Japanese Scientists Publish Results From "Scientific" Whaling Program

Japan has been roundly criticized by many commentators over the past two decades for it's “scientific” whaling program, with many saying the program is no more than commercial whale hunting in disguise. Japanese scientists have finally published data from this program in Popular Biology, and their findings aren’t good: whales are getting skinnier, and global warming might be at fault:

Japan's scientists claim their controversial whaling programme has produced a key finding. Measurements taken from more than 4,500 minke whales slaughtered since the late 1980s reveal the animals have lost significant amounts of blubber, and are getting thinner at a worrying speed. The team says its study offers the first evidence that global warming could be harming whales, because it restricts their food supplies.

It seems equally likely that chronic overfishing has also played some part in the decrease in food available to whales as well, but this is not mentioned in the article.

These aren't the first published results from the "scientific whaling" program, but these are the most high-profile findings so far. In 2005 Australian scientist Nicholas Gale analyzed 43 scientific papers produced by the program and concluded that only a handful were relevant and required the whales to have been killed. The others included descriptions of bizarre experiments to cross-fertilize whales with sheep and cows.

Climate Change "Skeptic" Admits He Was Wrong.

James Hrynyshyn at The Island of Doubt has a post up this morning which describes a rapid about-face performed by climate change denialist Steven Goddard of The Register.

We all make mistakes. And even the most humble among us can be a little self-righteous when it comes to our pet projects. But when was the last time you came across a self-righteous pseudo-skeptic who had the decency to admit to getting it completely wrong? Meet Steven Goddard of The Register, a peculiar little news outlet published in London. Sort of. Goddard wrote a piece that appeared on Aug. 15 under the bold headline "Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered." As anyone who has been following the plunging arctic sea-ice extent graphs at the National Sea Ice Data Center can attest, this is a rather peculiar interpretation of the data.

Goddard's article was riddled with errors of science and made clear his lack of familiarity with the subject. This prompted actual experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to offer a rebuttal:

The author asserts that NSIDC's estimate of a 10% increase in sea ice compared to the same time as last year is wrong. Mr. Goddard does his own analysis, based on images from the University of Illinois' Cryosphere Today web site, and comes up with a number of ~30%, three times larger than NSIDC's estimate. He appears to derive his estimate by simply counting pixels in an image. He recognizes that this results in an error due to the distortion by the map projection, but does so anyway. Such an approach is simply not valid.

The proper way to calculate a comparison of ice coverage is by actually weighting the pixels by their based on the map projection, which is exactly what NSIDC does.

Thankfully Steven Goddard had the intellectual honesty to admit his error in an addendum to the original article:

"Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC has convinced me this week that their ice extent numbers are solid. So why the large discrepancy between their graphs and the UIUC maps? I went back and compared UIUC maps vs. NASA satellite photos from the same dates last summer. It turns out that the older UIUC maps had underrepresented the amount of low concentration ice in several regions of the Arctic. This summer, their maps do not have that same error. As a result, UIUC maps show a much greater increase in the amount of ice this year than does NSIDC. And thus the explanation of the discrepancy.

"it is clear that the NSIDC graph is correct, and that 2008 Arctic ice is barely 10% above last year - just as NSIDC had stated."

Unfortunately the original error-riddled article was immediately seized as evidence that the science of global climate change is built on shaky ground and the myth rapidly metastasized around the internet. A quick Google search reveals 55,300 hits for the phrase "Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered".
I wonder how many of those denialists who trumpeted the original article will have Steven Goddard's intellectual honesty and will print a retraction...

Exxon-Mobil and Climate Change Deniers

From David McKnight in The Age this morning:

In May this year, the multibillion-dollar oil giant Exxon-Mobil ... announced that it would cease funding nine groups that had fuelled a global campaign to deny climate change.
Exxon's decision comes after a shareholder revolt by members of the Rockefeller family and big superannuation funds to get the oil giant to take climate change more seriously. Exxon (once Standard Oil) was founded by the legendary John D. Rockefeller. Last year, the chairman of the US House of Representatives oversight committee on science and technology, Brad Miller, said Exxon's support for sceptics "appears to be an effort to distort public discussion".

The article mentions several climate change denialist groups that have been funded by Exxon-Mobil in recent times, including the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute made headlines recently with its release of a paper challenging global warming theory, citing 500 climate scientists as "co-authors". Many of these so-called "co-authors were horrified to find their names attached to this work and claimed that it grossly misrepresented their findings. Some of the scientists proved to be dead or imaginary.

