ICECAP

Jun 02, 2010

From Climate Wars to Congress? By Paul Chesser

As has been reported here regularly, global warming alarmists have been losing to their opponents on the facts, on their credibility, in the public’s eyes. Now there’s the possibility they could actually lose a Congressional seat to a climate realist, and that really scares them.

Dr. Art Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and director of the Global Warming Petition Project which has collected the signatures of more than 31,000 scientists who dissent from climate catastrophism, is the Republican nominee to challenge Rep. Peter DeFazio in Oregon’s 4th District. The prospect of a Robinson victory in this year of Tea Party momentum has the state’s official climatologist (and data-fudger) Philip Mote in a tizzy, as he expressed in an email from his Oregon State University account to a listserv of other academics and students. The Oregon Politico reports:

Mote began the e-mail by acknowledging that Art Robinson was chosen during last week’s Republican primary race to run against incumbent Democrat Congressman Peter DeFazio, who represents the Eugene area. Robinson gained fame with his work on the Oregon Petition Project, a list of scientists worldwide who disagree with the premise that climate change is caused by humans.

“A Robinson [sic] victory would put us in the tragic ranks of our climate colleagues at University of Oklahoma (Senator ‘global warming is a hoax’ Inhofe) and Univ of Alaska (Rep. ‘scientists have their opinion, I have mine’ Young),” wrote Mote.

ICECAP explains a bit of Mote’s history, which fits nicely with the Climategate narrative:

Phil Mote...published a cherry picked data analysis allegedly linking western snowpack to global warming....Mote’s paper while state climatologist for Washington State was published readily by the sadly advocacy driven [American Meteorological Society]. The much more qualified Oregon state climatologist he subsequently replaced, George Taylor, and the Assistant Washington State Climatologist Mark Albright (who Mote stripped of his title for questioning Mote’s hypothesis)—and even UWA warmist Professor Cliff Mass—published papers that showed by analyzing the entire record you see no trend but a cyclical change related clearly to the [Pacific Decadal Oscillation]. See how with the recent change to the negative PDO, heavy snow has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Given the imminent return to La Nina and forecast for deepening of the negative PDO stage, another wild winter with deep snowpack is likely.

Mote apparently received a wrist-slap from OSU, as he wrote a later email to the listserv to apologize and calling the original one “a mistake.”

How is it so many of these activist climate scientists are so gaffe-prone?

Update 12:18 p.m.: My friend Todd Myers at the Washington Policy Center calls attention to another instance two years ago, when Mote had to recant incorrect testimony he gave to the state legislature.

Read more here.

May 29, 2010

Uncertain Science Newsweek

Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust.

Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically. In uber-green Germany, only 42 percent of citizens worry about global warming now, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Britain, just 26 percent believe climate change is man-made, down from 41 percent as recently as November 2009. And Americans rank global warming dead last in a list of 21 problems that concern them, according to a January Pew poll.

The shift has left many once celebrated climate researchers feeling like the used-car salesmen of the science world. In Britain, one leading scientist told an interviewer he is taking anti-anxiety pills and considered suicide following the leak of thousands of IPCC-related e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming. In the U.S., another researcher is under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds. In an open letter published in the May issue of Science magazine, 255 American climate researchers decry “political assaults” on their work by “deniers” and followers of “dogma” and “special interests.”

This is no dispute between objective scientists and crazed flat-earthers. The lines cut through the profession itself. Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity” - the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.

The backlash against climate science is also about the way in which leading scientists allied themselves with politicians and activists to promote their cause. Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports - including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Just as damaging, many climate scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and reasoned arguments. When other researchers aired doubt about the IPCC’s prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, the IPCC’s powerful chief, Rajendra Pachauri, trashed their work as “voodoo science.” Even today, after dozens of IPCC exaggerations have surfaced, leading climate officials like U.N. Environment Program chief Achim Steiner and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research head Joachim Schellnhuber continue to tar-brush critics as “anti-Enlightenment” and engaging in “witch hunts.”

