This is one excellent example of how innovative thinking and new technology can help solve America's energy problems. Let's have more of it! I'll bet the people in North Dakota aren't too worried about carbon dioxide emissions causing global warming. Anyone wanting to know more, do a search of this blog on the Bakken Formation and the Barnett Shale of North Texas.
Peter
source
Oil Is Making Millionaires in North Dakota
By James MacPherson, Associated Press CNSNews.com June 30, 2008 Beulah, N.D. (AP) -
Oscar Stohler was raised in a sod house in western North Dakota and ranched there for nearly seven decades. He never gave much thought to what lay below the grass that fattened his cattle.When oilmen wanted to drill there last year, Stohler, 83, doubted oil would be found two miles underground on his property. He even joked about it."I told them if they hit oil, I was going to buy a Cadillac convertible and put those big horns on the front and wear a 10-gallon hat," Stohler recalled.He still drives his old pickup and wears a mesh farm cap -- but it's by choice.In less than a year, Stohler and his wife, Lorene, 82, have become millionaires from the production of one well on their land near Dunn Center, a mile or so from the sod home where Oscar grew up. A second well has begun producing on their property and another is being drilled -- all aimed at the Bakken shale formation, a rich deposit that the U.S. Geological Survey calls the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed.
Landowners in western North Dakota have a much better chance of striking it rich from oil than they do playing the lottery, say the Stohlers. Some of their neighbors in the town of about 120, from bar tenders to Tupperware salespeople, have become "overnight millionaires" from oil royalty payments."It's the easiest money we've ever made," said Lorene Stohler, who worked for decades as a sales clerk at a small department store.
State and industry officials say North Dakota is on pace to set a state oil-production record this year, surpassing the 52.6 million barrels produced in 1984. A record number of drill rigs are piercing the prairie and North Dakota has nearly 4,000 active oil wells. The drilling frenzy has led companies to search for oil using horizontal drilling beneath Parshall, a town of about 980 in Mountrail County, and under Lake Sakakawea, 180-mile-long reservoir on the Missouri River."I have heard, anecdotally, that there is a millionaire a day being created in North Dakota," said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. Kathy Strombeck, a state Tax Department analyst, said the number of "income millionaires" in North Dakota is rising. The number of taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income of more than $1 million in North Dakota rose from 266 in 2005 to 388 in 2006, Strombeck said. The 2007 numbers won't be known until October, she said.
Bruce Gjovig, director of the University of North Dakota's Center for Innovation, said his informal survey estimates the number of new millionaires in Mountrail County, one of the biggest drilling areas of the Bakken, may be as many as 2,000 -- or nearly a third of the county's population -- in the next three to five years. North Dakota's per capita income in 2007 was $36,846, ranking the state 30th in the nation and up from 42nd in 1997, said Richard Rathge, the state Data Center director and North Dakota demographer. "The two main drivers are energy and agriculture income," Rathge said. The increasing wealth in the state from oil should push the average annual wage in North Dakota, he said.
The oil boom has spurred several "Jed Clampett-like" tales of ordinary folks getting rich, said Tom Rolfstad, the economic development director for the city of Williston. Rolfstad said he hasn't spotted any Ferraris or Rolls Royces in town, though several people can afford them now."I'm seeing a lot more big, shiny gas-guzzling pickups," he said. Several homes that cost more than a million dollars also are being built in Williston, he said. The community of about 12,500 people is perhaps best known as the hometown of NBA coach Phil Jackson. Most people "don't want people to know how much money they got and they don't want to be tagged with being wealthy -- they want to be themselves," Rolfstad said.
Oscar and Lorene Stohler said their newly found wealth hasn't changed them."We still know what tough times are," Oscar said. "We grew up in the Dirty '30s.""We put our kids through college without that oil money," Lorene said. The couple moved a few miles east to Beulah and paid cash for their new home, the first one they have owned. They have established trust accounts for their four children. Lorene said the only thriftless purchase was an automatic sprinkler system for her flowers that surround the couple's new home. And Oscar bought a $1,000 ring for his wife to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary."We got enough now to buy new stuff," Lorene said, "but we like our old stuff."
Monday, June 30, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
A Majority Of Meteorologists Do Not Believe The Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming?
How can this be? When people say the "debate is over", "we must act now", the United Nation's IPCC says they are sure, and others claim their is a "consensus" among "climatologists". What utter and total nonsense. See the following article; is this a lie, does this person work for "Big Oil", is it just "propaganda", is this meteorologist evil? Or are there just educated and informed people out there who want the public to know the truth. There are many honest people who believe the myth of man-caused global warming is harming the economy of America and the world. What do you think?
Peter (source)
Meteorologist Says Money Behind Warming Alarmism 'Can Corrupt Anybody'
Cullen adversary argues he knows only one broadcast meteorologist who is 'on the global warming bandwagon.'
By Jeff Poor Business & Media Institute 6/17/2008 11:27:10 AM
A year and a half ago, James Spann questioned the money and the so-called scientific consensus pushing the idea that mankind is causing global warming. Today, he says it’s losing steam. Two imminent surveys of meteorologists may further complicate the climate debate.
Spann, a broadcast meteorologist for ABC 33/40, an affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., downplayed the future of the global warming movement in a June 13 appearance. He was interviewed by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for its Washington Watch Weekly broadcast. Spann told Perkins:
“[Y]ou know, there was some great power in that movement back in January of 2007,” Spann said. “It’s pretty rapidly running out of gas and it just seems like every day more and more people are coming out with the fact that that’s pretty much a hoax. And these are Ph.D climatologists that are pretty much saying what I said all along.”
In January 2007, Spann received national attention when he wrote a post on his blog challenging a post by The Weather Channel climate expert Dr. Heidi Cullen. Cullen had argued that meteorologists should have the American Meteorological Society (AMS) credentials taken away if they doubt the validity of manmade climate change.
“If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval,” Cullen wrote for Weather.com on Dec. 21, 2006.
Spann fired back on Jan. 18, 2007: “Well, well,” Spann wrote. “Some ‘climate expert’ on ‘The Weather Channel’ wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for ‘tolerance’, huh?”
Spann claimed at the time he didn’t know any broadcast meteorologists who were sold on the theory touted by global warming alarmists. Since then, he has managed to find one.
“Again, one of my statements in that original article – I did not at the time know of a single broadcast meteorologist that was on the global warming bandwagon,” Spann said in his interview. “Now since then – and it’s been a year and a half, I found one, one guy and I know hundreds. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I know meteorologists on television in some of the most liberal markets in this country that agree with me and I did find one – and that’s fine. And I certainly respect his opinion.”
Spann’s comments about broadcast meteorologists come two weeks prior to the AMS 36th Conference on Broadcast Meteorology, set for June 25-29 in Denver. At the conference, two separate surveys of broadcast meteorologists’ opinions on climate change are set to be unveiled – one by the National Environmental Education Foundation and one by Sean Sublette, a meteorologist for WSET, the ABC affiliate in Lynchburg, Va.
Spann explained it wasn’t his belief that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, but he told Perkins to understand the motivation of those who say it is – they should follow the grant money.
“Of course, the root of this whole thing is money,” Spann said. “And, there is a vast amount of wealth being generated by this whole issue. And I always recommend to folks – if anyone speaks on the subject, get a disclosure and find out their financial interests in it.”
The same claims are often made by climate change alarmists – global warming skeptics are in it for the money from big energy corporations. Spann told Perkins he has never accepted any money for speaking out about global warming alarmism, but he had reservations about money’s effects on government policy pertaining to climate change.
“When I speak on this topic, I’ve never accepted one dime,” Spann said. “It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other – if warming that we’ve seen in recent years is natural or not. But, there’s a vast amount of grant money going to very, very powerful people and I think that maybe that flows into some of the lobbying efforts and it goes and winds up in Washington.”
He pointed to former Vice President Al Gore as an example of how money behind climate change and global warming alarmism can perpetuate a theory that shouldn’t warrant as much merit otherwise.
“I’m not a politician, don’t understand it – I honestly don’t know,” Spann said. “But, I will tell you that there’s a lot of people who have gotten very, very wealthy – filthy rich off this subject. I think former Vice President [Al Gore] collects a minimum of $200,000 per speech on this and all of this money – it can corrupt anybody, and I just think it’s all about money.”
Related Links:
A Special Report from BMI: Global Warming Censored
BMI's Special Report "Fire & Ice: Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can't decide weather we face an ice or warming"
Climate of Bias: BMI's page devoted entirely to global warming and climate change in the media
Peter (source)
Meteorologist Says Money Behind Warming Alarmism 'Can Corrupt Anybody'
Cullen adversary argues he knows only one broadcast meteorologist who is 'on the global warming bandwagon.'
By Jeff Poor Business & Media Institute 6/17/2008 11:27:10 AM
A year and a half ago, James Spann questioned the money and the so-called scientific consensus pushing the idea that mankind is causing global warming. Today, he says it’s losing steam. Two imminent surveys of meteorologists may further complicate the climate debate.
Spann, a broadcast meteorologist for ABC 33/40, an affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., downplayed the future of the global warming movement in a June 13 appearance. He was interviewed by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for its Washington Watch Weekly broadcast. Spann told Perkins:
“[Y]ou know, there was some great power in that movement back in January of 2007,” Spann said. “It’s pretty rapidly running out of gas and it just seems like every day more and more people are coming out with the fact that that’s pretty much a hoax. And these are Ph.D climatologists that are pretty much saying what I said all along.”
In January 2007, Spann received national attention when he wrote a post on his blog challenging a post by The Weather Channel climate expert Dr. Heidi Cullen. Cullen had argued that meteorologists should have the American Meteorological Society (AMS) credentials taken away if they doubt the validity of manmade climate change.
