Environmental pressure group Ceres, whose primary activity is to drive corporations to report their greenhouse gas emitting activities and disclose climate risk in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings, recently released a report that outlines exactly what companies should be disclosing.

The report, “Disclosing Climate Risks and Opportunities in SEC Filings: A Guide for Corporate Executives, Attorneys and Directors,” was written by three environmentalist attorneys and was reviewed by representatives of Friends of the Earth, Climate Change Lawyers Network, Carbon Disclosure Project, Natural Resources Defense Council, Investor Environmental Health Network, California Public Employees’ Retirement System, California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and Environmental Defense Fund, plus other “Green” law firms and investor groups.

As global warming alarmists scramble to tamp down another Climategate-related scandal and their dire predictions are shown to be untrue again and again, some corporate leaders are still cowed into reporting imaginary climate “risks” by the tactics of Ceres and their cohorts. The report cited Chiquita Brands International, Siemens, Rio Tinto, AES and Xcel Energy as exemplary corporate climate risk reporters. But those companies represented the responsible minority, according to Ceres.

“Assessments of corporate disclosure practices on climate change show significant improvements in recent years, particularly in voluntary disclosures,” the report concluded. “However, overall disclosure continues to be highly inconsistent and often inadequate, particularly in mandatory filings, and frequently fails to meet the needs of investors.”

Note: It’s the SEC filings that are mandatory, not reporting the alleged climate risks. Indeed when the SEC announced last January its interpretive guidance on disclosure related to climate change, Chairman Mary Schapiro said, “We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace it might be changing, or due to what causes. Nothing that the Commission does today should be construed as weighing in on those topics.” The potential risks that are to be reported are those posed by government regulatory action related to climate change - such as cap-and-trade or EPA regulations - rather than any meteorological threats.

Nevertheless, Ceres and its environmentalist lawyer friends demanded improved corporate reporting in SEC filings pertaining to the following:

“Detailed information about significant physical effects of climate change, such as increased incidence of severe weather, rising sea levels, reduced arability of farmland and reduced water availability, that may materially affect a company’s operations, competitiveness and bottom-line results”

“A thoughtful and candid discussion of management’s understanding of how climate change may effect its business, whether from new opportunities or risks from decreasing demand for high carbon-intensive products or rising demand for cleaner, more energy-efficient products”

“Current direct and indirect GHG emissions from their operations, methodology used to produce such data, and estimated future direct and indirect emissions from their operations, purchased electricity and product/services”

“A strategic assessment that includes a statement of the company’s current position on climate change, an explanation of significant actions being taken to minimize risks and seize opportunities, and corporate governance actions relating to climate change, such as establishment of any management or board of director committees to address the topic”

The last point made clear that Ceres expects corporations to attribute any potential natural disaster threats to climate change, whether they believe it or not. The Ceres report also provided an 11-point checklist to “approach climate change as a strategic business issue,” which would impose huge personnel (and other) costs that would affect corporate bottom lines:

1. Integrate consideration of climate risk and opportunity throughout the firm

2. Create a climate management team

3. Create a board oversight committee

4. Develop internal controls and procedures for gathering GHG emissions data and other climate change-related information

5. Measure, benchmark, and inventory current GHG emissions from operations, electricity use, and products

6. Calculate projected and past emissions

7. Create specific emissions reduction targets and regularly report on progress

8. Identify risks and opportunities; then assess materiality

9. Quantify emissions, risks and opportunities whenever possible

10. Be specific: Provide a particularized discussion of climate risks and opportunities with respect to specific company assets and operations

11. Consider investors’ demands when assessing materiality

These demands illustrate the nightmare of compliance that companies would be required to implement under a greenhouse gas regulatory scheme. Therefore to avoid further economic harm, the proposed measure to defund the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act is necessary.

Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center and is executive director for American Tradition Institute.

See here where Michael Mann solicits the help of a libel firm in Canada associated with ultra green David Susuki Foundation to sue skeptics.

In today’s Hearing on ”Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations,” John Christy and Francis Zwiers both presented testimony that focused on extreme events, climate sensitivity and warming trends.

Their respective testimonies provide starkly different perspectives on these subjects, with Zwiers representing the “convinced” perspective and Christy representing the “skeptical” perspective.  By all accounts that I’ve seen in the blogosphere, Christy and Zwiers each did a good job presenting their oral testimony.  Lets take a look at their respective arguments and how they were presented in their written testimony.

