Carbon storage premise ‘totally erroneous’

Guardian News & Media | April 27, 2010

A RESEARCH paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon against global warming.

The paper from Houston University says that governments wanting to use carbon sequestration have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the carbon dioxide produced by one power station.

The research has serious implications for Australia, which has invested heavily in developing the technology, though it has not stored carbon from a power plant.

The aim is to be able to capture the carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and pump them safely underground, so they do not add to global warming.

Previous modelling had hugely underestimated the space needed to store carbon dioxide because it was based on the ”totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University, argue.

”It would be hard to inject carbon dioxide into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape,” Professor Economides said.

The paper said that carbon capture and storage ”is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in carbon dioxide emissions”.

Jeff Chapman, the chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, which lobbies for the sector, said conclusions in the paper were wrong and said his views were backed up by rebuttals from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute.

April 27, 2010 Posted by aletho | Aletho News, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Toward a Better Understanding of Industrial Wind Technology

Michael Morgan | Allegheny Treasures | October 26, 2009

Jon Boone – Environmentalist, Artist, Author, Documentary Producer, and Formal Intervenor in Wind Installation Hearings

Introduction: It’s been extremely difficult to bridge the gap that exists between those who know little about the issue and those who have a more comprehensive understanding of the workings of the electrical grid and the related technologies that supply it, like wind energy. For many, their only information comes from the local press, “green” promotions by so-called environmental organizations, and occasional visits to web sites dedicated to one side or the other. It’s often a mind-boggling quagmire! The following conversation with Jon Boone, who now lives in Oakland, MD after a 30 year career at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an attempt to bridge that gap, perhaps allowing us to better understand the limitations of and problems associated with industrial wind technology. He has no dog in the fight.

Michael Morgan is Writer/Editor for Allegheny Treasures – An information resource dedicated to countering popular misconceptions regarding the impact of wind installations, and help preserve the historic mountains of West Virginia.

Allegheny Treasures: Mr. Boone, wind developers and their supporters portray their technology as a viable source of renewable electricity, providing “nearly” free power by capturing the wind – a virtually inexhaustible source of energy. Their mantra is that wind energy is “free, clean, and green.” Can you explain your concern with this portrayal?

Mr. Boone: Industrial wind technology is a meretricious commodity, attractive in a superficial way but without real value—seemingly plausible, even significant, but actually false and nugatory. Those who would profit from it either economically or ideologically are engaged in wholesale deception. All adults should know that if something seems too good to be true, it almost always is. Although the wind itself may be “free,” the cost of converting it to electrical energy is extremely expensive. A 100MW wind project would cost, in today’s market, about $350 million, most of it paid for by taxpayers.

AT – Morgan: And—sorry to interrupt—what about its benefits, such as its alleged ability to shut down fossil fuel plants?

Boone: In contrast to wind proponents’ alluring but empty promises of closed coal plants and reduced carbon emissions is this reality: wind energy is impotent while its environmental footprint is massive and malignant. It can’t dent a grape in the energy scheme of things; it’s a sideshow technology with great potential for mainline environmental harm. In some ways, it’s almost the perfect enterprise for our era, as it produces no meaningful product or service but is subsidized up to 80 percent by rate and taxpayers. Like many “celebrities,” it is famous for being famous, not for its actual performance.

AT – Morgan: Would you explain?

Boone: A wind project with a rated capacity of 100MW, for example, with 40 skyscraper-sized turbines, would likely produce an annual average of only 27MW, an imperceptible fraction of energy for most grid systems. The electric generating units supplying the PJM grid, which serves much of the Middle Atlantic region, produce over 140,000MW at peak demand times.

AT – Morgan: When you say “average,” does that mean that even when the wind is inconsistent, we can expect equal contributions from other generators?

Boone: In truth, more than 70% of any wind project’s rated capacity must come from other generators. More than 60% of the time, a 100MW project would produce less than 27MW and, at peak demand times, often produce nothing.

AT – Morgan: Nothing … at peak demand times?

Boone: This would be the case frequently. And it would rarely achieve its rated capacity, producing most at times of least demand. Whatever it generated would be continuously skittering, intensifying, magnifying the destabilizing effects of demand fluctuations, for wind volatility is virtually indistinguishable from the phenomenon of people whimsically turning their appliances off and on. But wind fluctuations are in addition to those of demand, and even more volatile—both on a minute-by-minute basis and at wide scale, where whole days can pass with wind production at less than 10% of its rated capacity.

AT – Morgan: You used the term “producing most at times of least demand” … and … “whatever it generated.” Isn’t there an expectation of “control” to meet demand, even when the wind increases and decreases at peak and off peak hours?

Boone: Control is expressed by the idea of capacity value, which is the ability to dispatch responsively just the right amount of energy to do the job—and withdraw it as desired. Wind projects can never produce capacity value, which is something that should be anathema to regulatory agencies, with their task of ensuring reliable, secure, affordable electricity. Most grids attempt to predict how much wind energy might be available at peak demand times by a statistical hedge known as capacity credit, which is based upon calculating historical averages of wind availability. Presently, the PJM has assigned wind a capacity credit of 13%, meaning that, over a three year history, the small number of wind installations in the grid produced 13% of their rated capacity at key peak demand times. Most regional grids have capacity credits of 10% or less. But, for the same reason that a baseball player’s batting average cannot predict what he’ll do in his next at bat, the grid cannot know how its fluctuating wind plants will do at any future time, despite such a statistical “credit.” Given the random nature of the wind, the past is never a certain predictor of the future. Persistent industry “predictions” about improved weather forecasting for wind availability have proven to be as reliable as rain dances.

The only way to control wind volatility is to shut the wind turbines down completely. This is in stark contrast with all conventional generators, which, of necessity, are completely controllable and highly responsive, able to dispatch their rated capacity, or a desired portion thereof, whenever asked.

The ability of machines to perform as expected on demand is the basis of modernity, underlying contemporary systems of economic growth, wealth creation and well-being. Machinery that doesn’t do this is now quickly discarded.

This wasn’t the case for much of history—look at the early days of television or radio or even the automobile. Only in the last hundred years or so has the West come to rely on machines with this standard. Wind energy is a throwback to pre-modern times. And the physical laws governing wind technology assures it will stay rooted in the past.

AT – Morgan: Would you please expand on the term capacity value?

Boone: Capacity value is a crucial idea, central to the success of our way of life.

Here’s a practical way to think about it. You don’t drive your car all the time, with the result that its capacity factor—the percentage of your car’s potential (its rated capacity) that is actually used—is something like 15-20%. But when you do wish to drive it, the car works virtually all of the time, getting you from point A to point B in line with your own continually changing schedule. This is its capacity value. Ditto with your chain saw—or television, or any modern appliance we all take for granted—because they work when we want them to work. Appliances that don’t do this are dubbed “lemons,” and we have even passed laws to protect consumers from such appliances. Conventional generators that fail to reliably respond on demand are quickly removed from the grid.

The critical test for “capacity value” is: how much electrical output can we really count on when electricity demand is at peak levels? Since we don’t know if the wind will be blowing at the time of peak demand, the real answer to the question is “zero.”

Consequently, wind provides no capacity value and can pass no test for reliability. One can never be sure how much energy wind machines will produce for any future time. And generating units that don’t provide capacity value cannot be meaningfully—and favorably—compared with those that do, just as unreliable automobiles—lemons—cannot be accurately compared with reliably proven automobiles.

Modern power vastly improves productivity and our quality of life. Wind energy reduces them. The best wind can be is an occasional substitute—a supernumerary; it is not, as frequently claimed, a rational part of any energy solution for modernity. Trading nuclear, or coal, or natural gas, or hydro generation for wind is akin to trading Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Sandy Koufax, or Willy Mays for a third string high school baseball player who made the team because of his father’s contributions to the alumni fund.

AT – Morgan: I understand the concept now, but I’ve heard that, even though the input from wind energy is variable, the electricity generated by these projects can still be added to the grid and somehow controlled. If so, doesn’t it really contribute overall?

Boone: Adding wind instability to a grid may be someone’s idea of job security. But for rate and taxpayers, and a better environment, it’s criminal. For the grid is then forced to extend itself, since variable energy at industrial scale cannot be stored, at least not economically. As the wind bounces randomly around the system, operators must continuously balance it to match supply precisely with demand, compensating for the ebb and flow much in the way flippers keep the steel ball in play during a game of pinball.

I coined the term “Windball” to describe this concept. Windball expends a lot of energy and takes a lot of coins. In real life on most American grids, more than 70% of any wind project’s rated capacity must come from the flippers of reliable, highly flexible, fossil-fired generation (typically natural gas) constantly turned up and back inefficiently to compensate for wind fluctuations. These inefficiencies will result in substantial carbon emissions and increased consumer costs. Wind volatility cannot be loosed on the grid by itself: it requires companion generation to make it whole. And the higher the wind penetration is on the grid, the more wind cuts into the grid’s marginal reserves, the greater the odds that the grid will TILT, ending the windball game—until compensating reliable generation is brought on board to secure it.

AT – Morgan: But can’t the grid engineers somehow compensate for the variance? And why is it so important to balance supply and demand so precisely?

Boone: Given what is known of demand cycles, grid operators, using computerized automatic generation controls, bring supply to match demand on a less than second-by-second basis within plus/minus one percent. And this includes balancing on-going demand fluctuations. After more than a hundred years of experience, grid engineers can predict demand very accurately, which is possible because aggregate demand is not fundamentally random, unlike wind volatility. If there’s too little supply, widespread brown-outs and black-outs will occur; if there’s too much supply relative to demand, the surge can fry both transmission lines and appliances. Even brief dips, like surges, can harm sensitive electronics that many of our lives depend on. Excess supply is also sometimes dumped, which is a financial loss to all tax and ratepayers. Dumping excess wind energy and/or shutting down the turbines, is a common situation in Germany, Spain, and Texas, made necessary when large spikes of wind threaten the grid’s security.