“If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval,” Cullen wrote for Weather.com on Dec. 21, 2006.
Spann fired back on Jan. 18, 2007: “Well, well,” Spann wrote. “Some ‘climate expert’ on ‘The Weather Channel’ wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for ‘tolerance’, huh?”
Spann claimed at the time he didn’t know any broadcast meteorologists who were sold on the theory touted by global warming alarmists. Since then, he has managed to find one.
“Again, one of my statements in that original article – I did not at the time know of a single broadcast meteorologist that was on the global warming bandwagon,” Spann said in his interview. “Now since then – and it’s been a year and a half, I found one, one guy and I know hundreds. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I know meteorologists on television in some of the most liberal markets in this country that agree with me and I did find one – and that’s fine. And I certainly respect his opinion.”
Spann’s comments about broadcast meteorologists come two weeks prior to the AMS 36th Conference on Broadcast Meteorology, set for June 25-29 in Denver. At the conference, two separate surveys of broadcast meteorologists’ opinions on climate change are set to be unveiled – one by the National Environmental Education Foundation and one by Sean Sublette, a meteorologist for WSET, the ABC affiliate in Lynchburg, Va.
Spann explained it wasn’t his belief that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, but he told Perkins to understand the motivation of those who say it is – they should follow the grant money.
“Of course, the root of this whole thing is money,” Spann said. “And, there is a vast amount of wealth being generated by this whole issue. And I always recommend to folks – if anyone speaks on the subject, get a disclosure and find out their financial interests in it.”
The same claims are often made by climate change alarmists – global warming skeptics are in it for the money from big energy corporations. Spann told Perkins he has never accepted any money for speaking out about global warming alarmism, but he had reservations about money’s effects on government policy pertaining to climate change.
“When I speak on this topic, I’ve never accepted one dime,” Spann said. “It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other – if warming that we’ve seen in recent years is natural or not. But, there’s a vast amount of grant money going to very, very powerful people and I think that maybe that flows into some of the lobbying efforts and it goes and winds up in Washington.”
He pointed to former Vice President Al Gore as an example of how money behind climate change and global warming alarmism can perpetuate a theory that shouldn’t warrant as much merit otherwise.
“I’m not a politician, don’t understand it – I honestly don’t know,” Spann said. “But, I will tell you that there’s a lot of people who have gotten very, very wealthy – filthy rich off this subject. I think former Vice President [Al Gore] collects a minimum of $200,000 per speech on this and all of this money – it can corrupt anybody, and I just think it’s all about money.”
Related Links:
A Special Report from BMI: Global Warming Censored
BMI's Special Report "Fire & Ice: Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can't decide weather we face an ice or warming"
Climate of Bias: BMI's page devoted entirely to global warming and climate change in the media
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Bakken Formation of Montana and North Dakota: Is It The Answer To Our Energy Needs?
It sounds to me as if the amount of oil recoverable from the Bakken has been greatly exagerated. Based on some knowledge of technology, geology, the oil industry, the USGS, and the kind of hype by people selling investment "advice", especially on the internet, I tend to believe the basic premise of this report. There is a lot of oil in the Bakken Formation, and some of it is economically recoverable with relatively new horizontal drilling and rock fracturing technology. Any oil, anywhere, is very attractive at today's $130 per barrel price. Even if the USGS "estimates" are correct, and you can be sure that is what they are, a best guess, 4 Billion barrels of recoverable oil is very significant. It is 40% of what was initially thought to be recoverable from the Prudhoe Bay Field on Alaska's North Slope, which is the largest oil field ever found in North America. Of course the Bakken Formation is not one simple oil field. It is primarily a layer of shale rock spread over a huge area, with many, many wells needed to produce that much oil. The Bakken Formation is not going to be a panacea for our energy crisis. There is one other article on this blog dealing with the Bakken Formation, see here Peak Oil? An Example Of How Technology "Discovers" More Oil
Peter
U.S. Says 400-Billion Barrel Bakken Oil Field a 'Myth'
By Keriann Hopkins CNSNews.com Correspondent June 18, 2008 (CNSNews.com) - source
Reports circulating on the Internet tell of an oil field spanning parts of western North Dakota and eastern Montana where 400 billion barrels of oil supposedly are just waiting to be tapped. However, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tells Cybercast News Service that those huge estimates are "a myth."A USGS report issued in April estimates that there are between 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil in what is referred to as "the Bakken Formation" -- well below the 400 billion barrels discussed on the Web, but up from the previous estimate of 151 million barrels made in 1995.
Richard Pollastro, Bakken Formation task leader at the USGS, said the myth stems from a 1999 draft report -- never published -- by a now-deceased USGS employee, Leigh Price. Price estimated that the Bakken Formation holds up to 400 billion barrels of oil. To put that in perspective, Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has about 260 billion barrels of known oil reserves. Price, however, died in 2000, before his study could be peer-reviewed and published, and the Bakken Formation became the fool's gold of the oil industry. "Unfortunately, in many instances, we are still trying to explain and defend our assessment versus the inappropriate and irresponsible posting of Dr. Price's 'draft report,'" Pollastro told Cybercast News Service.
According to Jonathon Kolak, a USGS scientist and information specialist, the discrepancy between Price's 1999 estimates and the agency's 2008 findings arises from the fact that Price was trying to assess the "oil generation potential" of the oil found in the pores of rocks and shale in the Bakken field, as well as the total content of how much oil might be pooling up - or "oil in place.""What Dr. Price was looking at was 'oil generation potential,' and then, from that, trying to make an estimate of 'oil in place,'" said Kolak. "Those terms are very distinct from 'undiscovered technically recoverable resources.'" The latest study, which was commissioned by U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), is an estimate of how much "technically recoverable" oil and gas is available -- i.e, how much oil can actually be recovered using today's technology.
Kolas also explained that the 25-fold increase between the 1995 estimates and the 2008 assessment is due to two factors: an improved understanding of the geology and advances in drilling technology. "Our understanding of the geology improved significantly because of the time difference between the studies," he said. "There has been some drilling since then, there has been a lot more information that has come out, other people have conducted studies, and also USGS researchers have conducted studies. "Moreover, drillers are utilizing directional drilling in the Bakken fields, a way of drilling at an angle to tap previously unrecoverable reservoirs.
"If you've been out to western North Dakota, you don't need a USGS report to know that there's oil there because you can see from all the drilling activity that there's a lot of energy development going on in western North Dakota," Dorgan spokesman Justin Kitch told Cybercast News Service . Kitch admits that comparing Price's 1999 study to the April USGS study is like comparing "apples and oranges. "But certainly it's nice to have an up-to-date assessment of the amount of oil that's technically recoverable in the Bakken," he said.
In 2006, Marathon Oil bought 200,000 acres in the Bakken to drill over 300 wells. This past May, after the report was released, Texas-based XTO Energy bought 352,000 net acres in the Bakken Shale for $1.9 billion. The federal government, meanwhile, said only a small proportion of the oil available with today's technology is economically viable for recovery. "If you're drilling the Bakken, it's pretty easy to drill somewhere in there and at least see some oil, but the question is: Is there enough there to get out and actually be economically recoverable?" Kolak asked. At the end of 2007, about 105 million barrels of oil had been produced from the Bakken Formation. The USGS, meanwhile, considers any release or dissemination of Price's unpublished report to be "inappropriate and irresponsible."
Peter
U.S. Says 400-Billion Barrel Bakken Oil Field a 'Myth'
By Keriann Hopkins CNSNews.com Correspondent June 18, 2008 (CNSNews.com) - source
Reports circulating on the Internet tell of an oil field spanning parts of western North Dakota and eastern Montana where 400 billion barrels of oil supposedly are just waiting to be tapped. However, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tells Cybercast News Service that those huge estimates are "a myth."A USGS report issued in April estimates that there are between 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil in what is referred to as "the Bakken Formation" -- well below the 400 billion barrels discussed on the Web, but up from the previous estimate of 151 million barrels made in 1995.
Richard Pollastro, Bakken Formation task leader at the USGS, said the myth stems from a 1999 draft report -- never published -- by a now-deceased USGS employee, Leigh Price. Price estimated that the Bakken Formation holds up to 400 billion barrels of oil. To put that in perspective, Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has about 260 billion barrels of known oil reserves. Price, however, died in 2000, before his study could be peer-reviewed and published, and the Bakken Formation became the fool's gold of the oil industry. "Unfortunately, in many instances, we are still trying to explain and defend our assessment versus the inappropriate and irresponsible posting of Dr. Price's 'draft report,'" Pollastro told Cybercast News Service.
According to Jonathon Kolak, a USGS scientist and information specialist, the discrepancy between Price's 1999 estimates and the agency's 2008 findings arises from the fact that Price was trying to assess the "oil generation potential" of the oil found in the pores of rocks and shale in the Bakken field, as well as the total content of how much oil might be pooling up - or "oil in place.""What Dr. Price was looking at was 'oil generation potential,' and then, from that, trying to make an estimate of 'oil in place,'" said Kolak. "Those terms are very distinct from 'undiscovered technically recoverable resources.'" The latest study, which was commissioned by U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), is an estimate of how much "technically recoverable" oil and gas is available -- i.e, how much oil can actually be recovered using today's technology.
Kolas also explained that the 25-fold increase between the 1995 estimates and the 2008 assessment is due to two factors: an improved understanding of the geology and advances in drilling technology. "Our understanding of the geology improved significantly because of the time difference between the studies," he said. "There has been some drilling since then, there has been a lot more information that has come out, other people have conducted studies, and also USGS researchers have conducted studies. "Moreover, drillers are utilizing directional drilling in the Bakken fields, a way of drilling at an angle to tap previously unrecoverable reservoirs.
