This is very interesting information. How do we know who to believe. Follow the money......
Peter
GeoPeter,
You made a statement about Dr. James Hansen receiving $250,000 in some form from a foundation run/financed by Heinz (Ketchup)Kerry. Can you document that? Nobody can hold a candle to the hypocrisy of the Kerrys. They make Al Gore look like a rank amateur.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20010305/
Dr. Jim Hansen, Chief of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, N.Y., and one of this year's recipients of a $250,000 Heinz Award, receives his award tonight at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
http://www.heinzawards.net/Heinz_mechanica.PDF
Dr. Hansen began his lifelong study of the Earth’s atmosphere in the 1970s at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It was Dr. Hansen’s interest that led the Goddard Institute to concentrate on global climate change.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=38d98c0a-802a-23ad-48ac-d9f7facb61a7
If a climate skeptic receives any money from industry, the media immediately labels them and attempts to discredit their work. The same media completely ignore the money flow from the environmental lobby to climate alarmists like James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer. (ie. Hansen received $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation and Oppenheimer is a paid partisan of Environmental Defense Fund) The alarmists have all of these advantages, yet they still feel the need to resort to desperation tactics to silence the skeptics.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Newsweek Cover Story: Global Warming Is A Hoax
This article is worth reading. It provides a fairly comprehensive (if slanted) summary of the battle between those who believe man is causing global warming, and those who challenge this assumption. It is gratifying that some journalists at Newsweek are paying attention to the debate. All of us not being paid by Exxon/Mobil must be getting a good chuckle out of the whining, conspiracy theories, and the personal attacks coming from the die-hard global warming true believers. They just can't understand that a lot of good, honest, common-sense scientists, engineers, and economists, unpaid to do so, are speaking out.....and the public is listening.
The debate over global warming and what to do about it is far from over. It is going to be very interesting how our Presidential candidates and other politicians handle this. I hope Europeans and others around the world read this article and more. They also need to wake up to the reality than man is not causing global warming, and we can't do much about it except learn to live with it. Newseek has it partly right, the idea that man is causing global warming is indeed, A HOAX.
Peter
The Truth About Denial
By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that.
By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that.
But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."
If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the "Live Earth" concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, "green" magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore's best-selling book, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."
Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was "a lot" of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was "mainly caused by things people do." In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world's economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is "a lot of disagreement among climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.
As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action. Yes, last September Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark law committing California to reduce statewide emissions of carbon dioxide to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent more by 2050. And this year both Minnesota and New Jersey passed laws requiring their states to reduce greenhouse emissions 80 percent below recent levels by 2050. In January, nine leading corporations—including Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Du Pont and General Electric—called on Congress to "enact strong national legislation" to reduce greenhouse gases. But although at least eight bills to require reductions in greenhouse gases have been introduced in Congress, their fate is decidedly murky.
The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives decided last week not even to bring to a vote a requirement that automakers improve vehicle mileage, an obvious step toward reducing greenhouse emissions. Nor has there been much public pressure to do so. Instead, every time the scientific case got stronger, "the American public yawned and bought bigger cars," Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey congressman and physicist, recently wrote in the journal Science; politicians "shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing."
It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now."
It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now."
The reaction from industries most responsible for greenhouse emissions was immediate. "As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began," says historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment. ICE's game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research. ICE ads asked, "If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?" This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.
Shaping public opinion was only one goal of the industry groups, for soon after Hansen's sweat-drenched testimony they faced a more tangible threat: international proposals to address global warming. The United Nations had scheduled an "Earth Summit" for 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and climate change was high on an agenda that included saving endangered species and rain forests. ICE and the Global Climate Coalition lobbied hard against a global treaty to curb greenhouse gases, and were joined by a central cog in the denial machine: the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank. Barely two months before Rio, it released a study concluding that models of the greenhouse effect had "substantially exaggerated its importance." The small amount of global warming that might be occurring, it argued, actually reflected a simple fact: the Sun is putting out more energy. The idea of a "variable Sun" has remained a constant in the naysayers' arsenal to this day, even though the tiny increase in solar output over recent decades falls far short of explaining the extent or details of the observed warming.
In what would become a key tactic of the denial machine—think tanks linking up with like-minded, contrarian researchers—the report was endorsed in a letter to President George H.W. Bush by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler's Germany, is described by old friends as the kind of man who, if you're in the minority, opts to be with you. "I thought it was important to make it clear that the science was at an early and primitive stage and that there was little basis for consensus and much reason for skepticism," he told Scientific American magazine. "I did feel a moral obligation."
Bush was torn. The head of his Environmental Protection Agency, William Reilly, supported binding cuts in greenhouse emissions. Political advisers insisted on nothing more than voluntary cuts. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, had a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and "knew computers," recalls Reilly. Sununu frequently logged on to a computer model of climate, Reilly says, and "vigorously critiqued" its assumptions and projections.
