The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

Many Scientists Say Temperature Drop From Recent Record Highs Is a Blip, While a Few See a Trend; Inexact Climate Models

Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by man.
Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth's temperature was beginning to drop.

Global climate models did not account for a drop in global temperatures since 2006, but climate scientists believe the lower temperatures are temporary.

That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don't believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.
The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.
"There is a lot of room for improvement" in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again -- a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. "You need to know what you can believe and can't believe from the models."
The renewed discussion of inherent shortcomings in climate models comes on the cusp of potentially big financial commitments. In five weeks, diplomats from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to hash out a new agreement to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions. The science continues to evolve.
The goal of climate models is to project how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will interact with natural forces to affect the global temperature. The models are technological marvels. Using supercomputers, they divide the world into grids of roughly 4,000 cubic miles apiece. The grids are stacked, one on top of the other, up through the atmosphere.
It is complicated stuff. The models consist of dozens of equations written to reflect how liquids and gases move about the planet. Just as a symphony's sound is affected by the crash of symbols or the pluck of a violin string, the planet's future temperature is influenced by powerful ocean currents and tiny specks of sea salt. In between are other players, such as sunlight, clouds and rain.
Added to the equations are such measurements as past temperatures, barometric pressure and sea salinity. Calculations about the influence of sunlight are entered. Then various projections of greenhouse-gas emissions are factored in. The computers run the equations and generate projections of global temperatures.
The models are only as good as the information they are fed. One big uncertainty is ocean temperature. Oceans trap huge amounts of heat, and they process by which they release it over time affects the temperature of the planet. But there isn't a lot of actual data, because the vastness of the oceans makes gathering temperature data costly and arduous.
The success of the models also depends on the soundness of their assumptions. The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet. The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation -- and how clouds in turn affect temperature -- remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.
On a graph, the models' temperature projections ultimately point upward, signifying warming. But along the way, each line has dips -- temporary periods of cooling. The timing and depth of the drops differ from model to model.
Most climate scientists have regarded these zigs and zags as noise. Their models are designed to project how greenhouse gases will affect the global thermostat over a century, not what temperatures will be in any year or even in any decade.

"We care about the climate in the 2080s. We don't care about the climate on Aug. 15, 2084," says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
The models' focus on century-long trends is in part a function of limited data. Predicting short-term temperatures requires more measurements than projecting long-term trends. But such data have been lacking. "These long-term climate projections are a much easier problem than these shorter-term climate projections," says Mr. Dessler. "It's sort of counterintuitive."
Though often overlooked in the debate about man-made warming, natural factors have contributed to record high temperatures. The year 1998, for example, was widely noted as the hottest year on record, intensifying concerns about global warming and people's role in it. But one reason that 1998 set a record is that a strong shift in ocean temperature known as El Niño occurred that year. "1998 was a very hot year because it was an El Niño year," says Mr. Dessler.
The 2007 U.N. report included in its widely read summary a chart of projected temperatures that lacked visible periods of cooling. That is because it was an average of the lines from many different climate models. As averages do, it looked smooth. And it pointed up, indicating rising temperatures.
Yet as the report was released, the global average temperature was below what it had been in 2005, which along with 1998 was one of the two hottest years on record. Even so, the average temperature in 2006 and 2007 remained among the 10 highest ever recorded.
About a year of the U.N. report's release, researchers in Germany published a paper in the journal Nature that attributed the cooling to the enigmatic ocean currents.
The paper was based on a model that used new ocean-temperature measurements. It concluded that a shift in ocean currents was counteracting the warming from greenhouse gases. And that is causing the planet, on balance, to cool.
The paper argues that intermittent cooling from natural factors such as ocean currents will prove less significant in the long term than continued warming from greenhouse-gas emissions. But climate scientists acknowledge that those natural variabilities aren't fully understood. "This is pioneering work," says Mr. Latif, one of the authors of the authors of the German paper. "I won't say our forecast will be correct."
A separate study by researchers in the U.K., published in 2007 in the journal Science, also says the cooling will soon be outweighed by warming from greenhouse gases.
Unsurprisingly, the research hasn't settled the debate. Scientists who have long questioned man-made global warming cite the temperature drop that began in 2006 as more evidence the models are wrong. "They were predicting warming," says Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Lindzen's work, regarded as leading the research challenging man-made warming, suggests that natural factors such as clouds generally inhibit, rather than intensify, greenhouse-gas warming. He wrote in a recent article that the study from the U.K. admits that the kind of climate model cited in the U.N.'s IPCC report "did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC's iconic attribution" linking greenhouse-gas emissions to climate change. He added that "even when all models agree, they can all be wrong."
The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won't resume for perhaps a decade.
Such disagreements aren't unusual in a nascent science. "I don't think anybody is surprised that we're going to get one model that suggests it's going to cool and another that suggests it's going to warm," says Vicky Pope, a scientist at the Hadley Center, the U.K. institute where the research for the British paper was done. "That's consistent with where we are with the science."
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com

 

Climate Model Fails: Drop in Global Temperatures "Not in the Plans"

Ugh, Wilderness!: The Horror of 'ANWR,' the American Elite's Favorite Hellhole

National Review, August 6, 2001 by Jonah Goldberg

Deadhorse, Alaska

As I stand here looking at what must be the largest selection of porn magazines above the Arctic Circle (and an impressive display by any standards), I can't help thinking of a line from the 1973 film classic Papillon: "Abandon all hope and masturbate as little as possible."

In a sense, that should be the motto of Deadhorse. This "town" has one store and no restaurants. Worse, with the exception of some inaccessible Indian and Eskimo villages, the nearest alcohol is on the other side of a vast mountain range hundreds of miles to the south. Indeed, this fact alone may explain why the general store has every conceivable publication for the man who enjoys drinking a beer and wooing a lady, but can't-because he's in Deadhorse.

Residents of some humble towns boast of their McDonald's or Krispy Kreme franchises, or perhaps the fact that Elvis once passed through. Deadhorse chauvinists are quick to brag that this sprawling, gravel- lined lot of airplane hangars, cargo dumps, and corrugated trailers has a ZIP code; once this postal luxury has been mentioned, the frills drop off dramatically. The next-most-impressive thing is the bumper sticker on the pickup truck that splashed mud on my shoes. It reads, "Where the Hell is Deadhorse, Alaska?"

I have come here because if you want to write about oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, you have to come here. Deadhorse is the central spur for oil activity on the North Slope of Alaska, specifically the area known as Prudhoe Bay. I arrived in Deadhorse together with a hundred or so regular commuters from Anchorage, all of them employed one way or another in the search for what was once called-at least in the opening of The Beverly Hillbillies-black gold, or Texas Tea.

