RAIN TO RETURN: The Climate Prediction Center now forecasts a wetter-than-normal late summer and early fall in South Florida.

Thanks for everyone who came out to the show! Here are some great photos sent to us by Brian Smith of the 2011 FERMILAB/WGN seminar!






Below is a picture of  this year's speakers. From left to right is award winning extreme weather photographer Jim Reed, Tom Skilling, Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, MD, University of Illinois-Chicago, Dr. Louis W. Uccellini, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Ed Fenelon, Meteorologist in Charge of the NWS Forecast Office-Chicago, Jim Allsopp, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, NWS Chicago, Dr. Jim Angel, State Climatologist, Midwestern Regional Climate Center, and Brian Smith, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, National Weather Service, Omaha, Nebraska:

As every month, VC Cafe is re-posting the “Invest in Israel” Newsletter, published by the investment promotion center of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which offers many helpful tools for prospecting investors.  See the April 2011 edition after the jump. For previous editions, click here.

ISRAELI ECONOMY TO EXPAND 3.8 PCT IN 2011
The International Monetary Fund recently increased its growth prediction for the Israeli economy to 3.8% in 2011 and 2012.
Israel was cited along with Australia, Canada, Korea, Norway and Sweden, as a country in which economic conditions and underlying price pressures are somewhat stronger than in other advanced economies. The IMF also predicted that unemployment in Israel will drop to 5.5 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2012 from 6.7 percent last year.
The Bank of Israel has forecast the Israeli economy to grow 4.5% in 2011 and 4% in 2012. The Israeli economy grew 4.5% in 2010, and reached a 4-year record of 7.7% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

WORLD LEADER EMC TO OPEN R&D CENTER IN BEER SHEVA
“Over the next five years, we expect to continue to grow our business tremendously in Israel and will benefit significantly by being able to leverage the academic network and the talented engineers in the region.” – Dr. Orna Berry, vice president and general manager of EMC Israel COE.
EMC Corporation, one of the world’s leading companies in information infrastructure solutions, is strengthening its investment and presence in Israel through the launch of a new research & development Center in the southern Israeli city of Beer Sheva.
The new facility will be located in the Beer Sheva High-Tech Park, directly adjacent to Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and SCE, the College of Engineering, which will enable the company to work with the country’s leading young technologists.
EMC’s new facility in the Negev will also benefit from the Israeli government’s incentives for multinational companies which open up facilities in peripheral areas of Israel. These incentives are designed to encourage investment and boost technological, economic and academic growth and cooperation throughout Israel.

ASSET MANAGEMENT GIANT ORBIMED CREATES $200 MLN ISRAELI FUND
OrbiMed, the world’s leading asset management firm in the global health sciences industry, is forming a $200 million fund to invest in research and development in the Israeli life sciences industry. The new fund will be one of the largest venture capital funds in Israel.
The new fund is the result of collaboration between OrbiMed and the Israeli government which will invest approximately $40 million in the fund. The fund will invest in medical devices, biotech, and diagnostics directing a significant part of the investments toward biopharmaceuticals, an area with outstanding infrastructure in Israel, which is considered to be not fully tapped.
Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor in 2009 established a Biotech Fund to help boost growth in Israel’s biotech sector. The fund aims to raise up to 1 billion shekels ($250 million), of which 250 million shekels will be provided by the Israeli government.

FDA APPROVES ISRAELI ALTERNATIVE FOR CHEMOTHERAPY
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Novocure’s non-invasive NovoTTF-100A System for the treatment of brain tumors. The NovoTTF, a portable, wearable device that delivers anti-cancer therapy as patients pursue their normal daily activities, is the first ever medical device for the treatment of cancer as an alternative to chemotherapy.
The device was approved for the treatment of patients with so-called recurrent glioblastoma, or cancer that continues to grow after treatments like surgery and chemotherapy.
Novocure, which has a research center in Haifa, is also conducting clinical trials of the NovoTTF on newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients in addition to standard treatments as well as in non-small cell lung-cancer.

ISRAELS MEKOROT WATER COMPANY TO DEVELOP UGANDAN WATER INFRASTRUCTURES
Mekorot National Water Company will develop Uganda’s water infrastructures under an agreement signed with the government-owned National Water and Sewerage Corporation. Mekorot will ultimately build 11 dams and reservoirs to supply water to two million residents.
Mekorot will first build projects in Karamoja district in Uganda’s arid northeast, but hopes to expand its work throughout the country and to include the development of sewage treatment plants.
Mekorot is one of Israel’s many innovative companies in the field of water technologies to participate in WATEC 2011, Israel’s bi-annual water event to be held on November 9-11 (www.watec-israel.com).