Sununu's side won. The Rio treaty called for countries to voluntarily stabilize their greenhouse emissions by returning them to 1990 levels by 2000. (As it turned out, U.S. emissions in 2000 were 14 percent higher than in 1990.) Avoiding mandatory cuts was a huge victory for industry. But Rio was also a setback for climate contrarians, says UCSD's Oreskes: "It was one thing when Al Gore said there's global warming, but quite another when George Bush signed a convention saying so." And the doubters faced a newly powerful nemesis. Just months after he signed the Rio pact, Bush lost to Bill Clinton—whose vice president, Gore, had made climate change his signature issue.
Groups that opposed greenhouse curbs ramped up. They "settled on the 'science isn't there' argument because they didn't believe they'd be able to convince the public to do nothing if climate change were real," says David Goldston, who served as Republican chief of staff for the House of Representatives science committee until 2006. Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")
The road from Rio led to an international meeting in Kyoto, Japan, where more than 100 nations would negotiate a treaty on making Rio's voluntary—and largely ignored—greenhouse curbs mandatory. The coal and oil industries, worried that Kyoto could lead to binding greenhouse cuts that would imperil their profits, ramped up their message that there was too much scientific uncertainty to justify any such cuts. There was just one little problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—the international body that periodically assesses climate research—had just issued its second report, and the conclusion of its 2,500 scientists looked devastating for greenhouse doubters. Although both natural swings and changes in the Sun's output might be contributing to climate change, it concluded, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate."
Faced with this emerging consensus, the denial machine hardly blinked. There is too much "scientific uncertainty" to justify curbs on greenhouse emissions, William O'Keefe, then a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute and leader of the Global Climate Coalition, suggested in 1996. Virginia's Michaels echoed that idea in a 1997 op-ed in The Washington Post, describing "a growing contingent of scientists who are increasingly unhappy with the glib forecasts of gloom and doom." To reinforce the appearance of uncertainty and disagreement, the denial machine churned out white papers and "studies" (not empirical research, but critiques of others' work). The Marshall Institute, for instance, issued reports by a Harvard University astrophysicist it supported pointing to satellite data showing "no significant warming" of the atmosphere, contrary to the surface warming. The predicted warming, she wrote, "simply isn't happening according to the satellite[s]." At the time, there was a legitimate case that satellites were more accurate than ground stations, which might be skewed by the unusual warmth of cities where many are sited.
"There was an extraordinary campaign by the denial machine to find and hire scientists to sow dissent and make it appear that the research community was deeply divided," says Dan Becker of the Sierra Club. Those recruits blitzed the media. Driven by notions of fairness and objectivity, the press "qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with 'some scientists believe,' where the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-caused [greenhouse] emissions are contributing to warming," says Reilly, the former EPA chief. "The pursuit of balance has not done justice" to the science. Talk radio goes further, with Rush Limbaugh telling listeners this year that "more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not likely to significantly contribute to the greenhouse effect. It's just all part of the hoax." In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 42 percent said the press "exaggerates the threat of climate change."
Now naysayers tried a new tactic: lists and petitions meant to portray science as hopelessly divided. Just before Kyoto, S. Fred Singer released the "Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change." Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy, had run the U.S. weather-satellite program in the early 1960s. In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes." Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people's. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.
Although Clinton did not even try to get the Senate to ratify the Kyoto treaty (he knew a hopeless cause when he saw one), industry was taking no chances. In April 1998 a dozen people from the denial machine—including the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer's group and Exxon—met at the American Petroleum Institute's Washington headquarters. They proposed a $5 million campaign, according to a leaked eight-page memo, to convince the public that the science of global warming is riddled with controversy and uncertainty. The plan was to train up to 20 "respected climate scientists" on media—and public—outreach with the aim of "raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom' " and, in particular, "the Kyoto treaty's scientific underpinnings" so that elected officials "will seek to prevent progress toward implementation." The plan, once exposed in the press, "was never implemented as policy," says Marshall's William O'Keefe, who was then at API.
The GOP control of Congress for six of Clinton's eight years in office meant the denial machine had a receptive audience. Although Republicans such as Sens. John McCain, Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee spurned the denial camp, and Democrats such as Congressman John Dingell adamantly oppose greenhouse curbs that might hurt the auto and other industries, for the most part climate change has been a bitterly partisan issue. Republicans have also received significantly more campaign cash from the energy and other industries that dispute climate science. Every proposed climate bill "ran into a buzz saw of denialism," says Manik Roy of the Pew Center on Climate Change, a research and advocacy group, who was a Senate staffer at the time. "There was no rational debate in Congress on climate change."
The reason for the inaction was clear. "The questioning of the science made it to the Hill through senators who parroted reports funded by the American Petroleum Institute and other advocacy groups whose entire purpose was to confuse people on the science of global warming," says Sen. John Kerry. "There would be ads challenging the science right around the time we were trying to pass legislation. It was pure, raw pressure combined with false facts." Nor were states stepping where Washington feared to tread. "I did a lot of testifying before state legislatures—in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Alaska—that thought about taking action," says Singer. "I said that the observed warming was and would be much, much less than climate models calculated, and therefore nothing to worry about."
But the science was shifting under the denial machine. In January 2000, the National Academy of Sciences skewered its strongest argument. Contrary to the claim that satellites finding no warming are right and ground stations showing warming are wrong, it turns out that the satellites are off. (Basically, engineers failed to properly correct for changes in their orbit.) The planet is indeed warming, and at a rate since 1980 much greater than in the past.
