By Charles Clover
Canute appointed, MAFF returns, Ministry for Concrete rolls on. Whether you are a climate-change denier, a sceptic or a believer in the scientific consensus on global warming, you have to admit that there is something preposterous about making someone Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
It’s a bit like giving King Canute added responsibility for sea level rise: it implies that he can do something about it. Given that there is a less than 50 per cent chance, in my view, that mankind could do something about its greenhouse gas emissions in time to prevent dangerous climate change - thereby proving itself rational - Ed Miliband, the newly appointed Secretary, would appear to have his work cut out.
Given, too, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that there is only a 95 per cent probability that man-made factors caused the warming we have seen, you might think that Gordon Brown might have seen fit to create a few more new posts in his reshuffle. The suggestion from the sceptic, Philip Stott, is that if the Prime Minister wanted to leave no stone unturned, he might also have created a minister for cosmic ray fluxes, solar magnetic cycles and sunspots; a minister for meteorites and cosmic dust, a minister for the earth’s orbit, tilt, wobble, shape and velocity; a minister for volcanic eruptions and ocean circulations; and a minister for water vapour, clouds and atmospheric gases. All of those have something to do with climate change. The unresolved question is how much.
Seriously, though, the new Energy and Climate Change post is a way of dealing with a serious problem: relentless squabbling between what used to be called BERR and what still is called DEFRA. That was a recipe for nothing happening at all, for example, on the timetable for cleaner coal-fired power stations. One can see the point of the tradeoffs being made in Mr Miliband’s head, rather than in two separate departments, between the long-term need for clean coal and the short term need to keep the lights on.
But there is no use pretending that the political landscape hasn’t changed. With the new remit comes new dangers - in this case the suspicion is that what has been created is the ministry for nuclear power, wind farms and the Severn Barrage. And toffee nuts to the environment. Read more here
By Maurizio Morabito
Timely but alas flawed contribution by Thomas Peterson of NOAA, William Connolley of the British Antarctic survey and science reporter John Fleck, reporting on the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society” about the apparent lack of peer-reviewed papers predicting global cooling, between 1965 and 1979 (it’s reported here in Nature’s Climate Feedback blog).
Unfortunately, it really does look like Messrs Peterson, Connolley and Fleck simply have not looked well enough or have conveniently restricted their search just enough to miss a 1961 article describing a Global Cooling consensus among scientists at a meeting supported also by the American Meteorological Association.
The article, written by Walter Sullivan for The New York Times (cited by Peterson et al. for his 1975 climate-related articles), refers to a 5-day Conference co-chaired by Rhodes W. Fairbridge of Columbia University and Charles G. Knudsen of the United States Weather Bureau, in the January of 1961. “After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”
Perhaps the AMA’s own archives could clarify what climatologists exactly talked about at the time. Notably, the 1961 Conference is described as varied and multidisciplinary as any today. And yes, scientists at the time were aware of the “greenhouse effect” of carbon dioxide. Techniques at the time included “observation with earth satellites”, “palinology” (pollen studies), “dendrochronology” (tree rings) and “the deciphering of ancient oriental scripts”. Read more here.
By Margaret Kriz
The odds are long for two reasons. First, with the nation facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression and high energy prices, many legislators will be reluctant to pass a bill that - at least in the short term - will make all carbon-based fuels even more expensive. “Financial realities will make it much more difficult for the new administration or Congress to put forth a very aggressive, economy-wide climate bill,” argued Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and one of Congress’s harshest critics of any climate-change action. “I believe the current financial crisis will only reinforce the public’s concerns about any climate bill that attempts to increase the costs of energy and jeopardizes jobs in the near term.” Inhofe and other opponents note that last year, despite broad support from the environmental community, Democratic leaders couldn’t muster the 60 votes they needed to prevent a filibuster of their global warming bill.
That measure, sponsored by Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Sen. John Warner, would have created a cap-and-trade program allowing businesses to eventually buy and sell greenhouse gas emission credits on the open market. David Kreutzer, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that even before the financial crisis hit, climate-change legislation was losing votes because it has the potential to raise the cost of electricity from coal-fired power plants. “When you put this kind of tax in place, you make energy more expensive,” he said. “You lose lots of jobs. You really hit manufacturing.”
“When we address the threat of unchecked global warming by investing in clean energy technologies and reducing our dependence on foreign oil, we also have a recipe for economic recovery,” noted Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Those who favor controlling greenhouse gases contend that Inhofe and other critics are ignoring the enormous long-term price of coping with higher sea levels, droughts, and increased disease brought on by global warming. Claussen, of the Pew Center, noted that both presidential candidates are now looking at action on climate change as “a job creation program that deals with the lower cost of climate change now rather then the higher cost” of responding to it in the future.
While the momentum is still on the side of controlling greenhouse gas emissions, environmentalists will have to settle for a less ambitious bill than they anticipated under next year’s Democratic Congress and a new White House. “The environmental community is going to have to adjust to reality,” Claussen said. “Any bill that’s going to pass the Senate and the House and be signed by the president, whoever it is, will have to come from the middle. The bill will have to address the needs of the manufacturing states and the agricultural states - not just the clean states,” she noted.
Before getting climate-change legislation back on the agenda, environmentalists will have to wait until the dust settles from the Wall Street fiasco. They’ll also have to devote some time to fighting new battles, like stopping efforts to allow oil and gas exploration off U.S. shores and on federal lands. And businesses will have to accept an emissions trading program with more strings attached and more safeguards than those imposed on the ill-fated Wall Street financial gurus. Read more here.