Some… oh, you know the drill:

• Two papers from the Director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska
• NASA is studying how airborne particles affect climate (we actually know very little about this and its of central importance)
• Has global warming reduced mortality?
• New paper from the IEA in London on “Global warming false alarms”
• What do the leaks from IPCC Working Group II mean?
• Carl Wunsch of MIT feels he was swindled by the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Was he?
• … Channel 4′s Head of Science says he wasn’t
• The Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says global warming science is “post normal“
• … British journalist Melanie Phillips is astounded
• BMW prepares for fight with EU over carbon limits
• While Siemens prepares to fight EU over light bulb prices

Lots of stuff there. Enjoy!

Last night, NPR and intelligence squared hosted a debate in New York City on the motion “Global Warming is not a Crisis.” The proposition, Michael Crichton, Prof. Richard Lindzen and Prof. Philip Stott, won by 46% to 42%. What makes the performance all the more impressive is that before the event the organizers found the motion would have been disapproved of 57% to 30%, so there was quite a swing as a result of the arguments deployed.

A cynic (who, me?) might suggest that this sort of result illustrates just why ‘alarmists’ are trying to close down the debate on the issue.

When recommending the Environmental Economics blog yesterday, I failed to mention the blog’s other main contributor, John Whitehead. A sin of omission. Mea culpa. The blog is always worth reading.

CNN has another story up about the evangelical divide over global warming.  As usual, it’s the National Evangelical Association’s Richard Cizik against the usual cadre of conservative evangelical political leaders—Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, and longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich, just to name a few.  Now, I think Cizik is mistaken to suggest that global warming poses a catastrophic threat that requires government action (and not like Kyoto/cap-and-trade will do much to lower temperatures anyway), but I also think that the Dobson crowd’s resistance to environmental issues might be a little much.  As the free-market environmentalism movement has shown, it’s entirely possible to be concerned for the welfare of the environment and not want to see public action taken in the name of protecting it.  There’s a great case to be made that markets and property rights do a better job of protecting nature than public land ownership and top-down rule-making. 

Additionally, it always seems odd to me when religious groups argue for more government. Do church leaders really want to give more power to an explicitly secular, already-powerful societal institution?  If the Cizik crowd could focus their energies in the direction of free-market environmentalism, not only would they put a damper on a lot of the evangelical acrimony over the issue, they’d be advocating policies more in their interests—and, perhaps most importantly, more likely to work.

Al Gore’s penchant is well-known; he seems to stumble more frequently than most into making outrageous statements such as he “took the initiative in creating the internet”, and tantalizing intimations (NYT password required) that he and Tipper were the model for Erich Segal’s Oliver Barrett and Jenny Cavalieri in “Love Story” (widely – in left-media circles – defended as a misquote).

On his signature issue, catastrophic Man-made global warming, he has similarly been making claims for years that he has been sounding the warming alarm since the mid-1970’s…which would be during the height of the catastrophic man-made global cooling craze, when meteorologists “[were] almost unanimous” about this phenomenon.

Consider the latest example, an email communication with the New York Times (OK, we know Dems are afraid of Fox News, but isn’t agreeing to communicate with the ever-faithful Grey Lady a sign that Gore is taking his refusal to be trapped into discussion about his claims a little far?) “He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, ‘I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.’”

Let’s all agree that this is a stretch of the truth, by at least half.

The record reflects that it is still under two decades since Gore emceed the debut of catastrophic Man-made global warming at a Senate hearing – this 1988 appearance described by left-leaning Salon as an “early alarm” harkening images of Paul Revere (about Hansen), mind you – which was hot on the heels and an unannounced 180° from the prevailing consensus over catastrophic cooling.

No, it hasn’t been 30 years any more than Gore is getting better at this. What’s next, insisting that he invented the question mark?

This story is surely proof that God has a sense of humor. It even leads with the punch line:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

Of course, the story ends with the obligatory escape hatch that warm and cold weather are predicted by global warming models. That’s icing on the cake. (hat tip to Jim Fitzgerald )

We’re endlessly told that damage from hurricanes has been going up and that this is all the fault of global warming. Tosh of course, damage from hurricanes has been going up because more people are building more expensive things in areas where hurricanes strike.

The next round of the argument seems to be that ah, yes, but we will have more hurricanes of greater intensity from global warming. Something which David Friedman doesn’t think is true : 

Consider first the physics. A hurricane is a heat engine; it converts thermal energy into work in the form of swirling winds. In principle one could use windmills to turn the hurricane into, say, electrical power, although I doubt it is a practical project. A heat engine that simply turns heat into work is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics. Actual heat engines take heat from a hot source, convert some of it into work, and dump some of it into a colder sink. They run not off the absolute temperature of the source but off the temperature difference between source and sink.

(…)

 Global warming, however, as the second commenter pointed out, affects both air and sea. There is no reason to expect it to change the difference between air and sea temperature, so the evidence that warm seasons generate hurricanes is irrelevant to the question of whether global warming would.

An interesting point don’t you think? Also worth pointing out that David Friedman is indeed a trained physicist .  

So wait a minute Iain.  They couldn’t go forward because of “drained batteries”?  Aren’t we supposed to be reducing our energy usage or something?  Isn’t there virtue in unspoiled nature?  I’m so confused…

I tried posting this earlier, but it disappeared into the ether; here are some tidbits and links you may have missed:

• “Deniers” vs “Alarmists” in a debate in NYC tonight
• More calls for individual carbon rations
• German scientists call EU emissions reduction plans deceptive
• John Edwards to purchase indulgences offsets for his campaign
• Global warming blamed for great cockroach migration
• … so it’s no wonder it makes Daredevil actress Jennifer Garner cry
• Petroleum industry faces worker shortage
• … so it’s a good job the nuclear-powered car is almost here
• Complex global warming lawsuits may be ’hot new litigation frontier’
• Coke seeking alternative sweeteners following ethanol driven spike in corn syrup prices

And finally, two intrepid explorers have called off a trek to the Arctic designed to raise awareness of global warming because of the extreme cold:

The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey,” said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

So there you have it – going forward at all costs isn’t part of the journey.

Spring is almost here, so with it will come gas price rises and, as sure as God made little green apples, accusations of price gouging against the oil companies. Lynne Kiesling has the definitive post on the fundamentals of this phenomenon, as she has for the previous two years.

Environmental economist Tim Haab (whose blog, env-econ.net, should be a daily read for anyone interested in energy and environmental economics, even if you don’t agree with all of it) Keep reading this post . . .