Climate & Climate Change

For some in Greenland these days, the grass is looking greener.

Article in National Geographic:

Global Warming Good for Greenland?

Rapid thawing brought on by global warming on the world’s largest island has opened up new opportunities for agriculture, commercial fishing, mining, and oil exploration. The island’s native people, though, may not be on the “winning” side of warming.

Meanwhile, Worlclimatereport.com draws on peer reviewed science to write an article entitled:

Greenland Climate: Now vs. Then, Part I. Temperatures

From the Chicago Tribune:

Reporting on global warming not clean, simple

So NBC’s “Today” show has unveiled big plans for next month to jet its stars to the far reaches of the planet — Matt Lauer in the Arctic, Al Roker at the Equator and Ann Curry in Antarctica — for live broadcasts aimed at alerting us to the effects of global warming.

You know, the phenomenon said to be exacerbated by 21st Century conveniences that spew carbons into the environment, such as, um, jet travel.

From The Times of India:

Libya joins UN Security Council after leaving US terrorist list

UNITED NATIONS: Libya won a seat on the UN Security Council, just over a year after the US removed the north African nation from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and without any opposition from US President George W Bush’s administration.

The closest race for a council seat was between Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Some diplomats said privately that the Czech Republic lost because of President Vaclav Klaus’ skeptical comments about global warming, which is a key issue for many UN members, especially small island states. In a statement last week, Klaus said he was “surprised” that former US Vice President Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize “because a link between his activities and the global peace is unclear and blurred.”

Local Transport Today (LTT) is a UK local authority magazine for transport professionals. The latest issue has a 3 page interview with two prominent members of the recently re-branded anti-car/anti-roads organisation ‘Transport 2000,’ funded by the bus and rail industries, and now known as the ‘Campaign for Better Transport ‘(except car transport, of course). The interview with Jason Torrance (ex-Greenpeace) and Stephen Joseph is entitled ‘Campaigning for better transport, but who’s it better for?’

Joseph is quoted thus:

Joseph accepts there are still some people having an “upstream debate” about the science of climate change but he doesn’t think this should interfere with discussions about transport policy. “In a way the debate about whether climate change is happening or not, or is caused by humans or not is one removed [from transport] because, like it or not, the politicians have bought an argument that climate change is real, is caused by human emissions and transport’s a quarter of these in UK terms. Therefore transport’s going to be a target for emission cuts.”

George Monbiot is guest speaker at their Road Block Conference on 27th October.

Moving on, another article reports on a transport and climate change conference at the British Museum in London:

A hushed silence fell across the auditorium at last week’s transport and climate change conference in the British Museum as one delegate broke the day’s consensus by mounting a spirited defence of people’s desire and right to use their leisure time to travel to more and more faraway destinations. Soon the silence was broken by mutterings of despair, accompanied by the shaking of heads, as the delegate went on to express the view that for leisure trips in the UK the car was usually the only practical option. If the Government wanted to try and cut carbon dioxide emissions then perhaps it should concentrate on economic sectors other than transport, he added.

A couple of delegates openly challenged what they had just heard and one summed up his exasperation by making a general remark about the lack of political appetite for controlling car use: “I’ve heard so much about car bashing and yet we don’t do it enough.”

But event chairman, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, detected that, though the gentleman may have sounded like a contrarian to most of the 90-strong audience, he was probably reflecting the views of quite a large section of the British public. “This guy speaks for a huge majority of the population,” suggested Harrabin.

A succession of votes showed that the vast majority of the audience (a mix of central and local government officers, consultants, transport operators, academics and NGOs) did indeed hold diametrically opposite views to this man.

On a lighter note, I enjoyed this letter to the editor:

Attacks on aviation are motivated by ideology, not science

With several correspondents attacking aviation (Letters LTT 27 Sep), once again we see atmospheric science failing to co-operate with politicised motivations on the ground.

Just as the absence of predicted warming in the troposphere starts to hit home on those who want to use tree food gas (carbon dioxide) as a green flag of convenience on the back road to localised medieval lifestyles and economic collapse, we find a recent groundbreaking publication in Nature upsetting another false consensus, that affecting the stratosphere (The troposphere and the stratosphere happen to be the two layers of the atmosphere through which aircraft fly).

Comments from the scientific community on the work (by Rex) summarise the situation well and reflect very badly on extremists claiming that the science is settled:

“Scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.” Quirin Schiermeier, News@Nature, 26 September 2007

“Our understanding of [atmospheric] chloride chemistry has really been blown apart.” John Crowley, Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, 26 September 2007

So, instead of jumping headlong into quality of life oblivion – or, more likely, allowing ourselves to be sleepwalked into the same nightmare – the precautionary principle actually dictates that we hold back from precipitous, costly and pointless action. Particularly when the words of Charles Secrett at a Labour Party/Greenpeace fringe meeting show that the motive behind attacks on air travel is anything but environmental – he stressed that ABC1s, the top social groups, were responsible for 70 per cent of flights. So, after taxing lifestyle on the road, dinosaur envyists want to tax lifestyle in the air and any flag of convenience will do.

