Obama to save the planet

with Geoengineering:

WASHINGTON – The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

You can't make this stuff up. The lunatics are now officially in charge of the asylum - (no disrespect to lunatics intended).

McClintock: An Inconvenient Question

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York on the contradictions of green policies:



Via Reason.com

Notes for the speech of the President of the Czech Republic at the UN Climate Change Conference

Václav Klaus:

Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

As responsible politicians, we know that we have to act when it is necessary. We know that our duty is to initiate public policy responses to issues that could pose a threat to the people of our countries. And we know that we have to form partnerships with colleagues from other countrieś when a problem cannot be confined to national boundaries. To help us doing it is one of the main reasons for the existence of institutions such as the United Nations.

However, the politicians have to ensure that the costs of public policies organized by
them will not be bigger than the benefits achieved. They have to carefully consider and seriously analyze their projects and initiatives. They have to do it, even if it may be unpopular and if it means blowing against the wind of fashion and political correctness. I cońgratulate Secretary General Ban Kimoon on organizing this conference and thank him for giving us an opportunity to address the important, but until now onesidedly debated issue of climate changes. The consequences of acknowledging them as a real, big, imminent and manmade threat would be so
enormous that we are obliged to think twice before making decisions. I am afraid it is not the case now.

Let me raise several points to bring the issue into its proper context:

1. Contrary to the artificially and unjustifiably created worldwide perception, the increase in global temperatures has been – in the last years, decades and centuries – very small in historical comparisons and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human béings and their activities.

2. The hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon undeniable past experience and upon its trends and tendencies. These forecasts are based on relatively short time series of relevant variables and on forecasting models that have not been proved very reliable when attempting to explain past developments.

3. Contrary to many selfassured and selfserving proclamations, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of recent climate changes. An impartial observer must accept the fact that both sides of the dispute – the believers in man's dominant role in recent climate changes, as well as the supporters of the hypothesis about their mostly natural origin – offer arguments strong enough to be listened to carefully by the nonscientific community. To prematurely proclaim the victory of one group over another would be a tragic mistake and I am afraid we are making it.

4. As a result of this scientific dispute, there are those who call for an imminent action and those who warn against it. Rational behavior should depend on the size and probability of the risk and on the magnitude of the costs of Its avoidance. As a responsible politician, as an economist, as an author of a book about the economics of climate change, with all available data and arguments in mind, I have to conclude that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too high and the application of a fundamentalistically interpreted "precautionary principle" a wrong strategy.

5. The politicians – and I am not among them – who believe in the existence of a significant global warming and especially those who believe in its anthropogenic origin remain divided: some of them are in favor of mitigation, which means of controlling global climate changes (and are ready to put enormous amounts of resources into it), while others rely on adaptation to it, on modernization and technical progress, and on a favorable impact of the future increase in wealth and welfare (and prefer spending public money there). The second option Is less ambitious and promises much more than the first one.

6. The whole problem does not only have its time dimension, but a more than important spatial (or regional) aspect as well. This is highly relevant especially here, in the UN. Different levels of development, income and wealth in different places of the world make worldwide, overall, universal solutions costly, unfair and to a great extent discriminatory. The already developed countries do not have the right to impose any additional burden on the less developed countries. Dictating ambitious and for them entirely inappropriate environmental standards is wrong and should be excluded from the menu of recommended policy measures.

My suggestions are as follows:

1. The UN should organize two parallel IPCCs and publish two competing reports. To get rid of the onesided monopoly is a sine qua non for an efficient and rational debate. Providing the same or comparable financial backing to both groups of scientists is a necessary starting point.

2. The countries should listen to one another, learn from mistakes and successes of others, but any country should be left alone to prepare its own plan to tackle this problem and decide what priority to assign to it among its other competing goals.

We should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism. Therefore, let's vote for adaptation, not for the attempts to mastermind the global climate.

Pielke: Serious error in recent IPCC report

Peter C. Glover at the Global Warming Hysteria blog writes:

Roger Pielke Snr., of the Climate Science Research Group, Colorado highlights what is a serious error in the recent IPCC Statement for Policymakers.