Francis Zwiers

Francis Zwiers’ written testimony can be found here. Excerpts from Zwiers’ arguments related to extreme events:

Recently we have seen a spate of extreme climate and weather events that have drawn intense media interest, including this winter’s intense storms affecting the US and Canadian eastern seaboard, similarly extreme winter storms last year, the Russian heat wave and Pakistani flooding of summer 2010, the extraordinary Australian flooding event of this past January. These events have certainly tested our ability to cope with weather and climate variations, have had significant negative impacts, and pose the question as to whether human influence on the climate system has played a role. While the research required to answer this question specifically in the context of recent events is yet to be completed, two new papers in Nature (Min et al., 2011; Pall et al., 2011) have presented evidence that changes in the intensity of extreme precipitation since the middle of the 20th century may be linked to human induced global warming, and that in at least in one instance, that human influence on climate had likely substantially increased the risk of flooding.

Changes in extreme temperature and the intensification of extreme precipitation events are natural consequences of a warming climate. A warmer climate would inevitably have more intense warm temperature extremes than the present climate, including longer and more intense heat waves, and less intense cold temperature extremes.....

John Christy

John Christy’s written testimony can be found here. Some relevant excerpts regarding his comments on extreme events:

What this means today should be considered a warning - that the climate system has always had within itself the capability of causing devastating events and these will certainly continue with or without human influence. Thus, societies should plan for their infrastructure projects to be able to withstand the worst that we already know has occurred, and to recognize, in such a dynamical system, that even worse events should be expected. In other words, the set of the measured extreme events of the small climate history we have, since about 1880, does not represent the full range of extreme events that the climate system can actually generate. The most recent 130 years is simply our current era’s small sample of the long history of climate. There will certainly be events in this coming century that exceed the magnitude of extremes measured in the past 130 years in many locations. To put it another way, a large percentage of the worst extremes over the period 1880 to 2100 will occur after 2011 simply by statistical probability without any appeal to human forcing at all. Going further, one would assume that about 10 percent of the record extremes that occur over a thousand-year period ending in 2100 should occur in the 21st century. Are we prepared to deal with events even worse than we’ve seen so far? Spending resources on creating resiliency to these sure-to-come extremes, particularly drought/flood extremes, seems rather prudent to me.

I am not using these statistics to prove the weather in the US is becoming less extreme and/or colder. My point is that extreme events are poor metrics to use for detecting climate change....

Judith Curry’s comments: Apart from the issue of the relevance of Christy’s and Zwiers’ testimony to the issue at hand, which is the EPA CO2 Endangerment ruling.  My take on the attribution of extreme events is laid out on several previous threads (see here and here).  I don’t agree fully with the statements by either Christy or Zwiers, although my own take on this is much closer to Christy’s.

See more here.

ICECAP NOTE: Here is the record highs and lows by state which John has mentioned. Note the dominance of the 1930s for heat and the benign nature of the 2000s.

Enlarged.

Dr. Knute Nadelhoffer testified about the 30 years of warming on the Great Lakes. The actual long term trend shows it was just a leg of a multidecadal cycle related to the PDO and induced increased frequency of El Nino with warmer north central. Annual temperatures for that region.

Enlarged.

IPCC AR5 authors

The American wing of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has a page on its website about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That page contains an image which, while on the small side, is interesting nonetheless [backup link here].

This is a formal photograph of what appear to be 20 of the IPCC’s most senior personnel. Apparently taken in conjunction with the Nobel Peace Prize celebrations, the accompanying caption reads:

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize recognized climate change as one of the great destabilizing forces of our era. Dr. Richard Moss (second row center) is WWF’s lead on climate change and a long-term member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the prize with Gore. [bold added]

Moss’ WWF bio says he’s been involved with the IPCC since 1993. A press release says he became a WWF Vice President in 2007. It furthers says:

Moss joins WWF from the United Nations Foundation where he was the Senior Director for Climate Change and Energy. Since 1993, he has played many roles in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is a key part of the team that was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize… [bold added]

Ah, yes, the United Nations Foundation. That’s the charity headed by media mogul Ted Turner, the compassionate soul who recently declared that China’s brutal and coercive one-child policies should be exported to other countries to help curb global population growth. According to its website, the purpose of the UN Foundation is to support “UN causes.”

