Ephemera

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=arnFbb2wBQEA


Khosla Says Clean-Energy Investors Should Beware of IPO Rush
By Tim Mullaney

March 17 (Bloomberg) -- Investors should beware of stock offerings from clean-technology companies this year that lack a long-term technology edge and rely too much on government aid, said Vinod Khosla, the biggest U.S. investor in green startups.

“There will be Googles in this business, but before there is a dot-com rush, investors should ask questions,” Khosla, 55, said in an interview. “My objective is that good companies get funding and that, with the bad ones, people know what questions to ask.”

Electric-car company Tesla Motors Inc. and solar-panel maker Solyndra Inc. are the only two clean-technology companies to file for initial public offerings this year and received incentives from President Barack Obama’s administration. The companies, which together received $1 billion in aid from the government, plan to raise a total of $400 million in IPOs.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are looking to IPOs to bolster returns after the slowest two-year stretch of deals since 1975, said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Virginia. Menlo Park, California-based Khosla Ventures and the rest of the venture industry plowed more than $10 billion into almost 900 clean- technology deals since 2005, with investments rising more than eightfold from 2005 to 2008, according to the association.

Clean Technology
The term “clean technology,” which emerged in the venture capital industry around 2005, describes investments in renewable-energy, conservation and power-management companies. Last year’s economic stimulus bill set aside $36.7 billion for loans, grants and funding for alternative energy initiatives, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

A123 Systems Inc., the only U.S. clean-technology startup to go public last year, won a $249.1 million federal grant to build a battery plant in Michigan, and is applying to borrow another $235 million, according to regulatory filings. No U.S. clean-energy startup has gone public without government assistance since 2007.

The government has had a poor track record of backing energy technologies since the 1970s, said Ted Sullivan, an analyst at energy consulting firm Lux Research Inc. in New York. Under President Jimmy Carter, the government invested billions in Synthetic Fuels Corp., a corporation set up to develop petroleum alternatives. It was shut in the 1980s after oil prices dropped.

‘Bad Idea’
“It’s typically a bad idea for the government to pick winners,” Sullivan said. “A lot of history shows the government is incredibly poor at it.”

Khosla’s biggest investments include biofuel companies like Range Fuels Inc. of Broomfield, Colorado, and electricity- generation companies such as natural-gas startup GreatPoint Energy Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sausalito, California-based AltaRock Energy Inc., which is developing geothermal electricity.

Makers of solar panels, electric cars and automobile batteries will struggle to keep their technology far enough ahead of bigger competitors to become consistently profitable, Khosla said.

“The guy with scale and balance-sheet capability wins,” Khosla said. “Unless someone has a huge technology differentiation, it’s hard to achieve sustainability.”

Khosla Ventures has invested at least $367.6 million in 23 clean-technology companies since 2006, according to the National Venture Capital Association, making it the largest U.S. venture investor in that industry. Khosla declined to say how much his firm has invested. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was No. 2, according to the association.

Government Loans
Tesla, which makes a $109,000 electric sports car, landed a $465 million loan from the Obama administration. Solyndra, which makes rooftop solar panels from cylindrical modules, got a $535 million loan guarantee and has applied for another $469 million, filings show. Both companies have filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for IPOs and neither has set a date.

Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Tesla, and Dave Miller, a spokesman for Solyndra in Fremont, California, declined to comment. They cited federal regulations limiting public statements by companies preparing IPOs.

Investors in A123 bet on demand for the company’s products rather than on government subsidies, Chief Financial Officer Michael Rubino said. Watertown, Massachusetts-based A123 sells batteries for power tools and autos, and has development deals with carmakers such as Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. The market for electric-car batteries is expected to soar to $21.8 billion by 2015 from $31.9 million last year, according to A123’s filings, which cited consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

“You have growth drivers like global warming, national security and the price of oil,” Rubino said in an interview. “It isn’t any one factor...”

*****​

...While Tesla and Solyndra have products on the market, they haven’t yet turned a profit. Sales at Tesla jumped to $93.4 million in the first nine months of 2009 from $580,000 in the same period a year earlier, as it delivered cars that customers had ordered since 2006, according to a regulatory filing. Its net loss narrowed to $31.5 million from $57.3 million a year earlier.

Solyndra’s sales jumped to $58.8 million from $1.5 million in the same period, while its loss narrowed to $119.8 million from $179.8 million. Both Solyndra and A123 spend more to make their products than they sell for, even before marketing and overhead expenses.

Pick Winners
Codexis Inc. is the only U.S. clean-technology company that’s registered to go public this year and hasn’t received aid to build a factory, according to regulatory filings. Redwood City, California-based Codexis makes enzymes used to produce ethanol.

The question is whether government aid can prop up companies until they turn a profit, said Josh Lerner, a professor who specializes in venture capital at Harvard Business School. Both state and federal efforts to promote commercialization of specific technologies usually fail, because bureaucrats can’t predict which approaches will be widely adopted, Lerner said.

“The way the programs are structured doesn’t fill you with confidence,” Lerner said. “They’ve been problematic in terms of picking the real winners.”

 

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There is an astounding amount of randomness in this world:

Beach jogger killed by plane likely never heard it.

Russ Bynum and Dorie Turner, Associated Press Writers, On Wednesday March 17, 2010, 10:02 am EDT

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. (AP) -- The kit-built single-engine plane was gliding quietly as it came down for an emergency landing on a beach. Pharmaceutical salesman Robert Gary Jones, listening to his iPod while jogging, likely never saw or heard it before the aircraft hit him from behind Monday evening and killed him.

"There's no noise," said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. "So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you're basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?"

The 38-year-old Jones, whose mother said he was serious about nutrition and exercise, especially jogging, was on a business trip to Hilton Head for GlaxoSmithKline. He was looking forward to getting home to the northern Atlanta suburb of Woodstock, Ga., for his daughter's third birthday Wednesday, Pauline Jones said.

"I was never so shocked in all my life," she said of learning the news, her voice shaking. "They say that God only gives you what you can handle. I said, 'You know what, I've reached my max.'"

The pilot, Edward I. Smith of Chesapeake, Va., and his lone passenger walked away from the crash landing near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa. The Beaufort County Sheriff's Office named the passenger as David Henry, 59, also of Chesapeake, The Island Packet newspaper reported.

Smith was on the beach Tuesday, when the four-seater aircraft was hoisted onto a trailer hitched to a pickup truck and towed away.

"I've got a lot of issues going on right now," Smith said. "I've got a plane that's all torn up. And I've got a young man that I killed."

The Lancair IV-P aircraft had lost its propeller, with oil smeared all over its windshield, making visibility difficult, authorities said. It was "basically gliding" when it instantly killed Jones, said Ed Allen, the coroner for Beaufort County on the South Carolina coast.

The plane took off from Orlando, Fla., at 4:45 p.m. Monday and was en route to Virginia when it started leaking oil at about 13,000 feet, said Joheida Fister, spokeswoman for Hilton Head Island fire and rescue.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said no cause had been determined. He said the plane would be inspected in Virginia and that investigators would interview the pilot and any witnesses.

"We don't know what occurred, especially since we haven't actually examined the aircraft," Holloway said. "We are still gathering facts."

A Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman referred inquiries to the NTSB.

Even with oil smeared on the windshield, Schiavo, the former NTSB official, said Smith should have been able to see through a small window on the side of the plane and possibly yell out to anyone below. Still, there may have been little time to try to avoid hitting the jogger, she said.

She said Smith made the right choice in landing on the beach rather than the water. The aircraft likely wasn't carrying flotation equipment.

"Planes like this sink like a rock," she said.

The airplane model that killed Jones has a turbine engine, can be built from a kit and can fly up to 370 mph, according to the Lancair Web site. The "fastbuild kit" for the IV-P model, which has a pressurized cabin, is listed as costing $129,000 and is "fully FAA approved," the site says.

The plane "has proven over the years to be very safe, reliable and extremely low in maintenance," the site says.

Joseph Bartels, chief executive officer of Lancair International, the Oregon-based company that produces the aircraft kits, said Tuesday that the kit produces a "light, fast and strong aircraft."

"This particular aircraft is one of about 1,000 sold either as kits or completed," Bartels said, though he added he had no specific knowledge about the airplane that had crashed. His firm does not produce the engine, which is purchased separately, he said.

Bartels, who had seen online news photos of the damaged plane, called the landing "miraculous" given the damage to it, but also expressed sorrow at the deadly outcome.

Jones' mother, who lives in Dunedin, Fla., said he was a wonderful husband to his wife, Jennifer. The couple also has a 5-year-old son.

Pauline Jones said she's going on "borrowed strength."

"It's been very difficult," she said. "I haven't been to bed since I heard. I haven't had any sleep."

Full story: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Beach-jogger-killed-by-plane-apf-910171011.html?x=0&.v=1

 

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I swear to god, you can't make this stuff up:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier this week that bypassing a direct vote on the Senate measure was an option because there are “a lot of people who don’t want to vote for it.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a2CFuScQAu7Y

 

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Global Warming as Religion and not Science

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-Blaise Pascal

It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large.

Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.

The activists now prefer to call it “climate change”. This gives them two advantages:

1. It allows them to seize as “evidence” the inevitable occurrences of unusually cold weather as well as warm ones.
2. The climate is always changing, so they must be right.​

Only the relatively elderly can remember the cynical haste with which the scaremongers dropped the “coming ice age” and embraced exactly the opposite prediction, but aimed at the same culprit – industry. This was in Britain, which was the cradle of the new belief and was a response to the derision resulting from the searing summer of 1976. The father of the new religion was Sir Crispin Tickell, and because he had the ear of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was engaged in a battle with the coal miners and the oil sheiks, it was introduced into international politics with the authority of the only major political leader holding a qualification in science. The introduction was timely yet ironic since, in the wake of the world’s political upheavals, a powerful new grouping of left-wing interests was coalescing around environmental issues. The result was a new form of godless religion. The global warming cult has the characteristics of religion and not science for the following reasons.

Faith and scepticism

Faith is a belief held without evidence. The scientific method, a loose collection of procedures of great variety, is based on precisely the opposite concept, as famously declared by Thomas Henry Huxley:

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.​

Huxley was one of a long tradition of British sceptical philosophers. From the Bacons, through the likes of Locke, Hume and Russell, to the magnificent climax of Popper’s statement of the principle of falsifiability, the scientific method was painfully established, only to be abandoned in a few short decades. It is one of the great ironies of modern history that the nation that was the cradle of the scientific method came to lead the process of its abandonment. The great difference, then, is that religion demands belief, while science requires disbelief. There is a great variety of faiths. Atheism is just as much a faith as theism. There is no evidence either way. There is no fundamental clash between faith and science – they do not intersect. The difficulties arise, however, when one pretends to be the other.

The Royal Society, as a major part of the flowering of the tradition, was founded on the basis of scepticism. Its motto “On the word of no one” was a stout affirmation. Now suddenly, following their successful coup, the Greens have changed this motto of centuries to one that manages to be both banal and sinister – “Respect the facts.” When people start talking about “the facts” it is time to start looking for the fictions. Real science does not talk about facts; it talks about observations, which might turn out to be inaccurate or even irrelevant.

The global warmers like to use the name of science, but they do not like its methods. They promote slogans such a “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled. They were not, however, always so wise. In 1900, for example, the great Lord Kelvin famously stated, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Within a few years classical physics was shattered by Einstein and his contemporaries. Since then, in science, the debate is never closed.

The world might (or might not) have warmed by a fraction of a degree. This might (or might not) be all (or in part) due to the activities of mankind. It all depends on the quality of observations and the validity of various hypotheses. Science is at ease with this situation. It accepts various theories, such as gravitation or evolution, as the least bad available and of the most practical use, but it does not believe. Religion is different.

Sin and absolution
It is in the nature of religion to be authoritarian and proscriptive. Essential to this is the concept of sin – a transgression in thought or deed of theological principles.

Original sin in the older religions derived from one of the founts of life on earth – sex. The new religion goes even further back to the very basis of all life – carbon. Perhaps the fundamental human fear is fear of life itself. The amazing propensity of carbon to form compounds of unlimited complexity made the existence of life possible, while its dioxide is the primary foodstuff, the very start of the food chain. Every item of nutriment you consume started out as atmospheric carbon dioxide. It is therefore the ideal candidate for original sin, since no one can escape dependence on it. This manna that gave us life is now regularly branded in media headlines as “pollution” and “toxic”: surely one of the most perverse dysphemisms in the history of language.

The corrective to sin in religion is absolution, and the power of most religions comes from their claim to have the monopoly on absolution. So it is with the new godless religion. Furthermore, it is in the nature of religion to create false markets. In the time of Chaucer the Pardoner sold papal indulgences, which freed the prosperous from the consequences of sin. Likewise, the new pardoners sell carbon offsets. As in so much of both ancient and modern society these activities divert effort from wealth creation and so act as a drag on the economy. They also grant to the rich a comfort that is not available to the poor – a sure road to success.

Proselytes and evangelists
Most religions seek to grow by means of proselytism. Science does not seek or need converts. It teaches those that are willing to learn, but it does not impose itself on those who are indifferent. Religions (at least those that are successful) have a different imperative. A growing cohort of believers reinforces the beliefs of existing adherents and participating in the quest for converts helps assuage the inevitable doubts they might harbour. Successful religions are structured to encompass this expansionary mechanism. Those who can recruit others to the cause are therefore held in high regard.

