Category Archives: Warming Nights

Chris Coleman on right path to reduce St. Paul emissions

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New St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman kept a campaign pledge by signing the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement committing the city to align itself with the Kyoto accords. According to an article in the Strib:

The agreement will require the city, by 2012, to reduce pollution from cars and power plants to 1990 levels. What the city must do to get there will be hammered out in the next six months.

“We no longer can pretend this is not a serious issue or one that we don’t need to address,” Coleman said.

Although his predecessor, Randy Kelly, criticized the agreement during the 2005 campaign as “useless symbolism,” Coleman defended it as a way to try to “force leadership on a national level.”

Coleman joined mayors in 200 cities around the country who have signed the agreement, including those in Minneapolis, Apple Valley, Eden Prairie and Duluth.

The agreement challenges cities to meet or beat the conditions of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to address climate change that took effect in February 2005.

People say Coleman will be spectacularly ineffective but I think he can really pull this off. By the time he institutes smoking bans in private businesses and raises taxes to pay for the environmentally friendly initiatives he’ll have so gutted the city that hitting the emissions targets will be a snap. Think of it, no reason to go downtown, so fewer cars — and just think about how nice it will be without all those people exhaling carbon dioxide everywhere! Furthermore with less business and fewer people there’ll be less need for power and therefore fewer nasty power plant emissions!

Another one of the objectives from the agreement is to “reduce sprawl and increase open space.” Done! There will be lots of wide, open space in St. Paul.

Oh well, I suppose I need to be more realistic. Given the “success” that those progressive and green-thinking Europeans have had in meeting (not) their targets (see here) the objectives won’t be reached. Not that the city won’t die trying, though.

If Coleman is really serious about cutting emissions in our capitol city a good start would be cutting the amount of time the state legislature is in session by half. Signing a decree to that effect will have about as much impact as what he signed yesterday.

Animal, vegetable or liberal

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As they used to say on the X-files, “the truth is out there.” And with a little surfing around the Web you find … coincidence, or synchronicity?

From The Borowtiz Report:

SEN. BIDEN PRODUCING DANGEROUSLY HIGH LEVELS OF CARBON DIOXIDE
Talkative Lawmaker Creating Environmental Threat, Scientists Fear
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who has dominated this week’s confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito with his seemingly nonstop talking, is producing dangerously high level of carbon dioxide that could pose a serious environmental threat, leading scientists said today.

While many observers have found Sen. Biden’s interminable orating tedious and wearisome, few suspected that the lawmaker was producing gases that could threaten the ecological balance of the planet.

But at a conference in Oslo, Norway devoted to the environmental challenges posed by Sen. Biden’s endless nattering, scientists today said that the Delaware Democrat was producing levels of carbon dioxide that could prove harmful to many of the earth’s species.

“Carbon dioxide is a necessary part of the photosynthetic process that allows plants to grow,” said the University of Tokyo’s Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke. “But the massive amounts of carbon dioxide produced by Joe Biden could prove to be too much for even the hardiest vegetation to process.”

Ha-ha, good parody of Biden and global warming news stories. Or maybe it isn’t a parody after seeing this real story from Yahoo News (HT: Psycmeistr’s Ice Palace):

New source of global warming gas found: plants
LONDON (Reuters) – German scientists have discovered a new source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in its impact on climate change

The culprits are plants.

They produce about 10 to 30 percent of the annual methane found in the atmosphere, according to researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.

The scientists measured the amount of methane released by plants in controlled experiments. They found it increases with rising temperatures and exposure to sunlight.

“Significant methane emissions from both intact plants and detached leaves were observed … in the laboratory and in the field,” Dr Frank Keppler and his team said in a report in the journal Nature.

Methane, which is produced by city rubbish dumps, coal mining, flatulent animals, rice cultivation and peat bogs, is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in terms of its ability to trap heat.

Concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere have almost tripled in the last 150 years. About 600 million tonnes worldwide are produced annually.

The scientists said their finding is important for understanding the link between global warming and a rise in greenhouse gases.

The evidence is conclusive; Sen. Joe Biden is a vegetable (further testing will need to be done, but I’m guessing he’s either lima bean or rutabaga.) He must be stopped if the world is to be saved!

A real paper chase

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The National Center for Public Policy Research is attending the UN Climate Change Conferences in Montreal and distributing “emissions credits” — printed on toilet paper.

