The meeting of Arctic states held in Chelsea, Que. earlier this week was billed as a way to spur international efforts concerning global warming and the Far North.
Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Ottawa for failing to invite more foreign governments and other stakeholders, such as aboriginal groups, that are concerned with Arctic issues.
“We need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it,” Clinton said in a prepared statement. “What happens in the Arctic will have broad consequences for the Earth and its climate. The melting of sea ice, glaciers and permafrost will affect people and ecosystems around the world, and understanding how these changes fit together is a task that demands international co-operation.”
Yet when it comes to understanding how the climate of the Arctic will change in coming years, scientists say Canada is falling off the map.
Last week, a climate research centre at the University of Montreal, known by the acronym ESCER, warned that such groups are being forced to close across the country.
A lack of federal funds for climate and atmospheric science has “sounded the death knell for research groups working in this field in Canada,” Rene Laprise, ESCER’s director, wrote in a statement.
His centre has lost two staff, who found government jobs after learning that their salaries would not be guaranteed past September 2010, Laprise told CTV.ca by email. Five others are expected to leave “any time,” he wrote.
Climate scientists across the country say they’re in a similar situation—with dwindling funds and poor prospects to secure more money, they’re preparing to shut down major projects while their staff seeks jobs abroad.
Financial woes
Laprise and other scientists in his field are frustrated that the 2010 federal budget, made public last month, set aside no new money for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main source of federal funding for climate-related research.
CFCAS was founded in 2000 and has doled out $116 million on 198 research grants at universities from Victoria to Halifax.
Canadian scientists who have contributed to international initiatives such as the World Climate Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on the foundation for a large part of their research money.
And while CFCAS’s mandate runs to March 31, 2012, it hasn’t received any new cash since 2003, and the money it has received was “fully committed” two years ago.
“There are no more funds to be distributed,” Kelly Crowe, a spokesperson for the foundation, told CTV.ca by email. “Our researchers are all looking at wrapping up their projects for good.”
A spokesperson for Environment Canada said that last year, the ministry received a funding request from CFCAS for $50 million to be spent over three years. But the request hasn’t been approved.
“The government will continue to consider this proposal, in the context of our current fiscal constraints,” Tracy Lacroix-Wilson wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate on any future funding at this time.”
Brain drain
Meanwhile, climate and atmospheric science researchers have begun to leave the country.
In December, Katrin Meissner quit a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria and moved her family to Sydney, Australia. She now studies climate change at the University of New South Wales, with two other researchers who also recently left Canadian universities.
“The possible closing of the CFCAS was certainly part of it,” Meissner said, referring to her decision to leave.
Theodore Shepherd, a veteran physicist at the University of Toronto who studies atmospheric dynamics, said people like Meissner are pulling up stakes because the international landscape for climate-change funding no longer favours Canada.
When CFCAS was created in 2000, Shepherd said Canadian universities began attracting climate scientists from Europe who would otherwise have gone to the U.S.
But economic stimulus programs introduced in the wake of the recession injected cash into climate-change research in the U.S. and in many European countries. That’s made them more attractive destinations for scientists in related fields.
The situation is changing “partly because they’ve got more money, partly because we’ve got no money,” Shepherd said.
He admits he has started to look for opportunities abroad, due to persistent funding problems in Canada.
“Not super actively,” he said. “But I’m realizing it’s going to be very hard to do what I want to here.”
Atmospheric research on the Arctic, an area that experts say will be hit particularly hard by climate change, is also being threatened by federal funding problems.
James Drummond is an Oxford-educated physicist at Dalhousie University, and the principal investigator for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole.
He expects the lab will be forced to close unless Ottawa announces additional public money to pay for salaries and operational expenses.
“At the moment, we’re operating on the principle that something will turn up,” he said by phone from Halifax. “The reality is that the funding stream has been broken.”
In recent years it has become harder to get federal money in all areas of atmospheric science, Drummond said. And while many scientists in that field don’t expect to run out of funding until later this year or early 2011, he said they need new money now in order to map out their work next year.