ISRAEL PARTNERS IN 16% OF EUREKA’S 89 APPROVED INNOVATIVE PROJECTS
EUREKA’s representatives from 40 countries are investing 134 million euros ($194 million) in 89 initiatives across Europe, 14 of which have Israeli partners.
Israel has been one of the five most active members in EUREKA, the leading industrial R&D initiative in Europe, boasting the same number of projects as much bigger [EU] countries. In 2011, Israel became the first non-European state to head the EUREKA Network. Since the start of Israel’s chairmanship year, nearly 200 EUREKA projects have been approved, totaling more than 280 million euros ($405 million) of private and public investment.
The approved R&D projects cover a variety of areas, including renewable energy, agrofood technology, biotechnology, physical and exact sciences, IT and electronics, industrial manufacturing, and more. EUREKA initiatives look to meet challenges such as climate change, energy security, and limited water resources.

ISRAEL TO BECOME 1ST NON-EUROPEAN MEMBER OF EXCLUSIVE CERN NUCLEAR GROUP
Israel’s cabinet approved the country’s membership in the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) that currently includes 20 states, 18 of them from the EU.
Israel first joined the organisation in 1991 as an observer state, and became a special observer state in 2009.
Based in Geneva, CERN is the world leader in the research of particle physics. It’s star project is the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most sophisticated particle collider, a $10 billion project that aims to bash together the tiny particles making up the universe at phenomenal speeds to allow scientists to observe phenomena that occurred immediately after the Big Bang.
Israel is expected to become a full member of CERN by 2013, after two years as an associate member.

Announcing the 2011 FERMILAB/WGN Tornado & Severe Storms Seminar on Saturday, April 30, 2011

By Meteorologist Tom Skilling

Greetings to each of you! We have an extraordinary program planned for our 31st Annual Fermilab/WGN-TV seminar which takes place this year on Saturday, April 30th. I'm very excited about this year's program and the speakers who will join me at noon Saturday, Arpil 30th and again for a repeat of the entire program at 6 p.m. The event will take place at the Ramsey Auditorium on the grounds of the Batavia-based Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory.  Please feel free to attend either the noon session or the 6 pm session. We'd love to have you join us!  Hope to see you there and again here are the key details.

Where: Fermilab - Kirk Rd & Pine St, Batavia, Illinois, 1.630.840.3000
When:  Saturday, April 30th @12pm and again at 6pm

For a complete listing of guest speakers and topics of discussion continue reading below!

Putting these programs together the past 31 years has been a real labor of love for each of us involved in the seminar's preparation and production. The program is absolutely free! There are no tickets required--just show up! Seating is first come, first-served, so we recommend you get to the Fermilab grounds early--about an hour or hour and a half before the start of each program. As in recent years, we'll be giving away a number of NOAA Weather Radios.  Be sure you sign up at the Lake County Skywarn Booth as you approach the Ramsey Auditorium.

There's so much to talk about and share with you this year--and our speakers list is spectacular! We have an incredibly active 2011 tornado season underway and showing no sign of easing anytime soon which we intend to update and discuss. But, we've also been through quite a winter which has included one of this area's worst blizzards on record. The extraordinary Blizzard of 2011 was one for the books--the third worst snowstorm since records began in the 1884-85 snow season. Despite one of the best advance forecasts of such a storm ever, thousands ended up stranded on Lakeshore Drive--among other thoroughfares across the area. Why was that? And how was it that the storm was so accurately predicted so far in advance? We'll have insights from the National Weather Service's Dr. Louis Uccellini, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Spring, Maryland as well as Dr. Jim Angel, our Illinois state climatologist at the Midwestern Regional Climate Center in Champaign, who will join us to discuss the work he and his colleagues have done on the impact; economically and in human terms, of February's crippling storm.

Jim Reed is one of the most respected storm chasers and extreme weather photographers on the road today. An author and all around wonderful human being, it was Jim who guided our WGN team as it encountered a multiple vortex tornado which chased us at speeds over 60 mph last May in northeast Oklahoma.  You'll meet Jim and find his presentation riveting.