None of this means we should burn fossil fuels with abandon. There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels - including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast - and how much - global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

May 29, 2010

Rebel scientists force Royal Society to accept climate change scepticism Ben Webster, Environment Editor

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.

The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.

The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect - there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.

Sir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.

He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.

Sir Alan, 72, an electrical engineer, is a member of the advisory council of the climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

He said: “I think the Royal Society should be more neutral and welcome credible contributions from both sceptics and alarmists alike. There is a lot of science to be done before we can be certain about climate change and before we impose upon ourselves the huge economic burden of cutting emissions.”

He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.

“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”

Only a fraction of the society’s 1,300 Fellows were approached and a third of those declined to sign the petition.

The rebels are concerned by a document entitled Climate Change Controversies, published by the society in 2007. The document attempts to refute what it describes as the misleading arguments employed by sceptics.

The document, which the society has used to influence media coverage of climate change, concludes: “The science clearly points to the need for nations to take urgent steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, as much and as fast as possible, to reduce the more severe aspects of climate change.”

Lord Rees admitted that there were differing views among Fellows but said that the new guide would be “based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence”.

Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, urged the other signatories to come forward. “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it.”

He said that the petition would fuel public doubt about climate change and that it was important to know how many of the signatories had professional knowledge of the topic.

May 29, 2010

Mining for Cold, Hard Facts By Robert Lee Hotz

WEST ANTARCTICA—At a camp here on Earth’s remotest continent, American researchers have constructed a towering drill that, like a biopsy needle, periodically plunges thousands of feet into the ice to extract an exotic marrow of frozen gases and isotopes.

Their work could settle a central question in the dispute over climate change, by documenting how greenhouse gases influenced temperatures in the past. Only then can researchers accurately analyze climate changes that may be under way today.

Until now, that information was hidden in Antarctica’s ancient ice.

Scientists agree that global temperatures are rising, and so are levels of carbon dioxide. But the immediate impact of human activity on natural climate cycles—from ice-sheet dynamics to wind and ocean currents—remains unclear. The Antarctica research could, for the first time, teach scientists how global warming developed when humankind had no hand in it.

“One of the questions that everybody is interested in with greenhouse gases is, did the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations occur before or after the increase in temperatures in the past climate changes?” says glaciologist Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist of the $30 million U.S. National Science Foundation project. “Ice cores are the only way we can answer that question.”

Ten times a day, scientists here recently winched up a 10-foot cylinder of compacted ice crystals containing the unsullied air and chemicals trapped by snowfall for the past 100,000 years.

Each cylinder preserves bubbles of ancient air and layers of elements swept here by global winds. The ice records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures every year since before the last Ice Age, laminated by the cold in a parfait of time two miles thick.

In March, a shipment of this rare ice completed an 8,000-mile journey to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where it will be parceled out for analysis. Only Antarctica offers such a detailed calendar of climate change, the scientists say.

Since November, revelations of errors in reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have sapped public confidence in climate predictions. The scientists in Antarctica are excavating the ice as a reality check on computer climate models at the heart of today’s regulatory debates.

Much of the current controversy over climate change centers on efforts to reconstruct past temperatures using what is known as “proxy” data from tree rings, harvest records, sea beds and lake sediments. Unlike ice cores, which contain telltale gases and particles from ages ago, the proxy data offer only indirect or fragmentary evidence of climate trends.

“Unfortunately many of our proxies have significant errors and are prone to be a slave to assumptions,” says climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has often criticized the IPCC. His research, using temperature readings from NOAA and NASA satellites, has undermined arguments that the atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate.

The ice-core data from Antarctica is “terribly important,” Dr. Christy says. “We really need to know what the climate did before we can answer why it did what it did. If it happened before, it will happen again, and probably worse.”

The camp here, 600 miles from the South Pole, is called WAIS Divide, named for its place atop a regional divide of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In January, 45 scientists, technicians and support staffers labored here at a cost of about $3 million for the season. They worked around the clock, inside an icehouse, probing a plateau of ice so thick that the continent sags beneath its weight.

