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Gore brilliantly explains the stakes at Copenhagen.

I’m not sure that Saran Palin understands. She had this to say about global warming in a Washington Post editorial.

I know that Carbon Dioxide is a great gift from God, also a gift that brings warmth to us during the long Alaskan winter, and by burning natural gas and oil, we are honoring Him, sending a blessed and holy plume of smoke skyward to our great Father in heaven, imploring him to watch over Americans, and our troops, and also to bring us energy security, also to the great state of Alaska, and the first Dude and my beautiful family. And then as the glorious sun sets over the Last Frontier in shades of red, white and blue, I know with every ounce of my being that Russia, silent in the distance, will never understand the joy that I feel right now, a joy of freedom.

Please add your own Sarah Palin quotes. Visit Slate for inspiration; this was a GREAT contest.

Anthony Watts, the scientifically-illiterate host of Watts Up With That, has been running a silly initiative called the Surface Stations Project through which he is trying to invalidate recent historical temperature records in the US to prove that global warming is a HOAX. His belief is that these surface stations are too often located close to airport runways, city parking lots, air condioners, and other manmade constructions that raise localized temperatures a degree or two. On a larger scale, a similar phenomenon makes cities much warmer than the surrounding countryside in the Urban Heat Island Effect, and Watts believes that this siting of surface stations invalidates the entire temperature record compiled by the pinko socialists at NOAA.

Watts is a former weatherman and an ideologue, and in any other sphere of comment, he would be considered a buffoon. He should have no more credibility than a conspiracy buff who thinks the moon landing was faked. An old math teacher often used to say that you don’t know enough to know that you don’t know.

If the issue wasn’t so serious, I would take no pleasure in belittling his lack of education. Anthony Watts doesn’t have a science degree, but that doesn’t stop him — and his loyal minions — from libeling better men and women of climate science at every opportunty. It’s preposterous, really. He doesn’t even understand the science he’s attempting to refute. (See here, and here, for instance).

It’s true that many weather stations were established before global warming became an issue, so some of them might not have been ideally situated. But Anthony Watts parades around like he’s got something over on the scientists, like he’s thought of a very important detail that they hadn’t considered with all their fancy PhDs and Ivy League educations. But the simple truth is that anything he could think of as a layman has already been considered and accounted for a very long time ago. And thats why temperature records are accurate, and why we know the planet is warming dangerously. We also have the thousands of empirical studies which support the temperature record.

Watts doesn’t even understand how ridiculous he sounds. He‘s a con man, a snake oil salesman.

Peter Sinclair, the incisive mind behind the Crock of the Week series, published this analysis of Watts’ surface station project last week, but Watts claimed copyright infringement, and it was removed until his claims could be examined and, of course, rejected. It’s 8 minutes long, and worth every minute.

In a similar vein, NOAA recently eviscerated Watts’ — and his misinformed minions — hard work at Surface Stations in an excellent Q&A.

Q. How has the poor exposure biased local temperatures trends?

A. At the present time (June 2009), to the best of our knowledge, there has only been one published peer-reviewed study that specifically quantified the potential bias in trends caused by poor station exposure (Peterson, 2006). The analysis examined only a small subset of stations –- all that had their exposure checked at that time -– and found no bias in long-term trends.

Q. Does a station with good exposure read warmer than a station with poor exposure?

A. Not necessarily. Many local factors influence the observed temperature: whether a station is in a valley with cold air drainage, whether the station is a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters, whether the station reads and resets its maximum and minimum thermometers in the coolest time of the day in early morning or in the warmest time of the day in the afternoon, etc. But for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature -– whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station over grass -– but how that temperature changes over time.

Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?

A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.

And here’s the killer graphic. Watts has assayed 71 percent of the 1,218 weather stations used by NOAA to compile their historical temperature record, and found that only 70 stations could be classified as good or better.

But this graph highlights what happens when you compare the difference between the Watts-approved stations and NOAA’s entire 1218.

Can you see the difference? Apparently, only conspiracy buffs can.

Before starting One Blue Marble, I spent considerable time visiting political web sites to better understand why conservatives think that global warming is a huge hoax perpetrated by scientists (read: socialists) who are hellbent on destroying our cherished way of life.

