Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008, Bjorn Lomborg, Addiction to the worst of worlds.
The Japan Times online, Opinion posting.

COPENHAGEN — Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening, but that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

If we are regularly being surprised in just one direction, if our models get blindsided by an ever-worsening reality, it does not bode well for our scientific approach. Indeed, one can argue that if the models are constantly inaccurate, it is probably because the models are wrong. And if we cannot trust our models, we cannot know what policy action to take if we want to make a difference.

Yet, if new facts constantly show us that the consequences of climate change are getting worse and worse than expected, high-minded arguments about the scientific method appear to carry little weight. Certainly, this seems to be the prevailing bet in the spin on global warming. It is, again, worse than we thought, and despite our failing models, we will gamble on knowing just what to do: Cut CO2 emissions dramatically.

But it is simply incorrect to claim that climate data are systematically worse than expected; in many respects, they are spot on, or even better than expected. That we hear otherwise is an indication of the media’s addiction to worst-case scenarios, but that makes a poor foundation for smart policies.

***

The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1 degree Celsius over the past century, and is predicted by the U.N. climate panel (IPCC) to warm 1.6 to 3.8 C during this century, mainly owing to increased CO2. An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2 C.

But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures, and even more so for satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01 and 0.1 C per decade. When it comes to temperature development, one of the most important indicators of global warming, we ought to be hearing that the data are actually much better than expected.

Likewise, and arguably much more importantly, measurements have shown that the heat content of the world’s oceans has also been dropping for the past four years. Whereas energy in terms of temperature can disappear relatively easily from the light atmosphere, it is unclear where the heat from global warming should have gone — and certainly this is again much better than expected.

We constantly hear how the Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, and this is true. But most serious scientists also allow that global warming is only part of the explanation. They also take into account the so-called Arctic Oscillation of atmospheric pressure over the Arctic Ocean, which is now in a state that prevents buildup of old ice and creates winds that immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.

In 2007, The Associated Press, along with many other news outlets, told us that the “Arctic is screaming” and that the Northwest Passage was open “for the first time in recorded history.” Yet the BBC reported in 2000 that the fabled Northwest Passage was already without ice.

We rarely hear that the Antarctic sea ice is not in decline or that it is above average for the past year. IPCC models would expect declining sea ice in both hemispheres, but in fact where the Arctic is doing worse than expected, Antarctica is doing better.

Instead, we are inundated with stories of how sea levels will rise, and how one study after another finds that it will be much worse than what the IPCC predicts. Most models, however, find results within the IPCC range of a sea-level increase of 18 to 59 centimeters this century. This is of course why the thousands of IPCC scientists projected that range. Studies claiming one meter or more, however, obviously make for better headlines.

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels, and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2 mm — spot on the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the last two years, sea levels have not increased at all — actually, they have shown a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Hurricanes were the stock image of Al Gore’s famous film on climate change, and certainly the United States took a battering in 2004 and 2005, which lead to wild claims of ever stronger and costlier storms in the future. But in the two years since, the damage has been well below average, virtually disappearing in 2006. That is definitely better than expected.

Gore quoted MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emmanuel to support an alleged scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes much more severe. But Emmanuel has now published a new study showing that even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries. That conclusion did not get much exposure in the media.

Of course, not all things are less bad than we thought. But one-sided exaggeration is not the way forward. We urgently need balance if we are to make sensible choices.

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It,” head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.   www.project-syndicate.org)

EU-15 mostly on track to meet Kyoto targets.
Writes LEIGH PHILLIPS from Brussels. EUobserver, October 17, 2008.

 The 15 ‘old’ European Union member states are on track to meeting their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions that they signed up to under the 1997 Kyoto Agreement: The EU-15 as a whole, excluding member states that joined in 2004 and 2007, should meet its collective target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent for the period 2008-2012 compared with 1990, the Kyoto agreement’s baseline year.

While Denmark, Italy and Spain are behind in reducing emissions, the performance of the other EU-15 nations is enough to pick up the slack so that the EU-15 overall should meet its Kyoto commitments, according to figures in a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA).

“Emission performance remains mixed in the EU-15. A few member states are still off their Kyoto track,” said Jacqueline McGlade, the executive director of the agency.

The EEA figures show that as of 2006, four EU-15 Member States - France, Greece, Sweden and the UK - had already reached a level below their Kyoto target.

Eight additional other states - Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal - project that they will achieve their targets in the future.

The reductions are being achieved by a combination of domestic policies and measures, reforestation and buying “carbon offsets,” in which the countries pay for other states to make the carbon reductions on their behalf.

