ADAMANT

Eating The Heat

Here is the plate of thermal hors d'oeuvres  nature has dished up to fortify hurricane Gustave as it ponders chomping into New Orleans tomorrow night

The Third Blanket

At this time of year , many coastal New Englanders' last waking thought is of  their air conditioners, the comfortable  ballpark thickness of bedclothes having declined since January  from a much a possible to less than a cotton blanket's one-third-inch loft.

This is in part because we have , since our forebears day , added a similar thickness of insulation outside our windows. Carbon dioxide  is as effective in trapping  radiant body warmth as eiderdown is in isolating us from  the cold,, and while, brought to earth as a layer ,  the  260 parts per million of the gas in the air the Founders breathed would have been just two blankets thick , today  with 380 parts per million in the air  we are closing in on three- at this rate, by 2028, a full inch of CO2 will lay between us and the deep cold of  outer space.

Since air pressure is roughly a kilogram per square centimeter , and there are a million milligrams in a kilogram, CO2's  concentration  ( 380  millionths by volume  ) divided by its molecular weight (44)  tell us how thick a layer it would form if separated from the air above us to form a blanket on the ground . Right now that thickness stands at 19.5 millimeters -- there  are 25.4 to an inch,and as the blanket is thickening as fossil fuel is  burned.At the present rate of CO2 growth some parts per million per year, in a few decades the absolute thickness of  the cozy stuff will pass the one inch mark.

Some will hail this  as a boon to chilly mankind , a sentiment easily defended on a cold winter's night, but come a Fourth Of July  power brown out, cause for  some to change their minds.

The Fall and Rise of The New Atlantis

 I can scarcely  argue with Yuval Levin, now that the The New Atlantis editor   former Associate Director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House and  President's Council on Bioethics stalwart  has called on National Review  to do what two of my recent pieces in Taki's Magazine ,The Right's Science Problem,and Climate Of  Here   counsel--

To put ideology aside and get real on science policy .

Were it not for the fact that that journal ,along with the usual beltway policy magazines of a conservative or neoconservative bent , rejected  the opportunity to run  the substance of these two pieces  when offered them, repeatedly, between 2005 and 2007, all would be copacetic. The fact remains that  though such writers as Chris Mooney have written whole books about the beast, it took a paleocon editor to unveil the elephant in the Neocon's vestibule. Still,better late in the election cycle than never: an elephant is a terrible thing to waste.

Here is Yuval's plank from today's National Review  Online:

"The conservatives who are working to resist or to answer global-warming denialism (much of which was based on very genuine concerns about the accuracy of climate science and the policy implications its advocates were drawing from it) are not adopting the script of Al Gore’s movie, which is the epitome of the reckless hysteria school of climate change. They’re not talking about Manhattan under water, but about the apparent probability of a very modest increase in average temperatures over the course of the coming century and a half to which human activity appears to contribute some and which may have detrimental effects particularly on low-lying areas in the middle latitudes. There is plenty of time and space to improve our modeling and understanding, to seek some ways to mitigate and adapt, and find some creative solutions to both our energy and our environmental problems — as Jim Manzi has well argued in the pages of NR. These begin from seeing these problems realistically. Neither the right nor the left has done that squarely in the recent past, but the genuine abuses of science have been (and frankly continue to be — just listen to “rolling back the waters” Obama lately) more serious on the left in this debate than on the right. Global warming hysterics, at least as much as denialists, need to get a real grip on the science.

To take this as an instance of some kind of conservative anti-science agenda, and even to equate this with the evolution debate, is surely wrong-headed. In the evolution debate, for instance, some are inclined to deny scientific claims because they accept the notion that certain moral implications must follow from those claims, and they resist those implications. Rather than question the idea that the implications must in fact follow from the science, they dispute the science. (The evolution debate is much more complicated than that, I know, so no need for millions of e-mails, but it does exhibit this general dynamic among others.) In the global warming debate, on the other hand, we have seen a reaction (which sometimes has run to excess) against extreme and irresponsible hyping of scientific claims. Both debates are complex, but they are very very different; and the relationships between the right, the left, and science are very far from simple, as revealed in both instances and many others.

I might take the opportunity to mention that the relationship between the right, the left, and science, is one of the main subjects of a forthcoming book of mine, due out in September — Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. A chapter of that book (on science and the left) ran in the last issue of the New Atlantis. It is followed in the book by a chapter on science and the right, and the book takes up more generally the question of what all these science debates can teach us about American political life. (End of shameless plug)." -- Yuval Levin   NRO 06/20 12:39 PM

The Iron Snowman

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L07201, doi:10.1029/2008GL033311, 2008

Non-ideal liquidus curve in the Fe-S system and Mercury's snowing core

Bin Chen Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA. Jie Li

Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.Steven A. Hauck II

Department of Geological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Abstract

We conducted multi-anvil experiments to investigate the melting behavior of the iron-sulfur system at moderate pressures. Our data reveal a positive departure from ideal solution behavior at 14 GPa, as indicated by the presence of two inflection points on the liquidus curve of iron-rich compositions. In contrast, the shape of the liquidus curve at 10 GPa is consistent with nearly ideal mixing between end-member components. Combined with existing data at lower pressures and above 20 GPa, our results suggest a negative liquidus temperature gradient under conditions found at shallow depths in Mercury's core. At the present time, the core is most likely precipitating solid iron in the form of snow, at a single depth or in two distinct zones. Formation and segregation of iron snow would alter the thermal and chemical state of the core and influence the origin and surface expression of the planet's magnetic field.>
published 3 April 2008.

Yangoon Show

When The Sea Comes Up Like Thunder
And  the flying fishes play
O'er the landscape underwater
On the road to Mandalay
Stop reading Goddam  Kipling
There's a cyclone on the way

Burma's  PR  campaign marched on  as  Kipling's original rhyme became a tragic reality. Flying fishes  ruled  Myanmar's highways last week as Cyclone Nargis sucked in a dome of Andaman seawater five meters high and forty kilometers across, and bore it , flying fish and all, a hundred kilometers inland , dissolving half the  Irawaddy  delta into a flowing mudscape that is still running out to sea into a broad diagonal swath that literally extends  to the road  to Mandalay running north from Yangon.

With over  25,000 square kilometers under water, the death toll from this perfect cyclone may come  within a factor of two of the  2004  Boxing Day tsunami. The storm surge obliterated most of the coast  and Irrawaddy  delta reclaimed by ricefield  poldiering and levee construction  under the British Empire ,and in the two generations since.

I suspect Kipling had jumping Asian carp glimpsed from a  Mississippi-style steamboat of the Irawaddy Flotilla in mind, but there is no report  as to whether The  Old Moulmein Pagoda weathered the storm.

If the Goon Show in Yangoon goes on holding up foreign aid, the Burmese may  come up like thunder, before too many dawns have passed.

Before & after satellite photos of Burma.

