European Cooling

In Weather Takes Further Toll on Europe, the WSJ reports that:

Snowstorms and freezing temperatures continued across Europe, disrupting Christmas-holiday travel for thousands of people and claiming at least 80 lives.

Poland, where 29 people have frozen to death since the start of the weekend, and Ukraine, with 27 fatalities, have fared worst. But the effects are being felt from Scandinavia to Italy. A homeless organization in France said 12 people have died in the severe cold this month.

Following hard upon the irony of the American President leaving the Copenhagen climate summit a day early because of snow in Washington, this article goes to end with the following:

Private forecaster WSI said most of Europe is likely to experience colder-than-normal temperatures over the next three months. Todd Crawford of WSI said a combination of El Niño, a cold north Pacific and cold midlatitude North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures pointed to a continuation of frigid weather.

"There may be a relaxation of the current cold pattern during January, followed by a return to more consistent colder weather in February and March," he said.

The climate is always changing. There really and truly was fear of global cooling a quarter of a century ago. I remember that for a fact, for I was aware of its possibility when I moved from New York to Florida in the mid-1980s. Only to run into some record hot months. Go know.

How much human effort will be spent on changes in manufacturing and transportation to have minimal effect on the weather half a century out? Where are the green industries? Will this be the next Internet-like "hot" investment fad?

I dunno. But it looks as though there will be at least some cooling the European fervor for pro-cooling measures when this winter finishes.

Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009

Why Cynicism Is a Sensible Approach to Global Warming Sorry I Mean Climate Change Sorry I Used to Mean Global Cooling

Gandhis, all of them:

From Britain's Telegraph comes Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges;
Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."


Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers. . .

. . . Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

Let us remember there really was much angst about global cooling 3 decades ago. We need to think globally about the environment. Going largely vegetarian would be a huge, sustainable environmental win, not to mention the health benefits. Soybeans, not caviar or steak, should be prominent in Copenhagen this month.

Tofurkey, anyone?

Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009

Cap and Trade Will Likely Pass Because It Favors Big Finance

While thinking about the climate change legislation that heads to the Senate for review, I got curious about the history of climate change thinking.

I Googled "global cooling" and quickly got to the site linked to here titled "Fire and Ice". While it is long, I link to it because and it has numerous quotes reflecting the history of media and scientific thinking about global cooling and warming. Clearly it is published by a political organization, but
I am going to trust that the quotes are accurate.

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.

Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend. . .

The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said.

If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued.

Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." . . .

Various climatologists issued a statement that “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,” reported the Dec. 29, 1974, New York Times. If policy makers did not account for this oncoming doom, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result.

Time magazine delivered its own gloomy outlook on the “World Food Crisis” on June 24 of that same year and followed with the article “Weather Change: Poorer Harvests” on November 11. . .

Newsweek was equally downbeat in its article “The Cooling World.” “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” which would lead to drastically decreased food production, it said.

“The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now,” the magazine told readers on April 28 the following year.

This, Newsweek said, was based on the “central fact” that “the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Despite some disagreement on the cause and extent of cooling, meteorologists were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

"Cap and trade" promises huge profits for Big Finance (and small finance) with uncertain benefits for humanity, small reductions in coal usage in America, and significant tax expense. Regardless of the scientific merits of reducing CO2 emissions, this bill appears to be yet another of the Establishment's stratagems to be sure that the financialization of the world proceeds apace. If CO2 emissions are bad, why not simply tax them?

Surely the powers that be can have reduced tax rates for existing CO2-emitters if that is desired, perhaps with tax rates that rise over time; and high rates for "non-green" new CO2-emitting power plants, autos, etc.

This bill is in the same spirit of the proposals that if you are alive in the United States, you MUST purchase health insurance. It benefits the famous "FIRE" economy: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.

Whatever the various environmental or social merits of these proposals, somehow their implementation is always the same: the private FIRE economy gets to siphon off more and more of society's goods and services.

Will this ever end?

Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009