Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2013

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings”

Filed under: Business, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

A bit of LEED debunking at The New Republic:

When the Bank of America Tower opened in 2010, the press praised it as one of the world’s “most environmentally responsible high-rise office building[s].” It wasn’t just the waterless urinals, daylight dimming controls, and rainwater harvesting. And it wasn’t only the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification — the first ever for a skyscraper — and the $947,583 in incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also had as a tenant the environmental movement’s biggest celebrity. The Bank of America Tower had Al Gore.

The former vice president wanted an office for his company, Generation Investment Management, that “represents the kind of innovation the firm is trying to advance,” his real-estate agent said at the time. The Bank of America Tower, a billion-dollar, 55-story crystal skyscraper on the northwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, seemed to fit the bill. It would be “the most sustainable in the country,” according to its developer Douglas Durst. At the Tower’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gore powwowed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and praised the building as a model for fighting climate change. “I applaud the leadership of the mayor and all of those who helped make this possible,” he said.

Gore’s applause, however, was premature. According to data released by New York City last fall, the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan. It uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building. It also performs worse than the Goldman Sachs headquarters, maybe the most similar building in New York — and one with a lower LEED rating. It’s not just an embarrassment; it symbolizes a flaw at the heart of the effort to combat climate change.

[…]

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want — namely, green publicity, not energy savings,” John Scofield, a professor of physics at Oberlin, testified before the House last year.

Governments, nevertheless, have been happy to rely on LEED rather than design better metrics. Which is why New York’s release of energy data last fall was significant. It provided more public-energy data for a U.S. city than has ever existed. It found the worst-performing buildings use three to five times more energy per square foot than the best ones. It also found that, if the most energy-intensive large buildings were brought up to the current seventy-fifth percentile, the city’s total greenhouse gases could be reduced by 9 percent.

June 27, 2013

How many “environmental” groups are actually harming the environment

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That:

Now, given that poverty is the greatest threat to the global environment, the inescapable conclusion is that the only way the global environment stands a chance is if poor countries can develop economically.

And that is why the anti-development, pro-expensive energy stance of the large environmental NGOs is one of the great environmental tragedies of our times.

Here’s the chain of causality:

1. Climate alarmists, with the strong support of the major environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, declared war on CO2.

2. The method that they chose to fight CO2 was to discourage fossil fuel use by making energy more expensive, using a combination of taxation, legislation, international pressure, and expensive subsidies to achieve that end. Obama’s War on Coal, announced today, is just one of hundreds of examples of the wealthy NGOs and the rich governments working to increase the price of energy.

3. Since energy is development, expensive energy keeps poor countries in poverty. When the World Bank denies loans for coal fired plants in India, the poor suffer … but the environment suffers more. Until they can afford to use coal and gas, they’ll run the country on wood … I refer you back to Figure 1 for how well that works out.

4. Expensive energy slows a country’s economic development, and as President Obama pointed out, people worried about money don’t pay attention to the environment.

This ends up in a bizarre position—the actions of the major environmental NGOs are ensuring continued environmental destruction in the developing world.

June 22, 2013

The Economist on the cooling chances of major climate control legislation

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

I was disappointed when The Economist switched sides to join the “consensus” on global warming and started arguing for massive government intervention in the economy to “save the planet”. Fifteen years after the last significant bout of warming, The Economist is starting to sound a bit more sensible (and skeptical):

…there’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that “we cannot afford to wait”. More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

Of course, if the consensus climate models turn out to be falsified just a few years later, average temperature having remained at levels not even admitted to be have been physically possible, the authority of consensus will have been exposed as rather weak. The authority of expert consensus obviously strengthens as the quality of expertise improves, which is why it’s quite sensible, as matter of science-based policy-making, to wait for a callow science to improve before taking grand measures on the basis of it’s predictions.

As I wrote back in 2004, “I’ve never been all that convinced of the accuracy of the scientific evidence presented in favour of the Global Warming theory, especially as it seemed to play rather too clearly into the hands of the anti-growth, anti-capitalist, pro-world government folks. A world-wide ecological disaster, clearly caused by human action, would allow a lot of authoritarian changes which would radically reduce individual freedom and increase the degree of social control exercised by governments over the actions and movement of their citizenry.”