“It’s not research that can be turned on and off like a tap,” Drummond said.
With no additional money, he added, the issue of brain drain has become “very real” in the world of Canadian atmospheric science.
“And once those people leave it will be very hard to get them back, because they’ll say ‘well, look what happened last time.’” Read story here.
Around 300 people - including children on a school bus - have been rescued from cars trapped in snow on the Glenshane Pass near Londonderry, as severe winter storms battered parts of Britain. Police, mountain rescue and coastguards were drafted in for the operation.
Stranded drivers had initially been taken to Dungiven Leisure Centre near Londonderry, but a blackout meant the site had to be switched to the Roe Leisure Centre in nearby Limavady. Snow closes hundreds of schools and causes chaos on roads. Blizzards, gale force winds and torrential rain have hit Scotland and Northern Ireland, knocking down power lines and wreaking transport havoc.
The Met Office has issued extreme weather warnings for the two regions, forecasting more severe blizzards and severe drifting snow up to 50cm (20in) deep in parts. During the distinctly un-spring-like conditions, temperatures will remain close to zero through the day. There could also be snow flurries across high areas of England and Wales, experts said.
Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) said between 45,000 and 48,000 customers, mainly in the west and the north, have been cut off overnight after widespread damage to its network. At one point there were 600 individual faults reported, the firm said, with the biggest disruption was in Omagh, Enniskillen, Dungannon, Londonderry, Coleraine and Ballymena.
Poor visibility and strong winds were preventing workers from climbing poles, it added. A spokesman for NIE said 450 engineers and workers were out helping restore supplies as soon as possible - and blamed the disruption on “unprecedented” weather. “We have had unprecedented weather conditions, and are working to get people reconnected as soon as possible,” he said.
“Our crews are getting back out in the field again, we have 450 staff in the field.” Colin Brown, of the Roads Service, said they expected the weather to get worse throughout the day. ‘’We are getting geared up for difficult day of rain turning to snow as we progress through the day and into the afternoon and evening.’’
Scotland saw around 22,000 homes suffer power cuts on Tuesday, with people North Ayrshire the worst hit, but most properties were reconnected during the day. People living in north-east Scotland were suffering some of the country’s worst weather today, with gale force northerly blizzards whipping up snow drifts. Big cities Glasgow and Edinburgh will see wetter conditions. Snow ploughs and gritters were out yesterday across the country after cars and lorries became stranded in snow. Ten lorries were stranded for several hours on the M90 close to Bridge of Earn in Perthshire, and two trucks also got into difficulty on the M8 near Edinburgh creating large tailbacks.
Two men also had a lucky escape after a 50ft tree fell on a car in Edinburgh city centre. The men were treated for shock but were uninjured, police said. Among the roads closed today were the A68 at Soutra Hill in Lothian and Borders, and the A96 between Huntly and Colpy in Aberdeenshire.
Train services on the East Coast main line were also suspended north of Berwick after two landslips last night. Network Rail said it was working to re-open the line today, diverting some services via Newcastle and Carlisle and using replacement buses.
Elsewhere, heavy rain led to the River Esk bursting its banks in Musselburgh. Ferry firm Stena also said its sailings between Belfast and Stranraer were being delayed or cancelled.
Steve Ellison, a forecaster with MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said the wintry weather would start to die away tonight and tomorrow, but it would remain unsettled in many parts. He said: ‘’There’s been quite a lot of snow falling over Scotland, especially over the higher ground. But places like Edinburgh can also expect a covering. ‘’It’s also going to be very windy again. ‘’A deep low pressure is moving across the UK at the moment, dragging in a lot of cold air from the north.’’ See video here. See story and more here.
By Kirk Myers, March 30, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner
From the 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, “climate change” alarmists around the world turned their lights out in a symbolic gesture of unanimity, proving once again they are in the dark about global warming.
Lights went out in the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, Tower of Pisa, The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, and Independence Angel in Mexico City. In the United States, lights switched off on Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge and the St. Louis Gateway Arch. The “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign went dark.