Yes, engineers can make-work by adding wind flux to the system, which further destabilizes the match between supply and demand. They can lead a horse to water; but they can’t make it change its spots. By its nature, wind will require repeated flippering—lots of whips and whistles, even at small levels of penetration—in ways that will negate the very reason for its being—which is reducing CO2 emissions and backing down coal. This is why people quickly switched to steam 200 years ago. Retrofitting modern technology to meet the needs of ancient wind flutter is monumentally “backasswards.” It’s also a sure sign that pundits and politicians, not scientists, are now in charge. It will take much more than a smart grid to incorporate such a dumb, antediluvian idea successfully.

And it’s not just the engineers who would benefit, for there are many “suppliers” only too happy to profiteer from this situation. General Electric, which bought out Enron’s wind projects when the latter company went belly up in 2001 and is today one of the world’s largest wind suppliers, recently gave a presentation to the Canadian government detailing all the problems with wind—followed by a long list of products that would assist wind’s grid integration. Look for GE wind ads on its subsidiary, NBC.

AT – Morgan: Isn’t there some discussion about hydropower working in tandem with wind … pump–storage systems similar those operating in the TVA network, for example?

Pumped storage and wind has a history of problems, not least involving economics and availability at critical times. Besides requiring new reservoirs, at least half of the energy produced by wind would simply go to pumping the water. Pumped storage’s time frame (mostly diurnal) is different from wind and its gustiness. The pumps are reversible, not separate. And they generally can’t respond fast enough to account for minute-by-minute wind flux. Balancing wind skitter with hydro, which also emits no carbon, would produce relatively “clean” energy. But a wind/hydro tandem would hardly be green, since both would collude to degrade vast sections of sensitive habitat. Besides, most locales have very little hydro—and what they do have is already being used for producing electricity. However, even if hydro were abundant, a wind/hydro combination would offset only marginally fewer amounts of CO2 than hydro would offset by itself—without any wind at all. Ditto for natural gas units, which do burn about 50% cleaner than coal. But a duo of wind and natural gas would offset, at best, only about 15% more CO2 emissions than could be offset with natural gas units alone, without wind.

Large coal and nuclear plants aren’t sufficiently flexible to be quickly turned up and back to balance flux, and therefore aren’t usually good partners for wind volatility.

AT – Morgan: So the promise of wind power as a replacement for current power plants is, perhaps, not achievable?

Boone: Physicists define energy as the ability to do work, while power is the rate at which work is done. Huge turbines can convert wind energy into electrical power. But they do so with the same performance standards that powered sailing craft and water pumps in the early nineteenth century. Wind therefore provides “power” capacity appropriate to 1810, not 2010. Consequently, wind provides only energy to a grid, not modern power. Pretending that zero capacity wind technology is an answer to building a responsive supply to replace aging power plants or to meet new demand is perverse.

Ontario has long promised to retire (but has never been able to do so) all its coal plants. Officials tout that they will be replaced by “renewables.” To hedge its renewable energy bet, the Ontario government is building natural-gas facilities as insurance against new wind projects. In other words, the province expects to replace coal with natural gas, not wind. The latter could not exist without either hydro, which presently provides the province about 25% of total generation (wind is about one percent) or flexible natural gas generators. Projections by the Ontario Power Authority depend upon planned conservation savings and natural gas, not wind, as a means of displacing coal. Similarly, boasts by the governor of Kansas that her state will not approve a new coal plant because of its increasingly expansive wind projects conveniently forget to mention how the state plans to increase its importation of, you guessed it, natural gas–at higher cost.

Because of wind’s unpredictable variability, it can never replace the power performance—the capacity value—of conventional generation, especially a power source as reliable and inexpensive as coal, which is why China and India will continue to build new coal farms for many years to come. For example, a wind plant consisting of 2,500 turbines, 450-feet high and spread over five hundred miles, can mathematically offset a large coal or nuclear plant. Unfortunately, they cannot do so functionally–for what do you suppose must happen when 5000MW of volatile wind is only producing 100MW at peak demand times, a common occurrence?

With nearly 100,000 huge wind turbines now in operation throughout the world—35,000 in the USA—no coal plants have been closed anywhere because of wind technology. And there is no empirical evidence that there is less coal burned per unit of electricity produced as a specific consequence of wind. Due to this reality, in many areas, particularly Germany and the USA, along with India and China, a large number of new coal plants are in the offing, as reported in Der Siegel and The Washington Post. This will be especially true when demand for electricity increases as the world recession improves.

There is simply no substitute for capacity value.

Most people simply assume, falsely, that any power plant wind displaces on the grid is coal-fired. It may in fact displace hydro, or natural gas. To the extent it displaces coal—sporadically—it also causes the coal unit to ramp up and back more inefficiently than it would do otherwise, in the process creating more CO2 emissions. One need only to examine wind performance in Denmark and Germany, two of the wind industry’s poster wind countries, to see this effect. Denmark’s wind displaces Scandinavian hydro, with no CO2 savings while, in Germany, there is evidence that, on a per capita basis, the nation has the world’s highest CO2 emissions, despite its 21,000+ wind machines.

Perhaps the dirtiest—and best kept—secret about industrial wind technology is that the increased thermal effects produced by “windball” largely subvert much of the CO2 offsets that wind might induce on most grids—and in some cases may even cause more CO2 to be emitted than would have been the case without the addition of any wind volatility.

AT – Morgan: Your statement is very timely. Just a couple of weeks ago, speaking at the Grid Week conference in Washington, DC, Energy Secretary Steven Chu cited Bonneville Power in the Northwest noting, “it gets about one-fifth of its power from wind energy when the wind is blowing.” “But when it stops blowing, that share drops to zero.” He did allude to “smart” grids and huge investments to compensate for the variability of wind, but, in reality, do you see a place for wind in the energy business?

Boone: This business is absurd. The whole point of modern power systems has been to move beyond the flickering flutter of variable energy sources. Prostituting modern power performance to enable subprime energy schemes on behalf of half-baked technology is immoral, as is implementing highly regressive tax avoidance “incentives,” to make it appear that pigs can fly.

No coal plants will be shuttered and little, if any, carbon emissions will be reduced as a result of one 100MW project—or thousands of them. There is not a shred of evidence in the real world that coordinating the aggregate output of widely scattered wind projects will substantially improve upon wind’s predictability sufficient to give it meaningful capacity value—as is claimed by wind pundits.

AT – Morgan: John Droz, Jr. commented on a recent article by Dr. Michael Trebilcock at the Financial Post that “Wind needs to be in our energy mix to the same degree that Twinkies need to be in our diet.”

Boone: Indeed! Wind technology mirrors the subprime mortgage scams that wreaked havoc with the economy. Both are enabled by wishful thinking; bogus projections; no financial restraints, accountability, or transparency; no meaningful securitization; and regulatory agencies that looked the other way, allowing a few to make a great deal of money at everyone else’s expense while providing no meaningful service. As Twinkies have done for food, leading to a society that is overfed but malnourished, wind will do for electricity.

When placed on forested ridges, industrial wind projects will clear-cut hundreds of acres. Even small 100MW wind facilities would hover for miles over sensitive terrain, threatening vulnerable wildlife while mocking endangered species protections—and scenic highways strictures. They will cause unlawful, unhealthy noise for miles downrange. They will devalue properties in the area as much as 50%, if owners could sell them at all.

Dynamiting will threaten wells and aquifers. Out-of-region workers would perform most of the temporary construction jobs and only one or two permanent jobs would result, at modest wages. There would be little value added revenue. Claims about local tax revenues would be typically unsubstantiated and unsecured. Claims about union jobs are grotesquely overinflated.

AT – Morgan: I must admit, in our community, the flash of tax revenue and jobs has sold the town council and two of our three commissioners. Citizens who dare to question the concept are ridiculed as near Neanderthals, lacking vision.

Boone: Wind is a faith-based initiative, to be sure. And there are none so blind as those who will not see, speaking of a lack of vision. Promises of tax revenues are merely hopeful thinking; they are not secured. What people should keep in mind is that claims made by limited liability wind companies are strictly put forth in a blatant attempt to gain a larger profit. Assertions by state tax offices are based on general mathematical formulas (vs. real world guarantees) that only indicate what may be obligated BEFORE ANY DEDUCTIONS THAT A WIND LLC MAY USE TO REDUCE THAT FORMULA OBLIGATION.

This is really what industrial wind is about, after all—finding ways to shelter income through tax avoidance, although a new Treasury Department program now provides the option of cash grants for production tax credits.

AT- Morgan: You mention the state tax office. It was noted in a recent article that a “senior official with the WV State Tax Department confirmed that property-tax revenue projections by the developer of the proposed Pinnacle Wind Farm are correct, and that the project will deliver an average of $433,000 annually to Mineral County WV, for a total of $11 million over the 25 years of its projected life.” But the article immediately followed with, “If nothing else changes, these numbers are very solid numbers,” said Scott Burgess. “We’re pretty confident, given the level of costs, that that would be the tax generated for Mineral County.” The term, “if nothing else changes …” seems a disclaimer by the State even before the first piece is delivered. How do we know who or what to believe?

Boone: Citizens should demand promissory notes that unambiguously obligate the LLC to pay specific amounts of revenue at specific times. But they shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for this miracle to occur.

AT – Morgan: But if the taxpayers receive a commitment from the owners, or the LLC as you call them, aren’t they obligated to live up to them. Won’t they face legal issues if they back away from their promise?

Boone: What are the penalties to a wind LLC for lying? If the amount of local taxes promised your community failed to materialize because of arcane legal tax offsets known only to skilled accountants, what could local officials do—contemplate a lawsuit? Wind developers anticipate and budget for the possibility of lawsuits from local government, as well as suits brought by private citizens aggrieved by the range of nuisances and adverse health effects wind projects produce. That’s also a major reason they are LLCs. What happens if an LLC goes bankrupt; e.g., the project doesn’t produce as expected and there isn’t enough revenue to pay creditors? Is there any recourse to the parent company?