But I came away empty. There was nothing there, no insight to be gleaned. Instead I found only ideologues distorting science for their own tragic end. They perpetuate myths that have no basis in fact, myths that have been discredited again and again. I would feel sorry for them if the stakes weren’t so high.

The Truth About Climate Models

Among the most persistent false beliefs is the claim that we shouldn’t move to a renewable, clean energy economy because all the climate change warnings are derived from computer simulations, and models are a very poor branch of science that is easily manipulated to prove anything you want.

Like all denier arguments, this is one hell of a whopper, but you’ll see it repeated ad nauseum throughout the blogosphere. Like most climate change myths, it uses sophistry and cheap tricks to hide a hidden political agenda. Irrelevant points are polished and prettied to masquerade as reasonable facts, but don’t be fooled. It’s all just a con game to keep naive readers from doing their homework.

On astroturfing sites, the conventional wisdom suggests that:

1. Computer models are unproven, so we shouldn’t put our faith in them
2. The climate system is incredibly complex, and no computer model can possibly do justice to these complexities.
3. Clouds are incredibly important, yet none of the climate models accurately predicts how they will influence climate
4. Scientists can’t predict the weather next week, why should we believe what they say will happen in 25 years?*

I could go on, but you get the point. The essential scam here is that if they throw enough confusion into the air, they can divert you from this essential truth.

Climate models are inaccurate, and they are also incredibly useful.

Sid Crosby, the Stanley Cup, and Global Warming

Let me explain it this way. The Stanley Cup playoffs are currently dominating the sports news in Canada. Lets say that I created a serious computer model to predict the winner. Which would be harder to do… Write a program that accurately predicted the every single detail of every single game played during the 2009 playoffs, or write a program that just predicts who wins each series and, ultimately, Lord Stanley’s Cup.

Climate change deniers argue that the only correct way for me to proceed would be to write a program that predicts every niggling detail accurately, from the number of minutes played by Penguins’ superstar Sidney Crosby to the number of saves made by Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo. The deniers argue that if I can’t predict Crosby’s playing time, then my model is a incomplete and utter waste of time.

More Astroturfing

That’s what astroturfing — a targeting misinformation campaign — is all about. Keeping the analogy, the deniers and astroturfers are hoping that you’ll take your eye off the puck, because they don’t want you to know that my computer program has accurately picked the Stanley Cup winner for the last 20 years.

And so it goes with climate models. If you used the best system current available to predict the 24-hour temperature in Halifax, Nova Scotia on May 1, 2012, then a climate model will prove woefully inadequate. But if you use a climate model to predict warming trends due to rising CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2005, then climate models are frighteningly accurate, and that accuracy is supported by thousands of real world experiments offering hard, empirical data. The science is rock solid.

You see, climate models have been around for more than 20 years, and they’ve already made predictions that have been proven many times in the real world by leading scientists. Climate models have predicted that the Arctic will warm faster than the continental United States, and Arctic sea ice is disappearing at an alarming rate. Climate models suggested that Australia would be hit hard by climate change, and guess what? The country has been suffering from a decade-long drought and devastating crop losses.

Climate Model Successes

Grist offers a few additional climate model predictions that have already come to pass:

1. models predict that surface warming should be accompanied by cooling of the stratosphere, and this has indeed been observed;
2. models have long predicted warming of the lower, mid, and upper troposphere, even while satellite readings seemed to disagree — but it turns out the satellite analysis was full of errors and on correction, this warming has been observed;
3. models predict warming of ocean surface waters, as is now observed;
4. models predict an energy imbalance between incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared radiation, which has been detected;
5. models predict sharp and short-lived cooling of a few tenths of a degree in the event of large volcanic eruptions, and Mount Pinatubo confirmed this;
6. models predict an amplification of warming trends in the Arctic region, and this is indeed happening;
7. climate models predict continuing and accelerating warming of the planet’s surface, and so far they are spot on.

