PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet CLIMATE SCARES & CLIMATE CHANGE, 24 April 2002
----------------------------------------------------
"SCOTLAND has more woods and forests than 700 years ago when
Robert
the Bruce and William Wallace were fighting the English,
according to a
new Forestry Commission survey. The National Inventory of
Woodland and
Trees for Scotland shows that tree cover has increased by 50 per
cent since
the last national survey in 1980 and has more than trebled in the
past 100
years. Around a sixth, or 17 per cent, of the Scottish landscape
is now
forested, compared with 5 per cent in 1900."
--Shirley English, The Times, 22 April 2002
(1) "THE HEAT BEFORE THE COLD": DEBUNKING ANOTHER
CLIMATE SCARE
Greening Earth Society, 22 April 2002
(2) RENEWABLE REALITIES
Tech Central Station, 23 April 2002
(3) WHAT WATSON DID WRONG
Tech Central Station, 22 April 2002
(4) SHOCK, HORROR: TREES GAIN GROUND OVER SCOTLAND
The Times, 22 April 2002
==========
(1) "THE HEAT BEFORE THE COLD": DEBUNKING ANOTHER
CLIMATE SCARE
>From Greening Earth Society, 22 April 2002
http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/Articles/2002/vca13.htm
Dr. Terrence Joyce, who is chairman physical oceanography at
Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, wrote an op-ed published in the April
18th
edition of The New York Times. Dr. Joyce renewed public fear of
global
warming when he capitalized on the mid-April heat wave that had
set record
high temperatures across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. over
the course
of a couple of weeks, previous. In printing his op-ed "The
Heat Before the
Cold," Times editors apparently felt it was time to spread
what amounts to
little more than global warming hype when they turned to Dr.
Joyce to give
them a good scare story. This is because they were unable to find
anyone
else to link the heat wave to global warming. From beginning to
end, the
piece is rooted in half-truth and old ways of thinking.
"This week's unexpected heat wave across much of the
Northeast and Midwest,
coupled with recent reports about the surprisingly fast collapse
of an
Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, has heightened
fears of a
long-term rise in temperatures brought about by global
warming," Joyce
opines.
A quick search of on-line newspapers and wire services finds not
one single
article suggesting the heat wave is linked to global warming. In
fact, in
the only articles where "heat wave" and "global
warming" appear together,
the context is one in which the person being interviewed states
they
wouldn't go so far as to relate the two.
As for the heat wave being unexpected, extended long-range
weather forecasts
more than a week before revealed that what typically would be a
summertime
pattern in the eastern U.S. would arrive under the influence of a
Bermuda
high pressure system that was developing. As a consequence, the
heat should
not have surprised anyone who knows anything about meteorology.
It might
surprise people who don't watch daily weather forecasts (but any
weather on
any given day would come as a surprise to them, wouldn't it?).
As for the Antarctic ice shelf's collapse, The New York Times own
coverage
of the event by science writer Andrew Revkin went to great
lengths to point
out that Antarctic climate was not providing a consistent picture
of
warming. As Revkin's reportage pointed out, Antarctica's
continental
interior has been cooling while its peninsula (the region near
the ice
shelf's collapse) has been warming. Some Antarctic glaciers have
grown while
others have shrunk. This hardly is a pattern expected under
global warming.
But, the op-ed tacitly is labeled "opinion" and Dr.
Joyce is entitled to
one, even if it differs from current scientific understanding.
A basic tenet of Dr. Joyce's faith is that global warming
possibly will lead
to a slow down, or a southward deflection, of the Gulf Stream.
This, in
turn, will cause "an abrupt drop in average winter
temperatures of about 5
degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees
in the
Northeast" and across much of Europe. The argument goes
something like this.
More fresh water added to the North Atlantic due to melting of
Arctic ice
changes the salinity of the ocean's upper layer, which in turn,
alters the
regions of rising and sinking water, thereby altering ocean
currents and
changing climate.
Other climate hypesters dub this a climate surprise because they
believe
such a change would occur rapidly and somewhat unexpectedly. This
kind of
prediction of climate surprise has become increasingly vogue
since it became
apparent that the current trend in global warming is far too slow
to cause a
great upheaval. The problem with this kind of surprise scenario
is that
things just don't seem to work that way. The Gulf Stream doesn't
carry as
much responsibility for warming the northeast U.S. and Europe
folks like Dr.
Joyce seem to think.