The first samples already reveal intriguing evidence of climate complexity. In ice layers attributed to the Middle Ages, when Europe was unusually warm, the team found surprisingly high levels of carbon black particles, or soot. Levels were found to be twice as high as during the more heavily populated and industrialized 20th century, says geochemist Ross Edwards at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.

Overlooked in climate projections until recently, carbon black is a powerful warming agent. The soot, scientists speculate, came from giant wildfires that likely occurred in Australia and South America. So much soot could have raised temperatures.

Preliminary tests also showed that soot levels dropped during the cooler centuries after the Middle Ages, a period known as the Little Ice Age.

With more ice data, scientists hope to pin down the role of carbon dioxide in past global-warming episodes. Rising levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere today are attributed to fossil-fuel emissions, land-use changes, cement production and agriculture. But no one is certain what made greenhouse gases fluctuate in the past.

During Ice Age cycles of cooling and warming, temperatures often rose before levels of carbon dioxide changed—sometimes 800 years or so before—according to previous evidence of ice from Antarctica.

“You don’t expect the cause to follow the effect,” says atmospheric scientist Richard S. Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a frequent IPCC critic. “That’s become an important issue.”

Skeptics of carbon dioxide’s role in global warming have made much of this discrepancy. They don’t question the reliability of the data, but its interpretation, Dr. Lindzen says.

Climate scientists offer explanations for the lag, from periodic variations in solar radiation due to Earth’s orbit and changing ocean currents, to problems with the dating of the data itself. But they lack enough information to prove them.

The ice may hold the answer. “This ice core is going to allow us to really look at the cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 [carbon dioxide] and climate and temperature change,” says Julie Palais, head of the NSF’s Antarctica glaciology program, which is funding the project. “That should give us the smoking gun.”

To ensure accuracy, 27 independent laboratories will analyze the ice cores during the next three years. They expect to analyze 40 different trace chemicals related to climate, some in levels down to parts per quadrillion.

At every stage, the scientists must be able to prove that the ice cores haven’t been contaminated. They must also make sure the samples stay at minus-20 degrees Celsius or so throughout their 8,000-mile journey to Colorado. Otherwise, the key gases will dissipate.

“Its credibility is of crucial importance,” said Thomas Stocker at the University of Bern in Switzerland, a co-chairman of the United Nations working group that assesses data for the IPCC.

Antarctica is a vast climate-science laboratory. For millennia, each new storm here captured the dust and chemicals brought by high-altitude winds from warmer latitudes and concentrated them at the bottom of the earth as the snow piled up and compressed into ice.

Gradually, the snow pack became a periodic table of elements and temperatures 11,365 feet deep. “Because it never melts, they are perfectly preserved,” says hydrologist Ray Banta from the Desert Research Institute, who is analyzing the ice.

Dr. Taylor and his colleagues chose the remote drilling site in part because the snow and ice here accumulates about 10 times faster than most places in Antarctica. That means the annual layers are thicker and easier to tell apart.

Winter snowflakes are usually smaller and more densely packed, easily distinguished from the looser summer snow. By testing differences in acidity and electrical conductivity, researchers can also distinguish one year from the next.

Ice cores excavated elsewhere before in Antarctica have tapped into even more ancient ice. But none of these ice cores offered such well-defined annual layers as those here at the WAIS Divide.

Scientists here expect to harvest extremely detailed data for each of the past 40,000 years, plus another 60,000 years of data using both proven and experimental measuring techniques. Modern records of carbon dioxide levels go back a mere 50 years, and reliable temperature readings cover only the last 150 years or so.

By measuring oxygen isotopes, the scientists can track the rise and fall of seasonal temperatures. Sulfates and ash reveal volcanic eruptions, which can help determine the age of the ice.

Light isotopes of carbon in the ice can suggest the extent of vegetation elsewhere in the world. Calcium and a rare earth element called cerium hint at the extent of the world’s deserts, while sodium is a measure of ocean storminess and sea spray. Soot and ammonium record wildfires. Methane is a clue to distant rainfall. Beryllium indicates changes in solar radiation.