AT – Morgan: Before you go any further, could you explain the LLC concept and how it might play in the favor of the wind plant owners. The project seeking approval here in Mineral County is a double LLC of sorts. US WindForce LLC appears to have set up Pinnacle Wind Force LLC. I’m sure the lawyers understand all that, but for some of us private citizens, it just looks like an additional shield to the parent company. Am I off base, or is this just normal business?

Boone: All wind operations are limited liability companies—for a reason. They are structured to incur as little liability as possible for problems they create, allowing the LLC to dissolve quickly and morph into another LLC at the stroke of a pen, dodging responsibility—and blame. As I noted in “Life Under a Windplant,” even their “confidential” leases with property owners typically include language exculpating the LLCs from causing the very nuisances they claim don’t exist, while permitting the LLCs to abandon all the “equipment” to the property owner, usually on 30-day notice—all this while holding the owners feet to the fire for up to 50 years.

They know that costs of legal actions are difficult for private citizens and rural municipalities to maintain over the many years it often takes to resolve them. Moreover, if there’s illegal noise, who is going to shut a wind plant down, once it’s constructed? If, as is the case at California’s Altamont Pass, a wind facility slaughters thousands of wildlife species, the courts will likely refuse to intervene, arguing that those concerned about wildlife have no legal standing. When I asked a wind developer in the Maryland Public Service Commission hearing whether he would vouch for the $750,000 in first year taxes his company had pledged to a Maryland county in its written application, he stated only that he would “do what the law requires.”

AT – Morgan: But that runs counter to everything we’ve been led to believe.

Boone: We have arrived at a point in our legal culture where no negative consequences seem to exist for making false or misleading claims to sell energy. There is a wide range of wind plant-generated nuisances verified across three continents. The failure of many local governments to provide appropriate leadership on this issue is appalling—but not surprising, considering the highly technical nature of this situation. After-the-fact lawsuits brought because of predictable nuisances are difficult, expensive, and time consuming.

AT – Morgan: Your technical and economic arguments are quite convincing. What about the effects these projects have on communities?

Boone: These massive wind plants also precipitate incivility, pitting neighbor against neighbor. A major duty of government is to anticipate, then eliminate or mitigate this kind of incivility. Those who endorse or profit from placing such industrial complexes near the homes of others evidently don’t have a clue about how to foster civil society.

There is little that is cognitively more dissonant than supporting the concept of minimizing the human footprint on the earth while cheerleading for the rude intrusiveness of physically massive/energy feckless wind projects. The slap and tickle of wind propaganda flatters the gullible, exploits the well intentioned, and nurtures the craven. Industrial wind is a bunco scheme of enormous consequence. And people who value intellectual honesty should not quietly be fleeced by such mendacity, even from their government.

As even Huckleberry Finn knew, the Dukes and Dolphins of flim/flam lurk everywhere, dressed today in thousand dollar suits, spouting technical mumbo jumbo, bribing politicians, and selling all the stuff that dreams are made of… in an attempt to separate people from the contents of their wallet. They are a re-incarnation of the snake oil salesmen of our past. In those days, uneducated citizens were scammed of their hard-earned savings in hopes of attaining a miracle cure by swilling kick-a-poo joy juice. Despite our modern sophistications and our evident belief in our superiority over those who lived a hundred years ago, little seems to have changed….

AT – Morgan: Mr. Boone, thank you very much for your time. I noticed that among your many credentials, you chose to lead with Environmentalist. This seems a clear signal that the environment is a high priority for you. I hope you’ll consider another conversation in the very near future to discuss your position regarding the impact of wind plants on landscape and wildlife.

Boone: It would be my pleasure.

Jon Boone has been a formal intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission hearings. He produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant, which has been freely distributed within the United States and many countries throughout the world. The documentary is also available in three-part, YouTube format, here. For your convenience, the Google presentation is at the end of this section.

Mr. Boone also developed the website Stop Ill Wind, where anyone can read his complete direct testimony, with many related documents, in the Synergics wind case before the Maryland Public Service Commission.

Jon Boone | April 18, 2010

Between the Gush for Wind and the Hard Place of Reality

April 23, 2010 Posted by aletho | Aletho News, Deception, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Guardian Continues To Spread Misinformation About Eyjafjallajokull

By Steven Goddard | 21 04 2010

Yesterday WUWT reported on the inaccurate #1 environmental story at Guardian.

The Guardian article originally read:

The volcanic eruption has released carbon dioxide, but the amount is dwarfed by
the savings. Based on readings taken by scientists during the first phase of
Eyjafjallajokull activity last month, the website Information is Beautiful
calculated the volcano has emitted about 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each day.

After their article was written, more accurate information spread across the web – The Guardian numbers were off by more than an order of magnitude :

Experts said on Monday that the volcano in Iceland is emitting 150,000 to 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per day, a figure comparable to emissions released from a small industrial nation.

The Guardian responded by updating their article with better numbers, but failed to update their conclusions:

The volcanic eruption has released carbon dioxide, but the amount is dwarfed by the savings. Based on readings taken by scientists during the first phase of Eyjafjallajokull activity last month, the website Information is Beautiful calculated the volcano has emitted about 150,000 tonnes of CO2 each day. Worldwide, the US Geological Survey says volcanoes produce about 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.

• This article was changed on 21 April. It originally said the volcano has emitted about 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each day. Information is Beautiful has since corrected this figure to 150,000; we have updated our article to reflect this.

So what is wrong with their correction? Lots of things.

Their source of information now claims that the numbers are 206,465 tons saved vs. 150,000 tons emitted by the volcano. Those two numbers are well within the margin of error of the volcano estimates, and are the very low end of what scientists are claiming. If we use the average scientific estimate of 225,000 – the volcano was actually producing more CO2 per day than the savings from grounded aircraft. Yet the Guardian story still claims that emissions are dwarfed by the savings.
The Guardian story claims that there have been 2.8 million tons of savings, and the math doesn’t work out. At the time the story was written there had been six days of grounded flights. 206,465 tons/day X 6 days = 1.2 million tons, not 2.8 million tons.
The Guardian failed to research the actual volcano estimates, and again published the very low end numbers from an apparently unreliable source.
They failed to consider that the eruption has been going on for more than a month, while the flight ban has lasted only six days. Total volcano emissions actually dwarf the savings from the aircraft.
They failed to consider Anthony’s point that people stranded by grounded aircraft seek other means of transportation, including cars, trains and battleships, etc. The BBC estimated that these other modes of transport generate as much CO2 as the planes would have.
They failed to consider that the airlines will eventually run extra flights in order to catch up.

The evidence indicates that the net balance from the volcano is a large increase in CO2 emissions. The Guardian article was just Plane Stupid.

Furthermore, we know that plants, soil and the oceans generate 30 times as much CO2 as all fossil fuel burning combined. That is 200,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year from natural sources, compared with The Guardian’s inaccurate claim of 2,800,000 tons in savings from aircraft grounded. In other words, even their exaggerated claimed savings are less than 0.0014% of all natural emissions of CO2.

Numbers from Woods Hole Institute

April 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Of volcanoes and panic

RIA Novosti military commentator Ilya Kramnik | April 20, 2010

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.”

This optimistic statement was made on June 24, 1982 aboard a British Airways B-747 airliner bound from London for Auckland with stop-overs in Bombay, Madras, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Melbourne.

The airliner, however, failed to reach its destination. At 8:40 p.m. Jakarta time, south of Java in the Indian Ocean, co-pilot Roger Greaves and flight engineer Barry Townley-Freeman noticed St. Elmo’s fire appearing on the windshield. St. Elmo’s fire is a special kind of coronal discharge originating from a high-voltage electrical field in the atmosphere. From inside it looked as though tracer bullets were hitting the plane. Soon the aircraft commander, Eric Moody, also noted the phenomenon. He had returned to the cockpit after a short absence.

As a rule, St. Elmo’s fire indicates thunderstorm clouds nearby, but the weather radar displayed nothing of the sort. Still, the crew switched on a de-icing system for safety’s sake and “fasten your belts” lights went on in the cabin.

There was no thunderstorm in the region, however. It appeared that the airliner, flying at an altitude of 11,000 meters, entered a cloud of volcanic ash suddenly spewed by the Javan volcano Galunggung.

Fumes began building in the passenger cabin. Knowing nothing of the volcano, the general conclusion was that it was cigarette smoking – in those days smoking was allowed on aircraft. Soon, however, the fumes thickened, setting off an alarm in the cabin. Crew members set about searching for the cause, but naturally failed to find any.

Meanwhile, many passengers looking out the aircraft windows spotted an unusually brilliant glow on the body surface and particularly on the engines as though each carried a lamp illuminating the way ahead through compressor blades, which created a stroboscopic effect. This glow came from electrified dust particles that had settled on the surface of engine nacelles and on the compressor blades.

At about 8:42 p.m. Jakarta time, engine No. 4 failed because of a flameout. The co-pilot and flight engineer went into the immediate procedure of shutting the engine down, cutting the fuel supply and, just in case, activating a fire-extinguishing system. In the meantime the commander handled the controls, trying to cope with uneven thrust.

The passengers also noticed long yellow glowing streaks emanating from the remaining engines. Less than a minute after shutting down engine No.4, there was a blowout in engine No.2, which also stopped.

Before the crew could initiate the process of cutting down the engine, there was a blowout in the remaining engines, No.1 and No.3, and the windshield went opaque. The flight engineer exclaimed: “I can’t believe it – all the engines have stopped.” It was at that moment that Eric Moody made the statement quoted at the beginning of the article – with a characteristically British sense of humor.