We have a whole series of other presentations planned at our April 30th programs--and here's a rundown of them--both the speakers and the subjects of their talks. Both the noon and the 6pm programs run 3-4 hours with a break mid-way through.

I'm often asked if our program is suited to younger children.  Probably not. There will be all manner of "storm- in -progress" slides and videos which may frighten some young people. We've found in most past programs at Fermilab that 4th graders and older are best equipped to handle the content of our presentations.

Here are our speakers and the topics that will be discussed. Check them out!

Tom Skilling, Chief meteorologist, WGN-TV  Join us for a front row seat as we take you on a video excursion through a wild year of weather. The presentation will include our all-too-close encounter with a multiple-vortex tornado which chased us down an Oklahoma highway at 55mph. We'll also take a look at February's horrific blizzard--arguably the area's single most crippling snowstorm in decades. The blizzard, despite a week's worth of advance warning, still stranded thousands in howling 70 mph winds under drifts up to 5 to 6 ft. on Lakeshore Drive for up to 14 hours. We'll also review early returns from the already formidable 2011 tornado and severe weather season underway which is seriously outpacing the 2010 twister season to date.

Tom plans to take you on a video excursion through it all--and will even include eye-opening and horrifying video clips of the devastating Japanese tsunami in progress, as it takes apart one seaside community in the space of just 9 minutes.  The presentation will include a look at the revolution underway the past half century in meteorology which has allowed better forecasts and tracking of tornadoes and all manner of weather.

Dr. Louis W. Uccellini, Director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)  Dr. Uccellini will present a talk: "Forecasting The Blizzards of 2010-2011".  Warnings for Chicago's third largest snowstorm on record in February 2011 and New York City's record blizzard in December 2010 were issued with plenty of lead time; yet not all heeded the warnings.  This talk will explore how forecasters approached these storms and offer insights into how the warnings were received as the dangerous storms approached major metropolitan areas.

Extreme weather, including blizzards, tornadoes and severe thunderstorm outbreaks, are being predicted with greater accuracy and longer lead times than ever before. This past winter's blizzard in Chicago, the third largest snowstorm on record, was flagged as a potential threat for the Great Lakes region 5 to 7 days before the storm struck. Yet uncertainty in the track forecast remained even as the storm was predicted to become a large and dangerous blizzard that would impact a large area of the northern Midwest. The ability of this country's forecast system to provide forecasts of extreme events (like the blizzards and the recent major tornado outbreaks) has been decades in the making and is based on revolutionary advances in observing, numerical prediction models, computers, and the abilities of the forecasters to work with and fully utilize these sophisticated models and observations to issue warnings with increased confidence and specificity.

Global and local observations are becoming increasingly reliant on satellites and radar networks.  And today's forecast models run on supercomputers which are able to readily access over 3.5 billion observations per day and perform 70 trillion mathematical calculations per second---a speed which will double or triple over the next 4 to 5 years.  There may be no one who who has played such an active role in this revolution in weather forecasting than Dr. Louis W. Uccellini who, as Director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (or NCEP as it is known in the meteorological profession), oversees the operations of 9 centers including the Storm Prediction Center, Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center and the Environmental Modeling Center (which plays a key role in the development of the computer models) and of the NCEP Central Operations (which maintains and runs these models on the operational supercomputers on a daily basis).  Dr. Uccellini will discuss the Chicago and New York City blizzards with a comparison showing that while the forecast and warnings highlighted the potential threat associated with the onset of these storms highlighted days before their arrival, improvements are still needed to provide predictive information and decision support required for more decisive action.  Finally, Dr. Uccellini will take your questions at the end of the presentation..

Dr. Jim Angel, State Climatologist, Midwestern Regional Climate Center February 2011 Blizzard's astounding impact: Tab on storm $400-million in snow removal costs and in lost business, nearly 7,000 miles of highways buried beneath a foot or more of snow, over 10-million impacted

The February blizzard's economic impact has come in at just under half a billion dollars in northeast Illinois alone, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center's Dr. Jim Angel. Angel is Illinois' state climatologist in Illinois. Just under 10 million Illinoisans alone experienced 12-inch plus accumulations and an extraordinary 6,993 miles of Illinois highways were buried beneath 12 inches.

