Destroying and disproving the myth of man-caused global warming has had a significant effect on General Electric, one of the myth's primary supporters. Apparently GE has seen the light, come to their senses and finally realizes that the entire premise of man-caused global warming has been one gigantic hoax. Search this blog for articles on GE to follow the history of these schemes, scandals, lies, and deceptions. Look for similar changes in focus and attitude toward global warming, climate change and all it entails. Peter
The browning of GE
3:36 pm ET 12/13/2010 - MarketWatch Databased News
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- General Electric's decision to buy Britain's Wellstream Holdings PLC is clearly about securing a spot for itself in Brazil's booming deepwater oil industry.
But it also offers an interesting counterpoint to GE's own carefully groomed public energy persona.
For the past few years, GE has been busy prying open business opportunities in green energy. As part of the push, it created a separate R&D clean-tech unit called Ecomagination, slapping a bright green GE logo on the enterprise to visually drive home the point.
The company is now deep into wind power (turbines), it's a huge proponent of electric vehicles (recharging stations), and a major player in the developing a "smart" energy grid (smart meters) -- programs that also happen to be backed by billions of dollars in government stimulus funding.
So why is GE plunking down $1.3 billion to buy Wellstream Holdngs , a company that makes pipeline and other equipment for the offshore oil industry? Read about the GE-Wellstream deal.
Wellstream is an interesting choice because much of its operations and revenue are in Brazil, a country that's emerging as a global energy powerhouse because of its rich offshore oil fields, surplus of sugar-based ethanol fuels and extensive hydropower. GE simply wants to be in the mix.
The oil component of that mix is certainly looking more attractive than it did when GE launched Ecomagination a couple of years ago, before the Great Recession.
GE couldn't at the time have seen just how deep the recession would be, or what impact it would have on budgets aimed at "going green." They also couldn't have foreseen how the Cancun Climate Change Summit, which wrapped up this weekend, would end up being about as toothless as COP15, the Copenhagen climate change summit a year ago.
A major recession and an international stalemate over imposing stricter carbon controls are not helping GE's green technology sales. And who knows how long government stimuli are going to last, especially given the results of the mid-term elections here at home.
By buying Wellstream, GE is doing what all conglomerates do. It's diversifying. It's also plunking down a big chunk of cash to make sure it's got a piece of the action in the overseas offshore oil industry. That might not sound very green to an environmentalist, but given the current economic climate, it simply sounds like GE hedging its bet.
It looks like all the accusations of corruption within the global warming/climate change "Industry" are proving to be true. The leaked State Department cables are the latest smoking gun. The truth is finally coming out. Notice Al Gore is lying low, nowhere to be seen. He know he's been a liar, and more and more global warming true believers are realizing they've been played for fools. It is wake-up time, and for many it is a difficult pill to swallow.
Peter
WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord
Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord
A Greenpeace activist in a hot air ballon ahead of the current UN climate summit in Cancún. WikiLeaks cables expose US use of espionage before the 2009 Copenhagen summit. Photograph: Luis Perez/AFP/Getty Images
Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
But intelligence gathering was not just one way. On 19 June 2009, the state department sent a cable detailing a "spear phishing" attack on the office of the US climate change envoy, Todd Stern, while talks with China on emissions took place in Beijing. Five people received emails, personalised to look as though they came from the National Journal. An attached file contained malicious code that would give complete control of the recipient's computer to a hacker. While the attack was unsuccessful, the department's cyber threat analysis division noted: "It is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist."
The Beijing talks failed to lead to a global deal at Copenhagen. But the US, the world's biggest historical polluter and long isolated as a climate pariah, had something to cling to. The Copenhagen accord, hammered out in the dying hours but not adopted into the UN process, offered to solve many of the US's problems.
The accord turns the UN's top-down, unanimous approach upside down, with each nation choosing palatable targets for greenhouse gas cuts. It presents a far easier way to bind in China and other rapidly growing countries than the UN process. But the accord cannot guarantee the global greenhouse gas cuts needed to avoid dangerous warming. Furthermore, it threatens to circumvent the UN's negotiations on extending the Kyoto protocol, in which rich nations have binding obligations. Those objections have led many countries – particularly the poorest and most vulnerable – to vehemently oppose the accord.
Getting as many countries as possible to associate themselves with the accord strongly served US interests, by boosting the likelihood it would be officially adopted. A diplomatic offensive was launched. Diplomatic cables flew thick and fast between the end of Copenhagen in December 2009 and late February 2010, when the leaked cables end.
Some countries needed little persuading. The accord promised $30bn (£19bn) in aid for the poorest nations hit by global warming they had not caused. Within two weeks of Copenhagen, the Maldives foreign minister, Ahmed Shaheed, wrote to the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressing eagerness to back it.
A diplomatic dance ensued. "Ghafoor referred to several projects costing approximately $50m (£30m). Pershing encouraged him to provide concrete examples and costs in order to increase the likelihood of bilateral assistance."
The Maldives were unusual among developing countries in embracing the accord so wholeheartedly, but other small island nations were secretly seen as vulnerable to financial pressure. Any linking of the billions of dollars of aid to political support is extremely controversial – nations most threatened by climate change see the aid as a right, not a reward, and such a link as heretical. But on 11 February, Pershing met the EU climate action commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, in Brussels, where she told him, according to a cable, "the Aosis [Alliance of Small Island States] countries 'could be our best allies' given their need for financing".