Here is a quote from Roger Pielke's website:

The SPM reports on a “Total Net Anthropogenic” global average radiative forcing for 2005 of +1.6 [0.6 to 2.4] Watts per meter squared. When one converts the units, this means that the Earth’s climate system should be accumulating Joules at a rate of 2.61*10**22 Joules per year [0.98*10**22 Joules to 3.91*10*22 Joules per year] in 2005.

The data, however, show quite a different accumulation of Joules in recent years, and in 2005 in particular...

What these observations mean is that the statement in the IPCC SPM that there is a positive radiative forcing of 1.6 [0.6 to 2.4] Watts per meter squared in 2005 (when this was not true based on real data) is a particularly egregious error. Rather than relying solely on model based estimates to calculate a global radiative forcing, the authors of the IPCC Report should have also used real world data for the assessment of the net radiative forcing.

Read more.

Another issue ignored in the IPCC AR4

Roger Peilke Sr. comments on the major role of land cover / land use within the global climate system:

The lack of including an emphasis on this issue in the IPCC Statement for Policymakers is disappointing and shows their continued neglect of critically important issues in climate variability and change.

Source.

Climate Controversy and AEI: Facts and Fictions

Regarding allegations that the American Enterprise Institute sought to "buy scientists" to challenge the IPCC report:

On February 2, 2007, London’s Guardian newspaper published an article about the work of two AEI scholars, Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green on global warming. The article, laced with inaccuracies, circulated widely. Four senators wrote to AEI on February 6 asking for a response to the allegations.

AEI president Christopher DeMuth's response is here. Also see this.

h/t: Volokh via Instapundit

Tim Patterson and Tom Harris on CFRA

CFRA's John Counsel speaks with Tim Patterson and Tom Harris on the IPCC Summary for Policymakers report and global warming in general.

Listen here

Much more audio at Officially Screwed

Independent Summary for Policymakers released today

The Fraser Institute has released its Independent Summary for Policymakers.

News Release:

London, UK - An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.

In 2006, independent research organization The Fraser Institute convened a panel of 10 internationally-recognized experts to read the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report and produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers. The result, released today, is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of the science. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.

While a lot of effort goes into producing the large IPCC reports, its complex message is often obscured by its accompanying Summary for Policymakers. That summary report does not come from the scientific community. Instead it is developed through political negotiations by unnamed bureaucrats from various governments. Critics of past summaries point out they downplay and gloss over areas of uncertainty and data limitations,” said Dr. Ross McKitrick, coordinator of the independent review and senior fellow with The Fraser Institute.

The debate around climate change has become highly politicized and alarmist. So we asked a team of highly qualified scientists to look at the IPCC report and produce a summary that they felt communicates the real state of knowledge. Our intent with this document is to allow people to see for themselves what is known and what remains highly uncertain within climate change science.”

Read the Executive Summary or download the full Independent Summary for Policymakers.

Lord Monckton responds to IPCC Report

Lord Monckton's response is here (pdf)

FIGURES in the final draft of the UN’s fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.

Sources at the center of the drafting say that, though the now-traditional efforts are being made to sound alarmist and scientific at the same time, key projections are being quietly cut.

Computer models heavily relied on by the UN did not predict the considerable cooling of the oceans that has occurred since 2003 – a cooling which demonstrates that neither the frequency nor the intensity of the hurricanes in the year of Katrina was attributable to “global warming”.

The UN’s models also failed to predict the halt to the rise in methane concentrations in the air that began in 2001. And they did not predict the timing or size of the El Nino which hiked temperature in 1998.

h/t: Kate at SDA.

Experts Criticize IPCC Decision to Withhold Global Warming Report

By: Michael Van Winkle

"The policymaker's summary is being carefully edited behind closed doors by politically appointed bureaucrats," warned Joseph Bast (jbast@heartland.org - 312/377-4000), president of The Heartland Institute. "It is astounding that reporters, aware of this, would nevertheless treat the summary as credible and newsworthy."