In an extensive paper to be published in the Quaternary Journal
of the Royal
Meteorological Society, a research team lead by Dr. Robert Seager
of
Columbia University's Lamont Doughty Earth Observatory carefully
examines
the role of the Gulf Stream on the climate of Europe and North
America. The
paper begins:
"It is widely believed by scientists and laypeople alike
that the transport
of warm water north in the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift,
and its
release to the atmosphere, is the reason why western Europe's
winters are so
much milder (about 15-20°C) than those of eastern North
America... This idea
seems to have gained wide currency with the subtle difference
that the
poleward flow of warm water is now more likely to be ascribed to
the
thermohaline circulation than the Gulf Stream per se. It remains
a central
organizing principle of climate research."
and concludes:
"In the current paper we demonstrate that transport of heat
by the ocean is
not responsible for the contrast between Europe's mild winters
and the harsh
ones of eastern North America. Indeed, this contrast would occur
if the
ocean was a motionless slab of modest and uniform depth. Instead
the
contrast arises as a consequence of atmospheric advection around
the
Icelandic Low and the simple maritime-continental climate
distinction."
In other words, the climate of western Europe and the eastern
U.S. primarily
is driven by their geographic position and does not rely on the
Gulf Stream.
Because any land area would respond to temperature change (or
changes in
solar radiation) faster than would water, land areas are colder
in winter
and warmer in the summer than is the ocean.
Eastern North America has cold winters because there is a large
continental
landmass to its west (the direction from which most of the
weather comes in
the Northern Hemisphere extra-tropics during the winter). Western
Europe has
relatively mild winters because it has a large ocean west of it.
Unless a
"plate tectonic surprise" looms ahead, these facts are
not soon going to
change.
Reference
Seager, R., et al., 2002. Is the Gulf Stream responsible for
Europe's mild
winters? Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society,
in press.
Copyright 2002, Greening Earth Society
==========
(2) RENEWABLE REALITIES
>From Tech Central Station, 23 April 2002
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/envirowrapper.jsp?PID=1051-450&CID=1051-042302A
By Sallie Baliunas 04/23/2002
"After the last woman has been sawed in half, after the
elephant has been
made to disappear, after the last brood of chicks has been made
to appear in
a spectator's pocket, the magicians will sit around for hours in
their
magical headquarters and talk about the simplest of all effects.
"In the
trade it's called the Scarne effect."
-- Introduction to Scarne on Cards by W.A. Caldwell
John Scarne never believed in luck. His fingers deftly dealt
cards almost as
fast as his mathematical mind computed gaming odds. He was a
master card
player because he knew card games rely on a mixture of skill and
probability, but not luck. During World War II the War Department
had Scarne
educate our soldiers on gambling scams in the military.
I mention Scarne to make a point as I begin a series focused on
whether
renewable energy sources can meet future U.S. energy needs. In
the realm of
energy, as in card games, luck does not exist.
Renewables
Life depends on energy. And energy is not only essential to life,
it is
essential to civilization. Early hominids first controlled fire
some 1.5
million years ago and have traveled a long road in improving
their
utilization of energy. With energy they improved their chances of
survival.
According to estimates by researchers at the UCLA Gerontology
Research
Group, Homo sapiens' average life expectancy 50,000 years ago was
10 years,
owing to death by disease, predators and accidents. The average
life
expectancy in the United States is now over 76 years, thanks to
energy use
and science that have curbed nature's brutality. The wealth
arising from
energy use enables health and welfare to prosper.
Today approximately 85% of our total energy needs are met by
fossil fuels,
8% comes from nuclear power and only 7% by renewables. Renewables
other than
hydroelectric power - geothermal, landfill gas, solar and wind
power, plus
incineration of wood, municipal waste or other biomass material
that can be
regrown or re-accumulated - account for only 2% of the 35% of our
energy
used to produce electricity.
Providing energy growth is essential to economic growth. A bill
now in the
Senate, S. 517, would focus most of our energy development on
renewable
energy sources - now redefined to exclude hydroelectric power,
because of
the apparent detrimental environmental footprint of dams Electric
utilities
would be mandated to increase to 10% the portion of their
electricity
provided by renewables - except hydroelectric power - by 2020.
Such a requirement might seem easily accomplished. That's perhaps
why
Independent Senator from Vermont, James Jeffords aimed to double
the
renewable requirement, again excluding hydroelectric power, to
20%. That
amendment, though, was defeated.
But as for reliably providing for future energy growth by relying
on
renewables - that's akin to relying on luck. As Scarne would say:
There's no
such thing as luck in the realm of energy!
The reasons have to do with the laws of energy.
What energy is
We learned in school that energy is defined as the ability to do
work, and
that the rate at which energy is used is power. We also found out
that
energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from
one form to
another.
As the Nobel Physicist and superb teacher Richard Feynman wrote
in Six Easy
Pieces: " There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing
all natural
phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to
this law -
it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation
of energy.
