India rejects climate doom, pursues economic boom

Posted on July 26, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 26, 2008

India loves the UN’s climate change policies and so does India’s representative at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri.

Why the love-in? The Indian government’s new “National Action Plan on Climate Change,” which Pachauri helped craft, plainly explains why: The UN formally establishes that global warming is a matter of secondary importance to India, allowing the world’s largest democracy to pursue its own best interests.

As the National Action Plan unapologetically puts it, the UN’s climate change convention “recognizes that ‘economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country parties.’ Thus, developing countries are not required to divert resources from development priorities by implementing projects involving incremental costs.”

And India doesn’t. Throughout its National Action Plan, India demonstrates that it will divert precious little of its scarce resources to solving the climate crisis. Where greenhouse gases will be curbed — for example, by aggressively building hydro dams or modernizing industry — the curbs will be a by-product of India’s national security concerns or economic development plans.

The UN’s climate change convention is even better than that — it’s a money-maker for India and a lever with which to obtain western technology. As the Action Plan makes clear, there’s only one condition under which India need spend a upee to help curb global warming “– (if) these incremental costs are borne by developed countries and the needed technologies are transferred.”

Apart from wanting to develop, and wanting transfers of western wealth, the Indian government has one other reason for putting global warming on the back burner — although it agrees that climate change may one day pose a threat, the National Action Plan states boldly that man-made global warming may not exist, and that if it does exist, its existence may be of no account to India.

“No firm link between the changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established,” the report states matter-of-factly, before proceeding to list the areas in which the science is not settled.

Parts of India have warmed, the Action Plan explains, and parts have cooled. Monsoon rains have increased in some areas and decreased in others. There have been no marked long-term trends in droughts or floods. Some regions have had a greater and others a lesser frequency of severe storms. Neither do the Himalayan glaciers demonstrate any consistent trend.

The upshot? With climate change such an ephemeral threat, why spend money on this possible non-event. Much better to focus on maximizing wealth and health.

The prescription? Grow the economy as fast as one billion people can possibly manage by building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants — India is planning a five-fold increase by 2030, making it the world’s third largest CO2 producer.

This National Action Plan is no ordinary report from a low-level government bureaucracy. It was commissioned last year by the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, chaired by the Prime Minister of India himself, and has the imprimatur of both the Government of India and the Prime Minister’s council.

Neither is Rajendra Pachauri an ordinary government representative at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is its chairman, in effect the world’s most senior climate change official. As such, he has been a vehement defender of the UN Panel’s position, brooking no dissent from the view that time was short if the planet was to avert climate change catastrophe. As one example, when the mild-mannered Danish statistician Bjorn Lomberg, a believer in man-made climate change, concluded that climate change was unlikely to cause catastrophe, Pachauri likened him to Hitler.

How did Pachauri react when his own prime minister, and the government that he represents at the UN, not only downplayed man-made global warming but positively asserted that there is no proof for it?

He vehemently endorsed his Prime Minister’s National Action Plan. “We are an expanding economy. How can we levy a cap [on CO2 emissions] when millions are living with deprivation?,” he told the Indian press. The National Action Plan should be implemented and the west should “get off the back of India.”

Posted in Coal, Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Radioactive part was missing at Bruce plant

Posted on July 26, 2008 by energyprbe

Tyler Hamilton
Toronto Star
July 26, 2008

A radioactive part was missing for almost two months at the Bruce nuclear plant before a worker walking through an area called “the vault” discovered the problem after his radiation detector went off.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which misplaced the part while working on the multi-billion-dollar restart of the plant, failed to notify officials at Bruce Power about the incident.

The federal nuclear regulator wants to know why the loss of the part was kept quiet until it was accidentally discovered.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission said Bruce Power has until Aug. 8 to file a detailed report of what happened at Unit 2. Industry experts say it’s just the latest in a string of events that reflect poorly on AECL.

“AECL became aware of the problem on April 23 that a calandria tube insert was unaccounted for, however they failed to notify the RP (radiation protection) department of this fact,” according to an incident briefing filed on June 24 by Bruce Power to the regulator. “The increased hazard would have existed from that time.”