The heavy airliner headed back to Jakarta, hoping to make an emergency landing. But to reach the capital of Indonesia, it was necessary to re-start at least one engine. The alternative was ditching in the far from welcoming waters of the ocean filled with all kinds of dangers – high waves could make the rescue of the crew and passengers difficult, and strong currents could scatter the safety rafts far adrift, not to mention sharks.

An aircraft with a take-off weight of 380 tons became a glider. With the engines shut down, a Jumbo Jet (the nickname of the B-747) can glide 15 km per each kilometer in lost altitude. Commander Moody calculated that from an altitude of 11 km the airliner could glide for 23 minutes, covering a distance of 169 kilometers.

But the descent was more rapid. Air pressure in the cabin dropped: the cabin pressure compressors were driven by the engines which had stopped. Given these bleak realities, the plane was unlikely to negotiate the mountains and land in Jakarta. The crew began preparing to splashdown in the ocean.

The aircraft exited from an ash cloud at 8:56 p.m. Jakarta time, after about 13 minutes of gliding. At that point, it was at 12,000 feet in the air. At this height, the crew managed to fire one engine and then the three others (one engine, however, later went dead again when the Boeing climbed and reentered the cloud). The aircraft was able to successfully land in Jakarta.

The mechanics who broke down the engines found a great mass of molten ash in the turbines that had plugged the lines. All four engines had to be replaced.

Another volcanic incident also involved a Boeing-747, this time flown by KLM on the Amsterdam-Tokyo route. While on approach to Anchorage, Alaska, the airliner hit a cloud of ash spewed by the volcano Mt Redoubt. All four engines failed. But the aircraft captain, Karl van der Elst, managed to save the day – after descending more than 4,000 meters the crew succeeded in restarting the engines.

Both cases show the dangers of volcano eruptions for aircraft but in both cases the aircraft suddenly found themselves in dense ash clouds while in direct proximity to fire-spewing mountains where the concentration of hard particles was the highest.

At a considerable distance from a volcano, the ash concentration in the air falls off by many orders of magnitude, and such a large-scale closing of air space in Eurasia, following the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallojokull, is more reminiscent of hysteria than a real assessment of danger.

Seen against this background, the quiet operation of Russia’s Aeroflot, which continues its flights despite any volcanoes, is worth noting.

See also:

Volcanic ash cloud: Met Office blamed for unnecessary six-day closure

April 20, 2010 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

University told to hand over tree ring data

BBC | April 19, 2010

Queen’s University in Belfast has been told by the Information Commissioner to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings, used for climate research.

Douglas Keenan, from London, had asked for the information in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act. Mr Keenan is well-known for his questioning of scientists who propose a human cause for climate change.

Queen’s University refused his request saying it was too expensive, but it is now considering its position. The university claimed that as the information was unfinished, had intellectual property rights and was commercially confidential information, it did not have to pass it on. After a series of counter claims from Mr Keenan and the intervention of the Information Commissioner, Queen’s have now been told that they could be in contempt of court if they do not hand the data over.

In his legal decision, the commissioner said that Queen’s had failed in its procedural requirements and had wrongly used legal exemptions to withhold the requested information.

Mr Keenan, who hopes to use the data to reconstruct temperatures during the Medieval Warm period, said “this has taken three years, but it is worth it. “It is an important victory for FoI on research data,” he said.

Tree ring data is used by climate scientists to study historical climate information.

BBC environment correspondent Richard Black said Mr Keenan’s victory has a wider context.

“This is the latest development in an on-going process that has seen ‘climate sceptics’ attempting to obtain raw data and documentation on methodologies from researchers, especially those working to understand the climate of the past, ” he explained.

“The sceptics’ contention is that academics have, through error or will, mis-represented Earth’s temperature record so as to portray a picture of a warming planet.

“The on-going series of reviews into climate science at the University of East Anglia – the so-called ‘ClimateGate’ affair – has concluded that scientists ought to have been more open with data than has typically been the case.”

April 20, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Missing Heat Hides From Climate Scientists

By Doug L. Hoffman on 04/18/2010

Climate scientists have decided that as much as half of the heat energy, believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, is hiding somewhere it can’t be found.

By measuring the radiative energy input at the top of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists have a pretty good idea of how much energy is entering the planetary environment—the problem is figuring out where it goes. The most likely place is in the deep ocean, whose waters form a huge potential storage place for heat. Because energy is exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean, this heat can resurface at a later time to affect weather and climate on a global scale. It has been suggested that last year’s rapidly occurring El Niño may be one way the “missing” solar energy has reappeared—the implication being more sudden El Niño events may be on the way.

Oceans contain around 80% of the climate system’s total energy, so ocean heat is a good measure of what is happening with Earth’s climate. According to a Perspectives article in the April 16, 2010, issue of Science, “Tracking Earth’s Energy,” science has been unable to properly track energy within Earth’s environmental system. Kevin E. Trenberth and John T. Fasullo , both scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), warn in the new study that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this “missing” heat. They fear that it may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system. “The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

As noted on the NCAR site, a Science Perspectives piece is not formally peer-reviewed, but is reviewed by editors of the journal. Science reportedly invited Trenberth to submit the article after an editor heard him discuss the research at a scientific conference. Trenberth and his co-author, Fasullo, focused on what they call a central mystery of climate change. Why, since 2003, have scientists been unable to determine where much heat energy Earth receives from the Sun is going. According to the NCAR site:

Satellite measurements indicate that the amount of greenhouse-trapped solar energy has risen over recent years while the increase in heat measured in the top 3,000 feet of the ocean has stalled. Although it is difficult to quantify the amount of solar energy with precision, Trenberth and Fasullo estimate that, based on satellite data, the amount of energy build-up appears to be about 1.0 watts per square meter or higher, while ocean instruments indicate a build-up of about 0.5 watts per square meter. That means about half the total amount of heat is unaccounted for.

Either the satellite observations are incorrect, says Trenberth, or large amounts of heat are penetrating to regions on Earth that are not adequately measured. One such place is the deepest parts of the oceans. Compounding the problem, Earth’s surface temperatures have largely leveled off in recent years. This inability to properly track energy has implications for understanding the way climate works and most definitely on predicting future climate. Obviously, if scientists are at a loss to identify the hiding place of the missing heat climate modelers are unable to include its possible future effects in their programs. With as much as half of the suspected heat energy buildup gone missing, it must be asked how well science understands Earth’s climate.

Where does the energy go?

El Niño, periodic events in which the upper ocean waters across much of the tropical Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer, are seen by many as a mechanism for dumping heat, stored in the ocean, back into space. Trenberth and Fasullo explain the relationship between the ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and delayed release of ocean stored energy this way:

To understand how energy is taken up and later released by the climate system, consider the natural variability from El Niño Southern Oscillation. The cold sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific present in normal or La Niña conditions create conditions favorable for fewer clouds and more sunshine and a build-up of heat in the ocean as a precursor of El Niño. The spread of warm waters across the Pacific, together with changing winds, in turn promotes evaporative cooling of the ocean, moistening the atmosphere and fueling tropical storms and convection over and around the anomalously warm waters. The changed atmospheric heating alters the jet streams and storm tracks and controls weather patterns for the duration of the El Niño event. The loss of heat can in turn lead to La Niña.

A strong La Niña event in 2007–2008 extended into the 2008–2009 northern winter, causing cooler than normal weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere. By June 2009, the situation had reversed as the next, comparatively moderate El Niño emerged. Multiple storms barreled into Southern California in January 2010, consistent with expectations from the El Niño. These storms also caused significant snowfall and precipitation across the American Southwest, South and up the Eastern Seaboard.

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding ocean temperatures these days. Recently, new estimates of the past temperatures have been published. On in particular, that shows a sudden jump in the 2002-2003 time, prompted Real Climate to post a plot of ocean heat content. This is a contradiction of a 2009 paper by Craig Loehle in Energy & Environment that found global ocean cooling since 2003. The linear component of the model used showed a trend of -0.35 (±0.2) x 10²² Joules per year, shown in the plot below.

The Loehle study showed an unambiguous cooling trend.

“The model, fit to the smoothed data, gave an excellent fit (r = 0.922, R2 = 0.85) and showed clearly that there is an annual periodicity in the data, probably due to the north-south asymmetry in ocean area and the effect of orbital variations over the year,” the study states. The Loehle study was based on ocean heat content anomaly (OHCA) data compiled by Josh Willis et al. Indeed, it was the 2008 paper “Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales,” by Willis, Chambers and Nerem, that prompted this comment by Roger Pielke Sr.:

Global warming, as diagnosed by upper ocean heat content has not been occurring since 2004. It is impossible to know if this lack of warming will continue but these observations are inconsistent with the predictions of long-term global climate predictions, such as reported in the 2007 IPCC report.

Since then, the debate over ocean heat and ocean levels has raged. Claims and counter claims, studies finding warming and studies finding cooling. Now it looks like the warming proponents are throwing in the towel on surface temperature increase (this is the temperature trend, not normal, cyclic variability). In a reply to questions from Dr. Pielke, Dr. Willis said:

There is still a good deal of uncertainty in observational estimates of ocean heat content during the 1990s and into the early part of the 2000s. This is because of known biases in the XBT data set, which are the dominant source of ocean temperature data up until 2003 or 2004. Numerous authors have attempted to correct these biases, but substantial difference remain in the “corrected” data. As a result, the period from 1993 to 2003 still has uncertainties that are probably larger than the natural or anthropogenic signals in ocean heat content that happen over a period of 1 to 3 years. However, the decadal trend of 10 to 15 years seems to be large enough to see despite the uncertainties.

So, despite the confusion caused by changing from XBT (Expendable Bathythermograph) measurements to measurements by the Argos satellite-based location and data collection system, it still looks like the upper portions of the ocean are cooling. Such data discontinuities when changing sensor types or measurement methods is not new, the same type of flap erupted over radiosonde data a decade ago. Even so, the debate about the missing ocean heat is far from over.