"If you've been out to western North Dakota, you don't need a USGS report to know that there's oil there because you can see from all the drilling activity that there's a lot of energy development going on in western North Dakota," Dorgan spokesman Justin Kitch told Cybercast News Service . Kitch admits that comparing Price's 1999 study to the April USGS study is like comparing "apples and oranges. "But certainly it's nice to have an up-to-date assessment of the amount of oil that's technically recoverable in the Bakken," he said.
In 2006, Marathon Oil bought 200,000 acres in the Bakken to drill over 300 wells. This past May, after the report was released, Texas-based XTO Energy bought 352,000 net acres in the Bakken Shale for $1.9 billion. The federal government, meanwhile, said only a small proportion of the oil available with today's technology is economically viable for recovery. "If you're drilling the Bakken, it's pretty easy to drill somewhere in there and at least see some oil, but the question is: Is there enough there to get out and actually be economically recoverable?" Kolak asked. At the end of 2007, about 105 million barrels of oil had been produced from the Bakken Formation. The USGS, meanwhile, considers any release or dissemination of Price's unpublished report to be "inappropriate and irresponsible."
Thursday, June 19, 2008
It's Official, (Supposedly) More Extreme Weather...
Someone needs to tell these researchers to read their own government reports showing that the climate has not been warming, and is in fact cooling during the past ten years. Also, asking these scientists to give a truly objective analysis is similar to expecting the fox to guard the hen house. This report comes from people who are dependent upon continued government funding, in times of doubt and economic stress, to keep their jobs. In light of the current Midwest flooding in the U.S., isn't the timing of the release of this "analysis" coincidental? Factor these realities into the validity of this "new" report of an old story line.
Peter
U.S. experts: Forecast is more extreme weather
Rare events likely to become commonplace, climate report says
source
Feeling the heatJune 19: A federal review of research on warming's effects forecasts more frequent and longer-lasting extreme weather events. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.
Nightly News
WASHINGTON - Droughts will get drier, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with a warming climate across North America, U.S. government experts said in a report billed as the first continental assessment of extreme events.
Events that have seemed relatively rare will become commonplace, said the latest report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a joint effort of more than a dozen government agencies.
"Heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity," the report stated. "Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights."
There has been an increase in the frequency of heavy downpours, especially over northern states, and these are likely to continue in the future, Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in a briefing Thursday.
For example, Karl said, by the end of this century rainfall amounts expected to occur every 20 years could be taking place every five years.
Such an increase "can lead to the type of events that we are seeing in the Midwest," said Karl, though he did not directly link the current flooding to climate change.
The report itself noted that "intense precipitation (the heaviest 1 percent of daily precipitation totals) in the continental U.S. increased by 20 percent over the past century while total precipitation increased by 7 percent."
Shifting dangers: But the report cautioned that preparing for weather that has been relatively common can leave people vulnerable as extreme events occur more and more.
"Moderate flood control measures on a river can stimulate development in a now 'safe' floodplain, only to see those new structures damaged when a very large flood occurs," the report said.
At the same time heavy rains increase, there'll be more droughts, especially in the Southwest, Karl said. "When it rains, it rains harder and when it's not raining, it's warmer — there is more evaporation, and droughts can last longer," he explained. The Southwestern drought that began in 1999 is beginning to rival some of the greatest droughts on record including those of the 1930s and 1950s, he added.
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there has been a trend toward increasing power in hurricanes since the 1970s in the Atlantic and western Pacific, a change that can be linked to rising sea surface temperatures.
There is a statistical connection between rising sea surface temperatures and hurricane activity, Meehl said, but linking changes in hurricanes to human actions will require more study.
Hotter days more often: More easily attributed to human impact, through release of greenhouse gases, is an overall increase in temperatures, he said. It's not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades and there are fewer nights with frosts, a trend expected to continue into the future, Meehl said.
"A day so hot that it is experienced only once every 20 years would occur every three years by the middle of the century," under the mid-range projections of climate models, the report said.
Researchers can use computer models of climate to separate out cause and effect of this warming, he explained — looking at the effect of things like changes in solar radiation or volcanic eruptions — and the result is to attribute climate warming to the burning of fossil fuels.
"It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases," the report itself states.
Other future projections cited in the report include:
Sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in summer in coming decades; Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense; Droughts will likely be more frequent and severe in some areas;
Hurricanes will likely spawn increased precipitation and wind; The strongest cold-season Atlantic and Pacific storms are likely to create stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.
Participating in the Climate Change Science Program are the Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Department of State, Department of Transportation, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.
The full report is online at http://www.usgcrp.gov/
Peter
U.S. experts: Forecast is more extreme weather
Rare events likely to become commonplace, climate report says
source
Feeling the heatJune 19: A federal review of research on warming's effects forecasts more frequent and longer-lasting extreme weather events. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.
Nightly News
WASHINGTON - Droughts will get drier, storms will get stormier and floods will get deeper with a warming climate across North America, U.S. government experts said in a report billed as the first continental assessment of extreme events.
Events that have seemed relatively rare will become commonplace, said the latest report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a joint effort of more than a dozen government agencies.
"Heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity," the report stated. "Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights."
There has been an increase in the frequency of heavy downpours, especially over northern states, and these are likely to continue in the future, Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in a briefing Thursday.
For example, Karl said, by the end of this century rainfall amounts expected to occur every 20 years could be taking place every five years.
Such an increase "can lead to the type of events that we are seeing in the Midwest," said Karl, though he did not directly link the current flooding to climate change.
The report itself noted that "intense precipitation (the heaviest 1 percent of daily precipitation totals) in the continental U.S. increased by 20 percent over the past century while total precipitation increased by 7 percent."
Shifting dangers: But the report cautioned that preparing for weather that has been relatively common can leave people vulnerable as extreme events occur more and more.
"Moderate flood control measures on a river can stimulate development in a now 'safe' floodplain, only to see those new structures damaged when a very large flood occurs," the report said.
At the same time heavy rains increase, there'll be more droughts, especially in the Southwest, Karl said. "When it rains, it rains harder and when it's not raining, it's warmer — there is more evaporation, and droughts can last longer," he explained. The Southwestern drought that began in 1999 is beginning to rival some of the greatest droughts on record including those of the 1930s and 1950s, he added.
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there has been a trend toward increasing power in hurricanes since the 1970s in the Atlantic and western Pacific, a change that can be linked to rising sea surface temperatures.
There is a statistical connection between rising sea surface temperatures and hurricane activity, Meehl said, but linking changes in hurricanes to human actions will require more study.
Hotter days more often: More easily attributed to human impact, through release of greenhouse gases, is an overall increase in temperatures, he said. It's not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades and there are fewer nights with frosts, a trend expected to continue into the future, Meehl said.
"A day so hot that it is experienced only once every 20 years would occur every three years by the middle of the century," under the mid-range projections of climate models, the report said.
Researchers can use computer models of climate to separate out cause and effect of this warming, he explained — looking at the effect of things like changes in solar radiation or volcanic eruptions — and the result is to attribute climate warming to the burning of fossil fuels.
"It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases," the report itself states.
Other future projections cited in the report include:
Sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in summer in coming decades; Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense; Droughts will likely be more frequent and severe in some areas;
Hurricanes will likely spawn increased precipitation and wind; The strongest cold-season Atlantic and Pacific storms are likely to create stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.
Participating in the Climate Change Science Program are the Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Department of State, Department of Transportation, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.
The full report is online at http://www.usgcrp.gov/
Surprise! Humans To Blame For Flood Damage....But NOT Because Of Global Warming And CO2 Emissions
Finally, someone is listening to scientists about the real causes of flooding. Dump the myth of man-caused global warming and climate change. Human activity is to blame for the severity of flood damage, but it is not because of carbon dioxide emissions altering the climate, not in Iowa, or New Orleans, or anywhere. We must listen to our scientists, not the United Nations, the IPCC, nor the politically-motivated Jim Hansen, and last of all, Al Gore.
Peter
Man to blame for Iowa flooding?
Where some blame days of rain, others point to an altered landscape
By Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: "What is going on?"
The river would eventually rise six feet higher than any flood on record. Farther downstream, in Cedar Rapids, the river would break the record by more than 11 feet.
Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.
"We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of nature."
Officials are still trying to understand all the factors that contributed to Iowa's flooding, and not everyone has the same suspicions as Enshayan. For them, the cause was obvious: It rained buckets and buckets for days on end. They say the changes in land use were lesser factors in what was really just a case of meteorological bad luck.
Drastic changes to landscape
But some Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding. They know it's a hard case to prove, but they hope to get Iowans thinking about how to reduce the chances of a repeat calamity.
"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."
Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation.
Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.
The basic hydrology of Iowa has been changed since the coming of the plow. By the early 20th century, farmers had installed drainage pipes under the surface to lower the water table and keep water from pooling in what otherwise could be valuable farmland. More of this drainage "tiling" has been added in recent years. The direct effect is that water moves quickly from the farmland to the streams and rivers.
"We've lost 90 percent of our wetlands," said Mary Skopec, who monitors water quality for the Iowa DNR.
Land ill-suited for deluge
Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and soybeans -- annual plants that don't put down deep roots.
Another potential factor: sediment. "We're actually seeing rivers filling up with sediment, so the capacity of the rivers has changed," Asell said. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, Iowa led the nation in flood damage year after year.
This landscape wasn't ready for the kind of deluge that hit Iowa in May and early June. Central and eastern portions of the state received 15 inches of rain. That came on top of previous rains that had left the soil saturated. Worse, the rain came at the tail end of an unusually cool spring. Farmers had delayed planting their crops. The deluge struck a nearly naked landscape of small plants and black dirt.
"With that volume of rain, you're going to have flooding. There's just no way around it," said Donna Dubberke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities. "This is not just because someone put in a parking lot."