All of this raises some puzzling questions:

1. How can Moss - who has cashed paycheques from a charity dedicated to advancing the UN’s agenda and from an activist group whose fundraising prospects are connected to the public’s sense of alarm - be regarded as a dispassionate and neutral scientist?

2. Although some of Moss’ work is cited by the 2007 climate bible, he doesn’t appear to have been a member of any of the author teams for any of the 44 chapters of that report. So why was he considered a key part of the team that was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize? Why does he appear in that photograph?

3. Why did a VP of the WWF attend an IPCC workshop in Berlin last November? Why was Moss’ WWF affiliation not declared in that context? Why does the workshop documentation instead say he’s affiliated with the Joint Global Change Research Institute?

4. Now comes the million dollar question: What is a VP of the WWF doing serving as a Review Editor for Working Group 2, Chapter 15 of the latest edition of the climate bible - the one that is being written as we speak? [see page 13 of this 27-page PDF]

5. When the IPCC announced the list of people participating in the AR5 (Assessment Report 5) last June why did it not reveal that the WWF is Moss’ employer? Why did the IPCC tell us, instead, that he’s affiliated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory?

BONUS READING: I find Moss’ testimony (12-page PDF) to a US Senate committee in November 2007 troubling. It suggests that senior scientists see their government positions, their academic positions, IPCC activities, employment with the United Nations, and employment with activist groups as being all interconnected and pretty much equivalent.

To me, this suggests that activist scientists are far from rare. It appears that activism has become the new normal. H/T Climate Depot

Read here. IPCC Climategate science predicts that as CO2 increase in atmosphere, the resulting warming will increase the atmosphere’s water vapor levels, which will cause more warming (a positive feedback).

Unfortunately for the IPCC, that major tenet of the AGW hypothesis has not worked so well, as the below atmospheric humidity chart from www.climate4you.com reveals. (click here to enlarge)

Now a new study discovers why the water vapor levels have not increased as predicted. Lammertsma et al. determine that as CO2 levels rise, vegetation responds in two ways: one, by absorbing more CO2 for food production, and two, releasing less water vapor. The scientists calculate that with this vegetation response, a doubling of atmospheric CO2 to 800ppm levels will cut in half the amount of atmospheric water vapor - that’s called a major, natural NEGATIVE feedback.

This negative feedback that will have a huge impact on the atmosphere’s water vapor content is not included in any climate models that the IPCC, NASA and NOAA utilize. This may be a major reason why these models have continually failed in their predictions. Thus, current models’ estimates of climate sensitivity evaporate, or if you prefer, transpire...or, is climate sensitivity kind of a climate model ‘vaporware’ chartacteristic.

“As carbon dioxide levels have risen during the last 150 years, the density of pores that allow plants to breathe has dwindled by 34 percent, restricting the amount of water vapor the plants release to the atmosphere, report scientists....."The increase in carbon dioxide by about 100 parts per million has had a profound effect on the number of stomata and, to a lesser extent, the size of the stomata,” ..."Our analysis of that structural change shows there’s been a huge reduction in the release of water to the atmosphere.”...If there are fewer stomata, or the stomata are closed more of the day, gas exchange will be limited.....suggests that a doubling of today’s carbon dioxide levels - from 390 parts per million to 800 ppm - will halve the amount of water lost to the air, concluding in the second paper that “plant adaptation to rising CO2 is currently altering the hydrological cycle and climate...” [Emmy Lammertsma, Hugo de Boer, David Dilcher, Stefan Dekker, Andre Lotter, Friederike Wagner-Cremer, and Martin Wassen 2011: PNAS1 and PNAS2]

See post here.

This week, a high profile event was held in Edinburgh: the 2011 Scottish European Green Energy Centre Conference, with the title Delivering the Scottish Green Energy Opportunity. It was arranged with European Commission involvement and the keynote speaker was Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister. Enthusiasm for renewable energy remains at a high level in this and some other governments.

There are no reports available yet from the conference, but according to the announcement “‘A politicians’ panel of energy spokespersons will discuss future energy policy and whether a consensus approach could provide a stable basis for economic development in this area.” This was not about whether there should be investment in renewables, but about exactly what should be done, and when. And in Scotland, that generally means either on- or off-shore wind.

