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Global warming
Global warming talks spark friction between US and China
Dec 13th
Buildings are seen in a heavy haze in Beijing’s central business district, Thursday. Credit: Jason Lee/Reuters
Nobody said crafting a new global warming treaty would be easy.
During the first four days of talks here aimed at building a truly global agreement to combat global warming, China has lashed out at the US, Europe, and Japan for offering what it sees as inadequate emissions targets.
The head of a bloc of developing countries, known as the G-77, has lashed out at – among others – the Danes, hosts of this gathering, for circulating a draft treaty that the G-77 finds flawed.
Meanwhile, US officials have pointed to China’s anticipated growth over the next several decades and says that math, not politics, is driving Washington’s insistence that China offer more than it has on greenhouse-gas control efforts – and that what they do must be verifiable from beyond the Great Wall.
Tiny Tuvalu, speaking for small-island nations, insists that any agreement this meeting achieves by Dec. 18 must be legally binding, and not a mere political agreement, since the survival of many island cultures hang in the balance.
The Totalities of Copenhagen
Dec 11th
‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Is it not obvious that the vision of apocalypse as it was revealed to Saint John of Patmos was, in fact, global warming?
Here’s a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and “biocultural diversity.”
All this, of course, on top of the Maldives sinking under the waves, millions of climate refugees, a half-dozen Katrina-type events every year and so on and on—a long parade of horrors animating the policy ambitions of the politicians, scientists, climate mandarins and entrepreneurs now gathered at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen. Never mind that none of these scenarios has any basis in some kind of observable reality (sea levels around the Maldives have been stable for decades), or that the chain of causation linking climate change to sundry disasters is usually of a meaningless six-degrees-of-separation variety.
Still, the really interesting question is less about the facts than it is about the psychology. Last week, I suggested that funding flows had much to do with climate alarmism. But deeper things are at work as well.
Earth much more sensitive to global warming than thought
Dec 7th
Factory smoke Photo: MARTIN POPE
A new study suggests bigger cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions may be needed to prevent drastic long term climate change.
The evidence was obtained by scientists looking back three million years to the Pliocene epoch, when global temperatures were 5.4F (3C) to 9F (5C) higher than they are today.
They found that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time should not have produced such a warm world.
Climate models used to predict modern levels of man-made global warming, temperatures in the mid-Pliocene should have been lower.
The findings suggest the Earth’s temperature may be 30 per cent to 50 per cent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than experts have assumed.
The discrepancy can be explained by long term changes in vegetation and ice cover.
Ice reflects solar radiation back into space and therefore helps to prevent the Earth heating up. When ice melts and disappears this “albedo” effect is lessened, contributing to a rise in temperature.
Vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide but also keeps the Earth warm by preventing heat reflection.
The scientists compared temperature reconstructions from sediments in the ocean floor with a global climate simulation model which aimed to map climate three million years ago.
What Are Global Warming Supporters Trying to Hide?
Dec 7th
Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available, but global warming advocates reassure us that this shouldn’t really concern us because some other data sources reportedly show the same thing. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the University of East Anglia.
Take Queen’s University in Belfast. It has amassed one of the longest-running data collections on tree rings, spanning 7,000 years and ranging from over 1,500 sites around the world. How much a tree grows each season can tell us a lot about temperatures and other climate related variables. You would expect the institution to be proud of this enormous data set they have so diligently created and expect it to want to share the data with anyone who is interested. Not so. Indeed, scholars have now been trying for two-and-a-half years to go through the UK’s Freedom of Information Acts to force Queen’s University to release the data, but to no avail.