In the Maelstrom

One reason Phaeton's Reins ' the overview of the Climate Wars by Kerry Emanuel of M.I.T. has graced this blog's sidebar since its inception  is Kerry's truly contrarian capacity to change his  mind .
He's done it again-

In the 1980’s, he warned of thermodynamically driven rise in hurricane intensity  from increasing  CO2 , and just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a Nature that  statistical evidence linked rising hurricane energy and warming. Despite the uncertainty in the science, his work accordinly figured  in An Inconvenient Truth,

But his latest study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society  hardly inspires confidence in Gore's polemics. (The abstract is here. A pdf is downloadable from  Emanuel’s home page.) Kerry told the NYTimes Andy Revkin :

The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet.

The study essentially meshed two kinds of computer models — the massive global climate simulations used to project long-term consequences of building greenhouse gases and small high-resolution simulations of little atmospheric disturbances that can grow into hurricanes. When hundreds of potential storms were seeded across warming oceans, some places in some computer runs — like the North Pacific — saw more activity, but others saw less intensification and fewer storms.

Emmanuel told the Houston Chronicle :

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some places it will go down.”

Real Time CO2

Viewing the literal pulse of the nation in 3-D helps put a lot of things- from urban heat islands to oil dependence, in geographic perspective

And Now A Word from Our Sponsor

I hope Bill Buckley and George Orwell are comparing notes:

Among the 52 organizations, Good , Bad,  & Ugly lending their  503C's to the  claim that next weeks New York conference on the climate non-crisis is  not  funded [directly] by corporations, is one I have celebrated : but whose largess I somehow never expected to receive:

"The Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute is a non-partisan public policy think tank conducting research on technology, science and culture, economics, and foreign affairs. Its mission is to make a positive vision of the future practical. It discovers and promotes ideas in the common-sense tradition of representative government, the free market, and individual liberty. Its mission is promoted through books, reports, legislative testimony, articles, public conferences..."

To that mandate may be added the subsidy of seriously screwing around  with scientific content .the
self explanatory title of my presentation  ' Fossil Hydrogen ', on how shifting fuel sources could mitigate CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour was transformed without my advice or consent  into:

'Coal Power Not at Odds with Reducing Carbon Emissions'

Huh ? It's about closing down  a quarter of the coal mines in existence.
Read the beta version here and compare it with the  bogus title printed in the program of a  conference whose sessions ironically includes

Business & Media Institute Roundtable Panel:
Global Warming Censored

Since  1/52 of the  conference honorarium is  $19.23 , and it costs $ 9.95 a month to run this place , entry-level  Philanthropists may send me a 31 cent monthly  subvention  to earn a coveted  Adamant Distinguished  Discovery Fellowship, and standing room at my next lecture on the subject. In  forlorn hope of a happier relabeling malfunction,its working title is Coal Tar: Key To Peace In The Holy Land ,

Sustainable Sloth

Sustainability Begins At Home. Hut

A Greenhouse implosion is a fearful thing. With fuel prices spiraling upward, Madison Avenue's most luxuriant  Greens must fear for their  livelihood. What if people can't afford to buy enough carbon to maintain  a decent standard  of CO2 growth?  Those with carbon permits in their 10K portfolios realize that even a measly one part per million annual increase in the greenhouse gas requires  everyone on Earth to  burn fuel enough to provide  ~782 kilograms, or 1,745 pounds per capita of CO2 each year. Many nations exceed this  ¾ metric tonne criterion-- Americans with  over 20 tonnes of CO2   each,  Kazakhstanis with 13 and  Israelis with over 10. Despite the  handicap of Gaullist  nuclear electricity  , even the French manage a respectable 6.

But heaven help the heavily carbon-leveraged  if more  nations start emulating the few, the proud, that took Earth Day 1970 seriously, and  are showing the world the way forward with this  exemplary spectrum of  low carbon footprint  lifestyles.

No wonder some American politicians have embraced the energy efficient and Eco-conscious national costume of that most advanced of Ultra-Green nations, the sovereign republic of  Somalia, whose citizens exhale far more carbon than statistics suggest they combust-

Wow! What a small camp fire !

CO2 per capita  KG      Life Expectancy   Lifetime Footprint:Tonnes CO2 

• USA                20,000             80.1                   1602.0

• Paraguay        742                 78.0                         57.8   

• Angola            505                  38.6                         19.5

• Sudan              287                 50.3                         14.4

• Zambia           204                 38.5                           7.9

• Ethiopia         103                  50.4                          5.2

• Rwanda           63                   50.1                          3.2

• Cambodia        39                  63.4                          2.5

• Afghanistan   29                 43.9                           1.3

• Chad                  13                  48.3                           0.6
  

• Somalia             3                   50.7                          0.15

I find the UN 's contention  that Somali's get by on  six ounces of fuel a month pretty unsustainable, but  their data base is not my problem. Then again, a lot of the time it's too hot in Somalia to risk working up a sweat carrying firewood.

Satellite Temperature Data For Dummies

How to look at the RSS satellite-derived temperature data

Rare is the statistician who can write- don't miss William Briggs lucid and disinterested introduction to whence the data underlying the policy debate come, and what happened to their error bars along the way.

Strange Attractors, Political Division

“You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt”

Spiked Jan. 2008

 Beat the heat selling CO2 Indulgences from the
 InterPapal Climate Concordat

........................ADAMANT Aug. 2007

 

More Than Planet Gore Ever Wanted To Know

About  Climate  Modeling
And JunkScience Is Afraid To Ask:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/02/ipcc-archive/langswitch_lang/wp#more-520

What the world is doing is not always to to the modeler's liking though.  As the owlishly skeptical Roger Pielke Senior notes of Real Climate's own skepticism about  what the short term --less than a generation--implies about the still parlous state of the modeling art:

"Ironically, by suggesting that there might be some significance to recent climate trends, [ IPCC head] Dr. Pachauri has provided ammunition to those very same skeptics that he disparages. Perhaps Real Climate will explain how misguided he is, but somehow I doubt it.

For the record, I accept the conclusions of IPCC Working Group I. I don't know how to interpret climate observations of the early 21st century, but believe that there are currently multiple valid hypotheses. I also think that we can best avoid confirmation bias, and other cognitive traps, by making explicit predictions of the future and testing them against experience. The climate community, or at least its activist wing, studiously avoids forecast verification. It just goes to show, confirmation bias is more a more comfortable state than dissonance -- and that goes for people on all sides of the climate debate."

 

Going Overboard On Carbon Offsets

Another shot has been fired  across the bows of RV Weather Bird II, the only liquid asset of Planktos, a company of carbon offset buccaneers that has moved its operations literally offshore in emulation  of the floating tax wheeze of those Brethren of the Coast, the scientologists.

The converted trawler was last spied crawling towards High Barbaree after being run out of port in La Palma. Apart from the harbormaster not liking the cut of her jib, his Spanish Majesty's securities and exchange inquisition took unkindly to Planktos' abortive scheme to bilk the pious out of $700,000 towards buying
  .. a climate indulgence for the Pope?

