Scientists say the jury is still out on whether rising sea temperatures will cause more hurricanes to hit U.S. coastlines. Yet some insurance companies are boosting premiums based on assumptions that they will. Others are withdrawing from coastal communities altogether. Last year, Leanne Lord of Marion, Mass., decided to put her house up for sale after her insurance premiums more than doubled to about $2,892 a year since 2005. Many of her Cape Cod neighbors, who hadn’t seen a hurricane in the area since 1991, followed suit. Today, there’s a glut of houses on the local market.

“A lot of people can’t afford to live here anymore, between the insurance and the taxes having gone up so much,” says Ms. Lord, a 52-year-old public-health nurse. “They have been forced to leave and I think that is really sad.” Costs for homeowner insurance along the East and Gulf coasts have risen 20% to 100% since 2004, says the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. In the three years through 2006, says the institute, property and casualty insurers registered record profits, topping out at $65.8 billion in 2006. (Despite severe U.S. weather that has caused about $8.9 billion in insured property losses to date this year, it’s too early to forecast 2008 profits.)

Helping to drive these developments is a little-known tool of the insurance world: Computerized catastrophe modeling. Crafted by several independent firms and used by most insurers, so-called cat models rely on complex data to estimate probable losses from hurricanes. But regulators and other critics contend that the latest cat models—which include assumptions about various climate changes—are triggering higher insurance rates (or cancelled or denied coverage).

The impact from cat models on homeowners along the East and Gulf coasts has stirred some of the greatest controversy. In New Jersey, State Farm Mutual Insurance Co. and a subsidiary of Allstate Corp. have declined to renew at least 12,000 customers with homes near the ocean. In Mississippi, several insurers, including Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., have stopped covering wind damage in six counties along the Gulf. Some homeowners in the region got a 90% premium increase in 2006. And in Florida, State Farm, the largest private insurer there, said recently it would no longer write new homeowner policies and planned to drop 50,000 existing ones.

Read more here.

If the price of gasoline is around $4 a gallon, Americans have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, we have demonized the people and businesses who supply our energy. Energy fuels our economy and prosperity, but bad public policies have made it increasingly more difficult to develop our own vast resources. Americans are in danger of falling irreversibly into a dysfunctional culture and fading into the dust of history.

We sit on our own undeveloped energy supplies and complain about the high price of gasoline and imported oil. Public policy in the United States is not designed to facilitate the development of new energy supplies, but to stop it. The U.S. government has placed the Continental Shelves of the U.S. off-limits for drilling. Offshore drilling would have virtually no significant effect on environmental quality.  But our energy policies are not determined by science, reason or facts. Energy policy in the United States is held hostage by a fanatical environmentalism based on emotion, fraud and deceit. The common-sense conservation ethics of Henry Thoreau, John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt have been supplanted by a radical ideology that is anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-human. In the 18th century, Rousseau argued that humanity had been ruined by agriculture and metallurgy. In the 21st century, it’s fossil fuels and technology. The exaltation of the primitive is rooted in a hatred of the human mind. This suicidal and nihilistic creed can only lead us back to the Stone Age.

Global warming is a fraud and a hysterical scare tactic. Recent warming trends are very modest, and well within the range of natural variation. Predictions of future warming are based on speculative computer models whose accuracy cannot be evaluated or even tested. Sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is at the highest level since satellite monitoring began in 1979. Last summer there was record low snowmelt in Antarctica. During April this year, 1,185 new all-time record low temperatures were recorded at U.S. weather stations. Given these facts, it is difficult to see how global warming can be real, or how we can be in the middle of a “climate crisis.”

But when these data are related to environmentalists, there is no sense of relief. Instead, it makes them angry that they might be deprived of their primary excuse to make war on civilization.

We need energy policies that actually produce energy. Fossil fuels, conventional and unconventional, are far from depleted and will remain our primary energy sources for many decades. The United States has enough oil and gas resources to meet our energy needs for hundreds of years. Nothing but our own ignorance stands in the way of developing them.

David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis and an associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma

Senator Barbara Boxer is one of Washington’s most skilled close-in fighters, a tough scrapper unsurpassed in her zeal for bare-knuckled political brawl. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, knows this better than most, having served opposite Boxer on the Senate’s environment committee for years. As that panel’s chairwoman, Boxer has led the push for global warming legislation as well as attacks on efforts to boost American sources of oil.