They work in the North Slope, an 89,000-square-mile tract of land roughly the size of Minnesota. If Alaska were Don King, the North Slope would be his afro. More specifically they work in the much smaller area around the coastal plain near Prudhoe Bay, the starting point of the trans-Alaska pipeline and the home of the richest oilfields in North America. And within that space, they work on a comparatively tiny archipelago of parking-lot-sized islands of human activity in a boundless ocean of tundra.

Indeed, before you can appreciate what a small presence human beings have up here, you need to understand how mind-bogglingly huge-and devoid of people-Alaska really is. Alaska has a population not much greater than that of the nation's capital, but you could fit the District of Columbia into it more than 9,000 times. You could squeeze California into it almost four times; New York State, more than eleven times. A former Army Ranger who now works in Prudhoe Bay as a doctor put it to me this way: "We don't even bother trying to put out Connecticut-sized forest fires up here. Maybe we start to worry when they get to be the size of Virginia."

Over 60 percent of the official wilderness areas of the U.S. are in Alaska alone (which is one reason native Alaskans resent bureaucrats four time zones away who try to turn their state into a federally protected theme park). Anchorage, on the southern coast, is Alaska's biggest city, accounting all by itself for more than a third of the state's population.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is way over on the other side of Alaska, past several mountain ranges. ANWR is 19.6 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. And it's beautiful. Well, most of it is. But more about that in a moment. On the very northern cusp of ANWR is what is commonly called the coastal plain, a tract of flat tundra largely indistinguishable from other spots along the coast and throughout the region. This comprises about 8 percent of the refuge-but an even smaller fraction of its pretty scenery. Some of this area is already off-limits to oil exploration, permanently. Nonetheless, the U.S. Geological Survey-seconded by industry experts-believes there could be untold billions of barrels of oil in the swath still legally available. The oil industry says it would need to use only 2,000 acres- an area no bigger than Dulles Airport, outside D.C.-to get that oil. This footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits.

Why do affluent Ted Turner types oppose exploration? Well, there's a simple explanation and a complicated one. The simple one is that it could be bad for the Porcupine River caribou herd, the second smallest of the four major caribou herds that sometimes use the area to calve their young; in turn, a tribe of Indians called the Gwich'in claim this would destroy their way of life because they live off the Porcupine caribou (but nowhere near where the drilling would be). The more complicated explanation is that this is all a convenient and bogus cover for the simple fact that Americans generally-and environmentalists like Turner specifically-are more than a little daft when it comes to ANWR.

The most striking thing about this part of the world is how much meaning we impose on it. I don't even mean simply the ideological baggage of environmentalists or rank capitalists. Human beings impose meaning at the most basic level. Take, for example, something as mundane as the calendar. "Day" and "night" are total abstractions up here. When I arrived in Deadhorse, it was "early morning" according to my watch. But the reality is that the sun has not set into night, nor will it rise into a new day, for weeks.

The sun beats down on the North Slope more or less constantly for another month or two as the Northern Hemisphere eases itself into winter. When winter comes, there is no sunlight whatsoever for 56 straight days, and long after that, the sun is barely a momentary gift of orange and (later) yellow. If you wanted to set your clock ahead for daylight savings, you'd need to turn the big hand to "May."

In this sense the whole area is really just a Rorschach test for the imagination. There's little doubt that for much of human history most reasonable people would have considered this spot the definition of the word "godforsaken." You need not look back, for evidence, to the ancient pilgrims who died on the frozen tundra. You could simply read an old copy of the Washington Post from 14 years ago: "[T]hat part of the [ANWR] is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life."

Two decades have intervened, and an environmental fatwa has been issued declaring that the word "pristine" is synonymous with "beautiful" or "sacred." Of course, anyone who has seen a mint-condition AMC Gremlin knows that pristineness and aesthetic appeal have only a coincidental relationship. Even ANWR fetishists concede that in the winter, with its complete darkness and 70-below-zero temperatures-not counting wind chill-this is no paradise.

But then, it's no paradise in the summertime either. During the winter, the entire coastal plain is covered by a vast tarp of ice; when the sun comes back, the resulting thaw creates, well, lots of puddles. These patches of freestanding water pock the flat tundra for as far as the eye can see; that's why this barren region is the only place the U.S. government recognizes as both a desert and a wetland. The water in an old tire can breed thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes.

In preparation for my trip, I contacted several Prudhoe veterans. They all said the same thing: Beware the mosquitoes. "They're about the size of blue jays," one man warned. Another explained how they pluck the lighter roughnecks off the catwalks to devour them more slowly in their vast, hidden mosquito caves.

So when I reach the oil installation called Alpine, I'm prepared. In Anchorage, I'd bought the most powerful bug repellent the store had, containing 95 percent DEET-a shorthand for some monstrous chemical that requires a warning label more appropriate for a rusty drum of anthrax. I sprayed myself all over with the solution-except in the face; the bottle warned that this might send me to the hospital-including my thick long-sleeved shirt and the tucked-in T-shirt underneath.

We take an SUV down the gravel road to the oil wells, a couple of dozen mosquitoes in tow. As we drive up to the wells, a man walking down the road waves at us, and presumably smiles, from behind a mask of tropical mosquito netting, the sort worn by the crews who finished the Panama Canal. Our guide declares, "I've got to get one of those."

Me too, I quickly decide. The mosquitoes are not fast flyers, but if you stand still they swarm around you like senators spotting a TV camera. The DEET works well, where it works. But since the warning label suggested avoiding my face, the buggers go straight for my nose, mouth, and, most distressingly, the air pockets of my safety goggles. While they are not the size of blue jays, I can't help wondering how so many journalists have scoured the area without mentioning the fact that on a bad day, according to the villagers in nearby Nuisquit, you can't open your mouth for fear of inhaling the mosquitoes.

All right, it may not be great shakes for people, but this is Eden for the caribou, right? Well, that's what you might think from reading the purple prose found in, for example, the New York Times. Perhaps because of the politics involved, a seemingly limitless number of journalists from the Lower 48 put on their "nature lover" hats when writing about the spring thaw along the coastal plain. They write about the "majestic" and "glorious" return of the "majestic" and "glorious" caribou herds to their ancestral and, yes, "majestic" and "glorious" calving grounds. From these dispatches it's a wonder teenage girls ever bothered with unicorn posters when they could have pinned serene Arctic caribou to their bedroom walls.