The EU-15 have already cut emissions by 2.7 percent, which should climb to 3.6 percent by 2010. Reforestation counts for 1.4 percent of the eight percent cut, and the purchase of carbon offset credits through “Kyoto mechanisms” delivers another three percent.

Most of the EU-15 are planning for reforestation to achieve much of their Kyoto target. However, the total amount of carbon dioxide that could be removed annually between 2008 and 2012 is relatively small (1.4 percent compared to 1990), according to the EEA, although it is somewhat higher than the projections made in 2007.

This means that the countries may have to purchase more carbon offset credits to make up the difference.

“In the end, some member states might make use of Kyoto mechanisms more intensively than they are currently planning,” the report says.

——————–

Climate package must now be ‘cost-effective’; Poland has not put its veto back in its holster yet.
part two of LEIGH PHILLIPS  posting in EUobserver of October 17, 2008, dated October 16, 2008

Europe’s climate package was saved from collapsing during a summit of the bloc’s leaders under threat of veto from Poland and Italy on Thursday (16 October).

European Union heads of state and government agreed during a two-day meeting to reach an agreement on the package by December, but only by offering the two rebel nations a compromise that will now allow member states to implement the package in a way that is “cost-effective.”

Poland has not put its veto back in its holster yet.

The final statement agreed to by the leaders calls for “intensified work in coming weeks to allow the European council to decide in December 2008 appropriate solutions to the issues in this work in progress.”

The package will be implemented “in a rigorously established cost-effective manner to all sectors of the European economy and for all member states, respecting each member state’s specific situation,” the final conclusions continue.

“The objectives remain unchanged, the calendar remains the same,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a press conference after the summit.

“The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it,” he said.

The key issue for Poland, alongside Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia, is the use of 2005 as the baseline year for setting new emissions targets, rather than 1990. They argue that they made significant cuts in carbon emissions after 1990.

Italy too had threatened a veto, arguing that its economy already has a problem with off-shoring jobs, and that the burden imposed on its manufacturing sector by having to reduce carbon emissions will now be squeezed even further if the world tips into recession.

Not yet in the clear

German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, asked by reporters whether there had been at any point a real threat to the package as a whole, responded “That was precisely what was at stake this morning.”

He added that at one point, the French presidency took the Poles out of the meeting for a short tete-a-tete to convince them.

However, despite the compromise, the climate package is still not entirely in the clear, as the Poles have not put the threat of a veto back in its holster.

Speaking at the end of the summit, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland “has won the right to veto if there is no other solution.”

His foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, echoed Mr Tusk, telling reporters that Poland’s veto “is still possible.”

Nevertheless, he said, Warsaw hopes to reach an agreement by December that is acceptable to every member state.

“That means that we have now a few weeks [to finish negotiations on] a very good package that has to take into account the interests of our part of the world.”

Mr Tusk stressed that Poland is interested in protecting the climate, as it is the very country that is to host the next UN climate change conference, which will take place in Poznan in early December.

Yet this conference, he declared, will be host to “both the rich and the poor.” The poorer countries were “afraid” for their economies, he said.

“It is a ‘to be or not to be’ question for Poland,” the Polish leader said, as his country depends for 90 percent of its power on coal. “If Poland can not agree to the targets, how will the other 100 poor countries?” he asked.

“We are not telling the French to decommission their nuclear power plants, which several tests show are very dangerous - and use only windmills as of tomorrow.”

“Nobody is going to persuade Poland that we have to decommission all coal-fired power plants and start using windmills,” he said.

Vague language

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen welcomed the result, admitting he had been taken by surprise when a paper from seven countries tabled on Thursday morning suggested the December deadline be scrapped.

In return for keeping the December deadline, heads of states agreed to have final talks on the package at their December summit. This means that even if given the OK by qualified majority at the ministerial level when environment ministers meet to discuss the package next week, any final agreement will require unanimity, as decisions taken at European summits must be unanimous.

Mr Rasmussen admitted it would be very difficult to reach a global agreement on a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 if European countries are not able to reach agreements at the latest by the end of this year.

***

Greens relieved:

Green groups, for their part, were relieved at the result.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Greenpeace spokesperson Mark Breddy told EUobserver.

“Italy and Poland failed to delay the package for the moment, opportunistically using the financial crisis as an excuse,” he said.

“There was vague language worked into [the final statement], but nothing that stops environment ministers to negotiate a strong deal.”

