Despite their benefits, wind farms aren’t without environmental baggage, say some experts

Posted on June 28, 2008 by energyprbe

Conor Mihell
The Sault Star
June 28, 2008

Studies are being done to monitor the impacts of wind turbines on landscape ecology and wildlife, such as birds and bats.

According to the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Ontario Wind Atlas, winds off of Lake Superior blow more incessantly than anywhere else in the province.

As the province ramps up its supply of “green” energy, the 126 turbines spinning in Prince Township are likely a harbinger of more to come — and a storm of debate over the pros and cons of harvesting power from the wind.

When it’s done “in conjunction with well-thought-out land use planning,” wind is an environmentally friendly way to produce electricity, said Janet Sumner, the executive director of the Wildlands League, the Ontario chapter of the non-governmental Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

The process of converting the energy of spinning turbine blades into electric power doesn’t release climate change-inducing greenhouse gases, smog-producing pollution or toxic nuclear wastes. Unlike hydroelectric projects, wind farms don’t pollute the aquatic environment with methyl mercury, a dangerous human neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and is released into waterways when vast areas are flooded by hydro dams. And since wind farms involve a network of individual turbines, shutting one down has little effect on the installation’s overall capacity — unlike centralized plants such as nuclear reactors or hydroelectric stations.

Still, wind power is underutilized. Currently, only 500 megawatts of Ontario’s 31,000 megawatts of annual power-producing capacity is generated by the wind. (One megawatt of consistent energy production will meet the annual energy needs of about 220 households.) The lion’s share of the 8,000 megawatts of renewable energy feeding Ontario’s 29,000-kilometrelong grid is produced by hydroelectric developments.

As a part of Ontario’s plans to double its output of renewable energy by 2025, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA), the province’s electricity planning agency, has made three requests for proposals for renewable power in the past five years. The first two rounds yielded 1,200 megawatts of wind power, most of which is scheduled to be online by the end of the year. Proposals for the OPA’s third request must be received by the end of October and will result in the allotment of 500 megawatts of renewable power in December.

Another 750 megawatts of wind power has also been contracted as a result of the provincial renewable energy “standard offer” program that pays guaranteed, preferential rates over a 20-year term for wind, solar, hydro or biomass developments that have capacities of less than 10 megawatts and connect to a local distribution grid. A proposal to develop a 240-hectare wind facility east of Montreal River Harbour has been tabled under this program. The same incentives apply to factory, highrise or neighbourhood-based efforts in which renewable energy producers can sell power back to the provincial grid after meeting their own demands.

The process of developing a wind farm is largely proponent-driven. According to the Canadian Wind Energy Association, a non-profit trade organization that promotes wind power, this involves collecting at least a year’s worth of wind speed data at the proposed site, determining the type, number and location of turbines, acquiring land use and building permits and completing a financial analysis. Any proposal with a capacity greater than two megawatts are subject to an environmental screening and permitting process that involves the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Natural Resources and federal agencies.

The environmental footprint of commercial wind farms such as Brookfield Renewable Power’s Prince Township installations deal mostly with matters of scale. All told, the Prince I and II developments occupy 8,000 hectares of land and the blades of its 126 turbines sweep nearly 60 hectares of airspace. Building roads, erecting towers and installing transformer stations and transmission lines destroys forest habitat, and the noise and turbulence and vibrations of spinning turbines may alter the behavioural patterns of wildlife, said Mark Nash, the president of the Canadian Peregrine Foundation, a nongovernmental raptor protection group based in Toronto.

Nash admits that preliminary research in Ontario has shown “no evidence that (wind turbines) are having an impact on bird mortality.” But a survey of a 120-turbine development in New York in 2006 estimated that each turbine killed 23 birds and 59 bats per year.

“Thirty years of wind farming in Europe have shown that turbines kill birds,” said Nash. “I predict that as we get more and more of these big projects we’re going to see the same high level of mortality that’s been documented in Europe.”

