A Few Things Ill Considered

A layman's take on the science of Global Warming featuring a guide on How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

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Another week of GW news - January 28, 2007

Courtesy of H.E.Taylor, here is this week's GW news roundup
(skip to bottom)

It's always nice to start with a larf:

Speculation and leaks are still the order of the day with the upcoming [Feb 2nd] release of the 2007 IPCC report looming large:


Click here to read more

It will be interesting to see if this work is replicated:

The Stern Review is still getting kicked around:

In the hurricane wars:

Glaciers are melting:

More GW impacts are being seen:

Yes we have no wacky weather, except:

The conflict between biofuel and food persists:

And the troubling matter of falling food production:

Elsewhere on the mitigation front:

Large scale geo-engineering keeps popping up:

Meanwhile in the journals:

[I don't have a link, but the February Scientific American has a good article by Keppler & Rockmann on the matter of plants producing methane.]

Before we get into politics, there was some science done:

Meanwhile on the Kyoto-2 front:

A lot of noise has been generated by the Davos WEF:

There is another conference coming up in Washington this time:

Meanwhile on the emissions trading front:

  • 2007/01/26: BizEdge: Global warming concerns will drive emissions policies: report
    Global warming concerns are about to force North American governments to declare war on carbon emissions, according to a CIBC World Markets report. The report predicts all jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S. will have carbon dioxide (CO2) regulations in place by the end of the decade. The report says every province and state will follow the lead of California and implement not only a CO2 emissions cap but also an emissions trading system that will allow larger polluters to buy emissions credits from other firms whose emissions are less than what is allowed under the cap.
  • 2007/01/22: PlanetArk: US Carbon Market Takes Step Closer to Reality
  • 2006/12/15: PM: The impressive Warwick McKibbin
    It takes me back to when we first met, in Tokyo when I was working as the ABC's correspondent. Warwick McKibbin phoned, said he was visiting and suggested that we have a bite to eat. Back then experts were either supporters or opponents of the Kyoto Protocol. I don't remember the detail what he said over soba noodles but I do remember the way in which he said it.
    It was obvious that both sides were wrong. Globally agreed targets to cut carbon emissions would never work, and nor should they. Why adopt a target when no-one knew what it was necessary to achieve? What you needed was a mechanism that would set up a framework for action and get people on board. He had come with a framework that would work and in time people would see that his was the right one.

And on the American political front:

The SOTUA garnered a lot of comment:

California electricity will be greener?:

Several contradictory polls have been taken recently:

This would be funny if it weren't so tragic:

The Gore-apalooza is still bopping along:

Meanwhile in the UK, Blair is demonstrating he is delusional about more than Iraq:

And in Europe:

In Australia, things are not going well:

PM John Howard has had a pre-election change of heart:

  • 2007/01/27: ABC(Au): Climate change report a 'wake-up call' for Howard
  • 2007/01/26: Australian: Howard a climate convert
    A former climate change sceptic, John Howard has shifted his position on the subject, saying he now accepts global warming has contributed to Australia's long-running drought. Delivering his $10 billion national plan for water security yesterday, the Prime Minister said the current trajectory of water use and management was not sustainable. "In a protracted drought, and with the prospect of long-term climate change, we need radical and permanent change," Mr Howard told the National Press Club in Canberra.

Also down under, Tim Flannery has been named Australian of the Year:

And in China:

In Canada, environmental issues are conflictual:

They've been taking polls as well:

And minority neocon PM Harper is still greenwashing like mad:

There may be 'fine print' on this deal, but it looks good:

The idea of a carbon tax is still bouncing around:

And the difficult question of aviation & GHG production is in the air:

A Tipping Point has been sighted:

Apocalypso anyone?:

As for how the media handles the science of climatology:

Here is something for your library:

And for your film & video enjoyment:

Wrestling over a new energy infrastructure continues unabated:

A major report out of MIT trumpets the future importance of geothermal:

Automakers, lawyers and activists argue over the future of the car:

The reaction of business to climate change will be critical:

The carbon lobby are up to the usual:

The Cullen storm still had some steam:

Coby Beck is continuing to post his excellent "How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic" series on GristMill:

Then there was the usual news and commentary:

And here are a couple of sites you may find interesting and/or useful:

--regards--

-het

PS. You can access the previous postings of this series here

--
"This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."
-Andrew Weaver

Global Warming: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/globalwarming.html
GW News: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/gwnews.html
GW News Archive: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/gwna.html
H.E. Taylor http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/

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posted by coby @ 1/28/2007 12:23:00 PM   1 comments

Thursday, January 25, 2007

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Policy advocate, or human being?

Roger Pielke Jr has another posting complaing about how the IPCC is not policy neutral despite its stated objectives, and therefore not an "honest broker" of the science of climate change. He offers this quote as support:
I hope this [forthcoming IPCC] report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action as you really can't get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work.

from Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC director.

I commented over there that his accusations of some sort of hypocrisy rest entirely on the assumption that everyone shares his definitions and I do not think that most people consider statements like "we should take serious action" to be advocating a policy at all.

Quite rightly Roger asked me how I would define "policy neutral". So, because I wrote a lengthy reply to that and would like to keep it handy, I thought I would reproduce it here. ("You" refers to Roger, of course)

I daresay "policy neutral" is one of those concepts where the only possible comprehensive definitions for it in its most abstract meaning render it a useless term. That is to say, the purest definition - having no preferences for any policy over any other and even no preference for any goals or set of goals over any other - is one that no living breathing human being could conceivably subscribe to. It requires having no values, no aspirations, no ethics.

So to avoid defining such a term out of a useful existence, policy neutral can only have meaning within a specific context. For example, if you are sitting at a meeting and there are five proposed policy options on the table and you have no preference of one over any other, you are policy neutral within this context.Now, of coures, the five that were on the table must have come from somewhere, but to be policy neutral, and human, you must already be looking at a limited set of options.

So let me try to bring this into its specific context here. I believe that one can be policy neutral even though they believe that climate change is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with. Someone could be policy neutral because they have no particular convictions about how addressing climate change should be done: nuclear energy, CO2 sequestration, drastic lifestyle changes, combinations of approaches, etc.

I believe that I am not alone in thinking this way, and in fact it is you who need to "come to grips" with what others mean by policy neutral. The way you have defined and use this term (I have no doubt that it is consistent with your field's usage btw) means that the simple desire to avoid large scale human suffering makes you a policy advocate.

This is really splitting semantic horsehairs while the fossil fuels burn.


I am sure I will be following up on that over there...

Labels: ,

posted by coby @ 1/25/2007 11:30:00 AM   13 comments

Monday, January 22, 2007

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Another week of GW news - January 21, 2007

Courtesy of H.E.Taylor, here is this week's GW news roundup
(skip to bottom)

Speculation and leaks are the order of the day with the upcoming [Feb 2nd] release of the 2007 IPCC report looming large:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists changed the doomsday clock:

The rate at which the CO2 concentration is increasing is increasing:

New islands are appearing as Greenland's glaciers melt:

  • 2007/01/20: ClimateArk: Islands appear off Greenland as polar ice melts away - An ominous discovery
  • 2007/01/16: NYT: The Warming of Greenland
    All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks -- "lonely mountains" in Inuit -- that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
    [...]
    The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.
    "The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate," said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible."
  • 2007/01/20: CDreams: ProvidenceJournal: The World's Largest Mineshaft Canary

Coral proxy records have shown a relationship between ENSO, monsoons and the Indian Ocean Dipole:

  • 2007/01/19: PhysOrg: Corals show Aussie drought link to Asian monsoon
  • 2007/01/17: PhysOrg: Asian monsoons might become more intense
    British scientists have found an unexpected link between Asian monsoons and an oscillating pattern of Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures. Nerilie Abram and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey say their findings suggest the consequences of future Asian monsoons will be more widespread and intense than previously forecast. The recently discovered Indian Ocean Dipole, as it is known, has profound impacts on rainfall across the tropical Indian Ocean region. But its interactions with the Asian monsoon system and El Nino/ Southern Oscillation -- which are themselves forecast to change -- have been unclear. Abram and his colleagues used coral records to reconstruct the interaction for the past 6,500 year -- including times when the Asian monsoon season behaved very differently from how it does today. The results, the scientists say, show the dipole does not act in isolation but is influenced by the Asian monsoon, which appears to extend dipole-related droughts and sea-surface cooling.
  • 2007/01/18: PlanetArk: Indian Ocean Shift Seen Stoking Indonesia Droughts

wmc is watching for sea level rise malarkey:

Meanwhile [not] in near earth orbit:

The Stern Review is still getting kicked around:

And more impacts of GW are arising:

And then there are the tropical rainforests:

Everyone is talking about the wacky weather:

The conflict between biofuel and food persists:

And the troubling matter of falling food production is not going away:

Elsewhere on the mitigation front:

Large scale geo-engineering keeps popping up:

Wallace Broecker has won the Craaford Prize:

Stephen Schneider spoke at Stanford this week:

  • 2007/01/19: BSD: Notes on Stephen Schneider presentation, Jan. 17th at Stanford
    On Kyoto:
    -The most important accomplishment of Kyoto isn't controlling emissions, it's setting up an ongoing process for countries to work together to manage climate change.
    US politics and climate change:
    -Climatologists like him used to have a contentious and negative relationship with previous Republican administrations (Reagan and Bush I). With Bush II, there's no relationship at all - this administration doesn't even want to talk to climatologists.

Meanwhile in the journals:

Before we get into politics, there was some science done:

ASEAN held a conference this week:

And the World Economic Forum at Davos is upcoming:

Meanwhile on the Kyoto front:

And on the Kyoto-2 front:

While on the emissions trading front:

As Ross Gelbspan once remarked, GW controversy begins & ends at the American border:

And on the American political front:

In a belated attempt to spin the Democratic congress, major US energy players are embracing change:

There has been some stir looking forward to the upcoming SOTUA:

The E.O.Wilson campaign to matchmake science & religion may be bearing fruit:

Now here is a harsh truth:

Just when you think US politics can't get any stranger:

Dr. Heidi Cullen kicked off the howler monkeys by suggesting AMS weathermen stop making incorrect statements and get informed:

The Gore-apalooza is still bopping along:

And the NSTA & AIC debacle is still unfolding:

Okay, so we have a problem. What do we do about it?:

Meanwhile on the UK political front:

The BBC and ClimatePredictionNet have generated their first results:

Meanwhile in Europe:

Meanwhile in Australia, it's getting biblical with fire, flood, drought and snakes:

And in Canada, minority neocon PM Harper is greenwashing for all he's worth:

And what are the Liberals up to?:

Apocalypso anyone?:

Here is something for your library:

And for your film & video enjoyment:

Developing a new energy infrastructure is the fundamental challenge of the current generation:

Automakers, lawyers and activists argue over the future of the car:

The reaction of business to climate change will be critical:

Insurance and re-insurance companies are feeling the heat:

The carbon lobby are up to the usual:

Exxon comes in for extra scrutiny:

Then there was the usual news and commentary:

And here are a couple of sites you may find interesting and/or useful:

--regards--

-het

PS. You can access the previous postings of this series here

--

"Climate is an ill-tempered beast, and we are poking it with sticks."
-W.S. Broecker

Global Warming: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/globalwarming.html
GW News: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/gwnews.html
GW News Archive: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/enviro/gwna.html
H.E. Taylor http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/

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posted by coby @ 1/22/2007 11:20:00 AM   1 comments