Demagogues and hypocrites
Demagoguery is also, therefore, a feature of religion. Some people have the capacity to hold the masses in their thrall. It is a mysterious art, as their skills of oratory do not often stand up to any sort of critical examination. They are idols of the moment, who often turn out to have feet of clay, as so frequently seems to happen with charismatic TV preachers.

One of the most notorious demagogues of the godless religion is Al Gore. He is certainly no great orator, but he makes up for it with chutzpah. His disregard for truth is exemplified by his characteristic and ubiquitous pose in front of a satellite photograph of hurricane Katrina. Even some of the most vehement climate “scientists” refrain from connecting that particular isolated and monstrously tragic event with global warming. Likewise his Old Testament style prophecies of further disasters, such as floods due to a rise in sea level, greatly exceed the more modest claims of the “professionals”. As in the overthrow of the cities of the plain and other biblical prophecies, Gore promises a rain of fire and brimstone on us, unless we change our ways.

Gore also displays all the characteristics of the classical religious hypocrite. He disregards his own proscriptions with abandonment and ostentation. By his own measure (carbon footprint) his sins are great; at least twenty times those of the average American. It is all right though, because he purchases absolution (carbon offsets) through his own company. As he is a private individual it is not known whether he profits directly, but at a minimum he does not pay out of his taxable income and, worst of all, he demonstrates that the rich are immune from any of the actual privations that attachment to the new religion visits upon its poorer adherents. This is also not unknown in traditional religions and has been a source of material for satirists throughout the centuries.

Infidels and apostates
Religions vary in their treatment of unbelievers, which ranges from disregard to slaughter. The new religion relies at present on verbal assault and character assassination, though there are those who would go further. They call the infidels “deniers” – a cheap and quite despicable verbal reference to the Holocaust. There is a sustained campaign to deny the deniers any sort of public platform for their views.

Apostates are universally even more reviled than infidels. They have turned their backs on the true faith, whichever that might happen to be. Partial apostates, or heretics, are even more loathed and through the ages have been subjected to the most appalling punishments and deaths. In the case of the “sceptical environmentalist”, Bjorn Lomborg, he is of the faith. In fact he is a serial believer; accepting, for example, that eating celery causes two percent of all cancers and, of course, that global warming is man made, but he rejects the sacrificing of humanity to the belief. This is unacceptable! What are a few million deaths from dirty water, mosquito bites and other hazards so long as people can be made to conform? So far he has only been assaulted with insults and custard pies. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, broke with the movement over its growing anti-human, anti-scientific tendencies and drift into extremism. The last straw for him was the campaign against chlorine, not only an essential component of human life but also the basis of one of the most dramatically life-saving hygienic interventions. He has, consequently, been subjected to a prolonged campaign of vilification, described as an eco-Judas, turncoat and traitor. Every minor commentator or blogger who manifests disbelief can expect to be the target of abuse from self-appointed protectors of the creed.

Sacrifice and ritual
It is part of human nature that we do not like to admit making a mistake, even to ourselves. So if, for example, we buy a magic device that by some mysterious means improves the fuel efficiency of our car, we drive a little more conservatively in order to prove that we have not been had. Religions exploit this weakness as a means creating and reinforcing commitment. If someone can be induced or coerced into making a sacrifice they then have a stake in the cause.

Windmills, for example, are the symbols of power, not physical power (of which they are derisorily short) but political and religious power. They are like the great domes of temples, the statues of Saddam or the big “M” arch of MacDonald’s. Windmills are ugly: they destroy the visual (and aural) landscape, but that is their purpose. They are part of the sacrifice. It would not be so bad if they were simply useless, but it is worse than that. Conventional generating systems of equivalent power have to operate for 80% of the time, while the wind is blowing too soft or too hard, and then be switched to warm standby when it is just right, an expensive and wasteful process. Windmills are there to remind us of our commitment, willing or not, to the cause, both in excessive taxation and loss of visual and aural amenity.

As in other forms of mental conditioning, continued reinforcement is a necessary part of the process and that is where ritual comes in. Ritual comprises tiny sacrifices infinitely repeated. Going round the house switching off standby lights performs the same function as the repetitive chanting of mantras. The fact that it is pointless is the whole point.

One of the most valuable ideas of modern engineering, lost in the noise, has been lost in the noise. In most applications a change of, say, one part in ten thousand is too small to be measured and therefore not worthy of concern. If standby in domestic devices ever were a problem, it is now a rapidly diminishing one. In the old days of thermionic devices (valves or tubes) it was necessary to keep cathodes heated to avoid a prolonged warming up period, but transistors and LCDs do not have cathodes and are therefore instantly available. Present standby powers are about five watts. In the temperate zone that is transferred from your central heating bill for half the year, though it is barely enough to keep your big toe warm. In fact, it would be relatively easy to make the standby power microwatts, just enough to power an optical sensor and decoder, though until now nobody thought such a pointless exercise necessary.

Prophecy and divination
In the real world attempts at prophecy always come to a bad end. Only in religious texts and the currently popular fantasy fiction do prophecies come true. H G Wells, in The shape of things to come, successfully predicted the mechanised War, as did Winston Churchill, but little else, and the film that Wells closely supervised now provides rather comic entertainment (but wonderful music). Even those of us closely involved in electronics did not foresee that a development of the ancient art of writing on stone, lithography, would result in millions of transistors being available on one chip, changing the world forever, including granting new and sinister means of control to those in authority.

Likewise, divination was greatly regarded in all cultures, ancient and modern. Stars were observed, chickens and other animals slaughtered, so that their steaming entrails could be examined to predict the future, cards were shuffled and crystal balls peered into. Comparatively recently the leader of the most powerful nation on earth relied on the advice of astrologers.

Now divination has returned with, for example, the examination of the entrails of ancient trees. Though the methods used are invalid (they wrongly assume linearity) and have been comprehensively shown to be irreproducible and misleading, the results have been paraded before the world in defence of draconian sacrificial policies.

The main form of modern divination, however, is computer models. Forty odd years ago an instruction passed round the Faculty of Engineering of the University of London that no PhDs were to be awarded on the basis of computer models unsupported by measurement. As T S Eliot asked in Choruses from The Rock

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?​

Now, huge and generously funded university and government departments do nothing but develop computer models, involving assumptions about physical interactions that are still not understood by science. Their dubious (to say the least) results are used by the new international priesthood to frighten the people into conformity.

Puritans and killjoys
No one has bettered Mencken’s definition of Puritanism – the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. It is an unfortunate characteristic of many varieties of religion that this characteristic is to the fore and Global Warming is far from being an exception. Nothing the proponents offer involves an improvement or even maintenance of human contentment, quite the opposite in fact. You might think that any philosophy of life would involve swings and roundabouts, good and bad, but think again. Virtually everything you enjoy is now sinful – holidays, driving your car, having a comfortable temperature in your home, being free from the stink of rotting garbage, and on and on.

As with the flagellants of old, for some people a feeling of self-righteousness not only transcends all discomforts, but derives from them. The rest of us have to be coerced into conformity.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that there are people who get their kicks out of pushing other people around. The existence of little pleasures of life, such as savouring a fine wine or cigar (and even more so the proletarian equivalents) is intolerable to them. They will exploit any means – the distortion of science, the suborning of weak politicians, the repetition of mendacious propaganda – to achieve the elimination of the hated practices. The eleventh commandment for the killjoys is “Thou shalt not have fun”, and global warming provides a delightful playground for them.

Censorship and angles
Freedom of speech and publication is at the very heart of science. Even the most foolish of hypotheses is allowed to be offered for examination. In much of religion the opposite is true; challenging the established dogma is heresy, for which the punishment has ranged from ostracism to horrific torture and death. One of the greatest ironies produced by the successful policy of entryism by the eco-theologians is that it is none other than the Royal Society that has been orchestrating the attempt to censor any deviation from establishment beliefs. Authoritarian politicians, such as Congressman Brad Miller, would give such suppression the force of law.

It is a curious repetition of history that those who advance the hypothesis that the sun is the controlling element in changes of climate are vilified, just as Galileo was, for supporting the Copernican heliocentric description of the solar system. Yet the sun is clearly the driver for climate – if it stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would drop to near absolute zero. In the establishment dogma the sun is barely mentioned, while the puny efforts of mankind are gratuitously magnified out of proportion. In a scientific approach to climate, a full understanding of the behaviour of that solitary driver would be the first prerequisite, but this is waived in the interests of piety; so leading solar researchers have been deprived of funding.

One of the most exploited ways of angling the news is by “ratchet reporting”. News of unusual warm weather, for example, is given copious coverage, while cold weather is studiously ignored. Thus the spring of 2007 was disastrously cold in parts of North America, with ice-bound ships and snowed-off baseball, but this was kept secret from the British, whose wonderful summery April was presented as though it were bad news (and that in the land of rheumatism and bronchitis!). The fact that Britain had no spring at all in 2006 was conveniently forgotten, except as a basis of comparison to establish that 2007 was substantially warmer.

That the media know that they are peddling untruths is demonstrated by these tricks they get up to. If they were confident of the truth of their case there would be no need to fake the coverage. They have been frequently caught out faking their numbers and graphs, but only a few internet surfers know about it. If you think you have a good case, you can afford to present both sides, but they don’t. The great majority of the population have no idea that there is an alternative view. That is not science, it is religion.

Control and taxation
Religion has always played an important part in the imposition of authority. For many centuries it took the form of the “Divine Right of Kings” or the “Mandate of Heaven”. Once you get the people to believe, you can get away with almost any imposition. The alliance between the shaman and the legislator has long been the very foundation of authoritarianism. Even when the dogma is a godless one, such as Marxism, it is imposed with religious fervour, for that is the way to induce conformity.

People now accept laws that restrict their liberty and standard of living, which would once have provoked riots, because they are cloaked in a quasi-religious formula of environmentalism. So-called environmental burdens, for example, now greatly outweigh the incremental effect of the poll tax that met with such violent opposition in England, yet are now meekly accepted, as is the parasitic presence of various forms of snooper, who even invade people’s dustbins.

Contradictions and irrationality
Traditional religions not only tolerated contradiction and irrationality, they embrace them as part of the mystique. Words and phrases are repeated ad nauseam and in strange contexts, until they lose all meaning and become self-preserving mantras.

Contradictions and irrationality also abound in the modern theocratic world. The EU, for example, gratuitously destroys a tiny industry making traditional barometers, on the grounds of an irrational fear of mercury, then imposes the use of fluorescent light bulbs that distribute that same dreaded substance in huge quantities across the continent, all on the basis of the threat of global warming.

People who have never heard of Wien or Planck confidently assert that it is “obvious” that man-made CO2 will cause runaway warming of the planet, when it is not at all obvious to many who are familiar with the works of those gentlemen. It is obvious in the sense that it is obvious that believers will have everlasting life or that a senseless act of self-immolation will earn the eternal attentions of 72 virgins in Paradise. The capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast has been restored from fantasy to accepted normality.

Wealth and power
Some organisms develop the ingredients to survive and multiply, so it is with business and religions. It is characteristic of businesses that they dispose of the entrepreneurs who create them and are taken over by a different breed of corporate manager: so it is with religions. The brutally suppressed troglodytes who were the early Christians of Rome were a different breed from the cardinals, bishops and abbots who bestrode mediaeval Europe and lived the opulent life. There were also, of course, the humble and saintly mendicant friars. The equivalents of all these varieties exist within the new movement.

Money is the basis of the new religion. It poured in from various foundations (the so-called ketchup money) and naïve donors. The activists found that they had to maintain and innovate their product (anxiety) to keep the income rising, so they had to keep increasing the imaginary threats both in intensity and number. With money came power. In Britain, the political parties are all effectively bankrupt, so the temptation to hang onto the coattails of a movement with so much momentum was irresistible. Even the Conservative Party submitted to a coup that was totally alien to everything it had ever believed in.

The other route to power was the Trotskyite method of entryism. Once one adherent to the cause obtained a position of authority he could recruit others of a like mind. One by one the bastions of the media, and even science itself, fell to the intruders. A new breed of environmental editors achieved a monopoly of reporting in those areas that coincided with their beliefs. With powerful media organisations behind them they then also had the protection of the law to intimidate their adversaries. Opposition to the movement was largely confined to the internet and a few determined individuals in remote institutions, such as the emasculated rump of the British House of Lords.

With power comes patronage. At its best this has produced great architecture and art. At its worst it produces vast acres of ugly, worse than useless windmills and rigidly controlled research. What passed as scientific research a quarter of a century ago now barely exists. To get funding, your project has to conform to one of the mantra descriptions, such as “sustainable development”. Doubters are afraid to speak out. Their institutions are dependent on millions in grants at the disposal of green officials to obtain “appropriate” results relevant to global warming and related scares. When your institution is involved in a fight for survival, you do not rock the boat.

The lavishness of the tax-funded, aviation-fuelled, international junkets enjoyed by the global warming priesthood, contrasted with the frugal gatherings of their relatively impotent scientific opponents, is the very stuff of mediaeval satire. Just as Rabelais had to go into hiding from the anger of the priesthood of his time, so critics of the new religion are largely confined to the interstices of the internet. As ever, wealth and power determine the ability to propagate one’s views. It might be some small compensation for members of the resistance, cowering in the electronic maquis, that history remembers the name of Rabelais, while his persecutors are forgotten.