The roughnecks in Prudhoe Bay have a saying: "Life begins at forty." This is not a self-help mantra, but a statement of fact. Once the temperature rises above 40 degrees, torrents of insects-the mosquitoes among the least nettlesome-emerge to dash through the winged portion of their life cycle before the winter returns. Perhaps because they are in such a hurry, they don't take much time to be kind to the caribou; the swarms can kill calves and even adults.

Consider the warble fly, a vicious bumblebee-like insect that is so mean it can cause a whole herd to go berserk, stomping the ground in a panic and eventually stampeding; not even wolf packs can make them do that. The warble fly lays its eggs on the caribou's leg hairs. When the larvae hatch, they march like Germans through Paris-which is to say, unopposed-through the caribou's flesh to its back, where they feed off its skin and fat from the end of summer until the following spring. Starting in late May, the creatures burst out of the caribou's skin and fall to the ground. A biologist's text asserts: "Every caribou hide I've ever examined has had anywhere from 20-350 warbles along its back."

And then there's the nostril fly, or nosebot, which reproduces by harassing the caribou's ample nostrils. In the process of trying to rid themselves of these agonizing pests, the animals lick at their muzzles or press their snouts into the soil, which delights the nosebots because it pushes the larvae into the caribou's nose. The grubs hatch in the nostrils and inch their way back to the base of the throat, where they feed and grow into a larval mass so large that the caribou's breathing can become difficult. The following spring, the caribou do get to sneeze the fly larvae onto the ground-but the expelled critters only hatch and start the process all over again.

And all the while, the caribou are hunted by the omnipresent mosquitoes as well as bears, wolves, various native tribes on three-wheelers or in boats, and (of course) the occasional mukluk-wearing well-to-do orthodontist from New Rochelle who fancies himself a big-game hunter. The caribou essentially race to the coastal plain in a cloven-hoofed Arctic death march in pursuit of cooler pastures and, perhaps-if they are lucky-someplace with the tiniest breeze to spare them from the pestilence.

One such place happens to be Prudhoe Bay itself; specifically, the areas around the oil installations and pipelines, where the Central Arctic caribou herd has thrived in the shadow of extensive oil extraction. Since drilling started here, the herd has increased fivefold. The caribou throng to the roads and gravel pads because the breeze is slightly stronger, and hence a bit more free of the bugs. They hide in the shade under the pipeline on the warm days, and plenty of people will tell you they cozy up to it for warmth in the winter. At least for the Central Arctic herd, the oil facilities are less a disruption and more like the equivalent of the man-made reefs we make from old tankers, for sea life, off the Louisiana coast.

At the terminal in Deadhorse, we boarded a beat-up old yellow school bus that serves as the shuttle to planes bound for the "remote" areas on the North Slope. The formidable female bus driver announced to her regular roughneck passengers, "Boy! The grizzlies are really on the prowl this morning."

As I was to learn from dozens of roughnecks and others, grizzly bears, like caribou, aren't frightened by oil exploration. They consider Deadhorse the Paris or New York of the North Slope; they come in to see the sights, perhaps grab a little dinner, even to catch a show. Everyone has a bear story: The owner of an air-charter service recounts to me how she came out of her office one day to find three bears sitting, expectantly, atop her car, as if she were late for the car pool.

There wasn't much to look at on the flight to Alpine. Once you get over the fact that you are literally on top of the world, in an exotic locale relatively few people will ever see, you come to the sobering realization that the landscape below makes the tall grassy marshes surrounding New York's JFK Airport look like the wilderness outside Winnie the Pooh's house. Most of the regulars didn't even look up from their newspapers to peer out the window. I comforted myself with the fact that ANWR would be much better looking.

Opponents of drilling are absolutely right: Oil exploration isn't pretty. The Alpine site looks like a few gravel parking lots connected by a gravel road. There's industrial piping piled up and corrugated trailers and loading paddocks everywhere. The whole place looks like the floor of one of those giant construction pits before they put up a skyscraper in downtown New York. But what the opponents are reluctant to acknowledge is that the place is tiny: The entire Alpine installation, including living quarters for up to 700 people, covers less than 100 acres (97, to be exact). Those 100 acres represent two- tenths of 1 percent of the 40,000-acre oilfield. The drilling that once would have required perhaps a dozen wells, spread out across the tundra, now requires only one.

This is the miracle of directional drilling, a relatively new technology that environmentalist ideologues are loath to admit even exists, because it runs completely counter to the earth-gouging stereotypes of yesteryear. Directional drilling makes it possible to drill in virtually any direction for miles. Indeed, the drilling can go down hundreds of feet, then sideways, then upwards again, like a fishhook. Don't think of an oil well as a straw, but as an octopus, with tentacles stretching out in all directions. If the Washington Monument were an absurdly tall directional oil well, it could extract oil from underneath the Bethesda suburbs, Arlington National Cemetery, and the Capitol dome-without waking up a sleeping Bethesda baby, rattling an Arlington headstone, or knocking Tom DeLay's bullwhip from the wall.

Today, crews aren't allowed on the tundra. "If I took a leak out there, I'd get fired," an engineer tells me. "In the winter, if you spill some coffee into the snow, you'd better go get a shovel and dig it up."

One of the reasons there is so little environmental impact is that these are the M*A*S*H units of oil exploration: The entire operation is on wheels. Pretty much everything in Alpine doubles as a cosmic-sized Tonka truck. In order to avoid roadwork on the precious tundra, the oil companies build immense ice roads that can bear massive stresses, but still melt harmlessly during the summer. Divided into 15 modules weighing over 15,000 tons, almost the entire Alpine installation was driven, literally, over the Arctic Ocean, and across miles of tundra- without leaving so much as a pothole.

During my tour, the "company man"-that's really what they call them- walks us around the well and through the huge machinery that processes the oil and washes the gravel thrown off by the drilling. I expected the oil workers to feel more than a little put out by all of the environmental hoops they are forced to jump through. But I can't find anyone to say so. In fact, everyone brags about how they run a "zero discharge" facility. "What comes on the slope, comes off the slope," is a mantra. Alongside the runway are huge piles of garbage slated to be flown back to civilization.

Regardless, the media coverage of North Slope oil extraction is a constant source of exasperation to the engineers and roughnecks. For example, the biggest topic of conversation during my stay here is a recent issue of Field & Stream that asserted that bored Prudhoe workers were shooting endangered animals for fun in their off hours. It is the source of constant eye-rolling, jokes, and sighs among the allegedly bored and dangerous workers.