May 15, 2013

Canadians’ hypocrisy on climate change

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Stephen Gordon fired off a tweetstorm yesterday:

April 19, 2013

Enviro-Apocalypse Now (or real soon, anyway)

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

At sp!ked, Tim Black reviews the latest environmental doom-mongering tome from Andrew Simms:

All of this ought to leave Simms & Co looking like the boys who cried climate catastrophe. Yet somehow, as Cancel the Apocalypse shows, they are continuing, unabashed, to preach environmental doom despite its palpable absence. In fact, the hyper-pessimism has even been ramped up a bit. ‘The horsemen are galloping and there are more than four of them’, Simms chirrups. ‘Climate change, financial meltdown, the global peak and decline of oil production, a mass extinction event of plant and animal species, overuse of fresh water supplies, soil loss, economic infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to external shocks — it’s the age of the complex super disaster.’ It seems devastating climate change is no longer enough for Simms; he wants to solicit a whole host of other unrelated, and highly debatable, phenomena for his narrative of woe. Cancelled? No way, Simms chortles: the apocalypse is back on.

So how is Simms able to maintain his unshakeable belief in our imminent destruction? What makes him and his tweedy, right-on puritan mates different to, say, William Miller, founder of the Second Adventists (later to become the Seventh Day Adventists), who, as Simms tells us, believed the day of reckoning would fall in 1843, 1845, 1846, 1849, 1851, 1874 and 1999?

The ostensible answer is that whereas previous doomsayers derived their predictions from ‘gobbledygook floating up from patterns of words and numbers dimly discerned in books about faith and belief’, Simms and his followers rely upon ‘verifiable scientific experiment’. Of course, The Science.

Which is funny, because Cancel the Apocalypse does not contain much in the way of ‘verifiable scientific experiment’. What it does feature, though, is a scientistic use of the authority of science to justify a whole range of dubious assertions. In Simms’ hands, science is no longer science. It is a metaphor, an authority-bolstering gloss, allowing him to talk, for example, of socio-historical phenomena such as the economy in terms of the laws of nature: ‘Just as physical laws constrain the maximum efficiency of a heat engine’, he writes, so ‘economic growth is constrained by the finite nature of our planet’s natural resources, the variable but ultimately bounded biocapacity of its oceans, fields, geology and atmosphere’; and later on, ‘the laws of physics mean it is not possible to create the order of such [economic] exchanges without a little something being lost [Simms is referring to the biosphere]’.

March 28, 2013

British energy prices graphically explained

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

At The Register, Lewis Page debunks the propaganda from the government and shows the cost components of British energy prices from the government’s own published source:

The government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet — or anyway reduce carbon emissions — and it not only costs nothing, but puts money in our pockets?

In a word, no: of course not. If that was true there would be no need for government action, we’d be acting to reduce carbon emissions on our own. And indeed, once you skip the foolish tinned quotes and bogo-stats in the executive summary, the report itself makes it very clear that in fact green policies are already to blame for most of the sustained climb in electricity prices we’ve suffered over the past decade — and that it’s going to get a lot worse.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

So there you are, plain as day. The various green interventions in the UK and EU energy markets which have come in since the turn of the century are already costing you a hefty sum — the government have already forced up the price you pay for electricity today by nearly 20 per cent over where it would have been if they’d left matters alone. If they carry on as planned, by the year 2030 they will have managed to drive it up by more than a third over where it would normally be.

March 23, 2013

Human Achievement Hour 2013

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Oh, right. It’s once again time for the Gaia-worshippers to do an hour’s penance for the crime of being alive in an industrialized society. The Competitive Enterprise Institute proposes a different way of using that hour:

On Saturday, March 23 at 8:30pm (local time), some people, businesses and governments around the world will choose to sit in the dark for one hour as a symbolic gesture to take action against climate change. The organizers of Earth Hour say that they [no] longer expect energy use to actually drop during the hour, but instead see it as a way for people to show their commitment to reducing energy use and taking action beyond the hour.

It’s absolutely every person’s right to decide if they want to conserve energy for whatever reason; they are free to sit in the dark as long as they want. However, it should not be their right to impose their beliefs or opinions on others. And that is what is at the heart of the environmentalist movement. While many participants in Earth Hour sincerely want a cleaner environment — a desire most of us share — the environmentalist movement whether implicitly or explicitly seeks to clamp down on human progress by reducing energy consumption whether through regulation and taxation. They want to make fossil fuels, which they see as dirty, more expensive to encourage the use of renewable “greener” energies.

Despite any good intentions, the ultimate result of environmentalist policies is not a healthier, cleaner environment. Instead we will see a population that is sicker and poorer. The only way we achieve technology that is “greener” is by building on older “dirtier” technology. As we make it harder and more expensive for those in the business of creating new technologies, all we do is slow progress and make it that much longer to reach more environmentally friendly solutions.