The document said the worker, who discovered the radioactive part on June 22, followed proper procedure and kept his radiation exposure to safe limits.

The reactor contains hundreds of calandria tubes, which contain heavy water. Collectively, these metal tubes form the core of a Candu nuclear reactor.

Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive officer of Bruce Power, dismissed the seriousness of the incident when contacted by the Star. “It’s not a story,” he said. “It’s a bull—- story. There is no issue.”

Federally owned AECL is a key contractor in the Bruce restart project and a supplier of Candu reactor technology that lies at the heart of all nuclear plants in Ontario. Spokesperson Dale Coffin acknowledged it took too long for the company to alert officials.

“We’re disappointed we didn’t notify Bruce Power sooner,” he said.

Coffin explained that the work AECL was doing is all automated, done by remote control outside of the vault area and monitored through TV cameras. A robot removes and destroys the old calandria tubes and tube inserts, which are chopped up and disposed of in a shielded waste bin. A single reactor has 960 metal tube inserts.

He said the company was aware of an “accounting discrepancy” with regards to the parts that were handled.

“We were going back and verifying whether or not (the part) was still in the tube or placed in the bin. It did not add up. We were in the process of verifying that,” Coffin said.

Frank Greening, a nuclear scientist and consultant with more than three decades of industry experience, equated the incident to a doctor leaving a scalpel inside a patient, knowing about it, but taking two months before saying anything.

“They seem to have a habit of not reporting stuff, then they have to talk their way out of it when it finally is reported,” he said. “There’s a bit of a pattern here of sloppy bookkeeping and reporting.”

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research at Energy Probe, which is critical of nuclear power, said it’s standard practice to immediately report such events. “Obviously, things that are carcinogenic and lethal shouldn’t be left around, no matter what field you’re in,” said Rubin.

Bruce Power is trying to restart reactor units 1 and 2 at its Bruce A site, a project originally estimated at $2.75 billion. The nuclear power generator is now expecting costs in the range of $3.1 billion to $3.4 billion under a contract with the government that will see Ontario electricity consumers pay for $237.5 million of budget overruns so far.

TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., a financial partner in the Bruce restart project, told shareholders in April that AECL has been largely responsible for the delay and added rebuilding costs.

AECL is among three bidders hoping to win the chance to build two new nuclear reactors at the Darlington site, a decision the Ontario government yesterday delayed by three months to March 2009.

The incident at Bruce is just the latest in a series of troubles for the Crown corporation, currently the subject of a federal government review that could result in its privatization.

Last November, AECL’s research reactor at its Chalk River laboratory was shut down after regulators found problems with an emergency backup system. This led to a prolonged outage that put the world’s medical isotope supply at risk and resulted in the federal government bypassing the authority of the regulator.

Earlier this month, life sciences companies MDS Inc. launched a $1.6 billion lawsuit against AECL after it decided to cancel a 12-year-old project for two new research reactors at Chalk River. Those reactors were supposed to guarantee a long-term supply of medical isotopes to MDS but AECL couldn’t get them to work properly.

Read the article here.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Safety | Leave a comment

You can’t have your yellowcake and hide it

Posted on July 15, 2008 by energyprbe

Energy Probe

July 15, 2008

“The international trade in nuclear materials and technology is inherently and uniquely fraught with long-term hazards to world peace and security.”

Energy Probe‘s Norman Rubin made an appearance in a recent report by Global-TV on the delivery this month of 550 metric tons of Iraqi yellowcake uranium to the Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp. The yellowcake, described as the last remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arms program, was bought by Cameco from the United States for a reported sum in the tens of millions of dollars.

Norm’s points of interest concerning the yellowcake deal follow below and include news angles that were not touched on by the Global-TV report and that have yet to be followed up by other media outlets.

According to Norm, although Cameco “solved’ a potential nuclear-proliferation problem by getting some uranium out of unstable Iraq, Cameco and others are selling these same materials to countries that will probably become unstable in the future — long before the uranium itself becomes safe. (Says Norm: the Uranium-235 isotope boasts a billion-year half-life, so the ‘hazard’ can wait).