Confession and salvation
One of the last bastions of science to fall was the British Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Science and Manufacture. It has a Chief Executive who was formerly one of the most powerful green civil servants. It now offers its fellows the opportunity to make public confession of their sins in the form of their “carbon footprint”. They even have a programme of “Carbon Control” directed at seven to fourteen year olds, urging them to take control of their carbon emissions. Young children now have nightmares about the burning planet, just as some of us once had nightmares about burning in hell unless we believed, and then lay awake at night wondering whether we believed or not, or what “believe” actually means. The ruthless exploitation of the receptivity of the young, and their relentless indoctrination, is one of the less pleasant characteristics of much of religion. As the Jesuits say “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

Hell-fire is the stick and salvation is the carrot. Perhaps the best you can say about the new religion is that the object of salvation is “the planet” and not just oneself. It is also the worst you can say; for it is essentially inhuman; which is what inflames heretics like Lomborg. Science, of course is also inhuman. Science though, unlike religion, does not seek to dictate policy. It can provide information for policy-makers, such as “If you do this, millions of Africans are likely to die” but it does not say “You must, or must not, do this.” Religion, depending upon its particular variety, will say “They must be saved” or, while not so indelicate as to put it into words, “Let them die.” One of the most offensive manifestations of the new religion occurred when hundreds of the priesthood went on one of their lavish junkets in Africa, where all around them was suffering and death.

Envoi
The human spirit is sick. It soared during the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It flowered during the nineteenth. It beat off the tyrants of the twentieth century. Now, at an alarming rate, it is surrendering its freedoms to a concocted religion based on fraudulent science. Of course, it is not only science that has suffered in the overwhelming cultural downturn. The great artistic tradition has given way to displays of dead animals and soiled beds. In much of what passes for literature and drama, the expletives remain while the loftier aspirations of humanity are deleted. Entertainment is debased by displays of banality, cruelty and vacuous, groundless celebrity. It was science, however, that gave us lives of a length, comfort and healthiness that were unthought-of, even within human memory; a gift that is cold-bloodedly, but covertly, being denied to millions in poorer parts of the world. Extremists of the new religion regard humanity as an inconvenience or a pestilence that can be disposed of (not including themselves, of course).

Above all, science represented the triumph of humanity over the primitive superstitions that haunted our ancestors, a creation of pure reason, a monument to that evolutionary (or, if you prefer, God-given) miracle of the human brain. It is too valuable just to be tossed away like a used tissue. But who will speak for science when the barbarian is already inside the gate?

John Brignell

June 2007

I couldn't put it better myself— so I won't make an attempt.



http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm

 

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These people don't understand economics or mathematics. All they want is somebody else to pay. People like that are never willing to accept the consequences of their behavior and their choices; their entire concept of civilization is that they're entitled to be supported by other people. It is, on the whole, impossible to talk sense to those who do not comprehend mathematics or economics.


That's all this brouhaha is: one more effort to slough off an expense that 85% of the rest of us bear.


It's simply another confirmation that the public can be bamboozled into belief in the existence of free lunches and perpetual motion machines.


They will, eventually, receive a lesson in the immutability of the law of supply and demand. Most of them are not smart enough to understand it— believing in their naive and gullible fashion that utopian fantasies can be declared into existence.


Jesus H. Christ. Half the problem is that the dimbulbs have no understanding what insurance is.


The dolts who believe in perpetual motion machines, Santa Claus, free lunches and the tooth fairy also believe insurance is like manna from heaven. They ( somehow ) have come to expect that they are going to get more OUT of insurance than they put IN. I've got news— in the aggregate, that's an impossibility.


Get this through your thick skulls: INSURANCE IS A FORM OF SAVINGS.


That, of course, is anathema to innumerates possessing no self-discipline, no self-control and no concept of deferred gratification.


As usual, they haven't got a fucking clue what the hell they're talking about. They never do. They always fall for scams. If it isn't a Nigerian email, it's some other fantastic scheme like a mortgage with no payments or some such similar impossibility. It's hilarious. They're a bunch of uneducated, innumerate suckers who always fall in line behind the silver-tongued Pied Pipers who promise something for nothing. They're as predictable as night and day— they do it over and over and over again. They believe in perpetual motion, Santa Claus, miracle cures and the tooth fairy— mainly because they have absolutely no idea how the world works, they have no self-control and no self-discipline. Deferred gratification is an alien concept.

Both sides of the debate are adamant that either this is a huge cure all or a path to economic disaster. It clearly is historic but it will be years before we can tell whether it is going to be good historic or bad historic. Clearly, additional access to insurance is something many have sought for years but the obvious unanswered keys are (a) at what cost and (b) whether we are headed in the direction of a single payer system. There is a huge increase in Medicaid imbedded in the package and it isn’t clear whether the increased costs are adequately funded. If they are not, which seems probable, the key is how the gap will be closed. To date, the Medicaid gaps have been closed by states and the Federal government simply paying below market rates for goods and services. However, at some point, industry participants will push back and refuse to provide Medicaid coverage. Medicare faces similar predicaments. Indeed, we are already at the point where some refuse to provide Medicaid or Medicare services. To date those refusing to provide care are relatively few in number. Time will tell how and when that might change. Clearly, there is a limit, yet undefined, how much cost can be shifted from government programs like Medicare and Medicaid to the private sector. That shifting is responsible in large part for the large increase in private insurance premiums we are seeing today. The bills passed last night are more likely to accelerate that shift than slow them down. Key will be the size of revenue sources, mostly taxes on industry and high income individuals plus added insurance premiums paid by the young and healthy now required to have insurance coverage. Everyone has an opinion but it will be at least another half decade before we have most of the answers.

The psychological environment today is a lot more hostile today than when Medicare passed more than 40 years ago. The legislation creates an infrastructure that could have teeth but it also lacks firm requirements that guarantee any effective cost cutting. Yet virtually everyone agrees that unless costs can be contained the reform package is headed down a very potholed path. Insuring more people, insuring that the most ill are covered, and raising taxes to pay for the added costs is a recipe for disaster.

I'm glad I won't be around to see the train wreck; it's not going to be a pretty sight and it won't be fun to be here when it happens.


These are the same people who bankrupted Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, General Motors, Chrysler, Texas International, Delta Airlines, International Harvester, Bethlehem Steel and Penn Central. They never learn.

 

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Frontline ( PBS )
April, 2007
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/video/share.html?s=frol02n48eq72

Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in June 1988.

[Senator] TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.

DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?

[Senator] TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.

 

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I was curious to see the history of the state sales tax. I wanted to know when it was first imposed, what the historic rates were and whether the rate had ever been reduced.

What I unfortunately discovered is that in its 63-year history, the sales tax rate has TRIPLED.

Here is the entire sorry history of the state's taxes. There haven't been many reductions or eliminations.





1852
Lotteries become a major revenue source.
Clerks of Circuit Court collected license fees for billiard
tables, wood hucksters, marriages and oyster houses.

1860
Lotteries discontinued.

1880
Oysters become a fruitful revenue source.

1914
State Tax Commission established.

1922
Motor fuel tax enacted - 1 cent per gallon.

1924
Motor fuel tax increased to 2 cents per gallon.

1933
Alcoholic beverage tax enacted on distilled spirits up to
100 percent proof; tax rate set at $1.10 per gallon.
Motor vehicle titling tax of 1 percent enacted.

1936
Unemployment insurance tax enacted, with a rate of
2.7 percent of covered wages.

1937
Individual income tax of 5 percent enacted.
Corporation income tax of 0.5 percent enacted.
Recordation tax of 0.1 percent enacted.

1947
Sales and use tax of 2 percent enacted.
Motor fuel tax rate increased to 5 cents per gallon.

1953
Franchise tax on savings and loan institutions enacted.

1955
Employer withholding of income tax from wages began.
Corporation income tax raised to 5 percent.

1958
Income tax rate decreased to 3 percent.
Cigarette tax enacted at a rate of 3 cents per pack.

1959
Sales and use tax increased to 3 percent.

1968
Corporation income tax raised to 7 percent.
Sales and use tax increased to 4 percent.
Income tax changed to graduated tax with a 5 percent
maximum rate.
Local income tax created; calculated at 20 - 50 percent of
state tax.

1970
Transfer tax imposed on title conveyance to real property.

1973
Lottery re-enacted.
Cigarette tax increased to 10 cents per pack.

1977
Sales and use tax increased to 5 percent.
Motor vehicle titling tax increased to 5 percent.

1981
Agricultural land transfer tax created.
Motor fuel tax increased to 11 cents per gallon.
Cigarette tax increased to 13 cents per pack.

1984
Motor fuel tax increased to 13.5 cents per gallon.

1987
Motor fuel tax increased to 18.5 cents per gallon.

1992
Cigarette tax increased to 36 cents per pack.
Motor fuel tax on gasoline increased to 23.5 cents per gallon.

1998
Income tax rate reduced to 4.875 percent.

1999
Cigarette tax increased to 66 cents per pack.
Income tax reduced to maximum rate of 4.85 percent.
Local income tax calculated at 1 - 3 percent of taxable income.

2000
Local inheritance tax for spouses and lineal descendants repealed.
Franchise taxes on savings and loan, financial institutions
eliminated.

2001
Income tax rate reduced to maximum rate of 4.80 percent.

2002
Cigarette tax increased to $1.00 per pack.
Income tax rate reduced to maximum rate of 4.75 percent.

2004
Bay restoration fee enacted to help upgrade wastewater
treatment facilities.
Nonresidents who derive income from Maryland source are
subject to a special 1.25 percent nonresident income tax rate, in
addition to the regular 4.75 percent tax rate.

2006
Estate tax limited to 16 percent of the amount that the estate value
exceeds $1 million.

2007
State income tax rate increased to a maximum of 5.5 percent.
Corporation income tax rate increased to 8.25 percent.
Sales and use tax rate increased to 6 percent.
Cigarette tax increased to $2.00 per pack.
New state admissions and amusement tax of 20 percent is levied on
electronic bingo and electronic tip jars.

2008
State income tax rate amended to start at 2 percent on the first
$1,000 of taxable income and increase up to a maximum of
6.5 percent on incomes exceeding $1 million.
Personal exemption amount increased from $2,400 to $3,200 but is
subject to a partial phaseout depending on the taxpayer’s adjusted
gross income.

2009
State admissions and amusement tax levied on electronic bingo and
electronic tip jars increased from 20 cents to 30 cents.

 

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Monterey Bay Aquarium intake water pH ( 1995- )

Multiple plots of the pH spot check data vs. time, for the period 1995 – present as measured in the incoming water to the Monterey Bay Aquarium drawn from a ~50ft depth. Each of the following pages contains a 10-year period of the data, with the monthly mean ± standard error of the spot checks being presented. The pH was analyzed using the method outlined with this project. Both short-term seasonal changes and longer-term events, such as El Nino, are present in the data.


http://sanctuarymonitoring.org/regional_docs/monitoring_projects/100240_167.pdf

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/pHvCO2.png

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

 

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August 27, 2009
Source: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=59106&ct=162


A new 2,000-year-long reconstruction of sea surface temperatures (SST) from the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP) suggests that temperatures in the region may have been as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as they are today.

The IPWP is the largest body of warm water in the world, and, as a result, it is the largest source of heat and moisture to the global atmosphere, and an important component of the planet’s climate. Climate models suggest that global mean temperatures are particularly sensitive to sea surface temperatures in the IPWP. Understanding the past history of the region is of great importance for placing current warming trends in a global context.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

In a joint project with the Indonesian Ministry of Science and Technology (BPPT), the study’s authors, Delia Oppo, a paleo–oceanographer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and her colleagues Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers State University and Braddock K. Linsley of the University at Albany-State University of New York, collected sediment cores along the continental margin of the Indonesian Seas and used chemical analyses to estimate water past temperatures and date the sediment. The cruise included 13 US and 14 Indonesian scientists.

“This is the first record from the region that has really modern sediments and a record of the last two millennia, allowing us to place recent trends in a larger framework,” notes Oppo.

Global temperature records are predominantly reconstructed from tree rings and ice cores. Very little ocean data are used to generate temperature reconstructions, and very little data from the tropics. “As palaeoclimatologists, we work to generate information from multiple sources to improve confidence in the global temperature reconstructions, and our study contributes to scientists’ efforts towards that goal,” adds Oppo.

Temperature reconstructions suggest that the Northern Hemisphere may have been slightly cooler (by about 0.5 degrees Celsius) during the 'Medieval Warm Period' (~AD 800-1300) than during the late-20th century. However, these temperature reconstructions are based on, in large part, data compiled from high latitude or high altitude terrestrial proxy records, such as tree rings and ice cores, from the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Little pre-historical temperature data from tropical regions like the IPWP has been incorporated into these analyses, and the global extent of warm temperatures during this interval is unclear. As a result, conclusions regarding past global temperatures still have some uncertainties.

Oppo comments, “Although there are significant uncertainties with our own reconstruction, our work raises the idea that perhaps even the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions need to be looked at more closely.”

