November 26th, 2009

East Anglia chronology, so far

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 11:01 am

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, energy, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, global warming, law & politics, ocean, research

Tags: Hacking, Global Warming, Harry Fuller, East Anglia, media, global warming denial, emails, Copenhagen, chronology

1) University of East Anglia hacked documents appear online. We now know that a month ago the same docs were apparently offered to a British reporter who did nothing with them. During that time the University apparently did NOT know it had been hacked. Duh.

2) Reaction to hacking. Some early responses claim deception and fraud.

3) Global warming skeptics trumpet the emails, ignore the illegality. See data tampering.

4) One hacked scientist sees the affair as part of the propaganda war. Critics of global warming see East Anglia as center of conspiracy to shut down those critics.

5) One left-wing paper finds no conspiracy, no cover-up but plenty of dull emails about lunch. Realclimate website says somebody tried to put the stolen docs on their site. They alerted the ripped-off university, hitherto oblivious to the global role they were about to play.

6) East Anglia hacking shows clear dividing line in opinions on einvornmental regulations. Rush Limbaugh says the docs were liberated by a whistleblower. ZDnet poll respondents heavily in favor of full disclosure of all global warming data and documents. One left-wing colunist calls for resignation of Eaat Anglia researcher prominent in the emails.

7) Hacking may have happened last month. Dr. James Hansen weighs in, science is solid but the emails show bad judgement. Republican Senator preparing for investigation of global warming research in U.S.

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November 26th, 2009

India goes to Copenhagen

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 10:43 am

Categories: Blogroll, India, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, fossil fuel, global warming, law & politics

Tags: emissions, greenhouse gases, Copenhagen

As the world’s fourth largest producer of CO2 emissions, India is crucial to any possible agreement in Copenhagen next month. Here’s a look at how that nation’s leaders see the international emissions debate.

India has positioned itself as spokesnation for many underdeveloped nations: the rich guys should pay first and pay most. Don’t hold back India because you’ve been driving cars and burning tons of coal for decades. We in India have a right to our share of the economic pie.

This argument will be parroted in the U.S.Congress by those working to stop any energy and emission regulation law. See, they can say, if we clamp down on our pollutilon it will just give India another economic advantage in competing with our corporations and leach out even more U.S. jobs. Once the media have forgotten about the medical insurance issue, jobs and the lack of jobs in the U.S. will become the national obsession. So job-related arguments will be paramount for most of 2010, an election year as well.

November 26th, 2009

East Anglia: anger and aggro

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 10:20 am

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, global warming, law & politics, ocean, research

Tags: Tobacco, Climate Change, Harry Fuller

Still no public info on who hacked the Univrersity of East Anglia’s climate study center.

One right-wing British pub finds the “climate change lobby” to be “oviously traumatised.” And then goes on to warn that the global warming crowd has shifted its tactics to “cleaner air is good for you.” Does anybody really think all the human-caused particulates and nitrous compounds in the air are simply adding fiber to our diet? Well, that writer’s conclusion: clean air, be afraid, be very afraid. Just another conpsiracy to take away your freedom?

On our sister website, here’s a look at the code behind the hockey stick temperature curve developed at East Anglia. Code or crud? Using that CBS report as a basis, one “Atlantic” writer anlyzes what’s really at stake in the East Anglia affair.

The facts remain: even if East Anglia never had a university, ice sheets and glaciers are melting, the Northwest Passage is now real, plants and animals are shifting their range upslope or northward in response to milder winters. At issue after East Anglia: how far does this climate change go and should we try to do anything about it?

It would be extremely naive, it seems to me, to assume that anything humans do or don’t do about global warming will have the intended affect. Our ignorance of the our planet remains massive. Unintended consequences are almost certain to ensue.

WHO’S FOOLING WHO?

Wow, a Murdoch-owned website actually published, in the UK, a column on how the current campaign against climate change science mirrors the tobacco industry’s defense of its cancer sticks over decades. That’s a parallel I’ve blogged about a few times. Now the fossil fuel industry is funding the disinformation on climate change.Until the 1970s some tobacco ads actually claimed health-enhancing attributes for their cigarettes. Then they pretended that filtered cigarettes were healthy.
Today tobacco companies, BTW, basically stopped fighting in developed countries and now focus on poor and ill-informed populations. And some impoverished governments are only too happy to have tobacco companies’ freindship and prevent any tobacco regulations.