The Heartland Institute contends the body of the study will contain many qualifications and point to natural variance, uncertainty in the temperature record, and disputes over future emission scenarios. "But the summary," Bast said, "will generate misleading page-one headlines, while details of the full study, details that will contradict the headlines, will be buried on page 47 six months from now."

"This is not how science should be reported," said Bast.

Source.

Jim Brown OneNewsNow.com February 2, 2007

A global warming skeptic says a new United Nations assessment on climate change was not approved by scientists but rather U.N. bureaucrats. The report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change links burning fossil fuels to rising temperatures.

Hear This Report

A spokesman for Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe says a much ballyhooed United Nations report on global warming was not approved by scientists but rather by politically motivated U.N. bureaucrats.

The report released by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it is "very likely" the burning of fossil fuels by humans is linked to rising temperatures, sea levels, and extreme weather. Marc Morano with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee says while the U.N. may claim the summary speaks for 2,500 scientists, it is written by U.N. political delegates.

Morano contends scientists have to alter their work to meet the U.N.'s political agenda as laid out in the summary. He notes that in 2000, French President Jacques Chirac called the Kyoto Protocol the first step to "authentic global governance."

"So the U.N. has that agenda," Morano contends. "[It] wants to be able to tax, regulate, and essentially be an international governing body over the developed world, particularly the United States. This is seen by many as an opportunity to get their hands on United States taxpayer wealth."

Uh-huh.

Independent Summary for Policymakers

A Policy Briefing of another sort, presented by the Fraser Institute.

(LON, UK) Climate Change Without the Spin: An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report

Date: February 5, 2007

Speaker(s):
Dr. Ross McKitrick
Senior Fellow, The Fraser Institute

Event Brochure: IPCC Flyer.pdf

Event Outline:
On February 2, 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its Fourth Assessment Report on the science of climate change. In past reports, most attention has been focused on the Summary for Policymakers, a negotiated text that is not produced by the scientific community itself, and which has been criticized for inadequately communicating the complexity and uncertainty of the underlying science.

Last year, the Fraser Institute convened a panel of internationally-recognized expert scientists to produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers (ISPM), a detailed and balanced overview of the new IPCC report. The ISPM has since been reviewed by approximately 50 scientists around the world.

The ISPM is not a critique of or a response to the IPCC report. Instead, it aims to make the science that went into the underlying report accessible to the general public. It is, in essence, a summary of climate change science written and reviewed by scientists.

Please join several of the ten co-authors of the ISPM, along with a number of authorities in the area of climate change policy, for the global launch and presentation of the Independent Summary for Policymakers. This document will be concurrently distributed globally through the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Network.

***Confirmed VIP Guests***
Lord Nigel Lawson
David Henderson, former Head, Economics and Statistics Department, OECD
Dr. Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin

Note: Dr. McKitrick is co-author of Taken by Storm.

Climate Change's Carnival Atmosphere

By Steven Milloy

The global warming carnival hits its full stride this week in preparation for the release of the long-awaited and much-hyped United Nations report on global warming. It’s unfortunate for the climateers that this week’s climate science doesn’t live up to all the hoopla. (...)

First, the UN isn’t releasing its full report this week – just the curiously edited “Summary for Policy Makers.” The detailed report on the science won’t be issued until May or so because it’s not finished.

If you’re wondering how the UN can issue a summary of a report that’s not even finished, fear not. The UN has announced that changes to the full report shall be made “to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policy Makers." The UN process – akin to shooting first and asking questions later –is the exact opposite of the traditional scientific method.

Read the full article here.
h/t: PTBC

Politics first, science second

The IPCC releases its report tomorrow, February 2nd. Here's an excellent article illustrating how politics, not science, is driving the climate change agenda.