Comparisons

The marine-based IPWP temperature reconstruction is in many ways similar to land temperature reconstructions from the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Major trends observed in NH temperature reconstructions, including the cooling during the Little Ice Age (~1500-1850 AD) and the marked warming during the late twentieth century, are also observed in the IPWP.

“The more interesting and potentially controversial result is that our data indicate surface water temperatures during a part of the Medieval Warm Period that are similar to today’s,” says Oppo. NH temperature reconstructions also suggest that temperatures warmed during this time period between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1250, but they were not as warm as modern temperatures. Oppo emphasizes, “Our results for this time period are really in stark contrast to the Northern Hemisphere reconstructions.”

Reconstructing Historical Temperatures

Records of water temperature from instruments like thermometers are only available back to the 1850s. In order to reconstruct temperatures over the last 2,000 years, Oppo and her colleagues used a proxy for temperature collected from the skeletons of marine plankton in sediments in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The ratio of magnesium to calcium in the hard outer shells of the planktonic foraminifera Globigerinoides ruber varies depending on the surface temperature of the water in which it grows. When the phytoplankton dies, it falls to the bottom of the ocean and accumulates in sediments, recording the sea surface temperature in which it lived.

“Marine sediments accumulate slowly in general -- approximately 3 cm/yr -- which makes it hard to overlap sediment record with instrumental record and compare that record to modern temperature records," says Oppo. "That’s what is different about this study. The sediment accumulates fast enough in this region to give us enough material to sample and date to modern times.”

The team generated a composite 2000-year record by combining published data from a piston core in the area with the data they collected using a gravity corer and a multi-corer. Tubes on the bottom of the multi-corer collected the most recently deposited sediment, therefore enabling the comparison of sea surface temperature information recorded in the plankton shells to direct measurements from thermometers.

Oppo cautions that the reconstruction contains some uncertainties. Information from three different cores was compiled in order to reconstruct a 2,000-year-long record. In addition sediment data have an inherent uncertainty associated with accurately dating samples. The SST variations they have reconstructed are very small, near the limit of the Mg/Ca dating method. Even in light of these issues, the results from the reconstruction are of fundamental importance to the scientific community.

More Questions to Answer

The overall similarity in trend between the Northern Hemisphere and the IPWP reconstructions suggests that that Indonesian SST is well correlated to global SST and air temperature. On the other hand, the finding that IPWP SSTs seem to have been approximately the same as today in the past, at a time when average Northern Hemisphere temperature appear to have been cooler than today, suggests changes in the coupling between IPWP and Northern Hemisphere or global temperatures have occurred in the past, for reasons that are not yet understood. “This work points in the direction of questions that we have to ask,” Oppo says. “This is only the first word, not the last word.”

The US National Science Foundation and the WHOI Ocean and Climate Change Institute provided funding for this work.



__________________
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment.

Last updated: September 2, 2009

 

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html


A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
By Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

Life has become "awful" for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming.


Those days are now gone.

Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the "Climategate" affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.

His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. "We know where you live," his detractors taunt.

Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.

'100 Percent Confident'

One of the conclusions of his famous statistical analysis of the world's climate is that the average temperature on Earth rose by 0.166 degrees Celsius per decade between 1975 and 1998. This, according to Jones, was the clear result of his research and that of many other scientists.

"I am 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed," Jones says imploringly. "I did not manipulate or fabricate any data."

His problem is that the public doesn't trust him anymore. Since unknown hackers secretly copied 1,073 private emails between members of his research team and published them on the Internet, his credibility has been destroyed -- and so has that of an entire profession that had based much of its work on his research until now.

Those who have always viewed global warming as a global conspiracy now feel a sense of satisfaction. The so-called climate skeptics feel vindicated, because Jones, in his written correspondence with colleagues, all of them leading members of the climate research community, does not come across as an objective scientist, but rather as an activist or missionary who views "his" data as his personal shrine and is intent on protecting it from the critical eyes of his detractors.

An Entire Branch of Science in Crisis

The Climategate affair is grist for the mills of skeptics, who have gained growing support for their cause, particularly in English-speaking countries. What began with hacked emails in the United Kingdom has mushroomed into a crisis affecting an entire scientific discipline. At its center is an elite and highly influential scientific group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Working on behalf of the United Nations, the scientists organized under IPCC's umbrella -- including Phil Jones -- regularly prepare prognoses on the Earth's looming greenhouse climate. Without the IPCC reports, governments would not be embroiled in such passionate debate about phasing out the age of oil and coal.

In late 2007, the IPCC was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with former US Vice President Al Gore. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, as the personification of the world's conscience, accepted the award on behalf of his organization. "Climate change poses novel risks," Pachauri told his audience, saying that the decision to award the prize to the IPCC was "a clarion call for the protection of the earth as it faces the widespread impacts of climate change." He also warned of the risk of not taking action: "Every year of delay implies a commitment to greater climate change in the future."

Sloppy Work

Since then, the IPCC has experienced a dramatic fall from grace. Less than three years after this triumph, more and more mistakes, evidence of sloppy work and exaggerations in the current IPCC report are appearing. They include Jones' disputed temperature curve, the prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 -- which was the result of a simple transposition of numbers -- and the supposed increase in natural disasters, for which no source was given.

In mid-March, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon slammed on the brakes and appointed a watchdog for the IPCC. The InterAcademy Council, a coalition of 15 national academies of science, will review the work of the IPCC by this fall.

There is already a consensus today that deep-seated reforms are needed at the IPCC. The selection of its authors and reviewers was not sufficiently nonpartisan, there was not enough communication among the working groups, and there were no mechanisms on how to handle errors.

Offering the Skeptics an 'Unprotected Flank'

Also at issue is the position of IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who is praised as a "leading global thinker" in his official biography. A railroad engineer by trade, Pachauri wrote an erotic novel and recommended that people reduce their meat consumption while traveling around the world to save the climate. He has cut a miserable figure during the current crisis. The climate guru summarily dismissed justified objections to the IPCC report as "voodoo science."

Germany's Leibniz Association, an umbrella group which includes several climate research institutions as its members, is the first professional organization to call for Pachauri's resignation. Leibniz President Ernst Rietschel believes that climate research is now "in a difficult situation" because the skeptics have been "offered an unprotected flank." Rietschel told SPIEGEL: "Rajendra Pachauri should take the responsibility for this and should resign."

On balance, the entire profession has been seriously harmed by the scandal. "We are currently suffering a massive erosion of trust," concludes German climatologist Hans von Storch. "Climate research has been corrupted by politicization, just as nuclear physics was in the pre-Chernobyl days, when we were led to believe that nuclear power plants were completely safe."


Part 2: Politically Charged Science

No other branch of science is as politically charged. A religious war is raging between alarmists and skeptics, and it threatens to consume levelheaded climatologists. But it is a critical conflict, because it revolves around something as massive as the total restructuring of industrial society, a venture that will cost trillions of euros. Powerful economic interests and unshakeable fundamental beliefs come into play.

The credibility crisis in climatology comes at an extremely unfavorable time. Since the failed December 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, environment policy has been in a state of shock. US President Barack Obama, for example, has put his initiative for new climate legislation on hold. And last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy reversed his plans to introduce a climate tax, saying: "We will not impose any constraints on our industry yet."

On the other hand, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, an island nation threatened with extinction as a result of rising sea levels, accuses the Americans of engaging in intrigue to make climatology seem ridiculous. During a recent speech in Berlin, Nasheed characterized efforts to discredit climate research as "a diabolical plan."

Unwilling to Pay

Meanwhile, there are growing concerns in Berlin that German citizens could become less willing to pay for costly efforts to protect the climate. A poll conducted on behalf of SPIEGEL already signals a dramatic shift in public opinion and suggests that Germans are losing their fear of climate change. The strong majority of 58 percent who said they feared global warming about three years ago has declined to a minority of 42 percent.

German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is urging the IPCC to deal with its own errors more proactively. "The IPCC should openly admit its mistakes and correct them," he told SPIEGEL. "It is imperative that trust in the work of the IPCC be restored as quickly as possible."

There are also growing concerns at Germany's Ministry of Education and Research, which is spending €250 million ($338 million) to support climate science this year. Research Minister Annette Schavan has already summoned German IPCC scientists to attend a "meeting to clarify the situation and improve quality assurance." Officials at the ministry are horrified over how unprofessionally the IPCC is organized. "The IPCC's results must be above suspicion, because their impact can cost trillions and have serious political consequences," says Wilfried Kraus, a senior ministry official.

Scientists Who Want to be Politicians

Reinhard Hüttl, head of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam near Berlin and the president of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, believes that basic values are now under threat. "Scientists should never be as wedded to their theories that they are no longer capable of refuting them in the light of new findings," he says. Scientific research, Hüttl adds, is all about results, not beliefs. Unfortunately, he says, there are more and more scientists who want to be politicians.

"If the revelations about the affair in England turn out to be true, it will be a catastrophe for climatology as a whole," says Hüttl. "We can only monitor ourselves, and if we fail in that endeavor, who can be expected to believe us anymore?"

The British climate research center the Met Office has decided that the only way to regain lost trust is to make all climate data available online immediately, in a system that is accessible to anyone, offers maximum transparency and includes critical assessments on how reliable each piece of information is. The Met Office estimates that this major international project will take at least three years.

Despite the controversy, most climatologists agree that in the end the general view of climate change will not have changed significantly. Almost all share the basic conviction that we are headed for warmer times.

Open Questions

Scientists fear that without an open, honest process, they will no longer find a sympathetic ear. This process could mean that much of what has long been considered established knowledge will come under review once again, specifically, five elementary questions on the future of the climate:


■By how many degrees has the Earth's temperature already increased, and how much further will temperatures rise?
■How high will sea levels rise in a greenhouse climate?
■Can we expect to see storms of unprecedented strength in the future?
■Which parts of the world will experience more droughts, and where will there be more flooding?
■Will the situation on the planet truly spin out of control if the average global temperature increases by more than two degrees Celsius?

Anyone who speaks with leading climatologists today will discover how many questions remain open. The media, politicians and even scientists often talk about changes to the weather with a certainty that does not in fact exist.


Part 3: A Climate Rebel Takes on the Establishment

One man notes with particular satisfaction how Phil Jones and his colleagues are being forced to confess to one mistake after another. Steve McIntyre lives in a small brick house near downtown Toronto. It is a Sunday afternoon and he is sitting at his well-worn desk, illuminated only by a small energy-saving bulb on the ceiling.

This man, with his thinning gray hair, is an unlikely adversary for climatologists, and yet he is largely responsible for the current tumult in their field. "This is the computer I used to begin doing the recalculations," he says, holding a six-year-old Acer laptop with a 40-gigabyte hard drive. "My wife finally gave me a new one for Christmas."

The laptop marks a sharp contrast to the supercomputers at the disposal of Phil Jones and the other prophets of global warming, whose computers fill entire floors. Instead of gigabytes, they deal in petabytes. How is possible that this Canadian was able to bring such a self-confident group of scientists to their knees?

It all began when his three children went off to college and moved out of his house, which is filled with Asian antiques. "Things weren't going so well in the markets at the time," says McIntyre, "so I took six months to examine how climatologists arrive at their curves."

Hitting Pay Dirt

McIntyre normally works in the investment field, specializing in major mining projects. He has always been good at math. "I won mathematics prizes in school," says McIntyre. But after finishing his studies, which included a spell at the UK's elite Oxford University, he left the academic world for a career in high finance.

His late return would shake the academic world to its core. One day, McIntyre came across a curve that seemed all too familiar to him. It was the famous hockey stick curve (see graphic), with which US climatologist Michael Mann sought to prove that, during the last millennium, temperatures have never increased as sharply as they are rising today.

But McIntyre was suspicious. "In financial circles, we talk about a hockey stick curve when some investor presents you with a nice, steep curve in the hope of palming something off on you."

The stubborn Canadian pestered one scientist after another to provide him with raw data -- until he hit pay dirt and discovered that the hockey stick curve was, in his opinion at least, a sham.

Too Few Trees

The climate historians working with Michael Mann used tree rings as the primary source of their data. The problem with this approach is that large numbers of trees from suitable regions are required if conclusions about past temperatures based on tree growth are to be drawn. "Unfortunately, if we go back more than 500 years, we don't have many reliable trees for our analyses," explains Jan Esper of the University of Mainz in western Germany.

For example, there are many indications that in medieval times, between 900 and 1,300 A.D., when the Vikings raised livestock in Greenland and grape vines were cultivated in Scotland, it was in fact warmer than it is today. This is precisely what Mann denied, with a certainty that irritated even his allies.

McIntyre put the Mann curve to the arithmetic test. He accuses Mann of having filtered out the hockey stick graph more or less arbitrarily from the fluctuation noise of his tree-ring data. To prove his contention, McIntyre programmed his computer using Mann's methodology and entered completely random data into the program. The results, says McIntyre, "was a hockey stick curve."

Then the Canadian rebel turned his attention to the far more important temperature curves of the recent past, those of Phil Jones and of his comrade-in-arms at NASA, James Hansen. All things considered, the blunders he discovered at first were not particularly significant, but they were all the more embarrassing. For instance, scientists had long claimed that 1998 was the warmest year in the United States since temperatures were first recorded -- until McIntyre discovered that it was even warmer in 1934.