Nash is particularly concerned about the impacts of developing large wind farms in ecologically sensitive bird migration, staging and nesting areas, like much of Lake Superior’s north shore. Prince Township, for instance, is a part of an important corridor for thousands of migrating birds that cross Lake Superior at the narrows between Michigan’s Whitefish Point and Ontario’s Gros Cap peninsula every spring and fall.

“The jury’s still out on the environmental effects of these things,” said Nash. “Yet there’s a rush for development in some of the most critical raptor habitat in Ontario. Everyone’s been sold on this technology and nobody cares about a bunch of birds.”

As a part of its permit to harvest wind energy in Prince Township, Brookfield was required to commission a study of the operation’s impacts before, during and after installation. Waterloo, Ont.,-based Natural Resources Solutions Inc. (NRSI) has been responsible for monitoring since 2005. NRSI field biologists collected data before the turbines went up using radar to track bird flight patterns and populations. Post-installation work has involved cataloguing dead birds at the base of turbines and recording wildlife sightings.

Senior biologist and NSRI cofounder David Stephenson said his company’s work at the Prince wind farm will likely wrap-up this winter.

“Monitoring reports and mortality statistics are currently in draft and being reviewed by agencies,” said Stephenson.

“We have found no evidence to suggest that the operation of turbines is affecting bird use of the area,” said Stephenson, who wouldn’t reveal the number of birds killed at Prince. The power-generating efficiency of wind farms has also been questioned. Each 118-metre-tall General Electric wind turbine standing atop the highlands of Prince Township contains bus-sized gearbox and generator assembly that can produce power at a rate of up to 1.5 megawatts. At maximum capacity, each turbine can meet the energy requirements of about 330 households.

But generating capacity is based on sustained wind speeds of 40 to 90 km/h. A six-month audit conducted in 2006 by Energy Probe, an international non-profit energy policy watchdog organization, revealed that, on average, Ontario’s wind power installations achieved only 22 per cent of their rated capacities. And since turbines draw a certain amount of energy from the grid to operate, they are unable to produce electricity in the event of a blackout.

According to Jim Deluzio, Brookfield’s general manager of Sault Ste. Marie operations, the winds coming off Lake Superior at Prince Township are better than average. He said the Prince I and II installations achieve maximum production about 10 per cent of the time and produce about 32 per cent of their rated capacity.

For many, the zero-emissions allure of wind farms outweighs their environmental uncertainties and less than perfect efficiency. Even the National Audubon Society, a bird-focused network of U.S. nature conservation groups, supports facilities that are “planned, sited and operated to minimize negative impacts on bird and wildlife populations . . . as a clean alternative energy source that reduces the threat of global warming.”

But according to Sumner, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Wind is the fastest growing energy source in the world, but an even better bet, said Sumner, would be to reduce the demand for electricity rather than continually increasing the supply.

“As long as government keeps on promising to supply more energy it will keep being used,” Sumner said. “We need to be more aggressive in dealing with the demand side of the equation.”

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

Writer says fears of global warming unfounded

Posted on June 26, 2008 by energyprbe

Neil Scott
Leader-Post
June 25, 2008

Regina: Mother earth "is doing wonderfully,” despite alarmist reports about global warming and unfounded warnings about pending environmental catastrophes, a Regina audience was told Wednesday.

Lawrence Solomon, an author and newspaper columnist who has long been involved in environmental issues and organizations, said there is no scientific proof global warming is caused by the burning of carbon-based fuels.

Speaking to an audience of about 50, at a lunch organized by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Solomon readily conceded there has been a trend toward global warming, at least in the last century or two.

But there is no scientific consensus that global warming has been caused by industrialization or by the burning of carbon-based fuels, said Solomon, who is the authour of the book "The Deniers,” that deals with global warning related issues.

The modest increases that have occurred in the earth’s temperature and in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has actually produced some positive developments, Solomon said.