Norm argues that although the origin of the uranium yellowcake has not been revealed, what is clear is that Canada has long been willing to sell uranium and other nuclear materials and technology to Iraq, making Canada a possible source of origin, perhaps even Cameco itself, or one of its predecessor companies! Atomic Energy Canada Limited competed with France to sell Saddam-era Iraq the Osiraq research reactor — the same reactor destroyed by Israeli fighter pilots in the 1980s. In fact, says Norm, one source quotes a French nuclear official as saying that Canada’s AECL had even promoted the superior plutonium producing advantage of the Canadian design as a selling point.

The Associated Press story that has served as the basis for most coverage of the Iraqi yellowcake deal reports (and it’s the first time I’ve seen it reported – Norm) that Iraq also received four highly radioactive gamma sources from Canada’s MDS Nordion (presumably the radioactive isotope cobalt-60, which can be used directly for the making of a ‘dirty bomb’). These were reportedly removed from Iraq earlier in 2008 and returned to Nordion in Canada, by the US military.

Rather than neutralizing the threat, using yellowcake to make fuel for a civilian reactor makes the material more nuclear-weapons-usable (and therefore more ‘dirty bombs’ usable), says Norm. Specifically, he says, the used reactor fuel that it produces contains “almost 1000 bombs’-worth of plutonium.” Extracting the plutonium for use in a nuclear bomb is technically much simpler than turning yellowcake into any other kind of weapons material. But even though plutonium’s half-life to safety is a ‘mere’ 24,000 years, that’s still long enough a wait for even Canada to have become destabilized, nuclear-militaristic, or similar.

In short, says Norm, “the international trade in nuclear materials and technology is inherently and uniquely fraught with long-term hazards to world peace and security.”

Norm notes that yellowcake — a very crude form of uranium, neither extremely hazardous nor especially easy to use for nuclear weapons — isn’t usually shipped with top-secret ultra-secure handling. But for some reason, the Iraqi yellowcake was. Perhaps, says Norm, “to give the erroneous impression that it was connected somehow to Saddam’s non-existent post-Gulf-War stockpile of WMDs?”

One angle to this sale that has yet to be explored: Cameco is currently a willing buyer of uranium, partly because its output has nosedived since the 2006 flooding of its huge Cigar Lake mine in northern Saskatoon. That mine was scheduled to produce huge quantities of uranium this year, but its opening is now delayed until at least 2011.


Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Proliferation | Leave a comment

NOW for example

Posted on July 14, 2008 by energyprbe

NOW magazine
July 3, 2008

May Warming warning

NOW magazine, May 15-21

How on earth anti-nuke pioneers Energy Probe became global warming deniers is beyond us. Yes, EP executive director Lawrence Solomon‘s The Deniers: The World-Renowned­ Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, And Fraud is the hottest-selling "environmental" book in Canada and the U.S. Blaming the Third World for the planet’s eco problems, as Solomon does here, may make us energy hogs in the West feel better. But we’re the ones in real denial.

Just wait for the next smog day for that to become crystal-clear.

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

Letter in response, July 3-10


Warning warming deniers

Your criticism of Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers speaks well of the global warming hysteria (NOW, May 15-21).

If you’d bypassed your delicious dismay surrounding the provocative book title, you would have seen that it speaks more to scientific integrity than it does to taking sides in this complicated debate.

You could have made public one of the great suggestions: cutting subsi­dies for the energy industry and road users as a way of reducing negative environmental impacts (yes, di­rect­ed at us energy hogs in the North).

We cannot rely solely on pop­u­lar opinion and what the media pre­sents as settled issues.

Alison Doyle
Toronto

Posted in Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Abundant energy will power future growth

Posted on July 12, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 12, 2008

Up! Up! Up! The world is consuming more and more energy and, as if by miracle, the amount left to consume grows ever higher. Never before in human history has energy been accessible in greater abundance and in more regions, never before has mankind had more energy options and faced a brighter energy future.

