Help keep this blog going! 24 March 05

you are lucky your typing has a soporific effect, i`ve been told mine sounds like a herd of elephants; and no one gets anysleep.

I suppose for most people, CC is a remote issue, & a depressing one, (much like the thought of nuclear war used to be back in the 70`s & 80`s). I believe the approach to CC should be less doom, and far more “can do”. Peoples interest will be harnessed, and they will get motivated. This may explain some of the disinterest so far.

On the other hand, getting US CC policy to change is possible, but through the back door, so to speak. The problem with US energy policy, is that it subsidises dirty energy, so not only are pollution costs not internalised, pollution generation is given a leg up (to the cost of clean energy which does not enjoy such an extent of priviledges).

Now, the US energy market is decentralising, and aped the UK changes which occured since the 80`s. This bodes well, as a free energy market, with decreasing subsidies, will move to secure, competitive energy sources.

Why is this important? well it finally gives clean energy a fightging chance of becoming economical. Fossil fuel will not cede its subsidies willingly or rapidly, but we need Mr Bush to really stand by his assertions of being “pro-market” etc, and to see through the liberalisation of the US energy industry. This could help bypass the need for direct CC policies-could even save Bush getting egg on his face & having to climb down, which in turn would make it more likely to happen.

I am not confident the US will now go down the road of cap & trade systems, regulation or eco taxation. So a new energy revolution may be the best hope.

I always like reading your thoughts, Brendon, and I think we should take them to the next level.

No matter what the future holds, I agree that it is best to have an optimistic and enthusiastic can-do attitude with a belief system that has 100 percent confidence in our ability to solve all problems despite any doubt or uncertainty. There is no fun in working toward failure so it is best to visualize success instead since the satisfaction of success would be exhilarating for all engaged in solving the climate problem. Let us begin.

I have some specific thoughts based on your post:

International companies may embrace cap and trade policies since these companies work in EU markets plus USA markets. The best way to enlist these companies may be through allowing other countries who signed Kyoto to trade their emission reductions by reducing emissions in the USA.

I am not sure if there is an adequate trading mechanism in Kyoto’s current language but even if this is not the case, Kyoto could be modified to make this avenue more easily available. Since it does not matter where the emissions are reduced, investment strategies targeting the USA may be more beneficial to a country already low in per capita emissions to reduce further.

Since our emission reduction potential is very huge and our economic problems will only get worse, other countries may be in a better position in the future to apply capital investment making the USA more energy efficient at a profit.

This may force a future policy change in the USA by default out of pure necessity and the win-win economics would be irresistible. This idea has merit as oil and natural gas energy costs increase here.

There are many people in the USA, including myself, who would love to be a bridge in using capital investments from other countries to develop new markets here.

The USA has potential for emission reductions, new markets, intellectual capital, and an entrepreneurial can-do spirit worthy of exploitation. I say to those in the UK to go for it here in terms of leading and developing our own human resources for a mutual benefit.

As I said before in previous posts, if the USA reduced its emission level to be at par with current UK per capita emissions, then it would be equivalent to the UK reducing to zero emissions multiplied by four.

Best Regards, Dan

Scottish Executive confirms plans for £500 million road building project.

The Scottish Executive today announced that it will go ahead with a £500 million, 5 mile expansion of the M74 moterway through Glasgow. This is despite the fact that the independent public enquiry into the subject said that it was a bad idea on environmental, social and economic grounds. The Minister who confirmed it is Nicol Steven, who is a Lib Dem. Duncan MacLaren, Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland said that this was the worst environmental decision ever made by the Scottish Executive. This is the lastest in a long line of cases where the Lib Dems have shown that they have no credibility when it comes to environmental issues, including running the campaign against congestion charging in Edinburgh. The Scottish Executive still claims that it spends 70% of its transport buget on public transport. However, upon closer inspection, these figures amount to accountancy that Enron would be proud of. Public transport is counted as a sunk cost. This means that if we build a railway line now for £500, that costs £500 of this years buget. Roads are counted as an investment. This means that if we spend £500 on a road, that counts as £10 this year, and every year for the next 50 years, which means therefore that we spend 50 times as much money on public transport as we do on roads. This relic of Thatcher era transport policy has been used widely by the Labour party when selling their enviro creds, and it is great greenwash to look out for.

Adam

Adam,

I read information on the link below and I encourage others and even those in the USA who post on Mark’s site to offer comments if they may be helpful.

http://uk.geocities.com/jam74_uk/

One main argument stuck in my mind as needing further research and emphasis is the alternative to traffic congestion by providing a rail link to Glasgow’s Airport.