November 24th, 2009

East Anglia hacking: is this the ultimate litmus test on environmental politics?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:18 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, climate change, conservation, environmental health, global warming, law & politics, research

Tags: Hacking, Global Warming, Harry Fuller

It seems the response a group or person has to the East Anglia climate center hack job is a good indication of moral and political values.

The right-wing John Birch Society calls the revelations from the email “global warming fraud unmasked” and “ideology masked as science.”

Rush Limbaugh declares the emails were made public by “a whistleblower.” In Rush’s world the science of global warming is a hoax. “the whole global warming — manmade global warming movement is a fraud. It is a hoax. It’s made-up lies.”

One Fox news commentator says, “Usually academic research is completely ignored by the general public but in this case proposed regulations, costing trillions of dollars, are being based on many of these claimed research results. This coordinated campaign to hide scientific information appears unprecedented.”

Unprecedented? Guess he chooses to overlook the tobacco companies’ efforts to cleanse records connecting cigarettes and various cancers. And then there’s the usual claim that cleaning up the atmosphere is too costly. In fact, like scrubbing the gases that were causing acid rain, cleaning the air often creates more jobs and more profits as well as makes the planet healthier.

On the left there’s already a call for one scientist prominently represented in the emails ro resign, and a call for the data to be re-analyzed.

That scientist granted his first interview since the theft. He says there is no conspiracy. “That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice.”
It’s likely there’ll be a United Kingdom government investigation, not just of the theft, but the actions of those at the East Anglia climate study center. Says one British scientist, “The selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages has created the impression of impropriety, and the only way of clearing the air now would be through a rigorous investigation. ”

The BBC quotes one American climate scientist on the issue of transparency:
“The need for public credibility and transparency has dramatically increased in recent years as the policy relevance of climate research has increased.”

That’s shorthand for “We’re asking countries to make the kind of effort that usually goes for war or hosting the Olympics, so let’s be careful.”

That opinion in favor of transparency coincides with the majority of ZDnet blog readers repsonding to our poll on the hacking affair.

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There’ll no doubt be much palaver in the U.S. Congress with Republican global warming skeptics there already calling for an investigation.

So far there’s no indication the hacking and publication of the docs from East Anglia will have any material effect on the Copenhagen talks.

November 24th, 2009

Climate scientists saying global warming trend is worsening

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:00 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, climate change, conservation, environmental health, global warming, law & politics, ocean, research

Tags: Scientist, Climate, Global Warming, Harry Fuller

Today a 64-page “Copenhagen Diagnosis” was released by a group of climate scientists from several nations. They say now it looks like the average global temps couldclimb more than ten degrees Fahrenheit this century. Sea levels could increase more than three feet.

This report concludes that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are near the top of what the IPCC thought was possible when they issued their most recent report in 2007. The group says work on reducing man-caused greenhouse gasemissions must begin now.

“Our available emissions to ensure a reasonably secure climate future are just about used up,” said Matthew England, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The 26 scientists from eight countries also say the polar ice caps are melting faster than expected. That the need for international action is “urgent.”

The group urges international action at the Copenhagen talks that begin December 7.

November 24th, 2009

Intel encourages green tech at the university level

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 5:50 am

Categories: China, Russia, climate change, conservation, green tech, research

Tags: Team, Green Technology, Intel Corp., Team Management, Management, Heather Clancy

Spoke with one of the teams that participated last week in the Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. Although not strictly a green technology competition, there were a number of teams focused on solving environmental issues through innovative applications of technology.

One great example was the team I interviewed, which represented AMIREco, a year-old Russian venture that has developed a phosphate material that can be used to remove oil from soil or from other materials.

Igor Rozhdestvensky, senior partner of the venture from St. Petersburg, says the company recently earned a contract to test its idea at a site in Russia in conjunction with a large Russian company in his company’s target customer demographic. Rozhdestvensky and several other AMIREco partners traveled to the challenge event in order to gather ideas for how to develop and market their idea, as well as how to produce it in scale and not just small test batches. “Intel gave us an excellent course on entrepreneurship,” he says.

They also walked away from the event with some suggestions about how to overcome certain potential challenges with the materials, says the company’s research and development manager Oleg Rozhdestvensky.