She was fighting again this week, saying U.S. oil companies that favor new exploration in Alaska and off America’s coasts already sit on 68 million acres of federal oil leases - suggesting big oil is trying to leverage new leases and greater profits. “I say they should use it or lose it,” said Boxer, D-Calif.

People who know oil know that Boxer and others don’t know what they’re talking about - or worse, that they’re distorting facts to win a debate.

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute recently explained that offshore leases, especially, are a crapshoot. Until exploration occurs, a company can’t know whether a lease will produce, Cavaney wrote. Many don’t. If there isn’t enough oil to justify drilling costs, a company will move to more promising leases. “All during this active exploration and evaluation phase, however, the lease is listed as ‘nonproducing.’ Because a lease is not producing, critics cite it as ‘idle’ when, in reality, it is typically being actively explored and developed.”

Boxer probably knows better, but Washington is accustomed to debates that blur facts to win an argument. This one’s too important for grandstanding. As Cavaney noted, Congress has kept American energy sources locked up too long. If these sources had been developed years ago, “America would not be in the energy bind it finds itself in today,” he wrote. True that.

If the cheerleading section for Gordon Campbell’s gas tax will sit quiet for a moment, I’d like you to meet some smart folks who think the premier’s plan is pure madness. They call themselves the International Climate Science Coalition, whose chairman is Tim Patterson, Earth Sciences Professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University. They got together in New York in March to hammer out a response to what they considered to be unnecessary global panic over climate change. What came out of their meeting was a document called the Manhattan Declaration, a blistering indictment of the received wisdom on global warming. (Note: also see this story where signatories topped 1,100).

What heresies does it contain? The kind to make David Suzuki’s toes curl. First, it “affirms that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant, but rather a necessity for all life.” It says: “Attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.” There’s more! Current plans to restrict man-made CO2 emissions, “are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.”

Carbon taxes “will reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering. “All taxes, regulations and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 (should) be abandoned forthwith.” Back to the ICSC. As Tim Patterson puts it: “Millions of Canadians are coming to understand that the only constant about climate change IS change—it changes constantly.  Yet, governments continue wasting our money on the ridiculous goal of ‘stopping climate change.’” Read more here.

"Big Coal is firing back at James Hansen, NASA’s top climate expert, who on Monday told a House committee on energy and climate that he thought top executives of coal and oil companies should be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature.”

Below is a note sent to me by Vic Svec, who you heard from here earlier in the year in relation to efforts by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, a rising star in the Democratic Party, to deny permits for two proposed coal-burning power plants because of their potential contribution to global warming. Mr. Svec is a senior vice president for Peabody, which is the largest private coal producer in the world (to get an idea of their volume, and mission, visit peabodyenergy.com and watch the amazing coal-sales “ticker” at the bottom reel off tons of coal sold per second.

Here’s what Mr. Svec said about Dr. Hansen’s assertions:
1. His use of Holocaust analogies is outrageous and demeaning. It cheapens the dialogue and invites ridicule.
2. The suggestion that a dissemination of ideas be criminalized –- coming from a government employee no less –- does hearken back to World War II. It is stunning and should be pounced upon by everyone who advocates free speech, from the ACLU and talk radio complex to yourself.
3. Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If he would imprison those who don’t march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the Czech Republic, a former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.
4. Speaking for Peabody, our time and energy are being devoted to satisfying an energy-hungry world’s need for coal and advancing the commercialization of carbon capture and storage technology. Among other initiatives, we’re proud to have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by more than 30% since 1990; to be the initial developer of a supercritical coal plant that will emit 15% lower carbon dioxide than existing plants; to be a founding member of the FutureGen Alliance; to be a part of Australia’s low-carbon Coal 21 program; and to be the only non-Chinese partner in China’s zero-emissions GreenGen project.

In short, while some are interested in sound bites, we’ll keep going about the serious work of providing clean coal, energy solutions and environmental improvement.
Best Regards,
Vic Svec

Yesterday, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, called for oil executives to be tried for “high crimes against humanity and nature.” He also pledged to campaign against members of Congress with “poor” climate-change records, reported the Guardian. This follows comparisons of adversaries to Holocaust deniers and bosses of organized crime and a long record of adversarial relations with the elected officials who, in theory, oversee him. In short, Mr. Hansen sounds like a member of Congress, or perhaps Al Gore - which, indeed, points to two of the legitimate options a vocal, caustic public advocate such as Mr. Hansen has in a representative democracy. High technocrat for global warming is not one of them.