Just months after the Academy report, Singer told a Senate panel that "the Earth's atmosphere is not warming and fears about human-induced storms, sea-level rise and other disasters are misplaced." And as studies fingering humans as a cause of climate change piled up, he had a new argument: a cabal was silencing good scientists who disagreed with the "alarmist" reports. "Global warming has become an article of faith for many, with its own theology and orthodoxy," Singer wrote in The Washington Times. "Its believers are quite fearful of any scientific dissent."
With the Inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001, the denial machine expected to have friends in the White House. But despite Bush's oil-patch roots, naysayers weren't sure they could count on him: as a candidate, he had pledged to cap carbon dioxide emissions. Just weeks into his term, the Competitive Enterprise Institute heard rumors that the draft of a speech Bush was preparing included a passage reiterating that pledge. CEI's Myron Ebell called conservative pundit Robert Novak, who had booked Bush's EPA chief, Christie Todd Whitman, on CNN's "Crossfire." He asked her about the line, and within hours the possibility of a carbon cap was the talk of the Beltway. "We alerted anyone we thought could have influence and get the line, if it was in the speech, out," says CEI president Fred Smith, who counts this as another notch in CEI's belt. The White House declines to comment.
Bush not only disavowed his campaign pledge. In March, he withdrew from the Kyoto treaty. After the about-face, MIT's Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he'd done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would "do nothing, at great expense."
Bush's reversal came just weeks after the IPCC released its third assessment of the burgeoning studies of climate change. Its conclusion: the 1990s were very likely the warmest decade on record, and recent climate change is partly "attributable to human activities." The weather itself seemed to be conspiring against the skeptics. The early years of the new millennium were setting heat records. The summer of 2003 was especially brutal, with a heat wave in Europe killing tens of thousands of people. Consultant Frank Luntz, who had been instrumental in the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, suggested a solution to the PR mess. In a memo to his GOP clients, he advised them that to deal with global warming, "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." They should "challenge the science," he wrote, by "recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view." Although few of the experts did empirical research of their own (MIT's Lindzen was an exception), the public didn't notice. To most civilians, a scientist is a scientist.
Challenging the science wasn't a hard sell on Capitol Hill. "In the House, the leadership generally viewed it as impermissible to go along with anything that would even imply that climate change was genuine," says Goldston, the former Republican staffer. "There was a belief on the part of many members that the science was fraudulent, even a Democratic fantasy. A lot of the information they got was from conservative think tanks and industry." When in 2003 the Senate called for a national strategy to cut greenhouse gases, for instance, climate naysayers were "giving briefings and talking to staff," says Goldston. "There was a constant flow of information—largely misinformation." Since the House version of that bill included no climate provisions, the two had to be reconciled. "The House leadership staff basically said, 'You know we're not going to accept this,' and [Senate staffers] said, 'Yeah, we know,' and the whole thing disappeared relatively jovially without much notice," says Goldston. "It was such a foregone conclusion."
Especially when the denial machine had a new friend in a powerful place. In 2003 James Inhofe of Oklahoma took over as chairman of the environment committee. That summer he took to the Senate floor and, in a two-hour speech, disputed the claim of scientific consensus on climate change. Despite the discovery that satellite data showing no warming were wrong, he argued that "satellites, widely considered the most accurate measure of global temperatures, have confirmed" the absence of atmospheric warming. Might global warming, he asked, be "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?" Inhofe made his mark holding hearing after hearing to suggest that the answer is yes. For one, on a study finding a dramatic increase in global temperatures unprecedented in the last 1,000 years, he invited a scientist who challenged that conclusion (in a study partly underwritten with $53,000 from the American Petroleum Institute), one other doubter and the scientist who concluded that recent global temperatures were spiking. Just as Luntz had suggested, the witness table presented a tableau of scientific disagreement.
Every effort to pass climate legislation during the George W. Bush years was stopped in its tracks. When Senators McCain and Joe Lieberman were fishing for votes for their bipartisan effort in 2003, a staff member for Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska explained to her counterpart in Lieberman's office that Stevens "is aware there is warming in Alaska, but he's not sure how much it's caused by human activity or natural cycles," recalls Tim Profeta, now director of an environmental-policy institute at Duke University. "I was hearing the basic argument of the skeptics—a brilliant strategy to go after the science. And it was working." Stevens voted against the bill, which failed 43-55. When the bill came up again the next year, "we were contacted by a lot of lobbyists from API and Exxon-Mobil," says Mark Helmke, the climate aide to GOP Sen. Richard Lugar. "They'd bring up how the science wasn't certain, how there were a lot of skeptics out there." It went down to defeat again.
Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine's campaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. "If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action," says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. By appointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climate policy, he found, the administration made sure that didn't happen. Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and therefore no basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as "lack of understanding" and "considerable uncertainty." A short section on climate in another report was cut entirely. The White House "directed us to remove all mentions of it," says Piltz, who resigned in protest. An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, "You are doing a great job."
The response to the international climate panel's latest report, in February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme. Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, there's nothing to worry about. As Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in NEWSWEEK International in April, "There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe."