The Climate Change Smoking Gun

Additionally, we have a very simple way of testing models for accuracy: We can simulations to see how well they can predict the temperatures that have been observed for the last 130 or so years. And when you do that, you get a devastatingly accurate graph like this one:

As John Holdren, Obama’s National Science Adviser suggests, this is the smoking gun. You can argue that this historical accuracy offers no proof that models will accurately predict the future, and you might be right. But all the scientific evidence suggests otherwise, and you’d be asking us to bet the future of humanity on a 250-1 long shot.

A Dystopian Future… Unless

So what are computer models predicting for the next 90 years? Well dear reader, it ain’t pretty. The coming decade will be the warmest ever, and the arctic will largely melt by 2020. Droughts will intensify, and hurricanes will become ever more potent. By 2100, we expect that sea levels will rise by between 5 and 7 feet, that 85 percent of the Amazon rainforest will die, that 50 to 70 percent of species will go extinct, that agriculture will fail in California, that the American Southwest will be turned into a permanent dust bowl, and that a few billion people in Asia to have no water to live on. And that’s but a sampling of dozens of apocalyptic predictions.

We need to find a new way of living, one that treads lightly on the planet and powers our society with clean, renewable energy. It doesn’t need to be an empty life without meaning. For the west, it will be a test, but one that we can meet. For the developing world, it’s a matter of life and death. I believe that we must not fail them.

Support Waxman-Markey

Right now, if you’re American, the most important thing you can do is to support American Clean Energy and Security Act by writing your state’s representatives in the House. And if you are Canadian, you can work to unseat the federal Conservativess who are bringing us to financial and environmental ruin.

Our window of opportunity is small, and the challenge is great. There is no time to lose.

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*Climate and weather are two different things, and deniers often mistake the two.

I often write that the science supporting global warming is every bit as strong as the science that proves smoking causes cancer. But I then go even further by linking the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, suggesting deeper sins, claiming that oil companies actually stole a page from the tobacco industry by hiring right-wing and libertarian think tanks to confuse the uninitiated. On anti-science web sites, such an argument is called emotional and scientifically dubious.

Well, it is an emotional argument. But it’s also true. I make the link because the two industries are intimately connected, and they’ve made the connection.

Tobacco Ethics

In the 1990s, concerns over secondhand smoke were informing tough new anti-smoking regulations. So the tobacco industry boldly established a number of bogus and phony institutes comprised of sock puppets and tobacco industry public relations experts whose sole job was to convince as many people as they could that the science on secondhand smoke wasn’t conclusive. These groups were in the business of manufacturing doubt.

Even then, the medical evidence that dangerous carcinogens are present in sidestream smoke was overwhelming. As one expert epidemiologist noted at the time, the only way to make the smoking evidence stronger would be to conduct repeated and prolonged forced smoking experiments on human subjects, and measure how many illnesses they suffered as a result.

It’s obvious that tobacco companies don’t give a rat’s ass for the lives they destroyed. Even in 2009, these purveyors of doom and misery are still trying to hook generation after generation both here and in the developing world — they have always preyed upon the poor.

But here’s something so many poorly-informed climate deniers don’t seem to understand. When many of these sock puppets were creating their anything-for-a-buck institutes, they planned for the future. Perhaps knowing that the tobacco fight would soon be lost, they solicited second and third industries to replace the first. They knew that Exxon-Mobil would be happy to work alongside Philip Morris and that both would pay to keep the lights on.

And so when they drew up their tobacco disinformation campaigns, their argument held that second-hand smoke was junk science, no more to be believed than the junk science suggesting that heavy pesticides use is harmful to humans, or the junk science proving that CO2 emissions were warming the planet.

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means for establishing controversy.

• Smoking & Health Proposal • Brown and Williamson

A dozen years later, right-wing think tanks with consequential names like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heartland Institute still run these sophisticated PR campaigns, using a practice now known as astroturfing. The whole point of their tactics are to run interference, and convince enough people that climate scientists are still debating the science of global warming, just as they did 15 years ago with secondhand smoke.

Big Oil and Big Tobacco: Marriage Made in PR Heaven

Every single one of these institutes takes has taken serious money from oil companies, as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Exxon Secrets relate. It should go without saying that in the world of scientific endeavor, this fact alone should marginalize their debating points. If your bills were being paid by ExxonMobil and Shell, are you really likely to write a treatise entitled Goodbye Amsterdam, Mumbai, and Miami?