The pair were concerned at how the $30bn was to be raised and Hedegaard raised another toxic subject – whether the US aid would be all cash. She asked if the US would need to do any "creative accounting", noting some countries such as Japan and the UK wanted loan guarantees, not grants alone, included, a tactic she opposed. Pershing said "donors have to balance the political need to provide real financing with the practical constraints of tight budgets", reported the cable.
Along with finance, another treacherous issue in the global climate negotiations, currently continuing in Cancún, Mexico, is trust that countries will keep their word. Hedegaard asks why the US did not agree with China and India on what she saw as acceptable measures to police future emissions cuts. "The question is whether they will honour that language," the cable quotes Pershing as saying.
Trust is in short supply on both sides of the developed-developing nation divide. On 2 February 2009, a cable from Addis Ababa reports a meeting between the US undersecretary of state Maria Otero and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who leads the African Union's climate change negotiations.
The confidential cable records a blunt US threat to Zenawi: sign the accord or discussion ends now. Zenawi responds that Ethiopia will support the accord, but has a concern of his own: that a personal assurance from Barack Obama on delivering the promised aid finance is not being honoured.
US determination to seek allies against its most powerful adversaries – the rising economic giants of Brazil, South Africa, India, China (Basic) – is set out in another cable from Brussels on 17 February reporting a meeting between the deputy national security adviser, Michael Froman, Hedegaard and other EU officials.
Froman said the EU needed to learn from Basic's skill at impeding US and EU initiatives and playing them off against each in order "to better handle third country obstructionism and avoid future train wrecks on climate".
Hedegaard is keen to reassure Froman of EU support, revealing a difference between public and private statements. "She hoped the US noted the EU was muting its criticism of the US, to be constructive," the cable said. Hedegaard and Froman discuss the need to "neutralise, co-opt or marginalise unhelpful countries including Venezuela and Bolivia", before Hedegaard again links financial aid to support for the accord, noting "the irony that the EU is a big donor to these countries". Later, in April, the US cut aid to Bolivia and Ecuador, citing opposition to the accord.
Any irony is clearly lost on the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, according to a 9 February cable from La Paz. The Danish ambassador to Bolivia, Morten Elkjaer, tells a US diplomat that, at the Copenhagen summit, "Danish prime minister Rasmussen spent an unpleasant 30 minutes with Morales, during which Morales thanked him for [$30m a year in] bilateral aid, but refused to engage on climate change issues."
After the Copenhagen summit, further linking of finance and aid with political support appears. Dutch officials, initially rejecting US overtures to back the accord, make a startling statement on 25 January. According to a cable, the Dutch climate negotiator Sanne Kaasjager "has drafted messages for embassies in capitals receiving Dutch development assistance to solicit support [for the accord]. This is an unprecedented move for the Dutch government, which traditionally recoils at any suggestion to use aid money as political leverage." Later, however, Kaasjager rows back a little, saying: "The Netherlands would find it difficult to make association with the accord a condition to receive climate financing."
Perhaps the most audacious appeal for funds revealed in the cables is from Saudi Arabia, the world's second biggest oil producer and one of the 25 richest countries in the world. A secret cable sent on 12 February records a meeting between US embassy officials and lead climate change negotiator Mohammad al-Sabban. "The kingdom will need time to diversify its economy away from petroleum, [Sabban] said, noting a US commitment to help Saudi Arabia with its economic diversification efforts would 'take the pressure off climate change negotiations'."
The Saudis did not like the accord, but were worried they had missed a trick. The assistant petroleum minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told US officials that he had told his minister Ali al-Naimi that Saudi Arabia had "missed a real opportunity to submit 'something clever', like India or China, that was not legally binding but indicated some goodwill towards the process without compromising key economic interests".
The cables obtained by WikiLeaks finish at the end of February 2010. Today, 116 countries have associated themselves with the accord. Another 26 say they intend to associate. That total, of 140, is at the upper end of a 100-150 country target revealed by Pershing in his meeting with Hedegaard on 11 February.
The 140 nations represent almost 75% of the 193 countries that are parties to the UN climate change convention and, accord supporters like to point out, are responsible for well over 80% of current global greenhouse gas emissions.
The following opinion piece sums up quite nicely the current state of affairs in the (sadly) ongoing attempt to continue the myth of man-caused global warming or climate change. The blood-suckers who hope to make more Billions on carbon dioxide emission taxation and regulation just will not give up. They and the researchers making millions from government grants are like drug-junkies who are hooked on government funding. It is an understandably difficult habit to kick.
However nice and warm and cuddly it makes us feel to think we are saving the polar bears, and providing jobs for all the "climate scientists" (and ex-Vice Presidents), it is time for the general public to wake up to the fact that we have been scammed. We have been systematically misled, lied to and cheated by our political leaders and scientists who we pay and deserve to trust. We have been grossly betrayed to the tune of Billions upon Billions of dollars over at least the past two decades. Now we're going to have to pay the piper. Who do we blame? First and foremost the politicians who have led this charade in their own self interest for greater power and control.