'Playground Bully'

McIntyre's findings did not make him very popular. In the hacked Climategate emails, he is referred to as a "bozo," a "moron" and a "playground bully." But with their self-aggrandizement, the climatologists made him into a legend on the Internet. A million people a month visit his blog, climateaudit.org. They include climate skeptics and the usual conspiracy theorists, but also, more recently, many academics who are able to do the math themselves.

McIntyre asserts that he does believe in climate change. "I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water," he says, "but when I find mistakes, I want them to be corrected."

He repeatedly bombarded Jones with emails in which he drew his attention to freedom of information laws. This tenacity would prove to be disastrous for Jones.

McIntyre doggedly asked for access to the raw data. Jones was just as dogged in denying his requests, constantly coming up with new, specious reasons for his rejections. Unfortunately for Jones, however, McIntyre's supporters eventually included people who know how to secretly hack into computers and steal data.

Their target was well selected. Jones was like a spider in its web. Almost every internal debate among the climate popes passed through his computer, leaving behind a digital trail.


Part 4: The Smoking Gun of Climatology

Most of all, however, Jones controlled the "smoking gun" of climatology: the Earth's temperature curve. The temperature records dating back to the beginning of industrialization are intended to prove that the average global temperature has already increased by almost one degree Celsius since 1850.

There are various pieces of indirect evidence that support the theory of global warming. Glaciers are receding, sea levels are rising and sea ice in the Arctic regions is disappearing. But these signs are nothing compared with the readings taken at weather stations.

The problem is that the quality of the raw data derived from weather services around the world differs considerably. At a number of weather stations, temperatures rose because houses and factories had been built around them. Elsewhere, stations were moved and, as a result, suddenly produced different readings. In all of these cases, Jones had to use statistical methods to correct the errors in the temperature readings, using an approach called "homogenization."

Did Jones proceed correctly while homogenizing the data? Most climatologists still believe Jones' contention that he did not intentionally manipulate the data. However, that belief will have to remain rooted in good faith. Under the pressure of McIntyre's attacks, Jones had to admit something incredible: He had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve.

'One of the Biggest Sins'

For Peter Webster, a meteorologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, this course of events is "one of the biggest sins" a scientist can commit. "It's as if a chef was no longer able to cook his dishes because he lost the recipes."

While amateur climatologist McIntyre spent years begging in vain for the raw data, Webster eventually managed to convince Jones to send them to him. He is the only scientist to date who has been given access to the data. "To be honest, I'm shocked by the sloppy documentation," Webster told SPIEGEL.

Unnoticed by the public, Webster has spent several months searching for inconsistencies in the Jones curve. For example, it has been known for some time that there are noticeable jumps in ocean temperature readings. The reason for the inconsistencies is that, beginning in the 1940s, water temperature was no longer measured in buckets filled with seawater, but at the intake valves for the water used to cool ship engines.

But when he analyzed Jones's data, Webster discovered suspiciously similar jumps in temperature -- but on land. "Water buckets can't explain this," says Webster.

Curious Inconsistencies

The Jones team attributes another sudden jump in temperature readings to the decline in air pollution since the 1970s as a result of stricter emissions laws. Particles suspended in the air block solar radiation, so that temperatures rise when the air becomes cleaner. Air pollution in the south has always been much lower than in the north, because, as Webster explains, "there is less land and therefore less industry in the Southern Hemisphere."

Oddly enough, however, the temperature increase in the south is just as strong as it is in the north. "That isn't really possible," says Webster.

Webster doesn't believe that inconsistencies like these will invalidate the Jones curve altogether. "But we would like to know, of course, what's behind all of these phenomena." If a natural mechanism were at least partly to blame for the rise in temperatures, it would decrease the share of human influence in current global warming.

Urban Heat

Critics reproach Jones for not taking one factor, in particular, sufficiently into account: the growth of urban areas. Stations that used to be rural are now in cities. And because it is always warmer in cities than outside, the temperatures measured at these stations are bound to rise.

Environmental economist Ross McKitrick, one of McIntyre's associates, examined all rapidly growing countries, in which this urban heat effect was to be expected, and found a correlation between economic growth and temperature rise. He submitted his study in time for the last IPCC report.

Jones did everything he could to suppress the publication, which was critical of him. It proved advantageous to him that he had been one of the two main authors of the temperature chapter. In one of the hacked emails, he openly admitted that he wanted to keep this interfering publication out of the IPCC report at all costs, "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Jones failed in the end, but he did manage to smuggle a devastating sentence into the IPCC report, which states that McKitrick's findings were "statistically insignificant" -- in other words, meaningless.

Regaining Lost Trust

German climatologist Hans von Storch now wants to see an independent institution recalculate the temperature curve, and he even suggests that the skeptics be involved in the project. He points out, however, that processing the data will take several years.

"There is no other way to regain the trust that has been lost," he says, "even if I'm certain that the new curve will not look significantly different from the old one."

And if it does? "That would definitely be the worst-case scenario for climatology. We would have to start all over again."

Other central predictions of climatologists, such as that involving a noticeable rise in sea levels, would also have to be reevaluated. How high sea levels will go in the future is already a matter of debate.


Part 5: The Reality of Rising Sea Levels

They could have been scenes from a horror film: New York's skyscrapers jutted out of the ocean like reefs, while cities like Hamburg and Hong Kong, London and Naples had been flooded long ago. Entire countries had been swallowed up in other places. Denmark, the Netherlands and Bangladesh had ceased to exist.

A quarter of a century ago, climatologists grabbed the public's attention with such horrific visions. At the time, the experts calculated that the sea level would rise by more than 60 meters (197 feet) if the greenhouse effect caused all of the Earth's ice to melt.

No one talks about such nightmare scenarios today. None of the current simulations involves the complete melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. On the other hand, hardly any glaciologists doubt that sea levels will be significantly higher along coastlines by the end of the century. But how much higher, exactly? Estimates range from 18 centimeters (7 inches) to 1.90 meters (6' 3").

Hard to Calculate

"Of course, this isn't a satisfactory statement for coastal planners and politicians," admits Peter Lemke, chief climatologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the northern German port city of Bremerhaven. "But we can't sell something as certainty if we don't know exactly what it will be."

The current IPCC report mentions a relatively conservative range of 18 to 59 centimeters. "Most experts consider this estimate to be too small," says Lemke.

Two factors influence the sea level. The first one affects it directly: When water heats, it expands. This warming effect, which can be calculated with relative precision, is expected to cause the sea level to rise by about 22 centimeters by 2100.

Another effect that is not as easy to calculate is the melting of mountain glaciers and inland ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Most of the melting today is happening in mountain glaciers, from the Andes to the Himalayas. According to IPCC calculations, this melting activity contributes 0.8 millimeters a year to the rise in sea level. Greenland and Antarctica each contribute another 0.2 millimeters.

Quicker Melting

Meanwhile, satellite observations indicate that the rate at which the ice is melting has increased. Glaciologists speculate that parts of the Western Antarctic and, to a greater extent, Greenland, are melting more quickly than initially assumed.

But many scientists are reluctant to make new predictions, because the inner processes in the gigantic ice caps remain insufficiently understood. Reliable data on the behavior of calving glaciers has only existed for about 10 years. Greenland's glaciers are currently spitting a particularly large amount of ice into the ocean. After such a phase, however, many ice flows become dormant again for a longer period of time.

Lemke, like most of his fellow scientists, expects the sea level to rise by somewhere between half a meter and one meter.

Build dikes or get out of the way -- this is the principle coastal residents have applied for years to defend themselves against the forces of nature. In Hamburg in northern Germany, storm surges are now more than half a meter higher than in the 1960s. This is not the result of climate change, however, but of the narrowing of the Elbe River. Nevertheless, the port city is not as threatened as it once was, thanks to improved flood protection.

But storm surges aren't just caused by rising sea levels. Another factor that is at least as important is the wind, which pushes large amounts of water against coastlines.

Can we truly expect to see stormier times in a greenhouse climate?


Part 6: The Myth of the Monster Storm

Hurricane Katrina had hardly devastated the southern US city of New Orleans five years ago before a "hurricane war" broke out among US scientists. The alarmists, using the rhetoric of fiery sermons, warned that Katrina was only the beginning, and that we would soon see the advent of superstorms of unprecedented fury. Members of the more levelheaded camp were vehemently opposed to such predictions and insisted that there was no justification for such fears.

The dispute escalated when Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist and a lead author of the IPCC report, announced at a press conference at Harvard University that there was a clear relationship between global warming and the increased intensity of hurricane activity. Chris Landsea, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, was so furious over this unfounded prediction that he withdrew from his participation in the IPCC.

Now the two rivals have reached a surprising truce, and Landsea has largely prevailed with his reassuring assessment.

Last month Landsea, together with top US hurricane researchers, published a study that finally disproves the supposed link between hurricanes and global warming. The study concludes with the assessment that "tropical cyclone frequency is likely to either decrease or remain essentially the same." Top wind speeds could increase somewhat, says Landsea, but the changes would "not be truly substantial."

Setback for the IPCC

The all-clear signal on the hurricane front is another setback for the IPCC. In keeping with lead author Kevin Trenberth's predictions, the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate. One of the graphs in the IPCC report is particularly mysterious. Without specifying a source, the graph suggestively illustrates how damage caused by extreme weather increases with rising average temperatures.

When hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder saw the graph, he was appalled. "I would like to discover this sort of relationship myself," he says, "but it simply isn't supported by the facts at the moment."

Pielke tried to find out where the graph had come from. He traced it to the chief scientist at a London firm that performs risk calculations for major insurance companies. The insurance scientist claims that the graph was never meant for publication. How the phantom graph found its way into the IPCC report is still a mystery.

At first, the fear of monster storms seemed easily justified. Scientists conjectured that as the oceans became warmer, hurricanes would accumulate more energy. But, as is so often the case, the truth is more complicated. A specific set of conditions must be present in the atmosphere to allow a hurricane to develop and survive. "Wind shear can destroy a hurricane in an early stage," says Landsea, who flies into storm cells in research aircraft every year. Wind shear, however, is likely to increase in a warmer climate. For this reason, many computer models now even point to a decline in hurricane activity.

'Nothing Will Change'

Hurricanes have in fact increased since the late 1960s, a phenomenon scientists attribute to a natural cycle in ocean currents. The constantly rising insurance claims reported by reinsurance companies are a particularly unreliable indicator. "When you adjust for the growth in new buildings, road and factories being built in hurricane regions, there is no longer any evidence of an upward trend," Pielke explains.

The prognoses for all storms outside the tropical zone are even clearer. There has been a widespread fear that rising temperatures would lead to more and more powerful storms.

But current long-term forecasts offer no evidence of such a trend, especially not in the temperate latitudes. "All computer models show that nothing will change at all outside the tropics," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Hamburg Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). "In the future, we will see neither more nor stronger storms gathering over our heads."

In a greenhouse climate, only the storm paths in low-pressure zones are likely to change. There will probably be more wind in Scandinavia and less wind in the Mediterranean region. In Central Europe, on the other hand, no noticeable changes are expected.

It is easy to explain, in physical terms, why stormier times do not lie ahead for most of the world's regions. According to the models, the high latitudes will heat up more substantially than the equatorial zones (which also explains why climate change is already so visible in the Arctic regions). On balance, temperature differences on the Earth's surface will decrease, which in turn will even reduce wind speeds -- meaning the much-feared monster storms are unlikely to materialize.


Part 7: Climate Change's Winners and Losers

Even though researchers have been refining their climate models for more than 30 years, there is one natural phenomenon that continues to elude them. "Clouds still pose the biggest problem for us," says Marotzke. "The uncertainties are still very big. This remains the most important issue for us."

It all seems simple enough in theory. When temperatures rise, more moisture evaporates. But does that mean that more clouds form as a result? And if so, do they curb or accelerate global warming?

On their upper surfaces, clouds act like mirrors. They reflect sunlight back into space, thereby cooling the atmosphere. But on their lower surfaces they prevent the heat reflected by the Earth from escaping, and temperatures rise.

Which of the two effects predominates depends on the height and type of clouds. "You just have to look up to see how many different types there are," says US cloud expert Björn Stevens, the new director of the MPI-M. "And each cloud type behaves differently."

'The Jury Is Still Out'

Until now, no one knew exactly which clouds benefit from a greenhouse climate. But the answer to this question determines whether average global temperatures will end up being one degree higher or lower than predicted by today's models, a factor which creates significant uncertainty. "The jury is still out on which direction the pendulum will take," says Stevens.

Despite the enormous uncertainties, there is agreement on at least one issue: Global warming can no longer be stopped.

But would that be as horrific as has been predicted? Does humanity truly face plagues of biblical proportions? Won't a warmer climate also have its benefits? And won't it lead to higher crop yields and more tourism revenues in many places?

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. There will undoubtedly be losers, but there will also be winners. Whether global warming is more likely to be harmful or beneficial depends entirely on the location of the observer.

Imprecise Simulations

Unfortunately, the computer simulations that predict the climate of the future are still too imprecise to be able to draw reliable conclusions for each individual country or region. Although it is relatively easy to predict the amount by which average temperatures will probably rise in different parts of the world, the models are still relatively shaky when it comes to precipitation. In fact, the prognoses the different models make are sometimes very contradictory.