Carbon dioxide "is nature’s fertilizer, plants love it,” he said.

The increased carbon dioxide and the warming has contributed to the greening of the planet, he said.

"We are doing extremely well,” Solomon said.

Implementing costly measures to deal with carbon emissions "would be the height of irresponsibility,” unless science can prove that carbon emissions are causing global warming, Solomon said.

Lower income people would be the hardest hit by the carbon tax proposed by federal leader Stephane Dion, Solomon said.

And the term "fuel poverty,” will soon creep in the vocabulary, as people with limited means struggle with dramatically increased costs associated with unnecessary measures to curb carbon emissions, Solomon said.

The use of agricultural crops to produce ethanol for fuel consumption has contributed to a rising of food prices and to food riots in some developing countries, he noted.

The push to curb carbon gas emissions may also lead to an increased reliance on nuclear-powered energy — which might not be a good idea — Solomon said.

The news media, the general public and ultimately the politicians have been led to believe that there is a broad consensus in the scientific community that carbon gas emissions are causing global warming, Solomon said.

But that is not true, he said, adding that many very reputable scientists don’t make that link and believe that other factors are more likely the causes of global warming.

One common theory is that changes in the activities of the sun, including changes in sun spot activity, are changing the temperature on earth, he said.

Yet another theory holds that the earth is simply going through a normal cycle, in which temperatures vary from time to time, he said.

And temperatures may well cool on earth sometime in the future, depending on the activities in the sun and on various cyclical factors on earth, Solomon said.

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, that hosted Wednesday’s event at the Ramada Hotel & Convention Centre, is a non-profit organization that seeks to stimulate discussion on public policy issues.

Solomon is the executive director of the Energy Probe organization. He has also been involved in several other organizations that deal with environmental issues and has written several books on the subject.

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Energy Probe on Focus Ontario

Posted on June 26, 2008 by energyprbe

June 21, 2008

 

On Saturday, June 21, Norman Rubin of Energy Probe appeared on Global TV’s "Focus Ontario" to discuss the proposed Darlington B new nuclear build with host Sean Mallen and Murray Elston of the Canadian Nuclear Association (CNA).

The appearance in full is captured at the Focus Ontario website, listed here:
www.canada.com/globaltv/ontario/features/focus_ontario/video.html

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

Here comes the sun

Posted on June 24, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon

June 24, 2008

Nanosolar’s breakthrough technology is 10 times more powerful than a nuclear reactor and cheaper, too.

Go to YouTube and you can see a corporate video of a printing press running at 100 feet per minute, applying a nanoparticle ink to foil and producing solar cells. This machine is owned by Nanosolar Inc., which in turn is partly owned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. This one printing machine, Nanosolar claims, can produce solar cells with a capacity of 1,000 MW per year, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor at Indian Point outside Manhattan or two nuclear reactors at Pickering outside Toronto.

Unlike nuclear reactors, which take a decade to build and billions of dollars in capital costs before delivering a single kilowatt-hour to a home or business, Nanosolar’s breakthrough technology can help meet society’s power needs soon after its ink has dried, and the press’s capital costs amount to a mere $1.65-million. Put another way, we can wait 10 years to get nuclear power up and running. Or, by relying on a single Nanosolar press, we can have the solar equivalent of a major nuclear plant in one year, and the equivalent of 10 major plants in a decade. Soon, says Nanosolar, its printing presses will be operating much faster — perhaps 20 times faster. Should this prove feasible, a single Nanosolar press would pump out in a single decade the equivalent of 200 nuclear plants — far more than now exist in all of North America.

To add to the slam-dunk superiority of Nanosolar-type technology over nuclear, solar cells produce power when we especially need it — when people are awake and industries are humming. During the low-value off-peak hours when power is in great surplus, the solar cells sleep, too. Nuclear reactors, by contrast, can’t ratchet down or turn off when their output isn’t needed. Off-peak nuclear power, in fact, is sometimes produced at a loss because its operating costs exceeds the pittance earned at, say, 3 a.m.