Does anyone want their freedom and some control of their lives back? Then we must finally end the insane and completely unsupportable idea that carbon dioxide emissions are a major (or even minor) controller of global climate. Nobody minds paying taxes for needed purposes, but when the money is blown on lies and massive financial manipulation taking place at the highest levels of government, it is way past time to put a halt to it. Peter
Written by Alan Caruba, Warning Signs 28 November 2010
On November 14, 1957, leaders of the American and other Mafia organizations gathered at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in Apalachin, New York; approximately one hundred Mafiosi from around the United States, Canada, and Italy attended.
Up to then, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had refused to acknowledge that the Mafia even existed, but a succession of prime time television appearances before Congressional committees by members of the Mafia made it abundantly clear that crime in America was, indeed, organized and led by some very colorful and ruthless descendents of the Sicilian Mafia.
It is time for the U.S. government to acknowledge that a climate mafia has existed since the gathering in Kyoto, Japan, to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The December 11, 1997 treaty was, upon ratification, to go into force on February 16, 2005. Its expressed purpose was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the purpose of avoiding “global warming”, but its real purpose was to create an entirely bogus system of emissions trading to be known as “the carbon market.”
On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate, responsible for the ratification of international treaties, unanimously passed (95-0) a resolution rejecting the Kyoto Treaty on the grounds that it “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”
As this is written, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is striving to secure authorization to regulate GHG emissions despite massive evidence that they pose no threat to the environment and despite the fact that this authority would, as in 1997, cripple and likely destroy an already ailing economy.
There was no “global warming” then or now. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was deemed the chief cause of “global warming” when, in fact, it plays little or no role in climate change.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a criminal enterprise set up as a mechanism to facilitate the sale of bogus “carbon credits” and to transfer billions from industrialized, developed nations to those that have failed to keep pace. This latter scheme is little more than extortion.
In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC for their efforts to further this fraud. This demonstrates just how vast the effort to impose it had become. In the U.S., “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) was passed in the House and sent to the Senate. Political pundits say it is unlikely to come up for a vote.
In November 2009, the leak of thousands of emails between the scientists leading two university-based climate research centers responsible for the data published by the IPCC demonstrated they had deliberately rigged the data to assert a “global warming” that did not exist then or now. It was quickly dubbed “Climategate.”
The Climategate revelations doomed last year’s conference in Copenhagen that was intended to further the “global warming” fraud. It was attended by President Obama who said, “Today we’ve made (a) meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”
There is no threat of climate change beyond those natural climate events such as hurricanes and blizzards over which humankind has no control.
Abandoning the term “global warming” and substituting “climate change” does not change the fact that there has been NO dramatic increase in the Earth’s overall temperature and ignores the fact that, since 1998, the Earth has entered a predictable and natural cooling cycle.
The President was lying then and continues to lie today about “climate change.”
Billions worldwide have been wasted on the needless reduction of GHGs. Billions here in the U.S. have been diverted to two of the most unpredictable and least effective means of energy production, wind and solar power.
Billions have been wasted on the U.S. mandate that ethanol be mixed with the gasoline Americans purchase, despite the fact that ethanol releases more CO2 into the environment than gasoline without it. Due to expire on December 31st, it would save an estimated six billion dollars. Even Al Gore has disowned ethanol.
The IPCC meeting in Cancun begins on November 29 and will generate a lot of hot air for two weeks.
The Earth doesn’t need less carbon dioxide; vital to all crops, forests and vegetation. It needs more. The world doesn’t need less energy production. It needs more; vital to the economies of developed and developing nations.
The future of six billion people on planet Earth depends on the failure of the Cancun conference.
Readers should forward Caruba's article to their US senators and representatives. Too many are trying to be oh-so politically correct on energy/climate/environmental actions, and this one might help them see the light. Congressional hearings are needed soon!
It seems no matter what we do here in UK the fraud continues, all of our political parties support the 'green agenda' (redistribution of wealth into their own pockets agenda). All of them, their families and wives, or husbands, have financial interests in carbon tax, carbon credits, solar and wind power succeeding,and they will push it and push it, just like they made Ireland vote twice into accepting the Euro. The only party in UK that believes AGW to be a fraud is UKIP and they have only one Euro MP. Read Nigel Farage's take on it though, an eye opener.
In my opinion the scientific debate about whether mankind's activities play a significant role in global climate change is long over, as summarized in the commentary below. What remains is a battle to regain political and economic sanity. Whenever anyone claims we must produce electric cars, or "downsize", or "reduce our carbon footprint", or subsidize the building of "wind farms", "solar farms" and uneconomic geothermal energy, remind them that the rationale behind all of this activity is based on a fundamental lie.
As I have been saying and trying to show on this blog since day one, the idea that man-caused global warming, or climate change, or "climate disruption" is and has been an enormous LIE, a terrible, costly, and cruel hoax. We need to continue fighting to convince the dwindling number of people who still believe in the myth of man-caused global warming that they are flat-out wrong. It is past time to put an end to the hoax. Others can do the finger-pointing and play the blame-game. It is just time to put an end to the nonsense. America and our economic survival depends on it. Peter
Written by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker 07 November 2010 (source)
The New York Times editorial page has been persistent in publishing alarmist editorials on climate change. The latest one appearing shortly before the November elections accused politicians of being in "denial" about climate change. What nonsense! Climate is changing all the time; it has been doing it for millions of years -- without any human intervention. And politicians are simply trying to stay in step with the public.
There is no credible evidence at all that human activities have had any appreciable influence on global climate changes during the last century. While many scientists still believe in a major human contribution, the number of skeptical scientists has been growing steadily as the evidence against AGW [anthropogenic global warming] becomes ever more apparent.