North Korea, meanwhile, led the pack in the “turn out the lights” gesture, remaining in almost total darkness for the entire evening. Indeed, the North Koreans - offering a stark lesson in CO2 reduction - had years before discovered a way to keep the lights turned out and energy consumption at a near stand-still: simply strangle industry through a system of totalitarian regulations and controls.
The government of North Korea has been very successful in reducing CO2 and light emissions
It is a practice held in high esteem by the high priests and disciples of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). In the deep recesses of their atavistic minds is the antediluvian belief that industrial growth (capitalism), with its reliance on the internal combustion engine and CO2-emitting coal-fired power plants, is harmful to Mother Earth. Better to live in bucolic bliss, shivering in the dark and cursing the latest brown-out, rather than firing up a few more power plants and - perhaps, maybe - warming the planet a few degrees over the next century.
In a sane world, such silly, misanthropic views would be laughed at and dismissed. But the CAGW True Believers are deadly serious. They wish to slow down, if not halt, industrial progress, returning us to the romantic “one with nature” era of pre-industrial agrarian peasantry. In their Al Gorian-inspired minds, Earth’s very survival is at stake, threatened by mankind and its unquenchable appetite for fossil-fuel-burning climate-warming electricity.
As Lorri Golstein of the Ottawa Sun writes: “Only in the affluent West do we naively romanticize a world without electricity as one of shepherds tending their flocks. Those without electricity know better . . . without electricity, life is nasty, brutal and short.”
At the core of the global warming doctrine is a hatred of man-the-destroyer, driven by a collectivist revulsion towards capitalism. Coal- and oil-fueled industrial progress is seen as the bane of Mother Earth, the despoiler of the environment. Seldom is any thought given to mankind’s epochal struggle to tame nature, to bring some measure of comfort to everyday existence.
Only a primitive mind takes pleasure in turning off the lights and turning back the clock of human advancement, observes Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at Canada’s University of Guelp.
“Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance . . . depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. . . I don’t want to go back to nature. Haiti just went back to nature. People who work to end poverty and disease are fighting against nature,” he writes.
Of course, the real goal of the environmental movement is not to mitigate the imagined consequences of global warming by turning out a few lights; it is to initiate the global redistribution of wealth using “climate change” as the catalyst of economic change. A big chunk of upfront money for this undertaking finds its way into the coffers of professional doom-and-gloom promoters who sucker gullible donors with tall tales of disappearing polar bears and submerged coastlines.
Among the biggest promoters and beneficiaries of the climate-change scare campaign are environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace. According to figures compiled by Climate Resistance.org, WWF raised a cetacean-size $3.1 billion in donations from 2003-2008, making it the world’s wealthiest environmental organization. Greenpeace hauled in the second-largest catch, netting $2.37 billion from 1998-2008.
Very few contributors to those and other “green” organizations realize they are funding a Marxist makeover of the American economy, replete with carbon taxes and cap-and-trade restrictions that will drive up taxes, reduce their standard of living, and lead inexorably to North Korea-style energy shortages and rationing.
As ClimateResistance.org reports, “Most of this money comes from people who think that they are giving to save the rhino, panda, or the whale, because that’s how Greenpeace and the WWF sell themselves . . . Yet these ‘organizations don’t simply save whales and rhinos; they use their not inconsiderable financial clout to influence the political agenda throughout the world, in a way that the [climate change] ‘deniers’ simply have not been able to. This obviously includes preparing ‘research’ that finds its way into IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] Assessment Reports.”
“From early on, those at the top of the global warming - now “climate change” - food chain have had one primary objective: to relieve “the gullible rubes” of their hard-earned money while kicking down this country’s remaining constitutional barriers and dragging Americans into a global command-and-control economic system run by a cabal of oligarchs who will get spectacularly rich from carbon-offset trading.
The rest of us poor souls will have to content ourselves with sitting around dinner table, eating by candlelight and griping about the latest round of rotating black-outs announced by the Ministry of Energy.