The new claim is the missing heat, that climate change supporters so desperately want to find, has gone deep. Dr Pielke has exchanged a series of comments with Dr. Trenberth over his recent paper on the Climate Science website:

Trenberth’s [and co-author, NCAR scientist John Fasullo], however, are grasping for an explanation other than the actual real world implication of the absence of this heat.

First, if the heat was being sequestered deeper in the ocean (lower than about 700m), than we would have seen it transit through the upper ocean where the data coverage has been good since at least 2005. The other reservoirs where heat could be stored are closely monitored as well (e.g. continental ice) as well as being relatively small in comparison with the ocean.

Second, the melting of glaciers and continental ice can be only a very small component of the heat change (e.g. see Table 1 in Levitus et al 2001 “Anthropogenic warming of Earth’s climate system”. Science).

Thus, a large amount heat (measured as Joules) does not appear to be stored anywhere; it just is not there.

“I do not agree with your comments. We are well aware that there are well over a dozen estimates of ocean heat content and they are all different yet based on the same data,” said Dr. Trenberth in reply. “There are clearly problems in the analysis phase and I don’t believe any are correct.” Clear admission that climate scientists are groping in the dark here.

“I do not see how such large amounts of heat could have transited to depths below 700m since 2005 without being detected.,” responded Pielke, adding in a conciliatory way: “I am very supportive, however, of your recognition that it is heat in Joules that we should be monitoring as a primary metric to monitor global warming. Our research has shown significant biases in the use of the global average surface temperature for this purpose.”

Research done over the last several years has found that the return currents of the meridional overturning current (MOC) do not behave as previously thought (see “Conveyor Belt Model Broken”). More recently, it has been shown that the great ocean conveyor belt varies in ways unpredicted and previously unsuspected (see “Ocean Conveyor Belt Confounds Climate Science”). During the first 1-year period since new deep sea sensors became operational (measurements from March 2004 through March 2005) the strength of the MOC varied by more than a factor of 8. It still remains unclear how much the meridional overturning circulation varies from year to year, but the old model was clearly wrong.

New sensors reveal unsuspected behavior. Source CSIRO.

Now, the ocean is suspected of harboring hidden heat that scientists claim has gone missing. Some claim the heat is not there, while others, like Trenberth and Fasullo, fear that the missing heat will “come back to haunt us.” One thing is certain—those old claims of “settled science” and a “consensus among the world’s scientists” seem to have come back to haunt their originators. The overstatements made by the IPCC and its supporters in the past stand revealed for the empty lies they always were.

Trenberth and Fasullo state that it is imperative to get better measurements of the energy flowing through Earth’s climate system. Improved analysis of energy in the atmosphere and oceans might help researchers better understand and possibly even predict unusual weather patterns, such as the unexpectedly cold weather across much of the United States, Europe, and Asia over the past winter. But for now, no scientist can claim that we truly understand what is going on in Earth’s oceans—and that means climate science cannot claim to understand what is going to happen to Earth’s climate.

New study: ‘…climate system is only about half as sensitive to increasing CO2 as previously believed’ (wattsupwiththat.com)

April 19, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | El Niño, El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Kevin E. Trenberth, La Niña, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Pacific Ocean | Leave a comment

The trouble with Brazil’s much-celebrated ethanol ‘miracle’

By Tom Philpott | 13 April 2010

This is a post about Brazil’s sugarcane-ethanol “miracle,” but I can’t resist starting off with a look askance at our own corn-derived ethanol phenomenon. Has there ever been a “green” technology more ecologically discredited than corn-based ethanol?

It may yield slightly more energy than it consumes during production–but only if you grant a generous credit to distillers grains, an ethanol byproduct now busily being shoveled into Confined Animal Feeding Operations (and exported to China) as a highly dubious livestock feed. But corn ethanol’s unimpressive energy balance makes it a pathetic candidate to displace energy-rich petroleum gasoline.

Moreover, its total greenhouse gas emissions are likely titanic–a fact limply acknowledged by the EPA and then eventually retracted under industry pressure. For the love of God, the stuff is based on industrial corn–by far our biggest user of soil-degrading synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Yet the corn-ethanol behemoth lurches tediously along, forever demanding, and too often commanding, ever-spiralling amounts of government support and arable land. Sigh.

Too bad we’re not more like Brazil, where they’re displacing petroleum with highly efficient sugarcane-based ethanol … right? Well, no. In 2006, I co-wrote an article about what Brazil’s much-heralded cane ethanol revolution has to teach the United States. The conclusion: not much.

Now comes this blistering report from Foreign Policy magazine exposing the myth that sugarcane ethanol is some sort of environmental panacea.

Before I get to the details, I want to make the point that the biofuel-as-panacea impulse is only possible in society’s whose citizens fundamentally don’t understand agriculture. Biofuels are hailed as “renewable,” because crops can be grown on the same land year after year. But monocrops destroy soil–properly thought of as a non-renewable resource–and require lots of agrichemical poisons. Therefore, industrial-scale biofuels aren’t renewable. (Whether biofuels can work sustainably in regional niches, as part of a diverse cropping system, is a different question).

Okay, where was I? In the FP piece, author Nikolas Kozloff jumps right to the point in his lead:

While sugar cane ethanol is certainly less ecologically destructive than some other biofuels, the industry’s boosters have overlooked one key fact: You’ve got to plant sugar cane somewhere. One couldn’t pick a worse place to harvest cane than Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. There, sugar cane crops have led to deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.

He goes on to explain that the flattening of the Atlantic rainforest–distinct from the Amazonian one–stands as the original sin of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil. The history of several tropical crops we now take for granted–for example sugarcane and coffee–is essentially the history of razing of that vast forest (twice the size of Texas, with as much biodiversity as the Amazon forest). And this ecological crime was compounded by the use of slave labor, Kozloff reminds us. “The colonists shipped six million African slaves to Brazil to do the cutting,” he writes: surely one of the vilest episodes in human history.

Today, just 7 percent of the original Atlantic rainforest remains–and sugar producers are busily tearing into that precious remnant as ethanol production kicks up. In the last year alone, Kozloff writes, the government has had to fine two dozen companies for illegally clearing some 143,000 acres of Atlantic rainforest to plane sugarcane.

The explosion in cane-based ethanol has potentially dire implications for the Amazon rainforest, too. I shouldn’t have to note that the Amazon is one of the globe’s great climate-stabilizing assets. It’s also home to groups who have been living there for generations–making use of its resources without destroying them. Any “green” fuel that triggers Amazon deforestation and displaces people is an abomination. Even though sugarcane doesn’t do very well in wet conditions, “hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane have been planted in the Amazon,” Kozloff reports. Then there are also indirect effects–cane displaces other crops and pushes them into the Amazon region. Kozloff writes:

In the state of São Paulo, sugar cane has been planted on former pastureland and this has pushed cattle into Mato Grosso. Hundreds of thousands of cattle are moving into the Amazon every year as a result of displacement by ethanol in the state of São Paulo alone, say environmentalists. This migration is becoming all the more likely since one can purchase 800 hectares of land in the Amazon for the price of just one hectare in São Paulo. Additionally, some soy plantations in the center of the country have been turned over to ethanol production, prompting concern among environmentalists that this will lead soy producers to move into the Amazon. And local observers say that sugar cane plantations are already pushing soy farmers and ranchers into the rainforest.

Then there’s the problem of nitrogen fertilizer. As in, sugar requires plenty of it.

The Brazilian ethanol industry uses more than 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year [TP note: compared to about 1.9 million tons for corn-based ethanol] at a cost of about $150 million. At a public senate hearing in Brasilia called to discuss climate change, experts expressed concern that nitrogen fertilizers used in conjunction with sugar cane production yielded nitrous oxide. What’s more, when you cut cane by hand you’ve got to set controlled fires in the fields to smoke out razorsharp leaves, nasty snakes, and tarantulas. In the middle of the night, plantations look like a war zone as burning fields light up the sky and the wind blows billowing smoke clouds far and wide. Not only do the burnings pollute the air with soot, causing a number of illnesses, but they also release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and nitrous oxide.

Finally, in keeping with the historical tradition of sugarcane production, working/living conditions in sugar fields are brutal.

Today the Brazilian sugar cane industry is centered in the state of São Paulo — drive just an hour out of the city and you can see sugar cane fields stretching for hundreds of miles. Palmares Paulista is a rural agricultural town 230 miles from São Paulo. Behind rusty gates lies a squalid red-brick tenement building. Inside, weary migrant workers breathe the stale air and try to prepare themselves as best they can for the long day ahead. The cortadores de cana, or sugar cane workers, are crammed into tiny cubicles filled with rickety bunk beds and unpacked bags. They hail from the poverty-stricken, drought-plagued northeast and earn paltry wages.

What the FP piece teaches us is that unchecked expansion of Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry will likely lead to ecological disaster. Cane-based ethanol is no panacea. It may be “better” than it’s corn-based cousin–but that doesn’t make it an ecologically robust product. Pulling down trade barriers and allowing cheap Brazilian ethanol to flood the U.S. market–which same U.S. free-trade advocates are calling for–is no panacea, either.

I will be mocked for my lack of hard-headed realism for saying it, but here is a reality check: the royal road to a climate-stable and energy secure-future lies not in a mad search for “renewable” alternatives to gasoline. Rather, it lies in the direction of conservation and mass-transit alternatives to cars.

April 14, 2010 Posted by aletho | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Oxburgh’s 5 page Climategate book report gets a failing grade

Watts Up With That | 14 04 2010

I’ve read blog posts longer than this report. The Global Warming Policy Foundation of London has this to say about it:

Another Unsatisfactory Rushed Job

Press release

LONDON, 14 April 2010 – The Global Warming Policy Foundation regrets that the Oxburgh Panel has been rushed and therefore extremely superficial. The body of the report is hardly five pages long. The Panel should have taken more time to arrive at more balanced and more trustworthy conclusions as there was no need to rush the inquiry.