Just ask yourself: what evidence is there to indicate that any warming over the last century is due to human influences? Not even the UN- supported IPCC has been able to point to any solid facts in favor of AGW. The latest science debate revolves around "finger prints" in the climate record. Do the observations of temperature change in the atmosphere show a certain pattern, which is characteristic of greenhouse warming? The answer is a resounding No.
Without any scientific evidence to support AGW, it is wasteful, counterproductive -- and foolish -- to institute regulations that limit the emissions of CO2, restrict the use of energy, and misdirect energy policy into such areas wind farms, solar projects, and biofuels like ethanol. For economic survival, all of these require huge subsidies. which are paid for by citizens twice over: first as taxpayers, then as energy users.
The mid-term elections have pointed up the public skepticism about AGW. Supporters of misguided policies to control emissions of carbon dioxide, through "cap and trade" and fuel standards, went down to defeat almost everywhere. California provided the big exception and now faces an economic disaster.
As reported by Cooler Heads Digest: "... the new Republican majority in the House is largely skeptical of the claim that global warming is a potential crisis and is close to unanimously opposed to cap-and-trade and other energy-rationing measures. Not only is cap-and-trade dead, but there is a good chance that the House next year will move legislation to block or delay the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The question is, can such a measure pass the Democratic-controlled Senate? There is certainly a majority in the Senate for blocking EPA, but sixty votes will be needed. My guess is that there will be more than sixty votes. As EPA regulations start to bite next year, Senators will start to hear complaints from their constituents. And a large number of Democratic Senators are up for re-election in 2012 and will want to avoid the fate of so many of their colleagues this year.
The NY Times may be seriously out of step with its own readers, At least that's how I would judge the results of a survey of readers of Scientific American, a magazine that has been just as alarmist about AGW as the Times:
**77% believe that current climate change is caused by natural processes **68% think we should do nothing about climate change, are powerless to stop it **90% approve of climate scientists debating the issue in public forums **83% believe that the UN-IPCC is corrupt, prone to groupthink, and has a political agenda.
The New York Times is doing a disservice to its readers and to the US public in stoking unreasonable fears not based on solid science.
You won't read this in the mainstream media. The following letter is a late and lamented confirmation of what global warming skeptics (and a few honest scientists) have been saying for years. And now it is not global warming, nor climate change, now it is called "climate disruption". This would be funny if it were not such a deadly serious scandal. Peter
Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind---simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
The following article explains what geologists have known for decades. The visible, measurable, and documented history of the Earth shows that climate change is and always has been occurring since the dawn of time. The changes are far beyond any global effect mankind has on the planet. Most notably, the input of the harmless gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can not possibly have a significant negative effect on the global climate. Those who have been preaching and promoting this idea are clearly wrong.
I suspect most of these global warming alarmists, including President Obama's science advisers, know they are wrong but continue the myth of man-caused global warming for reasons other than the "health of Mother Earth". Oh, and now they want to change the terminology from "global warming" or "climate change" to "climate disruption". Isn't that clever? The only problem is I think people are tired of being fooled, manipulated, and lied to. I'm very happy to see an article like that which follows, published in that icon of the mainstream media, "Newsweek Magazine". As I have been saying on this blog since the beginning, the myth of man-caused global warming will be destroyed. The truth will prevail.
I propose our teachers teach real Earth History as a contrast to Al Gore's fatalistic fantasies.
The cover of The American Scholar quarterly carries an impertinent assertion: “The Earth Doesn’t Care if You Drive a Hybrid.” The essay inside is titled “What the Earth Knows.” What it knows, according to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, is this: What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time.
For example: The world’s total precipitation in a year is about one meter—“the height of a golden retriever.” About 200 meters—the height of the Hoover Dam—have fallen on earth since the Industrial Revolution. Since the Ice Age ended, enough rain has fallen to fill all the oceans four times; since the dinosaurs died, rainfall has been sufficient to fill the oceans 20,000 times. Yet the amount of water on earth probably hasn’t changed significantly over geologic time.
Damaging this old earth is, Laughlin says, “easier to imagine than it is to accomplish.” There have been mass volcanic explosions, meteor impacts, “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor.”
Laughlin acknowledges that “a lot of responsible people” are worried about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. This has, he says, “the potential” to modify the weather by raising average temperatures several degrees centigrade and that governments have taken “significant, although ineffective,” steps to slow the warming. “On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation.”
Buy a hybrid, turn off your air conditioner, unplug your refrigerator, yank your phone charger from the wall socket—such actions will “leave the end result exactly the same.” Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them “40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.”) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today’s. Then “over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds” the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, “eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.” This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.
It seems, Laughlin says, that “something, presumably a geologic regulatory process, fixed the world’s carbon dioxide levels before humans arrived” with their SUVs and computers. Some scientists argue that “the photosynthetic machinery of plants seems optimized” to certain carbon dioxide levels. But “most models, even pessimistic ones,” envision “a thousand-year carbon dioxide pulse followed by glacially slow decay back to the pre-civilization situation.”
Laughlin believes that humans can “do damage persisting for geologic time” by “biodiversity loss”—extinctions that are, unlike carbon dioxide excesses, permanent. The earth did not reverse the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today extinctions result mostly from human population pressures—habitat destruction, pesticides, etc.—but “slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world’s human population.” Which will not happen.
