Open letter from Dr. James Hansen, published in Aftenposten, May 19, 2010

Dear Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

As you know, I am fond of Norway, and have great respect for your country and its citizens, as well as for your personal ambitions to protect global climate. Your recent rainforest initiative is a splendid example of leadership the world desperately needs. And your commitment at the Copenhagen climate talks to reduce Norway’s emissions 40 per cent by 2020 was exemplary.

However, and especially in light of that, I am disappointed to learn that Statoil, Norway’s state-owned oil company, has taken such backward strides through its strategic decision to invest in Canada’s destructive tar sands industry. As the most energy-intensive source of oil, this project represents the worst of what humans are doing to the planet in a quest to prolong our global addiction to fossil fuels.

It is still feasible to stabilize the climate, but only if we leave the tar sands in the ground. The massive greenhouse gas amounts from the tar sands surely would cause the climate system to pass tipping points, while also trampling on the human rights of Canada’s First Nation communities and greatly damaging the Canadian boreal forest.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg, the world has reached a critical juncture in the climate debate. We can either move into the production of the most damaging fossil fuel, or we can begin to address our destructive addiction. We desperately need leadership at this time. I am confident that you could provide that leadership. Please do not prove me wrong.

In your capacity as owner or more than two-thirds of the shares in Statoil, I urge you to end Norway’s involvement in this dangerous, dirty and destructive project. I ask that you support the resolution at Statoil’s upcoming AGM on May 19th, that Statoil show environmental leadership and pull out of the Canadian tar sands. Statoil may pride itself on being a more responsible company than others, but that will not be enough in the tar sands. If we extract and use the tar sands, there can be no sustainable future for young people.

I look forward to my visit to Norway in June. I hope that it can be a time to celebrate Norwegian leadership in responsible environmental policies

Dr. James Hansen
James E. Hansen is member of the National Academy of Sciences, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, grandfather and winner of the Sophie Prize 2010.
James E. Hansen will visit Norway June 22 and 23 2010 to receive the Sophie Prize.

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The answer from the Government:

Dear Mr. Hansen,

Thank you very much for your e-mail to the Prime Minister, which was forwarded to the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy as the governmental body responsible for Statoil ownership issues. Let me first take this opportunity to congratulate you on being awarded the Sophie-prize for 2010. I know a lot of people are looking forward to your visit to Norway, and I hope you will enjoy your stay here.

On behalf of the Government, I am pleased to say that we hold your work on climate change in high esteem, and further, that we appreciate your engagement and your views on Norway’s efforts to find good sustainable solutions to the global climate challenges.

As you now know from the results of the Statoil Annual General Meeting, we see Statoil’s oils sands investment as a commercial decision which is within the Statoil board’s area of responsibility. We are of the opinion that such decisions should not be overturned by the AGM. It is our opinion that this is in line with good corporate governance, a view that is also shared by a vast majority in the Norwegian Parliament. I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad, and we look forward to your continued engagement.

Yours faithfully
Robin Martin Kåss
Statssekretær, Olje- og Energidepartementet
Deputy Minister, Ministry of Petroleum and Energy
Postboks 8148 Dep, 0033 Oslo, Norway

Fra: Jim Hansen
Sendt: 24. mai 2010 14:08
Til: Postmottak SMK
Kopi: Jim Hansen
Emne: Climate Change and the Tar Sands Development Vedlegg: Hansen text for ad and letter in both languages.doc

Dear Prime Minister Stoltenberg,

I understand that you may have missed my open letter to you published in Aftenposten, so for your convenience I have attached it here.

My wife Anniek and I are looking forward to visiting your beautiful country in June.
With kind regards,
James E. Hansen

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AND THE – Message from Sophie Prize Winner.

I am grateful to Jostein Gaarder and the Sophie Foundation for the opportunity to discuss the state of Earth’s climate, the implications for people and nature, and action that is needed.

Our planet today is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, on Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea level rise and species extinction accelerating out of humanity’s control. Increasing atmospheric water vapor is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.

Stabilizing climate requires restoring our planet’s energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth’s energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.

Actions needed so that the world can move on to the clean energies of the future are possible and practical. The actions would restore clean air and water globally, assuring intergenerational equity by preserving creation – the natural world — thus also helping achieve north-south justice. But the needed actions will happen only if the public becomes forcefully involved.
Citizens can help by blocking coal plants, tar sands, and mining the last drops of fossil fuels from public and pristine lands and the deep ocean. However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognize an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used.

Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.
Governments today, instead, talk of “cap-and-trade-with-offsets”, a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.

We need a simple honest flat rising carbon fee across the board. It should be revenue neutral – all funds distributed to the public – “100 percent or fight”. It is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.

But our governments have no intention of solving the fossil fuel and climate problem, as is easy to prove: the United States, Canadian and Norwegian governments are going right ahead developing the tar sands, which, if it is not halted, will make it impossible to stabilize climate.

Our governments knowingly abdicate responsibility for young people and future generations. I have been disappointed in interactions with more than half a dozen nations. In the end, they offer only soothing words, “goals” for emission reductions at far off dates, while their actual deeds prevent stabilization of climate.

The Sophie Prize provides a new opportunity to draw attention to the actions that are needed to stabilize climate. Norway may be the best place, with its history of environmentalism. I can imagine Norway standing tall among nations, taking real action to address climate change, drawing attention to the hypocrisy in the words and pseudo-actions of other nations.

So I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister suggesting that the government, as the majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in planned tar sands development. I appreciate the polite response, by letter, from the Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is “a commercial decision”, that the government should not interfere, and that a “vast majority in the Norwegian parliament” agree that this constitutes “good corporate governance”. The Deputy Minister concluded his letter “I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad”.

A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the Deputy Minister’s letter, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

The Norwegian government’s position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts. Perhaps our governments are in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry – but that is not for science to say.

What I can say from the science is this: the plans that governments, including Norway, are adopting spell disaster for young people and future generations. And we are running out of time.

Stabilizing climate is a moral issue, a matter of intergenerational justice. Young people, and older people who support the young and the other species on the planet, must unite in demanding an effective approach that preserves our planet.

Because the executive and legislative branches of our governments are turning a deaf ear to the science, the judicial branch may provide the best opportunity for redressing the situation. Our governments have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations. I look forward to working with young people and their supporters in developing the legal case for young people and the planet.

To the young people I say: Stand up for your rights, for your future. Demand that the government be honest, admit and face the consequences for you from their policies.

To the old people I say: we are not too old to fight. Let us gird up our loins and prepare to fight on the side of young people for protection of the world they will inherit.

I look forward to standing with the youth of the world as they demand their proper due and fight for nature and their future.

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Other Recent Publications by Dr. James Hansen:

2010. Obama’s Second Chance on the Predominant Moral Issue of this Century. Op-ed on Huffington Post, Apr. 5.

2010. Only a carbon tax and nuclear power can save us. Op-ed in The Australian, Mar. 11.

WORLD NEWS – JULY 29, 2010
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424…

Climate report shows Earth has heated up over 50 years.

Which in the printed Wall Street version was rechristened – “CLIMATE STUDY CITES 2000 as WARMEST DECADE.” This appropriate to the US inward look of New York, while the above title is clear better positioned for the world at large -

By GAUTAM NAIK

A new assessment concludes that the Earth has been getting warmer over the past 50 years and the past decade was the warmest on record.

The State of the Climate 2009 report, published Wednesday as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was compiled by 300 scientists from 48 countries and drew on measures of 10 crucial climate indicators.