January 24, 2013

Is the media’s love affair with “extreme weather” just an elaborate insurance scam?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post:

All it takes these days is a little normal January Canadian cold spell and all of a sudden the nation is plunged into a frenzy of chatter about “extreme weather.” The CBC led the way, aided and abetted by climate alarmists in the Canadian insurance industry, with help from an apparently leaked data point from an Environment Canada report that supposedly will show that Canadian winters are now 3.2C warmer than they used to be. Get it? It’s really cold, but that’s because of climate change, which is making Canada’s winters warmer.

If you find this confusing, well, get used to it. That may even be part of the objective, which, judging by the sudden extreme flood of media reports, seems to be keep Canada’s population agitated about global warming, a cause that has so far failed to ignite voters.

If the theory of climate change doesn’t grab people, maybe “extreme weather” will. The media certainly love it. All News Radio in Toronto now has an “Extreme Weather Centre” that rouses itself every time weather happens — snow storms, cold spells, heat waves, rain, temperature anomalies. Alarmist weather forecasting and reporting is a media staple, but the concept now appears to have reached a new level of hypedom.

[. . .]

The insurance angle was cleverly juxtaposed with a leaked bit of data from an Environment Canada report that will not be released until May. It supposedly will show that Canadian winter temperatures have risen 3.2C since Canada began keeping systematic records in 1948. As a standalone bit of data, not much can be made of it. Even less can be made of it for popular consumption if current temperatures are approaching record cold. How can we have record warm and record cold at the same time?

That’s where “extreme weather” comes in. It’s also where the Canadian insurance industry, through a front group called the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, is actively promoting extreme weather as a major vehicle for business and policy development. With offices in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario, the institute’s membership is almost exclusively insurance companies, its eight-member board is stacked with five insurance executives, and the executive director is Paul Kovacs, is former head of the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

December 12, 2012

Climatic witchcraft

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

No offense intended to practitioners of witchcraft intended:

Superstition about the weather in particular is hardly surprising, given the awesome power of nature. Witnessing storms, lightning and even the daily rising and setting of the sun surely induced fear and wonder in primitive cultures. The same fear and wonder are what warmists exploit today in linking weather extremes to global warming.

Scholars tell us that weather superstition often found expression in ritual human sacrifice. The Mayans, for instance, tossed victims into a limestone sinkhole to appease the rain god Chaac.

And it’s only a few centuries since superstition over the climate led to intensive witch hunts and widespread executions, usually by burning, for witchcraft.

University of Chicago economist Emily Oster demonstrated in 2004 that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with the Little Ice Age. Since then, other researchers have argued that chilly weather may have precipitated the Salem witch trials in the 1690s — one of the coldest periods of that epoch.

It was widely believed during the late Middle Ages that witches were capable of controlling the weather with their magic powers, and thus cause storms that could destroy harvests and hobble food production.

[. . .]

Our obsession with weather extremes has reached such heights that it has become a knee-jerk reaction for climate-change alarmists to ascribe any unusual weather event at all to global warming. So they tell us that heat waves, floods, harsh winters, dust storms — even wildfires — are all the result of man-made CO2. But a check of records from, say, the 1930s or the 1950s, when the CO2 level was much lower than now, reveals that such events are nothing new.

Climate-change skeptics might be regarded as modern-day witches because they think that global warming comes from natural forces. However, it’s superstitious alarmists, who believe that extreme weather originates in our CO2 emissions and who have a dread of impending disaster, who are really the witches.

December 5, 2012

The Doha climate change conference is “like an absurdist flash mob”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Rob Lyons explains why the current meeting in Doha isn’t getting the same media love that earlier conferences have been able to depend upon:

It’s like a fly banging its head against a window pane, desperately trying to get to the other side and uncomprehending as to why it never succeeds. Except this is a 17,000-strong swarm of flies taking part in its annual exercise in futility. Yes, there’s another UN climate conference going on, though you might well have missed it.

The eighteenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — there’s a good reason they call it COP18 — is taking place in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The small Arab state is, by some measures, the richest country in the world per head of population, a position built on the fact that it has the third-largest reserves of natural gas in the world. The conference has been running since 26 November and is due to end on Friday. But no one is predicting any kind of dramatic deal.

Which is a bit of a problem for those who run this peculiar show because another thing that ends soon is the Kyoto Protocol. Signed 15 years ago in Japan, the protocol aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialised countries and the EU to a level five per cent below 1990 levels for the period from 2008 to 2012. There’s no sign of a replacement — which, to be meaningful, really needs to include big developing countries like China, India and Brazil — just endless talks about talks. At last year’s event — COP17 in Durban, South Africa — there was an agreement to negotiate a ‘protocol, legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force applicable to all Parties’ by 2015, to take effect by 2020. As a Greenpeace representative bemoaned then: ‘Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.’

