By Dr. Walter Starck
And now we have Reefgate
For the past half century the Great Barrier Reef has sustained a Queensland industry predicated on “saving” the reef from a never ending succession of purported “threats”. All have been declared as dire and of course, they require urgent funding. None have ever become manifest in any serious manner and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in research has never resulted in a solution for any these non-problems.
The reef today remains a vast area of pristine nature with the majority of its over 2500 individually named reefs are seldom fished or even visited by anyone. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority headquartered in Townsville has grown into a 45 million dollar a year bureaucracy charged with “managing” the reef. This it does by remote control from air conditioned offices where it overseas the application of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems and administers a morass of regulations which have effectively strangled most healthy productive activity on the reef. Starting with no problems and only their own assessment of results, they have declared great success. This has been proclaimed widely through their extensive “educational” activity which serves to promote the Authority and create a high public profile for it.
In 2004 they stumbled badly with a large expansion of no fishing areas (a.k.a. green zones) on the reef. This resulted in a devastating impact on the small but important commercial fishing industry in the region as well as over 300 mandatory criminal convictions for otherwise law abiding recreational fishermen almost all of whom were arrested for inadvertently crossing one of the complex maze of unmarked boundaries. The upshot has been a massive compensation payout for the commercial fishermen, considerable public resentment and replacement of the GBRMPA chairperson.
With a sore need to remove the smudges from their workbook after the green zones debacle plus a juicy prospect for substantial expansion through management of a vast new Marine Protected Area in the Coral Sea, GBRMPA recently produced a glowing report of “extraordinary” benefits from the expanded green zones. To underscore the credibility and importance of their claims the report was published in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals rather than as just another of their own numerous publications. However, in doing this they badly overreached.
The report appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. This journal has strict requirements for authors. These include:
* A requirement that authors declare no conflict of interest; yet, all 21 of them are employed by or are recipients of generous funding from GBRMPA and they are reviewing outcomes of their own findings and recommendations.
* A requirement that authors must declare sources of funding; yet, this cannot be found in the report.
* A requirement that all data and materials be made available for independent examination; yet, the supplementary information posted on the PNAS website fails to provide this.
* A requirement that authors acknowledge and address any conflicting evidence. Not only was this not done in regard to a number of key claims, the conflicting evidence is clear, convincing and, most extraordinary of all, authored by some of the same researchers as those in the report.
This situation has been brought to the attention of PNAS and they have promptly responded that they are looking into it. The appearance of repeated serious breeches of scientific ethics as well as explicit requirements of the journal is incontrovertible. It is difficult to imagine any credible explanation which might indicate otherwise. This is a very big deal and a full explanation by GBRMPA is demanded. Any attempt to pretend otherwise will only compound the seriousness of this matter. See summary here. See PNAS letter here. See detailed analyasis here.
By Kevin Sieff in Washington, Financial Times
Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanise support among Republicans and industry groups.
The proposed legislation, encouraged by President Barack Obama, dilutes a climate bill that stalled last year in the Senate. The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.
Nearly six months have passed since the Senate’s most recent climate bill failed to win over conservatives and moderates, a political stalemate that cast a shadow on America’s presence at the Copenhagen climate summit. But some Democrats say the passage of healthcare reform has opened the door for climate change legislation, while acknowledging trade-offs will be needed to secure 60 Senate votes. “They know that to pass a comprehensive bill they will have to ease concerns of some special interests and mid-western senators whose states have manufacturing-oriented economies,” said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think-tank.
Environmental groups are divided over the bill, with some decrying the push to pre-empt existing state and federal greenhouse gas regulations. But many moderate groups are withholding judgment until the bill is introduced, saying concessions to industry bodies will be necessary. According to people briefed by the senators, the bill aims to cut carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 17 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, largely by implementing separate caps on utilities and manufacturers. The federal government would sell separate pollution permits to each sector, using a “hard price collar” to limit greenhouse gas allowances to between $10 and $30 per ton, and committing to flood the market with credits if the price ceiling is exceeded.
The bill’s sponsors - John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, Joseph Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican - said the new sectoral approach would begin imposing carbon caps on utilities in 2012 and manufacturers in 2016.
The bill includes a new petrol tax, which would be passed on to consumers, though this could be vulnerable in the efforts to reach a compromise. By mentioning investment in conventional energy, the senators have elicited favourable responses from industry leaders, including BP executives and lobbyists from the US Chamber of Commerce, who opposed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House of Representatives last spring. After meeting the senators, Bruce Josten, the chamber’s top lobbyist, said their efforts were “largely in sync” with industry targets.