"I knew a guy who got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," the former ranger tells me, with great exasperation. He wasn't throwing rocks for sport, mind you; apparently almost all of the Arctic foxes are rabid. If you get bitten by a rabid fox with inactive rabies, you get those infamous shots. If you get bitten by a fox with active rabies, the company pays for your funeral. "Every single fox head I've sent to Anchorage for testing has come up positive," he explains. I make a mental note to thank God that I don't have a job that requires the harvesting of rabid fox heads.

The day after my tour of Alpine, my pilot, Kermit Carns, and I fly out towards ANWR. To my left is the Arctic Ocean, a vast jumble of icy, slow-thawing jigsaw-puzzle pieces sitting on a table of dark water. To my right, another ocean, this one of green tundra with thousands of islands of water dotting the landscape: miles upon miles of tundra and puddles. We do see a couple of thousand caribou hugging the frigid beaches of the Arctic Ocean, where the cold and the wind protect them from the insects. The caribou look very bored, lounging along the shore, but I assume they are relieved.

When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's expedition stumbled upon the Grand Canyon in 1540, it did not occur to him or his party that it was a thing of beauty. Rather, it was a huge hole in the ground, and an even bigger hassle. Over the next three centuries, the Spanish and countless others encountered the natural wonder and considered it little more than a big obstacle. It wasn't until the 1870s that non-indigenous North Americans looked upon the Canyon as "beautiful."

So if it took hundreds of years for Americans to recognize that a giant gash in the ground was actually a marvel, perhaps I can be forgiven for failing to see the beauty in the coastal plain-if that beauty is actually there. But I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Moreover, the Inupiat Eskimos who actually live on the coastal plain are not Rousseauian noble savages living the life Ted Kaczynski wanted us to live. They are very poor people living in ramshackle housing, and they overwhelmingly support oil development on the coastal plain- because they will get a cut. Environmentalists don't mention these indigenous people because they muddle the story line. They do, however, mention the Gwich'in people very frequently. The "capital" of the Gwich'in nation is Arctic Village (pop. 150), which just happens to be hundreds of miles away from the coastal plain on the other side of the Brooks mountain range. The Gwich'in are regularly trotted out at congressional hearings in Washington, wearing native garb they only occasionally put on back home. The Gwich'in insist that even looking for oil on the coastal plain-with non-intrusive seismic imaging-would be unacceptable.

We are constantly told that the Gwich'in, with their premodern attachment to nature, put a human face on the fight against "corporate greed." But before you write your check to "Save the Gwich'in" (use an Internet search engine, and you'll see how easy that is), you might be interested to know that the Gwich'in invited those same evil oil companies to look for oil on their own lands more than a decade ago. Indeed, ask an Inupiat Eskimo why the Gwich'in are blocking exploration and he won't tell you about the Gwich'in's rejection of postindustrial bourgeois consumerism; he'll tell you the Gwich'in are furious because they don't have any oil of their own, and playing the noble savage for guilty liberals is the most lucrative revenge available.

But the fact is, none of that matters. The only thing that matters to the Robert Redfords of the world is the idea-yes, the idea-that this place is "pristine." The appeal of ANWR to the average environmentalist is an entirely psychological one. If 0.0000001 percent of the Americans who fervently oppose exploration in ANWR ever actually visited this remote corner of the world over the course of a decade, it would constitute a tourism stampede. The fact is, environmentalists simply savor the idea that there is something untouched by grubby humanity out there. Indeed, if the oil companies could extract the oil in secret and keep this dream alive, everybody would be happy-including, probably, caribou.

This, of course, exposes the true place ANWR holds in the worldview of its voluptuaries: It's a religious icon, the Dome of the Rock of environmentalism. Indeed, among environmentalists, religious adjectives crowd out all others. ANWR's coastal plain is "holy," "sacred," "divine," and "hallowed," not merely by the Gwich'in (who don't actually live there), but by the journalists and activists who just like knowing it's there. Drilling is therefore not just "greedy," but also sacrilegious. It would not matter, environmentalists insist, if there were a trillion barrels of oil safely extractable with a corkscrew and a turkey baster. To them, drilling isn't bad policy; it's blasphemy.

Because passions so completely trump reason on this issue, ANWR becomes ripe as a wedge issue for opportunistic Democrats. For example, Sen. Joseph Lieberman says ANWR exploration "would cause irreversible damage to one of God's most awesome creations." This is irresponsible absurdity. Not only would the damage, in fact, be reversible; this area simply cannot hold a candle to God's most awesome creations. The Post (and the New York Times) had it right in the 1980s, when they supported exploration-with far more intrusive technology than today's-in this truly remote, bleak, and nigh-upon-inaccessible redoubt on the top of the world.

Of course, the activists cannot admit this, so they compare ANWR to places most people have actually been or plan on going to: Yosemite, the Everglades, and even the entirely man-made Central Park. This sort of distortion is rampant. "The simple fact is, drilling is inherently incompatible with wilderness," former president Jimmy Carter wrote in the New York Times. "The roar alone-of road-building, trucks, drilling, and generators-would pollute the wild music of the Arctic and be as out of place there as it would be in the heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon." Never mind that all of that harmless noise pollution would occur in pitch darkness, drowned out by a 120-degree-below-zero wind chill. Even Jimmy Carter should know that music is like trees falling in the forest: It's only music if there's somebody there to hear it.

Sins of Emission

The ethanol boondoggle is also an environmental catastrophe.

Donning FDR's cape, Eisenhower's stripes and JFK's boat shoes, President Obama observed in Florida on Tuesday that his "clean energy economy" will require "mobilization" on the order of fighting World War II, building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. Of course, the only "mobilization" going on at the moment is on behalf of ethanol, whose many political dispensations the biofuels lobby is finding new ways to preserve even as the evidence of its destructiveness piles up.
The latest embarrassment arrives via the peer-reviewed journal Science, not known for its right-wing inclinations. A new paper calls attention to what the authors (led by Princeton's Tim Searchinger) call "a critical accounting error" in the way carbon emissions from biofuels are measured in climate-change programs world-wide. Bernie Madoff had a few critical accounting errors too.
Though you won't hear it from the biofuels lobby, ethanol actually generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as fossil fuels, or more, per unit of energy. But this was still supposed to be better than coal or oil because ethanol's CO2 is "recycled." Since plants absorb and store carbon that is already in the atmosphere, burning them as fuel would create no new emissions, whereas fossil fuels release CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.
With everything supposedly balancing out, the cap-and-trade programs run by the United Nations and European Union—and maybe soon the U.S.—treat biofuels as carbon-neutral. The Science study argues that this is a false economy, because it doesn't consider changes in land use. If mature forests are cleared to make room for biofuel-growing farms, then the carbon that would otherwise accumulate in those forests ought to be counted on ethanol's balance sheet as well.
Cap-and-trade programs exacerbate the problem because developed countries (where emissions are putatively capped) get credit for reductions from ethanol—despite the fact that their biofuels are generally grown in developing countries (where emissions aren't capped). So if Malaysians burn down a rain forest to grow palm oil that ends up in German biodiesel, Malaysia doesn't count the land-use emissions and Germany doesn't count the tail-pipe emissions.
Given these incentives, the authors cite a study showing that by 2050, "based solely on economic considerations, bioenergy could displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover. . . . The reason: When bioenergy from any biomass is counted as carbon neutral, economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions." In other words, not only is cap and trade self-defeating on its own terms but it also risks creating a genuine ecological disaster.
By way of a solution, Mr. Searchinger and his coauthors modestly suggest doing away with the regulatory three-card monte and counting net ethanol emissions from where they are actually emitted. But this is political heresy on Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee, which passed its own cap-and-tax program in July with the votes of farm-state Democrats, because the bill all but banned the Environmental Protection Agency from studying land-use changes. So much for letting "the science" guide public policy.
In Florida, Mr. Obama said the only people who could oppose his climate plan are "those who are afraid of the future." On this one, at least, the President is right.