For example, “SEGEC has already secured 40 million Euros for the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre which will be located off Aberdeen and will have a project total of around 200 million and 75 million for an offshore grid node, to link Shetland to the mainland and to link offshore renewables into the national grid.” There may be some small-scale wave power in the mix, but the number of wind turbines is certainly set to increase. And, since the panel was to discuss whether this would “provide a stable basis for economic development in the area”, you can be sure that the Scottish government believes the answer is yes.

Contrast this then with a report from Verso Economics, a consultancy also based in Scotland. Worth the Candle? The Economic Impact of Renewable Energy Policy in Scotland and the UK comes to a rather different conclusion on whether this is a stable basis for economic development. One of its key conclusions is that 3.7 jobs are lost in the UK economy for every one created in the renewable energy sector. The situation in Scotland is more balanced. There is a net flow of tax revenues from Whitehall to Holyrood and there is a greater concentration of generators of renewable power north of the border. But even in this favourable environment, no net new jobs are created. The transfer from the UK government to the Scottish renewables industry was 330 million pounds in 2009/10, making the equation look rather different to Scottish eyes but not altering the reality of the big picture.

Such alternative views have clearly swayed the Dutch government, which was reported last month to have radically reduced its support for renewable energy (The Dutch lose faith in windmills). The new system which will be in place this year is quite complex, and readers will find more details in the original article, but the key points to note are a reduction in the total annual subsidy from 4bn to 1.5bn Euros, with the reduced amount of money going on the most cost effective options.

This means that, while this policy is in effect, no new off-shore wind arrays will be built, and neither will any subsidy be used for new photovoltaic installations. The first round of applications will be for subsidies of 9 cents per KWh for technologies which have an excess generating cost over conventional sources of no more than this. The only eligible technologies meeting this criterion are biogas, hydropower, power from waste processing and gas from fermentation. Only if there is still money available from the budget will a second round of applications for subsidies of 11 cents per KWh be invited, and this would include on-shore wind.

Last year, the previous Dutch government announced a subsidy of up to 4.5bn Euros for a German developer to install two 300MW rated off-shore wind farms. This nicely illustrates a point which seems to be lost on the Scottish and UK governments: Dutch taxpayers’ money will indeed help to create jobs, but in Germany rather than the Netherlands. The winners from the enthusiasm for renewables will be those countries which manufacture the equipment, including Germany, Denmark and China. The losers will be those countries which not only create those jobs but which continue to subsidise the output from these inefficient forms of power generation for the next 15 or more years.

The German government, widely praised a few years ago for its large investment in solar power (a very expensive option at the best of times, but even more so in cloudy northern Europe), chose to cut back on its subsidy schemes. Spain made the same decision. With an obligation to maintain power security for their voters, these were entirely rational decisions. If there was any doubt, the recession has reminded governments that they should at least try to spend taxpayers’ money wisely, rather than waste it on some of the most expensive and inefficient ways of generating electricity to have reached a commercial scale.

Politicians are, however, victims of their own commitment to cut emissions of carbon dioxide in an attempt to mitigate future climate change. Despite a lack of hard evidence that increased CO2 will have more than a modest warming effect, the received wisdom is still that catastrophic change is only a generation or so away. Unless governments begin to question either this or the efficacy of current policies, there is no face-saving way for them to behave differently.

So enthusiasm has not entirely waned, as we can see from the Scottish situation. The difference now is that politicians are talking up the economic benefits of these policies. The problem is, as the Verso report makes clear, they are grabbing at straws. Creating short-term jobs to insulate houses and install wind turbines and solar arrays may sound good, but the permanent jobs are largely in other, competitive economies.

A long, long article by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus looking at where the green movement went wrong.

Yet today, environmental efforts to address climate change and build a green economy lie in ruins. The United States Congress this summer once again rejected climate legislation that even had it succeeded would have had virtually no impact upon U.S. carbon emissions over the coming decade. The magnitude and consequence of this defeat are poorly understood outside of Washington. Greens had the best opportunity in a generation—a Democratic White House and large Democratic majorities in Congress. But they banked everything on a single bill and walked away with nothing—or rather worse than nothing, since today environmental credibility with lawmakers of both parties is today at an all-time low.