Seven of the indicators were rising, including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, ocean heat and humidity. Three indicators were declining, including Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Each indicator is changing as we’d expect in a warming world,” said Peter Thorne, senior researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, a research consortium based in College Park, Md., who was involved in compiling the report.

The report’s conclusions broadly match those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, which published its last set of findings in 2007. The IPCC report contained some errors, which further stoked the debate about the existence, causes and effects of global warming.

The new report incorporates data from the past few years that weren’t included in the last IPCC assessment. While the IPCC report concluded that evidence for human-caused global warming was “unequivocal” and was linked to emissions of greenhouse gases, the latest report didn’t seek to address the issue.

The report “doesn’t try to make the link” between climate change and what might be causing it, said Tom Karl, an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration involved in the new assessment.

The report said, “Global average surface and lower-troposphere temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, and the 2000s (2000-09) was the warmest decade in the instrumental record.” The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere.

The scientists reported that they were surprised to find Greenland’s glaciers were losing ice at an accelerating rate. They also concluded that 90% of planetary warming over the past 50 years has gone into the oceans. Most of it had accumulated in near-surface layers, home to phytoplankton, tiny plants crucial to virtually all life in the sea.

A new study has found that rising sea temperature may have had a harmful effect on global concentrations of phytoplankton over the past century.

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BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL IS VERY ANEMIC ON CONTENT OF ABOVE NEWS – IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, AS MOSTLY ALMOST – GO TO THE FINANCIAL TIMES. HERE YOU FIND FIONA HARVEY’S FULL ARTICLE – SHE  CONTRIBUTES TO THE EDITORIAL SECTION AS WELL. YOU WILL BE IN THE CLEAR ABOUT THE MACHINATIONS IN WASHINGTON AS WELL.

You will also see there the Washington rot as in the following: “Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, formerly in charge of energy with the powerful CSIS, said the new report would not change people’s minds. “It’s clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”

You will find that there was no doubt about the implication that it is humans who did it except in the words of that outspoken minority of industry lobbyists that hold power over Washington.

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 http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/author…

NOAA finds “human fingerprints” on climate

July 28th, 2010  by Fiona Harvey

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6d1fd25c-9a69-…

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 http://planetark.org/wen/58965

Developing Nations See Cancun Climate Deal Tough.

 http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/…

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Yvo de Boer officially steps down today from his post as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), making way for incoming UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres.

Mr. de Boer took over the position in September of 2006, shepherding the unwieldy international climate negotiating process through several landmark sessions, including Bali in 2007 and Copenhagen last year. Everyone, including de Boer, was disappointed by the outcome of COP15, yet he defends the work of his UNFCCC colleagues in the face of near insurmountable odds and relentless international acrimony throughout COP15.

And it was at the feet of the international community that de Boer laid some of his harshest criticism before stepping down from the UNFCCC.

The one thing that has appalled me most is to witness the degree to which the international community is cutting off its nose to spite its face,” de Boer said at a Hong Kong business conference last week.

“(The world) is behaving as though climate change is somebody else’s problem… This is in the collective interest and it’s a collective challenge” he said, adding that ”Unless we deal with that challenge … we really are in big trouble.”

Yvo de Boer’s final round of international negotiations ended last month with the conclusion of two weeks of talks in Bonn, Germany in preparation for CO16 in Cancun, Mexico. Despite  de Boer’s cautious optimism for progress as the outcome of the Bonn talks, few hold out the kind of expectations for a “fair and binding” climate deal at COP16 that haunted COP15.

Upon handing the reigns to Figueres, who shocked some last month with her assessment that a “final, all-ecompassing” international climate treaty would likely take decades to achieve, de Boer will take up a climate advisory job at consulting firm KPMG.

Yellow Sub Finds Clues To Antarctic Glacier’s Thaw

Countries divvied out their climate officials across four negotiating arenas, the most prominent of which was the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA), the group working towards a new global deal for climate change. However, progress in that arena was slowed by the question and discussion format of the meetings that perpetuated an ad nauseum repetition of countries’ long-held positions. The result was that in most topics there was a lack of progress on the more controversial issues such as how to increase mitigation by developed countries, how to support upscaled mitigation in developing countries, how to manage new financing and get more technology on the ground. The issue of increased support for adaptation also proved controversial as developing countries differences seem to increase rather than find common ground. Negotiators seem almost unwilling to tackle their substantive differences, especially those generated by the particular positions of the United States.

The AWG-LCA had launched this session with a new text prepared by their chair – a promising start according to many delegates and observers. The chair then led negotiation sessions by posing a series of questions to the parties for each section of the text, an approach that some observers have said does not dig far enough into the heart of the most critical outstanding issues.

The chair then asked parties to “speak out of the box” in order to work on whittling down their differences rather than restating positions and ideas. However, little progress was made in the discussions and many of the more controversial issues remain unresolved.

Countries engage on response measures

An intense yet lively debate took place on the question of “economic and social consequences of response measures” under the LCA Thursday afternoon. The debate centred around whether to establish a new institution or mechanism to capture and address such impacts (supported principally by Saudi Arabia), whether to initiate studies or other forms of information gathering and reporting on this issue, or whether simply to use the existing national communications that parties present annually to report on arising areas of concern.

Many developed countries opposed the establishment of new institutions favouring the “do-it-yourself” approach. Notably, many developing countries lack the financial, institutional, and human resources to carry out extensive studies in this area, putting them at major disadvantage if support is not forthcoming under the UN climate system. Most of those countries are particularly concerned about the impact on trade of measures taken at the border or otherwise by developed  countries as they develop and implement new policies to address emissions at home coupled with policies to safeguard their national industries’ competitiveness.

Prank delays progress on final day

The closing plenaries of the AWG-KP and AWG-LCA were delayed as a special session was called to address an anonymous prank against Saudi Arabia. Many countries expressed their condemnation of the act and called for a thorough investigation by the Secretariat of the UNFCCC.

Some observers have suggested the action may have been a response to the previous day’s discussions where Saudi Arabia and a number of other Arab states opposed a proposal by the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS) who requested a study on the impacts of a 1.5 degree versus a 2 degree temperature rise. Nonetheless, there is currently no reliable information as to who perpetrated the act or their motives.

As sessions resumed, the LCA group reacted to a revised version of the negotiation text that they have spent the week discussing. The response for the most part was severely negative with the Group of 77 and China expressing “dismay” that the new text is imbalanced and no longer contains their proposals. The group emphasised that these proposals reflect a broadly representative position, carefully hewn among over one hundred countries.

US positions hinder progress

Sources say the United States has taken an increasingly conservative position on most topics up for discussion in Bonn. In many cases – including the discussions on technology and developed country mitigation commitments – the US position has held back progress. The European Union expressed their discontent with the inability of the negotiations during the past two weeks to tackle the issue of mitigation in a serious fashion. They particularly disapproved of the inability of the Secretariat to translate the levels of mitigation action communicated by parties after Copenhagen into a more detailed discussion on commitments and actions of all countries.

Throughout the meeting, Washington has reportedly blocked the establishment of a financing system by insisting that there be no decision-making board directing any climate-related fund. In many cases, the US continues to promote the elements of the Copenhagen Accord, despite the document’s non-consensual status.

Washington also pushed to simply make use of the instruments and institutions already existing under the Convention, rather than establishing new ones to scale up the global response. This approach is consistent with the US insistence on nationally led climate action, rather than a more robust “top down” international approach to address climate change – despite the widespread opinion that the current tools have proven to be slow, inadequate, and limited.