Yet deniers still hold to discredited orthodoxy, suggesting that the money isn’t the issue, it’s the quality of their research that matters — a courtesy they refuse to extend to other scientists. This position is hopelessly naive. Let’s forget for the moment that these institutes don’t conduct ANY scientific research at all. Let’s judge them by the company they keep, and by the things that they say, and understand that that they’d sell their own mothers to line their pockets.

The Heartland Institute runs the annual International Conference on Climate Change — a skeptics conference in New York — but they’re also the go-to think tank for the tobacco industry. They currently list five tobacco policy experts on their web site, and they are noted repeatedly in Philip Morris documents as playing a crucial role in disinformation campaigns. The Heartland Institute is run by Joseph Bast who has written (in a self-published book) that secondhand smoke isn’t a health issue.

Anti-smoking activists give smokers a stark choice: Stop smoking or die! In fact, there is a third path: Reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous kinds of tobacco products. For example, moving from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes, and from regular to “low tar” cigarettes, both appear to reduce the risk of lung cancer….

And later in the same book:

No victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can “prove” his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.

The Cato Institute is also notable for its ties to big tobacco and big oil. RJ Reynolds documents indicate that the group’s executive have been drafted to support the tobacco industry by writing pro-tobacco editorials, and appearing on television and radio as tobacco experts. The group insists that the cigarettes are unfairly taxed, and that the reported death rate attributed to smoking is wildly inflated. The Cato Institute has also argued that smoking bans infringe on personal liberty, and that health risks from secondhand smoke are debatable.

The Cato Institute employs Steve Milloy, who runs the web site Junk Science, and who moonlights as a pundit on Fox News, so although he’s not a scientist, he does pretend to be one on TV. He equates environmentalism with Nazism, he has worked as a lobbyist for Philip Morris, and for a Morris front group — now defunct — called the The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, so at least we know he has a sense of humor. He also claims that dioxin, pesticides in foods, environmental lead, asbestos, secondhand tobacco smoke and global warming can be categorized as scares and scams, and that all climate scientists at the IPCC are lying in order to attract more funding for their research. Since he has just published a book called Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin your life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, it seems Milloy does know a thing or two about lying to attract more funding.

The American Enterprise Institute charged the tobacco industry $25,000 to write a report supporting their position, and they’ve frequently taken money from major tobacco and oil companies. In 2007, they AEI offered scientists $10,000 to write articles that would “undermine a major climate change report” written by the IPCC. Lee Raymond, former Exxon CEO, is a vice-chairman at the AEI, and several of the policy makers at the AEI have worked for Philip Morris, or for the oil industry.

Over the last few years, new astroturfing sites devoted to climate change have emerged, including the Friends of Science, The Fraser Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute. They do not accept money from the likes of Philip Morris, but they are waist-deep in big oil money, and not surprisingly, do everything they can to the support industries that are driving climate change.

If you think global warming is a scam, then this is the company you keep. And I’m not really sure how you sleep at night.

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You’ll notice an absence of links. Every link that blogs give to a right-wing think tank would boost their web traffic, and I’m not going to help them lie to North Americans.

You’ll also note the many links to Sourcewatch. Might I suggest a donation to support the work they do?

Recent dramatic events in the Arctic and Antarctica are supporting scientists who suggest that the pace of climate change is accelerating. The Arctic ice cap is thinner than ever, with ice older than two years comprising less than 10 percent of the ice cover in measurements from the end of February. The amount of thick sea ice hit a record wintertime low of 378,000 square miles, which is down by 43 percent over the last year. As old ice is the thickest, and slowest-to-melt, it plays a vital role in regulating temperature on Earth.

“That thick ice really traps ocean heat; it keeps the planet in its current state of balance,” says Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief ice scientist. “When we start to diminish that, the state of balance is likely to change, tip one way or another.”

