Category Archives: global warming

Advanced biofuels will still take food out of the mouths of the world’s poor

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Environmentalists don’t seem to understand that life involves unavoidable trade-offs.  Nathanael Greene, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently wrote a post titled, “Europe catches up to the US on biofuels policy” in which he approves of the EU’s decision to “stick to its 10 percent goal for biofuels but require an increase percentage to be advanced biofuels that don’t compete with food production.”

The problem is that you cannot avoid competition between biofuels and food. The EU may state that new alternatives won’t compete with food production, but wishing something doesn’t make it so.

The first place new biofuel crops will be grown is on land that is already in cultivation. Instead of growing corn, for example, farmers will grow switchgrass. Instead of taking corn and turning it into fuel, these policies are just taking land that would have produced corn and re-purposing it to produce fuel.

There only difference is that advanced biofuel crops should be more efficient. But advanced biofuel conversion technology needs to first make it out of the lab out of the lab and into commercial-scale production. If biofuels could be made from organic waste, then advanced biofuel wouldn’t compete with food, but that’s the only scenario.

The point remains–our biofuel policies are taking food out of the mouths of the world’s poor. That is the unavoidable outcome our mandating the use of food for fuel. As the UN special rapporteur has stated, biofuels are “a crime against humanity.”

If the human toll of increasing food prices wasn’t enough, the environmental costs are significant. Today’s biofuel production releases more greenhouse gases than petroleum production and we are turning miles and miles of jungle into biofuel plantations.

Why does Al Gore exaggerate climate change?

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I don’t understand Al Gore. Why does he continuously exaggerate his claims about man-made global warming? Why does he feel it is necessary to exaggerate?

Pat Micheals explains some of Gore’s recent exaggerations:

Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”

Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!

Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”

Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.

Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”

Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”

Why the Kyoto Protocol Failed

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One of the many reasons the Kyoto Protocol failed has failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as promised is because the rules were poorly designed (you could argue they were set up to be gamed). The Wall Street Journal reports that a French companies will make about $1 billion dollars in greenhouse gas credits all because it made a $15 million dollar investment. Here’s the WSJ:

The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn’t make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It’s Rhodia’s single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution “credits.” […] The Rhodia factory in [South Korea] alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.

This doesn’t make any rational sense, but that’s not the point, is it?

One Reason to be Skeptical of the Science from the Environmental Protection Agency

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I’ll be posting a lot about EPA over the next four months. They recently announced plans to require Americans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors of the economy, including large houses, lawn and garden equipment, cars, trucks, ships, boats, and large cattle and beef operations (cows “emit” large amounts of methane to put it delicately).

Today I was reading through a document titled, “Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act.” In plain English, this document summarizes the science they believe requires them to regulate greenhouse gases because of the damages caused by increasing temperatures.  On page 11 I came across this misleading graph:

So why is this graph misleading? Because the data is at least 6 or 7 years out of date. EPA’s document is supposed to present the most recent data about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. So why do they include such out-of-date information?

I don’t know why they used out-of-date information, but I suspect they wanted to avoid an inconvenient truth–China has surpassed American greenhouse gas emissions and China’s emissions are only projected to go up.

If I were at EPA, I’d be honest and include recent information. Last month, for example, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency put out a new report on global carbon dioxide emissions in 2007. Here’s a graph from that report:

This graph is far superior to the EPA’s graph. This graph shows relative emissions from different countries ad it shows those emissions over time. It shows that America’s emissions have increased, but only slowly and that China’s emissions are rapidly increasing.

EPA argues its case to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as if it is an attorney arguing for a client. EPA only includes information that helps it make its case, instead of presenting all pertinent information. This is completely inappropriate for a regulatory agency.

How to fight global warming more efficiently than using cap-and-trade

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Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Washington Post today:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, has called it “the world’s most far-reaching program to fight global warming.” It is indeed policy on a grand scale. It would slow American economic growth by trillions of dollars over the next half-century. But in terms of temperature, the result will be negligible if China and India don’t also commit to reducing their emissions, and it will be only slightly more significant if they do. By itself, Lieberman-Warner would postpone the temperature increase projected for 2050 by about two years.

Politicians favor the cap-and-trade system because it is an indirect tax that disguises the true costs of reducing carbon emissions. It also gives lawmakers an opportunity to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners.