It’s all a far cry from the Copenhagen talks in 2009. US president Barack Obama agreed to attend, which meant that there was real anticipation of a major deal. Yet Obama came and Obama went, and nothing of substance was agreed. And so the process has trundled on in its own, other-worldly way. COP18 sees thousands of the kind of people who think we’re screwing up the planet by flying around the world, flying around the world in order achieve bugger all in a country, Qatar, made rich by the very fossil fuels the delegates want left in the ground. It’s like an absurdist flash mob.

November 19, 2012

Hurricane Sandy, storm surges, and superstition

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

In sp!ked, Dominic Standish looks at how some recent extreme weather incidents are being attributed to climate change/global warming without sufficient scientific evidence:

Hurricane Sandy brought havoc in the Caribbean, especially Haiti, and caused approximately 60 deaths. Then the storm hit the US east coast; New York experienced exceptional floods and at least 40 people lost their lives. Next, Venice in Italy witnessed high flooding on 11 November, when the city’s tide measurements reached their sixth-highest level for 140 years. No one died from these floods in Venice, but — like Haiti and New York — the economic impact was significant.

Global warming was widely blamed for the flooding, yet in all three cases flooding was principally caused by storm surges. In the Caribbean and America, there was an unfortunate convergence of weather systems creating storm surges. As Hurricane Sandy swirled north in the Atlantic and towards land, a wintry storm headed towards it from the West and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. After the hurricane devastated parts of the Caribbean, it moved towards the north-east of the US, pushing water up the estuaries of New York into the city. Venice’s floods were unconnected to Hurricane Sandy, but were also caused by high winds creating storm surges pushing water through the three inlets between the sea and the Venetian lagoon towards the city. Subsidence over the past century has made Venice more susceptible to storm surges. Nevertheless, after 70 per cent of Venice was under water on 11 November, Italy’s environment minister, Corrado Clini, insisted that global climate change was to blame.

Although storm surges were the cause of the floods in all three locations, global warming was widely identified as the culprit. Of course, we cannot ignore climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established in 2007 that there was a global temperature rise of 0.74 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005, which added to global sea levels rising by an average rate of 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961. We need to have an open debate about climate change and its relationship with bad weather events. Some argue that climate change has increased hurricanes and storm surges, while others suggest there is insufficient evidence to prove this link. Whether climate change impacts on the frequency and strength of hurricanes remains uncertain, yet global warming has definitely been deployed as a superstitious narrative to close down discussion.

Update: Of course, the storm damage will eventually repaired and the federal government will pay the lion’s share of the costs. This is one of the bigger causes of rising costs due to storm damage along the US coastline: properties that are more exposed to damage keep getting rebuilt. Here’s an example from Dauphin Island, Alabama:

The western end of this Gulf Coast island has proved to be one of the most hazardous places in the country for waterfront property. Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

Tax money will go toward putting things back as they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the hurricane.

November 15, 2012

The BBC’s 28 secret climate change advisors

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

The BBC has been prominent among media outlets for their relentless proclamations on the dangers of climate change. Despite the BBC’s charter requiring them to provide balanced coverage, in this particular area they have been cheerleaders for one particular message: that climate change is DOOM!

In 2006, the BBC convened a panel of climate change experts to advise them on the topic, and the corporation took the advice of that panel to heart and has been pushing the climate change = disaster meme ever since. Blogger Tony Newbery submitted a FOI request to find out who had been on the panel which had swung the BBC so far away from their charter, but his request was denied. Not just denied, but fought out in court at an estimated cost of £40,000 per day.

The BBC won in court, but the information was released by someone else:

Sadly for the BBC, another enterprising blogger called Maurizio Morabito unearthed the details anyway and published them on Monday via the website Watts Up With That?

So who were all these ‘best scientific experts’ who did so much to shape the BBC’s climate policy (and by extension, one fears, government policy too…)? Well, two were from Greenpeace; one was from Stop Climate Chaos; one was a CO2 reduction expert from BP; one was from Npower Renewables; one came from the left-leaning New Economics Foundation… Only five of those present could, in any way, be considered scientists with disciplines even vaguely relevant to ‘climate change’. And of these, every one had a track record of climate alarmism. No wonder the BBC tried so hard to keep the list of 28 a secret. Its claim that its policy change was based on the ‘best scientific’ expertise turns out to have been a massive lie.

November 10, 2012

“Carbon sequestration in peatland may be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time”

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Overall, global cooling is far more to be feared than global warming … and we may be seeing the conditions that would create a new ice age in the near future:

A group of Swedish scientists at the University of Gothenburg have published a paper in which they argue that spreading peatlands are inexorably driving planet Earth into its next ice age, and the only thing holding back catastrophe is humanity’s hotly debated atmospheric carbon emissions.