EU environment ministers meet to hammer out the details of the package on Monday (20 October).

    From:       acosbey@iisd.ca
    Subject:     New IISD postings on trade and climate change
Date:       October 14, 2008

Earlier this year, following on last December’s Trade Ministerial meeting on the margins of COP-13, IISD collaborated with the Government of Denmark, the German Marshall Fund and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development to convene a major seminar on trade and climate change in Copenhagen. The results have now been revised, edited and synthesized, and are available on IISDnet at http://www.iisd.org/trade/crosscutting.

The overall synthesis document can be found here: Trade and Climate Change: Issues in Perspective. The event’s summary remarks are also available.

The event’s six background papers are also on line, and constitute excellent brief surveys of the key issues in each of the six areas covered:

• Liberalization of Trade in Environmental Goods for Climate Change Mitigation: The Sustainable Development Context
• Border Carbon Adjustment
• Embodied Carbon in Traded Goods
• Climate Change, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Rights
• Clean Energy Investment
• Standards, Labelling and Certification

Support for this event came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Government of Denmark and the German Marshall Fund.

As always, we welcome your feedback or comments on any of these documents, or on the issues they cover.

Yours sincerely,

Aaron Cosbey

Aaron Cosbey
Associate and Senior Advisor, Trade and Investment
Associate, Climate Change and Energy
International Institute for Sustainable Development

Local Address:
Box 850, 2670A Iron Colt Ave.
Rossland, British Columbia  V0G 1Y0  CANADA
E-mail: acosbey@iisd.ca
+1 (250) 362-2275

IISD Main Office (Winnipeg, Canada):
Tel: +1 (204) 958-7700; Fax: +1 (204) 958-7710
www.iisd.org

Charles A. Hall writes that he wants to give us his “simplistic take” on the Wall Street mess (not to exclude greed, idiocy and so on):

Using what he is best at - Charlie suggests - Draw a Hubbert curve.  Then make an “Economic growth curve” in a different color that follows along the left hand (growth) side of the Hubbert curve .  As the Hubbert curve bends over  (Peak oil was more or less in 2005) everyone in Wall Street etc., believed that growth was continuing “as it always has”, so they kept their “assets”  “growing” with speculation.

================

Now economic reality is catching up with biophysical reality, which has not been growing.  This is called a financial “adjustment” to reality.  We have seen it every day for the last 10 days.  I think that this shows the power of a biophysical approach to economics to at least give us options as to how we should think about economics!

***

Charles A. Hall continues by suggesting we read the attached material by Gvail Tverborg, A Swedish economist:

Banks (enclosed), a Swedish economist, may be saying the same thing in a lot more words (attached).  I have just skimmed it - says Charlie.

Gail Tverborg’s take on gasoline shortages (they are serious!) :  http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4585 - see last paragraph there.

***

Further:
The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators at the Capitol say it’s been that way for a week now, as Americans across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote “No” on the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama) bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that ***the public is not fooled (calls are reportedly running better than 9:1 against a bailout, perhaps more like 99:1).

***

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant oversight or regulation.

***

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one–getting the toxic mortgages off the banks’ books and onto taxpayers’ hands. Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks’ balance sheets in the form of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which will mean they still won’t start lending money again. Left unaddressed too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system–a major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

***

Stiglitz doesn’t even address a fifth problem which is that [with] this trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you’re already talking $1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money - the stage is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that will reverberate through the economy.

Consider: if the dollar collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that Americans import–more than half of everything we use in daily life thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing–will rise dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding, interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what’s left of the economy to a grinding halt.

Download the Word document: banks_spec.doc

Arson attack on publisher of book on Prophet’s wife.
By Andy McSmith, The Independent, Monday, 29 September 2008.

Police are holding three suspected terrorists after a weekend arson attack at the London home of the publisher of a novel about the Prophet Mohamed’s child bride.

Two men were arrested by armed police outside the house in Islington, north London, and a third was detained outside a nearby Underground station. The fire was quickly put out after the fire brigade smashed the front door. The publisher, Martin Rynja, 44, was unhurt.

Scotland Yard described the operation as being “intelligence-led”, implying that the gang were being followed by undercover police.

***

Mr Rynja is director of Gibson Square, an independent publishing house which earlier this month announced it planned to release The Jewel of the Medina in Britain. He could not be contacted yesterday, and is thought to be under police protection.

The novel, by the American author Sherry Jones, was pulled by publishers in the US over fears it would anger Muslims, while a publisher in Serbia withdrew it from the shelves after protests from Islamic leaders, who said it insulted Mohamed and his family.