 

UN Signals Delay in Climate Change Treaty

 

By EDITH M. LEDERER (AP) – 2 hours ago

UNITED NATIONS — Just weeks before an international conference on climate change, the United Nations signaled it was scaling back expectations of reaching agreement on a new treaty to slow global warming.
Janos Pasztor, director of the secretary-general's Climate Change Support Team, said Monday "it's hard to say how far the conference will be able to go" because the U.S. Congress has not agreed on a climate bill, and industrialized nations have not agreed on targets to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions or funding to help developing countries limit their discharges.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made a new climate treaty his top priority, hosting a Sept. 22 summit on climate change to spur political support and traveling extensively to build political momentum for a global agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which only requires 37 industrialized nations to cut emissions.
Pasztor told a news conference "there is tremendous activity by governments in capitals and internationally to shape the outcome" of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in early December, which "is a good development" because political leadership is essential to make a deal.
But he indicated that Copenhagen most likely won't produce a treaty, but instead will push governments as far as they can go on the content of an agreement.
"The secretary-general believes that we must maintain the political momentum established by the 101 heads of state and government who attended the climate change summit and continue to aim for an ambitious, politically binding agreement in Copenhagen that would chart the way for future post-Copenhagen negotiations that lead to a legally binding global agreement," Pasztor said.
Ban was visiting Seattle on Monday to promote action on climate change. The U.N. chief told a news conference that he still thinks the U.S. can come up with an ambitious measure that will encourage other nations to act on carbon emissions.
"I'm very encouraged by the strong commitment by the Obama administration," Ban said.
Pasztor stressed that there is still a final negotiating session in Barcelona, Spain, from Nov. 2-6 that will be followed by two more weeks of work in Copenhagen. The secretary-general is in close contact with the Danish prime minister and might go to the meeting of Asian and Pacific leaders in Singapore on Nov. 14-15 — which President Barack Obama plans to attend — to keep pressing for a global accord in Copenhagen, Pasztor said.
Obama attended the U.N. climate summit, and this week the Senate environment committee will take up its version of a global warming bill which would cut greenhouse gases by about 80 percent by 2050 and require more domestic energy to come from renewable sources.
But with work still to be done on health care and deep divisions in Congress over how to deal with climate change, chances the Senate will pass a climate bill by the end of the year are slim.
Ban said he plans to meet with Senate leaders to encourage passage of the climate bill.
By doing so, the Senate "can have a huge political impact for other negotiators of other counties," Ban said. Many developing countries, such as China and India, "are ready to make some political compromises only if and only when the United States is ready to do that."
Pasztor said a U.S. climate bill is very important because without one, U.S. negotiators in Copenhagen can't negotiate on targets for emissions reductions.
He said two key unresolved issues are agreement on emission reduction targets for industrialized countries and how to finance actions by developing countries to limit their emissions growth and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Developed countries want to provide money for specific actions to curb emissions — but developing countries say the actions depend on how much money they're going to get, Pasztor said, and that still hasn't been decided.

Great is Truth, and Mighty Above All Things

Valedictorian Address by The Right Honourable

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

to the Heartland International Conference on Climate Change

10 March 2009

HERE are they all today, those bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the

Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency – those Greens too yellow to admit

they’re really Reds?

The main message of this conference to the bed-wetters is this. Stop telling lies. You

are fooling fewer and fewer of us. However many lies are uttered, the scientific truth

remains unalterable.

The Forces of Darkness, with their “global warming” chimera, came perilously close

to ending the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. They almost ushered in a new Dark

Age. Yet they have failed. Why? They have failed because you, here, have had the

courage to face them down, to confront their falsehoods, and to nail their lies.

The Age of Light and Reason shall not die. Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle to

that last goodnight: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” You have not raged in

vain. The world is not cooking: it is cooling. Every opinion poll – even those

conducted by the bedwetters themselves – shows that global public opinion is

cooling as fast as the global climate.

In one recent survey, “global warming” came at the very bottom of a list of political

and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on

the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem. “Global

warming” is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is

to have the courage to do nothing.

We, the people, are no longer afraid of “global warming”. We are fed up to the back

teeth of hearing about it. We are bored by it. And the bed-wetters know it. Their evermore-

outlandish predictions are a measure of their blind panic. The Dr. Strangelove

of NASA, in the latest of a series of ever-more-desperate attempts to flog the dead

horse of climatic apocalypse, recently wrote that sea level is about to rise by 246 feet,

“und anyvun zat disagrees viz me vill be arrested und put on trial for high crimes

against humanidy und nature.”

W

2

When Hansen’s political ally and financial beneficiary Al Gore had only predicted

one-twelfth that amount of imminent sea-level rise, Mr. Justice Burton said in the

London High Court, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any

scientific view.” But then, Al Gore knew that all along. In 2005, the year he said sea

level would imminently rise by 20 feet, he bought a $4 million condo in the St. Regis

tower, San Francisco – just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf. The only

danger to sea level is from all those bedwetters.

Now, if we’re going to exaggerate, let’s exaggerate properly. Sea level is going to rise

not by Gore’s 20 feet, not by Hansen’s 246 feet, but by 2640 feet. Half a mile. You

heard it here first. There goes Andy Revkin of the New York Times, dashing to the

telephone to tell them to hold the front page.

