PARIS (AFP) – – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes [...]]]>

source: Yahoo News

PARIS (AFP) – – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.

Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.

This is the term for the rebounding of Earth’s crust following the last Ice Age.

Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight.

When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.

This movement, though, is not just a single vertical motion, lead researcher Bert Vermeersen of Delft Technical University, in the Netherlands, said in phone interview with AFP.

“A good analogy is that it’s like a mattress after someone has been sleeping on it all night,” he said.

The weight of the sleeper creates a hollow as the material compress downwards and outwards. When the person gets up, the mattress starts to recover. This movement, seen in close-up, is both upwards and downwards and also sideways, too, as the decompressed material expands outwards and pulls on adjacent stuffing.

Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper.

It looks at tiny changes in Earth’s gravitational field provided by two satellites since 2002, from GPS measurements on land, and from figures for sea floor pressure.

These revealed, among other things, that southern Greenland is in fact subsiding, as the crust beneath it is pulled by the post-glacial rebound from northern America.

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

These variations show a large degree of uncertainty, but Vermeersen believes that even so a clearer picture is emerging on icesheet loss.

“The corrections for deformations of the Earth’s crust have a considerable effect on the amount of ice that is estimated to be melting each year,” said Vermeersen, whose team worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsation Laboratory and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

“We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted.”

If the figures for overall sea level rise are accurate, icesheet loss would be contribute about 30 percent, rather than roughly half, to the total, said Vermeersen. The rest would come mainly from thermal expansion, meaning that as the sea warms it rises.

The debate is important because of fears that Earth’s biggest reservoirs of ice, capable of driving up ocean levels by many metres (feet) if lost, are melting much faster than global-warming scenarios had predicted.

In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted oceans would rise by 18-59 centimeters (7.2 and 23.6 inches) by 2100, a figure that at its upper range means vulnerable coastal cities would become swamped within a few generations.

The increase would depend on warming estimated at between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (1.98-11.52 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, the IPCC said. It stressed, though, the uncertainties about icesheet loss.

Current computer simulations of the Earth’s climate capture only a fraction of the many intricate processes that shape our climate. (GOES satellite image, courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/GOES.)

Recent advances in supercomputing have brightened the future of climate modeling, but they also bring to light complicated questions about the fundamental [...]]]> source: PhysOrg.com

Current computer simulations of the Earth’s climate capture only a fraction of the many intricate processes that shape our climate. (GOES satellite image, courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/GOES.)

Recent advances in supercomputing have brightened the future of climate modeling, but they also bring to light complicated questions about the fundamental workings of our planet and our atmosphere.

Provided by Argonne National Laboratory (news : web)

I’ve recently reviewed a number of excellent books on aspects of the climate debate.  But I want to tell you about the book I’ve just read: “Climatism”.

I was at the Heartland Climate Conference in Chicago in May, when I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Goreham, the author of [...]]]> source: Roger Helmer MEP

I’ve recently reviewed a number of excellent books on aspects of the climate debate.  But I want to tell you about the book I’ve just read: “Climatism”.

I was at the Heartland Climate Conference in Chicago in May, when I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Goreham, the author of “Climatism!”.  Steve holds an MS from the University of Illinois, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.  He has just been appointed Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America (www.climatescienceamerica.org).   A few years ago he became interested in the climate debate, and has made an extended study both of the science, and of Climatsm as a social, political and economic phenomenon.  The result of his work is this book, one of the most comprehensive yet accessible studies I have seen.  While he doesn’t spare the scientific rigour, he writes in a wonderfully accessible way, and if you have any interest in the subject you’ll find it difficult to put down.

Unlike some authors, Goreham devotes a substantial chunk of the book – the first 137 pages – to the science, and naturally includes a range of very useful references which will be invaluable to those of us who get involved in debates on Climate.  I thought I knew the subject pretty well, but he’s come up with some points that are new to me.  For example, I hadn’t realised that an isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2 enables us to calculate the percentage of it that is man-made.  The answer comes out at a mere 4%, whereas the IPCC assumptions give a figure of 27%.

Amongst the science, though, Goreham is not averse to a homely analogy.  He breaks out the sequence of arguments used by the Climatists to “prove” that CO2 is the problem, starting with “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” (true) right through to “Therefore man-made CO2 emissions cause climate change” (false).  And his homely analogy uses peanut butter.  Consider: peanut butter is a fattening food.  Sales of peanut butter in the US in recent decades show a strong growth trend.  Obesity levels over the same period also show a strong growth trend.  Therefore it is clear that peanut butter is the cause of obesity, and that we can cure America’s obesity epidemic by the simple expedient of banning peanut butter.