I’m guessing that there are more than a few flushed faces around the table as a result.

Policy Group Distributes Toilet Paper ‘Emissions Credits’ at U.N. Global Warming Conference

Montreal, Canada – The National Center for Public Policy Research is handing out “emissions credits” printed on toilet paper at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal today, to symbolize the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the futility of emissions trading schemes.

Under the European Union’s “CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme,” companies are allotted credits that allow them to emit a fixed amount of carbon dioxide. Companies that reduce their carbon dioxide output, and thus don’t use all of their credits, can sell them to companies who are exceeding their C02 allotments.

As the flawed Kyoto treaty is all but dead, emissions credits aren’t likely to be of any value in the future.

“Emissions credits aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on,” said David Ridenour, Vice President of The National Center, “Unless, of course, that paper happens to be toilet paper.”

Read the whole story and see a picture here.

Reason, facts gone with the wind?

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The Missing Link isn’t just bedeviling evolutionary theory, but could be a problem for those trying to connect increased hurricane activity with global warming. As this National Center article by David Ridenour describes, the global warming/hurricane link may just be hot air:

An August article in the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “As the United States experiences more… out-of-season hurricanes like this summer’s, more Americans will recognize what the rest of the world has long accepted: Global warming is here, it will get worse…”1

This analysis has a critical flaw: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30.2

That would make summer hurricanes in-season, wouldn’t it?

And there’s another little problem with the Chronicle warning: Much of the global warming that occurred during the last century occurred from 1900-1940, followed by a cooling period that lasted from about 1940 to 1975.

A comparison of hurricane severity against the warming/cooling trends finds that we had an above average number of hurricanes in the 50s and 60s – when the Earth was cooling.

Hurricane severity is governed by a natural Atlantic Ocean temperature cycle that lasts decades. Following the identified pattern, Atlantic hurricanes were especially prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, were less so from about 1970 to 1994, and, since 1995, have been prevalent again.3

Talk of a link between global warming and increased incidence of hurricanes is just hot air, nothing more.

As Christopher W. Landsea, a scientist with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, has noted, “It is highly unlikely that global warming has (or will) contribute to a drastic change in the number and intensity of hurricanes.”

Landsea found that the number of intense hurricanes (those reaching Saffir-Simpson scale ratings of 3, 4, or 5) actually decreased in the Atlantic during the 1970s and 1980s.4 And from 1991 to 1994, the Atlantic had fewer hurricanes than any four-year period on record, with an average of less than four hurricanes per year.5

The article shows that while there has been more activity the last couple of years, the most severe storms have been in the past. The most intense hurricanes according to barometric pressure were the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Camille in 1969 (Katrina is third). If you go by wind speed at landfall, Camille, Andrew (1992) and the 1935 hurricane were the worst. In terms of lives lost, the Galveston Hurricane (1900) and Okeechobee Hurricane (1928) were more more devastating than Katrina (it could be argued on this count that there was less warning in the 1900 and 1928 hurricanes which may have contributed to higher death tolls; as Katrina showed, however, having plenty of warning may be of limited value).

There is also evidence that warmer weather may actually reduce hurricane activity.

Even if the planet does eventually warm, it’s not clear that either the incidence or intensity of hurricanes would increase.

Patrick Michaels, a research professor in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, has noted, “Atlantic hurricanes are much more delicate than their destruction suggests. One thing they cannot tolerate is a west wind blowing into them because it wrecks their symmetry. As a result, their maximum winds decline.”9

These are precisely the conditions that exist during El Ninos – weather phenomena that some scientists believe increase with rising global temperatures.

If they are right, this would mean that global warming might be expected to result in less severe hurricanes.

Other studies suggest that higher global temperatures would also result in fewer hurricanes.

A 1990 study of temperature data by Drs. Robert Balling, Sherwood Idso and Randall Cerveny spanning 41 years found that the warmest years had fewer hurricane days, on average, than the coldest years.

These findings are consistent with the earlier historical record. The most severe storms in the North Sea, for example, occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, after the onset of the Little Ice Age.10

Nature, not man-made global warming, causes hurricanes.

My father has been known to describe certain people as being “Windier than a sackful of…” well, I won’t use that kind of language on this blog. The description may be more than apt in describing the warming-mongers who may be more interested in “cause and elect” than “cause and effect.”

Follow the link and read the entire article (HT: Amy Ridenour). An interesting and humorous historical analysis can also be found here.