I have lived in 2 major cities in the USA and both have rail links to the major airports. They are a great alternative to driving. I always opted for the rail line because I could either find parking available at the rail station or a friend would drop me off at the rail station without going directly to the airport. The good news was that I saved money by avoiding parking fees and I saved time from the long walk from the parking lot.

Now, with respect to your motorway construction, it would increase commuter traffic to the airport and it may necessitate building larger parking lots making the problem I just explained even worse without a rail line.

Also, the rail line time schedules would be more predictable than any commuter traffic to the airport even when the motor way was completed. This point may decrease the value of the motorway to the airport being reliable to aid someone making a flight on time.

I do believe that any case is strengthened by providing an alternative means to solve a problem. There is a problem that has to be addressed.

It seems prudent that the rail link to the air port would be a major contribution to solving this problem and should be put at the top of the list of arguments since capital used for the motorway could be used instead for the rail line.

Sometimes a focus on the main problem may be most useful. It seems from what I read that the people of Glasgow are not for this project as others may be outside of Glasgow.

If that focus is getting to the airport quicker so a flight is not missed, then that may be the only thing decision makers may care about. They may not care about the people of Glasgow other than selling them their idea of constructing this motorway. Maybe the decision makers have missed flights during traffic congestion. It would be interesting to know if they have personal views about their own transport to the airport.

The links below may be of benefit:

http://archives.californiaaviation.org/airport/msg13192.html

http://www.culturechange.org/issue8/traffic%20expands.htm

Best Wishes, Dan

What I found when I delved into General Social Survey data in 1997 is that only about 15% of the people think GW is caused by fossil fuel emissions, and a much larger % think it is caused by a hole in the ozone layer. Recently I asked my upper division college class (mainly social science students, some older) questions. Of 35 present, not one knew what the Kyoto Protocol was (though 2 knew Kyoto was a city in Japan), and only a few raised their hand when I asked if they knew what global warming or climate change or the greenhouse effect was. About 3 knew it was caused by greenhouse gases.

I’m now writing a paper for presentation at an anthropology conference: “Global Warming: Fact and Fiction.” I hope to address many issues, e.g., the scientific v. medical (precautionary) models, contrarian views, and public knowledge (or lack thereof), and fictional represenations. This will give me a chance to inform my students and colleagues about GW.

I hope Mark can finish his SIX POINTS while baby listens to the click-click of the keyboard. Yes, babies like background repetitive noise.

Why not post a few “Best of MarkLynas Blogs” from the past. I think we need to keep going back to the runaway global warming scenario.

Excellent reviews for High Tide – now in paperback!

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1445186,00.html

High Tide: News From a Warming World, by Mark Lynas (Harper Perennial, £7.99) When a reviewer says that a book “ought to be read by everyone”, and the publishers put that on the cover, you can hardly blame them, but you can feel sceptical. Not in this instance. It really ought to be read by everyone.

like the best of marklynas.org. Surely we haven’t finished with discussing runaway global warming.

but of 2 ppm. The previous 2 years had increases of 2.5 ppm. That was beyond what could be explained by increases in human emissions, indicating a possible positive feeback of nature emitting CO2 due to the warming.

The averge yearly increase over the past few decades has been 1.5 ppm, so a 2 ppm increase this year is still higher than average, but not as dramatic as 2003 & 2002 increases.

Which means it still looks bad re possible natural positive feedbacks kicking in – or did someone in Outer Mongolia leave their car running?

By Patrick J. Michaels

Recently, a World Wildlife Fund press release was picked up by Reuters. “Himalayan glaciers are among the fastest-retreating glaciers globally due to the effects of global warming,” the advocacy group announced.

WWF timed its press release for a two-day Energy and Environmental Ministerial conference in London, where the United States was (predictably) criticized because it won’t commit economic suicide by adopting the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. This is one of those repeating news stories, like “Strife in Haiti” or “Irish unrest.” It goes like this. “The (glaciers, polar bears, butterflies) of (anywhere) are in dramatic decline because of global warming. Unless the (U.S., U.S., U.S.) signs on to the Kyoto Protocol, their continued decline is assured.”

Here’s another broken record. “It appears that the (U.N., World Wildlife Fund, New York Times) forgot to check the temperature histories where the (ice, polar bears, butterflies) are in decline, and the (U.S., U.S., U.S.) isn’t going along with counterfactual nonsense produced by agenda-driven environmentalists.”