Images: NASA
Going, Going, Gone: Satellite images show the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica disintegrating into the Weddell Sea in January, 2002 (left) and March of the same year (right). The 1,255-square-mile mass of ice, 700 feet thick and weighing 720 billion tons, collapsed over three months, setting thousands of icebergs adrift
To some extent, greenhouse denial is now running on automatic pilot. "Some members of Congress have completely internalized this," says Pew's Roy, and therefore need no coaching from the think tanks and contrarian scientists who for 20 years kept them stoked with arguments. At a hearing last month on the Kyoto treaty, GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher asked whether "changes in the Earth's temperature in the past—all of these glaciers moving back and forth—and the changes that we see now" might be "a natural occurrence." (Hundreds of studies have ruled that out.) "I think it's a bit grandiose for us to believe ... that [human activities are] going to change some major climate cycle that's going on." Inhofe has told allies he will filibuster any climate bill that mandates greenhouse cuts.
Still, like a great beast that has been wounded, the denial machine is not what it once was. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 38 percent of those surveyed identified climate change as the nation's gravest environmental threat, three times the number in 2000. After ExxonMobil was chastised by senators for giving $19 million over the years to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and others who are "producing very questionable data" on climate change, as Sen. Jay Rockefeller said, the company has cut back its support for such groups. In June, a spokesman said ExxonMobil did not doubt the risks posed by climate change, telling reporters, "We're very much not a denier."
In yet another shock, Bush announced at the weekend that he would convene a global-warming summit next month, with a 2008 goal of cutting greenhouse emissions. That astonished the remaining naysayers. "I just can't imagine the administration would look to mandatory [emissions caps] after what we had with Kyoto," said a GOP Senate staffer, who did not want to be named criticizing the president. "I mean, what a disaster!"
With its change of heart, ExxonMobil is more likely to win a place at the negotiating table as Congress debates climate legislation. That will be crucially important to industry especially in 2009, when naysayers may no longer be able to count on a friend in the White House nixing man-datory greenhouse curbs. All the Democratic presidential contenders have called global warming a real threat, and promise to push for cuts similar to those being passed by California and other states.
In the GOP field, only McCain—long a leader on the issue—supports that policy. Fred Thompson belittles findings that human activities are changing the climate, and Rudy Giuliani backs the all-volunteer greenhouse curbs of (both) Presidents Bush.
Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It's enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.
With Eve Conant, Sam Stein and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Matthew Philips in New York
Friday, August 3, 2007
Global Warming Skeptics Advance?
Here is the other side of the global warming debate. It differs from what we here and see and read about in the daily mass media. Is it about politics? You bet it is.
Peter
Global Warming Skeptics Advance, Says Inhofe
By Katherine Poythress CNSNews.com Correspondent August 03, 2007
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), told approximately 400 conservative students Thursday morning that despite attempts to silence global warming critics, the ground of the climate change debate is starting to shift their way, giving their views more exposure and effect. In his speech at the 29th National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Young America's Foundation, Inhofe accused liberals of trying to silence the dissenting voices. He then named a host of scientists from around the world who are critical of global warming, including MIT's professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen who calls the fear of man-made global warming "silly."
Referring to the most recent global warming report released by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, EPW Communications Director Marc Morano told Cybercast News Service, "There are 2,000 scientists affiliated with the U.N., and only 52 wrote the last summary for policymakers. Of those 2,000, they include prominent skeptics [of global warming] like Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels. "Inhofe also referred to a letter 60 prominent scientists sent to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006, in which they claimed the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s was a regulatory measure written out of ignorance and which is now unnecessary based on modern scientific discoveries.
After his speech, Inhofe spoke with reporters about his criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency's membership in the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), which reportedly has engaged in blackmail and threats to advance its agenda and silence global warming critics.
Specifically, Inhofe cited an e-mail sent by ACORE President Martin Eckhart to the prominent global warming critic Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In the e-mail, Eckhart vowed to Lewis: "It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America."
Inhofe said he has written four letters challenging the EPA, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Commerce to withdraw their memberships from ACORE. "With anyone who is threatening like that, something has to be done," said Inhofe. "If you don't have the truth, if you don't have logic, if you don't have science, you call names and you threaten." EPA Director Stephen Johnson reportedly is looking into the matter, but Inhofe said he does not yet know the extent of Johnson's actions.Inhofe admitted his stance on global warming is unpopular, even with some in his own party.
And he himself used to tow the global warming line until a few years ago, he said, when he began researching the Kyoto Protocol and its potential economic effects. The $300 billion tax needed to implement the treaty in 1997 would have been the largest tax increase in two decades, Inhofe said. In his research, Inhofe discovered there were many scientists who criticized the entire premise on which the Kyoto Protocol was based."
We're going through a warming period," Inhofe said, adding that the Earth's atmosphere is dynamic and has undergone many recorded changes in the past. He said he has seen too many scientists disagree with the claims that man-induced CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for the phenomenon and that the results are going to be catastrophic. Inhofe attributed what he calls the "myth" of global warming to an ulterior power-driven motive, described by former European Union Environment Minister Margo Wallstrom. She asserted that "Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big business worldwide," said Inhofe.
