact naked are derided and attacked, often in very personal ways. The establishment does not tolerate dissent well.

So, what will happen? Ultimately, the whole debate will be settled on the basis of real evidence. Whatever policy is implemented in the meantime is likely to be immaterial in terms of influencing the climate, although it will consume resources, slow growth and actually have a real negative impact on those at the bottom of the pile. But at some stage – perhaps by 2010, perhaps later – we could reach a tipping point where it becomes clear to the majority of scientists, commentators and the public that, whatever is happening to the climate, Mankind is not the major contributor, and cannot reset the thermostat by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Alternatively, real confirmatory evidence that carbon dioxide is the main driver may be found, and those critics with open minds will change their views.

If a tipping point is reached where the current received wisdom is overturned, it’s trust in the scientific establishment which will be the loser, and that could lead to further erosion in the general public’s regard for the scientific method. Human nature would have trumped science, and science would suffer.

Newsletter 31st August 2007
The Scientific Alliance
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