'The New Vatican Climate Forest Initiative to Fully Green the Holy See'

Though there is business in great waters, Weather Bird II may be bound for an iron shore. Writing in the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law.  Kristina Gjerde, high seas policy advisor to the World Conservation Union contends :

"Current proposals to combat climate change by stimulating phytoplankton or algal blooms in the ocean may violate fundamental principles of international law...Adding nutrients, such as iron or nitrogen... should not be considered as a potential solution to climate change.

We first need regulations...Difficulties in actually proving or verifying carbon dioxide sequestration... make the current informal and unregulated market for carbon offsets vulnerable.

One company is already offering carbon offsets to the public on its website to support its work...international law and common sense should not be the first victims...The con...needs to be stringently scrutinised through independent peer-reviewed science, not left in the hands of entrepreneurs...we need to be able to regulate any... benefits... governments should apply similarly rigorous standards to all proposed "geo-engineering" solutions.

The article has already proven fruitful. In responding that: "The idea of private companies offering "carbon offsets"...would just end up as a scam to generate profit for companies pedalling dubious science." Cambridge's Paul Lockwood may have answered the  age-old question of why a fish needs a bicycle. On the admiralty law side, perpetrators of offshore carbon offset piracy can now breath easy.

They are likely to get off  with hanging , for red blooded pirates are rich as  organic fertilizer in the micronutrients phytoplankton crave, and their flag  bears witness to their  being 100% biodegradable.

Taken together ,these factors render walking the plank and keelhauling gross violations of the proposed anti ocean fertilization rules, especially if the condemned are in irons.

Expect Admiralty Eco-Lawyers to commandeer the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law and post affadavies on the Piratically Correct way to  bring The Code into EPA compliance. Keelhauling will be banned, planks confiscated and only Fair Trade hemp rope and yardarms from carbon offset plantations henceforth allowed on execution dock. And no more plastic rum bottles.

Bugatti Veyron 16-4

Live Fast : Avoid Global Warming

If  Bugatti built any lighter,NASA would steal its handiwork. Every  part of the Veyron 16.4 is made of the material with the highest strength to weight ratio for its  level of functionality. The titanium piston rods save approx. 4 kg , the titanium screws 3.5 kg, and the magnesium valve caps another 2 kg and the titanium exhaust system with its wafer-thin  titanium aluminide  lining saves yet another 17 kg. These combine to limit  the Veyron 16.4’s weight to 1,888 kg-  about 1 horsepower per four pounds of car.

The entire exterior body, of carbon monocoque construction: weighs only 110 kg.  The front part of the monocoque frame is made of aluminum; the rear consists of a combination of carbon, stainless steel, and aluminum. Crash tests have shown the Veyron 16.4 to conform to all international safety standards – and to exceed them.which is is staggering given that the maximum speed is 400KPH.

How Green Was My Bayou

A current resident of a trailer park in Baker, Louisiana, displaced from his New Orleans home by Hurricane Katrina, is suing the government of the United States for $3,000,000,000,000,000 in damages.

Far from being excessive, this is a sum any thoughtful jury should endorse. Three quadrillion dollar bills would solidly fill a volume of 2.5 cubic kilometers, and the Louisiana State income tax rakeoff from an individual in so exalted a bracket would yield enough greenbacks to completely landfill the areas flooded by levee failure in the storm.

Indeed, there would be  enough dollar mulch left over to raise the entire greater New Orleans conurbation above the level of Bourbon Street, forever after sparing taxpayers need of the expensive and unreliable services of the Corps of Engineers.

Let us hope an enlightened judge is assigned the case.

Bring Out The Guillotine

Perfidy, thy name is Sarkozy.

In signing a decree that does not stop him from smoking cigars in the Palais Elysee'  Nicolas The Short has done more that drive more Frenchmen into the cold than Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. He may have driven the world over the brink of global warming.

This  attack on Liberte' , unsanctioned by voters, will drive millions to buy  two thousand watt  outdoor heaters in the interest of doceur de vivre.

Naturellement, the rest of the fashionable world will buy hundreds of millions more , not realizing the lack of nuclear electricity to run them.  The ensuing run on current - some hundred of gigawatts, will accelerate the construction of as many massive coal fired power stations, collectively releasing untold megatons of CO2, transmuting the use of a renewable resource, tobacco , into wholesale  fossil fuel demand.

It is time for the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace to intervene on the ground by tranquilizing a few  hundred of the most ferocious anti-smoking Jacobins in UNESCO's Paris Headquarters, and transferring them into safe custody in the bear houses of major European zoos. Such timely action could save the Arctic species from extinction, or worse, exploitation in the Coca Cola ads that have inspired so many impressionable and geographically challenged  junior bears to defalcate to Antarctica to feast on  penguin pate' and baby seals.

Striking Down the Doomsday Clock

The Bell Tolls For The Politics Of Limits :

In seeking to remotivate the tendencies comprising their beloved ' progressive'  movement , the authors of The Death Of Environmentalism  seem to be  rediscovering capitalism

Reason's Ron Bailey notes that

Schellenberger and Nordhaus identify an emerging faultline that they argue will divide the environmentalist movement of the 21st century. On one side stand the traditional anti-immigration, anti-globalization, and anti-growth greens. They believe these neo-Malthusians "will seek to establish and enforce the equivalent of an international caste system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to energy poverty in perpetuity." Eternal limits to growth for the already impoverished. 

A Drop In The Ocean

The Great CO2 Hoax: The Devil's In The Details

Nature has interviewed the anonymous ubergeek whose ersatz paper on  deep sea CO2 in the non-existent Journal Of Geoclimatic Studies was greeted like manna from heaven by Rush Limbaugh and other pundits who reject man-made CO2  as a serious force in driving climate change. An excerpt:

"Can you tell me your real name?

           No

Why did you decide to construct the fake website? Was it purely a joke or did you set out to make people taking your paper at face value look foolish?

Its purpose was to expose the credulity and scientific illiteracy of many of the people who call themselves climate sceptics. While dismissive of the work of the great majority of climate scientists, they will believe almost anything if it lends support to their position. Their approach to climate science is the opposite of scepticism.

Are you surprised at the pick up your coverage has generated?

Not really...

How quickly did you expect people to realise that your paper was fake?

In the Age of Google, hoaxes can't last for very long. But it hooked quite a few prominent sceptics before it was exposed. According to the various exposes now circulating online, among others, Rush Limbaugh broadcast it on his programme... Benny Peiser sent it to 2000 people and Ron Bailey wrote it up in glowing terms.

How long did it take to put the site together?   

Four days.

What would you say to those who were taken in by your spoof?

More fool you."