It’s so absurd it’s laughable.  And yet it exactly parallels the Climatist case.  But sadly while the economic damage from banning peanut butter would be small and localised, the economic damage from seeking dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions is currently running (says Goreham) at $150 billion a year.  That’s not peanuts.  Yet as Goreham repeatedly reminds us, out of every 10,000 molecules in the atmosphere, only four are CO2.  We’re asked to believe that this trivial amount of a harmless trace gas has more impact on global climate than the Sun, or than astronomical cycles.

The remainder of the book looks at Climatism as a political, social and economic phenomenon – at the causes and objectives of Climatism, and the remedies it proposes.  There is too much material to summarise here, but Goreham sees Climatism (rightly, in my view) as heir to a long and shameful tradition of disaster predictions, all associated with “solutions” which are anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and (quite literally in some cases) anti-humanity.   He starts with Malthus, the Anglican Minister whose 1798 paper “On Population” argued that famine was inevitable as populations grew geometrically.  He writes of the Eugenics movement, which held similar views and enjoyed a vogue in the early 20th century, but was finally discredited by Nazi racial policies in the Second World War  The story moves on to the sixties, and the modern environmental movement.  Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted global famine in the seventies.  Ehrlich made a series of disaster predictions on food, disease and the end of fossil fuels, which from the perspective of 2010 are quite simply risible.

The Club of Rome played a dishonourable part in the story.  In 1974, it said “The Earth has cancer, and the cancer is man”.  Warming to their theme, in a 1991 report the Club of Rome declared “The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”.  Which brings us to modern times, with the UN, the EU, the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and most recently the Copenhagen Climate Conference.  From the point of view of organisations like the UN and the EU, climate hysteria validates their existence, and legitimises their pursuit of global governance, which is so dear to their hearts.  When David Miliband suggested getting the public to love the EU by re-branding it as “The Environmental Union”, he rather gave the game away.

Climatism is based on duff science.  It is just not true.  Yet it remains the greatest threat to our prosperity, to our democracy and to our freedom.  If you have any doubts on these points, please read the book.

ROGER HELMER MEP

www.rogerhelmer.com

“Climatism!” is published by New Lenox Books (newlenoxbooks@comcast.net).  ISBN 978-0-9824996-3-4

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and [...]]]> source: Nature News

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.

“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers’ banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.

The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.

Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.

Hugo Mamani, head of forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia’s national weather centre, confirms that the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.

Dearth of surveys

But exactly how the cold temperatures caused such devastation remains a mystery. So far, there have been no rigorous surveys of the ecological damage, only anecdotal observations.

Fons Smolders, a fisheries scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is one expert who has visited the area and is keen for the phenomenon to receive proper study because such freak climatic events may become more common in the future.

Often, when cold weather causes fish deaths in lakes, the mortalities are directly due to hypoxia, when oxygen levels are too low to supply the animals’ cells and tissues. This is because the colder surface temperatures can reduce mixing in the water column.

Because the deaths occurred mainly in rivers, Smolders suspects that they are linked to infection. “Some of the fish that I saw had white spots that may indicate disease. The cold probably made them very susceptible to all kinds of infections,” he explains.

“When fish die, it’s usually not a single stressor, but multiple stressors interacting,” agrees Steven Cooke, an aquatic ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, who last year wrote a review of cold shock in fish¹. “So, if cold shock or cooler temperatures are being implicated in mortality, there’s probably something else going on as well.”

Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that [...]]]> source: The American Culture

Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis.

Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring.

The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade.

Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming from those proven to be wrong, because they are shameless.

One speaker at the conference, whom I was privileged to see, was James Delingpole, a non-scientist and a writer (a novelist, even!), who wowed the crowd with great common sense and a powerful insight into what’s really been behind the global warming scare all along. As Delingpole wrote in the Spectator after conference:

[T]he Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not about science and never was. As Climategate proved (but as some of us suspected long before), AGW is the invention of a cabal of activists, all working towards more or less the same ecofascist agenda: Mother Gaia is suffering; it’s mostly our fault; the only way to atone for our sins is to destroy Western industrial civilisation and shackle ourselves with a form of One World government run by ‘experts’ and bureaucrats over whom we have no democratic control. It is a battle against a tyranny every bit as great as we faced in the second world war or the Cold War. All what’s different about this enemy is that instead of jackboots it wears long hair, a warm, caring smile and drives a VW Combi with an ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ sticker.

That’s something we climate realists have known all along and had been trying in vain to convince people of for some years: that global warming never was about saving the planet but always just a pretext for progressive elitists to take ever-greater control over your life and mine.