All lands not submerged beneath the inexorably-rising waves will bake and wither

under permanent year-round drought. Yea, and the very same lands will smother

and drown under permanent year-round floods. And plagues of locusts. And

pestilences. And famines. And brimstone and fire. And boils and pustules, yea, verily,

and other things that pullulate and fester and sound nasty enough to get big

headlines and bigger research grants. (I see now why these bed-wetters exaggerate

on such an outrageous scale. It’s a lot of fun.)

Dr. Strangelove has published a peer-reviewed paper – so it must be true – saying

60% of all species will soon be flung into extinction. It won’t be 60%. It will be 326%.

Whaddaya mean, we can’t extinguish more than 100%? You heard the US President.

Yes We Can. How do we know we can? Because the IPCC says.

“Because the IPCC says.” That pathetic phrase is nothing less than an instrument of

political abdication on the part of our democratically-elected leaders. There was once

an androgynous crooner who called himself “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince”.

In Britain, Her Majesty’s Opposition, “The Party Formerly Known As Conservative,”

has stated, in the person of its chief of policy: “We cannot question what the

scientists say.” Yes we can.

When the Founding Fathers of this great nation met in that hot summer long ago in

the City of Brotherly Love to craft the noble Constitution of the United States, they

were building their great nation upon the solid foundation of your Declaration of

Independence. Independence! This winter, if the United States signs up to the Treaty

of Copenhagen, her independence – and our freedom – will be gone forever. If

Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would be turning in his grave.

Last year the President of the Czech Republic told this Conference, “It’s not about

climatology – it’s about freedom.” This year the President of the European Union

told us the same. Two statesmen with one message.

Let me ask you this question: and it is not a rhetorical question – I want to hear your

answer loud and clear. Do we want to be governed not by representatives whom we

elect and hold to account, but by the technocratic-centralist wannabe-worldgovernment

of the IPCC?

Do we want to pay a single red cent more of our taxes to fund the “global warming”

boondoggle?

Are we terrified by the spectre of sea level rising 246 feet?

3

Do we expect sea level to rise this century by more than about 1 foot?

Do we want to see the bed-wetting liars, hucksters, shysters, fraudsters and

racketeers ever more extravagantly rewarded with honors and prizes for their evermore-

extravagant falsehoods, fables, and fictions?

Do we want cap-‘n’-trade?

Do we need carbon taxes?

Do we want to let Joe Bast get away with not organizing another Heartland

Conference next year?

You, in this room, have bravely upheld the truth and the scientific method against all

manner of lies, threats, sanctions, personal attacks and entertaining revisions to your

CreepyMedia biographies. Because you have not failed or faltered, the Forces of

Darkness are now scuttling back into their lairs, there to snivel in the eternal

darkness of utter oblivion and CNN.

Divine Providence, unlike the bed-wetters, has a sense of humour. Governor

Schwarzenegger – now, there’s an oxymoron for you: or “moron” for short. As soon

as Governor Schwarzenegger announced that the science was settled – and how the

hell would he know? – two-thirds of California’s citrus crop was destroyed. Were all

those oranges and lemons wiped out by drought? Or by forest fires? No, by an

exceptionally bitter frost.

Last summer, just as the President of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest taxpayerfunded

pressure-group, was telling us, “Global warming is happening now,” global

temperatures had already been plunging for nearly seven years, at a rate equivalent

to almost 4 Fahrenheit degrees per century. Has your favourite news medium

reported that? Probably not. Maybe that’s why the President of the Royal Society

didn’t know. He doesn’t get his science from the learned journals. He gets it from the

media.

Just as Tony Bliar was announcing on his blog that “global warming is getting

worse”, just as Al Gore was testifying before the Senate – during an ice-storm – that

we face a “climate crisis”, global temperatures plummeted still more. They have been

plummeting at a rate equivalent to 11 Fahrenheit degrees per century throughout the

four years since Gore launched his mawkish, sci-fi comedy horror B-movie. At this

rate, by mid-century we shall roasting in a new Ice Age.

Gore no longer dares to publish his supposed “evidence” for “climate crisis”, because

he is rightly terrified that we here will pounce on it at once and demonstrate that it is

materially, serially, seriously inaccurate – demonstrate its falsity by the dull,

outmoded method of reference to the facts, the science, and the data.

When Gore appeared before the Senate a few weeks ago, the hearing was supposed to

be public. For it is one of the most ancient and settled principles of parliamentary

democracy that the deliberations of those whom we elect, and the testimony that

their committees hear, shall be open and visible to all. Yet, with the furtive

connivance of Senator Boxer and her politicized snivel servants, the science slides

Gore showed to the Senators were kept secret. I and others have asked for them.

4

They are “not available at this time”. And the Senate is “exempt from the Freedom of

Information Act”.

Why are those slides “not available at this time”? Because Gore is running scared.

Rightly scared. Scared of prosecution for peddling a false prospectus in Generation

Investment Management. Neither Gore nor any bed-wetter will any longer dare to

debate the science of climate with us or anyone in the light of day. Gore’s speaking

contract stipulates that he will not debate, he will not answer unscripted questions,

and he will not be interviewed except by journalists acceptable to him. Which

journalists are they? The dim ones that don’t know any science, and the prejudiced

ones that don’t care. Just about all of them.

Recently four of us in this room were invited to a meeting of Government and

opposition leaders and policymakers in Madrid, to debate the science and economics

of climate against Al Gore (not a climate scientist); Railroad Engineer Pachauri, the

head of the UN’s climate science working group (not a climate scientist); Sir Nicholas

Stern, the author of the UK Socialist Government’s joke report on the economics of

climate change (not a climate scientist); and the Environment Minister of Spain (not

a climate scientist).

All four of us – three climate scientists and I (not a climate scientist) accepted the

invitation to debate. All four of them refused. They said they would only come if they

could speak on their own, without facing any challenge, any debate, any question,

any fact, any inconvenient truth. Not one of them dared to face us. They did not have

what in English we should call the cojones.

There was no climate crisis. There is no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.

“Global warming” is not a global crisis. It is a global scientific fraud.

Without you, that blunt truth might have taken far longer to emerge than it has. And

delay is fatal. Though lies cannot alter or harm the truth, they can kill our fellow

men. The environmental movement is out of control. It is now humankind’s deadliest

enemy. In the name of humanity, it must be outlawed. Thirty years ago, the soidisant

“Greens” agitated for DDT to be banned. They killed 40 million people of

malaria, most of them children. Eventually, after a third of a century, the WHO at

last caved in at last to humanitarian pressure from me and others and reversed the

ban. Dr. Arata Kochi, announcing the end of that murderous ban, said, “Usually in

this field politics comes first and science second. Now we must take a stand on the

science and the data.” That is what you in this room have so gallantly done. You have

taken a stand on the science and the data.