Daniel Lashof, science director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, told Cybercast News Service he suspects that quotation was taken out of context. "That should be a goal of climate policy," Lashof said. "It needs to harness market forces to drive down pollution that causes global warming." Lashof said he has no doubt there are many scientists who support some of Inhofe's argument about global warming. But "there are no credible scientists who would support the overall conclusion that Sen. Inhofe is propounding," said Lashof. "He tends to suggest that [climate change] is not about the environment. I think that is a misinterpretation." Lashof said he suspects Inhofe's harsh criticism of the apparent global warming problem is driven by an aversion to adopting the policies that would be necessary to solve the problem.
Peter
Global Warming Skeptics Advance, Says Inhofe
By Katherine Poythress CNSNews.com Correspondent August 03, 2007
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), told approximately 400 conservative students Thursday morning that despite attempts to silence global warming critics, the ground of the climate change debate is starting to shift their way, giving their views more exposure and effect. In his speech at the 29th National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Young America's Foundation, Inhofe accused liberals of trying to silence the dissenting voices. He then named a host of scientists from around the world who are critical of global warming, including MIT's professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen who calls the fear of man-made global warming "silly."
Referring to the most recent global warming report released by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, EPW Communications Director Marc Morano told Cybercast News Service, "There are 2,000 scientists affiliated with the U.N., and only 52 wrote the last summary for policymakers. Of those 2,000, they include prominent skeptics [of global warming] like Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels. "Inhofe also referred to a letter 60 prominent scientists sent to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006, in which they claimed the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s was a regulatory measure written out of ignorance and which is now unnecessary based on modern scientific discoveries.
After his speech, Inhofe spoke with reporters about his criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency's membership in the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), which reportedly has engaged in blackmail and threats to advance its agenda and silence global warming critics.
Specifically, Inhofe cited an e-mail sent by ACORE President Martin Eckhart to the prominent global warming critic Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In the e-mail, Eckhart vowed to Lewis: "It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America."
Inhofe said he has written four letters challenging the EPA, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Commerce to withdraw their memberships from ACORE. "With anyone who is threatening like that, something has to be done," said Inhofe. "If you don't have the truth, if you don't have logic, if you don't have science, you call names and you threaten." EPA Director Stephen Johnson reportedly is looking into the matter, but Inhofe said he does not yet know the extent of Johnson's actions.Inhofe admitted his stance on global warming is unpopular, even with some in his own party.
And he himself used to tow the global warming line until a few years ago, he said, when he began researching the Kyoto Protocol and its potential economic effects. The $300 billion tax needed to implement the treaty in 1997 would have been the largest tax increase in two decades, Inhofe said. In his research, Inhofe discovered there were many scientists who criticized the entire premise on which the Kyoto Protocol was based."
We're going through a warming period," Inhofe said, adding that the Earth's atmosphere is dynamic and has undergone many recorded changes in the past. He said he has seen too many scientists disagree with the claims that man-induced CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for the phenomenon and that the results are going to be catastrophic. Inhofe attributed what he calls the "myth" of global warming to an ulterior power-driven motive, described by former European Union Environment Minister Margo Wallstrom. She asserted that "Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big business worldwide," said Inhofe.
Daniel Lashof, science director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, told Cybercast News Service he suspects that quotation was taken out of context. "That should be a goal of climate policy," Lashof said. "It needs to harness market forces to drive down pollution that causes global warming." Lashof said he has no doubt there are many scientists who support some of Inhofe's argument about global warming. But "there are no credible scientists who would support the overall conclusion that Sen. Inhofe is propounding," said Lashof. "He tends to suggest that [climate change] is not about the environment. I think that is a misinterpretation." Lashof said he suspects Inhofe's harsh criticism of the apparent global warming problem is driven by an aversion to adopting the policies that would be necessary to solve the problem.
Synchronized Chaos: Mechanism For Major Climate Shifts
This is another research effort suggesting something other that carbon dioxide emissions is causing global warming and climate change. It is interesting, but hardly definitive.
Peter
Source:
American Geophysical Union
Date:
August 2, 2007
Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts
Science Daily — In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere. After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated. To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation. By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.
Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability. The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century.
Title: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts
Authors: Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, and Sergey Kravtsov: Atmospheric Sciences Group, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) paper 10.1029/2007GL030288, 2007
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Geophysical Union
Peter
Source:
American Geophysical Union
Date:
August 2, 2007
Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts
Science Daily — In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere. After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated. To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation. By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.
Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability. The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century.
Title: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts
Authors: Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, and Sergey Kravtsov: Atmospheric Sciences Group, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) paper 10.1029/2007GL030288, 2007
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Geophysical Union
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Global Warming: Rich Countries Owe Poor Countries
If you believe that man, and in particular, industrialized man, is causing global warming and catastrophic climate change, then you will have to agree that rich countries owe a lot to poor countries.
The following article addresses this vastly important issue. Does anyone think that because many of these poor, underdeveloped, and un-industrialized countries are members of the United Nations, they could influence what the UN says about global warming? Is there a possibility that the "climate scientists" on the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) might be a little bit influenced by their government's desire to have rich countries pay them, because rich countries have caused and are causing all of the climate problems? After all, the scientists are paid by, and presumably controlled by their respective governments.