We offer this evidence. WWF is especially interested in the Gangotri glacier, in the Indian Himalayas. The glacier is retreating an average 75 feet yearly. Glaciers are in steady state when the annual snowfall and summer melting rate are roughly in balance. Actually, this is rare. When glaciers melt too much in the summer, they retreat. And if it snows more in the winter than normal, they advance. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes historical temperature records around the planet. They are averages for 5 X 5 degree latitude/longitude rectangles. They used these somewhat large areas so that, in general, many local records are averaged up to form a reliable regional picture. The Gangotri Glacier, which feeds the Ganges River, is in the 30-35N, 75-80E box. High-altitude glaciers melt during the summer. The IPCC has June-August temperatures for the Gangotri region back 1875. The net decline in temperature over the last 130 years is striking. In fact, at 1.2 degrees (F), it is one of the largest summer coolings on Earth. That’s right: cooling. In contrast, the temperature for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole increased 0.8 degrees during the same period.

Still, no one doubts the Gangotri glacier is receding. It was expanded far beyond where it is today when the cooling was first noted more than a century ago. Temperatures reached their low in 1990 and have popped up a bit, to the long-term average for the last 130 years. Perhaps this has something to do with Gangotri’s recent more rapid retreat. But that it has been in such a decline as overall century-scale temperatures have cooled tells us much about the long-term fate of glaciers away from polar regions: They are relics of the Ice Age, destined to melt.

Another place with an ice history that resembles Gangotri is our own Glacier National Park in Montana. There were 147 glaciers in the park 150 years ago, near the start of the Gangotri temperature record. Today there are only 37. What happened to summer temperatures? Unlike Gangotri, they didn’t cool. But temperatures remained fairly constant, with no significant warming since records began in 1895.

Most scientists think the mid-19th century marks the end of a multicentury period known as the “Little Ice Age,” though a small but vocal core of skeptics maintain a view known as the “Hockey Stick” history—one in which temperatures do not change for nearly a millennium and then shoot up in the last 100 years, producing a graph that indeed resembles a hockey stick. This view has been pretty much marginalized in a number of papers in scientific literature over the last year.

Indeed, glaciers went into retreat at the end of this cold period. Gangotri is even more tenuous, receding even as local temperatures continued declining.

Incidentally, the Northern Hemisphere’s largest ice mass - the Greenland icecap - is in retreat in the southern part of the island, where temperatures also show a substantial net cooling for the last 75 years.

All this leads to an obvious conclusion. Southern Greenland, Glacier National Park and the Himalayan glaciers are on their way out, with little or no nudging needed from people. They’re relics of the Big Ice Age that ended 11,000 years ago. It’s too bad, though, that in the fight to hype global warming, the truth is also rapidly becoming another relic.

The “hockey stick …. has been pretty much marginalized .. ” Really!! I thought Michael Mann gave a pretty good account of himself and his work on BBC Radio 4 the other week.

And who is this Patrick J. Michaels? Via Google I’ve learned he is part of the Cato Institute. They favour “Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets and Peace”. So the UN and it’s various interventionist bodies are of course frowned upon.

Michaels is against Kyoto, pro Bush (both of them) and the co-author of “The Satanic Gases” which argues “Global warming is vastly overrated as an environmental threat”. In a subsequent book “Meltdown” he argues that scientists are biased and this in turn is a result of them competing for government funds.

I think I can see who is biased in this debate – can you “norbert”?

And of course Michaels doesn’t actually deny global warming but suggests it is real but small and quite a good thing really. Ah well that’s all right then.

Readers might be interested in my next post Read this Book. See above.

Douglas Coker

You add up all the values, then you divide by the number of values.

That’s just about the time agriculture started, so maybe we’re on to something that the climate scientists don’t know. Anthropogenic global warming has been going on for 11,000 years! Of course, it will take time to get enough evidence to support that at the 95% certainty level. Meanwhile, since we are laypersons living in the world trying to avoid false negatives (doing nothing when harm is actually happening) and not those old fussy scientists trying to avoid false positives (claiming something when it is not happening), we could start addressing the problem now by reducing our greenhouse gases with money-saving, no regrets energy/resource efficiency & conservation, and with wind power, which is cheaper than conventional energy now. And that ought to cut our GHGs by 75% or more. After that we may have to think about sacrificing a bit. But what parents wouldn’t sacrifice a bit for their kids?

Great thing you brought this to our attention. Things have been getting out of hand for 11,000 years, so we’d better get on the hockey-stick post haste & start reducing GHGs.

It’s not only in the US that people are not aware. Even in UK, though people generally seem to realise now that Climate Change is happening, and is man-made, many people have no idea how serious or urgent the situation is.