The rising Mississippi River is expected to peak this week, threatening towns and farmland north of St. Louis as floodwaters continue to move down the river. So far, flooding and severe weather have killed at least 24 people in three states and injured 106, forced the evacuations of about 40,000, and driven corn prices to record highs.
500-year flood every 15 years?Two levees burst just north of Quincy, Ill., yesterday morning, forcing the evacuation of the small town of Meyer. Yesterday afternoon, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) visited the town after viewing the nearby Sny Island Levee, about 12 miles downstream from Quincy and, at 54 miles long, the second-biggest levee on the Mississippi.
In Iowa, the National Weather Service has reported record flooding at 12 locations on four rivers, including the Cedar, the Iowa, the Wapsipinicon and the Mississippi. The U.S. Geological Survey has preliminary data showing 500-year floods on the Cedar, the Shell Rock, the Upper Iowa and the Nodaway.
The Great Flood of 2008 has, for many inhabitants of sandbagged Iowa, come awfully soon after the Great Flood of 1993. Or, as Elwynn Taylor, a meteorologist at Iowa State University, put it: "Why should we have two 500-year floods within 15 years?"
Taylor attributes the flooding in recent years to cyclical climate change: The entire Midwest, he says, has been in a wet cycle for the past 30 years.
There has also been speculation that global warming could be a factor.
"Something in the system has changed," said Pete Kollasch, a remote-sensing analyst with the Iowa DNR. "The only thing I can point my finger at is global warming, but there's no proof of that."
Jeri Neal, a program leader for ecological systems and research at Iowa State's Leopold Center, said all these things have a cumulative effect on the landscape: "It doesn't have the resilience built into it that you need to withstand disturbances in the system."
The idea of a 500-year flood can be confusing. Hydrologists use the term to indicate a flooding event that they believe has a 0.2 percent chance -- 1 in 500 -- of happening in any given year in a specific location. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 100 chance of happening, and so on. Such estimates are based on many years of data collection, in some cases going back a century or more.
‘An act of City Council’But the database can be spotty. Robert Holmes, national flood coordinator with the U.S. Geological Survey, said a lack of funding since 1999 has forced his agency to discontinue hundreds of stream gauges across the country. "It's not sexy to fund stream flow gauges," he said.
What's certain is that a lot of water had nowhere to go when the sky opened over Iowa this spring. Some rivers did things they'd never done before. The flood stage at Cedar Rapids, for example, is 12 feet. The previous record flood happened in 1929, when the Cedar hit 20 feet. This year the Cedar hit 20 feet and kept rising. Experts predicted it would crest at 22 feet, and then upped the estimate to 24 feet. The river had other ideas. At mid-morning last Friday, it finally crested at 31.3 feet.
The entire downtown was flooded and a railroad bridge collapsed, dumping rail cars filled with rock into the river.
"Cities routinely build in the flood plain," Enshayan said. "That's not an act of God; that's an act of City Council."
Staff writer Kari Lydersen contributed to this report from Quincy, Ill.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25254541/
Peter
Man to blame for Iowa flooding?
Where some blame days of rain, others point to an altered landscape
By Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: "What is going on?"
The river would eventually rise six feet higher than any flood on record. Farther downstream, in Cedar Rapids, the river would break the record by more than 11 feet.
Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.
"We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of nature."
Officials are still trying to understand all the factors that contributed to Iowa's flooding, and not everyone has the same suspicions as Enshayan. For them, the cause was obvious: It rained buckets and buckets for days on end. They say the changes in land use were lesser factors in what was really just a case of meteorological bad luck.
Drastic changes to landscape
But some Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding. They know it's a hard case to prove, but they hope to get Iowans thinking about how to reduce the chances of a repeat calamity.
"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."
Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation.
Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.
The basic hydrology of Iowa has been changed since the coming of the plow. By the early 20th century, farmers had installed drainage pipes under the surface to lower the water table and keep water from pooling in what otherwise could be valuable farmland. More of this drainage "tiling" has been added in recent years. The direct effect is that water moves quickly from the farmland to the streams and rivers.
"We've lost 90 percent of our wetlands," said Mary Skopec, who monitors water quality for the Iowa DNR.
Land ill-suited for deluge
Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and soybeans -- annual plants that don't put down deep roots.
Another potential factor: sediment. "We're actually seeing rivers filling up with sediment, so the capacity of the rivers has changed," Asell said. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, Iowa led the nation in flood damage year after year.
This landscape wasn't ready for the kind of deluge that hit Iowa in May and early June. Central and eastern portions of the state received 15 inches of rain. That came on top of previous rains that had left the soil saturated. Worse, the rain came at the tail end of an unusually cool spring. Farmers had delayed planting their crops. The deluge struck a nearly naked landscape of small plants and black dirt.
"With that volume of rain, you're going to have flooding. There's just no way around it," said Donna Dubberke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities. "This is not just because someone put in a parking lot."
The rising Mississippi River is expected to peak this week, threatening towns and farmland north of St. Louis as floodwaters continue to move down the river. So far, flooding and severe weather have killed at least 24 people in three states and injured 106, forced the evacuations of about 40,000, and driven corn prices to record highs.
500-year flood every 15 years?Two levees burst just north of Quincy, Ill., yesterday morning, forcing the evacuation of the small town of Meyer. Yesterday afternoon, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) visited the town after viewing the nearby Sny Island Levee, about 12 miles downstream from Quincy and, at 54 miles long, the second-biggest levee on the Mississippi.
In Iowa, the National Weather Service has reported record flooding at 12 locations on four rivers, including the Cedar, the Iowa, the Wapsipinicon and the Mississippi. The U.S. Geological Survey has preliminary data showing 500-year floods on the Cedar, the Shell Rock, the Upper Iowa and the Nodaway.
The Great Flood of 2008 has, for many inhabitants of sandbagged Iowa, come awfully soon after the Great Flood of 1993. Or, as Elwynn Taylor, a meteorologist at Iowa State University, put it: "Why should we have two 500-year floods within 15 years?"
Taylor attributes the flooding in recent years to cyclical climate change: The entire Midwest, he says, has been in a wet cycle for the past 30 years.
There has also been speculation that global warming could be a factor.
"Something in the system has changed," said Pete Kollasch, a remote-sensing analyst with the Iowa DNR. "The only thing I can point my finger at is global warming, but there's no proof of that."
Jeri Neal, a program leader for ecological systems and research at Iowa State's Leopold Center, said all these things have a cumulative effect on the landscape: "It doesn't have the resilience built into it that you need to withstand disturbances in the system."
The idea of a 500-year flood can be confusing. Hydrologists use the term to indicate a flooding event that they believe has a 0.2 percent chance -- 1 in 500 -- of happening in any given year in a specific location. A 100-year flood has a 1 in 100 chance of happening, and so on. Such estimates are based on many years of data collection, in some cases going back a century or more.
‘An act of City Council’But the database can be spotty. Robert Holmes, national flood coordinator with the U.S. Geological Survey, said a lack of funding since 1999 has forced his agency to discontinue hundreds of stream gauges across the country. "It's not sexy to fund stream flow gauges," he said.
What's certain is that a lot of water had nowhere to go when the sky opened over Iowa this spring. Some rivers did things they'd never done before. The flood stage at Cedar Rapids, for example, is 12 feet. The previous record flood happened in 1929, when the Cedar hit 20 feet. This year the Cedar hit 20 feet and kept rising. Experts predicted it would crest at 22 feet, and then upped the estimate to 24 feet. The river had other ideas. At mid-morning last Friday, it finally crested at 31.3 feet.
The entire downtown was flooded and a railroad bridge collapsed, dumping rail cars filled with rock into the river.
"Cities routinely build in the flood plain," Enshayan said. "That's not an act of God; that's an act of City Council."
Staff writer Kari Lydersen contributed to this report from Quincy, Ill.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25254541/
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Alpine Field, North Slope, Alaska
A ConocoPhillips drilling rig near the Alpine field, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on Alaska's North Slope.By Barney Gimbel; photographs by Thomas Dworzak/Magnum
"We're looking to see if we left anything behind," says Jim Darnall, a geophysicist for Conoco.
The orange cable looks like the extension cord you might keep in your garage, but every 100 feet or so, three small blue geophones, which are used to detect seismic waves, are planted into the ground. The idea is to "shoot seismic," an oil driller's term for a laborious surveying process that maps the earth's subsurface.
Gas flares at Conoco's Alpine field in Alaska, the nation's fourth largest. The 100-acre facility is effectively a small town, with its own fire department, sewage treatment plant, medical clinic, and airstrip.
The 400 workers at Alpine field work 12-hour shifts, and sleep in small dorm rooms like this one. Most rotate in and out every two weeks.
Workers maintaining wellheads at Alpine.
A technician in the (heated) control room at Alpine.
A worker at Alpine. Pickups idle all the time up here; once you turn an engine off for any length of time, you may never get it started again.
The 800-mile Trans Alaska pipeline near its northern terminal at Prudhoe Bay.The Alpine Field is something I have an intimate knowledge of and probably played a significant role in finding. See the following photos.
Peter
Hunting for oil beneath the ice
source
There's a new rush for petroleum from Alaska to the North Pole. Can ConocoPhillips and other energy giants find another Saudi Arabia under the ice?
By Barney Gimbel, writer
(Fortune) -- It's 25 below outside, and the heat in the van is busted. Randy Boyer, a burly ConocoPhillips contractor in thermal coveralls, navigates the slick ice road. "This is nothing," he says, keeping his eye on the thin red line running down the center of the road. "The other week we had a whiteout, and I was stuck in my truck for 36 hours." Right now we're some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and it's so white outside that the distant horizon appears to blend seamlessly into the blustery sky.