In fact, Delingpole notes, even if global warming were to occur, it would be a good thing. Warm periods have tended to coincide with human thriving, and cold periods are associated with war, famine, and economic stagnation. And the sad fact is that we are far more likely to be heading toward uncomfortable cold than comfortable warmth, Delingpole notes:

[W]hile there has been no global warming since 1998, the general view among those who really know is that we could now be entering a lengthy period — 20 or 30 years (most of the rest of your and my life buggered) — of global cooling.

All the auguries are there. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which works in roughly 30-year cycles, has now begun its cooling phase (such as we last had in the chilly years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s). We’re about to enter a La Niña phase in the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which means at the very least we’re due for a winter every bit as harsh as the most recent one. Worse still, low sunspot activity suggests we might be entering a solar minimum period, such as the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) when those ice fairs were held on the Thames, or the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1830) which gave us both Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow and the terrible ‘Year Without a Summer’ (1816). Periods of cooling such as this are much more greatly to be feared, of course, than periods of warming — which historically have coincided with abundance, relative peacefulness, economic growth and cultural flourishing.

Or, if you want to be really depressed, there’s always the possibility that we’re on the brink of another ice age. Warm ‘interglacial’ periods such as the one we’re in now last about 10,000 years. And we’re already past the 10,000th year.

And it isn’t hysterical alarmists saying this stuff. Climate realists don’t really do hysterical alarmism.

Delingpole is right: the attendees at the conference were remarkably good-natured and cheerful, and the discussion was strong on real science and economics and without any interesting infighting.

As was noted more than once at the conference, organizer James Taylor of The Heartland Institute invited countless well-known global warming alarmists to attend, and only two chose to do so. And none of the prominent ones deigned to step forward for a real discussion of the science and economic facts behind the matter.

That’s been the attitude of the alarmists from the start: to claim “the science is settled” and insist that we all pay no attention to the repulsively obese ex-vice president behind the curtain and move on to changing our lifestyles to suit their vile fancies regarding the limits that should be placed on the energy and other resource consumption of ordinary people—while alarmists such as Al Gore notoriously live in a manner King Midas would have been ashamed to contemplate.

The fact is, the big money—including the corporate money, despite hysterical claims to the contrary—is all on the alarmist side. Climate change realists are continually being pushed out of jobs and their scientific papers rejected simply because they dare to question the phony consensus of big-government elitists. As Delingpole notes:

It’s no wonder that the bit of my speech that got the biggest laugh was when I asked: ‘How many of you here are in the pay of Big Oil?’ No hands were raised. ‘And how many of you would like to be in the pay of Big Oil?’ Up shot 150 arms. ‘Guess we picked the wrong side of the debate to be on,’ I said, hardly needing to explain that companies like Shell and BP pump far, far more money into eco-nonsense like carbon trading and green posturing than they do into sceptical science.

That’s the problem with being an Evil Climate Change Denier. The tide is turning in our favour. History will vindicate us. But until then the only perks of the job are the joy of one another’s company and the smug satisfaction of knowing that one day we’ll be able to look at the wreckage of disasters like cap and trade, David Cameron’s wind farms and the IPCC’s junk science predictions and say: ‘I told you so.’

There is one thing and one thing only behind the global warming scare, and it is not science. It is greed for power. The truth is slowly coming out, however, and as Delingpole says, the alarmists will ultimately be pushed back.

In the meantime, however, we are in great danger of instituting a catastrophically enormous waste of money and human toil by enacting cap and trade and other such outrages. Being right would be meager solace under those circumstances.

Note: the author is employed by the main sponsor of the conference, The Heartland Institute. That, however, does not influence his opinion in the slightest, because the science does that for him.

Background: Physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, 60, is a world famous physicist and climate researcher. After working in Germany and California, he was appointed founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in 1991, which he still leads today. He is an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel [...]]]> source: FreeInternetPress

Background: Physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, 60, is a world famous physicist and climate researcher. After working in Germany and California, he was appointed founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in 1991, which he still leads today. He is an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-related issues as chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU).

German physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is one of Angela Merkel’s advisers on climate change. In an interview with Spiegel, he discusses extreme weather events, global warming’s winners and losers, and the effects of the crisis of confidence in climate research.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Schellnhuber, Russia is burning and floods have inundated Pakistan. Are such extreme weather phenomena increasing because of gradual climate change?

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: Such events certainly do correspond to what we expect from a warmer world. We have seen record average global temperatures for more than a year now, and that increases the likelihood of regional heat waves like the one in western Russia at the moment. Besides, our climate models show that the South Asian monsoon is becoming more temperamental as a result of anthropogenic changes to the environment.