To get bang for the buck, and obtain the power that a growing economy needs, nuclear and solar are as different as night and day. Nuclear power, a half-century after the launch of the first generation of nuclear reactors, remains an immature technology, each successive generation proving to be not only unreliable but also subject to ever-higher costs. Solar technology, in contrast, becomes ever more reliable and ever less costly, and is only immature in the same way that computer technology is immature — there is no end in sight yet to how far and fast it can go.

Nanosolar, founded in 2002 by two Stanford PhD candidates applying Silicon Valley smarts, is a case in point. By the end of 2003, it had obtained 60 patents, By 2004, it had developed its printing method. By 2006, it had published its results in a peer-reviewed journal and, within months, raised $100-million. By the end of 2007 it had made its first commercial shipment. Now Nanosolar can’t keep up with the demand — its factory’s output for the next 12-months is pre-sold.

Nanosolar’s solar panels could go on rooftops but the company recommends against this — at least until building codes become flexible enough to accommodate panels without the need to battle municipal bureaucracies. Besides, it says, it is developing a residential product sure to wow the homeowner.

In the meantime, it touts small municipal solar power plants that can be up and running in one year on the outskirts of cities and towns, where land is readily available. Each would be between 2 MW and 10 MW in size — enough to power 1,000 to 5,000 homes. Put one of these in several hundred cities and a nuclear plant’s worth of power would be delivered, locally and in a decentralized manner, and without the expensive and unsightly transmission towers that accompany large nuclear plants.

As impressive as Nanosolar is, here’s something more impressive still: This company is but one of several with solar breakthroughs that stand to revolutionize the energy world. Some of the competing solar technologies are designed for large-scale applications, some small. In this dynamic new energy marketplace, some will prosper and, doubtless, some will fail, just as many of the computer pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s failed for one reason or another. But large or small, well capitalized or not, the solar technologies are working more impressively than anyone could have dreamed a decade ago and seem certain to overtake nuclear as a provider of additional power to our electricity systems. If the projections from Nanosolar and others prove accurate, in fact, they will become the most economic power source of all, besting even coal.

Clean, limitless power is now within grasp, courtesy of those who have reached for the sun.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers. This is the first in a series on renewable energy.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Renewables | Leave a comment

The Hydrogen Debate

Posted on June 23, 2008 by energyprbe

June 23, 2008

The CBC Radio series, “The Hydrogen Solution,” features a debate between Energy Probe‘s Norm Rubin and hydrogen expert David Sanborn Scott. This debate is now available for download online, via podcast.

To recap:

THE HYDROGEN SOLUTION

Ideas, CBC Radio One

Energy is not just a fuel. It’s an entire system that links our civilization together, says David Sanborn Scott, a hydrogen energy
expert. Energy is like a currency: it can be used like money for different purposes. Throughout history, new energy sources and
systems have replaced old ones. Understanding how this works is essential to combating catastrophic climate change. The series (originally broadcast over three nights from Tuesday, May 13, to Thursday, May 15) ends with a debate between David Scott and Norm Rubin of Energy Probe.

The debate between Norm Rubin and David Scott is available for download via podcast, here:

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/media/2008/hydrogen-solution-episode-3.mp3

All three episodes in the series are available here:

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/hydrogen-solution/index.html 



Posted in Energy Probe News, Renewables | Leave a comment

Behind the costs at Darlington

Posted on June 23, 2008 by energyprbe

Toronto Star editorial

June 22, 2008

Critics of the provincial government’s decision to expand the Darlington nuclear station have zeroed in not on safety or environmental concerns but on potential cost overruns.

The original Darlington plant, completed in 1993, was "wildly overbudget," said Lawrence Solomon of the anti-nuclear Energy Probe, citing an original cost estimate of $2.5 billion and comparing it with the final bill of $14.4 billion.