Meanwhile, green stimulus investments ended up creating very few jobs. Those that it did create were low-wage and temporary custodial jobs—not the high-wage manufacturing jobs that created the black middle-class after World War II. And today, the clean tech sector-- the darling of high tech VC’s at the height of the green bubble-- is in a state of collapse as stimulus funds expire, large public deficits threaten clean energy subsidies both here and abroad, and Wall Street firms short clean tech stocks.

ICECAP NOTE: We consider ourselves environmentalists and conservationists and practice what we believe. The radicals with entirely other social and political agendas have taken over the movement and in the process not only hurt the cause but hurt the global economy and the people they purport to save.

Our current renewable energy subsidy path (including tax credits, grants, mandated purchases and government loan guarantees) has proved to be unsustainable for a variety of reasons. For example, it has diverted private investments from viable to uncompetitive enterprises; created a welfare program for politically favored industries; distorted and disrupted proven free market structures; continuously rewarded repetitive failures; imposed unwarranted and involuntary cost burdens upon all energy consumers and taxpayers; and extended unprecedented government regulatory intrusions into our businesses and private lives.

According to Steve Hargreaves, a senior writer for CNNMoneyline.com, renewable energy subsidies including industry tax credits and direct grants cost the U.S. government (U.S. taxpayers) about $11 billion last year. That included approximately $5 billion for electrical solar and wind power and $6 billion for ethanol. Yet while originally intended to jump-start those industries, these handouts and other charities have yielded only entitlement-dependency.

Ethanol, for example, began to receive preferential support in 1978 on the premise that it would become a viable fuel contributor within a few years. And while this never happened, Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) consumption quotas imposed by the federal and several state governments require more to be used every year, regardless of high price, negative food cost or environmental impacts and lousy efficiency. Ethanol also receives a $0.45/gallon Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (aka “blender’s tax credit"), which was extended another year through a last hour Democrat stealth pork insertion into the lame duck session Senate tax bill. This has amounted to a an estimated $41 billion cumulative taxpayer cost since 1980. The industry has been asking for a five-year extension at an added cost of about $30 billion.

Insufficiently profitable to receive tax credits, the wind industry has depended on an annual $3 billion federal grant program for renewable energy projects (also extended for another year in the new tax bill). In addition, wind and solar industries have received more than $30 billion in 2009 stimulus funds which require taxpayers to cover 30% of all renewable energy costs. Wind and solar operators also benefit greatly from Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) mandated purchase quotas set by many state governments.  Home and business electrical power consumers are penalized by resulting price inflation.

Without all that help wind and solar wouldn’t have survived, and very likely won’t in the future either. The Wall Street Journal has reported American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) CEO Dennis Bode warning that without the extension of the Federal 1603 [grant program] investment credit, the wind industry would “flat line” or slope downward.

Yet even with all of that support, the number of new wind installations dropped during the first half of 2010 by 57% and 71% from 2008 and 2009 levels respectively - and were down 72% in 2009 over the period from 2006. And while the EPA has done everything in its power to kill coal, that industry added nearly three times more electrical capacity than wind during the first nine months of 2010 (39% vs. 14%).

This despite the fact that according to a 2007 EIA study (the last year they provided statistics) wind received 53 times more government subsidy support than conventional coal ($23.37 per megawatt-hour vs. $0.44 per MWh). This amounts to more than 20 times more for subsidies in terms of average electricity generated by coal and natural gas, while coal produces 50 times more U.S. electrical power than wind. Solar received even slightly more ($24.34 per MWh).

Apparently, that still isn’t enough help. AWEA lobbied hard for a federal renewable electricity standard mandate legislation proposal approved by the Democrat-controlled House in 2009. Although it stalled in the Senate, the industry continues to promote passage in the next Congress. The industry is also pushing the EPA to use regulation to raise costs on carbon sources of power.

More federal help for Big Wind may now be on the way through a regulatory end-run around Congress and consumer interests. On Dec. 16, 2010, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Jon Wellington announced plans to impose a $300 million to $500 million surtax on utility bills to cover the costs of creating renewable power transmission lines across 13 Midwest states. Those rules, which are expected to be finalized in mid-2012, constitute another preferential subsidy for wind energy that will raise electricity prices for everyone, whether they rely upon that source or not.