SPIEGEL: There have also been forest fires and floods in the past. Isn’t it too easy to automatically link natural disasters to climate change?

Schellnhuber: Of course it would be wrong, from a scientific perspective, to establish this relationship indiscriminately. But it would be just as unscientific to stop searching for such relationships, merely because the public’s interest in climate change has temporarily diminished.

SPIEGEL: In Russia, in particular, fire prevention has failed. The forest service was abolished, and fire departments in many places are in terrible condition. Do these major fires show that extreme weather situations don’t necessarily lead to catastrophes, but that poor crisis management is really to blame?Schellnhuber: That’s undoubtedly correct. In most cases, it’s social mismanagement that creates the conditions for social catastrophes. Often one can get away with having inadequate precautionary measures, provided the weather plays along. But extreme weather relentlessly exposes human mistakes and our crimes against nature. The German state of Brandenburg (editor’s note: where the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is based) offers an example of the right way to do things. Even though there are more forest fires here than in the past, due to global warming, the surface area burned by the fires has decreased substantially, thanks to improved monitoring with smoke detectors.

SPIEGEL: As climate adviser to the chancellor, you have a particularly high profile. Because of your frequently ominous predictions, critics have dubbed you the “Cassandra of Potsdam,” after the figure in Greek mythology whose predictions always went unheard. Why do you always have to scare people?

Schellnhuber: Let me answer your provocative question in an objective way. As an expert, it’s possible that I tend to point to dangers and risks more than to opportunities and possibilities – similarly to an engineer who builds a bridge and has to make people aware of everything that could cause it to collapse. Warning against a possible accident is in fact intended to reduce the likelihood of an accident. And a sudden shift in the climate could have truly catastrophic consequences. Besides, in Greek mythology Cassandra was always right — unfortunately.

SPIEGEL: Does that justify constantly predicting the end of the world?

Schellnhuber: Naturally, we have to be careful not to dramatize things. After all, scientific credibility is our unique selling point. But I do confess that when you have the feeling that people just aren’t listening, it becomes very tempting to turn up the volume. Naturally, we have to resist this temptation. On the other hand, the media often portray my statements in one-sided ways…

SPIEGEL: Can you give us an example?

Schellnhuber: Take agriculture, for example. If temperatures rise, harvests will suffer, in cereal crops, for example. But at the same time the higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to improved fertilization of plants. This fertilization from the air will make up for a large portion of the heat damage, perhaps even overcompensating for it. In other words, we could even get higher yields for a certain amount of time, provided there is enough water. In talks I give on the subject, I always mention both effects: the heat damage and the CO2 fertilization. But such subtleties are lost when it comes to how the issue is perceived by the general public.

SPIEGEL: It wasn’t just misunderstandings that shook public confidence in climate research in recent months. A number of statements in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such as one on the supposedly rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers, turned out to be appalling errors.

Schellnhuber: There were only a few slip-ups, but they were extremely vexing. The IPCC is in the public eye, and there is so much at stake that we cannot allow mistakes of this magnitude to be made. The IPCC now needs to do its homework to overcome the credibility crisis that’s occurred. We received a kick in the pants that probably did us a lot of good.

SPIEGEL: A scientific investigation panel in the Dutch parliament accuses the IPCC of overemphasizing the negative consequences of climate change.

Schellnhuber: On balance, this accusation is unjustified. It’s not like the IPCC is hiding its true face, which is characterized by ugly exaggerations, behind a mask. For example, the IPCC has deliberately made cautious and restrained predictions regarding the rise in sea levels. The IPCC is set up in such a way that it smooths things out as much as possible and uses conservative wording, so that all scientists involved can ultimately support the report.

SPIEGEL: Anyone who soberly asks for a cost-benefit analysis of climate change is demonized as a heretic. Why is it such a taboo to talk about the advantages of global warming?

Schellnhuber: You’re right – we do have to highlight the opportunities and benefits for some regions of the world more than we have done so far. There will certainly be winners, at least temporarily, especially in the northern latitudes. At a conference in Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told me quite openly: We are looking forward to global warming. We won’t need to heat as much, our fleet will be able to operate in an ice-free sea, and we’ll have more fertile land to farm. But is this really true? The current forest and peat fires show that global warming could also have drawbacks for Russia. The problem is that the consequences of climate change, both good and bad, have not been adequately studied yet. More than 90 percent of funding is still being used to investigate scientifically if humans are responsible for climate change. But this question has already been answered a long time ago: They are.

‘We Are Very Much in the Dark’

SPIEGEL: Is Germany more likely to be among the winners or the losers?

