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IGs Probe Allegations On Global Warming Data
Scientists Say Findings Were Suppressed
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
Inspectors general at two agencies have begun an investigation into whether the Bush administration has suppressed government scientists’ research on global warming, officials at NASA and the Commerce Department confirmed yesterday.
Prompted by a request this fall by 14 Democratic senators, the IGs are examining whether political appointees have prevented climate researchers at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from conveying their findings to the public.
(2 Nov 2006)
Related story at Associated Press.
MIT Survey: Climate Change Tops Americans’ Environmental Concerns
Mike Millikin, Green Car Congress
According to a recent MIT survey, Americans now rank climate change as the country’s most pressing environmental problem-a substantive shift from three years ago, when they ranked climate change sixth out of 10 environmental concerns.
The environment continues to rank in the middle of the list of “most important issues facing the US today.” Among 10 environmental problems, almost half the respondents put global warming in first or second place. In 2003, the destruction of ecosystems, water pollution and toxic waste were far higher priorities.
Almost three-quarters of the respondents felt the government should do more to deal with global warming, and individuals were willing to spend their own money to help.
(1 Nov 2006)
Rising Tide: UK Stern Report Sells Climate Short
The Rising Tide Coalition for Climate Justice
Today the international climate justice movement condemned a major new policy advisory from the United Kingdom on the economics of climate change. Named “The Stern Review” after its chief author Sir Nicholas Stern, climate activists warn that this 700-page analysis offers a dangerously inadequate and deceptive plan that will lead to inevitable global warming catastrophe if its recommendations are followed.
Commissioned by the UK government in conjunction with the G8 Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change, the Stern Review has been widely celebrated as a “landmark” and “authoritative” review that provides convincing evidence that global economic upheaval and depression will result from failure to urgently act in response to the climate change crisis. Yet grassroots climate activists are outraged and disturbed that The Stern Report’s underlying assumptions and its ultimate policy recommendations are not scientifically legitimate.
“Although climate scientists are in nearly unanimous agreement that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide must be limited to no more than 450 parts per million in order to avoid catastrophic climate chaos, the new UK report calls for CO2 emissions to be stabilized at the much higher rate of 500 to 550 ppm,” said Ethan Green, coordinator of the Counter-G8 Working Group of Rising Tide North America.
“This means the core assumptions of the Stern Report, plus its policy recommendations, are seriously flawed,” said Green. “Based on this Report, the UK today is declaring that it will advocate global cuts in carbon dioxide emissions of 30 per cent by 2020 and of 60 per cent by 2050. While realizing even those minimal cuts would represent great progress from the world’s current unsustainable business-as-usual path, clearly we need much more drastic reductions in order to prevent climate disaster.”
The government-funded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in a ground-breaking environmental report issued in the UK this September, concluded that a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions is needed by 2050. “We are deluding ourselves if we wait for technology or emission trading to offer a smooth transition to a low carbon future,” the Tyndall Report said. “The real challenge is making a radical shift within four years and driving down carbon intensity at an unprecedented 9% a year for up to 20 years.”
Climate campaigners argue that the scientifically rigorous Tyndall Report, with its comparably radical yet more realistic plan of action, should be used as a framework for the global response against climate change, instead of the watered-down Stern Report, written by an economist without significant training in climate science.
(30 Oct 2006)
You can’t do it all with mirrors
Philip Ball, Nature
The leading economist Nicholas Stern has just handed us, in advance, the bill for the impacts of climate change: close to $4 trillion by the end of this century1.
And with perfect timing, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has delivered the equivalent of a builder’s estimate for patching up the problem using a cosmic sunshade2. It will set us back by… well, let’s make it a nice round figure of $4 trillion by the end of the century.
Both figures are rough estimates — when costs add up to a significant fraction of global GDP no one can expect them to be very accurate. But this happy conflux of figures puts some perspective on the hope that global warming can be addressed with high-tech mega-engineering projects.
In this context, the sunshade solution looks like a bad bargain. If a builder told you that the cost of fixing a problem with your roof was likely to be about the same as the cost of not fixing it, except that the fix was untested and might not work at all, and in any event you know the work is likely to run over budget and probably over schedule — well, what would you do?
One could argue that in this case the ‘problem’ involves the potential suffering of millions of people — in which case you might conclude that investing in a risky technofix can be justified on humanitarian grounds.
But Stern’s report, commissioned by the UK government and hailed by many other economists as the most definitive study of its sort to date (see ‘How much will it cost to save the world?‘), makes some estimate of the likely costs of tackling climate change using existing approaches and technologies – and the answer looks cheaper and a whole lot more attainable than Angel’s sunshade.
(31 Oct 2006)
Why we must ration the future
Mark Lynas, New Statesman
You can’t bargain with the planet because it doesn’t care whether or not targets are “politically acceptable”. So unless we secure a deal determining how much carbon each nation and each person can emit, we simply will not survive.
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The best indication of whether a person truly grasps the scale of the global climate crisis is not whether they drive a hybrid car or offset their flights, nor whether they subscribe to the Ecologist or plan to attach a wind turbine to their house. The most reliable indicator is whether they support carbon rationing. The received political wisdom is that the general public will recoil in horror at a scheme whose very name recalls wartime national emergencies and austerity. Rationing is the opposite of today’s consumerist free-for-all, where economic growth is the highest objective of government policy.
But that is precisely the point. It is because carbon rationing represents a total break with business as usual that it is the only climate-change policy that will work. Let me put it simply: if we go on emitting greenhouse gases at anything like the current rate, most of the surface of the globe will be rendered uninhabitable within the lifetimes of most readers of this article. We must reduce our emissions by 90 per cent or so within three or four decades if we are to have any chance of avoiding this looming catastrophe.
(23 Oct 2006)
2050 too late for climate change action: former U.S. adviser
CBC News
A former top U.S. official in the Bush administration says the world can’t wait to tackle greenhouse gases until 2050, the date the Harper government wants Canada’s emissions cut in half.
“We don’t get the luxury of kind of growing into an awareness, we need to begin acting right now,” said Paul O’Neil, who served as treasury secretary in President George W. Bush’s cabinet for two years.
“There is no doubt that we have witnessed an enormous increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last 100 years.”