Two other green-techie ideas represented during the competition were Treems from Technical University Munich, which is pitching a way of identifying, selling and managed protected trees or other forestry resources, and the New Green team from Shanghai, which was pitching cards (sort of like the ph tests you would do on the pool in your backyard) for detecting the presence of pesticides and bacterias in Chinese food products.

Here’s a link to more information about the winner of the challenge, a Chinese student development team called Ihealth that is working on biodegradable bone screws. The team was awarded $25,000 by Intel to help fund it idea. Here’s a list of all the teams that participated.

November 23rd, 2009

Atmospheric CO2 levels to hit million-year high

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 8:29 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, energy, environmental health, fossil fuel, global warming, petroleum, research

Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Current Climate Change Theory, IPCC, Harry Fuller

American scientists say the CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere are going to hit levels not seen in the past million years. Current climate change theory says CO2 is one of the gases that is causing global warming.

Researchers say the additional CO2 entering the atmosphere is stable and can remain for thousands of years. As fast as plants absorb CO2, more is being added. The IPCC says the additional CO2 is partially due to human acticity, especially burning fossil fuels and wood.

The rise of CO2 in the atmosphere has been measured since 1998 when records were first kept. This past year has seen the CO2 concentration increase slightly faster. The World Moeteorlogical Organization says the increase began with the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago. The three main greenhouse gases are CO2, methane and N2O (nitrous oxide). All three have both natural and man-made causes.

The IPCC projects that the current CO2 emission curve would raise global temps from 4.3 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end. Temperatures are already 1 degree higher in the past century. The IPCC says this warming’s mainly due to the build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Such warming is predicted to change weather patterns with more extreme weather events. More drought and famine. Political and demographic disruption. More floods. Extinction of numerous plant and animal species. Rising sea levels along with the melting of land ice. Those are the IPCC predictions. Sounds like just another 2012 movie, doesn’t it?

November 23rd, 2009

EPA reports positive news on vehicle emissions, efficiency front

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:40 pm

Categories: air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, green tech, research

Tags: Carbon Dioxide, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Carbon Dioxide Emission, Heather Clancy

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is included carbon dioxide emissions information in its annual report, “Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2009.”

The news is relatively positive: Not only has fuel efficiency increased for the fifth consecutive year — to an average of 21.1 miles per gallon compared with 21 miles per gallon — the agency reports that average carbon dioxide emissions have decreased since 2005. Since 2004, average carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced by 39 grams per mile, which is a reduction of about 8 percent. This reverses a trend from 1987 to 2004, when carbon dioxide emissions increased and fuel efficiency decline, according to the EPA.

Here’s the trends report.

Try to tell me this is a bad thing.

November 23rd, 2009

British scientists call for action in Copenhagen

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 5:55 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, air pollution, climate change, energy, environmental health, global warming, law & politics, research

Tags: U.K., Copenhagen, Harry Fuller

Here’s a joint statement from the UK’s Met Office, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Royal Society on the the science of climate change ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference.

If you don’t care to read it, they’re saying: evidence of global warming is piling up, things are already deteriorating and humans should do something. Not mentioning the East Anglia hacking there in the UK, they say, “Climate scientists from the UK and across the world are in overwhelming agreement about the evidence of climate change, driven by the human input of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

The Copenhagen climate conference begins December 7th.

November 23rd, 2009

U.S. will propose emissions reduction before Copehagen talks

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:13 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, climate change, environmental health, federal government, law & politics

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Emission, U.S. Congress, Greenhouse Gas, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, House, Harry Fuller

The international conference on global warming will begin December 7th in Copenhagen, Denmark. Before that time the U.S. government will make a proposal about specific targets for emission reductions. This will be a complete reversal of the American official stance of the past nine years.

No legislation will have passed through Congress before December 7, so the White House position will be necessarily “nuanced” to take into account the tender feelings of the Congress. The House has passed a bill that calls for a 17% greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2020. The bills being bandied about the Senate set a slightly more aggressive goal. But like much in Washington it’s all smoke and vapor, until it’s real. And there’ll be no official energy and climate legislation out of this Congress this calendar year. The Senate now expects to talk energy in the spring. Assuming the healthcare bill doesn’t prove fatal. (Just kidding.)

Meanwhile, the EPA is back there studying and preparing. The EPA has already said it will begin to curtail emissions from major American industries, having declared CO2 emissions a public health hazard.