This new development is unprecedented. Traditionally, and by law, FERC has been bound to set electricity prices according to the production source that customers use and the amount they consume. For at least 65 years, courts have ruled that payment by beneficiaries is the “touchstone in any legal analysis of FERC-approved rate schemes” (as the D.C. Court of Appeals describes it). Here, FERC intends to establish by fiat, a national energy policy that Congress has pointedly refused to endorse. That rejection was clear when Congress voted against the Obama administration’s proposed renewable energy standard law because it would inflate power costs.

Where the Obama White House is concerned, it doesn’t end there. Stephen Power reported in a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper had obtained an internal Oct. 25 memorandum circulated among top advisors which recognized that while funding for a renewable energy federal loan guarantee program could find better uses, pulling the money out would antagonize powerful allies in Congress and “signal the failure of a Recovery Act program that has been featured prominently by the administration”. The advisors, including outgoing National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, energy policy czar Carol Browner, and V.P. Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, specifically questioned the logic behind subsidizing a big wind farm in Oregon that Energy Secretary Steven Chu had praised as “part of the administration’s commitment to doubling our renewable energy generation by 2012”. They believed that the project, sponsored by Caithness Energy LLC and General Electric, “would likely move without the loan guarantee”, adding that the corporate backers “would have little skin in the game (equity about 10%)”, while the government would provide “a significant subsidy (65+%)”.

The loan guarantee program discussed in the memo allows the Energy Department to help finance projects such as electric transmission systems and bio-fuel initiatives that begin construction no later than September 30, 2011. Congress originally allocated $6 billion for it in early 2009, later slashing that budget to pay for other priorities such as the “Cash for Clunkers” program, with $2.5 billion remaining.

The senior advisor’s memo suggested that the president “consider working with Congress to reprogram” the remaining funds into a separate federal program that allows renewable energy developers to convert tax credits they are eligible for into cash grants. Yet they caution that “failing to make progress on renewables” could upset Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who are strong federal loan guarantee champions. They observed that Senator Bingaman “views [the program] as ‘his program’ [and] would “strongly oppose” taking money from it. White House officials later stated that the administration has no intention of cutting off program funding.

Let’s finally be very clear about this. The money we taxpayers and consumers provide to support any and all energy industries does not belong to Senator Bingham, to Nancy Pelosi, or to anyone in the White House or Congress-on either side of the aisle. When we pay for those handouts, we, the sponsors, own those programs, and have every right to determine their usefulness and fates.

During a September 2009 G-20 speech, President Obama called for elimination of government subsidies for greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels, stating “I will work with my colleagues at the G-20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so that we can better address climate change.” Let’s go him one better. Why not terminate energy subsidies altogether? Isn’t it time to realize that when we allow government to pick energy industry winners we all lose?  Reprinted with author permission from Forbes.

Today, my friendly neighborhood Potbelly Sandwich Shop posted dozens of small flyers along the ordering line, asking: “Where are the tomatoes?” The flyer explained:

The recent cold weather across North America has had a severe impact on the availability, quality and cost of tomatoes.

Due to these factors, we will temporarily cease to offer tomatoes on your sandwhich. As soon as the tomato crop returns to normal we will add them back to your sandwiches.

We apologize for this inconvenience. We do not want to compromise on the quality or value of our sandwiches.

More evidence - if any were needed - that winter endangers public health and welfare. Tomatoes are a great source of anti-oxidents and other health-enhancing nutrients. And they are delish!

Besides ruining tomatoes, winter is strongly correlated with cold and flu. Winter can also cause or contribute to power outages, travel disruptions and delays, traffic accidents, and injuries from slipping on ice.

You’d think that by now global warming would have made harsh winter weather a thing of the past. Alas, no. Our tomatoes, and the health and welfare benefits they bring, are still endangered.

But be of good cheer. The carbon dioxide emissions allegedly responsible for Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” are helping tomatoes beef up. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change maintains a database on field and laboratory experiments measuring plant growth response to CO2-enriched environments. Here’s the link for data on tomatoes.

A whopping 45 studies have examined the effects of CO2 enrichment on the garden tomato (lycopersicon eculentum). On average, garden tomatoes gain 32.

See post.

Here is an approximate, preliminary look at the winter for the 90 days ending february 26, 2011. December/January was the coldest in Florida (winter vegetables) history and remember the frosts and freezes in California and south Texas.

Enlarged.