Nevertheless, a clear trend is emerging in most simulations. "In places where it already rains a lot today, it will rain even more," says Erich Roeckner, a veteran climatologist who has spent years simulating changes in precipitation in a warmer climate. "And where it's dry today, it'll be even drier in the future."

The common myth that developing countries, the poorest of the poor, will suffer the most as a result of climate change is wrong -- at least according to current climate models.

In central Africa, for example, the models predict that hardly anything will change, and precipitation will likely remain constant. And according to most simulations, precipitation could even increase in the drought- and famine-plagued Sahel. "If this turns out to be true," says Roeckner, "it will of course be a surprisingly positive side effect."

Clear Winners of Climate Change

The clear winners are principally the northern regions of the world where it has up until now been too cold and inhospitable. Countries like Canada and Russia can look forward to better harvests and blossoming tourism. The countries bordering the Arctic also hope that the melting of sea ice will enable them to reach previously inaccessible natural resources. For Scandinavians, for example, the only drawback will be a possible guilty conscience over the fact that they are benefiting from climate change.

It will become more arid, however, in many subtropical regions. Industrialized nations, which bear the greatest culpability for global warming, will be most heavily affected. The new drought zones will probably lie in the southern United States and Australia, as well as in South Africa. In Europe, Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy and Greece will struggle with even drier climates than they already have today.

A drastic shift could take place in the European tourism business, as climate change heralds bad times for the large tourist developments in southern Spain and good times for hotels along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts. "If I had a vacation house on Mallorca," Max Planck scientist Jochem Marotzke jokes, "I would sell it and look for one on (the Baltic Sea island of) Usedom."

A Mediterranean Climate in Germany?

Germany could be among the beneficiaries of climate change. A Mediterranean climate could prevail there by the end of the century, which would mean that summer temperatures in Hamburg, in the north, would be as warm as they are in the southwestern city of Freiburg today, while Freiburg's summers would come to resemble those of Marseilles today. Perhaps palm trees would even grow on the North Sea island of Helgoland.

But there are also downsides. While it will be drier in the summer, rainfall will increase significantly in the fall and winter. Northern Germany, in particularly, could see more flooding. To avoid flooding, it will be necessary to improve drainage on fields and pastures and reestablish old flood plains.

In particularly dry regions, on the other hand, such as the eastern state of Brandenburg, the risk of forest fires will increase even more than it has already as a result of the global warming that has already occurred. Paradoxically, the amount of land affected by fire has declined considerably since 1970, even though there are more fires today. This is because optical smoke detectors have now been installed to monitor forests, so that fires are extinguished more quickly. As global warming continues, it could also become necessary to replace pine forests with mixed forests.

For Germans today, who have just experienced an unusually harsh winter, these scenarios are still a long way off. What, some are likely to wonder, do simulations about the world in 100 years have to do with the reality of life today?

Looking into the Near Future

To illustrate the consequences of global warming more vividly, scientists at the MPI-M are currently developing a medium-term scenario: the world in 20 years' time.

"For the first time, we want to try to look into the near future," says MPI-M Director Jochem Marotzke. "This is more difficult, because the fluctuations are bigger than in the long term."

While the supercomputers are still computing away, scientists already estimate that average temperatures will rise by another half a degree Celsius by 2030, or about the same temperature increase since the 1970s. "This will be clearly felt here," says Marotzke.

Germany will see many more tepid summer nights, and spring will begin earlier and earlier. And in only 20 years, snow could become a thing of the past in Germany.

All of this can no longer be averted.

Delayed Reaction

Even if humanity were to stop burning coal, oil and natural gas immediately, there would still be a moderate temperature increase in the next two to three decades. This is because the planetary weather system reacts with a certain delay to the greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere.

One of the biggest unanswered questions is whether it will be possible to keep the temperature increase at less than two degrees Celsius, as world leaders agreed at the climate summit in Copenhagen.

Critics pose a completely different question: How slavishly must humanity stick to this target? Will it truly be the end of the world if this threshold is exceeded?


Part 8: The Invention of the Two-Degree Target

Climate models involve some of the most demanding computations of any simulations, and only a handful of institutes worldwide have the necessary supercomputers. The computers must run at full capacity for months to work their way through the jungle of data produced by coupled differential equations.

All of this is much too complicated for politicians, who aren't terribly interested in the details. They have little use for radiation budgets and ocean-atmosphere circulation models. Instead, they prefer simple targets.

For this reason a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.

It was a pretty audacious estimate. Nevertheless, the powers-that-be finally had a tangible number to work with. An amazing success story was about to begin.

'Clearly a Political Goal'

Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, "life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible."

But this is scientific nonsense. "Two degrees is not a magical limit -- it's clearly a political goal," says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated."

Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.

"Yes, I plead guilty," he says, smiling. The idea didn't hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany's most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief scientific adviser -- a position any researcher would envy.

Rule of Thumb

The story of the two-degree target began in the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). Administration politicians had asked the council for climate protection guidelines, and the scientists under Schellnhuber's leadership came up with a strikingly simple idea. "We looked at the history of the climate since the rise of homo sapiens," Schellnhuber recalls. "This showed us that average global temperatures in the last 130,000 years were no more than two degrees higher than before the beginning of the industrial revolution. To be on the safe side, we came up with a rule of thumb stating that it would be better not to depart from this field of experience in human evolution. Otherwise we would be treading on terra incognita."

As tempting as it sounds, on closer inspection this approach proves to be nothing but a sleight of hand. That's because humans are children of an ice age. For many thousands of years, they struggled to survive in a climate that was as least four degrees colder than it is today, and at times even more than eight degrees colder.

This means that, on balance, mankind has already survived far more severe temperature fluctuations than two degrees. And the cold periods were always the worst periods. Besides, modern civilizations have far more technical means of adapting to climate change than earlier societies had.

Since the first rough estimate was made, many other good reasons have emerged to support the two-degree target, says Schellnhuber. At the same time, however, the constant appearance of new studies has also made the picture significantly more complex.

Coral reefs, for example, could already be doomed if the oceans heat up by 1.5 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, crop yields in agriculture are likely to rise at temperature increases of up to 2.5 degrees Celsius -- good news for the world's growing population.

Completely Speculative

But what good are all the predictions? It's difficult enough to calculate exactly how far temperatures will rise in the coming decades. It becomes completely speculative to predict in detail how warming temperatures will benefit tourism or harm biodiversity.

"Of course, the conclusions of climate impact research are not as reliable as we'd like them to be," Schellnhuber admits. "But we can't exactly drop 10,000 studies from Science and Nature on our political leaders' desks. That would obviously be too much for them. Instead we, as experts, must attempt to condense the large number of analyses into plausible scenarios."

Critics say that the climate impact researchers have gone too far with their brand of political advice. "The two-degree target has little to do with serious science," says Hans von Storch. Many of his fellow scientists, he adds, now see themselves too much as political activists who want to get something done. This, in turn, harms the credibility of science as a whole, he adds, and it is also a more deep-seated cause of the Climategate affair and the sloppy work on the IPCC report.

"Unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors, who present their results in precisely such a way that they'll fit to their sermons," says Storch. "It's certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that became public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism."

'Completely Absurd'

Such suspicions irritate PIK Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, particularly when they are directed against him or his institute. Schellnhuber, a native of Bavaria, normally speaks quietly and diplomatically, but he raises his voice when discussing the accusations. He says that he is far from being an environmental activist or someone who acts purely for political reasons.

"That's completely absurd!" he says heatedly. "I don't participate in protest marches, I'm not a member of the Green Party, I like to eat meat and I drive a BMW. And I didn't study physics to become a climatologist, either."

But no, he adds, he happens to be someone who has acquired inside knowledge about a looming disaster, knowledge that he cannot keep to himself. "If I'm a passenger on a ship and I see, through my binoculars, that we're headed for an iceberg," says Schellnhuber, "I have to warn the captain immediately."

But exactly how far away is that iceberg? How much time is left to steer the ship onto an alternate course? And how great is the risk of collision? These are key questions. In reality, it isn't about stopping a luxury ocean liner, but about the massive effort that is required to end the age of oil and coal as quickly as possible.

Time to React

"We climatologists can only describe possible futures," Storch points out. "It's also possible that things will be completely different."

Storch, a native of northern Germany and one of the pioneers of climate modeling, recommends a more dispassionate approach. He grew up on the North Sea island of Föhr, where he experienced storm tides at first hand. He learned that humans are tough and adaptable beings.

"Fearmongering is the wrong way to go about it," says Storch. "Climate change isn't going to happen overnight. We still have enough time to react."


Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

 

[trysail]

Wind power the worst kind of mirage
By Henk Tennekes

Engineers cave in to green pressure, thanks to politically driven funding.


Wind energy is an engineer’s nightmare. To begin with, the energy density of flowing air is miserably low. Therefore, you need a massive contraption to catch one megawatt at best, and a thousand of these to equal a single gas- or coal-fired power plant.


If you design them for a wind speed of 34 miles per hour, they are useless at wind speeds below 22 mph and extremely dangerous at 44 mph, unless feathered in time. Remember, power is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. Old-fashioned Dutch windmills needed a two-man crew on 12-hour watch, seven days a week, because a runaway windmill first burnt its bearings, then its hardwood gears, then the entire superstructure.


This was the nightmare of millers everywhere in the “good” old days. And what did these beautiful antiques deliver? Fifteen horsepower at best, in favourable winds, about what a power lawn mower does these days. No wonder the Dutch switched to steam-powered pumping stations as soon as they could, in the late 19th century.


Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. These run at less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical - only at full power do they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered.


Think also a moment of the cable networks needed: not only a fine-maze distribution network at the consumer end, but also one at the generator end. And what about servicing? How do you get a repair crew to a lonely hillside? Especially when you decided to put the wind park at sea? Use helicopters - now that is green!


For that matter, would you care to imagine what happens to rotor blades in freezing rain? Or how the efficiency of laminar-flow rotor blades decreases as bugs and dust accumulate on their leading edges?


Or what did happen in Germany more than once? German legislation gives wind power absolute priority, so all other forms of generating electricity have to back off when the wind starts blowing. This creates dangerous, almost uncontrollable instabilities in the high-voltage network. At those moments, power plant operators all over Europe sweat blood, almost literally. The synchronization of the system is also a scary job: alternating currents at 100,000 volts or more cannot be out of phase more than one degree or so, else circuit breakers pop everywhere and a brownout all over Europe starts.


One application might be attractive, though. Suppose you fill a water basin in the hills nearby using wind power when it blows, and turn the water turbines on when emergency power is needed for one reason or another (a power plant failure, a cold winter night).


Wind power is a green mirage of the worst kind. It looks green to simple souls but it is a technical nightmare. Nowhere I have been, be it Holland, Denmark, Germany, France or California, have I seen wind parks where all turbines were operating properly. Typically, 20% stand idle, out of commission, broken down. Use Google Videos to find examples of wind turbine crashes, start meditating and reach your own conclusions.


Why don’t politicians listen to engineers? Why do engineers cave in to politically inspired financing? Merely to join the green daydreaming? I am an engineer; I want to be proud of my profession.

Henk Tennekes is an aeronautical engineer and the former research director of KNMI, the Dutch National Weather Service.

 

[trysail]

Government has effectively enacted tobacco prohibition ( or converted otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals ).


$82.00.........Cost of a carton of cigarettes
365..............Days in a year
10................Packs in a carton
36.5.............No. of cartons/year if consumption is one pack a day
$2,993.00....Cost per year

 

[trysail]

Yanno what? I find it very hard to believe that interest rates are gonna go down from here:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?&chart_type=line&graph_id=0&category_id=&recession_bars=On&width=630&height=378&bgcolor=%23B3CDE7&graph_bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&txtcolor=%23000000&ts=8&preserve_ratio=true&fo=ve&id=GS10,GS5&transformation=lin,lin&scale=Left,Left&range=Max,Max&cosd=1953-04-01,1953-04-01&coed=2010-03-01,2010-03-01&line_color=%230000FF,%23FF0000&link_values=,&mark_type=NONE,NONE&mw=4,4&line_style=Solid,Solid&lw=1,1&vintage_date=2010-04-06,2010-04-06&revision_date=2010-04-06,2010-04-06&mma=0,0&nd=,&ost=,&oet=,&fml=a,a

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aUCVS0M9DbUw


Calpers, Blackstone Clash Over Placement Agent ‘Jackpot’ Fees
By Michael B. Marois

April 7 (Bloomberg) -- Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, is challenging a California Public Employees’ Retirement System proposal to prohibit money managers from dangling contingency fees in front of middlemen who help win pension fund contracts.

Calpers, the largest U.S. public pension at $209 billion, is pressing for a law requiring so-called placement agents to register as lobbyists and ending pay-for-success arrangements similar to those of personal-injury lawyers. The bill is to get its first public airing at a legislative hearing today.

“The contingency fees are too much of a jackpot for the placement agents,” California Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a Democrat and member of the Calpers board, said in a telephone interview. They “invite corrupt practices,” he said.

The proposal follows federal and state investigations into influence peddling for access to the $2 trillion in U.S. public retirement funds. Calpers said in December that a former board member received more than $59 million soliciting business for investment companies such as Apollo Management LP.