Now the very same soi-disant “Greens” are killing millions by starvation in a dozen of

the world’s poorest regions. Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy,

senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent “global warming” bugaboo, has turned millions

of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for

automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing

Osamabamarama’s stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of

the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in

our caves.

The prosperity of the West is not only our sustenance. It is also the very lifeblood of

the struggling nations of the Third World. If our economies fail, we are

inconvenienced, but they die.

5

In the past year there have been food riots in a dozen major regions, in protest at the

doubling of the price of staple food which the World Bank blames almost entirely on

the biofuel scam. Has your favourite news medium reported the riots and the mass

starvation? Probably not. Has it given our starving fellow-men – our brothers and

sisters – the same attention and prominence and column inches and frequency of

coverage as it has given to every icicle putatively dribbling in Greenland? Certainly

not.

Those who are dying are only black people, poor people, in far-away countries of

which we know little, with no voice and no vote. Why should we care? Well, we

should care. And we – you and I – we do care. In this debate it is we who hold the

moral high ground.

There is no incompatibility between science and religion, as long as religion does not

attempt to usurp the realm of science, and as long as science does not become a

religion. So I hope that this scientific conference will forgive a Christian if, in a

Christian country founded by Christians, he does his duty as the valedictorian by

sending you away from this great gathering with a blessing – a blessing that has been

spoken in the stone-built village churches of England for longer than anyone can

remember. Let it be a tribute to your steadfast courage.

“Go forth into the world in peace;

“Be of good courage;

“Hold fast to that which is good;

“Render to no man evil for evil;

“Strengthen the faint-hearted;

“Support the weak;

“Help the afflicted;

“Honour all men;

“Love and serve the Lord,

“Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Ghost;

“And the blessing of God Almighty,

“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,

“Be upon you and remain with you always. Amen.”

Climate Chief Lord Stern: Give Up Meat to Save the Planet

Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

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He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”
Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.
He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.
He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.
Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees centigrade. Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes.
UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.
Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry.
Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: “Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It’s not a view shared by the NFU. Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us.”
On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day — the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern’s remarks. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment,” she said. “Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet.”
The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century.

Obama hits out at climate 'naysayers'

US President Barack Obama on Friday hit out at naysayers he blamed for peddling "cynical" claims that global warming is a myth to derail a landmark climate change bill in Congress. Obama warned that the closer the Senate came to passing legislation which has already cleared the House of Representatives, the more opponents would resort to underhand tactics.
"The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama warned in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"But I think it's important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we'll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we're engaged in.
"There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy," Obama said, a day after the release of a poll showing fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming.
"There are going to be those who... make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary."
Climate legislation was introduced in the Senate only at the end of September, three months after the House passed its version of the bill.
Prospects for the legislation are uncertain, but in recent weeks some prominent Republicans have signaled they will support the move to cut US emissions and introduce a cap and trade system for polluters.
Administration officials have already warned that the legislation will not pass before a UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December -- a delay hampering hopes of a major new international treaty to combat global warming.
Obama argued that the fight against climate change was not just necessary for the health of the planet, but should also spur a new range of green jobs and technologies that could unleash economic growth and promote energy independence.
"From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy," he said.
"The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy, I am convinced of that, and I want America to be that nation."
Obama, who reversed the global warming skepticism of the previous Bush administration, made his remarks a day after a new poll showed the number of Americans who believe climate change is real had fallen in the last year.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 57 percent of Americans see "solid evidence of warming," compared to 71 percent in April 2008, and 77 percent in August 2007.
The increase in the number of Americans with doubts about climate change came across the political spectrum, though it was particularly pronounced among independents.

President Obama won’t talk climate change in Copenhagen

Barack Obama will be in Oslo for his Nobel ceremony, but not Copenhagen

President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals, The Times has learnt.
With healthcare reform clogging his domestic agenda and no prospect of a comprehensive climate treaty in Copenhagen, Mr Obama may disappoint campaigners and foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, who have urged him to attend to boost the hopes of a breakthrough.
The White House would not comment on Mr Obama’s travel plans yesterday, but administration officials have said privately that “Oslo is plenty close” — a reference to the Nobel ceremony that falls on December 10, two days into the Copenhagen meeting.
The White House confirmed that the President would be in Oslo to accept the prize, but a source close to the Administration said it was “hard to see the benefit” of his going to Copenhagen if there was no comprehensive deal for him to close or sign. Another expert, who did not want to be named, said he would be “really, really shocked” if Mr Obama went to Copenhagen, adding that European hopes about the power of his Administration to transform the climate change debate in a matter of months bore little relation to reality. The comprehensive climate change treaty that for years has been the goal of the Copenhagen conference was now an “unrealistic” prospect, Yvo de Boer, the UN official guiding the process, said last week.

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• Welcome to the carbon circus

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Chinese and Indian resistance to mandatory carbon emission limits has so far proved an insurmountable obstacle to crafting a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that is acceptable to the US. America has also slowed the process through its reluctance to accept climate change science or the carbon cap-and-trade mechanism to combat global warming.
Only 57 per cent of Americans believe that there is strong evidence that the world has grown warmer in recent decades, down from 71 per cent a year ago, according to a new poll. Partly as a result, the White House is having to wage a vote-by-vote battle in Congress for a climate change Bill that would embrace cap-and-trade. The Bill will not be signed into law until next year at the earliest but is considered essential for any global deal.
Mr Obama flew to Boston yesterday to make the case for a wholesale American switch to clean energy, and to launch a six-week drive to persuade the world that the US is at last serious about joining international efforts to combat climate change.
He will have his work cut out. As a presidential candidate, he held out the hope of signing a cap-and-trade Bill in time for Copenhagen. Since then, a deep recession and months of delays on healthcare reform have pushed climate change into third place on the domestic US agenda, after financial regulatory reform. That reform is seen as essential for cap-and-trade because of the need to rebuild trust in complex financial instruments after “an incredible nativist backlash against new markets” caused by the banking crisis, according to Paul Bledsoe, a former White House official at the National Commission on Energy Policy.
For Mr Obama to travel to Copenhagen would be “completely out of keeping” with the American political climate and with precedent, Mr Bledsoe said. The most senior White House official to attend a past UN climate conference was Vice-President Al Gore in 1997. He signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the failure by Congress to ratify it since has been a defining theme of a decade of climate change talks.
In Mr Obama’s absence, the US delegation will be led by Todd Stern, the Administration’s special envoy on climate change. Analysts believe Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, could fly in at the last moment, but as one analyst said of both Mrs Clinton and Vice-President Joe Biden: “They only want to be associated with success, not failure.”
The gap between hopes of what Mr Obama can do and reality was on show this week when another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said he thought the President should be doing more. Instead, the Obama Administration is seeking to lower expectations before Copenhagen by drawing attention to its short tenure in office, the long years of US foot-dragging on climate change under his predecessor and recent progress on domestic climate change legislation.