Mr Graham, distinguishing his legislation from last year’s bill, told reporters this month “the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate are dead” and would be replaced. He hopes his sector-by-sector approach to regulation,
unlike Waxman-Markey’s economy-wide cap, will help him save face among conservatives. His role in the bill’s formulation was itself in doubt after he said the Democrats’ handling of healthcare reform “poisoned the well” for bipartisan co-operation.
The senators hope to send details of the bill to the Environmental Protection Agency this week. The bill is likely to be introduced by late April. Despite bipartisan sponsors, its passage is not guaranteed. Last week, 10 Democratic senators said they would not support unlimited offshore oil exploration. Meanwhile, some environmentalists said the bill would curb the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Read story here.
By Christopher Booker
There has been a curious by-product of the attempts being made by the University of East Anglia to whitewash last November’s embarrassing leak of documents from its Climatic Research Unit. Since it set up not one but two supposedly “independent” inquiries into the “Climategate” affair, climate sceptics were intrigued but not entirely surprised to find that almost all their members were committed, even fanatical advocates of global warming, and hence unlikely to be over-critical of the CRU’s bizarre record.
Most recently, the sceptics have been particularly intrigued by the background of the man chosen by the university to chair an assessment of the CRU’s scientific record. Lord Oxburgh declared on his appointment that he is linked to major wind-farm and renewable-energy companies. He admitted that he advises Climate Change Capital, which manages funds worth $1.5 billion, hoping to cash in on the “opportunities created by the transition to a low-carbon economy”, in a world market potentially worth - its website boasts - $45 trilllion.
What Lord Oxburgh kept quiet about, however, is that he is also a director and vice-chairman of a strange little private company few of us had heard of known as Globe International. The name stands for “Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment”, and it describes itself as a worldwide network to lobby governments to take more drastic action on climate change. Globe is certainly well-connected, as it showed just before last December’s Copenhagen conference by staging a seminar addressed by, among others, the conference’s chairman Yvo de Boer, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Ed Markey, the leaders of the campaign to push a cap-and trade-scheme - which could make a lot of people fabulously rich - through the US Congress.
The international president of this lobbying organisation turns out to be none other than Stephen Byers MP, now best known for his description of himself on last week’s Dispatches as “like a cab for hire”, happy to take 5,000 pounds a day for using his influence as a lobbyist.
Globe clearly knows how to pick its men. Its UK parliamentary team also includes Elliot Morley MP, Globe’s former president, and David Chaytor MP, both of whom now face criminal charges for fraud in connection with their expenses claims, Considering the record of some of his colleagues, it is perhaps not surprising that Lord Oxburgh was not too keen to declare his interest in this odd little outfit when he was appointed to chair an inquiry as to whether the world can rely on the evidence produced by the CRU to support its advocacy for global warming. But I am sure we can all have every confidence as to which way his inquiry’s conclusions are likely to point.
Read more and see comments here.
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Comments from Dr. Will Alexander on Climategate
“For more than the past 20 years I have searched in vain for scientifically believable evidence of large-scale environmental damage and threats to the African subcontinent’s water supplies that could be attributed to undesirable emissions from our coal-fired power stations and other sources. There could only be one conclusion. The alarmist claims have no foundation in science.
I have often wondered how it will all end. These scientists flouted all the basic procedures for numerical modelling of complex processes. They obviously had no experience in time series analyses. Nor were they familiar with the well documented multi-year anomalies in the hydrometeorological data. They rejected the periodicity in the data that has been known since biblical times and its synchronous linkage with variations in solar activity first reported more than a hundred years ago. Computer model calibration and verification procedures are obviously beyond their knowledge horizon.
Even more importantly, they followed the now discredited Climategate policy of refusing to share their information and procedures with those who disagreed with them. They went even further by distributing vitriolic articles on these scientists. They even demanded that a UK scientific journal should not publish our papers that disagreed with their views.
Now they are about to experience the consequences. They can no longer rely on the authorities to support their extremist views. Fellow scientists particularly those in the applied sciences, are increasingly distancing themselves from the patently alarmist tactics.
A committee of the UK Parliament has already heard evidence regarding the University of East Anglia’s role in the Climategate affair. The United Nations Secretary General has established a committee to report to him on the future activities of the IPCC. The UNFCCC and the IPCC cannot possibly survive in their present form. It now seems increasingly remote that a meaningful international accord will be reached in the foreseeable future whereby all nations agree to reduce their emissions to the required level. The whole climate change issue faces complete disintegration.”