The hoax came complete with gonzo scholarly apparatus- including a list of papers 'in press' from the non-existent Journal Of Geoclimatic Studies of the non-existent University Of Okinawa, including such instant classics as

Submarine lightning strikes in the Hadean Zone: an unacknowledged cause of fish mortality?:

The diurnal cycle of chlorine ion release from the Andean altiplano: a three-dimensional model

Plasma samples from the TOAST-2 mission: implications for future solar settlement

Hit this link for the whole nine yards. Too bad it's all apocryphal. A lot looks better than the products of  Oregon's  Institute Of Science And Medicine, or the state Academy Of Biology journal Intelligent Designers turned into a scientific vanity press a few years ago.

What elevates this hack to the level of geek chic is magisterial attention to detail. It featuresa brachiopod extinct since the Jurassic atop its deep sea food chain, and if you do the math on this mother of all carbon offsets,you'll  discover that at  4.3 x 10ˉ²¹g/m² ,  the bacterial mass supposedly responsible equals ,quite literally, a drop in the ocean.

Nobel Minds

I encourage you to write Stockholm seconding  my nomination of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee for next years Nobel Prize In Economics, richly  deserved for their brilliant coup in adding value to Norway's gas and oil reserves.

The Nobel they gave our former next president should accelerate his efforts to jack up the price of coal through carbon taxation. The more high carbon fuel costs, the more valuable low-carbon North Sea gas and oil reserves become. This should enrich Norway by a cool trillion Kroner.

Not a bad return on four Storting politicians and a retired Tromso University president awarding five million kroner of a Swedish foundation's money to an American film star. Stockholm can  scarcely object- what fraction of the Nobel endowment is vested in the energy business these days ?

If only Admiral Hyman Rickover had lived to see cutting CO2 become a sure fire way to earn a Peace Prize ! Banishing fossil fuel from whole fleets of strategic submarines would definitely qualify. Fortunately, Baroness Thatcher yet lives, and Lord knows she put paid to a lot of coal mines.

You can find the nomination forms on the web.

Sailing From Byzantium

One mild day in Greenland ,
a cruise ship puts His All Holiness Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople ashore to climb the hill behind the site of Bratthild,  a pagan Norse settlement founded by Erik The Red, and perform a Byzantine liturgy in the ruins of the first Catholic  church in the Western hemisphere.

His All Holiness' congregation responds antiphonally  with a Moravian protestant mission hymn sung in Inuit

Read the whole strange and elegaic thing here

Just The Facts , Ma'm

Climate Scientists Views On Climate Change

a survey          Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray

In 1996 and 2003 we surveyed the opinions on climate change held by climate scientists. The results of these surveys have been subject to many misuses and erroneous claims. Some have selected individual statements out of context (scroll down to number 5) to bolster their claims, while others have argued that the 2003 part of the survey would be strongly biased by skeptics misusing the online-sampling for multiple submissions... On the skeptical side, the survey has often been used to create the impression that most scientists were not in support of anthropogenic causes of ongoing climate change: Specifically, it was noted that “For example more climate scientists ‘strongly disagree’ than ‘strongly agree’ that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” This interpretation is certainly biased.

From Nature  Climate Feedback CLICK  FOR FULL TEXT

From Nature  Climate Feedback CLICK  FOR FULL TEXT

A Brief History Of Global warming bets

Is contained in this charming European Geophysical Union meeting paper:
Let The Market Decide

In case you are wondering, few vociferous skeptics, actually bet, and Pat Michael's 1998 offer in World Climate Report to wager on average global satellite temperatures going down by December 2007 has reportedly been withdrawn .

Newton's Law

Global solutions begin in Massachusetts, where Tip O'Neil first declared that all politics is local, including how to deal with CO2. While mayors elsewhere share the Constitutions dim view of treating with  foreign princes and potentates, ours regard the Kyoto treaty as a town ordinance: "Both Worcester and Newton are committed...a 75-85 percent reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary...Massachusetts must act now!"

Atmospheric activism is old in New England. In the17th century , Newton's  Pilgrim Fathers scorned Salem's failure to get carbon offsets for witch burning, and the Puritan Synod of 1679's wimp-out on the death penalty for smoking after fornication. But since then CO2 has burgeoned, and to achieve a 75% reduction, each latter day  Newtonian must take 300 tons of CO2 out of circulation -- wherever will they put it all?

Some may valiantly attempt to internalize the problem, by inhaling CO2 recreationally, or using it to freeze jack O'lanterns, and inflate bicycle tires, soccer balls, and whoopee cushions. Storing it as a liquid won't do, for building  steel tanks entails CO2-intensive coal mining and smelting, and leakage could turn Newton Reservoir into a fizzing slough of Vichy water. Clearly, a more solid solution is needed.

Bottom Ten Hot Things

Rush Limbaugh can still blame global warming on :

1.  Northern Lights spike following mutiny on the Aurora

2.  Volcanic eruptions on moons of Jupiter

3.  CO2 release from Vichy water in Casablanca remake

4. Solar energy absorption by expanding black shirt of Al Gore

5. Freon release by Islamofascist attacks on Iraqi air conditioners

6.  Electric car induced Telluric Currents

7.  Sea ice melting by warm seal puppies

8.  Shrinking solar heat reflection as Murdoch newspapers go tabloid

9.  Warming of Noosphere by Vatican carbon offsets

10. Elimination of sky-darkening hordes of locusts by DDT

Copyright 2007 Russell Seitz all rights reserved: This means you, Rush.

View From The Top

16 Sept 2007 :

Care to kayak from Canada to Kazakstan or Khatanga ?
Today's ice extent is shown in white.

The long-term average extent of summer sea ice is shown by the pink line. Last month, you could  chose between two Northwest Passages.

 

Image : National Snow and Ice Data Center

Off With Their Heads , And Their Carburetors

Jim Hansen is quite chuffed by Judge Sessions' rejection  of the usual suspects plea of nolo cogitare  in the Vermont CO2 case. 

 

PBS' Iterated Apocalypse

If  PBS were as good at advertising itself as environmental politics, viewers might be spared a world of boring fund raisers and an infinity of repeat programming.

The Tuesday night science hype of "Dimming The Sun'  was  seamlessly followed by Thursdays solid hour of big eyed baby seals , cuddly polar bear cubs and unicorn horned norwhals, all depicted as doomed should anything less than a Green landslide transform l climate policy in the election cycle to come. The following Monday, PBS reinforced these  images yet again by identifying energy production with cuddly species extinction. Never mind the shrill disinformation or the shameless bait and switch editing--this is a triumph of advertising as systems integration in the service of social engineering  , and no one should begrudge the perpetrators a  Life Achievement Emmy.

Dim Sun Of All Fears

" A Biblical famine,the closest thing to Hell on Earth"

Is not the sort of figure caption you run into in The Journal Of Geophysical Research, but Educational  TV tends to be a hotter medium than he scientific literature. With PBS airing of  'Dimming The Sun '  fact and image have been disconnected on the science screen to a degree rivaling The Great Global Warming Swindle. While the IPCC process ,shedding its earliest and wildest predictions of temperatures rising degrees per decade , ans subscribing to  scientific transparency  in placw of Green enthusiasm, has been converging on a  'consensus ' projection of some few degrees C of  global warming in this century,  NOVA  has been succumbing to hype. This program is  feverishly and unashamedly  bent on reimposing double digit  temperature inflation on the popular imagination --before the next election.