Placement agents working for private equity, hedge funds, venture capital and real estate firms typically earn the equivalent of 0.5 percent to 3 percent of the money they place under the management of their client, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the brokerage industry’s biggest lobbying group. Sifma opposes the legislation.

$120 Million in Settlements
At least 11 investment firms and individuals have paid more than $120 million to settle with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, in his probe of corruption in that state’s $129 billion pension fund, the third-largest in the U.S. Six people have pleaded guilty to criminal charges including David Loglisci, New York’s former chief investment officer.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown, also a Democrat, is likewise investigating and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Los Angeles office is heading an inquiry into California pension funds, court documents show.

Blackstone, based in New York, owns a placement-agent unit called Park Hill Group that’s solicited more than $110 billion for private equity, hedge fund, venture capital and real estate funds, according to its Web site.

Placement agents work much the same way as municipal bond underwriters, putting months of effort into a deal and getting paid only when the debt is sold, Blackstone spokesman Peter Rose said. If the sale is canceled, they don’t make money.

‘Hire a Middleman’
“It’s just like the state of California looking to sell bonds,” he said. “They would hire a middleman to market those bonds to whoever buys bonds.”

Blackstone is employing California Strategies LLC, a firm with a roster of former state officials, to lobby against the contingency fee provision of the bill, Rose said.

Blackstone and Sifma contend that smaller investment firms, unable to afford in-house marketing teams or retainers for placement agents, would be helpless to market themselves without the use of contingency fees.

“None of us in the industry like the scandals that have broken out in places like New York and California,” Rose said. “But a ban on contingency fees is harmful on these smaller funds that don’t get the fees until they get the money to invest.”

New, Small Managers
Calpers says that’s just not true. A senior pension fund manager is wholly committed to looking for new or small money- managers, Lockyer said. A dedicated e-mail account allows such firms to send proposals directly to Calpers’ investment staff.

“Of the small funds that have approached Calpers, fewer than half have actually used a placement agent,” Calpers Chief Investment Officer Joe Dear told the fund’s board in March. “There’s clear evidence in past practice that it’s possible to develop an investment relationship with us by making a normal approach, without the assistance of a contingent-paid placement agent.”

For the bill to become law, amending the state’s Political Reform Act of 1974, it must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. If it fails, Lockyer said, he’ll propose an outright ban on placement agents at Calpers and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the second-biggest U.S. public pension fund.

 

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503722_pf.html

Scientists' use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 6, 2010; HE01

The Washington Nationals will win 74 games this year. The Democrats will lose five Senate seats in November. The high Tuesday will be 86 degrees, but it will feel like 84.

And, depending on how much greenhouse gas emissions increase, the world's average temperature will rise between 2 and 11.5 degrees by 2100.

The computer models used to predict climate change are far more sophisticated than the ones that forecast the weather, elections or sporting results. They are multilayered programs in which scientists try to replicate the physics behind things such as rainfall, ocean currents and the melting of sea ice. Then, they try to estimate how emissions from smokestacks and auto tailpipes might alter those patterns in the future, as the effects of warmer temperatures echo through these complex and interrelated systems.

To check these programs' accuracy, scientists plug in data from previous years to see if the model's predictions match what really happened.

But these models still have the same caveat as other computer-generated futures. They are man-made, so their results are shaped by human judgment.

This year, critics have harped on that fact, attacking models of climate change that have been used to illustrate what will happen if the United States and other countries do nothing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists have responded that their models are imperfect, but still provide invaluable glimpses of change to come.

They have found themselves trying to persuade the public -- now surrounded by computerized predictions of the future -- to believe in these.

If policymakers don't heed the models, "you're throwing away information. And if you throw away information, then you know less about the future than we actually do," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"You can say, 'You know what, I don't trust the climate models, so I'm going to walk into the middle of the road with a blindfold on,' " Schmidt said. "But you know what, that's not smart."

Climate scientists admit that some models overestimated how much the Earth would warm in the past decade. But they say this might just be natural variation in weather, not a disproof of their methods.

As computers have become faster and cheaper, models both simple and sophisticated have proliferated across government, business and sports, appearing to offer precise answers to questions that used to be rhetorical.

How many games will the Redskins win next season?

The Web site Footballoutsiders.com, which uses computers to show fans hidden dimensions of pro football, uses a model with about 80 variables. It looks at a team's third-down conversions, the experience of its coaches, even the age of its defensive backs.

No crystal balls

How much cleaner would the Chesapeake Bay be if it had twice as many oysters?

The Environmental Protection Agency uses a model that divides the bay into 55,000 slices, and maps how pollution progresses through them, from upstream tributaries into the deeper waters of the Chesapeake. It could imagine thousands more oysters -- which filter water as they feed -- and watch cleaner water spread out via currents and tides.

But, some of the time, these electronic futures haven't come true.

The Footballoutsiders site predicted the Redskins would win 7.8 games in 2009. The real-world team won four. The EPA's Chesapeake Bay model has been criticized repeatedly for over-optimism, for creating a virtual bay that looked cleaner than the real one. Last month, another model's prediction was busted: a Georgia Tech professor's computer said Kansas would win the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The Jayhawks lost in the second round.

These and other models are only as smart as the scientists who build them -- they rely on data that scientists have gathered about the real world, and the accuracy of estimates about how all the factors fit together (Is an experienced coach more or less important than young defensive backs?).

They also depend on the computers running them. To accurately depict how individual clouds form and disappear, for instance, the computers that model climate change would need to be a million times faster. For now, the effects of clouds have to be estimated.

But scientists say complexity doesn't guarantee accuracy. The best test of a model is to check it against reality.

"We're never going to perfectly model reality. We would need a system as complicated as the world around us," said Ken Fleischmann, a professor of information studies at the University of Maryland. He said scientists needed to make the uncertainties inherent in models clear: "You let people know: It's a model. It's not reality. We haven't invented a crystal ball."

Scientists say they don't need models to know that the world is warming: There is plenty of real-world evidence, gathered since the mid-1800s, to suggest that. "There's no climate model in that conclusion," said Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California.

There are more than a dozen such models running around the world: mega-computers whose job is creating a virtual Earth.

These usually combine a weather simulation with other programs that mimic effects of rain and sun on the land, currents in the ocean, and emissions of greenhouse gases. First, these models imagine all the factors interacting within a "grid box" -- an imaginary cube of land, water and sky that might be 60 miles long and 60 miles wide.

Then, the computer imagines effects in one box spilling into the next, and so on.

As the model runs, imaginary cold fronts sweep over virtual oceans, simulating weather at rates such as five years per day. In some cases, the models are re-run with different weather conditions, until a pattern emerges in global temperatures.

The pattern is the point. It is man's signature, a guide to what could happen in the real world. All the major climate models seem to show that greenhouse gases are causing warming, climate scientists say, although they don't agree about how much. A 2007 United Nations report cited a range of estimates from 2 to 11.5 degrees over the next century.

"It's an educated, scientifically based guess," said Michael Winton, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "But it's a guess nonetheless."

Raining on their parade

But Warren Meyer, a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training who blogs at www.climate-skeptic.com, said that climate models are highly flawed. He said the scientists who build them don't know enough about solar cycles, ocean temperatures and other things that can nudge the earth's temperature up or down. He said that because models produce results that sound impressively exact, they can give off an air of infallibility.

But, Meyer said -- if the model isn't built correctly -- its results can be both precise-sounding and wrong.

"The hubris that can be associated with a model is amazing, because suddenly you take this sketchy understanding of a process, and you embody it in a model," and it appears more trustworthy, Meyer said. "It's almost like money laundering."

Last month, a Gallup poll provided the latest evidence of a public U-turn on climate change. Asked if the threat of global warming was "generally exaggerated," 48 percent said yes. That was up 13 points from 2008, the highest level of skepticism since Gallup started asking the question in 1997.

But scientists say that, during this time, they have only become more certain that their models work.

Put in the conditions on Earth more than 20,000 years ago: they produce an Ice Age, NASA's Schmidt said. Put in the conditions from 1991, when a volcanic eruption filled the earth's atmosphere with a sun-shade of dust. The models produce cooling temperatures and shifts in wind patterns, Schmidt said, just like the real world did.

If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, "You have to ask yourself, 'How come they work?' "

 

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Denali-details-its-pitch-for-apf-502611824.html?x=0&.v=12


Denali details its pitch for $35B Alaska gas line
Alaska may be big, but most agree only room for 1 gas pipeline as Denali unveils $35B plan

Becky Bohrer
Wednesday April 7, 2010
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) -- Everyone seems to agree there's room for only one major pipeline to move natural gas from Alaska's prodigious North Slope to North American markets. Now a high-stakes showdown is taking shape over who will be in charge and what it will take to make the long-hoped-for project economical and a reality.

Denali, a joint effort of ConocoPhillips and BP PLC, formally proposed a $35 billion project Wednesday, with a pipeline stretching more than 1,700 miles and having delivery points to help meet gas needs in Alaska and Canada.

Denali billed the project, which includes a gas treatment plant on the harsh North Slope, as "one of the largest private investments in the history of North America." Houston-based ConocoPhillips and Britain's BP claim lease rights for about half of Alaska's known North Slope gas.

The Slope's other major player, Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp., is helping TransCanada Corp. of Calgary, Alberta, with a competing project that has been promised up to $500 million from the state. Its two options include a line to Canada with a comparable $32 billion to $41 billion price tag.

Both ventures aim to be in service by around 2020, with plans to deliver about 4.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day to North American markets via larger lines to Canada. TransCanada's other option is smaller in size and cost -- between $20 billion and $26 billion -- for a liquefied natural gas facility that would export the fuel by ship.

Attention now turns to the next few months, when the competing projects plan to court gas producers and seek shipping commitments as part of what's called "open season."

"No one is going to build two pipelines," said Larry Persily, the federal coordinator for Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Projects.

TransCanada and Denali officials agree and say the best option for moving forward is having all three North Slope majors, and the state, behind a single project.

The question then becomes who supports which project, and what will be needed to make it more economical.

TransCanada successfully bid for a state pipeline license and the promise of a $500 million reimbursement under the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act pushed by then-Gov. Sarah Palin.

Denali is pushing ahead without state help. President Bud Fackrell said Wednesday that, while there's only enough room for one line, BP and ConocoPhillips do not agree with all the state's terms under the act, making it problematic to coalesce now. He said Denali and its owners are open to anyone who can add value joining their project, defending it as highly competitive.

Gov. Sean Parnell chalked Fackrell's comments up to "posturing." "They're negotiating," he told reporters, adding that he sees back-to-back open seasons as a positive for Alaska. TransCanada and Exxon Mobil plan to begin seeking shipping commitments as early as May 1, with Denali hoping to hold its own as early as July.

Doug Reynolds, a professor of energy economics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, sees the companies as having the upper hand. There will be a pipeline, he said, but it's a matter of what can be worked out with the state on long-range tax and royalty terms.

"This is all a game," Reynolds said. "The state is a little bit over the barrel," with companies holding leases to the vast resource that state officials have long seen as a way to help Alaska shore up royalty revenues as North Slope oil production declines.

While oil's still king, estimates have put the North Slope's proven natural gas reserves at 35 trillion cubic feet. But that's worthless to the state unless the gas flows to consumers.

Parnell has said the state would do what it sees as being in its best interests. The companies want greater control, he said, but the state should "stay the course."

There are other obstacles.

Denali noted the risks involved in its filing Wednesday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It's seeking leeway to consider other options -- a scaled-down project, an entirely different project, such as a line to a liquefied natural gas facility, or allowances to drum up additional support for the original -- if it doesn't get commitments for at least 85 percent of the line's capacity at open season.

Fackrell also pointed out questions of financing and an ongoing legal dispute over some Alaska lease holdings.

He noted that prospective shippers will have to decide, given the energy market's volatility, tax questions and other issues, whether they want to commit to the Denali project, TransCanada's project, or neither.

Some lawmakers have become skeptical of the idea of a mainline to North America because of other gas plays ahead of Alaska's and improved methods to tap natural gas stored in shale formations elsewhere. There's also the question of whether there will be sufficient demand beyond the next decade to make a major project succeed for all involved.

Reynolds said environmental concerns associated with developing shale gas, and infrastructure and other costs, should allow for Alaska gas to be competitive and make money on the market.

The volume of gas envisioned by the Alaska pipeline proposals is a small slice of demand, he said. U.S. consumers used about 60 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day in 2009.

Denali: http://www.denalipipeline.com

TransCanada and Exxon Mobil's plan: http://www.thealaskapipelineproject.com

Alaska Gasline Inducement Act: http://gasline.alaska.gov

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a2xng6J3TAdU


How $1 Trillion Time Bomb Posts a Phony Profit
by Jonathan Weil

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Home Loan Banks are a frequently overlooked band of government-chartered cooperatives whose name screams systemic risk with every word. Federal means Uncle Sam. Homes are a declining asset. A loan is money out the door. And banks are the things that get taxpayer bailouts when they’re too big to fail and enough of their loans go bad.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that these 12 regional lenders collectively suffered massive losses last year. What’s astonishing is that you wouldn’t know it by looking at their bottom-line earnings or from the strange way their regulator measures their capital cushions.