Take oil, the scarcest of the major energy commodities. In the Americas, proven oil reserves have increased from 170 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels over the last two decades, according to the 2008 Statistical World Review from British Petroleum. In Europe and Eurasia, proven oil reserves almost doubled, from 76 billion barrels to 144. Africa’s proven oil reserves did double, from 58 billion barrels to 117. Even the Asia Pacific region, where China and India are reputed to be sucking up everything in sight, has increased its proven reserves. And the Middle East, the gas tank of the world, shows no sign of slowing down — its reserves soared by almost 200 billion barrels, from a whopping 567 billion barrels to a super-whopping 756.

Bottom line for the world: an incredible 36% increase in oil reserves during the two decades that saw the greatest globalization-spurred oil consumption in the history of mankind. And that doesn’t include the 152 billion barrels in proven oil reserves obtainable from Canada’s tar sands. Is there any reason to doubt that the next two decades won’t build on the steady growth of the last two?

These oil reserves aren’t the end of it. These figures — for the year ending December 2006 — represent oil that’s not only known to be available, but also economic at 2006 prices using 2006 technology. Since prices have soared in the last year, and technology has improved too, BP’s annual assessment for the 2007 year will show greater proven oil reserves still.

But this is still not the end of it. Unconventional oil reserves are now in play. In 2005, the Rand Corporation estimated that the oil shale in America’s Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, contains 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, with as much as 1.1 trillion barrels of oil recoverable, an amount comparable to the reserves of four Saudi Arabias. Oil shale becomes recoverable at $95 a barrel, it determined. With oil now trading at $140 a barrel, oil shale exploitation is now very much economic. Then there’s Canada’s tar sands, with its even greater potential — estimates of the total reserves that may be available top two trillion barrels, or eight Saudi Arabias.

This is still not the end to it. Most of the oil we know about lies in the well travelled portions of the globe. But most of the world remains unexplored — the interiors of Africa, Asia and South America have seen relatively little oil exploration. Oil exploration in the oceans, too, is in its infancy. For all practical purposes, mankind has limitless oil supplies available to it. The story is similar for natural gas and coal, the other major nonrenewable sources of energy. And for nuclear power. And for the renewables.

The amount of solar power landing on Earth could supply our current needs 10,000 times over. This potential will soon start to be realized on a large scale thanks to breakthroughs in the U.S. and Israel that have dramatically brought down the cost of solar technology. Wind also represents an inexhaustible resource, as seen in a 2005 NASA-funded study at Stanford University of viable wind sites worldwide. It found that wind power could satisfy global demand seven times over, assuming a realistic capture rate of 20%. Some European countries already meet a significant portion of their power needs with wind.

The world is awash with exploitable energy, both renewable and non-renewable. Availability is not at issue and never has been.

The only issue is the cost — both economic and environmental — at which it can be exploited.

Nuclear currently fails on economic grounds. But most fossil fuel technologies don’t need subsidies and soon, neither will most renewable technologies. That leaves the environment as the chief determinant of what energy we use, and where we use it. Thanks to environmental awareness and the high energy prices we now face, energy production has become ever cleaner, safer, and more efficient, giving us more meaningful options than ever before.

Whatever the outcome, whatever energy forms we ultimately rely on, the table is diverse and bountiful, allowing the world economy to grow large and to grow cleanly. And it will have been largely set by environmentalists.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted in Tar Sands | 1 Comment

Medical firm sues AECL, Ottawa

Posted on July 10, 2008 by energyprbe

Tyler Hamilton
Toronto Star
July 10, 2008

Life sciences company MDS Inc. has launched a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and the federal government after a decision to cancel a 12-year-old project to build new nuclear reactors for producing medical isotopes.

Norm Rubin, director of nuclear research at Energy Probe, said any deal the federal government makes to privatize AECL will probably involve taxpayers taking on any potential liabilities from the lawsuit.

“We already have precedents of the Crown hanging onto the liabilities while selling what’s left. They sell the jewels and keep the garbage,”* he said.

He added, however, that the MDS lawsuit could make it more difficult for AECL to sell its next-generation Candu reactors in Ontario and elsewhere around the world.

“This is one more day that everyone is going to remember the Maple debacle, and that it wasn’t small. That’s got to hurt them.”

*The original report lists garage instead of garbage.

Source


Posted in Energy Probe News, Nuclear Economics, Nuclear Plant Security, Nuclear Power, Towards Shutdown | Tagged | Leave a comment

Is Wikipedia promoting global warming hysteria?

