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By Thomas Fuller, SF Environmental Policy Examiner

Monday, September 07 2009 15:33

Joe Romm Committee Hearing

© Andrew J Duck / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A lot of time and attention is spent on global warming. Barack Obama’s second major package of legislation (after the financial rescue but before the healthcare revamp) was cap and trade legislation, currently being considered by the Senate. It has occupied thousands of researchers (and an equal number of critics, it seems) and the attention of bloggers everywhere. But as originally put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of political analysts and policy makers commissioned by the U.N. 21 years ago, climate change was a technocratic issue designed to help politicians incorporate information about a slow but steady rise in temperatures into long term planning. It didn’t become headline material until U.S. Congressional hearings in 1988 and the pronouncements of a certain Al Gore, who I voted for three times and who I really wish would shut up. A new article in New Scientist tells us that a scientist working with the IPCC now says that global warming will disappear for one or two decades, swamped by the counter-effects of other natural cycles. “People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.” The funny thing is that if it weren’t for the hysteria surrounding the subject, this pronouncement would be natural, logical and quickly accepted. We know, after all, that many forces affect our climate–the tilt of the planet, cyclical changes in our orbit and changes in the orbit of the sun, cycles with various initials such as PDO, ENSO, etc., and other things that humans do, such as converting large swathes of the landscape to agriculture or cityscape, or diverting rivers and depleting aquifers. It’s only because the most hysterical of climate change activists have harped incessantly on the inexorable rise and cataclysmic effects of CO2 concentrations that any diversion from their projected path for temperatures seems to throw the whole issue into doubt. Had this remained a civil and scientific discussion within realms of possibility, the wider response to this would be ‘who cares?’ But when idiots like Glenn Beck and Joe Romm are foaming at the mouth on either side of the issue, there is no room for reasoned discussion. You know what? Global warming may well disappear for two decades and then reappear. That’s because it is one of, and not the strongest, forces that affect our climate. It will tend to push long term temperature averages up by 2 degrees Celsius if concentrations of CO2 double. Sea levels may rise 18 inches this century instead of a foot. We may have to reinforce some sea walls and change some zoning regulations as a result. The story from New Scientist is only relevant insofar as it shuts up some hysterics. If it does so and the conversation continues in more reasoned terms, it is to be welcomed. Otherwise, like the rest of the discussion on climate change, it should be in the background, analysed by technocrats and other scientists, with the occasional updates for those of us with an interest in the subject matter.
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By Jon Ferry, The Province

The best time to dump a stock, so the experts say, is when the hysteria surrounding it has reached its zenith. And, as a story in the U.K. media over the weekend makes clear, we’ve now reached that point in the feeding frenzy over the issue of human-induced global warming.

Now is the time to back the truck up, dump the garbage out and start again with a clean sheet — before we all go bonkers.

The story in the prestigious Sunday Times describes how the Royal Society, the U.K.’s top science institution, is backing research into simulated volcanic eruptions to stave off climate change. This, we are told, is on the grounds that “pouring sulphur-based particles into the upper atmosphere could be one of the few options available to humanity to keep the world cool.”

Keep the world cool? As a long-time global-warming skeptic, I think these Brit researchers are tilting at windmills. They arrogantly seem to think their dabblings in “geo-engineering” can regulate the Earth’s warming and cooling, as if they were dialling a thermostat up and down.

I mean what happens if, while they’re simulating these eruptions and spraying millions of tons of dust in the air, an actual eruption takes place — like that of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 — and the world cools down a bit too much? Will they trigger a new ice age?

Manchester University professor Brian Launder is quoted in the story by environment editor Jonathan Leake as saying that, without carbon-dioxide reductions or geo-engineering, “civilization as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime.”

My view is that civilization has already ended — at least at most western universities, where for too long kids have been brainwashed into eco-conformity by political zealots masquerading as professors.

Bold counter-action is needed. Indeed, if I was in charge, I’d end all this ideologically driven, academic nonsense before our politicians do something really dumb . . . like peppering the planet with huge, bird-killing wind machines.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what they seem intent on doing. They’re known as wind “farms.” And as anybody who has lived near them knows, they’re not just ugly, they’re unreliable and inefficient as power producers. Moreover, they require taxpayer subsidies to be economic.

So far, B.C. doesn’t have many of these modern windmills. Even the one with 37-metre blades being constructed at the top of Grouse Mountain isn’t in operation yet, though resort spokesman William Mbaho told me that “assembly should take place this month.”

It’s a privately-owned wind turbine that will undoubtedly make a bold statement. But I strongly suspect it’ll be a statement about its value as a tourist attraction rather than as a generator of electricity.

Not that I have anything against that. As B.C.’s budget shows, our province is desperate for dollars wherever it can get them.

Let’s not pretend, however, that erecting windmills will alter the Earth’s climate . . . any more than setting off phony volcanoes will.

Email Jon: jferry@theprovince.com

Source via our partners at Puget Sound Radio