Mexico, Figueres push for Cancun deal:

It remains an open question as to whether negotiators will be able to secure a comprehensive, legally binding agreement at this December’s COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico. The question of the “legal form” of the eventual agreement is still a subject of debate.

Mexico is lobbying hard to get parties focused on a strong outcome and positive pace at this mid-year meeting in Bonn. Fresh optimism was also injected into the Bonn meeting with the presence of Christiana Figueres, the former Costa Rican climate negotiator who will replace Yvo de Boer as head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“Governments will meet this challenge, for the simple reason that humanity must meet this challenge,” Figueres said in an interview with The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Bonn meeting. “We just don’t have another option.”

But whether there is enough optimism to sway key parties such as the EU and China – which have recently stated publicly that they do not expect a deal until the following year – remains to be seen.

ICTSD Reporting; “New climate chief: ‘no option’ but to take action,” THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 9 June 2010.

Probe at UN climate talks after Saudi sign smashed

Saturday, 12 June 2010 10:06
author:Reuters
POLITICS & ECONOMICS / NEWS
by Reuters, Saturday, 12 June 2010

SAUDI STANCE: Saudi angered many by blocking study of global warming. (Getty Images)

UN climate negotiators agreed to an investigation on Friday after protesters smashed a sign emblazoned “Saudi Arabia” and dropped it in toilet after Riyadh blocked a study of deeper cuts in greenhouse gases.

Many countries condemned the protest, after Saudi Arabia blocked a request by small island states at the May 31-June 11 talks for a study of tougher cuts in greenhouse gases to help slow a rise in world sea levels.

Mexico’s delegate Luis Alfonso de Alba, whose country will host the main climate talks in late 2010, said he was initiating an investigation by the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.

Study concludes – Melting Mountains Put Millions At Risk in Asia.

fromMRM <moothedathramanathan@gmail.com>

“Conserving energy is cheaper and smarter than building power plants” (Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld).

The watt. The volt. The ohm. All electrical terms are named after famous engineers and physicists from the 18th and 19th century. Now, an acclaimed 20th century scientist is lending his name to a new unit of energy savings – the ‘Rosenfeld.’

The proposed term – a ‘Rosenfeld’ – would represent the electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year — the annual output of an existing 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant – and avoid generating three million metric tons of CO2 emissions. The new energy-savings measurement term was authored by 54 scientists from 26 research institutions and announced in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters.

For your leisure time reading – a clean energy monthly E-zine from India          E_mag_June_2010.pdf

MRM says:  We shall be pleased if you could send us your views/comments/suggestions to make our publication more informative and useful.

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“The Rosenfeld” Named After California’s Godfather of Energy Efficiency.

With a decades-long career in energy analysis and standards, Rosenfeld is often credited with being personally responsible for billions of dollars in energy savings.

How to cut energy use, carbon? Do it – One “Rosenfeld” at a time.

Arthur Rosenfeld, who recently retired at the age of 83 after two five-year terms on the California Energy Commission, led the way in helping the state set its first-ever energy standards for household appliances and buildings. His mission as an energy-efficiency evangelist was launched in 1973 during the OPEC oil embargo … rather than rail on the oil producers, he reasoned, wouldn’t it be better if the US could find ways to stop wasting so much energy?

His impact on California’s per capita electricity consumption, which has remained flat since the mid-’70s, has long been dubbed the “Rosenfeld effect.” And he himself coined “Rosenfeld’s Law,” which asserts that the amount of energy required to produce one dollar of economic output has decreased by about 1 per cent per year since 1845.

Eighty Year Old Saved Us $800 Billion - 

Ode to Arthur H. Rosenfeld, Doctor Efficiency - 

Arthur H. Rosenfeld, Ph.D. was originally appointed to the California Energy Commission by Governor Gray Davis in April 2000. The Commissioner was reappointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger January 26, 2005. The five members of the Energy Commission are appointed by the Governor to staggered five-year terms and requires Senate confirmation. By law, four of the five members of the Energy Commission have professional training in specific areas – engineering or physical science, environmental protection, economics, law, and one commissioner from the public-at-large. Commissioner Rosenfeld filled the physical science position until his retirement in January 2010.

Commissioner Rosenfeld was presiding member of the Research, Development and Demonstration Committee and the Dynamic Pricing Committee (Ad Hoc Committee); and was the second member of the Energy Efficiency Committee.

Art Rosenfeld received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1954 at the University of Chicago under Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi, and then joined the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. There he joined, and eventually oversaw, the Nobel prize-winning particle physics group of Luis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) until 1974. At that time, he changed his research focus to the efficient use of energy, formed the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and led it until 1994.
 http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-storie…

 http://www.energy.ca.gov/commissioners/r…

 http://www.greenbang.com/how-to-cut-ener…

 http://earth2tech.com/2010/03/15/how-do-…

 http://robertreich.org/post/604861772/bp…

BP Stands for Bad Petroleum

Saturday the White House warned BP that it expects the oil giant to pay all damages associated with the disastrous oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico, even if the costs exceed the $75 million liability cap under federal law. BP responded Sunday saying its public statements are “absolutely consistent” with the Administration’s request.

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Actually, who still remembers that BP wanted us to believe that the letter stand for “BEYOND PETROLEUM?”

In effect BP moved into solar energy and together with the Shell Oil Company became one of the first two oil companies that tried to be seen as ENERGY COMPANIES by going beyond oil. We gave them lots of credit – then watched how Shell was helping destroy Nigeria. BP on the other hand was indeed rather blameless at that time. Both, BP and Shell got into the “ENERGY” business because of push by British NGOs. It was the enlightened part of the UK that did the trick, while the enlightened part of the US had no chance whatsoever because of the hold the US oil industry has on Washington – Democrats or Republicans alike.   It was EXXONMOBIL that actively fought the manmade global warming / climate change “theory” and funded all those self styled scientists – in the US and in the UK – that made sure that the media will conclude that only death is proof of death – what I mean is that only when disaster has occurred this is the proof that we are on the path to a disaster.

OK, disaster is striking the Southern coast of the US and beyond while BP has $10.5 Billion to distribute as dividend to share-holders. This alone is good reason for the US Administration to take over BP as it is unacceptable to see these funds leave the company’s coffers with potential reparation bills amounting to more then twice that amount. The $69 million mentioned by President Obama as first payment requested from BP in order to compensate for the oil-spill is pittance to the real cost of redress in this case. Robert Reich has quite a few important points on these issues.

Let us conclude this introduction by saying that BP will yet turn the clock back to the idea of “Beyond Petroleum” by having proven with their lack of preparedness for this accident that this is the true path to a sane world of the 21st century.

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Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His “Marketplace” commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

: Is this realistic?

A: Not only realistic but it may become necessary – both operationally and politically. If the disaster continues to worsen, it’s untenable for a for-profit corporation to be in charge.

Q: But why should we expect government to do any better job than BP?

A: BP would still be at the job – and its expertise, equipment, and other assets would continue to be utilized. But the federal government would be in overall control of the operation – weighing public risks and benefits, deciding what resources are necessary, getting accurate information and disseminating it to the public.

Q: Why should we trust the government?

A: This isn’t an ideological contest about how little you trust a giant oil company versus the federal government. It’s a matter of accountability. BP’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders. And it will cut corners – as it has before – if that’s the best way to maximize the value of their shares. But only the government, through the President, is directly accountable to the American public, and responsible for protecting it.

