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.
By Philip Stott, Sinfonia, h/t Benny Peiser
New Energy Finance tracks companies worldwide that claim to focus on ‘climate change’ stocks involving the generation and use of cleaner energy and efficiency. It hosts the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, known as NEX [see Graph: the NEX Index since October 2007. For the full graph, enlarged, go here].
In these dark days, the NEX is not having a happy ride, and, according to the latest report in the Scientific American [’Climate change stocks fall more than wider markets’, Scientific American, October 3], “shares in companies specializing in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, including energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, have tumbled faster than wider markets this year.” Figures for the last full quarter (June 30 to September 30) show that they fell by 30.3%, and that they are down by as much as 39% over the year so far.
The NEX is a global index of 91 companies listed on 24 stock exchanges whose, and I quote, “innovative technologies and services focus on the generation and use of cleaner energy, conservation, efficiency and the advancement of renewable energy in general” [see: ‘NEX Fact Sheet’]. It includes companies which claim to adopt lower-carbon approaches that “are relevant to climate change, and whose technologies help reduce emissions relative to traditional fossil fuel use.”
As the Scientific American reports: “"It would be easy to blame the credit crunch, which certainly has made it more difficult for project developers in wind and solar to raise debt finance,” said Michael Liebreich, chairman and CEO of research firm New Energy Finance on Friday. Another contributory factor was a correction in high valuations for some renewable energy companies, said Liebreich.”
Just so. What a surprise! It seems that sub-prime ‘global warming’ science and politics are no more to be trusted than sub-prime mortgages. Selling hot air was never going to succeed in the long run.
Ah well! The bulls and bears of the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index (NEX) may be hunted down [watch out for gun-totin’ Sarah Palin] through the NEX Website: At 5.43 am ET today, the Index stood at 244.91, down 4.54% on the day. Read more here.