This nightmarish scenario could become reality - all because a fraternity of unscrupulous, well-funded charlatan scientists decided to demonize CO2, a trace atmospheric gas and plant nutrient, elevating it to the status of a global warming Satan. Never mind the fact that the IPCC climate models their theory is based on have been thoroughly discredited, a rather important revelation that seems to have escaped the attention of the ever-somnambulant mainstream media.
As columnist Joanne Nova writes:
“Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted [by the IPCC], (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding ‘uncertainties’ nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified. [Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008].”
Moreover, global mean temperatures reached a peak in 1998, began to level off, and have been declining since 2002, clearly falsifying all the IPPC models, which predicted steady warming. Dr. Phil Jones, the disgraced former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia, admitted in a BBC interview this February that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995 and that recent temperatures have been cooling.
None of these facts makes any difference to the “science is settled” True Believers. They won’t be satisfied until the landscape is awash with ugly windmill farms from sea to shining sea, and the common folks are putt-putting around in electric cars and lighting their homes with new-fangled mercury-filled lamps that are too dangerous to throw in the kitchen trash.
Mankind must combat global warming now or risk defiling the planet for future generations, wail the high priests of global-warming theology. But what about wrecking the U.S. economy in a paranoid effort to prevent a conjured up catastrophe that tens of thousands of independent scientists say will never happen?
“How will we face our grandchildren and tell them we did nothing to stop catastrophic death counts caused by climate change, demands today’s smug warmist,” writes Golstein. “Better ask him how he will face his grandchildren and tell them he campaigned for consigning hundreds of millions to catastrophe by denouncing the very forms of energy by which we powered ourselves out of the Third World, into the First.”
NOAA’s State of the Climate report for the winter season (December through February) anthe month of February, state that temperatures were below normal for the contiguous United States. The winter season was wetter than normal; however precipitation in February alone was slightly below average.
Based on data going back to 1895, the monthly analyses, prepared by scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., are part of the climate services that NOAA provides to businesses, communities and governments so they may make informed decisions to safeguard their social and economic well-being.
For the winter season, 63 (appears based on number of divisions not area) percent of the country experienced below normal temperatures. In contrast to this national trend, Maine experienced the third warmest winter. February’s average temperature was 32.4 degrees F, which is 2.2 degrees below the long-term average.
Cold air in the wake of several reinforcing Arctic air masses dominated much of the United States during February, creating temperatures that were much-below average in the Deep South and below average in the Plains and mid-Atlantic states. Both the South and Southeast climate regions experienced their seventh coldest February on record. Meanwhile, warmer-than-average temperatures dominated the Northwest and Northeast climate regions. Florida had its fourth coldest February, Louisiana its fifth coldest, and Alabama, Georgia and Texas each had their sixth coldest. It was the seventh coldest February in Arkansas, while both Mississippi and South Carolina experienced their eighth coldest.
Precipitation for the winter season was above average while it averaged slightly below the long term mean for the month of February. The season-long wet spell was notable for the Southeast, as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina each had their eighth wettest winter. Precipitation was also much above normal for South Dakota, Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland. Wyoming and Idaho experienced their eighth and ninth driest winters, respectively.
Regionally, the active weather pattern in the South, Southwest, and Northeast created above normal precipitation for the month. The Northwest, West North Central, East North Central, and Central climate regions each had below-normal February precipitation. On the state level, New Mexico experienced its seventh wettest February on record. Conversely, Idaho had its seventh driest, and Wyoming its eighth driest.
Other Highlights
Major snowstorms on Feb. 4-7 and Feb. 9-11 plagued the Atlantic states. These storms ranked as Category Three (major) and Two (significant) storms respectively on the Northeast Snow Impacts Scale (NESIS). Combined and treated as one storm, they would become only the third Category Five (extreme) storm (the most extreme category) of the NESIS record. A third storm, also ranking as a Category Three on the NESIS scale, occurred across southern New England on Feb. 23-28. February 2010 is the first month during the NESIS period of record, since 1956, to place three storms of Category Two or greater.