Q: Under what legal authority could the President take control of BP’s North American operations?

A: Obama has implicit authority through laws and regulations dealing with offshore drilling, especially the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. By analogy, if a nuclear reactor were melting down, the President would use his regulatory authority over nuclear energy to take temporary control over the plant and the relevant parts of the corporation that ran it. President Truman seized the nation’s steel mills in 1952, arguing that the emergency of the Korean War necessitated it. (The Supreme Court ultimately blocked him but according to Justice Jackson, whose opinion was essentially the majority’s, that was because Truman had no statutory basis for the seizure, not even an implicit one. That isn’t the case here.)

Q: But BP is a British corporation. How can the U.S. government take control?

A: The nationality of a corporation’s shareholders has nothing to do with it. If it is operating within the jurisdiction of the United States and poses a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of Americans, a president would take control of its operations and assets in the United States.

Q: Do you really think Obama would do this? Wouldn’t he prefer to stay away from this mess and keep the responsibility squarely on BP?

A: He may not have much of a choice. If the disaster worsens and Obama doesn’t take control he risks inheriting the mantle of Katrina.

Q: What will force his hand?

A: The White House is already inching toward control. BP’s new admission that it can’t stop the leak until August has shocked a public already deeply distrustful of it. As new evidence emerges of the scale of the disaster, the pressure on the Administration to take full and open control will only grow. Last Saturday Energy Secretary Chu asked BP to cease its so-called “top kill” effort to stop up the gush because he and his team of scientists had concluded it was too risky. Now the White House has to decide whether BP’s continued use of highly toxic dispersants poses more of a threat to the public and the environment than a help. When do these decisions tip over into control? Any time now.

Nominations close 1st June for 2010-11 Martha T. Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica.

The “Martha T. Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica” is a US$ 100,000 unrestricted award presented to an individual in the fields of Antarctic science or policy that has demonstrated potential for sustained and significant contributions that will enhance the understanding and/or preservation of Antarctica.

The Tinker Foundation’s goal is to establish a prestigious award that recognizes excellence in Antarctic research by honoring someone in the early to mid-stages of their career. The Prize is inspired by Martha T. Muse’s passion for Antarctica and is intended to be a legacy of the International Polar Year 2007-2008.

The prize-winner can be from any country and work in ANY field of Antarctic science or policy, including Climate change, Life Sciences, Geo Sciences, Physical Sciences, Antarctic Politics.

The goal is to provide recognition of the important work being done by the individual and to call attention to the significance of understanding Antarctica in a time of change. The Prize is awarded by the Tinker Foundation  and administered by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR).

Please visit www.museprize.org for further details. Online nominations will close on the June 1st, 2010.

from    Renuka <rb302@cam.ac.uk>

UN NAMES COSTA RICAN AS NEW CLIMATE CHANGE CHIEF.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica to lead United Nations efforts to combat climate change.

She will take the reins of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from Yvo de Boer, who announced that he was stepping down to pursue new opportunities to advance progress on the issue in the private sector and academia.

“Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector,” Mr. Ban’s spokesperson, Martin Nesirky, said in announcing the decision.

She has been involved in climate change negotiations since 1995, serving as a negotiator for both the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol.

Ms. Figueres founded the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas (CSDA), a non-profit think tank for climate change policy and capacity building, and has both worked on and served on the boards of non-governmental organizations intimately involved in climate change issues.

“There is no task that is more urgent, more compelling or more sacred than that of protecting the climate of our planet for our children and grandchildren,” she said, upon hearing that she was appointed as the new Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC.

The news comes five months after the Copenhagen Accord was reached at last December’s UN conference in the Danish capital.

That non-binding pact aims to jump-start immediate action on climate change and guide negotiations on long-term action, pledging to raise $100 billion annually by 2020. It also includes an agreement to working towards curbing global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius and efforts to reduce or limit emissions.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that to stave off the worst effects of climate change, industrialized countries must slash emissions by 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, and that global emissions must be halved by 2050.

The next round of high-level global talks on climate change will be held later this year in Cancun, Mexico.

When announcing his resignation earlier this year, Mr. de Boer said, “I have always maintained that while governments provide the necessary policy framework, the real solutions must come from business.”

Countries did not reach a clear legal agreement in Copenhagen, but, he noted, “the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.”

With 194 Parties, UNFCCC has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which has been ratified by 190 of the UNFCCC parties. Under the Protocol, 37 States, consisting of highly industrialized countries and countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have legally binding emission limitation and reduction commitments.

———————————

Figueres, 53, will take the helm just five months before 193 nations reconvene in Cancun, Mexico, in December for another attempt to reach a worldwide legal agreement on controlling greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for the gradual heating of the Earth that scientists predict will worsen weather-related disasters.

De Boer, European Union officials and others are cautioning that the Cancun conference probably will yield only a first answer on curbing greenhouse gases, and a legally binding climate change treaty isn’t likely until next year at the earliest.

Figueres has a long history with the climate change convention: From 2007 to 2009 she was vice president of its bureau, representing Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the years she has chaired numerous international negotiations.

Her father, Jose Figueres, who led the 1948 revolution and founded modern democracy in Costa Rica, was president of the country three times. Her mother, Karen Olsen Beck, served as Costa Rican ambassador to Israel in 1982 and was elected a member of Congress from 1990-1994.

Figueres graduated from Swarthmore College in 1979 and received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

In 1994, she became the director of the technical secretariat of the Renewable Energy in the Americas program, today housed at the Organization of the American States. The following year she founded and became executive director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the participation of Latin American countries in the Climate Change Convention.

She is married, has two daughters and is based in the United States, outside Washington, D.C.

———————-

The Green blog spoke with her recently about her candidacy and how she might jump-start negotiations toward a meaningful climate accord.

——————–

Figueres is the first leader of the U.N. climate change secretariat to come from a developing country.  She beat fellow short-listed candidate Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a former South African environment minister.

The scale of Figueres’ task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world leaders failed to reach a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from 2010-2012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Cancun, Mexico, that begins in late November.  Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto, whose provisions expire in 2012.

Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.

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GOOD FOR BUSINESS:

In an interview with Reuters after her appointment, Figueres said the world can salvage a new deal to combat global warming but this was not a priority for 2010. Rich countries must first fulfill their pledges on climate aid, she said. “Parties need to prove to themselves that issues already on the table, such as fast-tracking financing, that’s not just on paper but can also be delivered. That’s the focus of Cancun,” she said.

The appointment of a U.N. climate chief from the South was widely forecast after a rich-poor rift in Copenhagen, where developing countries said the industrialized world was shirking its historical responsibility for causing climate change. Figueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995 and has held many senior posts in the U.N. climate process. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times.

Danish Climate and Energy Minister Lykke Friis said Figueres won unanimous support on Monday from key nations at a meeting of the U.N. climate bureau in Bonn. “She is highly experienced, she is well connected, she knows all the negotiators. She knows the dossiers,” Friis said.

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern called her “well qualified.”

One source close to the matter said: “If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she’s probably as good as you’ll get.” Business and those involved in the carbon market would welcome Figueres, said Andrei Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria. “From a business point of view, she has been willing to listen in the past and we hope she will continue to do so,” he said. Figueres has chaired talks to increase transparency in the global carbon offset market under Kyoto, which delivers about $6.5 billion finance annually to help developing countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.