Last week, the FHLBs, which is pronounced “flubs,” published their combined audited financial statements for 2009. And at first glance, it might seem like they had a profitable year. Net income was about $1.9 billion, the banks said, up 54 percent from the year before.

The most striking part about that dollar figure was what it didn’t include: About $8.8 billion of paper losses from their portfolios of mortgage-backed securities. By the banks’ own description, these losses were “other than temporary,” meaning the values of the investments aren’t expected to recover soon.

The reason those losses weren’t included in earnings? The Financial Accounting Standards Board rewrote its rules a year ago so they wouldn’t have to count, following an intense campaign by the banking industry and its friends in Congress. One thing the rule change couldn’t do, though, was make those losses go away in real life.

Among Biggest Borrowers
With more than $1 trillion of assets and about $973 billion of liabilities, the FHLB system is among the largest U.S. borrowers after the federal government, bigger even than Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Operating independently, the FHLBs make low- cost loans to about 8,000 member banks and finance companies. They also sport AAA credit ratings from Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, which keeps their borrowing costs low, because their debt has an implicit federal guarantee.

Thanks to the FASB rule change, the banks got a new way to report phony profits, too. Before 2009, whenever companies wrote down debt securities that they labeled as held-to-maturity or available-for-sale, their earnings had to include any losses they deemed other than temporary.

Now they get to separate the writedowns into two parts: estimated future credit losses and everything else. The first kind reduces earnings and regulatory capital. The other doesn’t, although both types must be included in the asset values on their balance sheets.

Lowball Numbers
The fallacy of this approach is that it’s impossible to discern how much of a bond’s decline in market value is due to perceived future credit losses versus other factors, such as liquidity risk. The obvious incentive for companies is to lowball their estimates of credit losses. The FASB rule change was one of the reasons cited by former U.S. Comptroller General Charles Bowsher when he resigned as chairman of the FHLBs’ Office of Finance in March 2009, saying he was uncomfortable vouching for the banks’ numbers.

Combined, the 12 banks reported $11.2 billion of other- than-temporary losses on their mortgage-backed securities last year. However, they said only $2.4 billion was related to credit losses, as if they had the ability to know.

Here’s how those numbers affect the banks’ capital ratios. The general rule is that the banks’ regulatory capital must equal at least 4 percent of assets. By that measure, all 12 of them exceeded the government’s minimum requirement, as of Dec. 31. The catch is that the government’s measure ignores lots of red ink, such as the aforementioned $8.8 billion last year, and treats some types of debt as if they were assets.

Four Fall Short
Had the government’s 4 percent benchmark been based on actual capital, rather than a fantasy version of the assets on their books, four of the 12 banks would have fallen short: those in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Indianapolis.

The San Francisco bank, the largest of the group, was credited with having $14.7 billion of regulatory capital, or 7.6 percent of assets. By comparison, its balance sheet showed just $6.2 billion of total capital, for a 3.2 percent ratio.

The Seattle bank is another extreme example. It showed $993.7 million of total capital on its balance sheet, or 1.9 percent of assets. That’s 51-to-1 leverage, far more than the Wall Street casualty Lehman Brothers ever disclosed. Yet the banks’ regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, credited it with $2.8 billion of regulatory capital, or a 5.6 percent ratio.

Imaginary Accounting
Even with the liberal accounting rules, the Seattle bank still showed a $161.6 million net loss, which excluded about $1 billion of “non-credit” investment losses. Fortunately, its regulator isn’t totally blind. Last year it classified the Seattle bank as undercapitalized anyway, partly out of concern the investment losses there may keep growing.

All told, the 12 banks reported a combined $42.8 billion of total capital on their Dec. 31 balance sheets, or 4.2 percent of their assets. The government gave them credit for $60.2 billion of regulatory capital, much of which was imaginary.

The only thing that bond investors care about, of course, is whether the U.S. Treasury would ever bail out these banks if needed. Undoubtedly, it would.

The bull market in moral hazard rages onward.

 

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Earth is never in equilibrium
By: Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — The writer is addressing the question, Is climate change real?

To a significant extent, the issue of climate change revolves around the elevation of the commonplace to the ancient level of ominous omen. In a world where climate change has always been the norm, climate change is now taken as punishment for sinful levels of consumption. In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.

Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.

For small changes in GATA, there is no need for any external cause. Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century. To be sure, man’s emissions of carbon dioxide must have some impact. The question of importance, however, is how much.

A generally accepted answer is that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (it turns out that one gets the same value for a doubling regardless of what value one starts from) would perturb the energy balance of Earth about 2 percent, and this would produce about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming in the absence of feedbacks. The observed warming over the past century, even if it were all due to increases in carbon dioxide, would not imply any greater warming.

However, current climate models do predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide might produce more warming: from 3.6 degrees F to 9 degrees F or more. They do so because within these models the far more important radiative substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever an increase in carbon dioxide might do. This is known as positive feedback. Thus, if adding carbon dioxide reduces the ability of the earth system to cool by emitting thermal radiation to space, the positive feedbacks will further reduce this ability.

It is again acknowledged that such processes are poorly handled in current models, and there is substantial evidence that the feedbacks may actually be negative rather than positive. Citing but one example, 2.5 billion years ago the sun’s brightness was 20 percent to 30 percent less than it is today (compared to the 2 percent change in energy balance associated with a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels) yet the oceans were unfrozen and the temperatures appear to have been similar to today’s.

This was referred to by Carl Sagan as the Early Faint Sun Paradox. For 30 years, there has been an unsuccessful search for a greenhouse gas resolution of the paradox, but it turns out that a modest negative feedback from clouds is entirely adequate. With the positive feedback in current models, the resolution would be essentially impossible.

Interestingly, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from manmade gases is already about 86 percent of what one expects from a doubling of carbon dioxide (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons, and ozone). Thus, these models should show much more warming than has been observed. The reason they don’t is that they have arbitrarily removed the difference and attributed this to essentially unknown aerosols.

The IPCC claim that most of the recent warming (since the 1950s) is due to man assumed that current models adequately accounted for natural internal variability. The failure of these models to anticipate the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 14 years or so contradicts this assumption. This has been acknowledged by major modeling groups in England and Germany.

However, the modelers chose not to stress this. Rather they suggested that the models could be further corrected, and that warming would resume by 2009, 2013, or even 2030.

Global warming enthusiasts have responded to the absence of warming in recent years by arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record. We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records themselves have come into question. Since we are, according to these records, in a relatively warm period, it is not surprising that the past decade was the warmest on record. This in no way contradicts the absence of increasing temperatures for over a decade.

Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) suggests that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, so too is the basis for alarm. However, the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc., all depend not on GATA but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind and the state of the ocean.

The fact that some models suggest changes in alarming phenomena will accompany global warming does not logically imply that changes in these phenomena imply global warming. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred, and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

One may ask why there has been the astounding upsurge in alarmism in the past four years. When an issue like global warming is around for more than 20 years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence and donations are reasonably clear. So, too, are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of carbon dioxide is a dream come true. After all, carbon dioxide is a product of breathing itself.

Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth. Nations see how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. So do private firms. The case of Enron (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, Enron was one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon-emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to trillions of dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions.

It is probably no accident that Al Gore himself is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.

Finally, there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.

Clearly, the possibility that warming may have ceased could provoke a sense of urgency. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, the need to courageously resist hysteria is equally clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.

 

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The Writer's Almanac
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/04/09

It was on this day in 1865 that General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant met in Appomattox Court House, and Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. The generals met at the home of Wilmer McLean.

A few years earlier, McLean had lived with his family in Manassas, Virginia, and the first major battle of Bull Run had been fought on his farm there. He moved farther south, near Appomattox Court House, to better serve the Confederate Army as a wholesale grocer. By total coincidence, Generals Lee and Grant chose Appomattox Court House to discuss the terms of surrender, and when they sent an aide ahead to ask the first citizen on the street for a house where they could talk, it happened to be Wilmer McLean, who eventually had to offer his own home. After Lee surrendered, Union officers swept through the house, determined to have a piece of history — they offered to buy everything, and what he refused to sell they just stole (many people, McLean's family included, say they stole everything). Pieces were taken from his sofa, the cane on his chairs was cut up and parceled out, and his property was destroyed for a second time.

 

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http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/levy-walks.png

http://www.leif.org/EOS/Levy-Flights.pdf

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/12/levy-walks-solar-flares-and-warming/

http://www.physorg.com/tags/global+temperature/

 

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As Sgt. Schultz used to say, "Very interesting!"

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/180/426622486_e7672314e8_o.jpg

How the IPCC invented a new calculus

A new form of calculus has been invented by the authors of the the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), in order to create the false impression that global warming is accelerating.


How the new IPCC calculus works
Here's how it works. Look at the following graph:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/cal1.jpg

Now consider the following question:

Is the slope of the graph greatest at the left hand end of the graph, or the right hand end?

By just looking at the graph, or by using old-fashioned calculus developed by Newton and Leibnitz, you might think that the slope of the graph is similar at both ends. But you would be wrong. In fact, the slope is much greater towards the right hand end of the graph. To prove this, we need to apply the new calculus developed by the IPCC. To do this, we draw a sequence of straight-line best fits backwards from the right-hand end-point:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/cal2.jpg

This clearly shows how the slope of the graph is in fact increasing.

How IPCC calculus is used in the IPCC report
Here is one of the key graphs from the AR4 report:


http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/_/rsrc/1259250343991/faq3.1fig1.jpg

The graph is Figure 1 from FAQ 3.1, to be found on page 253 of the WG1 report. The slope over the last 25 years is significantly greater than that of the last 50 years, which in turn is greater than the slope over 100 years. This 'proves' that global warming is accelerating. This grossly misleading calculation does not just appear in chapter 3 of WG1. It also appears in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM): "The linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years". Thus, policymakers who just look at the numbers and don't stop to think about the different timescales, will be misled into thinking that global warming is accelerating. Of course, we could equally well start near the left hand end of the graph and obtain the opposite conclusion! (Just in case this is not obvious, see here for an example). A similar grossly misleading comparison appears at the very beginning of chapter 3, page 237: "The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C vs. 0.07°C ± 0.02°C per decade)."


How did this get through the IPCC's review process?
The IPCC reports are subjected to careful review by scientists. So how did this blatant distortion of the temperature trends get through this rigorous review process? The answer to this question can now be found, because the previous drafts of AR4, and the reviewer comments, can now be seen on-line. (The IPCC was reluctant to release these comments, but was forced to do so after a number of freedom of information requests). The answer is quite astonishing. The misleading graph was not in either the first or the second draft of the report that were subject to review. It was inserted into the final draft, after all the reviewer comments. It is not clear who did this, but responsibility must lie with the lead authors of chapter 3, Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones. Here is the version of the graph that the reviewers saw in the second draft:


http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/_/rsrc/1259250344586/faq3.1fig1orig.jpg

Note that in this version there is only one trend line drawn.

So why was this graph replaced by the grossly misleading one? Did any of the reviewers suggest that a new version should be drawn with a sequence of straight lines over different time intervals? No. One reviewer made the following remark: 'This whole diagram is spurious. There is no justification to draw a "linear trend" through such an irregular record',... but his comment was rejected.


It is the same story with the misleading comment in the SPM mentioned above ("The linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years"). This statement was not in the original version reviewed by the scientists. It was inserted into the final draft that was only commented on by Governments. The Chinese Government suggested deleting this, pointing out that 'These two linear rates should not compare with each other because the time scales are not the same'. Well done to the Chinese Government for spotting that. Too bad their valid comment was ignored by the IPCC.

 

[trysail]

The glaciers in Glacier Bay— quite obviously ( see below )— began to recede long before the Industrial Revolution. Their retreat is explained entirely by the warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age. No need to panic, folks!

Source: U.S. Geological Service
Glacier Bay: Map of Alaska and Glacier Bay. Red lines show glacial
terminus positions and dates during retreat of the Little Ice Age
glacier. Green polygon outlines approximate area mapped
by multibeam system in May-June 2001.
http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2001/07/glacierbaymap.gif

http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2001/07/fieldwork2.html
​

Glaciers
Glacier
GlacierBay

 

[trysail]

http://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BF445_RESIDE_NS_20100412170829.gif


It has been drawn to my attention that an individual has objected to two of my posts on this thread.

It is patently obvious that the brief quotations from two books I have posted on this thread fall well within the spirit, letter and intent of the Fair Use doctrine. See: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html .

As the thought of the individual who has asserted copyright infringement holds no interest, I do not intend to respond further.

Throughout my life, it has been my practice to record for later reference brief excerpts ( by writing or keyboarding ) of cogent or memorable sections of books as I read them.



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

Hmm, knew you couldn't find anything to support your assertions.

I posted the law here and even highlighted the applicable parts. Not not fault if you choose not to read.

Happily copyright law will continue without you--especially since all you write are wrongheaded Internet discussion board postings.

Your main problem is that your comprehension of the law is simply flat dead wrong. That makes it especially difficult to criticize posts that are in perfect compliance with the letter, spirit and intent of copyright law. When you attempt to do so— in your typically obnoxious, annoying and abrasive manner ( in contradistinction to a gracious and respectful manner ), you provide corroboration of a spiteful and malicious intent.

In simple English, you're wrong— and, to make it worse— you're an ass.