Posted on July 9, 2008 by energyprbe

Noel Sheppard
News Busters
July 9, 2008

Two weeks ago, a parent-teacher council blamed the online research source Wikipedia for falling test scores in Scotland.

On Tuesday, Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon blamed Wikipedia for helping to spread global warming hysteria around the world.

The connection? Oftentimes “inaccurate or deliberately misleading information” published by Wikipedia is taken as fact by unsuspecting readers.

In the case of climate change, such inaccurate or deliberately misleading information acts to solidify the myth being espoused by Nobel Laureate Al Gore as millions of people across the globe believe Wikipedia is a purely factual resource.

To continue reading this article, please see: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/07/09/wikipedia-promoting-global-warming-hysteria

Posted in Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | 1 Comment

Wikipropaganda – Spinning green

Posted on July 8, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Review Online
July 8, 2008

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.

As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it — anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming.

Of course Oreskes’ conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’ work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

I soon found others who had the same experience: they would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.

Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party. And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore.

Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.

“Peiser’s crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.

Nor are Wikipedia’s ideological biases limited to global warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia’s entries on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives.


Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers.

Posted in Costs, Benefits and Risks, Energy Probe News | 1 Comment

Hysteria, persecution and fraud

Posted on June 30, 2008 by energyprbe

Mike Byfield
Daily Oil Bulletin
June 30, 2008

Lawrence Solomon: Airing the dubious science of global warming 

In The Deniers, Lawrence Solomon profiles 28 topflight scientists whose work undermines the case that humanity is heating up the planet to a destructive degree. Further, the executive director of Toronto’s Energy Probe shows that the scientific “consensus” behind that theory has been engineered in part by hardball political tactics.

The veteran environmentalist’s latest book names individuals whose grants evaporated when their research got out of line, and he describes pressure on scientists from climate bureaucrats at the United Nations.

“This media-inflated issue is diverting scarce resources away from environmental and economic problems that are much more urgent,” the writer told a breakfast meeting in Calgary last week.

Solomon’s parents immigrated from Rumania to Montreal when he was two. “I have no academic background,” the self-educated activist acknowledges. Even so, Energy Probe has proven an intellectually formidable foe of nuclear power, hydro-electric dams and urban sprawl.

In 1978, its fluent leader wrote The Conserver Solution, holding that polluters violate other people’s property rights and suggesting how to introduce ecological values into economic life. The Deniers, his seventh book, was published this year by Richard Vigilante Books.

Its investigation originally took shape as columns in the National Post. Solomon notes carefully that his “deniers” typically accept the possibility of anthropogenic global warming but they don’t believe that it’s been convincingly demonstrated. While the likes of former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and Canada’s David Suzuki dismiss their adversaries as industry-funded stooges or kooky individuals, The Deniers shows that the doubters are frequently better qualified than the primary proponents of global warming.

One denier is Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska. This geophysicist is best known for identifying the origin of storms in the aurora borealis. Twice named one of the world’s 1,000 most-cited scientists, he’s written 10 books and 550 professional journal articles. Based on ice core analysis, Akasofu postulates that the planet has been steadily warming at the rate of about half a degree Celsius since the 1660s, long before human-spawned emissions of carbon dioxide could be a serious factor in global temperatures. The Alaskan thinks the modest heating trend may well be a natural recovery from the preceding Little Ice Age, a period so cold that European crops failed widely, the Thames River froze over in England and the Dutch invented ice skates.

Ice cores themselves are problematic. The United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) works from the assumption that long-term ice formations preserve ancient air intact, allowing for the precise reconstruction of the atmosphere over millions of years.

“These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis but the foundation is groundless,” cautions Zbignieuw Jaworowski, past chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Environmental Program.