Several seasonal snowfall records were set: (previous record)
Baltimore: 79.9 inches (62.5 inches, 1995-96)
Washington (Dulles): 72.8 inches (61.9 inches, 1995-96)
Washington (National): 55.9 inches (54.4 inches, 1898-1899)
Wilmington, Del.: 66.7 inches (55.9 inches, 1995-96)
Philadelphia: 71.6 inches (65.5 inches, 1995-96)
Atlantic City, N.J.: 49.9 inches (46.9 inches, 1966-67)
In several eastern cities, February was the snowiest month on record: (previous record)
Washington (Dulles): 46.1 inches (34.9 inches, February 2003)
Central Park, N.Y.: 36.9 inches (30.5 inches, March 1896)
Pittsburgh: 48.7 inches (40.2 inches, January 1978)
Background information on this winter’s snowstorms and the links to climate change is available online here.
Icecap additonal notes: Dallas Fort Worth came within 0.5 inches of their 1977/78 record and Des Moines is within 3 inches of an all time record set in 1911/12. Note the consistent above normal snowcover through the winter. It ended up second snowiest since records started in 1967.
Above is the top 12 winters for average snowcover. 2009/10 trailed only 1977/78 and finished ahead of 2007/08 and 2002/03 (courtesy Rutger’s snowlab).
See also here, where the Russian winter ranked perhaps as the coldest ever with very heavy snows. See here an excellent summary of the winter of 2009-10 in Europe, storm by atorm.
WASHINGTON - Fifteen phony products - including a gasoline-powered alarm clock - won a label from the government certifying them as energy efficient in a test of the federal “Energy Star” program.
Investigators concluded the program is “vulnerable to fraud and abuse.” A report released Friday said government investigators tried to pass off 20 fake products as energy efficient, and only two were rejected. Three others didn’t get a response.
The program run by the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to identify energy-efficient products to help consumers. Tax credits and rebates serve as incentives to buy Energy Star products. But the General Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, said Energy Star doesn’t verify claims made by manufacturers - which might explain the gasoline-powered alarm clock, not to mention a product billed as an air room cleaner that was actually a space heater with a feather duster and fly strips attached, and a computer monitor that won approval within 30 minutes of submission.
The alarm clock’s size - 1 1/2-feet high and 15 inches wide - and model name “Black Gold” should have raised alarms with Energy Star, but the automated review system didn’t catch on to the deception. “EPA officials confirmed that because the energy-efficiency information was plausible, it was likely that no one read the product description information,” GAO said.
In addition, the four phony GAO companies were able to become Energy Star partners, giving them access to the program’s logos and other promotional resources. Energy Star didn’t call any of the companies or visit the addresses, and sent only four of the 20 products to be verified by a third-party, GAO said.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who requested the study, said that “taxpayers are shortchanged twice” when Energy Star products are not thoroughly vetted - when consumers are willing to pay more for the products, and when taxpayer dollars are spent encouraging the purchases. The GAO findings were first reported by The New York Times.
According to the GAO, the EPA and Energy Department told investigators in briefings that although the program is based on manufacturers’ certifying their products meet efficiency standards, that efficiency is ensured through aftermarket tests and self-policing. The GAO did not look at those efforts.
The GAO did note that the two agencies said they are shifting to a more rigorous upfront screening process. In a news release last week, they announced additional testing of products and an ongoing verification program. In a joint statement Friday, the agencies said consumers can have confidence in the Energy Star label.
“In fact, a review last year found that 98 percent of the products tested met or exceeded the Energy Star requirements, and last year alone, Americans with the help of Energy Star saved $17 billion on their energy bills.” But the agencies acknowledge the report raised important issues.
“That’s why we have started an enhanced testing program and have already taken enforcement actions against companies that have violated the rules,” the agencies’ statement said.