The Panel worked by interviewing and questioning staff members of CRU, but failed to interview critical researchers who have been working in the same field for many years. The Panel even ignored, as it admits, to properly review their written evidence.

We welcome the acknowledgement by the Panel that the Urban Heat Island effect on surface temperatures records in and around large cities is important but poorly understood. We also welcome the admission that the IPCC ignored the expressions of uncertainty in CRU papers.

We also note, in the context of the long-term temperature record, its comment that “the potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work.”

In general, the report is being politely kind to CRU, but in essence rather critical of the disorganised and amateurish use of statistics. It is hardly an endorsement of the quality of the research being carried out at what is supposed to be the world’s leading unit which has received so much government funding.

Given the huge economic and social implications, one would expect that an independent audit would be more rigorous and more even-handed than the Oxburgh panel.

– end

Steve McIntyre writes that he wasn’t interviewed:

Oxburgh’s Trick to Hide the Trick

The Oxburgh report ” is a flimsy and embarrassing 5-pages.

They did not interview me (nor, to my knowledge, any other CRU critics or targets). The committee was announced on March 22 and their “report” is dated April 12 – three weeks end to end – less time than even the Parliamentary Committee. They took no evidence. Their list of references is 11 CRU papers, five on tree rings, six on CRUTEM. Notably missing from the “sample” are their 1000-year reconstructions: Jones et al 1998, Mann and Jones 2003, Jones and Mann 2004, etc.)

They did not discuss specifically discuss or report on any of the incidents of arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data, mentioned in my submissions to the Science and Technology Committee and the Muir Russell Committee. I’ll report on these issues later in the day as they’ll take a little time to review. First, let’s observe Oxburgh’s trick to hide the “trick”.

Long before Climategate, Climate Audit readers knew that you had to watch the pea under the thimble whenever you’re dealing with the Team. This is true with Oxburgh of Globe International as well.

Oxburgh of Globe International alludes to the “trick..to hide the decline” in veiled terms as follows:

CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

Without specifically mentioning the famous “trick …to hide the decline”, Oxburgh subsumes the “trick” as “regrettable” “neglect” by “IPCC and others”.

But watch the pea under Oxburgh’s thimble.

The Oxburgh Report regrettably neglected to highlight the fact that CRU scientists Briffa and Jones, together with Michael Mann, were the IPCC authors responsible for this “regrettable neglect” in the Third Assessment Report. They also regrettably neglected to report that CRU scientist Briffa was the IPCC author responsible for the corresponding section in AR4.

Oxburgh pretends that the fault lay with “IPCC and others”, but this pretence is itself a trick. CRU was up to its elbows in the relevant IPCC presentations that “regrettably” “neglected” to show the divergent data in their graphics.

“It really shows what’s been going on in the Arctic – it’s falling apart”

GE sponsors 15-year-old on polar trip

By Anthony Watts | April 7, 2010

Photo courtesy of GE and Scott Draper

Shortly after twice reporting a temperature of -34 C, he suggests that the ice is “falling apart” around him.

Skiing and trekking to the North Pole: Parker Liautaud blogs to save the earth – Update

Parker Liautaud, 15 years old, is reporting on his progress skiing his way to the North Pole. He has made his goal to become the youngest person to ski to the North Pole, and to use that attempt to bring greater awareness to the urgent environmental issues of the arctic.
…
And more importantly for his purpose of letting the world see the ravages of global warming on the arctic – There was a lot of open water today. It really shows what’s been going on in the Arctic – it’s falling apart. Right now we’re camping on this patch of old ice, but all around us is open water, broken and thin ice. To our north there’s a massive pan of very thin ice. Everything is freshly frozen, if not open.

That’s called “leads” kid, part of the regular landscape well before your trip. Oh but wait…what is the Temperature? Thanks to Twitter reports we know.

Twitter / Parker Liautaud: Temp -34, Windchill -42. W …
Temp -34, Windchill -42. We did about 11 Nm today, it was a really good day. We have about 35 Nm left, and about 5 before we’re half way. 3:00 PM Apr 4th via API [His previous tweet also reported a temperature of -34]

Son of Venture Capitalist Gets Foursquare Badge for Polar Trip – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com

Normally if you’re the teenage child of a multimillionaire, you might expect a nice car or designer clothing as a present, VentureBeat reported.

But if you’re the 15-year-old scion of Bernard Liautaud, who founded and later sold Business Objects to SAP for $6.78 billion and is now a partner at Balderton Capital, you can probably do a lot better.
…
Mr. Liautaud fils rounded up a sponsorship from G.E. for a trip to the North Pole promoting environmental awareness.

Of course, anybody can go to the North Pole, and blog about it, by paying a tour guide like this one that is with the 15 year old right now.

From the San Fransisco Examiner “offbeat places” blog:

Parker’s journey is part of an expedition that is open to the public. For more than 10 years, Doug Stoup has been guiding teams across the frozen Arctic Ocean and Antarctica. From numerous ‘Last Degree‘ treks to his most recent 660-mile epic journey to the South Pole.

Cost: €25,700 but for a quickie (I’ll bet you didn’t know you could do this as a quickie), fly from Longyearbyen to Ice Station Barneo, then take a helicopter to 89.599? North. Spend some quality time on the ice for photos and celebration and then return. Cost: €16,900.

I always like to encourage young minds in science, but this is just a glorified field trip with a guide. What a bunch of suckers GE is for paying for such an expedition.

The ice from Cryosphere Today looks better than 30 years ago.

April 8, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

UCSB Geologist Discovers Pattern in Earth’s Long-Term Climate Record

University of California, Santa Barbara | Press Release | April 6, 2010

Santa Barbara, Calif. –– In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of the Earth’s orbital cycle to changes in the Earth’s climate. The finding is reported in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Lisiecki performed her analysis of climate by examining ocean sediment cores. These cores come from 57 locations around the world. By analyzing sediments, scientists are able to chart the Earth’s climate for millions of years in the past. Lisiecki’s contribution is the linking of the climate record to the history of the Earth’s orbit.

It is known that the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years. The orbit becomes either more round or more elliptical at these intervals. The shape of the orbit is known as its “eccentricity.” A related aspect is the 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Glaciation of the Earth also occurs every 100,000 years. Lisiecki found that the timing of changes in climate and eccentricity coincided. “The clear correlation between the timing of the change in orbit and the change in the Earth’s climate is strong evidence of a link between the two,” said Lisiecki. “It is unlikely that these events would not be related to one another.”

Besides finding a link between change in the shape of the orbit and the onset of glaciation, Lisiecki found a surprising correlation. She discovered that the largest glacial cycles occurred during the weakest changes in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit –– and vice versa. She found that the stronger changes in the Earth’s orbit correlated to weaker changes in climate. “This may mean that the Earth’s climate has internal instability in addition to sensitivity to changes in the orbit,” said Lisiecki.

She concludes that the pattern of climate change over the past million years likely involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system, as well as three different orbital systems. The first two orbital systems are the orbit’s eccentricity, and tilt. The third is “precession,” or a change in the orientation of the rotation axis.

April 7, 2010 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?

Forecasting The NSIDC News

By Steven Goddard and Anthony Watts | March 31, 2010

Barring an about face by nature or adjustments, it appears that for the first time since 2001, Arctic Sea ice will hit the “normal” line as defined by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for this time of year.

NSIDC puts out an article about once a month called the Sea Ice News. It generally highlights any bad news they can find about the disappearance of Arctic ice. Last month’s news led with this sentence.

In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average, and near the levels observed for February 2007.

But March brought good news for the Polar Bears, and bad news for the Catlin Expedition and any others looking for bad news. Instead of ice extent declining through March like it usually does, it continued to increase through the month and is now at the high (so far) for the year.

If it keeps this trend unabated, in a day or two it will likely cross the “normal” line.

Source: NSIDC North Series

The Danish Meteorological Institute shows Arctic ice extent at the highest level in their six year record.

Source: DMI Ice Extent

The Norwegians (NORSEX) show Arctic ice area above the 30 year mean.

Source: NORSEX Ice Area

And the NORSEX Ice Extent is not far behind, within 1 standard deviation, and similar to NSIDC’s presentation. Note that is hit normal last year, but later.

Source: NORSEX Ice Extent

And JAXA, using the more advanced AMSR-E sensor platform on the AQUA satellite, shows a similar uptick now intersecting the 2003 data line.

Source: IARC-JAXA

WUWT asked NSIDC scientist Dr. Walt Meir about this event to which he responded via email:

It’s a good question about the last time we’ve been above average. It was May 2001. April-May is the period when you’re starting to get into the peak of the melt season for the regions outside of the Arctic Ocean (Bering Sea, Hudson Bay) and the extent tends to have lower variability compared to other parts of the year as that thinner ice tends to go about the same time of year due to the solar heating. Even last year, we came fairly close to the average in early May.

He also mused about a cause:

Basically, it is due primarily to a lot more ice in the Bering Sea, as is evident in the images. The Bering ice is controlled largely by local winds, temperatures are not as important (though of course it still need to be at or at least near freezing to have ice an area for any length of time). We’ve seen a lot of northerly winds this winter in the Bering, particularly the last couple of weeks.

As we’ve been saying on WUWT for quite some time, wind seems to be a more powerful factor in recent sea ice declines than temperature. Recent studies agree.

See: Winds are Dominant Cause of Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheet Losses and also NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face

You can watch wind patterns in this time lapse animation, note how the ice has been pushed by winds and flowing down the east coast of Greenland:

Animation of Arctic sea-ice being pushed by wind patterns – CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW ANIMATION- Above image is not part of original story, but included to demonstrate the issue. Note that the animation is large, about 7 MB and may take awhile to load on your computer. It is worth the wait Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Dr. Meier also wrote:

This has very little implication for what will happen this summer, or for the long-term trends, since the Bering Sea ice is thin and will melt completely well before the peak summer season.