NDP environment critic Peter Tabuns referenced the same figures in the Ontario legislature and asked: "Why is this government so intent on repeating history and committing Ontario to an expensive, unreliable … nuclear future?"

That may seem like a good question. But before it is answered, some perspective is required.

First of all, the $2.5 billion starting point is a lowball estimate from the early 1970s, at least five years before any detailed planning was done by Ontario Hydro on a new nuclear station at Darlington. A more valid base figure is the $5 billion estimate released in 1978 by Hydro’s board as the go-ahead was given for detailed engineering and design. Better still is the 1981 estimate that arose from this detailed planning: $7.46 billion.

Of course, an escalation from $7.46 billion in 1981 to $14.4 billion in 1993 is still worrisome, but there are explanations for it. Interest rates were soaring in the early 1980s, well into double digits. And the project was plagued by stops and restarts ordered by a series of governments of different political stripes. Finally, as former Hydro adviser Andy Frame wrote on the Comment page on Friday, the establishment of a new regulatory regime under the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission led to design changes that drove up costs.

So if — and, granted, it is a big if — interest rates stay relatively low, the politicians keep their nerve, and the regulatory regime does not throw a curveball at the project, costs for Darlington II should not escalate anywhere near as much as they did on the original project.

Besides, what choice do we have as the existing nuclear plants come to the end of their life cycles? More power from coal, with its greenhouse-gas emissions? Or from natural gas, which has become a very expensive fuel? Or from wind, which doesn’t always blow? Or massive savings from conservation, which would require a dramatic change in our lifestyle?

Some would say yes to any or all of the above. But the Star believes that more nuclear power should be part of the mix, with appropriate oversight to ensure that costs do not run out of control.


To read the Lawrence Solomon article quoted in this editorial, please see "Darlington reactors are not really new."

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

Skeptics on climate are worth a listen

Posted on June 20, 2008 by energyprbe

Issac J. Bailey
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com
June 20, 2008

We’ve done a disservice. I’m talking about the media, in the aggregate, about global warming.

We skim over uncertainty inherent in predictions. The perils we face, not from potential catastrophes, but from over reach, we discount. If we did the same for hurricanes, tourism would be harmed every time a storm formed off Africa.

We would be placed in a “cone of uncertainty” for weeks at a time, scaring off potential visitors.

A few years ago, local chamber officials complained about the decision to begin using five-day rather than three-day forecasts. They raised a legitimate issue.

Forecasters just weeks ago told us that annual forecasts shouldn’t be seen as bedrock predictions. That’s why I was intrigued by the new book, “The Deniers.” Its author is Lawrence Solomon, an environmentalist whose group was one of the first to sound the alarm about potential climate change.

He is not in the “global warming is a liberal conspiracy” camp. He simply set out to find the “deniers,” scientists whom Al Gore compared to moon landing conspiracy theorists. He ended up finding some of the world’s best — scientists who have raised credible questions about the extent of global warming – including the belief that recent warming was its hottest in the past 1,000 years.

They are just as impressive as the scientists who believe man-made warming is real. Check out my blog for more background. But Solomon had a more disturbing finding.

Our insistence on blaming global warming for such things as the resurgence of malaria is providing cover for despotic governments whose policies are the cause. And the world’s poor are being displaced because carbon offsets are making their land irresistible to corrupt governments.

Our rush to stop global warming may end up making Earth a less habitable place for green life and may make Third World riots more likely.

And it has convinced some to stop or slow funding for research that may unlock climate secrets, out of fear of being branded a “denier.”

“Although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction … countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt,” Solomon said in a recent online interview. “Environmentalists, who ordinarily would demand a full-fledged environmental assessment before a highway or a power plant can be built, are silent on the need to question proponents or examine alternatives.”

Myrtle Beach Online.com is a news outlet based in South Carolina with a daily circulation of 50,937 subscribers.