“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide,” says Professor of Physical Geography Lars Franzén, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Gothenburg uni.

[. . .]

The scientists have calculated that the potential is there for Swedish peatlands to triple in extent, enormously increasing their carbon sink effect. By extrapolating to include the rest of the world’s high-latitude temperate areas – the parts of the globe where peatland can expand as it does in Sweden – they project the creation of an extremely powerful carbon sink. They theorise that this is the mechanism which tends to force the Earth back into prolonged ice ages after each relatively brief “interglacial” warm period.

“Carbon sequestration in peatland may be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time,” says Franzén.

With no other factors in play, the time is about right for the present interglacial to end and the next ice age to come on. Indeed, Franzén and his crew think it has barely been staved off by human activity

Caution should be exercised with this as with all climate-model-based predictions: our models are still not good enough to be dependable, so this is no more something to panic about than the “global warming” scare of the last decade. It is something to consider and to try to develop better models and collect more data to support or contradict the findings.

November 5, 2012

Matt Ridley on the real threat to our ecology

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It’s not global warming:

I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of hope in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are not clones — uniformly vulnerable to the pathogen. But it’s only a glimmer: tree parasites, from chestnut blight to pine beauty moth, have a habit of sweeping through species pretty rampantly, because trees are so long-lived they cannot evolve resistance in time.

The Forestry Commission’s apologists are pleading ‘cuts’ as an excuse for its failure to do anything more timely to get ahead of the threat, but as a woodland owner I am not convinced. An organisation that has the time and the budget to pore over my every felling or planting application in triplicate and come back with fussy and bossy comments could surely spare a smidgen of interest in looming threats from continental fungi that have been spreading out from Poland for 20 years. The commission was warned four years ago of the problem.

Here’s what the commission was up to instead. Just last year, I received a letter from the Forestry Commission demanding access to survey one of my woods to answer the question ‘what are the forecasts for timber, biomass and carbon?’ in order to ‘help the United Kingdom meet international commitments, such as reporting for the Global Forest Resources Assessment and the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE)’.

Notice the Sir Humphrey-esque circular argument: surveys must be done so that the results can be reported to assessment meetings. In other words, as far as I can tell, the Forestry Commission’s priority has been, as in so many government bodies, to supply talking points for the international carbon-obsessed bureaucracy. The implicit assumption here, of course, is that climate change is the greatest threat to Britain’s trees, when in reality far greater threats come from diseases carried around by foresters themselves.

This is happening throughout the world of nature conservation. A climate fetish has sucked all the oxygen from the real threats to species and habitats — indeed it has actually begun to make those threats worse.

August 20, 2012

The butterflies of doom

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

In The Register, Lewis Page tries to round up the varied results of some recent biodiversity/climate change reports:

A volley of studies into the likely effects of climate change on various animal species — and thus on biodiversity worldwide — have come out in the last few days. The headliner, examining butterflies in Massachusetts, seems to indicate that rising temperatures are having powerful ecological effects: but another pair of studies showed that other factors may be more powerful than warming, and yet another appears to indicate that dangers are being overblown.

[. . .]

“For most butterfly species, climate change seems to be a stronger change-agent than habitat loss. Protecting habitat remains a key management strategy, and that may help some butterfly species. However, for many others, habitat protection will not mitigate the impacts of warming,” comments study author and Harvard postdoc Greg Breed.

Open and shut, then — the warming seen from the 1980s to the turn of the century has already seriously affected butterflies, and projected future warming will surely mean more serious consequences. Many people, indeed, have not hesitated to link recent severe weather events in the States to global warming — despite a refutation of this idea from no less a body than the IPCC. But as it is well known to all followers of pop-science coverage that just one butterfly beating — or not beating — its wings can have major effects on the weather in the northeastern United States, it seems only reasonable to suggest that the invading Zabulon Skippers, apparently wafted into Massachusetts by global warming, are responsible for recent storms, floods, heatwaves etc.

[. . .]

Or, in summary, scientists don’t really know what will happen to any given species in future.

“Taken together, these two studies indicate that many species have been responding to recent climate change, yet the complexities of a species’ ecological needs and their responses to habitat modification by humans can result in unanticipated responses,” says Steven Beissinger, professor at UC Berkeley and senior boffin on both studies. “This makes it very challenging for scientists to project how species will respond to future climate change.”

Yet another recent study announced in the past week goes still further, suggesting that the danger to Earth’s biodiversity posed by rising temperatures has been exaggerated.

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