Five New Zealander scientists released a statement saying that they "strongly object to the implication that they support Heartland’s position." One of these scientists was Dr Jim Salinger of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA):

"Global warming is real," he said, and demanded reference to his work be removed. The institute refused. The Heartland Institute received almost $800,000 from Exxon, according to Greenpeace's research based on Exxon's corporate giving disclosures.

David McKnight - associate professor at the University of New South Wales - also says in his article:

In Australia, the main group that tries to undermine the science of global warming is the Lavoisier Group. It maintains a website with links to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (over $2 million from Exxon), Science and Environmental Policy Project ($20,000) and the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide (at least $100,000).

The Lavoisier Group webpage contains (amongst other gems) a link to a paper which recycles many of the same old denialist talking points. All of those raised are refuted here on the New Scientist website. If I were Exxon-Mobil I would have wanted to get slightly more for my $2 million than that recycled nonsense.

Perhaps they did. There has certainly been a marked increase in denialist letters to the editor and editorials in Australian newspapers in the last few weeks. This follows a poll indicating that 60% of Australian voters support the introduction of a cabon emissions trading scheme "regardless of what other countries do", while 23% support a scheme "if other countries act".

When asked if climate change was caused by human activity, 96 per cent said it was entirely or partly caused by human activity; 84 per cent believed climate change was currently occurring.

UPDATE: Exxon-Mobil yesterday reported the largest quarterly operating profit in US corporate history.

Scientists Slam Climate Change Deniers

New Zealand's national science academy, the Royal Society (RSNZ), has challenged climate change "deniers", issuing a statement declaring unequivocally that the globe is warming and that humans are to blame.

"The globe is warming because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions," the society said, reporting the findings of an expert committee on climate.

In summary, the statement says:

The globe is warming because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Measurements show that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are well above levels seen for many thousands of years. Further global climate changes are predicted, with impacts expected to become more costly as time progresses. Reducing future impacts of climate change will require substantial reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Royal Society is charged by its Act with informing the public about science, and fostering evidence-based scientific debate.  We hope this statement makes a useful contribution to public understanding of climate change.

 

The full statement is available at the RSNZ website.

Carbon Trading and Biodiversity Credits

Conservation biology began life as a crisis discipline, its central tenet to understand and help reverse losses of biodiversity and habitat (Armsworth et al 2007) . Those losses of biodiversity and habitat continue today, implying that conservation biology is not achieving its central aim. New tools for protecting habitat and biodiversity are urgently required if these losses are to be halted.

Carbon trading is an administrative approach used to control carbon emissions by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of carbon. Carbon trading was introduced as part of the Kyoto Protocol's goal to reduce industrial nations' greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. The idea was that countries whose emissions fall under the emissions cap - the permitted level of CO2 equivalent emissions per year - could then sell those carbon credits to countries who are not able to meet their own caps.

An article in the June 2008 issue of Conservation Biology - Using Carbon Investment to Grow the Biodiversity Bank (Bekesy and Wintle 2008) - contains a novel and exciting proposal for halting biodiversity losses through a capped carbon trading regime. The authors propose simply that:

...investors should be allowed to reap the dual benefits of carbon and biodiversity credits from one parcel of land and those credits could later be traded on the relevant markets.

This is proposed as a response to the current approaches to carbon emissions offsetting which rely largely on investment in monoculture plantations. The authors go on to say that:

[the proposed scheme is] ...more robust to uncertainty about carbon sequestration and is guaranteed to have broad environmental benefits, including restoration of degraded natural systems and endangered species habitats. The proposed scheme provides a mechanism for investing in the world's most threatened ecosystems that makes carbon, biodiversity, and financial sense.