The IPCC thesis is an “arbitrary assumption” that Jaworowski says has now “clearly” been proven false. Water remains liquid and present in ice at temperatures as low as -72 degrees Celsius and it can greatly alter the carbon dioxide content of the trapped air. So does pressure, which squeezes out CO2 at ice depths below 70 metres. The Polish scientist notes that the effect of these factors is to create a relatively uniform CO2 content within the trapped air bubbles, as illustrated by core samples taken from the Taylor Dome in Antarctica. That uniformity, Jaworowski asserts, contradicts evidence in favour of greater CO2 variability in ancient times from other sources such as fossil leaf stomata. In his view, science still lacks a precise means of tracking atmospheric CO2 in the past.

To determine the impacts of carbon dioxide on future temperatures, the IPCC relies on computerized models of the atmosphere. Among the many skeptics concerning that approach is Antonino Zichini, a physicist who’s credited with discovering nuclear anti-matter and a great deal more. Solomon calls him Italy’s greatest living scientist.

Zichini explains that climate models involve “strongly coupled, non-linear” equations whose “free parameters” are in reality guesswork. With four free parameters, he notes, a mathematician can build a model that describes exactly everything that an elephant can do. Given a fifth parameter, the elephant can be forecast to fly. Climate modelling, according to its critics, invariably involves a great many more than five free parameters due to uncertainties about the effects of clouds, dust, moisture and more.

Climate scientists often point out that their critics lack formal qualifications in the discipline. The Deniers reverses that charge with a chapter entitled “The Case of the Disappearing Hockey Stick.” Michael Mann from the University of Massachusetts wowed the world with data indicating that temperatures in the northern hemisphere had remained relatively flat for most of the past 1,000 years, then veered sharply upward at the beginning of the twentieth century. This “hockey stick” graph has been reproduced many thousands of times by print and broadcast media.

“More than any other piece of evidence, it made global warming a serious popular and political issue,” Solomon says, noting that Mann had tremendous credibility as a lead author of the IPCC’s “Climate Change 2001: Third Assessment Report.”

Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian mining scientist, noticed that Mann’s work looked strikingly similar to the rigged graphs often used by promoters to hype mining shares. He and Ross McKitrick, an economist from the University of Guelph, determined that Mann’s statistical methodology was deeply flawed. The U.S. Congress commissioned Edward Wegman to sort out the controversy on this pivotal issue. Wegman, a mathematical statistician by training, headed the U.S. Navy’s advanced research in ultra-high speed computing, presided over the International Association of Statistical Computing and has published eight books in his field.

Wegman confirmed the Canadian assessment of the hockey stick, whose shape stems from technical errors. The Congressional investigator’s report concluded that “the atmospheric science community, while heavily using statistical methods, is remarkably disconnected from the mainstream community of statisticians in a way that is not true of the medical and pharmaceutical communities.” Mann, although an accomplished climate scientist, was ignorant of important statistical developments as were his colleagues and IPCC third parties who reviewed his research.

The Deniers casts equally grave doubt on the purported spread of malaria in a warmer world, on the supposed melting of Antarctic ice (ten times larger by volume than Arctic ice), and on the much-headlined but inaccurate concern that hurricane activity has intensified due to global warming. Several profiled scientists outline the emerging possibility that solar irradiation cycles are warming not just Earth but Mars. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Space Research Laboratory at the major astronomical observatory in Saint Petersburg, hypothesizes that another half-century round of serious global cooling is about to begin. The Russian government has focused research at the International Space Station on this alarming possibility.

Solomon says he still has 100 more well-qualified scientific deniers to profile. His book’s final chapter – “The Carbon Catastrophe” – attacks the concept of carbon credit trading as pointless in terms of human well-being and destructive to the interests of many poverty-stricken people.

“We’ve seen peasants pushed off their land because carbon credits have artificially increased the value of fast-growing eucalyptus plantations,” the author reports. “The proponents of global warming are far better funded and publicized than the scientific deniers. But truth counts, and I’m still optimistic that world can be brought to its senses.”

He may be right. A new poll from the Strategic Counsel shows that gasoline prices now top the environment as the primary concern of Canadians. The survey, based on data collected in April, indicated that 18% of Canadians and 19% of Americans felt gasoline prices were their top priority. Canadians who rated the environment as most important declined to 16% in the most recent survey from 22% in January. In the U.S. 33% gave their first priority to the economy. That trend may well migrate north if the economies of Ontario and Quebec weaken any further.