There’s certainly no reason to disagree with the idea that much of the Bering Sea ice will melt this summer, it happens every year and has for millenia. But with a strong negative Arctic Oscillation this year, and a change in the wind, it is yet to be determined if Arctic Sea ice minimum for 2010 is anomalously low, and/or delayed from the usual time.

In 2009, WUWT noted it on September 15th: Arctic sea ice melt appears to have turned the corner for 2009

Dr. Mark Serreze of NSIDC offered some hopeful commentary in a press release back on October 6th 2009, but still pushes that “ice free summer” meme:

“It’s nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there’s no reason to think that we’re headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geography department. “We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades.”

Remember this 2007 prediction from The Naval Postgraduate School?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm

==============================

Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013′

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco

Arctic summer melting in 2007 set new records

More details

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly

Professor Peter Wadhams

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.”So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

===

Joe Romm wrote up a clever piece last year on this subject:

Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat

June 5, 2009

I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center. Partly I wanted him to explain his “death spiral” metaphor for Arctic ice

So now that Arctic ice has returned to normal extent and area, we eagerly await the explanation from the experts about how that fits into the “death spiral” theory. Richard Feynman famously said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”

Time will tell. 2010 is looking promising for sea ice recovery again. After all, who wouldn’t want the Arctic Sea ice to recover? WUWT is predicting a recovery again this year, which we started mentioning as a prediction last fall.

So given what we know today, what will NSIDC highlight in their April Sea Ice News?

March 31, 2010 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

How government cash created the Climategate scandal

Andrew Bolt | Herald Sun | March 22, 2010

Australian climate scientist policy analyst Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen tells the British parliamentary inquiry into Climategate just how much global warming science is corrupted by politics and money. Excerpts:

I was peer reviewer for IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)… Since 1998 I have been the editor of the journal, Energy & Environment (E&E) published by Multi-science, where I published my first papers on the IPCC. I interpreted the IPCC “consensus” as politically created in order to support energy technology and scientific agendas that in essence pre-existed the “warming-as -man-made catastrophe alarm.”…

3.2 Scientific research as advocacy for an agenda (a coalition of interests, not a conspiracy,) was presented to the public and governments as protection of the planet… CRU, working for the UK government and hence the IPCC, was expected to support the hypothesis of man-made, dangerous warming caused by carbon dioxide, a hypothesis it had helped to formulate in the late 1980s…

3.3 … In persuading policy makers and the public of this danger, the “hockey stick” became a major tool of persuasion, giving CRU a major role in the policy process at the national, EU and international level. This led to the growing politicisation of science in the interest, allegedly, of protecting the “the environment” and the planet. I observed and documented this phenomenon as the UK Government, European Commission, and World Bank increasingly needed the climate threat to justify their anti-carbon (and pro-nuclear) policies. In return climate science was generously funded and required to support rather than to question these policy objectives… Opponents were gradually starved of research opportunities or persuaded into silence. The apparent “scientific consensus” thus generated became a major tool of public persuasion…

4.1 … As editor of a journal which remained open to scientists who challenged the orthodoxy, I became the target of a number of CRU manoeuvres. The hacked emails revealed attempts to manipulate peer review to E&E’s disadvantage, and showed that libel threats were considered against its editorial team…

4.4 Most recently CRU alleged that I had interfered “maliciously” with their busy grant-related schedules, by sending an email to the UKCIP (Climate Impact Programme) advising caution in the use of CRU data for regional planning purposes. This was clearly reported to [CRU head Phil] Jones who contacted my Head of Department, suggesting that he needed to reconsider the association of E&E with Hull University. Professor Graham Haughton, while expressing his own disagreement with my views, nevertheless upheld the principle of academic freedom…

4.5 The emails I have read are evidence of a close and protective collaboration between CRU, the Hadley Centre, and several US research bodies such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where former CRU students had found employment. Together they formed an important group inside IPCC Working Group 1, the science group…

The CRU case is not unique. Recent exposures have taken the lid off similar issues in the USA, the Netherlands, Australia, and possibly in Germany and Canada… It is at least arguable that the real culprit is the theme- and project-based research funding system put in place in the 1980s and subsequently strengthened and tightened in the name of “policy relevance”. This system, in making research funding conditional on demonstrating such relevance, has encouraged close ties with central Government bureaucracy. Some university research units have almost become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Government Departments. Their survival, and the livelihoods of their employees, depends on delivering what policy makers think they want. It becomes hazardous to speak truth to power…

Postglacial climatic history is by no means well understood and the human contributions cannot yet be assessed.

Saturday 20 March 2010

1 Declaration of Interest

I have no financial interest in this enquiry; I am no longer asking for research grants and have no close personal relationships with any of the people involved.

My interests are purely academic, professional and political. I am interested in the value and misuse of the peer review process. The negative attitudes of the IPCC/CRU people to my often sceptical journal have harmed it. Its impact rating has remained too low for many ambitious young researchers to use it, and even sales may have been affected. However, this is not an interest as my work is voluntary and the publisher has remained supportive. As a member of the Labour Party and deeply politically engaged person, I have not found life as a ‘climate sceptic’ always easy, but have kept my MP and MEP informed. I have been somewhat offended but not surprised by the ‘CRU-hack’ revelations.

2 Introduction: My Involvement as Researcher and Editor

2.1 Since the late 1980s I have been a researcher of the politics and science of climate change, and especially the IPCC, from the perspective of energy policy and international politics. (See publications, APPENDIX). I was peer reviewer for IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), peer reviewer for Working Group 3 (responses, emission scenarios, economics) for two of its reports and I studied the science and politics of IPCC under a 3-year grant from the ESRC.

2.2 Since 1998 I have been the editor of the journal, Energy & Environment (E&E) published by Multi-science, where I published my first papers on the IPCC. I interpreted the IPCC “consensus” as politically created in order to support energy technology and scientific agendas that in essence pre-existed the “warming-as -man-made catastrophe alarm.”[1]

2.3 I have published peer-reviewed papers and opinion pieces by all the best known ‘sceptics’ and know a number of them personally. My own views being known, E&E therefore attracted, inter alia, papers from IPCC-critical and therefore IPCC-excluded scientists. This did not please the senior CRU members, a number of whom I know personally.

2.4 Since the mid-1990s I have taught environmental management at the Geography Department, Hull University, after a decade as Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Science and Technology Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. Previously, I had studied physical geography, including some climatology (as well as geology and German literature) atAdelaide University and married into a well known family of Australian scientists. Science and research have been a major part of my life. I now consider climate scepticism my (unfunded) research area but have published a great deal on the IPCC, climate science and energy policy in the past. (See Appendix)

3 My Understanding of the Issue

3.1 I have no reason to believe that most of the scientists involved in the CRU affair (and this a group reaching beyond the UK) did anything but act in good faith, doing their duty to science, bureaucracy and the public as they saw it and as they were funded to do. It is important, however, for you check my observation, that most climate change since the late 1980s has been government- and grant- funded with the clearly stated objective that it must support a decarbonisation agenda for the energy sector.

3.2 Scientific research as advocacy for an agenda (a coalition of interests, not a conspiracy,) was presented to the public and governments as protection of the planet. This cause of environmental protection had from the start natural allies in the EU Commission, United Nation and World Bank. CRU, working for the UK government and hence the IPCC, was expected to support the hypothesis of man-made, dangerous warming caused by carbon dioxide, a hypothesis it had helped to formulate in the late 1980s and which became “true” in international law with the adoption of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.

3.3 This treaty and its protocol does not define “climate”, and applies only to anthropogenic warming assumed to be dangerous. In persuading policy makers and the public of this danger, the “hockey stick” became a major tool of persuasion, giving CRU a major role in the policy process at the national, EU and international level. This led to the growing politicisation of science in the interest, allegedly, of protecting the “the environment” and the planet. I observed and documented this phenomenon as the UK Government, European Commission, and World Bank increasingly needed the climate threat to justify their anti-carbon (and pro-nuclear) policies. In return climate science was generously funded and required to support rather than to question these policy objectives. This policy was of course challenged by those unhappy with the proposed government-stimulated replacement of carbon fuels, but this need not concern this Committee beyond noting that it increased the anger of climate “sceptics” who saw science misused for policies they doubted. Others liked the policy and kept quiet. Opponents were gradually starved of research opportunities or persuaded into silence. The apparent “scientific consensus” thus generated became a major tool of public persuasion.

4 Energy & Environment and CRU

4.1 I inherited the editorship of Energy & Environment from a former senior scientist at the Department of the Environment (Dr. David Everest) because we shared doubts about the claims made by environmentalists and were worried about the readiness with which politicians accepted these claims, including ‘global warming’ which followed so seamlessly from the acid rain scare, my previous research area. As editor of a journal which remained open to scientists who challenged the orthodoxy, I became the target of a number of CRU manoeuvres. The hacked emails revealed attempts to manipulate peer review to E&E’s disadvantage, and showed that libel threats were considered against its editorial team. Dr Jones even tried to put pressure on my university department. [2] The emailers expressed anger over my publication of several papers that questioned the ‘hockey stick’ graph and the reliability of CRU temperature data. The desire to control the peer review process in their favour is expressed several times. Benny Peiser, the Guest Editor of a special issue will report to you on his experience.

4.2 I was sent about 20 emails (e.g. 125655744.text, 1256765544, 12565500876, 125510086, and 125558481) that concern me or the journal E&E. I have not spent time searching for more but have followed the wide debate in several countries. (See Fuel for Thought attachment). The emails also cover events which I have followed since the late 1980s and concern people and institutions I am to some degree familiar with.