There's a new rush for petroleum from Alaska to the North Pole. Can ConocoPhillips and other energy giants find another Saudi Arabia under the ice?
By Barney Gimbel, writer
(Fortune) -- It's 25 below outside, and the heat in the van is busted. Randy Boyer, a burly ConocoPhillips contractor in thermal coveralls, navigates the slick ice road. "This is nothing," he says, keeping his eye on the thin red line running down the center of the road. "The other week we had a whiteout, and I was stuck in my truck for 36 hours." Right now we're some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and it's so white outside that the distant horizon appears to blend seamlessly into the blustery sky.
Boyer pulls over into a small mobile base camp to switch trucks. We're deep in the tundra of Alaska's North Slope, and you need a vehicle with tanklike treads or special tires to venture off-road. After a bone-rattling 15-minute ride - the tundra only looks flat - we catch up with a red truck creeping across the frozen landscape. A worker bundled in a blue coat of Michelin-man dimensions trudges behind it, uncoiling orange cable that looks like the extension cord you might keep in your garage. Every 100 feet or so, he plants three small blue geophones into the ground.
He's setting up to "shoot seismic," an oil driller's term for a laborious surveying process that maps the earth's subsurface. It will take a team of 100 workers more than a week to lay a precise grid of 21,000 geophones, which act as motion detectors, along 145 miles of wire. After that a truck known as a "vibrator" will make stops along the grid, lowering a large plate onto the ground. The apparatus creates seismic waves - tiny earthquakes - that are recorded by the geophones. Geologists in Anchorage will then spend six months transforming that data into a picture of the underground formations. Some of them, they hope, will contain oil.
He's setting up to "shoot seismic," an oil driller's term for a laborious surveying process that maps the earth's subsurface. It will take a team of 100 workers more than a week to lay a precise grid of 21,000 geophones, which act as motion detectors, along 145 miles of wire. After that a truck known as a "vibrator" will make stops along the grid, lowering a large plate onto the ground. The apparatus creates seismic waves - tiny earthquakes - that are recorded by the geophones. Geologists in Anchorage will then spend six months transforming that data into a picture of the underground formations. Some of them, they hope, will contain oil.
The folks at Conoco surveyed this slice of barren land about a decade ago. But times are a bit desperate up here in North America's largest oil region, and they've come back. "We're looking to see if we left anything behind," says Jim Darnall, an acquisition geophysicist for ConocoPhillips, as he brushes ice off his bushy gray beard. "We're trying to milk this field anyway we can."
Is this what America's late-20th-century oil paradise has been reduced to - the petroleum equivalent of rooting for loose change in the cushions of a sofa? U.S. crude production is at its lowest since 1949, and nowhere has that decline been steeper than in Alaska, where oil output is less than half what it was a decade ago. The fields that since the late 1970s have provided more than 20% of America's oil are slowly running dry. It's a phenomenon that is hardly limited to Alaska. The world's five largest oil companies are replacing only 82% of the oil they pump each year, as once-prodigious fields fade and state entities in such countries as Venezuela and Russia consolidate ever more control over their oil and gas.
The combination of falling reserves and $100-plus oil is sparking a frenzy of oil and gas activity in Alaska the likes of which hasn't been seen since the state's initial oil boom more than three decades ago. ConocoPhillips (COP, Fortune 500), Alaska's biggest producer and America's third-largest oil company, is spending huge sums to re-explore old stomping grounds like the North Slope. The company is also investing in heavy-oil technology and early preparation for a proposed $30 billion natural gas pipeline. "We think the Arctic is the new frontier," says Conoco CEO Jim Mulva, "and it's not just in Alaska. The potential exploration opportunities go all the way around the Arctic Circle."
The excitement extends even farther north, where the shrinking ice cap is helping spur a new race for territorial supremacy. In August, Russia planted a flag 2 1/2 miles below sea level at the actual North Pole, laying claim to what it says are vast quantities of oil and gas. Some experts estimate that a quarter of the planet's undiscovered energy resources are buried at the top of the planet. But that figure is highly speculative - much of the Arctic is unexplored - and even if you find something, how do you transport it through a sea of ice?
Who Is Really To Blame For High Gas Prices In America?
Something to think about........especially between now and the November elections......GP
The Imperative of Developing Natural Resources
Paul Weyrich
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 (source)
The year was 1967. I was on a private aircraft belonging to an oil company with my boss, the late Senator Gordon L. Allott (R-CO). We were flying to Oklahoma City, where Allott was to address the State GOP Convention. An oil company executive asked me if ever I had seen oil shale. I said I had not. Whereupon he picked up a piece, took out his cigarette lighter, and lit the piece. It burned like high grade coal. The oil company man proceeded to tell me that if oil ever reached $30 a barrel it would be profitable to develop oil shale. Even with inflation oil has exceeded that price so why aren't we developing the trillions of barrels of oil-shale reserves. There is a one word answer to that question: Congress.
I receive mail from folks who tell me they don't vote because there is no difference between the political parties. In some ways they are correct but not when it comes to energy. Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO), House Minority Whip, has presented his colleagues with data which clearly makes the case that in terms of developing oil and natural gas there is a profound difference between the parties, at least in the House of Representatives.
Blunt's figures show that for the past 14 years 91% of House Republicans voted to develop oil at ANWR while 86% of Democrats opposed drilling there. In the conversion of coal to liquid category 97% of House Republicans supported the concept while 78% of Democrats opposed it. Regarding the development of oil shale in Colorado and Utah the level of support among House Republicans was 90% while the level of opposition to the development of oil shale among Democrats was 86%.
When it comes to oil exploration for the Outer Continental Shelf 81% of Republican House Members said yes while 83% of Democrats said no. And look at this figure: 97% of House Republicans want to increase refinery capacity while 96% of Democrats said, no way. Historically, Blunt said, 91% of Republicans have favored development of oil and gas reserves while 86% of Democrats historically have been against oil and gas exploration and development.
Blunt's staff also compared the plans of each of the parties to deal with the skyrocketing price of gasoline. The Democratic plan includes seven investigations of price-gouging, four investigations of speculators, suing OPEC, $20 billion in new taxes against the oil companies. None of these would reduce the cost of gasoline. The only item in their plan which would do so is to stop the oil going to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That would lower the cost of a gallon of gasoline by 5 cents The Republican plan would develop oil in the Continental Shelf and develop it deep in the sea. It would develop oil shale, and it would abolish earmarks to pay for the Federal gas tax holiday. Republicans and Democrats agree on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Taken together these items would reduce the cost of a gallon of gasoline by at least $1.95 and maybe a lot more depending on the productivity of each of the development projects.
What many of us wonder is this: When will the people of the United States say enough is enough and demand of their elected representatives that we develop our own resources? If we did we would not need to import one drop of oil from these ruthless dictators who would like to see us defeated or dead. I love the pristine beauty of nature, too. But we have made so many strides in new technology that we do not have to ruin the environment to explore and develop oil and gas. $4 a gallon doesn't yet seem high enough for a public revolt. What will do it? $5 a gallon? How about $8 to $11, which is what some Europeans are paying already. I hope and pray the revolt comes before it is too late.
The Imperative of Developing Natural Resources
Paul Weyrich
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 (source)
The year was 1967. I was on a private aircraft belonging to an oil company with my boss, the late Senator Gordon L. Allott (R-CO). We were flying to Oklahoma City, where Allott was to address the State GOP Convention. An oil company executive asked me if ever I had seen oil shale. I said I had not. Whereupon he picked up a piece, took out his cigarette lighter, and lit the piece. It burned like high grade coal. The oil company man proceeded to tell me that if oil ever reached $30 a barrel it would be profitable to develop oil shale. Even with inflation oil has exceeded that price so why aren't we developing the trillions of barrels of oil-shale reserves. There is a one word answer to that question: Congress.
I receive mail from folks who tell me they don't vote because there is no difference between the political parties. In some ways they are correct but not when it comes to energy. Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO), House Minority Whip, has presented his colleagues with data which clearly makes the case that in terms of developing oil and natural gas there is a profound difference between the parties, at least in the House of Representatives.
Blunt's figures show that for the past 14 years 91% of House Republicans voted to develop oil at ANWR while 86% of Democrats opposed drilling there. In the conversion of coal to liquid category 97% of House Republicans supported the concept while 78% of Democrats opposed it. Regarding the development of oil shale in Colorado and Utah the level of support among House Republicans was 90% while the level of opposition to the development of oil shale among Democrats was 86%.
When it comes to oil exploration for the Outer Continental Shelf 81% of Republican House Members said yes while 83% of Democrats said no. And look at this figure: 97% of House Republicans want to increase refinery capacity while 96% of Democrats said, no way. Historically, Blunt said, 91% of Republicans have favored development of oil and gas reserves while 86% of Democrats historically have been against oil and gas exploration and development.
Blunt's staff also compared the plans of each of the parties to deal with the skyrocketing price of gasoline. The Democratic plan includes seven investigations of price-gouging, four investigations of speculators, suing OPEC, $20 billion in new taxes against the oil companies. None of these would reduce the cost of gasoline. The only item in their plan which would do so is to stop the oil going to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That would lower the cost of a gallon of gasoline by 5 cents The Republican plan would develop oil in the Continental Shelf and develop it deep in the sea. It would develop oil shale, and it would abolish earmarks to pay for the Federal gas tax holiday. Republicans and Democrats agree on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Taken together these items would reduce the cost of a gallon of gasoline by at least $1.95 and maybe a lot more depending on the productivity of each of the development projects.