Schellnhuber: It’s hard to say. We are currently working on a comprehensive study of this issue in Potsdam. Unfortunately, there are still many unknowns. Climate impact research still lags behind the rest of climate research by about a decade. The following example illustrates how complex all of this is: On the surface, warmer temperatures are fantastic for tourism along the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. On the other hand, the beaches there will first have to survive the rise in sea levels. And that’s not a trivial matter. In Hawaii, one-third of beaches are already threatened by flooding. So do the advantages outweigh the drawbacks? We don’t know yet.

SPIEGEL: Apparently it’s just as hard to predict whether there will be more and stronger hurricanes in the future.

Schellnhuber: It’s true that it is still unclear whether they will increase in frequency. A few studies do note that wind speeds in tropical storms could increase. But given that climate research is still in its adolescent phase, the next study could reach precisely the opposite conclusion.

SPIEGEL: The computer models come to more obvious conclusions with regard to storms in our moderate latitudes. Outside the tropics, hardly anything will change. Germany, according to the models, will see neither more nor more powerful storms, although the storm paths of low-pressure zones are likely to shift.

Schellnhuber: Yes, I know that my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) in Hamburg gave the all-clear signal after doing their simulation. But this is a preliminary result at best. Personally, I don’t believe that there will be no changes in storms in a world that’s, say, five degrees Celsius warmer. That would greatly surprise me, given that it’s such a non-linear phenomenon.

SPIEGEL: But the public has gained the impression that superstorms with previously unheard of destructive power will devastate our cities in the future. Shouldn’t climatologists at least make it clear that they are still largely in the dark?

Schellnhuber: The simple answer is yes. In fact, we are very much in the dark on this issue. On the other hand, that fact is by no means reassuring. Do we really want to embark on a planetary experiment with an unknown outcome? Do we want to simply allow climate change to happen and then calmly observe the storms to see whether or not they’re actually getting worse?

SPIEGEL: Was it generally a mistake not to have done more to point out the serious gaps that still exist in climate research?

Schellnhuber: Once again, all I can say is that we shouldn’t adopt a bunker mentality, especially in climatology. Instead, all the doubts should be clearly and candidly addressed at conferences, even when it’s painful. Just think how passionately Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein used to argue about the fundamental aspects of quantum theory. But that was a small, manageable group of physicists who respected each other and constantly met in person…

SPIEGEL: …and global politics wasn’t an issue.

Schellnhuber: Exactly! In climatology, it would be difficult, even just from a technical point of view, to conduct the entire scientific debate in full public view. That’s because politicians and society want the clearest, most unambiguous answers possible. And if we can’t provide those answers, many people simply stop listening to us. They’re basically saying: Don’t bother us with your models and counter-models. Get back to us when you have all the answers.

SPIEGEL: Is that also the reason why there are some exaggerations in the summary of the IPCC report for political decision-makers?

Schellnhuber: They’re not exaggerations, but a condensing of information. We scientists can’t exactly slam tens of thousands of pages of scientific articles onto the table in front of parliaments and governments. Of course the results are condensed, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. However, in the interest of scientific accuracy, perhaps we could abandon the overarching goal of the IPCC report, which is to deliver summary answers to all questions about the climate – and sometimes just say nothing.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t there also a risk that studies could be suppressed if they were likely to give a boost to skeptics of anthropogenic climate change?

Schellnhuber: Believe it or not, I don’t practice self-censorship, and as a physicist, I’m accustomed to recognizing that new studies might correct my point of view, even if this translates into intellectual defeat. I wouldn’t hesitate to tell the chancellor that there is a new study that suggests we are all backing the wrong horse and that humans are not to blame for climate change. Or perhaps we’ll discover in 20 years’ time that we can easily master a five-degree increase in global temperatures. I would be very happy about that. But from today’s perspective there is no reason for such optimism.

SPIEGEL: You are fighting to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. But it’s already almost one degree warmer today than it was at the beginning of industrialization. Because of the greenhouse gases already circulating in the atmosphere, another increase in temperature by 0.6 degrees can no longer be avoided. And more than 30 gigatons of CO2 are still being emitted into the air every year. Isn’t the two-degree target completely unrealistic?

Schellnhuber: Technically speaking it’s probably still just about possible. But in 10 years’ time it’ll probably be too late. After that, it could be that the only solution will be global carbon management, that is, the artificial removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps through reforestation of degraded areas of land or the direct filtration and permanent disposal of carbon dioxide. That’s the ace up our sleeve, which we would then have to play. Incidentally, I’m convinced that in the long term we should take the atmosphere back to the cooler state that prevailed in the Neolithic Age, when humans became sedentary.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean? It seems hubristic to assume we can simply program average temperatures on the planet, as if we were dealing with an air-conditioning system. Do you really believe that human civilization will collapse if the temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius?