One source said the small island developing states — among those most at risk from climate change — argued strongly for Figueres, saying they wanted someone from a smaller nation. Costa Rica has one of the world’s most environmentally friendly policies, including a strong focus on ecotourism and a long-term goal of becoming “carbon neutral,” under which industrial emissions would be soaked up by forests.

from MOTHER JONES

April 19, 2010

THIS WEEK’S CONUNDRUM

ECONUNDRUMS YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL DILEMMAS SOLVED!

Which Companies Are Cashing In On Global Warming?

The Climate Desk launches today!

What is it?

Seven news organizations—Wired, Slate, Mother Jones, Grist, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Atlantic, and PBS’ Need to Know—teaming up to explore the impacts of our warming world. First up is a story by journalist Clive Thompson on the business of global warming: While politicians continue to spar over whether or not humans are to blame for rising temperatures and sea levels, companies have already accepted climate change as fact. And now they’ve moved on to figuring out how best to adapt:

If a firm’s bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won’t stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.
 

Betting on Change

— Illustration: Christoph Hitz – Is the planet really warming up? Just ask the corporations that stand to make—or lose—billions due to “climate exposure.”

Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there’s money in global warming.

By Clive Thompson,  a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.

Mon Apr. 19, 2010

Beluga is a German firm that specializes in “super heavy lift” transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multi-ton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.

Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, head north and west to the Russian port city of Archangelsk—located near the border with Finland—and wind up in Nigeria. Normally, this route requires Beluga’s ships to navigate an 11,000-mile route through the Suez Canal. But in 2008, its executives decided that global warming had eroded the Arctic’s summer sea ice significantly enough that their ships could travel the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia. Previously, a cargo ship could only safely navigate that route if an icebreaker went ahead, smashing a route through thick ice.

Now, a warming climate had—for six to eight weeks beginning in July—transformed much of the route into mostly open water, studded with ice floes that the Beluga ships could navigate. So the executives got permission from the Russian government to travel along the coast, paid a transit fee of “a comparably moderate five-digit figure,” and sent the ships on their way. Four months later, they’d finished the trip. Compared to the old Suez Canal journey, this shorter route saved an enormous pile of money: It cost $300,000 less per ship in lower fuel and bunker costs. Global warming had boosted the company’s revenues by more than half a billion dollars in one year alone.

When I interviewed Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg via email this spring, he said he envisions using the Northeast Passage regularly. Indeed, he’s planning on another trip this summer. He said that since the shorter passage requires generating far less C02, it’s “greener”; it’s also more ironic, since it was high concentrations of C02 that helped melt the route in the first place.

“I am convinced,” Stolberg added, “that the Arctic will become an area of quite regular sea traffic at least during summer.”

If you looked merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question “Is climate change really happening?” is still unresolved. In recent months, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on “Climategate“—leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientists—to argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked. Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s main report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup study found that Americans’ concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

But there’s one area where doubt hasn’t grown—and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: The world of industry and commerce.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That’s often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the “reality-based community.” If a firm’s bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won’t stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.

This makes capitalism a curiously bracing mechanism for cutting through ideological haze and manufactured doubt. Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who’s facing “climate exposure”—as it’s now called by money managers—cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion. Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations—aluminum manufacturers, real-estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick—and you’ll find straightforward statements about the grim reality of climate change that wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Greenpeace. Last year Wall Street analysts issued 214 reports assessing the potential risks and opportunities that will come out of a warming world. One by McKinsey & Co. argued that climate change will shake up industries with the same force that mobile phones reshaped communications.

Consider, as one colorful example, the skiing industry. Beginning 10 years ago, the Aspen Skiing Company began noticing that European ski lodges were being slowly destroyed by warmer weather. Europe’s ski resorts tend to be located on lower mountains—about 6,000-8,000 feet high, compared to American peaks up around 11,000 feet—so they’re vulnerable to even extremely tiny increases in global temperature. The 2 percent temperature rise in the 20th century was enough “to put a lot of them out of business,” says Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen Skiing, which operates two resorts spread across four mountains.

But now Aspen’s own season is getting shorter: “More balmy Novembers, more rainy Marches,” Schendler says. “That’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what the science suggests would happen. If you graph frost-free days, there are more and more in the last 30 years.” Climate-change models also predict warmer nights. Aspen Skiing has noticed that happening too, and the problem here is that nighttime is when ski lodges use their water-spraying technology to make snow—”and if you make it when it’s warmer it’s exponentially more expensive.” The increasing volatility of weather overall—another prediction of climate change—poses a particular danger for ski resorts, because they operate in the red most of the year, making up their deficit during the busy spring break in March. So if the weather is terrific for the entire winter but suddenly balmy during March break, that can ruin the whole fiscal year.

Schendler has also learned firsthand a point that climate scientists have been making for some time: With climate change, “warming” isn’t the only—or even the most serious—challenge. The sheer interdependence of complex ecosystems systems can grease you. For example, recent droughts in Utah have kicked up red dust clouds that settle on Aspen’s snow. This makes the snow melt more quickly (because the red absorbs more heat from the sun) while also making it too gritty to ski on.

Are all of Aspen Skiing’s recent weather problems caused by global warming? It’s impossible to tell. But as Schendler notes, the last few years certainly mimic the precise effects that climate models predict, so it is at least a taste of what’s to come. During a recent dust storm on Aspen’s slopes, Schendler’s boss wandered into his office looking morose. “He said, ‘Auden, if climate change is the scary thing for the future, this is the apocalypse now. What if you get this in March?”’ Schendler recalls.

Now, all this tricky weather hasn’t exactly destroyed Aspen Skiing; the firm could probably survive even worse stuff. The top of the mountain is so high “we can ski it in 50 years and it’ll be great,” Schendler notes. But it could certainly erode Aspen’s profits, and Colorado would suffer: The ski industry overall is a $2 billion business for the state, employing fully 8 percent of the workforce. So to try and preserve its profit margins, the Aspen Skiing Company has recently become a loud voice in favor of congressional action on the climate. In 2007, Schendler testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, calling for a cap on carbon emissions—among other things.

“Our attitude when we go to Congress is, look, we’re a business!” he adds. “We didn’t ask for this. We just started looking at the data and the science dispassionately and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a problem.’”

Another industry that can’t pretend climate change is a myth is insurance. Insurance firms have always carefully studied real-world data to figure out what, precisely, constitutes a risky activity. As a result, they were among the first to notice that weather was getting more violent, and more unpredictably so.

“It’s just a logical consequence,” says Peter Hoppe, head of the “Geo Risks Research” division of Munich Re, the multinational reinsurance firm. “Global warming affects our core business. We have seen changes already in some readings.” Worldwide, Munich Re has found that “great catastrophes”—act-of-god weather events that cause more than a billion dollars of damage—have tripled since 1950. In 2008, even though there weren’t any Katrina-level disasters, weather-related events were so severe that “catastrophic losses” to the world’s economy were the third-highest in recorded history, topping $200 billion globally—including $40 billion in the United States. Hoppe doesn’t think global warming is all to blame; some of these events are likely due to natural cycles like the 30-year “North Atlantic Oscillation” that is currently warming the Atlantic. But Munich Re’s policy is that anthropogenic global warming is already making things worse, and that governments ought to act quickly while they still can.

Granted, a warming globe isn’t all downside for insurance firms. There are also profitable new business opportunities, as Hoppe points out. Munich Re is now offering coverage for renewable energy products, because wind farms and solar parks need insurance against the possibility that low wind and weak sunlight will reduce their output. “It’s very important for investors to dampen and level out the volatility from season to season,” Hoppe says. Munich Re has also developed a product covering solar cells that wear out before their expected 30-year lifetime.