The snow also traps air. “In between snowflakes, there are holes,” says Anais Orsi, a climate researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “As they get compacted into ice, it seals in the air.”

Each ice core is about 10% ancient air—a time capsule of the atmosphere unchanged from the year it formed. “It is as if you opened a flask of air sampled 100,000 years ago or so,” says Dr. Stocker in Bern. “It gives you direct, unbiased, unchanged access to its physical and chemical properties.”

Spinning at 80 revolutions per minute, the $8 million drill chewed through the ice with four hardened tool-steel cutters, boring ever deeper into ice that bottoms out a mile below sea level.

Every few hours, technicians from the University of Wisconsin in Madison put a narrow log of ice taken from the drill barrel into a frigid work room, where, bundled in red government-issue parkas, researchers inspected it, measured it and cut it into 3-foot sections for easier handling.

Their cheeks were blushed from frost; their eyes reddened by the glare of polar ultra-violet light. Stiff wisps of hair whitened by frost framed their faces. As they handled the ice, they kept an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven, to don when their work gloves froze and fingers stiffened.

They slept in unheated tents on a snowfield smooth as a starched shirt. They were allocated one bucket of snow to melt for a shower once a week and three buckets of snow for laundry. In blizzard winds, crews slung guide ropes so that people could safely feel their way to the nearest outhouse.

Working conditions are so harsh the researchers consider themselves lucky to run the drill 35 days a year. By the end of January they had drilled 1.5 miles into the ice. They packaged 4,500 feet of ice cores in individual three-foot tubes, padded with snow. Then, they packed up the entire camp onto 68 wooden pallets for storage on the open ice cap until they can return next season. It may be another year or so before they can reach the bottom of the ice cap.

The New York Air National Guard flew the year’s shipment of ice to McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supply base in Antarctica.

There it was put into three refrigerated containers for shipment aboard a freighter across the tropics to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it arrived March 8. Then, the ice was driven across the desert to Denver.

The refrigerated containers each have a back-up power generator and a back-up compressor, which are triggered automatically if the temperature drops. A refrigeration technician accompanies the units. The temperature of the containers is also logged via satellite.

“If it warms past minus 15 degrees C, it is worthless,” says Geoffrey Hargreaves, curator of the National Ice Core Laboratory.

There are four back-up systems to make sure everything stays safely frozen. In the worst case, technicians can flood the facility with liquid carbon dioxide.

Sometime this summer, technicians will start sawing the ice up into small samples and shipping them to laboratories around the country, often via overnight mail. The samples then will be vaporized to free the air and elements within for analysis.

At the peak of activity earlier this year, the crew guided the drill 100 feet deeper into the ice sheet every 24 hours, and another 365 years further into the past.

“The drill is basically a time machine,” said planetary geologist Maria Banks from the Smithsonian’s Center for Earth & Planetary Studies. As she spoke, she carefully wiped down a cylinder of ice that had fallen as snow 15,800 years ago.

May 28, 2010

Society to review climate message By Roger Harrabin, BBC

The UK’s Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages.

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.

The society’s ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.

The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September.

It is chaired by physicist John Pethica, vice-president of the Royal Society.

Its deliberations are reviewed by two critical sub-groups, each believed to comprise seven members.

Each of these groups contains a number of society Fellows who are doubtful in some way about the received view of the risks of rising CO2 levels.

Continue reading the main story It’s not clear to me how we are going to get precise agreement on the wording
Review member
One panel member told me: “The timetable is very tough - one draft has already been rejected as completely inadequate.”

The review member said it might not be possible for the document to be agreed at all. “This is a very serious challenge to the way the society operates,” I was told. “In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a society without having to seek consensus of all the members.

“There is very clear evidence that governments are right to be very worried about climate change. But in any society like this there will inevitably be people who disagree about anything - and my fear is that the society may become paralysed on this issue.”

Another review member told me: “The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised. It’s not clear to me how we are going to get precise agreement on the wording - we are scientists and we’re being asked to do a job of public communication that is more like journalism.”