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Many people believe that everyone has a moral obligation to ask how we can best combat climate change. Attempts to curb carbon emissions along the lines of the bill now pending are a poor answer compared with other options.

Consider that today, solar panels are one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many “green” approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can’t avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.

The answer is to dramatically increase research and development so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050: We would have solved the problem of global warming, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn’t be the preserve of rich Westerners.

How to think about climate change science

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I like reading Steve McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit. A lot of it is technical information is way over my head, but there is some really interesting information there. McIntyre is a good scientist and he wants climate scientists to use good scientific procedures when doing climate science. McIntyre and his economist friend Ross McKitrick debunked the infamous temperature “Hockey Stick” which showed recent temperatures as higher than anything in the last 1000 years. McIntyre also found mistakes in NASA temperature record which made temperatures after 2000 warmer than they should have been.

McIntyre is a skeptic, but he is the type of skeptic all scientists should be–skeptical about scientific claims unless they are proven. He thinks about climate change science in a way more people should. Here’s a comment on his blog and his response:

Can someone tell me if any of the AGW predictions have been found correct? To me it seems that they haven’t but I don’t have a thorough enough understanding of the subject. I read realclimate when such things happen and they seem to say, “Yes just what we thought.” or, “It fits the theory” when there or no predictions, or, “The data is wrong.” I say this because as a sceptic from the very beginning we are going down a black hole of public spending and taxes and none of us seem to be able to roll back the tide of political belief that global warming is MM.

Gerry Morrow

Steve: Serious people believe that it is an issue. There’s a lot of promotion and hype, but that doesn’t mean that, underneath it all, there isn’t a problem. No one’s shown that it’s not an issue. The hardest part for someone trying to understand the issue from first principles is locating a clear A-to-B exposition of how doubled CO2 produces a problem and I’m afraid that no one’s been able to give such a reference to me – the excuse is that such an exposition is too “routine” for climate scientists. That’s the first attitude than has to change.

Just because people like Al Gore and NASA’s Jim Hansen as snake oil salesmen doesn’t make some of their fundamental points wrong. It’s important to remember that when thinking about climate change science.

McIntyre raises a really important questions that climate scientists gloss over (and makes me very skeptical of their claims)–they can’t show from first principles how a doubling of CO2 is a problem. This should trouble climate change scientists, but they seem unconcerned that they can’t prove their fundamental problem.

The real question is not whether Gore or Hansen are right, the question is, what is the appropriate response. On this count, there is no way Gore’s solutions should be followed, unless we want to impoverish the world with little to no environmental benefit.

CO2 is plant food

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One reason I don’t trust global warming alarmists is that everything about increasing levels of carbon dioxide is bad. Worse, only good things happen to “bad species” (the warming will benefit mosquitoes that carry malaria by expanding their range) and only bad things happen to “good species” (polar bears’ range is decreased). It sounds as if the temperatures at some time during the twentieth century was some kind of climate optimum and if the climate warms, only bad things will happen. This just can’t be the case. There have to be some benefits from a warmer globe.

Lawrence Solomon reports in the Financial Post of one benefit of higher levels of carbon dioxoide:

In the 1980s, ecologists realized that satellites could track production, and enlisted NASA to collect the data. For the first time, ecologists did not need to rely on rough estimates or anecdotal evidence of the health of the ecology: They could objectively measure the land’s output and soon did — on a daily basis and down to the last kilometre.

The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth’s vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life.

A warmer world with greater concentrations of carbon dioxide isn’t all rosy, but there are some benefits, and great production from plants sound like a nice benefit.

Only $45 TRILLION Need to Combat Global Warming

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The AP reports:

The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday.

The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a “energy revolution” that would greatly reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth.

“Meeting this target of 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge, and we would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale,” IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said.

The Logic of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner Bill

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Here’s the logic of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner global warming bill:

  1. We must “do something” about global warming.
  2. This is something.
  3. Therefore, we much do it.

[Logic courtesy of Brian Kaplan via Megan McCardle.]

Who cares that the bill will increase the price of energy and won’t make a difference with respect to global temperature. These are unimportant. Results and costs don’t matter. What matters is “doing something.”