It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy,
that does
not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. ... It
is not a
description of a mechanism, ... it is just a strange fact that we
can
calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go
through her
tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same."
Some examples of energy are heat energy, electrical energy,
electromagnetic
energy, chemical energy, nuclear energy, kinetic energy and mass
energy.
Feynman highlights that we describe energy as a number. As on a
double-entry
accounting spreadsheet, if we add energy on one side of the
ledger we must
subtract it from the other side. And as long as we have properly
counted all
the different forms to which energy has been converted in the
physical
process, the bottom line is that the net of input to output is
always zero.
That's true whatever counting system we use, even if I count in
Sumerian.
The conservation law stands.
Our knowledge and control of energy continues to progress, so
much so that
modern Homo sapiens verges on replicating the fusion process that
powers the
Sun as it converts simple hydrogen into more complex and more
massive atoms
like helium. Still, we cannot create energy ex nihilo. Because of
the law of
conservation of energy, we are allowed only to convert energy
from one form
to another.
And this is where the argument for renewables as a means of
growing our
energy supply and our economy fails.
Sources and non-sources of energy
If fossil fuels, uranium and hydroelectric continue to be
disfavored for
providing growth in energy needs, then growth will rely on
expanding the
remaining renewables. Furthermore, fossil fuels, uranium and
hydroelectric
energy supplies may be forced to shrink from the base production
they now
yield, further increasing reliance on renewables.
But the physical laws make the prospect for renewables on a grand
scale look
dismal: solar and wind energy have enormous environmental
footprints.
Because they are dilute and intermittent sources, they require
great
acreage. Their intermittency requires that stable power sources
like coal or
uranium provide the steady base so critical to electrical supply.
Biomass
power requires frequent clear cutting of areas devoted to growing
fast-rotation woody crops. Large swaths of land devoted to
biomass clear
cutting, wheezing wind towers or habitat-hungry solar facilities
could be
viewed as an aesthetic, and actual, environmental hazards.
Opportunities for
power from geothermal sites and landfills are limited, and
decline with use.
Hydrogen fuel cells, often touted as another futuristic
renewable, merely
carry energy. Fuel cells are not sources of energy. The process
of
energizing a fuel cell with hydrogen cracked from methane (itself
a valuable
energy resource) or water requires more energy than returned from
use of the
fuel cell. Their utility is in applications where people may want
zero local
pollutants like oxides of nitrogen or sulfur. But if carbon
dioxide
emissions are also undesired, then fuel cells would be disfavored
unless the
hydrogen-production and distribution phases of charging a fuel
cell were to
use no fossil fuels, but instead rely on uranium or renewables.
Conservation is sometimes lumped with the neauveaux renewables
(i.e., minus
hydroelectric power) as a source of energy. Conservation and
efficiency
improvements may make sense on their own economic or other merits
and play
an important role in energy policy, but they are not sources of
energy.
Securing U.S. energy and electrical production is a high-stakes
effort,
because our powerhouse economy depends on energy. But energy
production
depends only on skill - i.e., the laws of physics - and not luck.
Solar,
wind and biomass energy cannot be counted on to provide the
timely,
reliable, inexpensive electricity resources the U.S. needs. As
Scarne
writes, "So much for luck."
Stay tuned for the luckless facts of science in energy and
electricity
production
Copyright 2002, Tech Central Station
===========
(3) WHAT WATSON DID WRONG
>From Tech Central Station, 22 April 2002
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/envirowrapper.jsp?PID=1051-450&CID=1051-042202A
By Paul J. Georgia 04/22/2002
Environmental activists are attacking the Bush administration for
orchestrating the ouster of an American scientist, Robert Watson,
as
chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change
(IPCC), the supposed ultimate scientific authority on global
warming.
They've picked the wrong culprit. Watson orchestrated his own
demise. As
Friday's vote for IPCC chairman showed, the administration was
hardly alone
in its opposition to him. Seventy-five other nations also voted
for Indian
challenger, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and an economist. Only
49 nations
supported Watson.
Why?
The New York Times characterized Watson as an "outspoken
advocate of the
idea that human actions - mainly burning coal and oil - are
contributing to
global warming and must be changed to avert environmental
upheavals." And
that was the problem. Watson's "advocacy" of the
environmentalist agenda
clouds his scientific objectivity, it has cast doubt upon the
IPCC's
scientific authority.
What did Watson do wrong? A whole list of things.
Watson presided over the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR),
published
last year. The assessment reports are supposed to be a
comprehensive review
of the state of climate science in support of the international
climate
negotiations. What they have become under Watson's guidance is a
political
bludgeon to enforce global warming orthodoxy.