Neighbours of Mr Rynja said armed police, assisted by fire-fighters, broke into his home at around 2.30 am. Kevin Austin, 44, said he was woken up by police banging on his front door. “All we heard was someone outside shouting ‘Get on the ground. Get on the ground,’ loudly and forcefully,” he said.

“Then they shouted ‘Stop struggling,’ and we heard a van door closing and several cars speeding off. Then we were told to get out of the house. We only got as far as the front door when the police told us to get back inside.”

Another resident said he saw the two arrested men being put into forensic suits to protect evidence, before being bundled into a black van.

The three men, aged 22, 30 and 40, were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, and are being questioned at a London police station. Officers also searched four properties in north-east London – two in Walthamstow, one in Ilford and one in Forest Gate.

***

Announcing the publication of The Jewel of the Medina earlier this month, Mr Rynja said he felt such books were important in a liberal democracy. “If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of the Medina has become an important barometer of our time,” he said.

In an interview with a German newspaper, the author dismissed the idea that her work – which focuses on the relationship between Mohamed and his wife, Aisha – would provoke a violent response. “To claim that Muslims will answer my book with violence is pure nonsense,” she said.

Her agent, Natasha Kern, said: “There are many misconceptions about this book floating around the internet, including that it is a romance novel or that it focuses on sexual content. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The Following is all from The Financial Times of  Monday, September 29, 2008.

We do not post the paper’s editorial by its Editorial Board, but we post Chrystia Freeland’s article - she is the Economics’ Editor of the paper.

David Sirota | Back In the USSR.
Friday 26 September, 26, 2008

by: David Sirota, Creators Syndicate

 http://www.truthout.org/092708F

When I worked for then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the late 1990s, Washington was in the panting throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned my boss’s opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that a few years later, our country would become the globe’s newest U.S.S.R.: The United States’ Socialist Republic.

Yes, a red flag is rising over the Capitol, only the laborer’s hammer and sickle has been replaced by a baron’s top hat and monocle. America is Amerika, and throughout Washington a socialist rallying cry echoes: Politicians and lobbyists of the world unite! — unite to rescue Wall Street capitalists with a $700 billion taxpayer bailout.

***

Though socialism seems new in the U.S., it isn’t. Using public resources and government power to control the economy is as Amerikan as the Pentagon and the Patent Office. And the problem is not socialism itself, but our uniquely destructive version of it.

Amerika’s is not the democratic socialism of many countries.

Ours is kleptocratic socialism — the objective is theft.

Unlike European comrades, our socialists rarely mandate returns on taxpayer investments. The same 19th century socialism that gave the Mountain West to railroad companies became a 20th century socialism subsidizing oil and drug industry profits. Now, our 21st century socialists propose giving financial industry con men the national credit card, confirming Marx’s theory that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

Bolivian socialists nationalize to combat wealth stratification, remove greed from human necessities like energy, and allow the public to own the means of producing valuable commodities. Amerika’s socialists nationalize to preserve inequality and force the public to own the means of worthless production. Most recently, taxpayers’ $85 billion will purchase bankrupt AIG and its means of producing paper, all to let speculators continue profiteering off the human need for housing.

Shutter one in Ohio, and workers get nothing, except politicians saying their jobs are never returning and national health care is “unaffordable.” But if investment banks teeter, those same politicians quickly find billions for bailouts.

***

Of course, socialist revolutions can share key traits.

John “I am fundamentally a deregulator” McCain has suddenly gone French, embracing regulation with the zeal of a beret-wearing Parisian reciting “Das Kapital” in a left bank coffeehouse (call him Monsieur Jean McCain, s’il vous plait). CNBC’s Larry Kudlow justifies kleptocratic socialism by absolving the financial elite and blaming the meltdown on that all-powerful Poor People Lobby, which he claims is “forcing banks to make low-income loans.” And New York Times’ columnist David Brooks, long the ruling class’s Minister of Propaganda, applauds the “public spiritedness” of Paulson’s “Progressive Corporatism.”

As this socialist uprising intensifies, the most prominent counterrevolutionary is none other than Sanders. Now a senator, he is calling for both re-regulation and a millionaire surtax to pay for the bailout and avoid adding its full cost to the national debt.

“The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush’s economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout,” he said.

Once the federal government’s only (admitted) socialist, Sanders is evidently its only fiscal conservative, too. It’s time Amerika listened to this original visionary.

-——–

David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” was just released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com