But both members said they agreed that some of the previous communications of the organisation in the past were poorly judged.

Question everything

A Royal Society pamphlet Climate Change Controversies is the main focus of the criticism. A version of it is on the organisation’s website. It was written in response to attacks on mainstream science which the Royal Society considered scurrilous.

It reads: “This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change…”

One Fellow who said he was not absolutely convinced of the dangers of CO2 told me: “This appears to suggest that anyone who questions climate science is malicious. But in science everything is there to be questioned - that should be the very essence of the Royal Society. Some of us were very upset about that.

“I can understand why this has happened - there is so much politically and economically riding on climate science that the society would find it very hard to say ‘well, we are still fairly sure that greenhouse gases are changing the climate’ but the politicians simply wouldn’t accept that level of honest doubt.”

Another society protester said he wanted to be called a climate agnostic rather than a sceptic. He said he wanted the society’s website to “do more to question the accuracy of the science on climate feedbacks” (in which a warming world is believed to make itself warmer still through natural processes).

“We sent an e-mail round our friends, mainly in physical sciences,” he said.

“Then when we had got 43 names we approached the council in January asking for the website entry on climate to be re-written. I don’t think they were very pleased. I don’t think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society.

“But we won the day, and the work is underway to re-write it. I am very hopeful that we will find a form of words on which we can agree.

“I know it looks like a tiny fraction of the total membership (1,314) but remember we only emailed our friends - we didn’t raise a general petition.”

Precautionary principle

He said the agnostics were also demanding a “more even-handed” bibliography.

The first “climate agnostic” also said he was angry at previous comments from the previous president Lord May who declared: “The debate on climate change is over.”

Lord May was once quoted as saying: “‘On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”

One source strongly criticised the remarks.

Lord May’s comments were made at a time when world scientists were reaching a consensus (not unanimity) that CO2 had warmed the planet and would probably warm it more - maybe dangerously so.

Lobbyists funded by the fossil fuel industry were fighting to undermine that consensus and science academies were concerned that public doubt might deter governments from taking precautionary action to reduce emissions of CO2.

Climate change doubters among the society’s Fellows say that in their anxiety to support government action, the academies failed to distinguish between “hired guns” and genuine scientific agnostics wanting to explore other potential causes of climate change.

The remit of the society panel is to produce a new public-facing document on what scientists know, what they think they know and which aspects they do not fully understand. The task is to make the document strong and robust.

It should answer the complaint that previous communications have failed to properly explain uncertainties in climate science.

Language of risk

At the Heartland Institute climate sceptics conference in Chicago, Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), criticised the current society president Lord Rees for what he described as exaggerating the certainty in a joint public letter with Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences.

The letter, published by the Financial Times newspaper, states: “Something unprecedented is now happening. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising and climate change is occurring, both due to human actions…. Uncertainties in the future rate of (temperature) rise, stemming largely from the ‘feedback’ effects on water vapour and clouds, are topics of current research.”

Professor Lindzen says the “unprecedented” statement is misleading because neither the current warming nor the CO2 level are unprecedented. He complains that the statement on uncertainties is also misleading because it does not reveal that uncertainties about future climate projections are, in his view, immense.

A spokesman for the society defended the letter, saying that the rise in man-made CO2 was indeed unprecedented. But Professor Lindzen told me: “This is part of an inflation of a scientific position which has sadly become rather routine for spokesmen for scientific bodies.”

The forthcoming Royal Society publication - if it can be agreed by the review panel - will be scrutinised closely because the society carries huge weight in global science. Under Lord May it was prime mover of a joint letter of international academies stating that climate change was a major concern.

The comments from the current president Lord Rees in his first Reith lecture next week are rather carefully measured and couched in the language of risk rather than certainty - but even in this speech, critics are likely to say that in some particulars he does not sufficiently distinguish between what is certain and what is very widely believed. See post here.

Too late. The Royal Society like the National Academy under Ralph Cicerone have lost credibility by abusing the science and taking an advocacy position supporting politically-driven,, ecologically-driven agendas.