The NOVA  pseudo-documentary's erstwhile subject, --  the  falling rate at which sunlight drives evaporation on the ground -- is rapidly subordinated to the program's polemic agenda-- elevating to undeserved public credibility some of the most extreme climate modeling scenarios in existence , and implying that climatic doom awaits us before the century is out. At the films end and beginning the screen is  surreallly filled with a burning ocean - an icon old as Coleridge's albatross or the incendiary marine luminism  of Turner's Slave Ship. But this hot button icon has nothing to do with melting ice or methane clathrates- it is hoary footage  blownout gas well awaiting recapping in the Gulf of Mexico.

Like much  PBS science programming , it is a replay of an import- A DOX Production, produced, written and directed by Duncan Copp, a talented British filmaker who anticipated  Green demand by producing Planet Storm-- a scary  2001 compendium of extraterrestrial weather  implying that industry may create a literally alien atmosphere on earth. It  features wild  computer animations of imagined weather phenomena , much as featured in The Day After Tomorrow. I'd credit him with leading with production values for that other Sundance winner, An Inconvenient Truth, rather than following suit( James Bowman, are you taking notes ? )

'Dimming The Sun' introduces Peter Cox, a climate scientist whose main claim to fame is  his suitabilitay as  foil for Jim Hansen , whom he makes seem a paragon of moderation - the bait and switch works too ,
, as it screens  scenes of a burning  offshore gas well blowout , the voiceover speaks of fast forwarding  temperatures rise  to  whole degrees a year ,leading to a global extinctions  driven by  undersea methane clathrate meltdown :

NARRATOR: While today's models foresee a maximum warming of five degrees Celsius by the end of the century, Cox thinks that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that by 2100, temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Many plant species could not survive such rapid climate change. In his scenario, trees would die all over the planet; the world's best agricultural land would be struck by drought and soil erosion; famine would not be far behind. And in the far north, there would be a risk of releasing a vast natural store of greenhouse gas bigger than all the oil and coal reserves of the planet.

PETER COX: We will be in danger of destabilizing these things called "methane hydrates," which store a lot of methane at the bottom of the ocean, in a kind of frozen form—ten thousand billion tons of this stuff—and they're known to be destabilized by warming.

NARRATOR: If this were to happen, some or all of the ten thousand billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas eight times stronger than carbon dioxide, would be released into the atmosphere. When this last happened 50,000,000 years ago, when the Earth was already warmer than it is today, the average temperature rocketed by 13 degrees Fahrenheit, making the Earth 25 degrees hotter than today, and life struggled to survive.

\If you like unadulterated tabloid journalism , buy the DVD. I confess I kind of like the  aviation impact of
sequence, since on September 12 2001, at the Hoffman Lab,  I told Harvard's Mike McElroy, now head of its Center For The Environment, to take advantage of the post- 9-11 halt in civil aviation to check the climate impact of the halt in aircraft contrails that at once reflect sunlight and shade the ground.

As ususal. AEI, CEI, and the rest of the  K Street  climate wizards and Planet Gore regulars again  failed to  provide warning of what the Public Broadcast system is  up to on Al's behalf.

Run It Up The Flagpole And See If It Waves

If $10,000 is the going rate for climate puff pieces from Podunk U, imagine what you can get for $100,000,000 a year  on Madison Avenue

Crazy Bayes & That Rascal Pascal

 Garbage In,Garbage Out, the old saw has it,
But what if you don't know what garbage looks like?

“Science ” was a word quite unknown when London's Royal Society was founded in 1660. Until a generation after the  American revolution, the Society's focus was referred to as "natural philosophy", but nature and philosophy parted company as the natural philosophers assumed power in the Victorian Establishment. Yet the link lingers in the name of a  Royal Society journal:  Philosophical Transactions , whose current issue is devoted to the science of climate modeling.

A Must Read in The Economist  examines Phil Trans' discussion of how the widely misunderstood statistical ideas of 18th century philosopher Thomas Bayes figure in today's climate change debate.

Pulse Of the Ocean

There is more to heat transport in Atlantic waters than the vagaries of tropical trade winds and the Gulf Stream's warm  northward flow . That's why an  ambitious initiative has been instrumenting the ocen depths along the 26th parallel to measure the sum of the heat flow. That means measuring masses of water- flows so large that they are reckoned in  millions of tons per second.Reviewing this research in Science this week ,Australian climate researcher John A. Church has laid another wild card on the high stakes climate policy table: the mass and heat flow is anything but steady --it varies by a factor of ~2 :

On time scales of 15 days and longer, the sum of transports into the North Atlantic should be about zero. Indeed, the observations reported by Kanzow et al. indicate that the sum varies with a root-mean-square value of only 3.4 Sverdrup (1 Sv = 10⁶ m³/s), slightly larger than the expected measurement errors of 2.7 Sv, thus demonstrating the remarkable effectiveness of the array. The fact that the observed sum varies slightly more than the expected measurement errors presumably reflects deficiencies in the method, such as the unobserved flow deeper than the deepest part of the array and the impact of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Cunningham et al. report a year-long average meridional overturning circulation of 18.7 ± 5.6 Sv (3), but with large variability ranging from 4.4 to 35.3 Sv over the course of the year.

Great Caesar's Dice !

O tempora, O climatores !

Reading Yale Economist William Nordhaus'  DICE 2007 Meta-Model makes one wonder : Doesn't anybody remember  The Club of Rome report?

His acronym stands for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate & Economy. It reckons the Stern Report's proposal for deep CO2 cuts would cost $27 trillion in order to reduce future  climate damage by $13 trillion. DICE deems Al Gore's proposal for a 60% cut by 2050 and a 90%  by 2100 an even worse deal,  costing $34 trillion to yield  $12 trillion in benefits.

The Gore and Stern proposals imply carbon taxes rising to over $250 per ton by 2025, and to around $750 by 2050. This would double  the price of coal-fired electricity and gasoline , and raise America's taxes by a trillion dollars a year. Nordhaus instead reckons an  optimal policy to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius  would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010,  rising to $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton  in 2100.

Such an "optimal trajectory" would reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion at a  cost of $2.2 trillion. he writes that  "The net present-value global benefit of the optimal policy is $3.4 trillion relative to no controls...While this is a large number absolutely, it is a small fraction, about 0.17 percent, of the discounted value of total future income."

Greens hope doubling coal 's price will make wind and solar electricity competitive. But  neither the development of infrastructure for energy storage enough to handle peak demand, nor carbon capture technology to deal with burning coal of necessity during clouds and calms figure in the DICE scenarios.

With reason--it is  hard  for any model to project the cost of technologies that do not yet exist.Where would Caesar be if the die he cast were lighter than air, and  history suspended pending its landing?