There is something like a pathology of climatology. To avoid mixing fact and speculation, earth scientists are, Laughlin says, “ultraconservative,” meaning they focus on the present and the immediate future: “[They] go to extraordinary lengths to prove by means of measurement that the globe is warming now, the ocean is acidifying now, fossil fuel is being exhausted now, and so forth, even though these things are self-evident in geologic time.”
Climate change over geologic time is, Laughlin says, something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” People can cause climate change, but major glacial episodes have occurred “at regular intervals of 100,000 years,” always “a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s.”
Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”
People around the world are not going to stop using oil and gas (nor can they) because of the recent oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. As they say in the following article, the oil and gas industry must learn from this disastrous spill and move on. That is what is happening in other parts of the world, in the deep oceans, off the shores of many modern, intelligent and progressive countries.
However, the Obama Administration is continuing the offshore drilling ban in the U.S. They seem intent on destroying and/or controlling the U.S. energy industry and along with it the entire American economy. I wonder when Americans will wake up and realize this is NOT the "Change" they had in mind when they voted for Obama. Peter
Written by Wall Street Journal Editorial 08 August 2010
With reason to hope that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is being brought under control, it's time to start thinking into the future. The Obama Administration is sticking by its ruinous deepwater drilling moratorium, when it would be better to take a hint from the rest of the world's oil-producers. Their response to the Gulf disaster? Learn from it, and drill on.
Norway, run by the very model of modern environmentalists, announced a deep-water drilling halt until the spill is done. However, its ban applies only to new drilling, unlike the Obama Administration's total ban.
Norway also announced it's moving ahead with a deep water push into the Barents and Norwegian Seas, putting up 94 new blocks for drilling leases. Minister of Petroleum and Energy Terje Riis-Johansen made clear he views the stoppage as temporary.
Brazil is accelerating its drilling pace, announcing it would spend some $200 billion the next five years to tap newly discovered offshore reserves at depths to 23,000 feet. State-controlled Petrobras, the world's biggest deep water producer, recently struck oil three miles under Brazil's sea—a reserve that could yield 380 million barrels of oil and natural gas.
Australian Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has offered 31 new leases off his country's coast that allow for wells at twice the depth of the BP Macondo. As recently as 2000, Australia was self-sufficient in oil and gas but its import costs are rising. The new leases reverse that trend.
"There is no intention by the government to scale back the development of the oil and gas industry in Australia," Mr. Ferguson said. "It is important in terms of the nation's energy security, jobs and the overall economy." Maybe he'd consider a position at Interior?
New Zealand has authorized its first permit to drill off the east coast of its North Island, with Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee saying it is vital that the country "attract investment" from the same oil companies that U.S. politicians are bashing.
Canada continues to allow drilling in deep water off Newfoundland and Labrador and is moving ahead with exploration licenses in the Arctic. The U.K. is still drilling in deep water in the North Sea.
Many of these countries even hope to benefit from America's politically motivated moratorium by bidding for deep water rigs now working in the Gulf. Brazil's Petrobras is looking far and wide for deep water drilling rigs, with a goal of 60 by 2017, and it's looking to sign long-term contracts with owners of rigs now idled in the Gulf.
These are hardly rogue nations. What they share is an understanding that environmental concerns must be balanced with the reality that oil and gas remain crucial to economic growth, and that their reserves are increasingly in deep water. The leaders of these nations are also confident that the oil industry has the technology and know-how to do this right, with proper oversight.
America's oil and gas reserves are no less essential to the U.S. economy, notwithstanding President Obama's romance with "green jobs." Every day the Administration spends trying to justify its moratorium is one more day when the U.S. is losing jobs that may not return.
It seems that lately there has been little common sense coming from our leaders in Washington, D.C. However the recent failure of the Cap and Trade (really just "cap and tax") legislation offers Americans a glimmer of hope. Anyone who has followed this issue as it relates to "man-caused global warming knows these laws can not possibly have any affect on climate change or global warming. Therefore it is painfully obvious that the proposed Cap and Trade legislation is just a way of increasing tax revenue, further controlling the energy industry, and promoting the Obama Administration's "green" energy agenda, all at the expense of the taxpayers. It doesn't look like the public, and even some Democrat lawmakers, are buying the hype. The following article comes from The Wall Street Journal. Thank goodness for global warming skeptics! Peter
The Death of Cap and Tax
Harry Reid's latest energy bill is designed not to pass.
President Obama's undeniable success in passing liberal legislation hasn't translated into greater popularity for himself or the Democratic Congress. So perhaps he'll get a bump in the polls now that he's suffered his first setback on one of his signature promises.
We refer to the failure of cap and tax, which Mr. Obama once modestly promised would signal "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave the plan, if not the planet, up for dead this month, and last week he unveiled a new energy bill whose major provisions include a Cash for Clunkers replay for home appliances and a $5.8 billion subsidy for natural gas vehicles.
Associated Press
Harry Reid
In other words, the green lobby has suffered a landmark defeat, and the recriminations in the liberal press are remarkable. Either Mr. Obama didn't sell it well enough, perfidious Big Business intervened (never mind that many CEOs were supporters), the obtuse middle class won't sacrifice for the global good, or evil Republicans . . . Everyone is to blame but the policy itself.