The Real Climate Change Catastrophe

In a startling new book, Christopher Booker reveals how a handful of scientists, who have pushed flawed theories on global warming for decades, now threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:00AM GMT 25 Oct 2009
Comments 87 | Comment on this article

Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable events ever to take place in the House of Commons. For six hours MPs debated what was far and away the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before Parliament.
The Climate Change Bill laid down that, by 2050, the British people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by well over 80 per cent. Short of some unimaginable technological revolution, such a target could not possibly be achieved without shutting down almost the whole of our industrialised economy, changing our way of life out of recognition.
Even the Government had to concede that the expense of doing this – which it now admits will cost us £18 billion a year for the next 40 years – would be twice the value of its supposed benefits. Yet, astonishingly, although dozens of MPs queued up to speak in favour of the Bill, only two dared to question the need for it. It passed by 463 votes to just three.
One who voted against it was Peter Lilley who, just before the vote was taken, drew the Speaker’s attention to the fact that, outside the Palace of Westminster, snow was falling, the first October snow recorded in London for 74 years. As I observed at the time: “Who says that God hasn’t got a sense of humour?”
By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly sound science.
This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.
There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the politicians’ response to it.
It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies, temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping out CO₂ and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern civilisation.
In 1988, a handful of the scientists who passionately believed in this theory won authorisation from the UN to set up the body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the year when the scare over global warming really exploded into the headlines, thanks above all to the carefully staged testimony given to a US Senate Committee by Dr James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), also already an advocate for the theory that CO₂ was causing potentially catastrophic warming.
The disaster-movie scenario that rising levels of CO₂ could lead to droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and, above all, that melting of the polar ice caps, which would flood half the world’s major cities, struck a rich chord. The media loved it. The environmentalists loved it. More and more politicians, led by Al Gore in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon. But easily their most influential allies were the scientists running the new IPCC, led by a Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and Dr John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office.
The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly believed that the IPCC consists of “1,500 of the world’s top climate scientists”, charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and against “human-induced climate change” in order to arrive at a “consensus”.
In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of evidence were all programmed to show that, as CO₂ levels continued to rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.
One of the more startling features of the IPCC is just how few scientists have been centrally involved in guiding its findings. They have mainly been British and American, led for a long time by Dr Houghton (knighted in 1991) as chairman of its scientific working group, who in 1990 founded the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for research into climate change. The centre has continued to play a central role in selecting the IPCC’s contributors to this day, and along with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor Philip Jones at the University of East Anglia, controls HadCrut, one of the four official sources of global temperature data (another of the four, GIStemp, is run by the equally committed Dr Hansen and his British-born right-hand man, Dr Gavin Schmidt).
With remarkable speed, from the time of its first report in 1990, the IPCC and its computer models won over many of the world’s politicians, led by those of the European Union. In 1992, the UN staged its extraordinary Earth Summit in Rio, attended by 108 prime ministers and heads of state, which agreed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and this led in 1997 to the famous Kyoto Protocol, committing the world’s governments to specific targets for reducing CO₂.
Up to this point, the now officially accepted global-warming theory seemed only too plausible. Both CO₂ levels and world temperatures had continued to rise, exactly as the IPCC’s computer models predicted. We thus entered the second stage of the story, lasting from 1998 to 2006, when the theory seemed to be carrying everything before it.
The politicians, most notably in the EU, were now beginning to adopt every kind of measure to combat the supposed global-warming menace, from building tens of thousands of wind turbines to creating elaborate schemes for buying and selling the right to emit CO₂, the gas every plant in the world needs for life.
But however persuasive the case seemed to be, there were just beginning to be rather serious doubts about the methods being used to promote it. More and more questions were being asked about the IPCC’s unbalanced approach to evidence – most notably in its promotion of the so-called “hockey stick” graph, produced in time for its 2001 report by a hitherto obscure US scientist Dr Michael Mann, purporting to show how global temperatures had suddenly been shooting up to levels quite unprecedented in history.
One of the hockey stick’s biggest fans was Al Gore, who in 2006 made it the centrepiece of his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. But it then turned out that almost every single scientific claim in Gore’s film was either wildly exaggerated or wrong. The statistical methods used to create the hockey-stick graph were so devastatingly exposed by two Canadian statisticians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (as was confirmed in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress) that the graph has become one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.
The supporters of the hockey stick, highly influential in the IPCC, hit back. Proudly calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, their membership again reflects how small has been the number of closely linked scientists centrally driving the warming scare. They include Philip Jones, in charge of the HadCrut official temperature graph, and Gavin Schmidt, Hansen’s right-hand man at GISS –which itself came under fire for “adjusting” its temperature data to exaggerate the warming trend.
Then, in 2007, the story suddenly entered its third stage. In a way that had been wholly unpredicted by those IPCC computer models, global temperatures started to drop. Although CO2 levels continued to rise, after 25 years when temperatures had risen, the world’s climate was visibly starting to cool again.
More and more eminent scientists have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that the IPCC, with its computer models, had got it all wrong. It isn’t CO₂ that has been driving the climate, the changes are natural, driven by the activity of the sun and changes in the currents of the world’s oceans.
The ice caps haven’t been melting as the alarmists and the models predicted they should. The Antarctic, containing nearly 90 per cent of all the ice in the world, has actually been cooling over the past 30 years, not warming. The polar bears are not drowning – there are four times more of them now than there were 40 years ago. In recent decades, the number of hurricanes and droughts have gone markedly down, not up.
As the world has already been through two of its coldest winters for decades, with all the signs that we may now be entering a third, the scientific case for CO₂ threatening the world with warming has been crumbling away on an astonishing scale.
Yet it is at just this point that the world’s politicians, led by Britain, the EU and now President Obama, are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world – measures so destructive that even if only half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the dark ages.
We have “less than 50 days” to save the planet, declared Gordon Brown last week, in yet another desperate bid to save the successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time. But no one has put the reality of the situation more succinctly than Prof Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, one of the most distinguished climatologists in the world, who has done as much as anyone in the past 20 years to expose the emptiness of the IPCC’s claim that its reports represent a “consensus” of the views of “the world’s top climate scientists”.
In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”
Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves.
Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.
How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?
'The Real Global Warming Disaster’ by Christopher Booker (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 postage and packing. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk