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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
From the Wall Street Journal (via Instapundit):
Coal's Doubters Block New Wave Of Power Plants
From coast to coast, plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high.
If significant numbers of new coal plants don't get built in the U.S. in coming years, it will put pressure on officials to clear the path for other power sources, including nuclear power, or trim the nation's electricity demand, which is expected to grow 1.8% this year. In a time of rising energy costs, officials also worry about the long-term consequences of their decisions, including higher prices or the potential for shortages.
As recently as May, U.S. power companies had announced intentions to build as many as 150 new generating plants fueled by coal, which currently supplies about half the nation's electricity. One reason for the surge of interest in coal was concern over the higher price of natural gas, which has driven up electricity prices in many places. Coal appeared capable of softening the impact since the U.S. has deep coal reserves and prices are low.
But as plans for this fleet of new coal-powered plants move forward, an increasing number are being canceled or development slowed. Coal plants have come under fire because coal is a big source of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, in a time when climate change has become a hot-button political issue.
Coal plants generate energy we desperately need so as to be free of price-gouging, terrorist-sponsoring nations. And plans for new coal plants are being discarded due to fears of so-called global warming. But proof of the connection between carbon dioxide and global warming is evaporating.
From Canadian Climatologist Timothy Ball:
Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was one of the first Canadian Ph.Ds. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.
What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
From Investors.com:
Global Warming: A private firm's downgrade of its hurricane forecast raises an obvious question: If scientists can't get near-future projections in a limited area right, how can they predict the climate decades from now?
A reasonable response is: They can't. But the global warming climate of fear did not blow in on the soft breezes of reason, but by the storm winds of emotion.
Forecaster WSI Corp. said Tuesday that the season ending Nov. 30 will bring 14 named storms, six of which will grow into hurricanes, three of them major. WSI's initial forecast was for 15 named storms, eight hurricanes and four majors.
Why the change? "Because," said WSI forecaster Todd Crawford, "ocean temperatures have not yet rebounded from the significant drop in late spring."
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny
...Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.
For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame." [Update 8-2-07: see this comment.]
Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."
...Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."
...Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.
From Australian scientist David Evans:
I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.
...There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere - but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics.
The only current "evidence" for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory observations). Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned out to be spectacularly wrong: heavier-than-air flight is impossible, the sun orbits the earth, etc. For excellent reasons, we have much more confidence in observations by several independent parties than in models produced by a small set of related parties!
From England's Channel 4:
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Earth's 4.5 billion year history is one long story of climate change. This fact is pretty much accepted by those who think global warming is a natural process, and those who think it's caused by man.
In more recent history there has been: a mini ice age in the seventeenth century when the Thames froze so solidly that fairs could regularly be held on the ice; a Medieval Warm Period, even balmier than today; and sunnier still was the so-called Holocene Maximum, which was the warmest period in the last 10,000 years.
...For some people, the final nail in the coffin of human-produced greenhouse gas theories is the fact that carbon dioxide is produced in far larger quantities by many natural means: human emissions are miniscule in comparison. Volcanic emissions and carbon dioxide from animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean outweigh our own production several times over.
...New evidence shows that that as the radiation coming from the sun varies (and sun-spot activity is one way of monitoring this) the earth seems to heat up or cool down. Solar activity very precisely matches the plot of temperature change over the last 100 years. It correlates well with the anomalous post-war temperature dip, when global carbon dioxide levels were rising.
...In fact, what is known of solar activity over the last several hundred years correlates very well with temperature. This is what some scientists are beginning to believe causes climate change.
The global warming campaign is wrong on the facts, and is doing great harm to our nation's energy supply, at a time when that energy supply is key to national security.
From a comment posted by Olah Chadasha, of the Greetings from the French Hill weblog:
If, as Al Gore claims, humans and their big evil industrial outputs are the cause of global warming, how is it that there was an ICE AGE before humans existed?!? Did the industrial revolution start a bit earlier than history recorded? Furthermore, how was it that the earth warmed enough to end the Ice Age again BEFORE humans were driving their evil SUVs?!?
Can some-one, ahhem I’m talking to you Mr. Gore, please explained to me how that happened? If humans, with their evil fossil fuels, Humvees, and evil corporations are the main culprits of global warming then an Ice Age and then Ice Age Melting could NEVER have happened. According to his and the UN (Useless Neanderthals) claims, the earth’s temperature’s rise could not happen on its own. So, what happened? Did Haliburton build a time machine, travel back in time, and cause an Ice Age and then melted it a few million years later?
Answers… anybody?
Newsweek puts the hammer on global warming concerns:
What most commentators-and many scientists-seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature-a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.
In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.
Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down-not up-the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise-a dubious proposition-future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.
I was listening to talk radio last week - I think it may have been Al Rantel in Los Angeles - and a guest said it was ridiculous to rebuild New Orleans, because the city's below the waterline, and will never be safe from destruction by flooding.
Well, tell that to the Dutch. Most of the people in the Netherlands live below sea level, and their storm system has kept them safe since the 1950's. Newsweek asks, "why not hire the Dutch" to rebuild the New Orleans levees?
From Variety:
"An Inconvenient Truth" started off marching bigger than the penguins, but now it's looking more like "Bowling for Columbine."
Paramount Vantage's global-warming doc bowed Memorial Day weekend to a boffo $367,311 at just four theaters, giving it a three-day average of $70,333 per play, the highest ever for a documentary.
But after expanding successfully to the top 10 and 25 markets in its second and third frame, keeping its average take at $17,615 and $12,334, respectively, doc has slowed down significantly as it opened in smaller cities and suburban markets.
The leadership of the Left rejects religion, but it is also no good at science.
Gore's attention-getting claims in "The Inconvenient Truth," are inconveniently (for Gore) easy to debunk.
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
...Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
...Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
Here Gore is following the Left's mantra of attacking anything that's successful. In this case, it's successful businesses.
Beware of Dems today who call any group of Americans "oppressors." They usually have no factual basis for doing so.
Dick Morris points out that by having had success on their key issues, Conservatives have diminished the need for those issues to be dealt with. As a result, Conservatives need to set new goals for the country, on which to campaign:
The generic party ballot for Congress, for example, has now swollen to a 13-point Democratic edge ... A big part of the reason is the success the Bush administration has had in solving and hence diminishing the importance of the Republican agenda. Taxes have been cut, we have not had a terror attack since Sept. 11 and trial lawyers are on the defensive. The issues that remain - energy, environment, healthcare and Social Security - usually are Democratic and liberal.
Morris makes specific suggestions:
Since we have not had a terror attack in four and a half years, the homeland-security issue, the mother of all Republican issues, would seem likely to fade into the background. But by beating Bush over the head for his efforts to keep America safe, the liberals are helping Bush, raising the salience of one of his core issues. In his State of the Union speech, Bush should spend considerable time taking them to task on these grounds, since it will help him enormously.
Two new solid Republican issues are begging for attention from the White House: immigration and drugs.
The administration's guest-worker program is a good step in the right direction to appease Hispanic voters, but it must be accompanied by some red meat for the base - the border fence passed by the House. The fence without guest-worker rights will alienate the fastest growing bloc of voters, the Latinos. The guest workers without the fence will do nothing to move voters toward the GOP.
... Bush should urge drug testing, with parental consent, in schools in his State of the Union address and put drugs back in play as a domestic issue. Crime is down, but drug use is still a vital Republican issue. Put it back on the agenda.
Finally, the Republican Party had better consign itself to defeat in the next two elections unless it does more to elaborate an energy/environmental policy. It must go beyond nuclear power and Alaska drilling in policies to achieve more energy independence.
Terrorism and pump prices have made this issue the dominant one in our political matrix. Bush needs to make hydrogen and hybrid cars a key part of his program and needs to challenge America to switch and end our dependence on imported oil.
Can you imagine if GWB made a national commitment to hybrid cars, the way JFK did to putting a man on the moon? It would capture the imagination and enthusiasm of the nation.
From the Pacific Research Institute Tenth Anniversary Index of Leading Environmental Indicators:
Also:
Impressive.
(via Everything I Know is Wrong. )
I was walking around a week or so ago, and I saw a yard, lushly planted with thick, well-maintained, vegetation:
Looking around from the sidewalk, I saw this sign:
Click for a larger image.
The sign reads:
Backyard Wildlife Habitat
National Wildlife Federation
This property provides the four basic habitat elements needed for wildlife to thrive: food, water, cover, and places to raise young. It has been certified by the National Wildlife Federation as an official Backyard Wildlife Habitat site.
Isn’t that a great thing to do with your yard?
The Backyard Wildlife Habitat home page is here.
I was surprised to see this:
...forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it’s 76 percent forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10 million acres of forestland.
There are many reasons for America’s arboreal comeback. We no longer use wood as fuel, and we no longer use as much land for farming. Indeed, the amount of land dedicated to farming in the United States has been steadily declining even as the agricultural productivity has increased astronomically. There are also fewer farmers. Only 2.4 percent of America’s labor force is dedicated to agriculture, which means that fewer people live near where the food grows.
The literal greening of America has added vast new habitats for animals, many of which were once on the brink of extinction. Across the country, the coyote has rebounded (obviously, this is a mixed blessing, especially for roadrunners). The bald eagle is thriving. In Maine there are more moose than any time in memory. Indeed, throughout New England the populations of critters of all kinds are exploding. In New Jersey, Connecticut, and elsewhere, the black bear population is rising sharply. The Great Plains host more buffalo than at any time in more than a century.
...Anyway, there’s more good news, of course. According to Gregg Easterbrook, air pollution is lower than it has been in a generation, drinking water is safer, and our waterways are cleaner.
Read the whole thing.
Per scientist William F. Ruddiman writing in Scientific American, Earth has been in an ice age for millions of years, with brief interruptions by warm periods like ours. Given the length of previous such warm periods, this one should have ended 8,000 years ago. What stopped the ice age and made current human civilization possible? Global warming, caused by…. human agriculture.
Orson Scott Card has a great discussion of Ruddiman’s article here.
From Dick Morris:
While President Bush hunts the terrorists down and pressures nation-states to give up their sponsorship of terror gangs, Schwarzenegger is working to solve the problem of Islamic terrorism once and for all – by ending our dependence on foreign oil and stopping the worldwide economic and climatic distortions that global oil usage causes.
He’s doing it by providing aggressive state leadership to open the way for hydrogen fuel cell cars. While President Bush speaks of the advent of these vehicles in the indefinite future, Gov. Schwarzenegger is bringing them to the here and now by converting gas stations along California’s interstate highways to provide hydrogen fuel as well as gasoline.
With financing projected to come one-third each from federal, state and private sources, California will offer hydrogen fuel every few miles in urban areas and at least every 20 miles along the highway system by 2010. Eventually, he and the leaders of Washington, Oregon, Baja California and British Columbia will work together to create a “hydrogen highway” that will run from B.C. (British Columbia) to B.C. (Baja California).
The Schwarzenegger plan calls for state-subsidized production of hydrogen and for tax incentives for those who purchase hydrogen cars.
Replacing gasoline engines with hydrogen-fuel cells would eliminate two-thirds of America’s need for oil – a demand that we could meet entirely with domestically produced oil.
Since California accounts for 20 percent of U.S. new-car purchases, the tail will wag the dog and a national hydrogen grid will become almost inevitable.
The effects on our relationships in the Mid-East would be substantial. Nations that sponsor terrorists would know that they can’t hope to blackmail us with the threat of an oil shock.
It looks like the car companies are on board:
“There are no game-breakers that we can’t overcome,” said Dave Barthmuss of GM.
The biggest challenge, he said, is developing a system of safe and convenient refueling stations without needing attendants dressed in white Haz-Mat suits.
Motorists “need to be able to drive from San Diego to San Francisco without worrying about running out of juice,” Barthmuss said.
The oil companies appear to be wisely seeking to profit from this new technology, rather than to make the error of trying to suppress it:
Oil companies are working to cash in, aiming to open hydrogen pumps next to regular, unleaded and super.
“Hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles will grow to become an important part of the future global energy and transport mix,” Jeremy Bentham, chief of Shell Hydrogen, said in a speech this summer.
“Governments now recognize that clear public benefits and international momentum has already been generated,” he added. But, at a price. Shell Hydrogen estimates that it will cost $20 billion to build a reliable and convenient fueling network throughout the United States.
Rising gas prices are powering the push for hydrogen:
Said [Schwarzenegger adviser] Tamminen: “The biggest ad for hydrogen is when you pass gas stations and the price is approaching $3 a gallon.
“Every 25-cent-a-gallon increase brings us a year closer to hydrogen realization.”
As my friend Chris Cook pointed out yesterday, if the Conservatives take the lead on the environment, the Libs will have almost nothing left on which to claim leadership.
The home page for the California Hydrogen Highway is here.
In an “Author’s Message” on page 569 of his current techno-thriller, State of Fear, Michael Chricton states (no link):
H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, endorses Crichton’s analysis:
...Crichton exposes serious problems the climate models that predict warming. The models don’t accurately portray past or current temperature reality, so why should their predictions about the future warming be trusted, much less used to inform public policy?
...I must admit, sitting in Dallas in December watching snow fall in the midst of below freezing temperatures—not typical Texas weather, even during the winter—it would be hard to take global warming alarmism seriously even had I not, after years of seriously studying and working on the issue, concluded that the disaster scenarios spun by environmentalists from human-caused global warming are more fiction than fact.