What many of us wonder is this: When will the people of the United States say enough is enough and demand of their elected representatives that we develop our own resources? If we did we would not need to import one drop of oil from these ruthless dictators who would like to see us defeated or dead. I love the pristine beauty of nature, too. But we have made so many strides in new technology that we do not have to ruin the environment to explore and develop oil and gas. $4 a gallon doesn't yet seem high enough for a public revolt. What will do it? $5 a gallon? How about $8 to $11, which is what some Europeans are paying already. I hope and pray the revolt comes before it is too late.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
More On Global Warming As Religion.....And Why It Is Wrong
This is a very long and rambling article, written by a Professor and Scientist. Mr. Brignell obviously cares very deeply about the importance of science, its history and its future. The concept of environmentalism and its associated MYTH of man-caused global warming and climate change has been called the new religion by others. The similarities are striking. You can do a search of environmentalism and religion here on this blog and find many other references. I think there is a lot of truth here. Non-scientists must make an effort to understand what science is, how it operates, and the dangers of confusing it with blind faith.
Peter
Global Warming as Religion and not Science
By John Brignell
Professor Emeritus (ESD)
John Brignell was educated at Stationers’ Company’s School and began his career as an apprentice at STC. He studied at Northampton Engineering College (which became The City University, London) and took the degrees of BSc(Eng) and PhD of London University. He joined the staff at Northampton and was successively Research Assistant, Research Fellow and Lecturer.
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Blaise Pascal
It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large. Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.
The activists now prefer to call it “climate change”. This gives them two advantages: It allows them to seize as “evidence” the inevitable occurrences of unusually cold weather as well as warm ones. The climate is always changing, so they must be right. Only the relatively elderly can remember the cynical haste with which the scaremongers dropped the “coming ice age” and embraced exactly the opposite prediction, but aimed at the same culprit - industry. This was in Britain, which was the cradle of the new belief and was a response to the derision resulting from the searing summer of 1976. The father of the new religion was Sir Crispin Tickell, and because he had the ear of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was engaged in a battle with the coal miners and the oil sheiks, it was introduced into international politics with the authority of the only major political leader holding a qualification in science. The introduction was timely yet ironic since, in the wake of the world�s political upheavals, a powerful new grouping of left-wing interests was coalescing around environmental issues. The result was a new form of godless religion. The global warming cult has the characteristics of religion and not science for the following reasons.
Faith is a belief held without evidence. The scientific method, a loose collection of procedures of great variety, is based on precisely the opposite concept, as famously declared by Thomas Henry Huxley: The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. The global warmers like to use the name of science, but they do not like its methods. They promote slogans such a “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled.
They were not, however, always so wise. In 1900, for example, the great Lord Kelvin famously stated, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within a few years classical physics was shattered by Einstein and his contemporaries. Since then, in science, the debate is never closed. Read the other reasons and much more of this essay here.
Peter
Global Warming as Religion and not Science
By John Brignell
Professor Emeritus (ESD)
John Brignell was educated at Stationers’ Company’s School and began his career as an apprentice at STC. He studied at Northampton Engineering College (which became The City University, London) and took the degrees of BSc(Eng) and PhD of London University. He joined the staff at Northampton and was successively Research Assistant, Research Fellow and Lecturer.
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Blaise Pascal
It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large. Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.
The activists now prefer to call it “climate change”. This gives them two advantages: It allows them to seize as “evidence” the inevitable occurrences of unusually cold weather as well as warm ones. The climate is always changing, so they must be right. Only the relatively elderly can remember the cynical haste with which the scaremongers dropped the “coming ice age” and embraced exactly the opposite prediction, but aimed at the same culprit - industry. This was in Britain, which was the cradle of the new belief and was a response to the derision resulting from the searing summer of 1976. The father of the new religion was Sir Crispin Tickell, and because he had the ear of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was engaged in a battle with the coal miners and the oil sheiks, it was introduced into international politics with the authority of the only major political leader holding a qualification in science. The introduction was timely yet ironic since, in the wake of the world�s political upheavals, a powerful new grouping of left-wing interests was coalescing around environmental issues. The result was a new form of godless religion. The global warming cult has the characteristics of religion and not science for the following reasons.
Faith is a belief held without evidence. The scientific method, a loose collection of procedures of great variety, is based on precisely the opposite concept, as famously declared by Thomas Henry Huxley: The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. The global warmers like to use the name of science, but they do not like its methods. They promote slogans such a “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled.
They were not, however, always so wise. In 1900, for example, the great Lord Kelvin famously stated, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within a few years classical physics was shattered by Einstein and his contemporaries. Since then, in science, the debate is never closed. Read the other reasons and much more of this essay here.
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Dangers Of Tobacco Vs. Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Conspiracy Theory?
This is an issue that warrants watching. Is there a legitimate comparison between tobacco companies covering up the dangers of smoking and oil companies covering up the danger of carbon dioxide emissions? Tobacco companies were apparently convicted of conspiracy and "settled" for $200 Billion. Now some of the same lawyers are using the same strategies to go after even "deeper pockets"......BIG OIL. Can it be proven, in a court of law, that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming and destructive climate change? If it can, we are all in a whole lot of trouble.
Peter
Stephan Faris: Conspiracy Theory
11:08 AM CDT on Sunday, June 15, 2008 (source)
Stephan Faris' book on the political, economic and strategic implications of climate change, "Forecast", will be published in January. His e-mail address is stephanfaris@yahoo.com. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
During the tobacco wars of the 1990s, attorneys Steve Susman and Steve Berman stood on opposite sides of the courtroom.
Mr. Berman represented 13 states in what was then seen as a quixotic attempt to recover smoking-related medical costs and conceived the strategy that would break the tobacco industry's back: an emphasis on charges of conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes. Mr. Susman had turned down offers to represent Massachusetts and Texas against the cigarette makers; instead he defended Philip Morris – until 1998, when the industry settled for more than $200 billion, the biggest civil settlement ever. Now, a decade later, the two lawyers find themselves on the same side of the aisle, working on a case that seems just as improbable as the ones that brought down Big Tobacco – and with implications that could be at least as far-reaching.
The Eskimo village of Kivalina sits on the tip of an eight-mile barrier reef on the west coast of Alaska. Fierce storms are ripping apart the shores. Residents report sinkholes in nearby riverbanks. Despite emergency erosion-control efforts, the crumbling coast threatens the village's school and electric plant.
In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that Kivalina would be uninhabitable in as little as 10 years and that relocating its approximately 400 residents would cost at least $95 million. Global climate change, the Corps report said, had shortened the season during which the sea was frozen, leaving the community more vulnerable to winter storms.
As scientific evidence accumulates on the destructive impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, a handful of lawyers are beginning to bring suits against the major contributors to climate change. Their arguments, so far, have not been well received; the courts have been understandably reluctant to hold a specific group of defendants responsible for a problem for which everyone on Earth bears some responsibility. Lawsuits in California, Mississippi and New York have been dismissed by judges who say a ruling would require them to balance the perils of greenhouse gases against the benefits of fossil fuels – something best handled by legislatures.
But Mr. Susman and Mr. Berman have been intrigued by the possibilities. Both have added various environmental and energy cases to their portfolios over the years, and Mr. Susman recently taught a class on climate-change litigation at the University of Houston Law Center.
Over time, the two trial lawyers have become convinced that they have the playbook necessary to win big cases against the country's largest emitters. It's the same game plan that brought down Big Tobacco. And in Kivalina – where the link between global warming and material damage is strong – they believe they've found the perfect challenger.
In February, Mr. Berman and Mr. Susman – along with two attorneys who have previously worked on behalf of the village and Matt Pawa, an environmental lawyer specializing in global warming – filed suit in federal court against 24 oil, coal and electric companies, claiming that their emissions are partially responsible for the coastal destruction in Kivalina.
More important, the suit also accuses eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and Southern Co.) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking – by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus.
This second charge arguably eliminates the need for a judge to determine how much greenhouse-gas production – from refining fossil fuel and burning it to produce energy – is acceptable. "You're not asking the court to evaluate the reasonableness of the conduct," Mr. Berman says. "You're asking a court to evaluate if somebody conspired to lie."
Monetary damages to Kivalina need not be sourced exclusively to the defendants' emissions; they would derive from bad-faith efforts to prevent the enactment of public measures that might have slowed the warming.
Mr. Berman and Mr. Susman aren't alone in drawing parallels between the actions of the defendants and those of the tobacco industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group, has accused ExxonMobil of adopting the cigarette manufacturers' strategy of covertly establishing "front" groups, promoting writers who exaggerate uncertainties in the science and improperly cultivating ties within the government. The oil company, it says, has "funneled approximately $16 million to carefully chosen organizations that promote disinformation on global warming."
"The strategy to foster doubt is very effective," says Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego. Ms. Oreskes is writing a book on the similar methods that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries have used to challenge unwelcome scientific evidence.
"If 'nobody knows,' " she says, "then nobody is to blame. If 'nobody knows,' then how can we do anything about it?"
The research and public-awareness efforts funded by Big Oil involve some of the same scientists and other professionals who once worked on behalf of Big Tobacco. For instance, Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, who died in March, served as a research adviser for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and then founded the George C. Marshall Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank that has challenged the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming. (The academy dissociated itself from Mr. Seitz's conclusions in 1998.)
The energy industry's ties to government, like the tobacco industry's, have been unusually tight, and its lobbying efforts demonstrably effective.
Philip Cooney, a liaison between the Bush administration and federal environmental agencies, edited uncertainty into reports on global warming by top government scientists from 2001 until 2005, when he resigned after examples of his changes were published by The New York Times. Before joining the White House, Mr. Cooney had worked for the American Petroleum Institute; a week after his departure, ExxonMobil announced he was joining the company.
"In a sense, ExxonMobil walked right into the room of the science program," says Rick Piltz, the federal official who blew the whistle on Mr. Cooney.
A government memo obtained by Greenpeace outlines a State Department official's talking points for a meeting with energy-company lobbyists: The president, the memo says, "rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you."