While 2008 was a comparatively cool year worldwide, and 2009 and 2010 predicted to be much warmer, the concern is that arctic sea ice will retreat dramatically — exceeding record losses that occurred over the last two years. Sea ice is important because it reflects sunlight back into space, and helps turn down the Earth’s thermostat. As the ice melts, the dark ocean waters will absorb unprecedented amounts of energy, which will accelerate the thawing of the permafrost, potentially releasing billions of tons of methane ― a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than CO2 — into the atmosphere. Warming begets warming.

In similar news, the map of Antarctica will need to be redrawn, as the thin bridge holding back the Wilkins ice shelf from the sea snapped earlier this week. The Connecticut-sized ice shelf is now expected to disintegrate, turning the Charcot Island into a true island. Although this single event won’t affect sea level, it demonstrates that Antarctica is melting three or four generations ahead of schedule. It also threatens to speed the flow of continental glaciers to the ocean, and that will affect sea level.

________________

* Climate change deniers like to think that we’re heading for another ice age despite all evidence to the contrary. Over the last two years, Arctic amplification has dramatically increased ice melt in the Arctic, but every winter — just as you’d expect — the ice refreezes. And so they run a story every month headlining the dramatic increases in Arctic sea ice over the winter.

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. What matters in the Arctic isn’t the extent of sea ice, but the volume. And the graph above — from researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center explains the problem perfectly.

We have two main problems — and many smaller ones — that occur when arctic sea ice melts. One is that the high arctic has worked as a planetary air conditioner for thousands of years. If you’ve ever gone for a walk on a sunny day following a huge snowstorm, everything is so bright that it hurts your eyes. And that’s because the pristine white snow reflects sunlight. In the arctic, the huge expanse of ice and snow ensures that all that sunlight — and energy — bounces harmlessly off into space. If we lose that ice and snow, the dark matter beneath will absorb heat, and accelerate the planet’s warming significantly.

The second problem is that the high arctic permafrost — in all those famous frozen wastelands like Canada, Siberia, and Alaska — holds an unbelievably large cache of methane and CO2. As the permafrost melts, and bacteria get busy, they could potentially release billions of tons of greenhouse gases — even more than humanity has emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. Once that occurs, all bets are off.

I suspect that it’s already happening. Global methane emissions have spiked ominously, and scientists working in Canada, Alaska, Siberia and the Baltic Sea have measured surging methane levels* from landscapes that were once buried beneath snow and ice. It could be even worse, as Russian scientists have measured huge roiling plumes of methane escaping from the Siberian sea floor, something no one expected would happen for hundreds of years, if ever.

That’s why we need to get our shit together.

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*Unlike CO2, methane has a relatively short lifecycle in the atmosphere. But it also possesses 21 times the greenhouse gas potency of carbon dioxide, so we really don’t want it there.

When I was studying science at Dalhousie, one of my professors was Gordon Ogden who was publishing regularly in scientific journals to warn about the dangers of acid rain. At one lecture, he explained that the pristine lakes and rivers in Nova Scotia — we had a multimillion dollar sport fishery at the time — would die in a generation if more wasn’t done to curb air pollution.

Well, it didn’t take a generation, just a decade. Our lakes and rivers still have fish, but they are few and far between. The acid rain shifted the pH downward by just a smidgen here and there, and now very few Atlantic salmon and trout eggs actually hatch. We no longer have much of a sport fishery, and people in Nova Scotia eat farmed salmon and trout.

We can’t even be blamed for soiling our own nest, as the pollution that killed our lakes and rivers originated in the Ohio industrial belt. But the saddest truth is that we can’t turn back the clock. Reclaiming our lakes and rivers would take more money than our government possesses.

Science is often that lighthouse at the edge the rocky shore. Thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed studies offer proof that global warming is here, and that it’s likely to roll over us if we don’t get our shit together.

And yet there is an entire industry based on denying the science of climate change, and thousands of bloggers have taken up the charge. We can’t call them skeptics, because they’re not, for skeptics are supposed to have an open mind. Skeptics can be convinced by the evidence.

The folks who inhabit the Denialosphere cannot be convinced by any metric. They cling to long-refuted doctrines and seem to believe that all climate scientists are in cahoots, and falsifying data to secure funding.