His Club in Rome, perhaps, energetically reading reports on the Mideastern olive oil crisis? Or ordering  sacrifices on the Ara Pacis to Jupiter Ops-Ed Maximus, to assure the triumph of legions dispatched to teach the pesky Parthians the benefits of Imperial Democracy ?

Northwest Passage

The retreat of  sea ice around the North Pole  began early this summer, and has since accelerated.

In the last few days, satellites have at last made  the proverbial Northwest Passage visible.

See it open before your eyes - Java needed

How Now, Brown Cloud ?

Hot Times In Hanimaadoo

Nature reports a sporty experiment by Indian scientists--flying UAV's over the Maldives to distinguish warming of atmospheric layers by aerosols from background radiative forcing by greenhouse gases. Highly recommended for its lucid refresher on the the paradoxes of aerosol radiative forcing. In this satellite image, Smog drifts down India's populous Ganges valley and out into the Bay of Bengal. Similar  'atmospheric brown clouds' over the Indian Ocean, and the climatic effect of their  constituent aerosol particles are investigated by Ramanathan et.al

HIT AND MYTH

A future hole in the fog of  climate modeling ?
Cox & Peterson try to explain this sobering graphic in Science. Note the window of policy  opportunity that opens a generation hence , as uncertainty dips just before  what we don't know gives way to what we can't find out !

Tinfoil Climatology Down Under

If you think the Northern Hemisphere climate wars a magnet for the tinfoil hat wearing classes , take a video gander at the cohort that showed up to cheer the debut of  The Great Global Warming Swindle down under.

In The Jungle, The African Jungle, The Lion Freezes Tonight

Officials at Live Earth Johannesburg have blamed global warming for poor concert turnout . Organiser John Langford said the first snow in a quarter century  kept people away from the concert, which starred Joss Stone, UB40, Angelique Kidjo and Baaba Maal. "We're expecting 10,000 here tonight. It's a bit chilly"

Concerts On The Green

Can Venice Save LiveEarth From A Watery Grave?

A little consciousness raising is a dangerous thing. Now that Live Earth bids fair to become an event as annual as EarthDay, the fear of rising seas inspired by An Inconvenient Truth has overflowed onto the Live Earth concert stage. Will rave bands demanding megawatts of  lighting undermine Al's midlife climate crisis?  "Biodiesel" was the mantra  the concert moguls offered globally in response to this year's furtive coal-fired electrical demand , but all Green politics is local. Unless future Live Earth crowds offset their affluent effluence, CO2 from sweaty dancing  may  one day raise the fever swamps of the Potomac and inundate the National Mall like the Lagoon of Venice at high tide.

The party animals of the Serene Republic long ago devised a sartorial solution to CO2 exhalation.To survive Carnival celebrations during Venice's 18th century  brush with the Black Death, cool Venetians packed the schnozolli of their party masks with spices, to soak up the deathly Miasma, and bravely boogied on.

The germ theory of disease has since cooled the Venetian party scene, so ratty plague masks can now be picked up for a song in better Adriatic flea markets by Green ateliers seeking to recycle them as Carbon Dioxide capture systems. It'd simply a matter of repacking their beaks with SodaSorb, an ecofriendly product used to soak up the satanic gas on nuclear submarines. But EcoRock raves entail nonstop heavy breathing. How can masks keep soaking up CO2 as the bands play on ?  And on-- Genesis, Snoop Dogg, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas,The Foo Fighters...

Judging by this year's performance,the electric guitar amperage alone risks turning the Supreme Court porte cochere into a Gondola stand.To avoid a climatic tipping point, carbon offsets and renewable energy will be called for. But what ?

The Daily Planet Op-ed Page

"Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground... and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun.  It’s the carbon dioxide."

Al Gore's latest NYTimes oped is plenty scary, but the prospect of Earth falling prey to a Venereal meltdown " cosmic in scale "  is less atmospheric science than the stuff of  popcorn movies. The reflexive hyperbole that left millions of  inattentive viewers of An Inconvenient Truth in terror of a  20 foot sea level rise within decades shows no sign of abating

Having literally no kind of atmosphere, Mercury has no legitimate place in his analogy--It literally exists in a vacuum, while far from being akin to Earth's our  sister planet’s massive gas mantle exerts pressure enough to crush a submarine hull.

 

100 times more massive than the Earth's atmosphere, its veritable ocean of air is equal to 3000 feet of sea water with a concentration of CO2 two thousand times higher than the Earth's. What's more, it rotates only once in 243 earth days, and the two-month run-up to midsummer makes for a mighty warm high noon. Little wonder lead flows like water in its alien abyss

That's not scary enough for Al, -- in March he told Congress that Venus is "hotter the boiling point of lead."  in reality  Venus is over a thousand degrees cooler than  the heavy metal's1,749 degree Celsius boiling point , but no one on the committee was scientifically literate enough to gainsay him.  But why should he know better? For one thing, he inherited a major lead-zinc mine in Tennessee.

Reviewing An Inconvenient Truth , I gave Al a gentleman's C ,for keeping its factoid to fib ratio below  4 to 1. Not this time- his abuse of  scientific analogy has reached disaster movie proportions. His expertise at blowing hot and cold is indisputable, but mathematics is clearly not his metier. It's time to remind him that sometimes a bad scientific analogy is worse than  none at all.

What exactly is he trying to imply when he declares "Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury"?  That 289 F. is one third of the "867 Fahrenheit " he cites?  "867 Fahrenheit " is indeed 463 Celsius, or 736 degrees above absolute zero, but while adding and dividing Earthly day and night temperatures by 2 may be convenient, the truth about planets twisting slowly in the solar wind is not easily captured by a single number Who would guess from Al's molten prose that Venus' acid upper troposphere is colder than the heights of Antarctica?

Mercury broils on one side while the other freezes in a vacuum, as cold as the dark side of the moon. And while lead can't boil on Venus, on Mercury,  mercury can. With sunrise and sunset 88 Earth-days apart, it reaches 800 degrees Fahrenheit in Mercury’s noonday sun, and stays hotter than a pizza oven in Al's pool house for months on end. Yet Mercury’s dark side temperature is  less than a third of 763 Kelvin- or “867 Farhenheit.” It’s  minus 180C , or  minus  292 F, - since Mercury has no kind of atmosphere,  Al is pointing to an ephemeral band of equatorial  twilight in motion.

Lacking a magnetic field, Venus lost its water vapor eons ago, as the solar wind stripped its atmosphere of hydrogen. Lacking water, it never had a hydrogeological cycle to rain out CO2 escaping from its volcanoes. So though similar in size, its geochemical evolution has been  radically different , and  its natural history simply does not  speak to the fate of the Earth.

Yet Al's op-ed is not without educational value. It testifies to the hazards of polemic indifference to inconvenient scientific facts. If fuel reserves were infinite-- and they aare not, it would take two million years of today’s conspicuous coal and oil consumption to realize Al's fears.