Schellnhuber: First of all, what’s hubristic here is the way we are unscrupulously interfering with creation by burning all the fossil fuels. And of course the world won’t end if temperatures go up by 2.01 degrees, let alone end suddenly. From today’s scientific perspective, we could possibly live with a warming of two to three degrees. But that range should be the extent of it, because greater increases in temperature would trigger uncontrollable processes, leading to sudden and irreversible changes in ice sheets and continental ecosystems. The overwhelming majority of climatologists assume that a global temperature rise of four degrees would be an immensely dangerous route that we should avoid at all costs.

SPIEGEL: Why then have you, as one of the creators of the two-degree target, imposed such a magical limit to which all countries must slavishly adhere?

Schellnhuber: Politicians like to have clear targets, and a simple number is easier to handle than a complex temperature range. Besides, it was important to introduce a quantitative orientation in the first place, which the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change managed to elegantly wangle its way out of. And let’s be honest: Even if we aim for the two-degree target, we’ll end up somewhat higher. Whenever there’s a speed limit, most drivers tend to go a little faster.

SPIEGEL: At the climate summit in Copenhagen, the prevailing impression was that the most important countries don’t want any fixed rules at all.

Schellnhuber: It’s true that the big picture remains unclear. For the time being, there will certainly be no substantial treaty among all 194 signatories to the convention. That’s why we have to pin our hopes on smaller alliances for now, such as between the European Union and Brazil. What’s happening in Brazil is unbelievable. In 20 or 30 years, they could meet all of their energy needs from renewable resources. Perhaps we’ll all be driving with sustainable biofuel from Brazil soon. And such bilateral projects will certainly help set the unwieldy behemoth that is the global climate treaty into motion.

SPIEGEL: Which countries do you believe are best suited to bringing about a total rebuilding of industrial society?

Schellnhuber: Ultimately only democratic societies will be able to master this challenge, notwithstanding their torturous decision-marking processes. But to get there perhaps we’ll need innovative refinement of our democratic institutions. I could imagine assigning 10 percent of all seats in parliament to ombudsmen who represent only the interests of future generations.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Schellnhuber, thank you for this interview.

Intellpuke: This interview with Physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was conducted by Spiegel journalists Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter; you can read it in context here: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,712113,00.html

By Russell Berman

Former Vice President Gore is calling for major rallies to protest congressional inaction on climate change.

In a post on his personal blog headlined “The Movement We Need,” Gore linked to and quoted from an Australian wire service report that “tens of thousands of protesters … have taken to the [...]]]> source: The Hill

By Russell Berman

Former Vice President Gore is calling for major rallies to protest congressional inaction on climate change.

In a post on his personal blog headlined “The Movement We Need,” Gore linked to and quoted from an Australian wire service report that “tens of thousands of protesters … have taken to the streets across Australia to urge the major political parties to take action on climate change.”

“Across the world, when politicians fail to take action to solve the climate crisis, people are taking action,” Gore wrote.

He added after excerpting the news report: “It is my hope we see activism like this here in the United States.”

Gore noted he trained activists in Australia to deliver the slideshow that formed the basis for the documentary film that won him an Academy Award. A representative of Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection addressed the rally in Sydney.

Gore has in recent weeks stepped up his criticism of the Senate for its inability to pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill that would put a price on carbon. In a conference call with environmental activists last week, he reportedly said “the United States government in its entirety, largely because of the opposition in the United States Senate to taking action on clean energy and a solution to the climate crisis, has failed us.”

By Steve Goddard

CRU Temperature Anomalies

Yesterday, the Guardian reported :

Meteorologists have developed remarkably effective techniques for predicting global climate changes caused by greenhouse gases. One paper, by Stott and Myles Allen of Oxford University, predicted in 1999, using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, that [...]]]> source: Watts Up With That

By Steve Goddard

CRU Temperature Anomalies

Yesterday, the Guardian reported :

Meteorologists have developed remarkably effective techniques for predicting global climate changes caused by greenhouse gases. One paper, by Stott and Myles Allen of Oxford University, predicted in 1999, using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, that by 2010 global temperatures would rise by 0.8C from their second world war level. This is precisely what has happened.

Huh?

The temperature rise since WWII reported by CRU is 0.4C (not 0.8C) and it occurred prior to the date of the study. Climate models use thousands of empirically derived back-fit parameters. Given that fact, the only thing remarkable is that their prediction was so far off the mark. Their forecast is the equivalent of me predicting that Chelsea wins 12-0 yesterday. Off by a factor of two, and after the fact.