It’s absurd!

But what to call them? I thought about that this week as I answered a critic who took issue with an earlier post. And later in the day, I came across these two editorials at The Guardian.

From James Randerson.

How do you sum up an intellectual stance that has a pre-conceived position that is unyielding to the most compelling evidence; ignores mounting and alarming data from numerous scientific fields backing up the opposing position; and clutches at the most ephemeral of straws that can be twisted to support its arguments? How to capture the sheer head-in-the-sand-fingers-in-the-ears bloody mindedness?

Let me give you just one example of this mindset. When The Guardian broke the story in December that 2008 would be a relatively cool year by recent standards, the response was predictable and depressing. Wilfully ignoring the fact that this was the tenth hottest year on record and a scorcher by the standards of Charles Dickens’ era, many commentators leapt on the data as incontrovertible proof that climate change has gone into reverse. That was despite the calm words from climate scientists that they had expected 2008 to be a colder blip in the warming trend because of a short term climate phenomenon called La Niña.

How on Earth do we sum up such dim-witted obstinacy in a single phrase?

Climate change fact-ignorers? A little too cumbersome I think. Climate obfuscators? Better, but still not quite right. Climate change creationists. A suggestion from a friend that I believe sums them up perfectly. Although people have linked the two groups before, as far as I can see no one has used the phrase before.

From George Monbiot:

I use the term deniers not because I am seeking to make a link with the Holocaust, but because I can’t think what else to call them. They describe themselves as sceptics, but this is plainly wrong, as they will believe any old rubbish that suits their cause. They will argue, for example, that a single weather event in one part of the world is evidence of global cooling; that the earth is warming up because of cosmic rays and that the Antarctic is melting as a result of volcanoes under the ice. No explanation is too bonkers for them, as long as it delivers the goods.

The OED defines a sceptic as, “A seeker after truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite conclusions.” This is the opposite of what people like Booker, Bellamy and Tomlinson are. They have their definite conclusion and will defend it against all comers, however many inconvenient truths might stand in the way.

There is another class of people, whose materials these independent deniers often use: those who are paid by corporations to defend definite conclusions. I have documented this trade extensively (see also my book Heat). But many of these people still masquerade as free thinkers. Earlier this month, for example, the Guardian’s Comment is Free site published an article by Patrick Michaels. The Guardian described him as “a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes“. What it didn’t say is that he has been paid extremely well in the recent past to promote the views he expressed here by interests which, as far as I can discover, he has never voluntarily disclosed.

Take a look at this leaked memo circulated by the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) in 2006. IREA transmits electricity – most of which is produced by coal-burning power stations – across the US midwest.

The memo reveals that IREA was about to start buying electricity from a new coal-fired plant, replacing some of the gas production it was using before. But the cost advantages would be wiped out if a carbon tax were imposed. In the hope of averting this prospect, IREA had:

decided to support Dr Patrick Michaels and his group (New Hope Environmental Services, Inc). Dr Michaels has been supported by electric cooperatives in the past and also receives financial support from other sources … In February of this year IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels. In addition we have contacted all the G&T’s [generators and transmitters of electricity] in the United States and as of the writing of this letter, we have obtained additional contributions and pledges for Dr Michaels group.

I posted this information up in the comment thread following Dr Michaels’s article, but it was deleted by the moderator. I’m not sure why.

Whether we’re talking about people who are paid to deny that climate change is happening, or those who use the materials these flacks produce, denial is a precise and concise description of what they do. Their attempt to wriggle out of it by insisting that – by calling them what they are – we are somehow debasing the Holocaust is as contrived as all the other positions they take. We shouldn’t fall for it.

“I think you have to think about this stuff as more like nuclear waste than acid rain: The more we add, the worse off we’ll be,” NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon told reporters in a conference call. “The more time that we take to make decisions about carbon dioxide, the more irreversible climate change we’ll be locked into.”

The reasons are simple. The earth is more than 70% water, and humanity is current being saved by the ocean’s ability to absorb heat and CO2. It’s the reason why global warming hasn’t been more dramatic. But this natural mitigation will eventually reverse, boosting temperatures and CO2 emissions, and that process will bring an incredible rise in sea level, and droughts that will turn some of the world’s most productive farmlands in North America and Europe into dust bowls and deserts.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years,” she says. “What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years.”