Can our noble, and pure scientists be coerced and manipulated by their governments? Could it be that it is not the land that is being drowned, but the truth about global warming? Or am I just being skeptical and cynical?
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/earth/03clim.html?ex=1186200000&en=e5e91c31eee8f5f5&ei=5070
The Climate Divide
Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: April 3, 2007
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In a Warming World, Who Comes Out Ahead? By William K. Stevens, The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1991 (PDF)
Do rich nations have an obligation to help poorer ones prepare for potential changes caused by global warming?
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet. Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news. “The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”
The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand. But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The following article addresses this vastly important issue. Does anyone think that because many of these poor, underdeveloped, and un-industrialized countries are members of the United Nations, they could influence what the UN says about global warming? Is there a possibility that the "climate scientists" on the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) might be a little bit influenced by their government's desire to have rich countries pay them, because rich countries have caused and are causing all of the climate problems? After all, the scientists are paid by, and presumably controlled by their respective governments.
Can our noble, and pure scientists be coerced and manipulated by their governments? Could it be that it is not the land that is being drowned, but the truth about global warming? Or am I just being skeptical and cynical?
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/earth/03clim.html?ex=1186200000&en=e5e91c31eee8f5f5&ei=5070
The Climate Divide
Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: April 3, 2007
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In a Warming World, Who Comes Out Ahead? By William K. Stevens, The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1991 (PDF)
Do rich nations have an obligation to help poorer ones prepare for potential changes caused by global warming?
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet. Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news. “The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”
The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand. But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that “the polluter pays,” many experts say. “We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for,” said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.
“If you drive your car into your neighbor’s living room, don’t you owe your neighbor something?” Dr. Gleick said. “On this planet, we’re driving the climate car into our neighbors’ living room, and they don’t have insurance and we do.”
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world’s most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm’s way.
Population Control: Is The Answer To Global Warming and Protecting The Environment?
Since over-population of the Earth by human beings is often cited as a cause of global warming and many other supposed environmental disasters, I'm citing the following article to generate some thought and some questions.
Can population control really be achieved? Is it working in China? Is it "ethical" to deny women the "right" to have children? If we can reduce the number of births, is that really a good thing? Would reducing world population really have an effect on global warming? These are just some of the many questions we need to be asking. What do you think?
Peter
from: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200707/INT20070719a.html
Restricting Family Size May Become Unavoidable, Says Environment Group
By Kevin McCandlessCNSNews.com
CorrespondentJuly 19, 2007London (CNSNews.com) -
A British advocacy group is warning that compulsory restrictions on family sizes may become "unavoidable" if the Earth is to be saved from disaster. The Optimum Population Trust, a group that advocates curbing global population growth because of humans' impact on the environment, says that over the next 50 years, the planet will have to deal with the largest generation of adolescents and teenagers in history. Many of these, the organization says, will be unemployed young men who, in their frustration over their situation, may resort to violence. This will add to the already overwhelming burden developing countries are facing as a result of population growth.
In a report released this month, OPT Co-Chairman John Guillebaud said that the United Nations projection of a world population of 9.2 billion in 2050 -- up from 6.7 billion today -- was a "highly optimistic" estimate and that the actual number may be "many more."The population of the 50 poorest countries in the developing world will double in size, a shift that will wipe out gains in agriculture, education and health care faster than they can be made, said Guillebaud, who is a retired professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College in London.
By 2050, OPT projects that the world's population will be using the biological capacity of two Earths. It says this will lead to a massive population crash through a combination of violence, disease and starvation. To prevent this, the report advocates a mix of government policies to prevent women worldwide from having more than an average of two children. Recommendations for developing countries include funding to provide women much greater access to contraception and abortions. Despite the fact that fertility rates in nearly all European countries has dropped below two -- demographers say the generational replacement level is 2.1 -- the trust said fears of "a baby shortage" are misplaced.
Some European governments have started to offer citizens financial incentives to have children. The report criticized the policy, saying it would only postpone the day when there are more retired people than workers. China's communist government enforces a controversial population control policy that, with some exceptions for minorities and rural dwellers, limits couples to one child. Critics say family planning officials use coercive measures, including forced abortion and sterilization, to enforce the policy. The government insists that "only" punitive fines and financial incentives are used.
Guillebaud said the Chinese policy was "counterproductive" but argued that unless voluntary measures are brought in quickly, other countries may be forced to follow China's lead. "No one is in favor of governments dictating family size, but we need to act quickly to prevent it." he said.
Donna Nicholson, a spokeswoman for the Scottish chapter of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said that the problem facing many developing countries is not overpopulation but global inequality. The United States produces enough food annually to feed the entire world, she said. At the same time, the crippling debt facing many African countries drives them to cut back on education and health care. Citing her experience working in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nicholson said the answer to solving poverty was not population control. "You can't look at a woman in the Third World and say the problem is that she's pregnant," she said.
Josephine Quintavalle, head of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, another British pro-life group, said she found it frightening that the OPT report was getting attention. She said Europe was facing a situation in which in just a few years, more people would be over 60 years of age than under 60. Unless European countries took urgent measures to encourage more people to have babies, she said, the continent could skip an entire generation of children. "One wonders what planet this organization comes from when they come up with these conclusions," Quintavalle said.