I recently attended a meeting of weather modelers, who told me that their models are effective for about 72 hours, not 60 years. GCMs use the same underlying models as weather modelers, plus more parameters which may vary over time.

TOLUCA, MEXICO; AUGUST 4, 2010: If Al Gore thought a trip South of the Border would alleviate his recent divorce and masseuse tabloid scandals up north, he found only more controversy in Mexico. On Wednesday, the former US vice president visited Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico, as [...]]]> source: The Narco News

TOLUCA, MEXICO; AUGUST 4, 2010: If Al Gore thought a trip South of the Border would alleviate his recent divorce and masseuse tabloid scandals up north, he found only more controversy in Mexico. On Wednesday, the former US vice president visited Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico, as invited guest of Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, a 2012 presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) who is seeking to restore his party to power and is considered a heavy favorite in that contest.

The press was barred from Gore’s speech, reportedly about climate change, and state officials refused to say how much the former US presidential candidate was paid (Gore typically receives $170,000 dollars per speech). The mystery was further fueled by vague admissions that private sector donors had financed Gore’s visit, but state officials claimed they did not know who paid the speaker’s fees and costs.

Sponsored by the state’s “Commitment to Mexico” initiative as part of a two-day conference on climate change and sustainable development, the website for the forum states that “all of the forums will be transmitted live” on Mexican state television, radio, and over the Internet. All other parts of the forums were in fact broadcast live, but not Gore’s speech.

This, only two months after Gore lambasted similar behavior from the oil company BP for barring reporters from parts of the Gulf of Mexico damaged by its massive oil rig leak. Gore told the Christian Science Monitor that BP’s actions were “completely unacceptable,” and that “this de facto form of censorship needs to stop.”

But what’s “completely unacceptable” for the former vice president in the Gulf of Mexico apparently is just fine for Mexico itself, as only 300 elite invitees of the state government were permitted into Gore’s speech, of which only the first five minutes – during which Gore personally thanked and praised Governor Peña Nieto’s “leadership” – were fed to reporters on closed circuit TV. The Narco News Team was there in the pressroom, and with video and cameras during Gore’s arrival, and reports more details from Toluca, below.

A Speech, Behind Closed Doors

While the forums weren’t open to the public, they were open to credentialed press. But on Wednesday morning reporters covering the panels were surprised to find out that the venue for Gore’s speech would not only be closed to the media, but that they would only be able to listen to the first five minutes of the American politician’s speech from a closed-circuit TV. Journalists at the conference were given a press advisory stating in Spanish that “there would be no transmission of the lecture for any media after the first five minutes,” per the request of Gore’s representatives. The memo also stated that Gore’s media team had requested there be no “interviews or press conferences with Mr. Gore.”

Only about 300 distinguished guests of the Mexican state government were allowed to enter the building where Gore gave his address. Those who attended the lecture were quickly escorted by private security and Mexican state police troopers from valet parking outside of the venue, past metal barricades erected to block out the press. Gore himself arrived in a blue Chevy Tahoe SUV a few minutes before the forum was set to take place, and was followed by an entourage of security personnel. “We were all surprised,” said one producer who works for the state radio station. “I mean, to only have the speech for five minutes…. What’s the point?”

Enrique Peña Nieto and the Anonymous Financial Backers

Mexico state officials who organized the conference were unwilling to disclose who paid for Gore to speak in Toluca. Antonio Juárez, a spokesman who was in the press room during the forums, confirmed with Narco News that speaking fees had been paid to Gore. However, when asked who had paid for the speech the media representative said, “I don’t know. They were private sponsors.” Juárez also stated that because the money was private, he didn’t know how much Gore had been paid to speak at the event. A press secretary with the state legislature told Narco News that Gore was paid $5 million pesos ($397,000 US) for the speech.

Other journalists questioning the financial backing behind Gore’s talk have received similar answers. The Mexican newspaper Reforma quoted Mexico state’s environmental secretary, Gustavo Cárdenas, a few days before the event, when he said, “I don’t have the cost right now.” On Wednesday, the daily Milenio noted that the amount of money that was charged by Gore to participate in the event still “hasn’t been reported.” Reforma has also written that, in the past, Gore has charged more than $175,000 for a speech.

But all of the contentious questions relating to the media lock down and the lack of transparency are tied to a man named Enrique Peña Nieto, the governor of the state of Mexico and a front-runner for the country’s presidential elections in 2012. It was Peña Nieto who inaugurated the Foros de Reflexión (“Reflection Forums”) in Toluca, referring to them as his “gift to Mexico.” It was also Peña Nieto who sat next to Gore shortly before he delivered his private address to the few hundred invitees.