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

Darlington reactors are not really new

Posted on June 16, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
June 16, 2008

Ontario’s Liberal government will soon announce the construction of new nuclear reactors, likely at the site of the existing reactors at the Darlington A station near Toronto. If history is any judge, the construction of those reactors will not be smooth, and may not happen at all.

The new Darlington reactors aren’t really new. Ontario Hydro maps in the 1970s not only showed "Darlington A," the nuclear station that the government then announced amid political controversy, but also "Darlington B" and "Darlington C."

Darlington C would soon disappear from the planners’ maps, never to reappear. Darlington B would also disappear, and not reappear until 2008 — the Ontario government’s announcement this week, in effect, is an attempt to resurrect the 1970s dream of Darlington B.

The government’s official pronouncement of three decades ago that Darlington A would be built was more a government wish than a surety, even though the government provided what amounted to a blank cheque for Darlington’s construction. Darlington A, like hundreds of other reactors around the world that were then either planned or under construction, would be fiercely opposed by large segments of the public, by environmentalists, and by political parties that wanted it stopped.

Ontarians, in fact, thought they had stopped it in 1985 when they threw out the Tory government of the day in favour of David Peterson’s Liberals, who had promised to stop Darlington. By 1985, Darlington was wildly late (its planned completion date had been 1983) and wildly over budget (the $3.5-billion that had then been spent exceeded the project’s estimated $2.5-billion price tag of 1978). Rather than stop the bleeding, the Liberals instead voted to complete Darlington.

Ontarians again thought they had stopped Darlington in 1990, when they threw out the Liberals in favour of the New Democratic Party of Bob Rae, who had campaigned on a promise to impose a moratorium on nuclear power. By then, Darlington’s costs had soared to $12.9-billion and was close to completion. The NDP completed Darlington A in 1993, a decade late, for $14.4-billion, almost six times the initial estimates. Hydro then went bankrupt in what was called "the biggest corporate financial meltdown in Canadian history."

Darlington A was one of the last nuclear reactors to be built in the western world — Ontario was slower than most in recognizing the foolhardiness of relying on nuclear. Now Ontario is poised to become one of the first western jurisdictions to return to nuclear, despite Darlington’s role in the province’s demise — Hydro’s nuclear program cost the province its AAA credit rating and Ontarians are still paying off Hydro’s stranded debt of $20-billion.

Construction of Darlington B, if it proceeds, will be fought by environmental organizations and by opposition political parties, who have very good reasons today and will have possibly even better reasons tomorrow to pull the plug on nuclear expansion. As one example, solar power has made great strides in Israel and the U. S.: The technology may be economic and available on a large scale in the next few years. As another, clean coal looks increasingly attractive both environmentally and economically.

In contrast, nuclear remains as uneconomic and uncertain as ever — as even the Ontario government recognizes. "It’s an expensive proposition, there’s no doubt about that," Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty acknowledged last week, adding that there’s no telling how expensive: "It’s really hard to nail down precise costs today [since] we don’t know what’s going to happen to so many of the costs of so many of the inputs."

Nuclear’s uncontrollable costs, in fact, have been a constant over its history in Ontario and they remain a constant elsewhere in the western world. France — the only country to go full bore for nuclear — has found nuclear to be so ruinously expensive that it’s bringing its old oil-fired stations back into service, some of which were built in the 1960s.

In Finland, the first western country to have actually begun construction on a new nuclear plant in recent years, delays proved so serious that, two and a half years after the start of construction, the project had fallen behind schedule by more than two years. The project is already 50% over budget. Cost estimates for other nuclear plants that are being considered have soared even more.

Ontario can cut its losses now and abandon nuclear expansion. Or it can spend the next decade or two wondering if it’s too late to do so.

 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 Energy Probe News, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment

In praise of carbon dioxide

Posted on June 7, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
June 7, 2008

With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green.

Planet Earth is on a roll!

GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.
GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere — the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe’s production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it’s been in decades, perhaps in centuries.

Until the 1980s, ecologists had no way to systematically track growth in plant matter in every corner of the Earth — the best they could do was analyze small plots of one-tenth of a hectare or less. The notion of continuously tracking global production to discover the true state of the globe’s biota was not even considered.

Then, in the 1980s, ecologists realized that satellites could track production, and enlisted NASA to collect the data. For the first time, ecologists did not need to rely on rough estimates or anecdotal evidence of the health of the ecology: They could objectively measure the land’s output and soon did — on a daily basis and down to the last kilometre.

The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth’s vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life.

As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U.S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”

Lush as the planet may now be, it is as nothing compared to earlier times, when levels of CO2 and Earth temperatures were far higher. In the age of the dinosaur, for example, CO2 levels may have been five to 10 times higher than today, spurring a luxuriantly fertile planet whose plant life sated the immense animals of that era. Planet Earth is also much cooler today than during the hothouse era of the dinosaur, and cooler than it was 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings colonized a verdant Greenland. Greenland lost its colonies and its farmland during the Little Ice Age that followed, and only recently started to become green again.

This blossoming Earth could now be in jeopardy, for reasons both natural and man-made. According to a growing number of scientists, the period of global warming that we have experienced over the past few centuries as Earth climbed out of the Little Ice Age is about to end. The oceans, which have been releasing their vast store of carbon dioxide as the planet has warmed — CO2 is released from oceans as they warm and dissolves in them when they cool — will start to take the carbon dioxide back. With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green, especially in areas such as Canada’s Boreal forests, which have been major beneficiaries of the increase in GPP and NPP.

Doubling the jeopardy for Earth is man. Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.

If these governments are right, they will have done us all a service. If they are wrong, the service could be all ill, with food production dropping world wide, and the countless ecological niches on which living creatures depend stressed. The second order effects could be dire, too. To bolster food production, humans will likely turn to energy intensive manufactured fertilizers, depleting our store of non-renewable resources.

Techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere also sound alarms. Carbon sequestration, a darling of many who would mitigate climate change, could become a top inducer of earthquakes, according to Christian Klose, a geohazards researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Because the carbon sequestration schemes tend to be located near cities, he notes, carbon-sequestration-caused earthquakes could exact an unusually high toll.

Amazingly, although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction, Canada and other countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt. Environmentalists, who ordinarily would demand a full-fledged environmental assessment before a highway or a power plant can be built, are silent on the need to question proponents or examine alternatives.

Earth is on a roll. Governments are too. We will know soon enough if we’re rolled off a cliff

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

To read other articles in the Deniers series, see here: http://energy.probeinternational.org/climate-change/the-deniers

Photo: The Earth from space (Reuters / NASA)

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

Selective precaution

Posted on June 3, 2008 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
National Review Online
June 3, 2008

How does the third world insure itself against Lieberman-Warner?

Senators Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) and John Warner (R., Va.) base their proposed Climate Security Act legislation on two fundamental premises: That there is a scientific consensus on global warming and that, even if the scientists are wrong and the global-warming risk never materializes, we will at least have aided the environment.

Both premises are wrong. Not just wrong. The premises could well have it exactly backwards.

First, consider the alleged scientific consensus. Nearby you’ll find the cover page from the 2006 press announcement from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body coordinating the worldwide effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. The cover page offers this impressive claim:

2500 SCIENTIFIC EXPERT REVIEWERS
800 CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS AND
450 LEAD AUTHORS FROM
130 COUNTRIES
6 YEARS WORK
1 REPORT
2007

Impressive, isn’t it? You may be even more impressed if you see the accompanying press materials. And you can forgive the press for being impressed, too, at the intellects assembled to establish that global warming is real and manmade. After all, 2,500 expert scientists can’t be wrong.