Environmental ‘Crisis’ and Government Power By Barun S. Mitra, Wall Street Journal Asia
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted for the first time last month that it is facing a crisis of confidence. But the IPCC’s failings go far beyond the recent spate of errors identified in its reports. The problem began with the global political climate that led to the formation of the IPCC two decades ago.
Contrary to popular perception, the IPCC is not a scientific organization. It does no research of its own. Composed of scientists nominated by different governments, its key function is to collate evidence of human-induced climate change, not just changes in climate.
It is hardly surprising that with such an inherently biased objective the scientists lost their objectivity. Many of them went on a crusade to support the political goal of proving anthropogenic global warming. Concerns about scientific objectivity and critical discourse were thrown overboard. Why did political masters set such a nonscientific mandate for their scientists at the IPCC? Because over the past half century, governments have often ridden the green bandwagon to justify public-sector expansion.
Almost every decade we have witnessed the birth of a new green scare, apparently based on new scientific findings. First came the campaign against the pesticide DDT in the 1960s, followed by the population bomb in the 1970s. Then we had the campaign to protect forests and species in the 1980s, the ozone hole in the 1990s, and most recently the crescendo over climate change leading up to last year’s Copenhagen summit. Each time, the scare was shown to be false or overhyped. For instance, millions of people in the developing world died of malaria because DDT was wrongly vilified. It took decades to overcome the blanket ban of the chemical, and now it is once again being used to control mosquitoes in Africa.
Predictions of a rising population depleting the world’s resources have proven equally false and destructive. India today is enjoying the demographic dividend of a young workforce, while China is getting worried at the prospect that it may become the first society in history to grow old before it becomes rich. Likewise, forests are making a surprising comeback in many parts of the world, as the rise in agricultural productivity and economic growth are lowering demand for agricultural land.
Clearly, the track record of green prophecies has been pathetic. And with the collapse of the Soviet empire, and periodic economic turmoil, (such as the Asian economic crisis in 1997, and the dot-com bust in 2000), the public’s confidence in their leaders’ capacity to make effective economic policies has been shaken. It is in this context that climate change provided a new opportunity for many governments to legitimize their role, and expand their scope. The formation of the IPCC and its apparent focus on the science of climate change allowed the political establishments to claim science as the basis for proposed climate policies that increased the power of government and curtailed the private sector. The time frame of the projected climate change was longer than earlier green crusades, typically from 50 to 100 years. This will allow policy makers to escape accountability for their misguided policies since they would be out of office by the time the consequences became apparent.
The relationship between a section of political leaders and scientists turned out to be mutually reinforcing. Policy makers justified their empire building on the basis of “scientific consensus,” and scientists found a very profitable avenue for political influence and access to funding. To sell this climate strategy, political leaders and scientists adopted the classic carrot-and-stick approach. The rich countries offered money to the poor ones in an attempt to buy support for the climate policies. More recently there is the threat of trade sanctions, which reflect the stick.
This approach was apparent in the build-up to the Copenhagen summit last December. The distinction between scientists and activists virtually disappeared as the scaremongering reached a new depth. The rich countries’ carrots virtually broke the Group of 77 developing-world nations, as some of the poorest countries found the lure of easy money in hand more attractive than the fruits of economic growth in the future.
The grand design failed on three counts, and the world was saved from the onslaught of the climate crusade. Copenhagen coincided with the global economic slowdown, and therefore the promise of money seemed more like a mirage. Second, the scientific authority of the IPCC collapsed. And finally, deepening developmental aspirations in some of the major developing countries, such as Brazil, China, India and South Africa, meant that the leadership in these countries could not afford to barter their economic future for the sake of some small change today.
The current crisis in the environmental movement is not limited to a few leading climate scientists; its root lies in the political shifts taking place in many countries. Leaders are being forced to take their responsibilities more seriously, and not to outsource it to scientists. And scientists will have to regain public confidence by returning to their traditional values of objectivity and intellectual rigor. Read more here.
Mr. Mitra is director of the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi, and a columnist for WSJ.com.