In fact, the bill went down for lack of Democratic votes, in particular those from Midwest coal and manufacturing states. Voters in those states have figured out that cap and tax is a redistributionist exercise from the carbon-dependent heartland to the richer coasts. A Democrat—Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia—is also leading the charge to repeal the EPA's climate "endangerment" regulation that imposes cap and trade though the backdoor.
The American Council for Capital Formation released a study on Senator John Kerry's "compromise" climate plan—which the greens castigated as too modest—that showed cumulative GDP losses of $2.1 trillion through 2030 and consumer electricity price increases up to 42%.
Environmentalists didn't even get consolation prizes like a "renewable portfolio standard," the mandate for utilities to generate a set percentage of their electricity from wind, solar and other marginal sources that was supposed to be their cap-and-tax fallback. The new oil and gas taxes that Mr. Obama endorsed in January, which would have run as high as $60 billion, didn't make Mr. Reid's cut either.
Left as collateral damage are House Democrats who Nancy Pelosi forced to walk point last year on a promise that the Senate would also take up the bill. Mrs. Pelosi has no regrets, last week calling that vote "one of our proudest boasts." The Blue Dog Democrats who voted for it will now deny paternity as they try to save their seats.
As for the Senate, Mr. Reid's new nonclimate energy bill is all about trying to link Republicans to Big Oil. With BP as the corporate villain, Democrats are proposing to lift the $75 million oil spill liability cap for economic damages to infinity. And to do so retroactively on all rig leases.
This is a bad-faith exercise. Mr. Reid knows that Democrats like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana have criticized Democratic proposals to set even a $10 billion cap, while Senate Republicans have proposed giving regulators the power to raise the cap based on specific circumstances. Mr. Reid's proposal is designed to throw a bouquet to the trial bar and undermine any grounds for compromise so Democrats can have an election issue.
The main effect, if it passed, would be to push the small- and mid-sized producers that account for most domestic drilling out of the Gulf, regardless of their safety records. Only the supermajors would be able to afford insurance under the unlimited liability regime.
A study by the consultant IHS Global Insight found that the vacuum of independent players would result in some 289,000 lost jobs in the Gulf states by 2015 and "significantly shrink offshore oil and gas activity, reduce the dynamism of the industry, and dilute U.S. technological and industry leadership."
Another Reid inspiration is a break-up of the Minerals Management Service. (The agency was recently renamed by the White House, like rebranding Philip Morris as Altria.) Liberals have always hated an agency that encourages energy production, not that another round of bureaucratic musical chairs will prevent the next blowout. In addition to ensuring higher energy costs and more green-tape delays, the reorganization will ensure that no one in government is accountable when the next leak does occur.
Whatever one thinks of the science of climate change, cap and tax is the wrong policy response. At enormous economic cost, it would do little to reduce global carbon emissions. To the extent that it reduces growth, it would make the world less able to cope with the consequences if temperatures do rise. The richer the world, the more resources the world will have to adapt and ameliorate bad effects.
Meantime, the failure of cap and tax removes one more threat to the still-mediocre economic recovery. With more such failures, Mr. Obama's approval rating might start rising too.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved (source)
No, it is not about protecting the environment or stopping global warming. The decades-long, mass-media assisted attack on the oil and gas industry is all about money, power, and control, pure and simple. Everything else is a smoke screen designed to deceive and manipulate the public. Al Gore represents the epitome of this scandal and he was awarded an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his lies. It is truly amazing.
Now the war against the big bad oil industry is being continued by the Obama Administration. They think they can raise additional revenue by eliminating "tax breaks" for the oil industry. As the following article points out, America needs oil and gas, very much so. To damage this industry will be disastrous for the American economy, people's jobs and the overall source of government revenue. However, that doesn't matter to many politicians who truly just want to expand their power and control over the oil and gas industry. They will use every means possible to achieve these goals, including extortionist tactics like those used against British Petroleum, creating lies about global warming as witnessed by "ClimateGate", and now the Obama Administration is using the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) as their enforcer to control and hinder the production of gas from shale rocks around the country.
Meanwhile there is a constant and continual propaganda effort to scare the public about first global warming and now "climate change". The fact that they think they can fool the public shows their contempt for the very people who voted them into office in the first place. Shame on them is too soft a punishment. They prove the phrase "dirty politics". Peter
Written by BERNARD L. WEINSTEIN, IBD 06 August 2010
The White House, along with certain members of Congress, has declared war on Big Oil. This animosity is evidenced not only by the current ban on offshore drilling, which may well force the industry to relocate to other parts of the world, it is also reflected in the myriad of proposals to hike the industry's taxes and use the additional revenues to pursue the administration's green agenda.
President Obama's 2011 budget would do away with $4 billion in accelerated depreciation, depletion allowances and other long-established incentives for oil and gas drilling. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has introduced a bill that would remove another $20 billion of industry "tax breaks."
According to the American Petroleum Institute, over the next decade tax hikes on the industry could exceed $80 billion. But both the president and Sen. Menendez argue that because profits are so high, removing these tax preferences will not be a disincentive to robust domestic production. They're dead wrong.
Without question, hiking the tax burden on America's oil and gas companies will mean less, not more, domestic energy production. And though the "enemy" is Big Oil, according to the Independent Petroleum Association these tax increases will fall disproportionately on small drilling companies and could potentially reduce domestic oil and gas production by 20% to 40%.