Buying insurance against bad weather isn’t entirely new. Farmers have done it for years. But back in the late ’90s, before Enron imploded, it created a huge new market of selling “weather futures” to electric utilities—hedges that would pay out if, say, a mild summer hurt their sales (because people would use less air conditioning). After Enron pancaked, weather futures stayed around—still mostly for utilities and farms—but buying them wasn’t easy: You had to personally contact one of the few weather-futures traders who’d set up their own trading desks in the wake of Enron’s dissolution. But with climate-change models predicting increasingly erratic weather, a new generations of startups is heading into the field, figuring that almost any firm might want to hedge against the bad economic effects of weather—such as clothing manufacturers (who could suffer massive losses in coat sales if an unexpectedly mild winter emerges), airlines (since weather is the top cause of delays), and sporting-event promoters (when it’s rainy, everyone stays away).

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A Year On, Little Change in Political Climate.

WASHINGTON, Mar 21 (IPS) – This time last year, United States federal legislation on climate change was starting to take shape, seemingly more pressing matters were taking up the bulk of U.S. policymakers’ time, and a major climate conference was looming at the end of the year. Twelve months later, the scene is eerily similar. The U.S. House of Representatives swiftly passed its bill last June, but the Senate now has four different paths it could take to address climate change – and has yet to move decisively toward any of them.

Likewise, while the economic recession has receded from the top of the Capital Hill agenda, reforming the country’s health care system now dominates debate here. And the follow-up to last year’s Copenhagen conference – in Cancún – awaits in November. But hope is far from lost, the European Union’s Climate Action Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, told reporters in Washington Thursday.

As the outgoing Danish Minister of Climate and Energy, Hedegaard was charged with hosting December’s Copenhagen, which has been largely criticised by groups and countries hoping for strong climate action that would halt rising global temperatures. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said global average temperatures should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees.

“Staying below two degrees is a tremendous challenge and when I think about that challenge, I think how are we going to make? But then I remember back to where we were just three or four years back…look at all the progress that’s been made,” said Hedegaard. Her main message Thursday, though, and throughout her trip to Washington, is how crucial significant U.S. legislation to address climate change is to global efforts – and the domestic benefits it would have for the U.S.

In meetings over the past couple days with her U.S. counterpart Todd Stern – the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change – as well as other major players here like U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, White House Climate and Energy Office head Carol Browner and Representative Edward Markey, Hedegaard says she got the sense that they are not sure “what will fly and what will not fly or when” with regards to U.S. climate legislation.

“I definitely get the feeling that if [the legislation] fails this time then it would not come until after the midterm elections,” Hedegaard said. Those elections take place Nov. 2. The Cancun climate conference starts Nov. 29. When the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change last met, in Copenhagen, a late push for the U.S. Senate to approve a climate bill before the start of the meeting had fallen short, and this was widely seen as decreasing both the potential effectiveness and the expectations of the conference.

Bolivia summit to seek global climate change referendum.
(AFP) LA PAZ — An alternative “people’s conference” on climate change in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April will seek to advance an international global warming referendum, organizers said Tuesday.

“The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy,” said Bolivia’s United Nations Ambassador Pablo Solon, a key organizer of the summit.

A priority of the meeting would be discussing the possibility of a global referendum “with the goal of reaching two billion people,” he told reporters.

Thousands of people, mostly members of social movements and indigenous groups, are expected to attend the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights on April 20-22.

Organizers say it is intended to “give a voice to the people” on climate change after the perceived failure of the U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen summit on the same issue.

Solon said he expected participants from 94 countries and representatives from 70 governments to attend, without giving further details.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who in January issued an open invitation to the conference to governments, scientists, and social movements, has said a number of South American presidents would also attend.

But the outlines of the conference remain vague, and it is so far shaping up to be something between an environmental forum and a political rally. It is expected to tackle many of the themes Morales raised at the Copenhagen summit last year, including creating a “climate court of justice” and the need to “change the system of capitalist consumerism” — proposals that could be included in the suggested global vote.

Solon said the summit’s conclusions would be delivered to the next U.N.-sponsored meeting on climate change, currently scheduled for December in Mexico.

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• Article history

Bolivia’s UN ambassador Pablo Solon-Romero during a press conference. Photograph: Paulo Filgueiras/UN Photo

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, those who defended the widely condemned outcome tended to talk about it as a “step in the right direction”. This was always a tendentious argument, given that tackling climate change can not be addressed by half measures. We can’t make compromises with nature.

Bolivia, however, believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to “betray our people for 30 pieces of silver”.

Our position was strongly criticised by several industrialised countries, who did their brazen best to blame the victims of climate change for their own unwillingness to act. However, recent communications by the European Commission have confirmed why we were right to oppose the Copenhagen accord.

In a report called International climate policy post-Copenhagen (pdf), the commission confirmed that the pledges by developed countries are equal to between 13.2% and 17.8% in emissions reductions by 2020 – far below the required 40%-plus reductions needed to keep global temperature rise to less than 2C degrees.

The situation is even worse once you take into account what are called “banking of surplus emission budgets” and “accounting rules for land use, land use change and forestry”. The Copenhagen accord would actually allow for an increase in developed country emissions of 2.6% above 1990 levels. This is hardly a forward step.

This is not just about gravely inadequate commitments, it is also about process. Whereas before, under the Kyoto protocol, developed countries were legally bound to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a certain percentage, now countries can submit whatever targets they want without a binding commitment.

This dangerous approach to climate negotiations is like building a dam where everyone contributes as many bricks as they want regardless of whether it stops the river.

The Copenhagen accord opens the dam and condemns millions. Various estimates suggest that the commitments made under the accord would lead to increases of between three to four degrees celsius – a level that many scientists consider disastrous for human life and our ecosystems.

For Bolivia, the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen was further proof that climate change is not the central issue in negotiations. For rich countries, the key issues in negotiations were finance, carbon markets, competitiveness of countries and corporations, business opportunities along with discussions about the political makeup of the US Senate. There was surprisingly little focus on effective solutions for reducing carbon emissions.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia observed that the best way to put climate change solutions at the heart of the talks was to involve the people. In contrast to much of the official talks, the hundreds of civil society organisations, communities, scientists and faith leaders present in Copenhagen clearly prioritised the search for effective, just solutions to climate change against narrow economic interests.

To advance an agenda based on effective just solutions, Bolivia is therefore hosting a Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on 19-22 April, and inviting everyone to participate. Unlike Copenhagen, there will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. Moreover the debate and proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals dedicated to tackling the climate crisis. All 192 governments in the UN have also been invited to attend and encouraged to listen to the voices of civil society and together develop common proposals.

We hope that this unique format will help shift power back to the people, which is where it needs to be on this critical issue for all humanity. We don’t expect agreement on everything, but at least we can start to discuss openly and sincerely in a way that didn’t happen in Copenhagen.

• Pablo Solón is Ambassador to the UN for the Plurinational State of Bolivia. He is a sociologist and economist, was active in Bolivia’s social movements before entering government, and is an expert on issues of trade, integration, natural resources and water.

When real scientists say they are uncertain about something because they know that nothing is matter – all is probability – they are called cooks and what they say is rejected by the real cooks – then when the scientists decide to be efficient by talking certainty rather then probability – the same real cooks call them charlatans. Is there any hope to a decent world led by decent government capable of saying that the uncertainty principle
becomes a must in dealing with the precautionary principle?