The question is: Would Mr. Hansen’s blatant political advocacy be tolerated anywhere else in the federal government? Could a decorated general advocate an invasion of Iran or North Korea, calling his congressional opponents weak or traitorous, without violating his office? Of course not. The NASA climate-science chief should stop trading on the public trust of an unappointed federal scientific position and try running for one of the offices that possess the legitimate powers he seeks to usurp.

Certainly no one should expect Mr. Hansen to act upon the merits of this argument on his own. A scientific institution such as the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is perhaps the ideal place for an ambitious empire-builder to push the limits of political advocacy while retaining the credibility of science. Housed in New York City’s Columbia University and affiliated with its well-funded, well-connected Earth Institute, Mr. Hansen’s operation is far removed from Washington’s political tentacles at Goddard’s main campus in Beltsville, Md. The United States is still a representative democracy. The sort of high-priest technocrat that Mr. Hansen presumes to be stands outside that tradition. An advocate is an advocate. Read more here.

As noted in other posts, IPCC policies state: All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process and will be retained in an open archive in a location determined by the IPCC Secretariat on completion of the Report for a period of at least five years.

Despite this, IPCC Review Editor John Mitchell of the UK Met Office claimed to have destroyed all their working documents and correspondence pertaining to his duties as Review Editor and the Met Office also claims to have expunged all records. David Holland has also made FOI inquiries to Keith Briffa, a lead author of AR4 chapter 6. The June 3rd refusal by David Palmer included the following comments:

“In accordance with s.17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 this letter acts as a Refusal Notice, and I am not obliged to supply this information and the reasons for exemption are as stated below

Cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit: The cost of finding and assembling the information will exceed the appropriate limit

Information provided in confidence: The release of this information would constitute an actionable breach of confidence.

Given the amount of material covered by your request, the cost of compliance in locating, retrieving and in the reading, editing or redaction of the relevant documents would clearly exceed the appropriate limit. Additionally, we hold that the exemption applies to all requested correspondence received by the University. We have consistently treated this information as confidential and have been assured by the persons and organisations giving this information to us that they believe it to be confidential and would expect to be treated as such. The public interest in withholding this information outweighs that of releasing it due to the need to protect the openness and confidentiality of academic intercourse prior to publication which, in turn, assures that such cooperation & openness can continue and inform scientific research and debate.”

OK, CRU says that they have “been assured by the persons and organisations giving this information to us that they believe it to be confidential” OK, what “organisations” are we talking about here? The only organization in question is IPCC, whose procedures require that comments be public. Is IPCC interfering at CRU off the record to prevent CRU from releasing supposedly open comments? Read more here.

Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria is one of a number of Scandinavian royals making for the Arctic archipelago on the Swedish ice-breaker Oden this weekend to participate in an event to coincide with and promote International Polar Year.

But will there even be a need for such ice-breaking vessels in years to come? Many commentators would have us believe that glaciers and ocean ice are about to go the way of the dodo. Upon their arrival at Svalbard in Norway, however, the royals are likely to be informed by Swedish polar researchers that there is in fact very little concrete proof tying global warming to climate changes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. Some indeed argue that there is more change in today’s political rhetoric than there is in the environment.

Every researcher seems to display a similar reticence when it comes to drawing far-reaching conclusions. Andrew Mercer studies the changes in glacier forms in the Arctic region at Stockholm University. “It is quite a big picture—we are talking about the whole planet. We have to compare many studies and often data is not available elsewhere in the same way it is here in Sweden,” he says, before adding that churches in Sweden have meteorological records dating back a few hundred years. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, was one of the first Swedish scientists to study the effects of climate on wildlife.

“In the 1980s and 1990s, Swedish glaciers grew in size, which should indicate that we have had colder weather. But in fact there were other factors that contributed to their growth,” Mercer says.

A tiny oasis in the vast expanse of Sweden’s glacier-carved Lapland wilderness, 625 miles north of Stockholm, Riksgransen was host to Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships, an extreme freeriding contest

Last year Sweden invested more than 33 million kronor ($5 million) on research in the Arctic region, which covers almost one quarter of the nation’s landmass. Most of the Swedish funding, according to many researchers, goes mainly toward surveying the effects of climate change on glaciers and wildlife. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, ACIA, anticipates the disappearance of all ocean ice in the period from 2060-2100 should global warming continue at the current rate. However, Swedish scientists are not convinced that today’s meteorological trends will stand the test of time. Read more here.