Proving that energy companies tried to slow government action on global warming won't be hard. The challenge in the Kivalina case, as it was in the breakthrough tobacco cases, will be to prove that these companies lied in the course of their business and were aware that the consequences could be dangerous.
"You don't want to interfere too much with efforts by people to lobby," says Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. "On the other hand, if they're deliberately engaging in deception, there's a stronger argument."
Climate-change litigation is so new that legal experts have little idea how to handicap it; in unexplored areas of tort law, cases become pivotal only in hindsight. Some legal scholars are skeptical of the merits of the Kivalina case, but many others are looking on with interest.
The cultural and political winds are certainly blowing in a favorable direction – and these winds often affect courts and juries. That factor, along with the very deep pockets of Big Oil, is likely to keep the lawsuits coming, testing different theories and different arguments.
"It's sort of like when infantry used to charge the machine guns," says Joseph Wayne Smith, an Australian lawyer and the author of Climate Change Litigation. "A lot of them would get mowed down, but eventually a wave would get through and take out the pillbox."
The first tobacco suits were filed in the 1950s, but it wasn't until 1988 that lawyers were able to find chinks in the industry's armor. The first lawsuit to succeed was also the first to accuse the industry of conspiracy.
It's anyone's guess whether climate change litigation, when mapped to that time line, is closer to the 1950s or to 1988. Indeed, it's not clear whether warming-related monetary damages will ever be won from energy companies – much less whether they should be. But if the charges do stick in the Kivalina case, the defendants can expect many more in short order, as island nations, ski resorts, drought-stricken communities and hurricane victims line up for their share.
Regulation and litigation are two sides of the same coin. By working aggressively to prevent one, the energy companies may have left themselves open to the other.
Stephan Faris' book on the political, economic and strategic implications of climate change, Forecast, will be published in January. His e-mail address is stephanfaris@yahoo.com. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
Peter
Stephan Faris: Conspiracy Theory
11:08 AM CDT on Sunday, June 15, 2008 (source)
Stephan Faris' book on the political, economic and strategic implications of climate change, "Forecast", will be published in January. His e-mail address is stephanfaris@yahoo.com. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
During the tobacco wars of the 1990s, attorneys Steve Susman and Steve Berman stood on opposite sides of the courtroom.
Mr. Berman represented 13 states in what was then seen as a quixotic attempt to recover smoking-related medical costs and conceived the strategy that would break the tobacco industry's back: an emphasis on charges of conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes. Mr. Susman had turned down offers to represent Massachusetts and Texas against the cigarette makers; instead he defended Philip Morris – until 1998, when the industry settled for more than $200 billion, the biggest civil settlement ever. Now, a decade later, the two lawyers find themselves on the same side of the aisle, working on a case that seems just as improbable as the ones that brought down Big Tobacco – and with implications that could be at least as far-reaching.
The Eskimo village of Kivalina sits on the tip of an eight-mile barrier reef on the west coast of Alaska. Fierce storms are ripping apart the shores. Residents report sinkholes in nearby riverbanks. Despite emergency erosion-control efforts, the crumbling coast threatens the village's school and electric plant.
In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that Kivalina would be uninhabitable in as little as 10 years and that relocating its approximately 400 residents would cost at least $95 million. Global climate change, the Corps report said, had shortened the season during which the sea was frozen, leaving the community more vulnerable to winter storms.
As scientific evidence accumulates on the destructive impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, a handful of lawyers are beginning to bring suits against the major contributors to climate change. Their arguments, so far, have not been well received; the courts have been understandably reluctant to hold a specific group of defendants responsible for a problem for which everyone on Earth bears some responsibility. Lawsuits in California, Mississippi and New York have been dismissed by judges who say a ruling would require them to balance the perils of greenhouse gases against the benefits of fossil fuels – something best handled by legislatures.
But Mr. Susman and Mr. Berman have been intrigued by the possibilities. Both have added various environmental and energy cases to their portfolios over the years, and Mr. Susman recently taught a class on climate-change litigation at the University of Houston Law Center.
Over time, the two trial lawyers have become convinced that they have the playbook necessary to win big cases against the country's largest emitters. It's the same game plan that brought down Big Tobacco. And in Kivalina – where the link between global warming and material damage is strong – they believe they've found the perfect challenger.
In February, Mr. Berman and Mr. Susman – along with two attorneys who have previously worked on behalf of the village and Matt Pawa, an environmental lawyer specializing in global warming – filed suit in federal court against 24 oil, coal and electric companies, claiming that their emissions are partially responsible for the coastal destruction in Kivalina.
More important, the suit also accuses eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and Southern Co.) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking – by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus.
This second charge arguably eliminates the need for a judge to determine how much greenhouse-gas production – from refining fossil fuel and burning it to produce energy – is acceptable. "You're not asking the court to evaluate the reasonableness of the conduct," Mr. Berman says. "You're asking a court to evaluate if somebody conspired to lie."
Monetary damages to Kivalina need not be sourced exclusively to the defendants' emissions; they would derive from bad-faith efforts to prevent the enactment of public measures that might have slowed the warming.
Mr. Berman and Mr. Susman aren't alone in drawing parallels between the actions of the defendants and those of the tobacco industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group, has accused ExxonMobil of adopting the cigarette manufacturers' strategy of covertly establishing "front" groups, promoting writers who exaggerate uncertainties in the science and improperly cultivating ties within the government. The oil company, it says, has "funneled approximately $16 million to carefully chosen organizations that promote disinformation on global warming."
"The strategy to foster doubt is very effective," says Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego. Ms. Oreskes is writing a book on the similar methods that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries have used to challenge unwelcome scientific evidence.
"If 'nobody knows,' " she says, "then nobody is to blame. If 'nobody knows,' then how can we do anything about it?"
The research and public-awareness efforts funded by Big Oil involve some of the same scientists and other professionals who once worked on behalf of Big Tobacco. For instance, Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, who died in March, served as a research adviser for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and then founded the George C. Marshall Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank that has challenged the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming. (The academy dissociated itself from Mr. Seitz's conclusions in 1998.)
The energy industry's ties to government, like the tobacco industry's, have been unusually tight, and its lobbying efforts demonstrably effective.
Philip Cooney, a liaison between the Bush administration and federal environmental agencies, edited uncertainty into reports on global warming by top government scientists from 2001 until 2005, when he resigned after examples of his changes were published by The New York Times. Before joining the White House, Mr. Cooney had worked for the American Petroleum Institute; a week after his departure, ExxonMobil announced he was joining the company.
"In a sense, ExxonMobil walked right into the room of the science program," says Rick Piltz, the federal official who blew the whistle on Mr. Cooney.
A government memo obtained by Greenpeace outlines a State Department official's talking points for a meeting with energy-company lobbyists: The president, the memo says, "rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you."
Proving that energy companies tried to slow government action on global warming won't be hard. The challenge in the Kivalina case, as it was in the breakthrough tobacco cases, will be to prove that these companies lied in the course of their business and were aware that the consequences could be dangerous.
"You don't want to interfere too much with efforts by people to lobby," says Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. "On the other hand, if they're deliberately engaging in deception, there's a stronger argument."
Climate-change litigation is so new that legal experts have little idea how to handicap it; in unexplored areas of tort law, cases become pivotal only in hindsight. Some legal scholars are skeptical of the merits of the Kivalina case, but many others are looking on with interest.
The cultural and political winds are certainly blowing in a favorable direction – and these winds often affect courts and juries. That factor, along with the very deep pockets of Big Oil, is likely to keep the lawsuits coming, testing different theories and different arguments.
"It's sort of like when infantry used to charge the machine guns," says Joseph Wayne Smith, an Australian lawyer and the author of Climate Change Litigation. "A lot of them would get mowed down, but eventually a wave would get through and take out the pillbox."
The first tobacco suits were filed in the 1950s, but it wasn't until 1988 that lawyers were able to find chinks in the industry's armor. The first lawsuit to succeed was also the first to accuse the industry of conspiracy.
It's anyone's guess whether climate change litigation, when mapped to that time line, is closer to the 1950s or to 1988. Indeed, it's not clear whether warming-related monetary damages will ever be won from energy companies – much less whether they should be. But if the charges do stick in the Kivalina case, the defendants can expect many more in short order, as island nations, ski resorts, drought-stricken communities and hurricane victims line up for their share.
Regulation and litigation are two sides of the same coin. By working aggressively to prevent one, the energy companies may have left themselves open to the other.
Stephan Faris' book on the political, economic and strategic implications of climate change, Forecast, will be published in January. His e-mail address is stephanfaris@yahoo.com. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
Dr. Reid Bryson, "Father Of Modern Climatology", 1920-2008
Search this blog for many other articles and insight about global warming and climate change from Dr. Bryson, an extraordinary man, scientist, and teacher. May he RIP.
Peter
“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling CO2”
Reid Bryson who died in his sleep at age 88 on June 11, 2008
source
Reid Bryson, a towering figure in climatology and interdisciplinary studies of climate, people and the environment, and the founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s meteorology department and Center for Climatic Research, and the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, died in his sleep early June 11 at his home in Madison. He was 88.
Bryson was one of the pioneers of modern climatology and was among the first to explore the influence of climate on humans and human culture and, in turn, some of the human impacts on climate. He was an early developer of simple computer models to study the causes of past climate change, comparing those simulations with records of paleoclimate and human culture.
Peter
“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling CO2”
Reid Bryson who died in his sleep at age 88 on June 11, 2008
source
Reid Bryson, a towering figure in climatology and interdisciplinary studies of climate, people and the environment, and the founder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s meteorology department and Center for Climatic Research, and the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, died in his sleep early June 11 at his home in Madison. He was 88.