May 27, 2010

NASA accused of ‘Climategate’ stalling By Stephen Dinan

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

He said with a global warming debate looming in the Senate, NASA may be trying to avoid having embarrassing documents come out at this time, but eventually the e-mails will be released.

“They know time is our friend,” said Mr. Horner, author of “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.”

Mark S. Hess, a spokesman for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which overseas the climate program, said the agency is working as fast as it can, and that Mr. Horner should expect some answers any day.

“It looks like the response to his appeal is probably going to happen very soon. I can’t tell you it’s going to be tomorrow or the next day, but it’s just a matter of days,” Mr. Hess said.

He said he hasn’t seen the response, and doesn’t know whether it will authorize any more information to be released.

The science behind global warming has come under question since e-mails leaked from one of the key sources for global temperature data, the Climatic Research Unit in Britain, seemed to show scientists manipulated data. It became known in the press as “Climategate.”

An investigation has cleared the scientists of deliberate malpractice and declared the basic science credible.

The British investigation also sympathized with scientists being reluctant to share all of their data, but investigators said the science needed to be above reproach and so the more that is shared, the better.

In the case of NASA’s FOIA situation, The Washington Times first reported on the agency’s delinquency in December. At that time, the agency was more than two years overdue on one request and nearing the two-year mark on another request - far longer than the 20 business days allowed under FOIA law for a first response.

After that report, the agency released about 2,000 pages, many of them heavily redacted, to CEI. Mr. Horner said among those pages was evidence he said proves NASA data is based on the British records that have come under fire.

But CEI said the agency withheld e-mails NASA scientists sent from nongovernment e-mails, even though they were doing government science work.

Mr. Horner said he has evidence one scientist went back and deleted time stamps on his Internet postings to his private website, which Mr. Horner said shows the scientist was doing that work on government time.

CEI’s lawsuit, which is expected to be filed in federal district court in Washington, also says that e-mails leaked from the British research unit include documents that should have been released by NASA, but haven’t been.

Mr. Hess said they are fielding more than just CEI’s inquiries, and they are taking them all in order.

“We all understand the statute is 20 days, and we work really hard to comply with that as much as humanly possible, but for the most part, especially for a request where you may have to search thousands of documents, sometimes 20 days is just a herculean task,” he said.

Some of the NASA scientists Mr. Horner targeted with requests have spoken out against the recent FOIA inquiries, calling them an effort to try to intimidate scientists into not publishing their work.

Gavin Schmidt said information requests have ballooned in recent months and that he thinks those making the inquiries are trying “to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public.”

And James E. Hansen, director of GISS, said in a March memo that responding to FOIAs takes away from his time to do research.

He called it “a waste of taxpayer money” and questioned the motives of those filing FOIA requests.

“It seems that a primary objective of the FOIA requesters and the ‘harvesters’ is discussions that they can snip and quote out of context,” he said, warning that could confuse the public and that might delay the pressure Mr. Hansen said will be needed to force policymakers to combat global warming.

The document fight comes as the Senate is preparing for two global warming debates.

One will be on a Republican move to try to overturn Obama administration rules that would let the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon emissions, even without specific new authorization from Congress. The second is expected to be a full-blown debate on Democrats’ bill to combat global warming.

On Wednesday, President Obama said he wants to see action.

“I’m going to keep fighting to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation in Washington,” he said at an event in California. “We’re going to try to get it done this year, because what we want to do is create incentives that will fully unleash the potential for jobs and growth in this sector.”

See full post and comments here. See post in Legal times here.

May 25, 2010

World Energy Use Projected to Grow 49 Percent Between 2007 and 2035 U.S. Energy Information Administration

WASHINGTON, DC - World marketed energy consumption grows 49 percent between 2007 and 2035, driven by economic growth in the developing nations of the world, according to the Reference case projection from the International Energy Outlook 2010 (IEO2010 ) released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). “Renewables are the fastest-growing source of world energy supply, but fossil fuels are still set to meet more than three-fourths of total energy needs in 2035 assuming current policies are unchanged,” said EIA Administrator Richard Newell.