We've only got one atmosphere, and turning it into pure CO2 simply beggars science fiction. Sending a fleet of gas  interplanetary tankers to fetch hydrocarbons from  Titan would need, but how would we pay for oxygen enough  to burn their cargo?  Could a LiveEarth concert help?

Let's see: 100 Earth atmospheres is about 75,000,000 tons per capita --Lord, the tickets are going to cost a mint.

 

Happy Feet , Size Twelve

You guys seen my pal Jaws?                     Here to cheer those gloomy about global
warming is an artists conception of the shape of things to come again ,if, after a 25 million year hiatus, climate change brings big birds in black tie back into evolutionary style.

Newly discovered as Eocene fossils in Peru, five foot tall Icadyptes salasi, and Emperor-sized  Perudyptes devriesi  are shown to scale with the diminutive Humboldt penguin, Spheniscus humbolti,which lives in Peru today. Icadyptes bucks a Paleontological fashion trend-- that species moving from cold to warm climates tend to grow smaller as balmy temperatures eliminate the need to conserve heat. The giant may  instead have stayed hefty to hunt in waters cold as today's Humboldt Current.

Though Icadyptes scary beak might make for a fair fight with Humboldt squid, it could  also turn the poor Humboldt penguin into an endangered hors d'oeuvre.

The tallest known fossil penguin Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, which used to chill out on Seymour Island in Antarctica, stood five feet seven inches, while New Zealand's strapping Pachydyptes ponderosus, though slightly shorter, was heavy as an adult human male. Read more online in a paper by Jullia Clark et al. in this weeks Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shooting Sunfish In A Barrel

"If the shooting of fish in barrels offends you, look away."

Warns Nature columnist Oliver Morton, of his inquiry into "The sceptical 'argument'...that global warming on Earth should be seen as a natural, as opposed to anthropogenic, phenomenon "because of  temperature changes on uninhabited planets erstwhile skeptics attribute to solar variability by default.

"This idea... regained a certain prominence in February when...National Geographic's website dredged up the belief of a Russian astronomer, Habibullo Abdussamatov, that the warming on Mars shows that the Sun is driving climate change on Earth."

The problem with this  Op-ed chestnut is that solar heating falls off with the square of planetary distance. So  a 1 degree increase in Neptune's temperature requires a vastly greater change in solar output than  does warming the Earth by 1 degree. About 29% to be exact. You would think solar cell salesmen would have noticed a 100 watt per square yard change , not to mention Coppertone copy writers.

Through A Screen Darkly

Why write about climate policy if readers lack a clear picture of how cloudy a crystal ball climate  modelers have in hand ?  The credibility of their products ought to improve as their resolution improves , and data and computational power evolve, but progress is neither automatic nor assured.

Because what goes in to them remains as subject to fashion consensus as hemlines , climate models still may no more resemble the real world than, well , models. Twiggy remains a three dimensional human being , but a cartoon on HDTV is still a cartoon. More than geographic realism is at issue , but some cautionary details of the limited resolution NOAA and the IPCC have to work with can be seen in one of Real Climate's best efforts to date.

Let viewers beware of what the media make of it --given the present state of the art , global models do not even attempt the prediction of regional climate. Map pixels small enough to show familiar features aren't enough. They need to reflect the shifting averages of their next nearest neighbors to carry modeling forward to a level of realism relevant to regional climate policy debates.
1-Dimensional Model circa early 1970's .

 

Flawed satellite data have caused  past  scientific acrimony over  temperature trends. One  wayward NOAA satellite  radiometer — the only instrument to measure temperature in the stratosphere before 1998, delivered pointing error biased temperature measurements that went undiscovered for two decades , concealing the reality of rising tropospheric temperatures.

Jean-Noël Thépaut, who heads The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warns "Inter-calibration has to be almost perfect if we want to look at climate trends — otherwise the bias will be stronger than the signal you want to address," The onboard recalibration of satellite instruments takesa long screwdriver too, and a German Weather Service research director notes "The development of new sensor technology is progressing much faster than our capability to validate data."

And The Exhaust Cures Scurvy

Having built the world's largest windmill , in , naturalamente , La Mancha , Spain's quixotic Greens are turning to biofuels.

Senor Esteban Gonzalez, Valencia's Minister of Land and Domiciles has announced  regional  government  plans for a service vehicle fleet running on alcohol made from  oranges.

Plants in Valencia which crush oranges to make cordials and soft drinks currently produce 240,000 tons of orange waste annually.This is expected to double by 2010

"Experiments in California show that this could be enough to produce 37.5 million liters of fuel ethanol," Sr. Gonzalez informed  a climate change conference. "We have a car plant and we have the oranges."

Adamant hopes fruit fly carburetor clogging will prove more tractable than the fuel injector issues that keep marmalade diesels off the biofuel menu.

 

 

The Invisible Green Hand

Over at Planet Gore, we see free minds and free markets at work in an entry entitled

Outspent but Unbowed   [Iain Murray]

One of the ways environmental alarmists avoid debate about the science and economics of global warming is to suggest that their opponents only say what they say because they are in the pay of big oil, and in particular ExxonMobil. Not only is this a fallacious ad hominem argument, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. For instance, my organization CEI has not received a penny from ExxonMobil since 2005, but we are no less vocal on the issue now than we were then.

We need to put the funding issue into perspective, Greenpeace, for example, is indignant that ExxonMobil paid out $2 million in grants to organizations that oppose global warming alarmism last year. Yet, according to Gristmill,

U.S. environmentalists are spending between $100 and $150 million on climate, according to an unpublished foundation report...

Yes, the environmentalists' budgets dwarf those of the anti-alarmists."

If money is not what motivates CEI , why  is the hundredfold disparity of funding so stunningly reflected in terms of scientific credibility and media product impact on culture high and low ?  As to Iain's deeply shocking discovery that :

Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando's compensation is three times - perhaps more - the total amount of corporate contributions The National Center for Public Policy Research received in 2006.

One might expect CEI to celebrate the free market functioning to such good competitive effect in executive compensation. How long before the invisible hand extends itself to the spigot watering K Street's plantings of switchgrass and corn , or the weedy biotreme of Planet Gore ?

AFTER THE FALWELL

No wonder it's warm
From our Old Dominion legal correspondent:

The Reverend Doctor Jerry Falwell , rumored candidate for Virginia State Climatologist , has risked catching hell-fire from The O'Reilly Factor by announcing that global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus."

Observers fear the irascible Fox commentator may construe Falwell's remark as a thinly veiled reference to convicted heretic Galileo Galilei's use of a so-called 'telescope' to foist his alarmist  'heliocentric' theories on liberal Catholic theologians.

At a Hot Sulfur Springs briefing, Satan declined comment, but his press secretary announced :

"He's not in denial--the jury's still out on global warming."

In a related development , Senate Environment and Public Works Committee  staffers are seeking to subpoena the Permanent Undersecretary Of The Interior's  testimony on what its ex-Chairman , Senator Inhofe , concurs with Falwell in calling "The greatest  hoax of our times."