Terence Corcoran,
Financial Post
Published: Saturday, January 27, 2007

If you've been lifting intellectual weights and taking extra runs around the science track to build mental stamina for next Friday's release of the much-hyped 1,600-page science report on climate change, you can now take it easy. There will be no report. You will not need to know about or read any science, because there will be no science. Instead, we are going to get a few ginned-up pages of generalized political scaremongering.

The advance billing for the report has been immense and spectacular. It's the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, five years in the making and jam-packed with scientific, technical, social and economic research into climate change.

According to the usual sources, this latest official United Nations' science project, billions of dollars in the making, is the "smoking gun" that leaves no doubt that humans are the cause of a major wave of climate warming that is set to engulf the world over the next 100 years.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said Jerry Mahlman, a U.S. government scientist and long-time proponent of climate change theory. "The evidence ... is compelling."

The University of Victoria's Andrew Weaver, official Canadian government climate modeller --and the CBC's go-to scientist for suggestive but unproven links between bad weather and climate change --blew himself right out the galaxy over the Fourth Assessment Report. "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles."

Somebody else said the report to be released in Paris on Friday contained an "explosion of new data."

All of this, however, is just the usual stage-managed showmanship that surrounds all climate science. First of all, what we are going to get on Friday is not the smoking gun, but the smoke without the gun, an explosion of data without the data, an intergalactic blast that never gets off the ground, the proof without the evidence.

Despite all the advance promotion, the full 1,600-page report will remain in quarantine, embargoed and locked up in secrecy for another two months. While the science remains shrouded in secrecy and subject to leaks and speculation, the IPCC will stage a major event, webcast to a world that's been whipped into a frenzy of anticipation. Live on the Web, officials will produce a brief 12-page document called the "Summary for Policymakers." Everything else, including the official summary of the science in the assessment report, will be kept under wraps.

Here's the official IPCC release plan: Next week in Paris, behind closed doors, the IPCC will give final approval to the 1,600-page report. At the end of the sessions on Friday, the panel will release the brief "Summary for Policymakers." Then, for the next two months, the IPCC will subject the 1,600 pages of heavy science to "the final stages of review and revision to be carried out in a balanced way." This will take two months, with the final report to be released in May.

What do they review and balance? The words in the IPCC process document are not encouraging. "Changes ... made after acceptance by the working group or the panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the 'Summary for Policymakers' or the overview chapter."

Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistics expert who blew the whistle on the IPCC's junk-science creation -- the 1,000-year-old climate record, the infamous hockey stick -- reads those words to mean the IPCC will go through the science to get the science to back up the summary. "IPCC insiders should not be allowed to change a comma of the [final] report after Feb. 2," he says.

We have, therefore, an extraordinary operating scheme in which brief sensational summary statements are produced, while the basis for the summary is kept confidential so they can get the science to correspond to the summary.

Will the government of Canada make any attempt, on behalf of Canadians, to get the IPCC to release the final report immediately? More likely, given current trends in Ottawa, the Tories have every intention of using the summary for their own political purposes.

These policymakers' summaries have a troubled history. One was once altered at the last minute to change wording that had already been approved by scientists. The summary release format also makes it clear that climate is a political issue first and a science issue second.

Another U.S. official says next week's summary will be an "iconic statement" rather than a sound science document. No surprise there. The policymakers' summary of the last report in 2001 highlighted the greatest climate icon of all, the 1,000-year hockey-stick graph. There it sits on page 3, the first graph, allegedly proof that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.

Today, the IPCC says the 1,000-year graph, the focal point of the February, 2001, summary, was a very minor part of the climate-science effort. The hockey stick, they say, played no big scientific role. But it played a major political role as part of the IPCC's campaign, which will be the sole purpose of next Friday's over-hyped event.

Climate paralysis

Terence Corcoran
Financial Post
Tuesday, January 23, 2007

If you found the last few weeks of global-warming publicity a little much, you ain't seen nothing yet. The Davos playground opens tomorrow, a sure source of fresh talk on the need for action to reduce carbon emissions. Tonight, George Bush delivers a State of the Union address; carbon controls are expected to get at least a mention as part of the President's continuing campaign to end America's oil "addiction" and attack climate change. Across Canada and Europe, governments are scrambling to make themselves look credible on what is now commonly thought to be the biggest crisis in human history. Corporations are scrambling to get close to the action, either to dodge policy bullets or cash in on the looming regulatory bonanzas.