4.3 CRU clearly disliked my- journal and believed that “good” climate scientists do not read it. They characterised it as a journal of choice for climate sceptics. If this was so, it happened by default as other publication opportunities were closed to them. Email No. 1256765544, for example nevertheless shows that they took the journal seriously. An American response to McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s influential paper I published in 2005 challenging the “hockey stick” says, “It is indeed time leading scientists at CRU associated with the UK Met Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.”

4.4 Most recently CRU alleged that I had interfered “maliciously” with their busy grant-related schedules, by sending an email to the UKCIP (Climate Impact Programme) advising caution in the use of CRU data for regional planning purposes. This was clearly reported to Professor Jones who contacted my Head of Department, suggesting that he needed to reconsider the association of E&E with Hull University. Professor Graham Haughton, while expressing his own disagreement with my views, nevertheless upheld the principle of academic freedom. I therefore have no reason to complain against theUniversity of Hull and I am still working from the Geography Department.

4.5 The emails I have read are evidence of a close and protective collaboration between CRU, the Hadley Centre, and several US research bodies such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where former CRU students had found employment. Together they formed an important group inside IPCC Working Group 1, the science group.

5 UK Policy Context

5.1 Having recently attended a business lunch addressed by our Minister for Regional Development (Rosie Winterton) and a manager from EON (UK) in charge of offshore wind farm development (Humber Gateway, to be completed by 2014, subject to planning permission), I am fully aware of this Government’s commitment to a decarbonisation agenda as the way towards British reindustrialisation, job creation and regional development, including related research and teaching by universities. At this gathering, the problems with IPCC science[3] and CRU (UEA) had not yet registered or were dismissed. More generally, judging by the most recent statements from leading spokesmen from all major parties, it seems that belief in IPCC science remains the primary justification for an energy policy that so obviously needs much more examination. TheUK clearly hopes to continue to “lead the world” in the decarbonisation of energy. Is this wise? What other consequences might arise? When has competitive advantage been secured by making our energy differentially more expensive? Unless of course, Britain can succeed in effecting a regulatory capture in energy markets on a global scale…

6 Your Specific Questions

6.1 Terms of Reference

The four terms as set out seem appropriate and should establish useful foundations. There is, however, a broader context. The CRU case is not unique. Recent exposures have taken the lid off similar issues in the USA, the Netherlands, Australia, and possibly in Germany and Canada. There may be a systemic problem here, and it would be neither fair nor helpful to make CRU and the UK Meteorological Office the sole fall-guys. It is at least arguable that the real culprit is the theme- and project-based research funding system put in place in the 1980s and subsequently strengthened and tightened in the name of “policy relevance”. This system, in making research funding conditional on demonstrating such relevance, has encouraged close ties with central Government bureaucracy. Some university research units have almost become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Government Departments. Their survival, and the livelihoods of their employees, depends on delivering what policy makers think they want. It becomes hazardous to speak truth to power. In the area of energy policy, there are particular problems since the familiar lobbies of the privatised energy industries have been joined by new pressure groups. As the justification for policies comes to rely increasingly on “environmental” arguments, a host of NGOs, often with electorally appealing single-issue concerns and deceptively simple solutions, begin to raise their voices. The politics have become very difficult, and it is not clear that the traditional structures can cope. The responsibility for excessive pressure on “science” to deliver the desired answers must also lie with the relevant research councils, NGOs, and Parliament itself. Have politicians kept a close eye on the science debate? Have they understood what kind of a body the IPCC really is? Professor Benfield has recently begun to move the debate in an interesting direction by suggesting that that bureaucracy will have to attune itself better to the recognition of the value of diversity in scientific advice. They need to accept that policy advisors and Ministers cannot abdicate responsibility for making balanced judgements by relying on project-funded research in the hope that it will produce settled solutions. I should be happy to discuss this with you.

My suggestions for action would be to expand this enquiry to include the funding of climate science and consider the pressure put on scientists by policy-makers and assorted lobbies.

6.2 How Independent Are The Other Two International Data Sets?

I am no expert here but from the large amount of material I have read, some of it mentioned in Fuel For Thought paper 21/2, I do not think that they are independent but rely on the same primary sources. All have tended to serve the same master (IPCC/ policy-makers) and ‘cause’ (saving the planet) and seem affected either by similar shortcomings (the available measurement periods, changing measurement technology and above all the declining and limited number of measuring points, not to mention the urban heat island effect. These data sets may soon be replaced by better and more reliable data to demonstrate the Earth’s postglacial temperature history (which says little about attribution/causation). Postglacial climatic history is by no means well understood and the human contributions cannot yet be assessed.

Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

Reader Emeritus, Hull University,

Department of Geography

February 2010

Appendix: Relevant Publications

Refereed journal articles

· ‘The role of IPCC as driver of international climate policy’ paper to Hamburg Institute of International Economics Conference “Critical elements of international climate policy” submitted to Geoforum, May 2004. To be revised/rejected.

· What drives the Kyoto Process?, translated by Kirril Kondratyev into Russian, Proceedings of the Russian Geographical Society, April 2004. Published in Russian

· Climate Policy: Interest driven, Culture Bound or based on Science? Submitted to Area April 2004./rejected

· ‘Investing Against Climate Change: Why Failure Remains Possible’, Environmental Politics: Autumn 2002; 11(3), pp.1-30.

· Journal of Science, Technology and Human Values: ‘Science, Equity and the War against Carbon’. Winter 2003.28 (1) Differentiation since Kyoto: An Exploration of Australian Climate Policy in Comparison to Europe, Energy & Environment, 11 (3), 2000, p.343-353.

· ‘Climate Change and the World Bank: Opportunity for Global Governance? Energy & Environment, Vol.10, No.1, January 1999, pp.27-50.

· ‘A winning coalition of advocacy: climate research, bureaucracy and ‘alternative’ fuels’, Energy Policy, Vol. 25, No. 4., 1997

· (with Z Young), ‘The Global Environment Facility: In Institutional Innovation in Need of Guidance?’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 6, No.1, Spring 1997

· ‘Political Pressures in the Formation of Scientific Consensus’, Energy & Environment, Vol.7, No.4, 1996 pp. 365-375;

· ‘Britain and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The impacts of scientific advice on global warming: Integrated policy analysis and the global dimension.’ Environmental Politics, Vol.4, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp.1-18

· ‘Britain and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The impacts of scientific advice on Global warming Part II: The Domestic Story of the British Response to Climate Change, Environmental Politics, Vol.4, No.2, Summer 1995, pp.175-196.

· ‘Reflections on the Politics linking Science, Environment and Innovation’, Innovation, Vol.8, No.3, 1995 pp.275-287.

· ‘Global climate protection policy: the limits of scientific advice – Part I.’ Global Environmental Change, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1994,

· ‘Global climate protection policy: the limits of scientific advice – Part II.’ Global Environmental Change, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1994

· (with J F Skea) ‘The Operation and Impact of the IPCC: Results of a Survey of Participants and Users’. STEEP discussion paper no. 16, SPRU, Brighton 1994.

· ‘A scientific agenda for climate policy?’ Nature, Vol. 372, No.6505,1 December 1994

· ‘Science policy, the IPCC and the Climate Convention: the codification of a global research agenda.’ Energy and Environment; Vol. 4, No. 4, 1993, pp. 362-408.

BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS

· With A. Kellow, Hobart, International Environmental Policy: Interests and the Failure of the Kyoto Process, Edward Elgar Publishing, October 2002.

Acid Politics: Environmental and Energy Policies in Britain and Germany, with J F Skea, Belhaven Press, London/New York, p 296, January 1991 (paperback April 1993)

BOOK CHAPTERS

o ‘Epilogue: Scientific Advice in the world of power politics’, final chapter (10) in Pim Martens & Jan Rotmans (eds.) (1999), Climate Change: An Integrated Approach. (Advances in Global Change Research), Kluwer Academic

Publishers, Dordrecht, December 1999, pp. 357-397. 0-7923 5996-8ISBN

o ‘Who is driving Climate Change Policy?’ In J.Morris (ed.), Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998, London

o Uncertainty in the Service of Science: Between Science Policy and the Politics of Power, in Gunnar Fermann, International Politics of Climate Change, Scandinavian University Press , Oslo 1997;pp 110-152. ISBN- 82-00-22711-

o ‘Science, power and policy.’ In: M Imber and J Vogler (eds.), Global Environmental Change in International Relations; London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 171-195

Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

——————————————————————————–

[1] Since the late 1990s I have contributed a lengthy ‘Fuel for Thought’ item to the journal which documents the relevant developments/discussions in IPCC critical climate science alongside the latest development in policy, technology and finance selected and sorted from a large variety of sources and sorted. The most recent item is attached to the submissions. It deals in some length with the CRU affair and reactions to it around the world, as well as with Copenhagen.

[2] On 26 October in a confidential message also addressed to Dr. Mann , the ‘creator’ of the hockey stick, Jones complained that E&E was to published a paper critical of Mann’s methodology and saw this as a part of a political campaign against energy legislation in the USA. Note (Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 15 January 2010): “Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind’s activities are causing global warming Glosser has called for the return of over $ 6million state funding stimulus funds received by Prof. Mann and about whom US Senator Jeffrey Piccola has said: “The allegations of intellectual and scientific fraud like those made against Dr. Mann are serious against anybody involved in academics, but the impact in this case is significantly elevated. The work of Dr. Mann and other scientists at the CRU is being used to develop economic and environmental policies in states and countries across the world. Considering the saliency of the work being conducted by the CRU, anything short of the pursuit of absolute science cannot be accepted or tolerated.”(http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/03/heat-on-mann-at-home)

[3] See http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2010-01/28/content_9388032.htm and the attached Fuel for Though 21/2 which conveys many of the reactions around the world , including from other scientists. Note Mike Hulme from UEA:

March 30, 2010 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons

Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo

Press TV – March 29, 2017

Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.

Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.

“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.

Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.

He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.

Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.

“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.

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