“Canadians have never had much depth of conviction about global warming and most are delighted to find out that the problem has been vastly exaggerated,” Solomon says.

Posted in Energy Probe News, The Deniers | Leave a comment

What I told the Petroleum Club

Posted on June 28, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
June 28, 2008

On a tour earlier this week for his new book on global warming, The Deniers, Lawrence Solomon made a presentation at the Petroleum Club in Calgary. His remarks, adapted, appear below.

I’m surprised to see so many of you here today. I thought you might be at trial, for your global warming crimes.
James Hansen — he’s one of the leaders in the climate change movement in the U.S. — wants you in court. “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing,” he stated yesterday. “…they should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Come to think of it, David Suzuki also sees those who abet CO2 emissions as criminals. And you know what, I bet some of you see yourselves as criminals — or something close to it — because there’s something in human nature that makes us feel guilty, even for crimes we didn’t commit, let alone for non-crimes. And I bet some of your friends and associates might look at you sideways. And your children may be teased and made to feel guilty about what their dad does for a living.

Even more, you’ve been cowed into silence. Instead of making your case to the public, instead of defending yourselves and your industry, you’ve thrown in the towel, or tried to be greener than green, hoping to avoid recrimination.

As many of you know, I and Energy Probe, my organization, have long been critics of the energy industry. We have opposed Arctic pipelines and tar sands that we considered to be ill-advised. We have opposed nuclear plants and big dams.

We favour conservation and renewable energy. We like clean and economic energy, something we have had too little of in Canada. For this, some of you in this room bear some responsibility.

But on the global warming issues, based on the evidence to date, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Albertans have nothing to feel guilty about either. No crime has been committed. No known harm has occurred. You’ve been had.

The fears of cataclysm over global warming are unfounded. There is no consensus on climate change, despite what Al Gore and the UN’s Panel on Climate Change would have you believe.

Let me tell you why most people think that global warming is a serious problem. It comes down to one number: 2,500. That’s the number of scientists associated with the UN’s Panel on Climate Change that the press reports has endorsed the UN Panel’s conclusions. These are the conclusions that get released in the UN’s mammoth reports every six years or so, and that then dominate the media airwaves for weeks.

“2,500 scientists can’t be wrong,” the press always says, explicitly or implicitly. Without that number, it would have no basis for the claim that they repeat over and over again — that there’s a consensus on climate change. 2,500 is an impressive number of scientists. To find out who, exactly, they were, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. The Secretariat replied that the names were not public, so I couldn’t have them. And I learned that the 2,500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers.

Those scientists hadn’t endorsed anything. They had merely reviewed one or more of the literally hundreds of background studies, some important and some not, that were part of this immense United Nations bureaucratic process. They did not review the final report or endorse it.

Their reviews weren’t even all favorable. I know that from many sources, including from among some of the scientists that I profiled — several of the deniers in my book are among those 2,500. And those deniers, and others, generally consider the UN’s work a travesty.

There is no endorsement by 2,500 top UN scientists. The press has been taken. And so the public has been taken.
The extent to which the public has been taken may surprise you. Not only is there no consensus, the scientists who are skeptics — the deniers — have extraordinary credentials, people at the very top echelons of the scientific establishment. They are the Who’s Who of Science.

Not only do they disagree with the UN conclusions, they often value CO2 for the benefits it provides the planet — satellite data shows the planet is now the greenest it has been in decades. Until recently, after all, CO2 was universally viewed as Nature’s fertilizer.

If these top scientists are right, you are being attacked without justification. You are being painted as criminals and your children are being made to feel ashamed of what you do. You are being victimized, in a modern form of shunning.
Your present strategy of lying low and hoping all this will pass has gotten you nowhere. You need to make your case, factually and frankly. The public will be skeptical of your arguments, as it should be. But if your critics can’t counter your factual arguments, it is your critics who will fail.

You need to decide. Do you want to go on being attacked for something that may be laudable, for producing CO2 may well be laudable? Do you want to go on feeling guilty out of public ignorance of where scientists truly stand on the global warming issue?

On global warming, the science is not settled. You have the facts on your side. But facts will count for naught as long as you see the battle as lost.

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