The Hadean CEO did not return calls, but his office suggested we contact his counsel of record about pending Securities and Exchange Commission charges of manipulation of brimstone emission permit markets , fraudulently franchising subterranean fire heated swimming pools in Nashville, Tennessee , and Presbyterian allegations that he figures in a K Street conspiracy to induce Congressional pages to cut Sunday school classes and fly to Scotland to play golf on the sabbath.

NASA : Blast Off Or Royal Flush ?

Why is Queen Elizabeth's entourage  going to call on NASA, not at a Texas or Florida space center, but a Maryland  climate modeling lab ? Certainly not to argue with Jim Hansen. How about a bit of off-season  lame duck shooting ?

Hot shot Prince Phillip has long been the Green's big gun as head of the World Wildlife Fund. Given the militancy of the Royal Society, and the passionate speech of  Britain's former Environment and present Foreign Minister at the UN two weeks ago , more heated words on climate policy  may be forthcoming as part of the state visit agenda  - a lot of international moves social and diplomatic  are afoot to pressure the Bush administration on the climate science front.

Back in the EU , German  leader Angela Merkel is making much of her recent meeting with President Bush, and getting him to acquiesce to a major agreement on climate change would boost her popularity at home still further. Andrew Curry reports in The Spectator that  the German press was thrilled that Merkel got Bush to concede human activity contributs to climate change , though "there were no hints of a hoped-for new agreement on greenhouse gases, the meeting was an important chance for Merkel to scope Bush out."  He  expects a concerted efforted  to convince the Bush administration to commit on climate change. Doing so would  establish Merkel's  EU leadership position before Sarkozy and Blair's successors can make their moves,

Expect fallout from whatever HM & Co say at NASA Goddard at the seaside Heiligendamm G8 conference next month. It's  in climate change photo-op country , on Merkel's  low-lying green home turf in  Mecklenburg.

Raising Daisies In The Climate Wars

Beat:  Smiling little girl playing with a dandelion on a suburban lawn:
............................................."Daddy, what did you do in the climate war?"
Pan: to  Father with back to the sun : ....... "Only my duty child--
.........I let the grass grow on the home front." 

"What did you do on Earth Day? "
Asks famed CO2 commercial producer and Planet Gore cultivator Iain Murray , answering that:
"I spent the day using energy to power-wash away the green mold that has been decaying my deck's structure and strength. Next week I shall use chemicals to varnish the deck and restore some strength to it.

I can't help but feel this is a metaphor for something."

What will Nova make of Iain's meme ?   Or Leonardo DiCaprio ? Or Frontline?  Iain is, after all , resident Philosopher of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gave us  Global Warming and Other Eco Myths, and PBS has plenty of deep green intellectuals on call.  One of their Frankfurt school dudes might postulate alienation as the metaphor-- could Iain be slaving away because the deck keeps turning into the CO2 that helped pay for it?  A Structuralist would maintain Murray is symbolically defying authority by playing with water toys on the sabbath, instead of being indoors listening to sermons with The Base. That might be less boring than watching the mold grow ,or hearing  Al Gore drone the  intro to six Green films in a row at the Tribeca Film Festival. Or a dozen at Cannes.

Smoking Gun Found In Hurricane Alley

It would take a streetcar to accommodate Green desire to link the inundation of New Orleans to global warming.
The oceanographic data made visible in this NASA/NOAA  composite image suggest a more tangible connection between the forces of nature and the fury of   the storm-- a killer loop current set up the Big Easy for a hot water powered hit.by Hurricane Katrina

The urbicide suspect is the arrow of tropical water shown in blood red , aimed not by tropical air temperatures , but the underwater Caribbean topography that shapes the hydrodynamics of the Gulf Stream. The loop wanders about the Gulf each summer like a lazy serpent's tongue, but the week Katrina bowled ashore , it flickered roughly along the lines of this 2003 snapshot , superheating the killer's track from Cuba to the Mississippi delta.

An Inconvenient Tree

This month's  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences should make warm reading for Al Gore.

The Wall Street Journal
Op-Ed  April 14 2007

By Russell Seitz
A report that just came online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences should make warm reading for Al Gore. The Former Next President, like many black clad greens gracing the cover of Vanity Fair , relies on  firms that promise to plant trees to offset their clients' fuel intensive lifestyles , allowing  the affluent to ignore their effluence and claim to be CO2 free. Al also points to windmills and other energy alternatives when pleading carbon-neutral to charges he's hardly innocent of global warming.

But where do Al Gore's green woodlands grow?   Canada?  Scotland?  Patagonia? Alaska? Siberia?  Does he really know?  Carbon offsets are sold by the ton, not by the acre, and don't come with return addresses.

He'd better find out--before Earth Day. The research reported by Govindasamy Bala of Lawrence Livermore National laboratory and colleagues at the Carnegie Institute of Global Ecology compared the climate effects of planting and clearing forests at latitudes  high  and low. Their computer simulations yielded some disturbing results.

Since 1997, the "Tree Canada Foundation has been responsible for the planting of 3,298,607 trees in Northeastern Ontario , an achievement its website advertises " Tree Canada is very proud to be associated with "  Reading the PNAS paper could thaw some Greens agreement.

And The Skies They Are Cloudy All Day

Clouds , Nature reminds us, “ are one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in efforts to measure and predict global warming. They have two opposite effects: increasing warming by absorbing heat radiated from the planet's surface (which is why cloudy nights are warmer), while offsetting this by reflecting sunlight back into space from cloud tops...modeling studies typically try to distinguish between cloudy and cloud-free regions of the atmosphere. “

But the distinction between  fair sky and cloudy has just gotten un-clearer. A paper by Ilian Koren et al in  Geophysical Research Letters. reports that digitized images reveal an invisible nimbus of damp but not dripping aerosols can extend  kilometers beyond the limits of what the eye can see- it takes the equivalent of a Photoshop contrast boost to reveal the tenuous halo that extends much further than previously imagined.

"People may have seen these extended haloes anecdotally,"  Lorraine Remer of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center told Nature. "But thanks to a new generation of instruments, the satellite observations have got much better, and we can look on larger scales, with more sensitivity and at finer resolution."

Satellite images of clouds over the Atlantic Ocean show that the sky's reflectance falls very gradually with increasing distance from cloud edge  for at least 20-30 kilometres away, Koren's team says. The twilight zone study also examined  years of images from a global network of ground-based lightmeters called AERONET, usually used to monitor solar brightness . estimate that for typical global cloud coverage, the halo could encompass as much as two-thirds of the sky usually classed as cloud-free.

Some climate models 'grow'  such halos automatically if they do a good job of capturing humidity variations . But simpler models might neglect the effect., leading to suspicions  that the overall cooling effect of aerosols may have been underestimated. But NASA admits that it is too early to say  how significant an impact it might have on climate predictions.

"Right now there is a discrepancy between what global models predict for aerosol effects and what satellites measure,"  says. Lorraine Remer of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center "This might be part of the reason for that."