It occurred to me that perhaps you Mark (or someone else with influence) should get Nelson Mandela on to this. Perhaps the world would listen to him if he made a very inspiring speech raising awareness and calling us all to action and sacrifice – something like Churchill and the second world war. I feel sure people would make many sacrifices and even give up their girls nights out in Barcelona if they thought that everyone else was doing it and it was for a great cause.

As the Labour Government follows public opinion rather than leading it we must change public opinion in Britain, as well as raising awareness in the world. Don’t you think Nelson is the man to do it?

Dr. Michaels is the Virginia State climatologoist and a professor of climatology at the University of Virginia, the same University that employs Michael Mann.

I’m hoping the new pope will speak out forcefully on this issue, since it really is potentially the mother of all pro-life issues. Yes, we need credible people not afraid to speak out, and Mandela is one of the most credible people, and Africa is really being harmed by GW. I wish Mother Teresa were here to speak on it. She could have framed reducing GHGs as something we all can (and must) do as our part in helping the poorest of the poor.

The U.S. bishops & many other faiths have come out with statements on GW, but people don’t seem to be listening, not even local parish priests – mine (better than others) said he didn’t want to get into the issue, because church members who follow Rush Limbaugh would put up a stink, but that if I could get some credible speaker, we could let him speak (not me, I guess).

I tried to tell my third order Carmelite brothers & sisters about it, and one really high on the pyramid told me that the U.S. bishops were perhaps wrong. And part of our vocation is obedience to church authorities! – but not when it comes to GW, I guess, only when it comes to pointing the finger at women having abortions. So the U.S. bishops are nothing in the minds of U.S. Catholics. Yes, we need really top people on this.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Why not shift over to blogger or movable type?

Not being able to read all the comments in one window is a bummer. The inconvenience probably accounts for the fact that the pool of users leaving commments is the most static I’ve come across on the web.

Peter,

I have noticed that if you click on the main blog page and scroll down to the very bottom of the page, then you will see a means for showing 10, 20, and 50 blogs at a time.

By clicking 50, you will expose a large portion of the blog posts.

If you do a simple word search using “Ctrl F” on your computer and then type a word such as “ice”, then this will go to anywhere on that page where that word appears.

I sometimes do this when a previous post of mine explained something that was relevant in a current discussion or when I want to reread a previous post from someone else or find a book or website someone suggested.

Also, you may explore Mark’s site more fully for additional features starting with the menu items at the top of the page if you have not already done so.

You can also sort the main blog page by clicking either date or title at the appropriate spot located at the very bottom of the main blog page.

See if any of these suggestions work for you and if any of this helps would you be so kind as to report back that it did.

I am assuming what works for me will also work for others as well.

Best,

Dan

Dan,

What you may not appear to be aware of is that there are plans in place to build a rail link as well as the motorway extension in Glasgow. (See www.glasgowraillink.com and www.garl.com) Also, these plans have recorded an almost constant support of over 80% of the local population when polls have been conducted over different periods. The fact is that Glasgow needs both the motorway and the railway. One problem is that there is a lack of joined up thinking on transport in Scotland. The rail link has been talked about for fifteen years and the motorway for at least forty. All of a sudden both come along at once – but they are not mutually exclusive. The rail link serves a known traffic generator – the International Airport with almost 9 million passengers each year most of whom travel by car. The motorway whilst leading to the Airport is also the only route from east to west Glasgow and it goes slap bang through the centre of the City. The new extension provides a relief road of 5 miles which will reduce daily congestion on the City Centre motorway; relieve peak hour jams at other motorway intersections; contribute to both business and environment by reducing overall vehicle journeys both in terms of time and emissions. Unfortunately, the initial web site referred to in your post is backed by the “All Roads Are Bad” thinkers. Whilst they say they are a community of environmental groups it is difficult to define who they are. They promote “direct action” (whichj to ordinary people means violence and vandalism) and appear to be suggesting breaking the rule of law. Not something that gets my vote unfortunately.

I did not know both the road and rail link were needed and thought the road was being promoted over the rail link from what I read.

My post was based on knowing the value of a properly designed rail link to an airport from my own experience and I thought that would be of some help.

However, I made a false assumption from the limited information I found. Thanks for the correction.

Best,

Dan

Dan,

I’m right with you 100% on the rail connection to airports and if there was to be a choice here in Glasgow the rail link would be my priority over any road. But we appear to be getting both – so fingers crossed that it isn’t a gossamer promise in the run up to our elections over here. It’s actually great that people from different parts are aware of this and take time to voice their opinion and support. I’ve been lucky enough to travel and see different rail systems – although my trip to Vegas to see the new monorail was a bit of a let down. When I got there it was suspended as too many people were using it. Here’s hoping Glasgow’s new rail link has the same success!

Regards,

Bill