In exchange for at best a small reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, thousands of jobs will be destroyed, billions of potential investment dollars will flow overseas, imports of fossil fuels will increase, energy prices will rise, and many states and localities that derive revenue from oil and natural gas production will witness further declines in their tax receipts.
What's more, these tax hikes would be at odds with the administration's own carbon-reduction goals since they would discourage production of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.
Here's the problem. While the Obama administration argues we can satisfy virtually all future energy needs from conservation, efficiency and renewables such as wind and solar, in reality we can't simply dismiss fossil fuels from the nation's energy future.
Indeed, the Energy Information Agency estimates that fossil fuels will still account for 79% of energy demand in 2030, regardless of how many tax incentives are thrown at solar, wind, algae, bio-diesel and other renewables. These incentives are already huge, amounting to about $2.82 per million British thermal units for solar and $1.35 for coal, compared with only three cents for oil and natural gas.
At a time when every respected study agrees on the need to increase all sources of domestic energy, we should be pursuing public policies designed to enhance, not retard, the domestic production of oil and gas. Since the Gulf oil spill, new offshore exploration and production have ground to a virtual halt.
New technologies now enable us to potentially extract trillions of cubic feet of natural gas from domestic shale formations, but development of these fields may be stymied in the face of higher taxes as well as possible EPA oversight of hydraulic fracturing.
Thirty-five years ago, before the OPEC embargo, America was importing about 30% of its oil needs. Today, we import more than 60%, some from countries that aren't necessarily friendly to the United States.
Oil and gas companies already pay billions each year in federal, state and local taxes. Adding to the industry's tax burdens at this time will destroy high-paying domestic jobs, shift more production overseas and retard the pace of economic recovery.
It seems more of the public is finally waking up to the myth and hoax that is the concept of man-caused global warming. They ought to be very angry about being misled and lied to and they ought to act on that unhappiness at the ballot box by voting all politicians out of office who perpetuate this lie about man-caused global warming. The following article explains how all the environmental hype and scare tactics about global warming have and are failing. This can not happen fast enough in my view. Peter
Written by John Hood, Lincoln Tribune 06 August 2010
For years, environmental activists have pushed state and federal officials to enact costly, far-reaching policies to combat global warming. They’ve run ad campaigns and endorsed politicians. They’ve attacked the reputation of scientists who don’t agree with their alarmism about climate change. They’ve produced books, websites, videos, even Hollywood movies to push their agenda.
And they’ve failed.
In Washington, Senate Democrats have just decided not to move a “cap and trade” bill designed to change the structure of energy production in the United States by raising the price of fossil fuels. They couldn’t muster enough votes, despite their large majority, to pass the unpopular bill.
In Raleigh, legislative Democrats created a commission back in 2005 to propose state laws and policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from North Carolina households and businesses. The commission has just disbanded without recommending any major initiatives.
Why have the alarmists’ efforts achieved so little?(Because they're wrong -- Peter)They offer a multitude of handy explanations, most of them based on crackpot conspiracy theories involving oil companies, real-estate interests, the Religious Right, and water-breathing space aliens set on melting the polar icecap as a prelude to colonizing the Earth’s oceans.
Okay, so I made that last part up, but it’s not much of an exaggeration of the absurdity of their allegations.
There’s no need for elaborate explanation. A straightforward one will do. Voters are properly skeptical about any energy policy promising to make their lives better by raising the cost of driving their cars, heating their homes, buying their groceries, and operating their businesses. No amount of environmental propaganda has been able to replace their skepticism with credulousness.
In the midst of a painful recession, with North Carolina’s jobless rate remaining in double digits for more than two years now, the idea of using government regulations or taxes to raise the cost of energy has little support. Not only would such policies impose additional hardships on households, but they would also make North Carolina less competitive for new or expanding industry – while accomplishing precisely nothing even if the goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions was a reasonable one, since North Carolina’s share of global emissions is negligible.
If the state’s last energy bill, a renewable-portfolio standard enacted in 2007, had been on the ballot rather than on the floor of the General Assembly, North Carolinians would likely have given it an overwhelming thumbs-down. They have never thought their utility bills were too low.
More generally, the voters have shown themselves to have more common sense than the alarmists anticipated. Offered pie-in-the-sky forecasts of green-job creation and long-term savings from expensive alternative-fuel subsidies, voters have come to doubt them. Promised that past environmental regulations would impose costs mostly on “business,” voters have rightly concluded that they bear most of those higher costs as employees and consumers – and that the costs of regulations usually prove to be far higher than promised.
Treated to copious news coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, voters have concluded that stringent safety requirements need to be enacted and enforced – not that American oil exploration is a bad idea.
And subjected to years of attempted indoctrination about the risks of catastrophic global warming, voters have concluded that scientists should continue to research the issue and study promising new technologies – not that Congress or state legislatures should immediately pass laws wreaking havoc on an already weakened economy and mandating fundamental changes in the way we live, work, shop, and travel.
The alarmists’ cause has taken additional hits of late, including the disclosure of emails from climate scientists that laid bare their contempt for the peer-review process and their unwillingness to comply with public-records laws. Do these scandals tell us anything about the wisdom of adopting public policies on climate change? Not really. But they further weakened the credibility of those calling for such policies.
The public’s priorities are clear at the moment: address the serious fiscal and economic problems facing North Carolina and the nation. Climate-change legislation would worsen them. So it’s going nowhere.