Solomon believes that continuing business-as-usual for another two decades will be all we need to make such devastation unavoidable. Her study undercuts the assumption made in many quarters that some future technology will compensate for inaction today.

(Source: NPR, Washington Post, NOAA).

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* The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also carried a study in this issue which suggests that Antarctica’s emperor penguins — featured in the wondering documentary March of the Penguins — will likely be extinct by 2100 because their habitat is melting.

** Solomon is a Nobel laureate who also holds the US National Medal of Science, the Great Medal of the Academy of Sciences of France and the Blue Planet Prize.

It’s called the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, and it’s an economic paradox. But as soon as you hear it, you’ll know instinctively that it’s real, and it’s a serious problem for the climate change movement. It’s also the reason why we need strong governments and bullet-proof legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We simply cannot depend upon industry or individuals to do the right thing, to make the choices that will stop greenhouse gases from crisping our world in 30 years.

We need determined governments in the west to impose graduated carbon taxes, so we can immediately start investing in green technologies. And we need governments to set limits — firm limits. We need them to say to industry that you must abide by this cap, that you can go this far, and no further, and if you don’t listen, your products will be taxed so hard that no one will buy them.

Governments start by defining society’s intentions. We tell car manufacturers, for example, that in three years, we need cars to use 10 per cent less gas. In five years, efficiency needs to improve by 20 per cent. And every year, we increase fuel taxes, step by step. So people have a roadmap, and they can make plans, and buy accordingly.

We challenge industry to get green and get creative, or they’ll be left behind. We don’t step back, we don’t accept failure.

It doesn’t mean that your taxes go through the roof, unless you’re wasteful. If you know what’s coming down the pike, you can choose to buy a fuel-efficient cars and insulate your homes. You can wear sweaters indoors, and invest in (carbon-neutral) Cogeneration units that burn biomass, and operate at 85 percent efficiency — or better.* And with carbon taxes in the treasury, our government starts building the infrastructure that will allow us leave our cars at home, and heat our homes with renewable energy created by wind, sun, and waves.

Heavily polluting industries will pay heavy taxes, but government doesn’t keep that money; it returns it to industry in the form of grants and programs that will help those businesses clean up their act. Our utilities would be required to invest heavily in energy efficiency programs that will help their customers save money, which cuts demand, and obviates the need for more power plants. As a reward, utilities keep some of those savings to protect their bottom line, and their corporate tax rate decreases.

It works. It’s working in many progressive countries, but even the best energy-efficiency programs in the world will come to naught unless we cap our CO2 emissions.

You see, if we start making our world more efficient, the sad truth is that people and businesses will start using more energy. If you have a car that gets 100 mpg in the city, then you might not think twice about zooming to the corner newsstand on a rainy day to pick up a magazine, or going for a 3-hour drive on a lovely Sunday afternoon.

It’s the same with business.

If a corporation starts generating 25 per cent of its energy from renewables, and waste heat further cuts their electrical bill by 10 percent, that company will find that — once its costs are covered — new opportunities come knocking. Product Alpha might have been too expensive to produce under the old regimen, but once corporate energy costs are reduced by 20 per cent, the folks in marketing believe that the world will beat a path to their door. Profits are simply too intoxicating.

In a free market, as efficiencies are introduced into the system, demand for energy will actually increase. We have Daniel Khazzoom and Len Brookes to thank for the theory.

We have human nature to thank for the truth of it.

History provides thousands of examples. In 1712, the first steam engine operated at 0.5 per cent efficiency. Today’s diesels are 100 times better. And yet energy use continues to grow year by year. When the amount of coal required to produce a ton of steel dropped by 66 per cent, it resulted in a ten-fold increase in coal production.

And that’s why a free marketplace — and clean technology — won’t save the world. And that’s why the strong governments we saw during the last world war are needed again.

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* And since a biomass-powered cogeneration unit is carbon-neutral, it would attract no carbon taxes! That just one example of how we can make it work.