This is topical at the moment due to a convergence of a number of powerful factors: In 2007 Rupert Murdoch declared that News Corporation would be carbon neutral across all of its businesses by 2010, committing to reducing and offsetting its greenhouse gas emissions. This follows commitments by the World Bank Group, Formula One, and VirginBlue, among other large economic interests. On 30 April 2007 Australia's Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments commissioned an independent study by Professor Ross Garnaut into the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy. The Garnaut Review's Final Report is due on 30 September 2008, with a Draft Report due by 30 June 2008. The review will recommend medium to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity. The New Zealand Government currently has a bill for emissions trading schemes before a select committee. Various reports by a range of groups support the scheme but differ in opinion as to how it should be implemented, and the proposed bill appears to currently be stalled in parliament without sufficient votes to pass in it's current form.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review's approach to climate change mitigation was initially set out in the Interim Report released in February 2008. That report stated that:

Australia must now put in place effective policies to achieve major reductions in emissions. The emissions trading scheme (ETS) is the centre-piece of a domestic mitigation strategy.

That proposed ETS was described in a discussion paper released in March 2008. Public forums on the Draft Report will be held in a number of capital cities across Australia from 7 to 11 July 2008. These public forums appear to be an ideal place for the powerful idea of biodiversity credits tied to carbon trading to be raised and debated in public.

References:

Armsworth PR, Chan KMA, Daily GC, Ehrlich PR, Kremen C, Ricketts TH, Sanjayan MA (2007) Ecosystem-Service Science and the Way Forward for Conservation Conservation Biology 21 (6), 1383-1384.

Bekesy and Wintle (2008) Using Carbon Investment to Grow the Biodiversity Bank Conservation Biology 22 (3), 510-513

Global Warming Bill Blocked in Senate

On Friday United States Senators from the Republican Party blocked a global warming bill that would have required major reductions in greenhouse gases, after a bitter debate over its economic costs and whether it would substantially raise gasoline and other energy prices.

The Environmental Law Prof Blog has a good run down of what the bill proposed, including:

• Capped annual US greenhouse emissions at 5775 million tons in 2012, reducing the cap every year until it reaches 1732 in 2050 -- a 70% reduction from projected 2012 emissions
• An advanced clean fuel efficiency standard
• A carbon duty or tariff placed on covered goods from countries that don't make a comparable effort to the United States
• A Climate Change Worker Training and Assistance Fund
• A Consumer Assistance Fund
• A Transportation Emission Reduction Fund
• A Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program
• An Efficient Energy Use Program
• A Zero or Low Carbon Generation Technology Fund
• A Carbon Sequestration and Storage Early Deployment Program

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a prominent coal-producing state, argued that the bill was a huge tax increase. He maintained that the proposed system of allowing widespread trading of carbon emissions allowances would produce "the largest restructuring of the American economy since the New Deal." Supporters of the bill accused Republicans of muddying the water with misinformation.

Even as this bill died however, other approaches to federal climate action had already begun to appear. James Hansen, the NASA climate expert who has long been a leader and spokesman for global warming campaigners, has strongly endorsed a variant on the “cap and dividend” system for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions (different from the “cap and trade” mechanism in the blocked bill, which would invest revenue in various programs, with little money returning directly to taxpayers.)

“Carbon tax and 100% dividend” is spurred by the recent “carbon cap” discussion of Peter Barnes and others.... A tax on coal, oil and gas is simple. It can be collected at the first point of sale within the country or at the last (e.g., at the gas pump), but it can be collected easily and reliably....

The entire carbon tax should be returned to the public, with a monthly deposit to their bank accounts, an equal share to each person (if no bank account provided, an annual check — social security number must be provided). No bureaucracy is needed to figure this out. If the initial carbon tax averages $1,200 per person per year, $100 is deposited in each account each month....

The worst thing about the present inadequate political approach is that it will generate public backlash. Taxes will increase, with no apparent benefit. The reaction would likely delay effective emission reductions, so as to practically guarantee that climate would pass tipping points with devastating consequences for nature and humanity.

Carbon tax and 100% dividend, on the contrary, will be a breath of fresh air, a boon and boom for the economy. The tax is progressive, the poorest benefiting most, with profligate energy users forced to pay for their excesses. Incidentally, it will yield strong incentive for aliens to become legal; otherwise they receive no dividend while paying the same carbon tax rate as everyone.

It seems clear that some sort of emissions capping mechanism is urgently needed to force the industry to embrace clean energy technologies. Implementing whatever carbon-pricing mechanism we settle on may make the technological challenges seem trivial by comparison however. An interesting looking recent book by Krupp and Horn recounts a conversion with Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, in which he senator was explaining why he votes for such ludicrous subsidies to corn-based ethanol, despite its drawbacks a clean fuel. The response? "It's 28 votes, the strongest lobby in the nation."