The exclusive nature of the event with private and state security details, coupled with the admitted participation of private sponsors, only raises more questions about the true intention of the forum. In truth, the Gore speech—overtly organized by officials within Peña Nieto’s own government—had all the signs of a political fundraiser. But any financial transactions relating to the speech remain undisclosed and unclear.

After the talk, officials released a photo on the Mexico state Web site showing Gore and Peña Nieto in a different room than where the speech was held, speaking in what appears to be a private luncheon with numerous guests—a separate event which is described in text on the site as relating to the conference. No such meeting was ever publicly disclosed to the press, or on the official program of events given to the media at the conference.

Peña Nieto, Architect of Repression

Governor Peña Nieto is a controversial leader in Mexico, largely due to his penchant for deploying excessive force against social movements. In May 2006, he was a key architect of brutal police repression against hundreds of people in San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco, towns located in the eastern part the state where he presides.

At that time, Peña Nieto, while partnering with the federal government of former Mexican president Vicente Fox, ordered police to enter the towns in an effort to supposedly quell civil resistance that had erupted after the state government insisted on evicting flower vendors from nearby Texcoco to make room for a new Wal-Mart. What followed were some of the most gruesome and clearly documented human rights abuses in recent memory in Mexico.

After state police raided the population, two people were left dead, hundreds were arrested, and dozens were injured and at least a dozen women gang-raped in front of scores of witnesses by Peña Nieto’s state troopers and also federal agents. Four years after the raid, twelve additional residents of Atenco remained imprisoned, with sentences ranging from 30 to 112 years. In June 2010, the Supreme Court of Mexico found there wasn’t sufficient evidence in the charges and ordered the immediate release of all of the prisoners.

Despite the documented abuses, Peña Nieto is still considered a main contender in Mexico’s upcoming 2012 presidential election on the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish initials) ticket, although he has yet to officially be nominated by the party. The presence of Gore in the capital of his state only appears to be a sign that the presidential campaigning and posturing have already begun.

In other words, the only climate that the former vice president and environmental activist has so far succeeded in maintaining unchanged, is the political climate of Mexico, where Gore’s appearance was widely interpreted as an expensive endorsement of Enrique Peña Nieto’s ambitions to take power and turn the clock back a decade to the seventy years (1929-2000) of Institutional Revolutionary Party rule.

BONN, Germany – Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world’s leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change.

British economist Nicholas Stern told international climate negotiators [...]]]> source: Yahoo News

BONN, Germany – Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world’s leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change.

British economist Nicholas Stern told international climate negotiators Thursday that government regulation and public money also will be needed to create incentives for private investment in industries that emit fewer greenhouse gases.

In short, a new industrial revolution is needed to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth, he said.

“It will be extremely exciting, dynamic and productive,” said Stern, one of 18 experts in public finance on an advisory panel appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

A climate summit held in Copenhagen in December was determined to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide trapping the sun’s heat. But the 120 world leaders who met in the Danish capital offered no ideas on how to raise that sum — $1 trillion every decade — prompting Ban to appoint his high-level advisory group.

The Copenhagen summit also resolved to mobilize a three-year emergency fund of $30 billion starting this year. It was unclear how much has been raised and disbursed so far.

The advisory panel, which began working in March, will present its final report to Ban in October, a month before the next decisive climate conference convenes in Cancun, Mexico.

It will analyze a range of options, Stern said, and governments must decide which to chose, how much to raise from each source, and how to distribute the money.

Potential revenue sources include auctioning the right to pollute, taxes on carbon production, an international travel tax, and a tax on international financial transactions, as well as government grants and loans. Each could produce tens of billions of dollars a year, Stern said.

“No one single source will deliver $100 billion by itself. There is no silver bullet, no hole in one,” he said.

Private capital also will be crucial, and governments must adopt policies reducing the risk to investors, he said.

The panel’s recommendations will weigh the practicality, reliability, and political acceptability of each method, he said.

The advisory panel is chaired by the prime ministers of Norway and Ethiopia and the president of Guyana. Its members include French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, billionaire financier George Soros and public planners from China, India, Singapore and several international banks.

The governments of 194 countries are negotiating an agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which called on industrial nations to reduce carbon emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Unlike Kyoto, the next deal would set emission goals for developing countries, especially rapidly growing economies like China and India, in exchange for help with financing and technology.

The negotiating session in Bonn ends Friday, and delegates will meet once more in China before the Cancun ministerial conference.