That figure of 2,500 scientists received saturation media exposure, and then it was amplified by environmental groups, bloggers, and others. A Google search of “IPCC” and “2500” produces almost 250,000 results, the vast majority of them references to the scientific consensus. Senators Lieberman and Warner can be forgiven for believing, as the press did, in the existence of a consensus.

But what did those 2,500 scientists actually endorse? To find out, I contacted the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and asked for the names of the 2,500. I planned to canvas them to determine their precise views. The answer that came back from the Secretariat informed me that the names were not public, so I would not be able to survey them, and that the scientists were merely reviewers. The 2,500 had not endorsed the conclusions of the report and, in fact, the IPCC had not claimed that they did. Journalists had jumped to the conclusion that the scientists the IPCC had touted were endorsers and the IPCC never saw fit to correct the record.

There is no consensus of 2,500 scientist-endorsers. Moreover, many of those 2,500 reviewers turned thumbs down on the studies that they reviewed — I know this from my own interviews with them, conducted in the course of writing a book about scientists who dispute the conventional wisdom on climate change.

From my interviews, it also became clear to me that, if a consensus exists, it exists on the other side. For instance Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, a former peer reviewer for the IPCC’s work on the spread of malaria and other diseases due to warming says, “I know of no major scientist with any long record in this field who agrees with the pronouncements of the alarmists at the IPCC.” Other scientists also told me that, in their particular discipline, the IPCC’s position was the outlier, far from the mainstream.

“So what?” many say. “Even if there is great uncertainty about the science of climate change, what harm will come of reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide? If it turns out that global warming is a natural phenomenon, we will have gained for ourselves cleaner air and less dependence on foreign oil.” As Sen. Lieberman put it in a PBS interview, “we ought to buy an insurance policy to deal with it. You know, I buy an insurance policy on my house. I don’t know there’s going to be a fire or a pipe is going to break, but I spend the money on it because the consequences of not having insurance are worse. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

This view finds favor with people across the ideological spectrum. Environmentalists, public-health advocates, and planners recognize an opportunity to lower emissions while promoting lifestyle changes; security hawks seize on the prospect of energy self-sufficiency; others see an opportunity to make common cause with Europe. All justify the expense of meeting Kyoto’s emissions targets as an insurance policy of sorts.

The problem is that far from being an insurance policy, Kyoto represents the single greatest threat to the global environment today and its scheme for using carbon credits and carbon offsets to reduce CO2 emissions comes with horrible human costs.

When we in the West purchase carbon offsets, typically someone, or some government, in the third world is paid for providing a “sink” for the carbon we’re emitting. Often that sink will be an industrial eucalyptus plantation, planted on what had been farmland or old-growth forest. Apart from the environmental amenities lost, personal tragedies abound. The former inhabitants of that land — either peasant farmers or forest peoples — will have been evicted from their lands, generally without fair compensation. Mass evictions are also the rule with new large-scale hydro dams, which can appear to become economically feasible only because of carbon credit schemes. China’s Three Gorges Dam, touted for being carbon-free, is uprooting some two million peasants and townsfolk. Nuclear power, too, is enjoying a renaissance due to carbon pricing — nuclear reactors have never been commercially viable without subsidies, and coming back now only because of a perceived carbon crisis.

The third-world suffers from Kyoto in other ways. With farm lands in the west converted to ethanol and other biofuels, world grain prices have doubled, leading to food riots in Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere. While many have criticized the economic costs of Kyoto, the treaty’s cruel social and environmental consequences represent far greater tragedies.

Environmentalists could once be counted on to insist that sound science be brought to bear on projects or policies that carried the potential for social harm, often through open processes called environmental assessments. In the rush to solve a carbon-dioxide problem that may not exist, many environmentalists have abandoned the science they once held dear and thrown precaution to the wind.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud, and those too fearful to do so (Richard Vigilante Books). His next book The Carbon Catastrophe is due out from Richard Vigilante Books in January 2009.

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