The first inkling that Watson was manipulating the panel's work
for
political ends was two weeks before the 2000 presidential
election. A draft
of the report's Summary for Policymakers was leaked to The New
York Times,
which reported that the IPCC "has now concluded that
mankind's contribution
to the problem is greater than originally believed," and
that, "Its
worst-case scenario calls for a truly unnerving rise of 11
degrees
Fahrenheit over 1990 levels." The leak was clearly
calculated to aid Al
Gore's campaign.
In January 2001, Watson publicly released the final draft of the
summary,
even though the report itself was still under revision, producing
another
media circus. Watson chimed in that, "This adds impetus for
governments of
the world to find ways to live up to their commitments ... to
reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases."
The Summary for Policymakers, written by U.N. politicos rather
than
scientists, is used by Watson to misrepresent the science. IPCC
lead author
Dr. Richard Lindzen noted that the 35-page chapter that he worked
on was
summarized in one sentence, and avoided any mention of the many
problems
with how the models misrepresent key climate processes.
By releasing the Summary for Policymakers before the report
itself, Watson
assured that its alarmist message was well ingrained in the
public psyche
before the real science could get a fair public hearing. Watson's
unorthodox
strategy has achieved the desired political impact as the report
itself has
been largely ignored.
Unfortunately, the report itself wasn't free of Watson's
meddling. The new
report estimates that the Earth's average temperature would rise
between 1.4
and 5.8 degrees Celsius -- or 10.44 degrees Fahrenheit, which The
New York
Times rounded up to 11 -- over the next century, a big change
from its
earlier estimate of 1 to 3.5 degrees C.
The higher prediction is not based on new evidence or on a new
understanding
of the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change,
but on an
unwarranted change in the assumptions about future population
growth,
economic growth and fossil fuel use.
Stephen Schneider, a professor at Stanford University and staunch
proponent
of the global warming agenda, expressed reservations in Nature
magazine
about the new assumptions. According to Schneider, "This
sweeping revision
depends on two factors that were not the handiwork of the
modelers: smaller
projected emissions of climate cooling aerosols; and a few
predictions
containing particularly large CO2 (carbon dioxide)
emissions."
To come up with the outlandish CO2 projections, for instance,
Watson formed
a group of academic scientists, environmental organizations,
industrial
scientists, engineers, economists, and systems analysts that
decided to
"create 'storylines' about future worlds from which
population, affluence
and technology drivers could be inferred. These storylines
"gave rise to
radically different families of emission profiles up to 2100 --
from below
current CO2 emissions to five times current emissions,"
according to
Schneider.
To get the final "dramatic revision upward in the IPCC's
third assessment,"
he wrote, it combined the climate sensitivities of seven general
circulation
models (GCMs) with the "six illustrative scenarios from the
special report"
within a simple model to get 40 climate scenarios.
To add insult to injury, these storylines were not subjected to
peer review.
In fact, they were added to the IPCC report during a
"government review"
after the scientific peer review was concluded.
Watson's actions proved that he was not fit to continue as the
head of a
scientific review process. The product of his tenure was not
science but
advocacy. The IPCC's new chairman faces the difficult task of
getting the
IPCC to promote sound science rather than political advocacy
masquerading as
science.
Copyright 2002, Tech Central Station
===========
(4) SHOCK, HORROR: TREES GAIN GROUND OVER SCOTLAND
>From The Times, 22 April 2002
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-275116,00.html
By Shirley English
SCOTLAND has more woods and forests than 700 years ago when
Robert the Bruce
and William Wallace were fighting the English, according to a new
Forestry
Commission survey.
The National Inventory of Woodland and Trees for Scotland shows
that tree
cover has increased by 50 per cent since the last national survey
in 1980
and has more than trebled in the past 100 years. Around a sixth,
or 17 per
cent, of the Scottish landscape is now forested, compared with 5
per cent in
1900.
For the first time the number of indigenous, broadleaf trees
being planted
has outstripped conifers, rising from 15 per cent to 18 per cent
of the
total wood cover, showing a new trend in forestry towards more
natural
looking, native woods, instead of the bland regimented
plantations of the
20th century.
Launching the report, Allan Wilson, the Scottish Forestry
Minister, said:
"Few countries have tackled the issue of forest loss as
vigorously as we
have."
The report said conifers still represent almost 70 per cent of
all woodland
in Scotland. The main species is sitka spruce.
Altogether Scotland has 18.58 million live trees. The industry
now supports
more than 10,000 jobs and is worth £800 million a year.
Copyright 2002, The Times
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