Bryson was one of the pioneers of modern climatology and was among the first to explore the influence of climate on humans and human culture and, in turn, some of the human impacts on climate. He was an early developer of simple computer models to study the causes of past climate change, comparing those simulations with records of paleoclimate and human culture.
Headed For Disaster Because Of The Belief In The Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming
If anyone thinks gasoline, diesel and jet fuel are expensive, and are harming our economy, take a look at what is going to happen to the cost of electricity and the natural gas we use to heat our homes, cook our food and run much of our industry. Try to imagine how this affects the cost of nearly everything we need to live, from food, to clothing, to shelter. Nothing will escape this inflationary cost escalation. Imagine the jobs lost, as businesses continue the flight to countries with more rational environmental laws. Now, also consider that this impending disaster is greatly due to the myth of man-caused global warming, that burning coal and gasoline and the carbon dioxide this emits is causing dangerous global warming and climate change.
Finally, ask yourself another question; which is worse, the very remote possibility of a slight increase in some arbitrary global temperature, or severe global economic depression?
Peter
Opposition to Coal Will Reduce Electricity Reliability, Harm US Economy
US Department of Energy NETL Report
Summary on SPPI (source)
In an April 2008 white paper entitled, “Natural Gas and Electricity Costs and Impacts on Industry”, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) reported that opposition to new coal-based power plants is leading to a generation capacity shortage in many areas of the country and endangering U.S. energy security. The opposition is also inducing a “dash to gas” and quickly causing a rise in natural gas prices at a time when federal climate change legislation could immediately lead to a doubling of natural gas consumption for power generation. This legislation would increase the country’s dependence on foreign energy sources in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) causing both natural gas and electricity prices to increase dramatically.
NETL also describes how coal has protected consumers from even higher natural gas prices. Unfortunately, the current opposition to coal would allow natural gas prices to match the percentage increase in the price of oil. Such increases in the price of natural gas could cause trade-exposed sectors of U.S. industry to shut in production, especially against coal-powered competitors like China or regions like the Middle East, where cheap natural gas reserves supply power needs. NETL estimates, by 2016, the absence of 18 GW of currently forecasted new coal-based power plants would mean additional natural gas demand of 1.4 Tcf/year, or almost all of the presently forecasted LNG growth. If electricity growth were higher, as it is in U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), up to an additional 2.3 Tcf of natural gas for generation would be needed.
In the event of climate change legislation with relatively strict cap and trade provisions, such as S.2191 - the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, an additional 5.4 Tcf/year is required for even more coal-to-gas switching, and even more natural gas generating capacity would be necessary just to meet peak demand. Since this approximate 9 Tcf increase in natural gas consumption would be occurring at high prices, the impact on the economy would be severe. Because both electric rates and heating prices would escalate, no sector would be exempt; although families and energy-intensive industry would certainly bear the heaviest burdens.
See larger image here
For more of this one page summery go here. For full NETL Report go here.
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Finally, ask yourself another question; which is worse, the very remote possibility of a slight increase in some arbitrary global temperature, or severe global economic depression?
Peter
Opposition to Coal Will Reduce Electricity Reliability, Harm US Economy
US Department of Energy NETL Report
Summary on SPPI (source)
In an April 2008 white paper entitled, “Natural Gas and Electricity Costs and Impacts on Industry”, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) reported that opposition to new coal-based power plants is leading to a generation capacity shortage in many areas of the country and endangering U.S. energy security. The opposition is also inducing a “dash to gas” and quickly causing a rise in natural gas prices at a time when federal climate change legislation could immediately lead to a doubling of natural gas consumption for power generation. This legislation would increase the country’s dependence on foreign energy sources in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) causing both natural gas and electricity prices to increase dramatically.
NETL also describes how coal has protected consumers from even higher natural gas prices. Unfortunately, the current opposition to coal would allow natural gas prices to match the percentage increase in the price of oil. Such increases in the price of natural gas could cause trade-exposed sectors of U.S. industry to shut in production, especially against coal-powered competitors like China or regions like the Middle East, where cheap natural gas reserves supply power needs. NETL estimates, by 2016, the absence of 18 GW of currently forecasted new coal-based power plants would mean additional natural gas demand of 1.4 Tcf/year, or almost all of the presently forecasted LNG growth. If electricity growth were higher, as it is in U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), up to an additional 2.3 Tcf of natural gas for generation would be needed.
In the event of climate change legislation with relatively strict cap and trade provisions, such as S.2191 - the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, an additional 5.4 Tcf/year is required for even more coal-to-gas switching, and even more natural gas generating capacity would be necessary just to meet peak demand. Since this approximate 9 Tcf increase in natural gas consumption would be occurring at high prices, the impact on the economy would be severe. Because both electric rates and heating prices would escalate, no sector would be exempt; although families and energy-intensive industry would certainly bear the heaviest burdens.
See larger image here
For more of this one page summery go here. For full NETL Report go here.
-->
Now Call It The MYTH Of Man-Caused Climate Change
We are no longer simply facing the dangers of supposed man-caused global warming, now it is being called "climate change", and anything harmful, or dramatic about the weather, from record snowfall and cold in the winter, to record heat and rainfall and flooding is now being blamed on the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As illogical as this seems, it is not a joke. This gross distortion of reality is being almost gleefully reported by our sensationalist mainstream media. Beware.
Peter
See more including larger map here
The record snows, severe weather and heavy rainfall has been the result of rapid COOLING in the northern tier of the United States and Canada not global warming. The flooding exceeded the floods of 1993 when rapid cooling following the eruption of Pinatubo produced a similar kind of cooling with a strong suppressed jet stream that brought a steady stream of storms and flooding.
Rapid warming as took place in the 1930s and again around 1980 leads to drought and record heat. The alarmist movement is reeling after the warming stopped in 1998 and cooling began in 2002, accelerating in the last year. Their claims have now morphed from warming to focusing on the extremes typical of La Nina and the colder decades to try and keep their hoax alive.
Peter
Environmentalists Take Advantage of Natural Disaster - Blame Midwest Floods on Global Warming
(source)
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
In the latest in a series of predictable news stories gobbled up by an all too willing media, an environmental group Clean Wisconsin today claimed that the disastrous floods that ravaged southern Wisconsin this week are consistent with global warming predictions in the January 2007 Clean Wisconsin report. The report, “Global Warming Arrives in Wisconsin,” forecast that global warming would lead to increased instances of severe droughts, more intense floods and increased snowfall.
Alarmists have adopted the can’t lose position that all extremes of weather - cold, warm, wet or dry are all due to global warming. They blamed the frequent tornadoes of the late winter and spring on global warming even though the number was not at all atypical of a La Nina year. Southern Wisconsin and much of the Midwest has had a rough winter and spring but it has been the antithesis of global warming.
Wisconsin had its 33 coldest winter on record, nearby Iowa its 19th coldest in 114 years. The cool weather continued into the spring with the 22nd coldest spring on record in Wisconsin and 24th in Iowa. Madison, Wisconsin had the snowiest winter on record, topping 100 inches for the first time ever.
In the latest in a series of predictable news stories gobbled up by an all too willing media, an environmental group Clean Wisconsin today claimed that the disastrous floods that ravaged southern Wisconsin this week are consistent with global warming predictions in the January 2007 Clean Wisconsin report. The report, “Global Warming Arrives in Wisconsin,” forecast that global warming would lead to increased instances of severe droughts, more intense floods and increased snowfall.
Alarmists have adopted the can’t lose position that all extremes of weather - cold, warm, wet or dry are all due to global warming. They blamed the frequent tornadoes of the late winter and spring on global warming even though the number was not at all atypical of a La Nina year. Southern Wisconsin and much of the Midwest has had a rough winter and spring but it has been the antithesis of global warming.
Wisconsin had its 33 coldest winter on record, nearby Iowa its 19th coldest in 114 years. The cool weather continued into the spring with the 22nd coldest spring on record in Wisconsin and 24th in Iowa. Madison, Wisconsin had the snowiest winter on record, topping 100 inches for the first time ever.
See more including larger map here
The record snows, severe weather and heavy rainfall has been the result of rapid COOLING in the northern tier of the United States and Canada not global warming. The flooding exceeded the floods of 1993 when rapid cooling following the eruption of Pinatubo produced a similar kind of cooling with a strong suppressed jet stream that brought a steady stream of storms and flooding.
Rapid warming as took place in the 1930s and again around 1980 leads to drought and record heat. The alarmist movement is reeling after the warming stopped in 1998 and cooling began in 2002, accelerating in the last year. Their claims have now morphed from warming to focusing on the extremes typical of La Nina and the colder decades to try and keep their hoax alive.
See larger map here.
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How The Battle Against Global Warming Affects The Price Of Gasoline....
Here is the latest opinion piece from John Coleman, "the founder of The Weather Channel", and a long-time television weather forecaster. If you do a search of this blog for John Coleman you will find other articles by and about him. He does a good job of summarizing in simplified terms the case against man-caused global warming.
Peter
source
Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas
by John Coleman
You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.
The future of our civilization lies in the balance.
That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.
With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.
Here is my rebuttal.
There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.
Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.
Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?
The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.
Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.
Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.
The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.
All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.
Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.
Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.
The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and viola, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.
May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.
Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.
So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.
So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.
To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.
So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.
I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position form Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.
In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.
I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.
The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.
So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.
So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.
I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it.
If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.
My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.
Peter
source
Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas
by John Coleman
You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.
The future of our civilization lies in the balance.
That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.
With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.
Here is my rebuttal.
There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.
Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.
Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?
The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.
Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.
Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.
The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.
All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.
Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.
Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.
The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and viola, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.
May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.
Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.
So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.
So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.
To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.
So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.
I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position form Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.
In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.
I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.
The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.
So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.
So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.
I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it.
If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.
My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.
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