All hail Caesar, I mean Obama and his Administration because they say the major problems associated with the recent oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico are over. There is no doubt they will be trying to take all of the credit for this success, it's just "good politics", the truth be damned. And life goes on, at least in the Gulf of Mexico. Peter
U.S. Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk
WASHINGTON — The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.
A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places.
On Tuesday, BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to seal it for good. Since the flow of oil was stopped with a cap on July 15, people on the Gulf Coast have been wondering if another shoe was going to drop — a huge underwater glob of oil emerging to damage more shorelines, for instance.
Assuming that the government’s calculations stand scrutiny, that looks increasingly unlikely. “There’s absolutely no evidence that there’s any significant concentration of oil that’s out there that we haven’t accounted for,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead agency in producing the new report.
She emphasized, however, that the government remained concerned about the ecological damage that has already occurred and the potential for more, and said it would continue monitoring the gulf.
“I think we don’t know yet the full impact of this spill on the ecosystem or the people of the gulf,” Dr. Lubchenco said.
Among the biggest unanswered questions, she said, is how much damage the oil has done to the eggs and larvae of organisms like fish, crabs and shrimp. That may not become clear for a year or longer, as new generations of those creatures come to maturity.
Thousands of birds and other animals are known to have been damaged or killed by the spill, a relatively modest toll given the scale of some other oil disasters that killed millions of animals. Efforts are still under way in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to clean up more than 600 miles of oiled shoreline. The government and BP collected 35,818 tons of oily debris from shorelines through Sunday.
It remains to be seen whether subtle, long-lasting environmental damage from the spill will be found, as has been the case after other large oil spills.
The report, which is to be unveiled on Wednesday morning, is a result of an extensive effort by federal scientists, with outside help, to add up the total volume of oil released and to figure out where it went.
The lead agency behind the report, the oceanic and atmospheric administration, played down the size of the spill in the early days, and the Obama administration was ultimately forced to appoint a scientific panel that came up with far higher estimates of the flow rate from the well. Whether the new report will withstand critical scrutiny is uncertain; advocacy groups and most outside scientists had not learned of it on Tuesday.
The government announced early this week that the total oil release, from the time the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 until the well was effectively capped, was 4.9 million barrels, plus or minus 10 percent. That estimate makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster the largest marine spill in history. It is surpassed on land by a 1910 spill in the California desert.
As the scientists did their calculations, they were able to rely on direct measurements of the fate of some of the oil that spewed from the broken well. For example, BP and its contractors succeeded in capturing about 17 percent of it with various containment mechanisms, the report says.
The outcome for much of the oil could not be directly measured, but had to be estimated using protocols that were scrutinized by scientists inside and outside the government, Dr. Lubchenco said.
The report calculates, for example, that about 25 percent of the chemicals in the oil evaporated at the surface or dissolved into seawater in the same way that sugar dissolves in tea. (The government appears to have settled on a conservative number for that estimate, with the scientific literature saying that as much as 40 percent of the oil from a spill can disappear in this way.)
The aggressive response mounted by BP and the government — the largest in history, ultimately involving more than 5,000 vessels — also played a role in getting rid of the oil, the report says. Fully 5 percent of the oil was burned at the surface, it estimates, while 3 percent was skimmed and 8 percent was broken up into tiny droplets using chemical dispersants. Another 16 percent dispersed naturally as the oil shot out of the well at high speed.
All told, the report calculates that about 74 percent of the oil has been effectively dealt with by capture, burning, skimming, evaporation, dissolution or dispersion. Much of the dissolved and dispersed oil can be expected to break down in the environment, though federal scientists are still working to establish the precise rate at which that is happening.
“I think we are fortunate in this situation that the rates of degradation in the gulf ecosystem are quite high,” Dr. Lubchenco said.
The remaining 26 percent of the oil “is on or just below the surface as light sheen or weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments,” the report says.
Some fishermen in Louisiana are worried about the buried oil, fearing that storms could stir it up and coat vital shrimp or oyster grounds, a possibility the government has not ruled out.
Testing of fish has shown little cause for worry so far, and fishing grounds in the gulf are being reopened at a brisk clip. At one point the government had closed 36 percent of federal gulf waters to fishing, but that figure is now down to 24 percent and is expected to drop further in coming weeks.
States are also reopening fishing grounds near their coasts. The big economic question now is whether the American public is ready to buy gulf seafood again.
The new government report comes as BP engineers began pumping heavy drilling mud into the stricken well on Tuesday, with the hope of achieving a permanent seal or at least revealing critical clues about how to kill the well before the end of the month.
Through the afternoon, in what is known as a static kill, engineers pumped mud weighing about 13.2 pounds per gallon at slow speeds from a surface vessel through a pipe into the blowout preventer on top of the well. If all goes well, cement may be applied over the next few days. But officials said they could be confident the well was plugged only when one of two relief wells now being drilled was completed, allowing the well to be completely sealed with cement.
“The static kill will increase the probability that the relief well will work,” Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal spill response effort, told reporters on Tuesday. “But the whole thing will not be done until the relief well is completed.”
The static kill operation could last for close to three days. After it is completed, work can resume on the final 100 feet of the first relief well, which officials say should be completed by Aug. 15 unless bad weather intervenes.
Clifford Krauss contributed reporting from Houston, and Campbell Robertson from New Orleans.
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Associated Press 
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