The major reason for all this policy chaos is the pending release on Feb. 2 of a new assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is the official producer of climate science, and its latest report will again say that climate change is real and human production of greenhouse-gas emissions is almost certainly one of the main causes, or some such declaration of qualified confidence.

To some degree, much will depend on the aggressiveness of IPCC language and how far its policy summary strays from the huge levels of uncertainty that are buried in the mass of unreadable -- and unread -- science reports. Close observers of the IPCC believe the objective of some of its members is to produce a policy summary that contains dire warnings of "dangerous" consequences from climate change. That would give the United Nations' power brokers a political club to force the United States and other countries to more extreme policy action to control carbon emissions.

As a miasma of talk and political manoeuvring gathers, generating massive volumes of commentary, announcements and policy frenzy, it will become clear that the the whole subject of climate change has collapsed into hopeless gamesmanship and paralysis.

The media appear set to play the story straight, latching on to the latest reports and policy initiatives as if they all formed part of a logical continuum: Climate is a priority, action is needed, and action is being taken.

Over the past week, Canada's Conservative government announced half a dozen pre-IPCC measures to give the impression of existing momentum before the report. There was little new in the plans -- money for renewables, subsidies for homeowners -- but the government sent out its new Environment Minister, John Baird, to officially declare the Conservative government's belief that climate change is real and the Conservatives are ready to act. That saves a lot of embarrassing media questions in the wake of the IPCC report. But it is also clear that Conservative climate policy on the big issues of emissions controls, carbon trading and regulation remains unknown and unfathomable.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper talks of Canada as an emerging energy "superpower," a phrase that seems at odds with the reduced energy regime implied by energy reduction to cut emissions. The Conference Board of Canada yesterday came up with the idea that Canada should aim to become a "Green Energy Superpower." These ideas are clearly in their infancy and have no real foundation other than rhetoric.

In Europe and the United States, the pre- IPCC scramble is even more intense and confused. The rise of the Democrats has produced a flush of political action. At least 10 different climate bills are floating around Congress aimed at imposing some kind of controls on emissions. Then there are state rules, including California's latest plans.

The U.S. policy framework is further confused by the tendency to conflate two different issues: climate change and energy security or, as it is sometimes called, energy independence. Some form of mandatory restrictions on carbon emissions are expected, although the exact purpose of any regime is never clear. Sometimes climate is the reason, at other times energy security is said to be the purpose. At other times, the subject is joined with smog, as the Financial Times did yesterday. It showed a picture of Los Angeles "cloaked in smog shortly before sunrise" followed by a comment from an electric-utility executive who said he expects carbon regulations to be a big 2008 presidential issue -- as if carbon regulation and smog control were the same issue.

A group of 10 CEOs -- of Alcoa, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, BP America, Du Pont -- yesterday urged President Bush to take action now to impose mandatory carbon regulation on industry. The group also includes Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, an activist group. He called the CEO initiative a "game changer" and a sign Washington should act before the 2008 presidential election. Many of the companies on the list have substantial vested interests in mandatory economy-wide regulation, either because they are major polluters themselves or they stand to cash in on the regulation by offering services and products.

Countries in Europe may be a little ahead of America on climate control. Their early efforts are generally in shambles. The continent's much-vaunted emissions-trading scheme is in disgrace, with prices falling to their lowest level on record. Nations are battling over how to regulate cars, airlines and other sectors. Germany appears to want out of the worst of the regulations.

As for China and other nations where carbon emissions are soaring, the gap between economic reality and the coming IPCC alarmism will be vast and impossible to traverse. The public-policy momentum, while seemingly rocketing forward through debate and announcements, is in fact a chaotic mess of indecision in which almost nothing is happening. Which is just as it should be.

h/t