March 10, 2010   -  One Flew over…..The Sequel   {that must have been … the Cookoo’s Nest?}

http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

—

STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Editorial: Global warming challenge

FROM-OC Register

The possibility of suspending California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, a law unlikely to change temperatures but certain to wreak economic havoc, appears to have increased dramatically.

Two large Texas-based refineries have pledged as much as $2 million to pay for signature-gathering to place an initiative on the November ballot that would suspend the global warming law if passed by voters, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Sacramento sources.

California refineries of the two companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., would be forced to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But the initiative would delay implementation until unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year.

Unemployment is now at 12.4 percent.
The last thing California needs is an unnecessary law that drives up costs for businesses, prices for consumers and could send many of both fleeing the state.

The Times reported Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked businesses not to support the ballot measure. The initiative is sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, and the People’s Advocate, a Sacramento-based anti-tax group. They have until April 24 to gather 433,971 valid signatures.

It’s time the public vote on the increasingly questionable theory underlying California’s law. Leaked documents have shown climate scientists paid by government grants may have rigged data, suppressed conflicting information and blocked skeptical scientists from inspecting their studies and submitting alternate theories.

Global warming alarmism would penalize huge economic sectors by forcing the purchase of government permits to emit greenhouse gases, while imposing other costly conditions to switch to uneconomical, taxpayer-subsidized alternative fuels.

The science behind the global warming is highly speculative. Several disclosures in recent months have shown many catastrophic claims were based on slipshod documentation, not peer-reviewed studies. A recent disclosure from Sweden’s Goteborgs Universitet showed only 62 percent of sources cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were peer-reviewed in the its 2001 report.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phil Jones, head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit was forced to step down after thousands of leaked e-mails revealed he may have suppressed and altered data. He testified last week in the House of Commons that he withheld data of countries including Sweden because those nations’ prohibited release. But he was almost immediately rebutted by the nonprofit Stockholm Initiative “for a rational climate policy,” saying “All Swedish climate data are available in the public domain” and “that fact has been clearly explained to Dr. Jones.”

Claims of catastrophic global warming are based on computer models derived from increasingly questionable data by a relatively small cadre of scientists, who have profited for years from government and private grants to study the alleged threat. We say, let’s have a vote.

FROM-The Times

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. Last month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

The Met Office, which produces the global temperature record used by the IPCC in its reports, has proposed a separate review of its data after admitting that public confidence in its findings had been undermined.

The Met Office relies on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is under investigation over allegations that its director manipulated raw data and tried to hide it from critics.
 http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/

————

We find in above the repetition of the figure 26 quite amusing. Actually we think that while at present perhaps indeed only 26% of the Netherlands is under sea level, but then, with sea level rise thanks to the melting of the ice at the poles, and in the mountain glaciers like in the Himalaya’s (what we call the three poles) – rest assured – half of the Netherlands will be under the water line. So what is your problem with that or with what the scientists said? By that time maybe 50% of the population will accept that this was an anthropogenic event – that is that they themselves caused it – and the only fault of the scientists was their shortage of words.

Arctic Melt To Cost Up To $24 Trillion By 2050: Report

Date: 08-Feb-10
Author: Timothy Gardner, Reuthers

WASHINGTON – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

“Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs,” said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report, called “Arctic Treasure, Global Assets Melting Away.”

He said the report, reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monetize the cost of the loss of one of the world’s great weather makers.

“The Arctic is the planet’s air conditioner and it’s starting to break down,” he said.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice and snow cover is already costing the world about $61 billion to $371 billion annually from costs associated with heat waves, flooding and other factors, the report said.

The losses could grow as a warmer Arctic unlocks vast stores of methane in the permafrost. The gas has about 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun’s energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

While much of Europe and the United States has suffered heavy snowstorms and unusually low temperatures this winter, evidence has built that the Arctic is at risk from warming.

Greenhouse gases generated by tailpipes and smokestacks have pushed Arctic temperatures in the last decade to the highest levels in at least 2,000 years, reversing a natural cooling trend, an international team of researchers reported in the journal Science in September.

Arctic emissions of methane have jumped 30 percent in recent years, scientists said last month.

Goodstein’s study did not look at worst-case scenarios Arctic melting could have, such as warmer temperatures that trigger massive releases of crystallized methane formations in Arctic soils and ocean beds known as methane hydrates. It also did not look at sea ice erosion troubling people in the Arctic.

Shackleton’s Whiskey Found Buried Near South Pole.

Lauren Frayer
Contributor to aol.com
(Feb. 6, 2010) — It’s probably the most sought-after scotch in history – crates of whiskey buried in Antarctica by the famed explorer Ernest Shackleton a century ago. He abandoned them on a failed attempt to reach the South Pole in 1909, and they’ve been on ice – literally – ever since.

Researchers from New Zealand found the crates while restoring a hut Shackleton built and used during the expedition. He and his team were forced to cut short the trip and abandon supplies, including their booze, to sail away before winter ice trapped them there.

The New Zealand team first spotted two crates underneath the hut’s floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be salvaged. Researchers returned to the site this past week, and finally extracted the crates after drilling into the ice around them. The surprise was that there were three more crates than expected – one more of whiskey and two of brandy.

The second trip was backed by the same Scottish company that distilled Shackleton’s whiskey, Mackinlay’s Rare Old Scotch. It could be the longest booze run in history. The Whyte and Mackay distillery hopes to replicate the whiskey, which hasn’t been made in a lifetime after the original recipe was lost.

“Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history,” the company’s master blender, Richard Paterson, said in a release posted on the company’s Web site. He called the find “a gift from the heavens” for whiskey lovers.

“If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated,” Paterson said.

Experts will try to extract the historic brew delicately. Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside. Icebergs surrounding the crates smelled of whiskey, and there may have been leakage, according to Al Fastier, a restoration expert with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust who made the find.

He told the BBC he heard the slosh of liquid inside the crates when they were moved, and is confident that much of the liquor is still inside.

Shackleton’s expedition ran short of supplies on a long trek to the South Pole that began in 1907. He had to turn back about 100 miles from the pole in 1909. The team had to move quickly to escape as winter ice began to form, so they were forced to abandon all but essential equipment and supplies – including their whiskey. No lives were lost.

A Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, was first to reach the South Pole two years later, in 1911.

As for what the future holds for Shackleton’s whiskey, there are international treaties preventing the removal of artifacts from Antarctica, but Paterson wrote on his blog that he hopes to get his hands on at least a sample of the whiskey, if not a couple bottles.

“What you all want to know is: How will it taste?” Paterson wrote. “To which the answer is: Cold.”

The capital region is not accustomed to this much snow. The average annual snowfall for Washington is 15 inches. But the 2009-10 winter has been far from average. A major storm just before Christmas dumped up to 20 inches in some areas, and the city has seen smaller snow accumulations already twice this week.

The record snowfall for D.C. was 28 inches in 1922.This weekend alone will surpass that amount.

The snow was expected to become particularly heavy after nightfall and continue through Saturday. The Washington DC district’s director of transportation, Gabe Klein, said the snow could pile up at a rate of four inches an hour during parts of the storm, with winds gusting up to 25 miles an hour.

For district officials, the latest blizzard seemed a bit old hat. “We’re pretty much going to handle it in the same way we handled the last storm,” said William Howland Jr., director of D.C.’s Department of Public Works. In the spirit of the season, city press advisories referred to the storm as the “super snow bowl.”  Others dubbed it – “Snowmageddon.” We call it a potential tie-breaker in the Congressional Global Warming Wars. They will call it Washington Freezing and find in it an excuse for doing nothing on the Global Issue.

