Lawrence Solomon, The Financial Post, Toronto, Canada
In the history of the global-warming movement, no scientist is more revered than Roger Revelle of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Harvard University and University of California San Diego. He was the co-author of the seminal 1957 paper that demonstrated that fossil fuels had increased carbon-dioxide levels in the air. Roger Revelle’s most consequential act, however, may have come in his role as a teacher, during the 1960s at Harvard. Dr. Revelle inspired a young student named Al Gore.
But in 1991, Dr. Revelle wrote an article for Cosmos, a scientific journal, entitled “What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap,” the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of increased carbon dioxide to be understood, and laid out the harm that could come of acting recklessly: “Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective.” Read more here
By Lorrie Goldstein, The Edmonton Sun, 28 April 2007
Ding-dong the Kyoto witch is dead, killed off by Canadian politicians—Conservative and Liberal—who never believed in it anyway. The messy coup de grace was delivered Thursday by Environment Minister John Baird, standing in for the nation’s leading, although now undercover, global warming sceptic, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Meanwhile, the predictable festival of indignation marking Kyoto’s demise was led by Stephane Dion, leader of the Liberals—collectively the biggest bunch of hypocrites on Kyoto to ever darken a doorway in Ottawa. Bad enough Harper now pretends to take global warming seriously. The Liberals pretended to do so for almost a decade after they signed Kyoto in 1998, then did nothing to implement it until they were tossed from power last year.
Harper is gambling we Canadians talk a better game on Kyoto than they’re willing to play, or, more important, pay. He read the polls showing that while we support implementing Kyoto by a margin of two-to-one, we also, by the same margin, don’t want to pay significantly more for fossil fuels to do it. Thus we’ve been handed “Kyoto-lite”—which will cost the average family a few hundred dollars a year once it’s up and running, rather than a few thousand.
By Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science Weblog
Thanks to Roger Pielke Sr. and Dev Niyogi for an important news report on the risk of ethanol vehicles on health. The article in Energy Daily is titled “Ethanol Vehicles Pose A Significant Risk To Human Health”
The text reads in part, “Ethanol is widely touted as an eco-friendly, clean-burning fuel. But if every vehicle in the United States ran on fuel made primarily from ethanol instead of pure gasoline, the number of respiratory-related deaths and hospitalizations would likely increase, according to a new study by Stanford University atmospheric scientist Mark Z. Jacobson. His findings are published in the April 18 online edition of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
See Climate Science Weblog post