The global economic recession that began in 2007 and continued into 2009 has had a profound impact on near-term prospects for world energy demand. Total marketed energy consumption contracted by 1.2 percent in 2008 and by an estimated 2.2 percent in 2009, as manufacturing and consumer demand for goods and services declined (Figure 1). In the Reference case, as the economic situation improves, most nations are expected to return to the economic growth rates that were projected prior to the downturn. Total world energy use in the Reference case rises 49 percent, from 495 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) in 2007 to 739 quadrillion Btu in 2035.

China and India are among the nations least impacted by the global recession, and they will continue to lead the world’s economic and energy demand growth into the future. In 2007, China and India together accounted for about 20 percent of total world energy consumption. With strong economic growth in both countries over the projection period, their combined energy use more than doubles by 2035, when they account for 30 percent of world energy use in the IEO2010 Reference case. In contrast, the projected U.S. share of world energy consumption falls from 21 percent in 2007 to about 16 percent in 2035.

Average world oil prices increased strongly from 2003 to mid-July 2008, then declined sharply over the rest of 2008. In 2009, oil prices again trended upward and this trend continues in the Reference case, with prices rising to $108 per barrel by 2020 (in real 2008 dollars) and $133 per barrel by 2035. Total liquid fuels consumption projected for 2035 is 28 percent or 24.5 million barrels per day higher than the 2007 level of 86.1 million barrels per day. Conventional oil supplies from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) contribute 11.5 million barrels per day to the total increase in world liquid fuels production, and conventional supplies from non-OPEC countries add another 4.8 million barrels per day. World production of unconventional resources (including biofuels, oil sands, extra-heavy oil, coal-to-liquids, and gas-to-liquids), which totaled 3.4 million barrels per day in 2007, increases nearly fourfold to 12.9 million barrels per day in 2035.

Other report highlights include:

From 2007 to 2035, total world energy consumption rises by an average annual 1.4 percent in the IEO2010 Reference case. Strong economic growth among the non-OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations drives the increase. Non-OECD energy use increases by 2.2 percent per year; in the OECD countries energy use grows by only 0.5 percent per year.

Petroleum and other liquid fuels remain the largest energy source worldwide through 2035, though projected higher oil prices erode their share of total energy use from 35 percent in 2007 to 30 percent in 2035.

World natural gas consumption increases 1.3 percent per year, from 108 trillion cubic feet in 2007 to 156 trillion cubic feet in 2035. Tight gas, shale gas, and coalbed methane supplies increase substantially in the IEO2010 Reference case-especially from the United States, but also from Canada and China.
In the absence of additional national policies and/or binding international agreements that would limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, world coal consumption is projected to increase from 132 quadrillion Btu in 2007 to 206 quadrillion Btu in 2035, at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent. China alone accounts for 78 percent of the total net increase in world coal use from 2007 to 2035.

World net electricity generation increases by 87 percent, from 18.8 trillion kilowatthours in 2007 to 35.2 trillion kilowatthours in 2035. Renewables are the fastest growing source of new electricity generation, increasing by 3.0 percent per year in the Reference case; followed by coal-fired generation, which increases by 2.3 percent per year.

In the IEO2010 Reference case, world industrial energy consumption grows 66 percent, from 184 quadrillion Btu in 2007 to 262 quadrillion Btu in 2035. The non-OECD economies account for about 95 percent of the world increase in industrial sector energy consumption in the Reference case.

Almost 20 percent of the world’s total delivered energy is used for transportation, most of it in the form of liquid fuels. The transportation share of world total liquids consumption increases from 53 percent in 2007 to 61 percent in 2035 in the IEO2010 Reference case, accounting for 87 percent of the total increase in world liquids consumption.

In the IEO2010 Reference case, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rise from 29.7 billion metric tons in 2007 to 42.4 billion metric tons in 2035 - an increase of 43 percent. Much of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions is projected to occur among the developing nations of the world, especially in Asia (Figure 2).

The IEO2010 Highlights can be found on EIA’s web site

(Figure 3).

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