Can population control really be achieved? Is it working in China? Is it "ethical" to deny women the "right" to have children? If we can reduce the number of births, is that really a good thing? Would reducing world population really have an effect on global warming? These are just some of the many questions we need to be asking. What do you think?
Peter
from: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200707/INT20070719a.html
Restricting Family Size May Become Unavoidable, Says Environment Group
By Kevin McCandlessCNSNews.com
CorrespondentJuly 19, 2007London (CNSNews.com) -
A British advocacy group is warning that compulsory restrictions on family sizes may become "unavoidable" if the Earth is to be saved from disaster. The Optimum Population Trust, a group that advocates curbing global population growth because of humans' impact on the environment, says that over the next 50 years, the planet will have to deal with the largest generation of adolescents and teenagers in history. Many of these, the organization says, will be unemployed young men who, in their frustration over their situation, may resort to violence. This will add to the already overwhelming burden developing countries are facing as a result of population growth.
In a report released this month, OPT Co-Chairman John Guillebaud said that the United Nations projection of a world population of 9.2 billion in 2050 -- up from 6.7 billion today -- was a "highly optimistic" estimate and that the actual number may be "many more."The population of the 50 poorest countries in the developing world will double in size, a shift that will wipe out gains in agriculture, education and health care faster than they can be made, said Guillebaud, who is a retired professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College in London.
By 2050, OPT projects that the world's population will be using the biological capacity of two Earths. It says this will lead to a massive population crash through a combination of violence, disease and starvation. To prevent this, the report advocates a mix of government policies to prevent women worldwide from having more than an average of two children. Recommendations for developing countries include funding to provide women much greater access to contraception and abortions. Despite the fact that fertility rates in nearly all European countries has dropped below two -- demographers say the generational replacement level is 2.1 -- the trust said fears of "a baby shortage" are misplaced.
Some European governments have started to offer citizens financial incentives to have children. The report criticized the policy, saying it would only postpone the day when there are more retired people than workers. China's communist government enforces a controversial population control policy that, with some exceptions for minorities and rural dwellers, limits couples to one child. Critics say family planning officials use coercive measures, including forced abortion and sterilization, to enforce the policy. The government insists that "only" punitive fines and financial incentives are used.
Guillebaud said the Chinese policy was "counterproductive" but argued that unless voluntary measures are brought in quickly, other countries may be forced to follow China's lead. "No one is in favor of governments dictating family size, but we need to act quickly to prevent it." he said.
Donna Nicholson, a spokeswoman for the Scottish chapter of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said that the problem facing many developing countries is not overpopulation but global inequality. The United States produces enough food annually to feed the entire world, she said. At the same time, the crippling debt facing many African countries drives them to cut back on education and health care. Citing her experience working in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nicholson said the answer to solving poverty was not population control. "You can't look at a woman in the Third World and say the problem is that she's pregnant," she said.
Josephine Quintavalle, head of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, another British pro-life group, said she found it frightening that the OPT report was getting attention. She said Europe was facing a situation in which in just a few years, more people would be over 60 years of age than under 60. Unless European countries took urgent measures to encourage more people to have babies, she said, the continent could skip an entire generation of children. "One wonders what planet this organization comes from when they come up with these conclusions," Quintavalle said.
Ethanol Production: A Very Bad Idea?
This article addresses the issue of ethanol production in the U.S. In my opinion this is another example of government policy gone mad in the name of global warming and our dependence upon "foreign" oil. It seems that subsidizing and encouraging the growing of corn, or any other crops, to then produce ethanol as motor vehicle fuel is a thinly veiled attempt by Congress to pacify environmental groups pushing for change.
Ethanol production is such a completely bad idea that even environmental groups oppose it. The following article explains many of the reasons why. Hopefully, these laws will be appealed. What do you think?
Peter
from: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200707/CUL20070719c.html
Study Slams Ethanol, Industry Cries Foul
By Jeff GolimowskiCNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
July 19, 2007Washington (CNSNews.com) -
Ethanol is not the "silver bullet" that will solve America's energy crisis, according to a new report released Wednesday by three liberal environmental groups.In the 77-page report, the groups allege that ethanol production will, in many cases, contribute to significant problems in the United States and the developing world.
But Doug Durante, executive director of Ethanol Across America -- an industry advocacy group -- said the criticisms levied in the report were unfair. He said the industry has never tried to be the answer to every problem associated with fossil fuels and transportation."Look at the numbers: Americans use 150 billion gallons of gasoline [a year] ... we make six billion gallons of ethanol," said Durante. "What rational person could say that next 144 billion gallons is no problem for us? Nobody is saying that."
The report, which cites dozens of studies by scientists and government researchers, looks at several different aspects of the ethanol debate. It alleges the production of ethanol will contribute to additional air and water pollution, even with modern environmental controls. It also alleges that the heavily subsidized industry will help corporate farms at the expense of rural communities.
Wenonah Hauer, executive director of Food and Water Watch, said: "We're already seeing the effects of the hype about ethanol. Ninety-three million acres of corn were planted -- and that's the largest amount of corn to be grown since 1944 -- but that's not enough corn to make America energy independent." "The push to make corn ethanol in mega-refineries is likely to contribute to the over-consolidation of the grain sector," Hauer said. "It won't benefit the smaller farmers and farm cooperatives in the long term."Hauer argued that only large-scale factory-style farms will be able to profit from ethanol production, which she said would accelerate the loss of family farms ."Agribusiness, whose political contributions are fueling the ethanol frenzy, are going to become the winners," she said.