Now aviation is the cause célebre for mobility hating Armageddonists, it must be sorely disappointing that 4x4s can’t fly.

From today’s Times:

China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams

Hu Jintao wants to make every Chinese twice as rich by 2020. He has done it once – in just five years, income per capita doubled to $2,000 (£983) – and the only obstacle in the Chinese President’s path is the fuel needed to stoke the boiler in China’s locomotive.

The president needs more copper, iron ore, zinc and natural gas. Above all, he needs more coal to keep the power stations humming nicely and more oil for Chinese cars and lorries. China accounts for more than a third of world demand for coal and the price in Australia soared this year as the People’s Republic switched from being an exporter to being an importer. If Mr Hu had a message for the world in his address to the Communist Party National Congress, it was this: we will burn our coal and, if we have to, we will burn yours, too.

Read the rest of the article.

Governments across the world are mishandling climate-change issues. Policies to curb ‘greenhouse-gas’ emissions too often take the form of costly specific regulations, rather than a general price-based incentive such as a carbon tax. More fundamentally, there is good reason to question the advice on which governments are basing their policies.

This advice is brought together through an elaborate process which governments have themselves created. The process is managed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988. This panel is made up of government officials, not all of whom are scientists.

The IPCC process has since produced four massive Assessment Reports, designed to provide the basis for climate-change policy. These cover the whole range of issues, including economic, scientific and technical aspects. The latest in the series, AR4, will be completed next month. It will run to more than 3,000 pages, and its preparation has involved a network of some 2,500 experts.

Because of this extensive and structured expert participation, the IPCC process and its findings are widely taken to be professionally above reproach. Yet the expert network is only one of three main groups of participants in the process. The Panel itself, at the center of the process, is a separate body from the network. Third are the national-level agencies—the policy makers—that it reports to.

Governments have formally laid down, in the “principles governing IPCC work,” that Panel reports “should be neutral with respect to policy.” But this instruction can apply only to the expert reporting process. As officials, the Panel members and those who appoint them are of course identified with the policies of their governments. And virtually all governments are formally committed, within the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to the “stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Since 1992, the risks arising from human-induced global warming have been officially taken as proven. Policies have been framed accordingly.

These committed Panel members, and their equally committed parent departments, provide the lists of persons from which the expert network is largely chosen. They also review, amend and approve the draft Assessment Reports. Hence departments and agencies which are not—and cannot be—neutral in relation to climate-change issues are deeply involved, from start to finish, in the reporting process.

Policy commitment often shades into bias. From the outset, leading figures within the IPCC process have shared the conviction that anthropogenic global warming presents a threat which demands prompt and far-reaching action. Indeed, had they not held this belief, they would not have been appointed to their positions of influence. Both they and their ministers are apt to make confident, alarmist statements which go well beyond the more guarded language of the Assessment Reports. A notable instance was the October 2006 joint statement by two European prime ministers that “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid a catastrophic tipping point.”

The expert reporting process itself is flawed, in ways that reflect this built-in high-level official bias. Despite the numbers of persons involved, and the lengthy formal review procedures, the preparation of the IPCC Assessment Reports is far from being a model of rigor, inclusiveness and impartiality.

A specific weakness in some IPCC documents is the treatment of economic issues, which is not professionally up to the mark. One aspect of this has been the use of invalid cross-country comparisons of real GDP, based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power parity estimates.

A basic general weakness is the uncritical reliance on peer review as a qualifying criterion for published work to be taken into account in the assessments. Peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu. What is more, the peer-review process as such is insufficiently rigorous, since it does not guarantee due disclosure of sources, methods and procedures..

Failures of disclosure, such as many journals would not tolerate, have characterized published work that the IPCC has drawn on. The Panel has failed to acknowledge this problem and take appropriate action to deal with it. The issue is simply evaded in the relevant sections of AR4.

So far, despite the prospective high costs of what could be mistaken policies, governments have paid little attention to telling outside criticisms of the IPCC process. As a former Treasury official, with later close dealings with economics and finance ministries in OECD member countries, I have been surprised by the way in which these ministries have accepted uncritically the results of a process of inquiry which is so obviously biased and flawed.
Even if the IPCC process were beyond challenge, it is imprudent for governments to place such heavy reliance, in matters of extraordinary complexity where huge uncertainties remain, on this particular source of information, analysis and advice. In fact, the process is flawed, and this puts in doubt the accepted basis of official climate policies.

In relation to climate change, there is a clear present need to build up a sounder basis for reviewing and assessing the issues. Governments should ensure that they and their citizens are more fully and more objectively informed and advised.

Two broad lines of action could be taken to this end. One is to improve the IPCC process, by making it more professionally representative and watertight. The other is to go beyond the process, by providing for alternative sources of information and advice. An independent expert review of AR4 would be a good place to start.

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This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal Europe on October 11, 2007 and is republished here with permission from the author, David Henderson. On October 12, 2007 the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace with Al Gore.

Mr. Henderson, a former chief economist of the OECD, is a visiting professor at the Westminster Business School in London.