Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
New Study Points to an Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming
National Center for Policy Analysis via ENN
Hitting theaters nationwide next week, Al Gore’s global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is the latest in a line of films, TV shows and news features warning of a impending global catastrophe caused by human-induced climate change. Yet according to a new study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), the most inconvenient truth is that the science behind these claims is fatally flawed.
“The complexity of the climate and the limitations of data and computer models mean all projections of future climate change are unreliable at best,” said David Legates, author of the study and the director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Climatic Research. “Science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures, nor claims of human influence on weather events or extinctions.”
The study notes that climate models used as the basis for global warming claims routinely miss key climate factors, which results in false predictions of catastrophe. Furthermore, some official reports, including the U.S. National Assessment, published in 2000, describe only the 2 most extreme predictions, ignoring 30 other models that are far less radical.
(16 May 2006)
The Environmental News Network (ENN) needs to do a little screening on the press releases they publish. This release came from The National Center for Policy Analysis, which is a “right wing think tank with programs devoted to privatization in the following issue areas: taxes, Social Security and Medicare, health care, criminal justice, environment, education, and welfare.” (People for the American Way) As a look at their recent publications on science shows, they are ideological climate change skeptics. Why is ENN publishing them?
David Roberts reports on another disinformation campaign. Looks like Gore film has shaken up the troglodytes!
-BA
Data Leaks Shake Up Carbon Trade
Heather Timmons, NY Times
LONDON — It had a promising start, hailed by traders, policy makers and environmentalists as a way to curb global warming with the craft of capitalism. After a banner first year, though, the carbon trading market has suffered a bout of nose dives, missteps and misreadings, leading now to a clamor for major change.
It may be just growing pains. But it could point to big problems ahead in carrying out the dictates of the Kyoto Protocol, which many countries are counting on to manage climate change.
Volume hit $10 billion in 2005, and may grow to as much as $30 billion this year, according to World Bank estimates. By comparison, the value of the entire wheat crop of the United States in 2005 was $7.1 billion.
“The market is nervous and needs to see moves to a more reliable structure to get back its credibility,” said Ingo Ramming, managing director of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein’s emissions business in London.
More than just trading profits are at stake. “This is the instrument that politicians choose to achieve climate change targets,” Mr. Ramming said. If countries are serious about global warming, he added, “the regulation and framework needs to be right.”
(15 May 2006)
Why Aren’t Americans ‘Very Worried’ About the Climate?
Joel Makower, WorldChanging
…Some answers may be found in a new study by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. It’s Project on Climate Change has just published an informative study on Americans and Climate Change (PDF), the product of a meeting Yale held late last year attended by 110 leading thinkers and actors in the environmental movement. The goal, according to Gus Speth, the school’s dean, “was to examine the gap between climate science and climate policy and action, with a particular focus on public understanding as a key intervening variable.”
The bottom line: We’ve got a lot of work to do to change the public’s understanding and awareness of the climate issue, and their willingness to do more than simply bury their collective heads in the sand.
Specifically, said the Yale project participants, we need to remove the scientific trappings of climate discussions, which “can cause profound disconnects in how society interprets and acts on the climate change issue.” Rather, we need a values-based approach involving religious communities and others to position climate as part of our overall societal responsibility. Climate should be “packaged” with other issues of concern, though that could risk deemphasizing climate change as an explicit societal priority. Translating awareness into action depends on identifying “the deeper incentive structures at play in our society.” And, perhaps most of all, we need to make climate change a nonpartisan issue.
The Yale report offers fully 39 recommendations for action aimed at bridging climate’s informational and culture divide. Typically, any list of recommendations represents watered-down groupthink — a set of “actions” that are either too lofty, too vague, or simply not reasonably actionable.
That’s not the case here, in my humble opinion. Nearly all of the Yale group’s action items seem not only sensible, but smart and systematic — a comprehensive to-do list for our teachers, editors, students, and business and political leaders.
(17 May 2006)
See original for links.