The report also alleges ethanol is contributing to human rights abuses around the world as developing countries alter their agricultural production to focus on "fuel" crops, such as sugar cane, instead of growing food. The study's backers say the message is clear. "Other alternative fuels exist besides corn ethanol ," said Michael Dworkin, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. "Even if corn ethanol did what it was supposed to do, it would only make sense to accept the cost that it has if it were necessary.
"The report makes several policy recommendations and asserts that the use of increased fuel economy standards would go much further in reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil than ethanol. Yet Durante, with Ethanol Across America, said the industry as a whole and the corn ethanol industry in particular are fulfilling their intended mission -- to provide an alternative to foreign-produced oil. "There are lots of reasons to support domestic renewable fuels ... what if we got to 10 percent [of domestic consumption]? That's 15 billion gallons times three bucks [a gallon saved over the price of regular gas]," said Durante. "We're going to spend that here and create roads and schools and jobs.
"As for the report's recommendations, Durante said that the arguments were not fair. Rather than making ethanol production a black-or-white issue, he said, corn ethanol production can be pursued at the same time as lower fuel standards. "Sure we'd like to see us use less fuel, but that is a different issue," he said. "I hate to see that become an either/or. I don't believe those goals are real. "The report does concede that ethanol can find a place in an integrated energy policy but says it should only be considered along with efforts to increase fuel-efficiency standards for U.S. autos and the promotion of other alternative fuels.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported, ethanol's "green" credentials have been called into question, as many refineries have been cited for violations of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Ethanol production is such a completely bad idea that even environmental groups oppose it. The following article explains many of the reasons why. Hopefully, these laws will be appealed. What do you think?
Peter
from: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200707/CUL20070719c.html
Study Slams Ethanol, Industry Cries Foul
By Jeff GolimowskiCNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
July 19, 2007Washington (CNSNews.com) -
Ethanol is not the "silver bullet" that will solve America's energy crisis, according to a new report released Wednesday by three liberal environmental groups.In the 77-page report, the groups allege that ethanol production will, in many cases, contribute to significant problems in the United States and the developing world.
But Doug Durante, executive director of Ethanol Across America -- an industry advocacy group -- said the criticisms levied in the report were unfair. He said the industry has never tried to be the answer to every problem associated with fossil fuels and transportation."Look at the numbers: Americans use 150 billion gallons of gasoline [a year] ... we make six billion gallons of ethanol," said Durante. "What rational person could say that next 144 billion gallons is no problem for us? Nobody is saying that."
The report, which cites dozens of studies by scientists and government researchers, looks at several different aspects of the ethanol debate. It alleges the production of ethanol will contribute to additional air and water pollution, even with modern environmental controls. It also alleges that the heavily subsidized industry will help corporate farms at the expense of rural communities.
Wenonah Hauer, executive director of Food and Water Watch, said: "We're already seeing the effects of the hype about ethanol. Ninety-three million acres of corn were planted -- and that's the largest amount of corn to be grown since 1944 -- but that's not enough corn to make America energy independent." "The push to make corn ethanol in mega-refineries is likely to contribute to the over-consolidation of the grain sector," Hauer said. "It won't benefit the smaller farmers and farm cooperatives in the long term."Hauer argued that only large-scale factory-style farms will be able to profit from ethanol production, which she said would accelerate the loss of family farms ."Agribusiness, whose political contributions are fueling the ethanol frenzy, are going to become the winners," she said.
The report also alleges ethanol is contributing to human rights abuses around the world as developing countries alter their agricultural production to focus on "fuel" crops, such as sugar cane, instead of growing food. The study's backers say the message is clear. "Other alternative fuels exist besides corn ethanol ," said Michael Dworkin, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. "Even if corn ethanol did what it was supposed to do, it would only make sense to accept the cost that it has if it were necessary.
"The report makes several policy recommendations and asserts that the use of increased fuel economy standards would go much further in reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil than ethanol. Yet Durante, with Ethanol Across America, said the industry as a whole and the corn ethanol industry in particular are fulfilling their intended mission -- to provide an alternative to foreign-produced oil. "There are lots of reasons to support domestic renewable fuels ... what if we got to 10 percent [of domestic consumption]? That's 15 billion gallons times three bucks [a gallon saved over the price of regular gas]," said Durante. "We're going to spend that here and create roads and schools and jobs.
"As for the report's recommendations, Durante said that the arguments were not fair. Rather than making ethanol production a black-or-white issue, he said, corn ethanol production can be pursued at the same time as lower fuel standards. "Sure we'd like to see us use less fuel, but that is a different issue," he said. "I hate to see that become an either/or. I don't believe those goals are real. "The report does concede that ethanol can find a place in an integrated energy policy but says it should only be considered along with efforts to increase fuel-efficiency standards for U.S. autos and the promotion of other alternative fuels.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported, ethanol's "green" credentials have been called into question, as many refineries have been cited for violations of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
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