The storm also got the attention of the White House, whose current occupant, Barack Obama, famously dissed his adopted city’s response to a minor snowfall shortly after taking office last year. This time around, his tune had changed. As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, “Even a transplanted Hawaiian to Chicago has sufficient respect for a forecast of nearly two feet of snow.”

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Even as city officials were urging residents to stay off the streets, Washingtonians were making plans for mass revelry in the form of giant snowball fights. (A group snow battle during the December storm was marred when a police officer pulled out a gun after snowballs hit his Hummer.)

On Friday, a Facebook group promoted the “official DuPont Circle Snowball Fight” for Saturday afternoon and boasted that its membership had soared from 30 people on Thursday to more than 2,000 a day later.

Local bars and restaurants were offering Snow Day specials, with at least one establishment, Urbana, promoting a “baby, it’s cold outside beach party” theme.

Washington, Maryland and Virginia all declared snow emergencies Friday morning, and hundreds of flights were canceled at the region’s three major airports.  The lobbyists will be stuck in town this weekend. With snow soon to be sticking to the runways, a Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesman said she expected the final flights to leave the area by 6 p.m., with the airports likely to be shuttered all day Saturday.

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By Nafeesa Syeed
AP
WASHINGTON (Feb. 6) — A blizzard battered the Mid-Atlantic region Saturday, with emergency crews struggling to keep pace with the heavy, wet snow that has piled up on roadways, toppled trees and left thousands without electricity.

The National Weather Service called the storm “extremely dangerous.”

Officials urged people to huddle at home and out of the way of emergency crews. Forecasters said the storm could be the biggest for the nation’s capital in modern history.

A record 2½ feet or more was predicted for Washington. As of early Saturday, 10 inches of snow was reported at the White House, while parts of Maryland and West Virginia were buried under more than 20 inches. Forecasters expected snowfall rates to increase, up to 2 inches per hour through Saturday morning.

Blizzard warnings were issued for the District of Columbia, Baltimore, parts of New Jersey and Delaware, and some areas west of the Chesapeake Bay.

“Things are fairly manageable, but trees are starting to come down,” said D.C. fire department spokesman Pete Piringer, whose agency responded to some of the falling trees. No injuries were reported.

President Barack Obama called the storm “Snowmageddon.”

Airlines canceled flights, churches called off weekend services and people wondered if they would be stuck at home for several days in a region ill-equipped to deal with so much snow.

“D.C. traditionally panics when it comes to snow. This time, it may be more justifiable than most times,” said Becky Shipp, who was power-walking in Arlington, Va., Friday. “I am trying to get a walk in before I am stuck with just the exercise machine in my condo.”

The region’s second snowstorm in less than two months brought heavy, wet snow and strong winds that forecasters warned could gust near 60 mph in some areas along the coast.

Hundreds of thousands of customers across the region had lost electricity and more outages were expected to be reported because of all the downed power lines. A hospital fire in D.C. sent about three dozen patients scurrying from their rooms to safety in a basement. The blaze started when a snow plow truck caught fire near the building.

Authorities blamed the storm for hundreds of accidents, including a deadly tractor-trailer wreck that killed a father and son who had stopped to help someone in Virginia. Some area hospitals asked people with four-wheel-drive vehicles to volunteer to pick up doctors and nurses to take them to work.

The country band Rascal Flatts postponed a concert Saturday in Ohio, but the Atlanta Thrashers-Washington Capitals NHL game went on as planned.

In Dover, Del., Shanita Foster lugged three gallons of water out of a Dollar General store.
“That’s all we need right now. We’ve got everything else,” said Foster, adding that she was ready with candles in case the power went out.

Shoppers jammed aisles and emptied stores of milk, bread, shovels, driveway salt and other supplies. Many scrambling for food and supplies were too late.
“Our shelves are bare,” said Food Lion front-end manager Darlene Baboo in Dover. “This is just unreal.”

Metro, the transit system the Washington area is heavily dependent upon, closed all but the underground rail service and suspended bus service.

Maryland’s public transportation also shut down Saturday, including Baltimore’s Metro. Maryland Transit Administration spokeswoman Jawauna Greene said the underground portion of the Metro could reopen later Saturday but it depended on the weather conditions.
“We have trees on the overhead wires, trees on train tracks. We can’t get anything out,” she said.

Amtrak also canceled several of its Northeast Corridor trains Saturday, and New Jersey’s transit authority expected to suspend bus service. As much as a foot of snow was reported in parts of that state.

Across the region, transportation officials deployed thousands of trucks and crews and had hundreds of thousands of tons of salt at the ready. Several states exhausted or expected to exhaust their snow removal budgets.

Maryland budgeted about $60 million, and had already spent about $50 million, Gov. Martin O’Malley said. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who has been in office less than a month, declared his second snow emergency, authorizing state agencies to assist local governments. As of early Saturday, some parts of Virginia had already seen more than 18 inches of snow.

The snow comes less than two months after a Dec. 19 storm dumped more than 16 inches on Washington. Snowfalls of this magnitude – let alone two in one season – are rare in the area. According to the National Weather Service, Washington has gotten more than a foot of snow only 13 times since 1870.

The heaviest on record was 28 inches in January 1922. The biggest snowfall for the Washington-Baltimore area is believed to have been in 1772, before official records were kept, when as much as 3 feet fell, which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson penned in their diaries.

In Washington, tourists made the best of it Friday, spending their days in museums or venturing out to see the monuments before the snow got too heavy.

A group of 13 high school students from Cincinnati was stranded in D.C. when a student government conference they planned to attend was canceled – after they had already arrived. So they went sightseeing.

At the Smithsonian’s natural history museum, Caitlin Lavon, 18, and Hannah Koch, 17, took pictures of each other with the jaws of a great white shark in the Ocean Hall.
“Our parents are all freaking out, sending texts to be careful,” Koch said. “Being from Ohio, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much snow at once.”

Associated Press writers Brett Zongker and Sarah Karush in Washington, Kathleen Miller in Falls Church, Va., David Dishneau in Chantilly, Va., Ben Nuckols in Hanover, Md., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., and Steve Szkotak in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

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Here in New York, I just came home from jogging on the street – there were more joggers out on a Saturday morning then I ever saw. The streets  are clear – the only white is that of salt some eager store owners or building – Supers sprinkled believing there will be snow. Indeed in between parked cars, in some streets, there is a little bit of white – so there was a dusting sometime earlier today. Will New York be spared this time? Was it all destined for Washington or we are still on line to get it later?

Plants sprout in Fuji permafrost thaw.

Kyodo News, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010.
Researchers said Friday they have found at the summit of Mount Fuji grass and other seed plants that used to be unable to grow there, probably because the permafrost is ebbing due to rising temperatures.

The 3,776-meter summit could only grow moss about 20 years ago, but Takehiro Masuzawa, a Shizuoka University professor on plant physiological ecology, and his team recently found plants usually seen at an altitude of about 2,500 meters growing there.

Permafrost on Mount Fuji was found at an elevation of around 3,100 meters at the lowest level in 1976 and at around 3,200 meters in 1998, but the team found its edge had further receded and was even partially lost around the summit in 2009.

With low temperatures, strong winds and ultraviolet light as well as soil lacking water and nutrients, the mountaintop environment was thought to be too harsh to allow the growth of seed plants.

Masuzawa’s team will report its findings Sunday at the University of Tokyo.
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