Jim Reed, Award winning photographer "Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey" - Join award-winning extreme weather photographer Jim Reed as he discusses his favorite images from his critically-acclaimed book and how he captured the photos

It was veteran storm chaser Jim Reed with whom Tom Skilling and WGN producer Pam Grimes and photographers Steve Scheuer and Jordan Guzzardo traveled into the Plains last spring for a trip which led to an encounter with a multiple vortex tornado which chased them down a northeast Oklahoma highwa. The storm flipped semis and cars on their sides. WGN viewers were along every step of the way for the ride. One of the world's most accomplished and award-winning extreme-weather photographers, Jim Reed has dedicated 20 consecutive years to documenting America's changing climate for editorial and fine art clients that include National Geographic, The New York Times, and Corcoran Gallery of Art.  In 2010, Jim served as WGN's field guide on the Emmy-Award winning "Chased by Tornadoes," leading Tom to his first on-location tornado. Author of the critically-accalimed book, "Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey," Jim has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Weather Channel, and many other TV shows. Check out Jim's Nikon Podcast on iTunes! You can follow Jim on Twitter: @jimreedphoto


Jim Allsopp, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, NWS Chicago  Tornadoes in the Chicago area: How often have they occurred and how do events like the current La Nina, which the cooling of the equatorial Pacific, have an impact on local tornado occurrence?

Several years ago Jim Allsopp did a study on the frequency of significant (F2 and greater) tornadoes across the eight county Chicago metro area. In 2010 Valparaiso meteorology student Tony Lyza expanded the study to the entire 23 county area served by the Chicago NWS office and also looked at correlations between tornado frequency and the El Nino/Southern Oscillation cycle.

Brian Smith, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, National Weather Service, Omaha, Nebraska "Killer Wind:  Do not ignore Severe Thunderstorm
Warnings"

Brian Smith, veteran National Weather Service meteorologist and severe weather specialist at the Service's Omaha forecast office, and former student and longtime research assistant to famed University of Chicago tornado researcher Dr. Ted Fujita, will look at derechoes and downbursts, explain what they are, how they happen and the dangers they represent.  Brian has irrefutable evidence they are just as dangerous as tornadoes and makes the case that Severe Thunderstorm Warnings should be taken just as seriously as tornado warnings and not ignored.

Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, MD, University of Illinois-Chicago The lightning injury rate in the U.S. is down but lightning injuries and deaths remain high in tropical and sub-tropical countries. What is being done to change this?

Due to the hard work of many people, the lightning injury rate in the US has declined substantially.  However, there continues to be significant numbers of injuries and deaths in tropical and subtropical countries around the world.  We cannot export the US solutions to areas where thatched roof homes and labor intensive agriculture is still the norm but must come up with other solutions including innovative educational ways to reach the people.  Dr Cooper will discuss some of the developments and outreach that is happening in these areas.

Ed Fenelon, Meteorologist in Charge of the NWS Forecast Office-Chicago Rip Currents: Killers on the Great Lakes--but what are they and what do you do when they strike?

Rip Currents caused the drowning death of 30 people last year on the Great Lakes, and on average claim 100 lives per year in the United States.  Sadly, most if not all of these lives could have been saved had people known the right thing to do.  Just what are these powerful water flows that occur at our beaches, and what do we need to be teaching our kids before they go in the water?  Ed Fenelon will talk about what ripncurrents are, and about a new partnership between beach managers, first responders, community leaders, the media, and the National Weather Service to reduce rip current drownings at our beaches.  Through advances in rip current research we are now able to predict days when rip currents may form.  By being informed before deciding to go to the beach, and following the advice of lifeguards and beach signs when there, we can ensure many happy returns to the water.  Rip Currents -
break the grip of the rip!  More information at ripcurrents.noaa.gov

Skanska USA Building plans to begin work this month to complete the new federal Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, more than two years after construction stopped because of cost disputes and lawsuits, The Gazette reported. The company was chosen to take control of the project when now-defunct developer Opus East LLC refused to make more improvements unless it was compensated for work revisions ordered by the General Services Administration. The 269,000-square-foot structure's construction site has been idle since, leaving the building 80 percent...

Snow went out like a punk on Sunday.

In what ABC7 senior meteorologist Bob Ryan has deemed the final snow "storm" of spring, D.C. received a passing brushstroke of white: just 0.2 inches. Alexandria got 0.4 inches and towns south of Richmond saw more than two inches. Somehow a snowfall record was set at Dulles International Airport. But still, it was a lackluster haunting from our once-fearsome, thundersnow-bombing winter.

Dry air was mostly responsible for kneecapping the storm in the D.C. region. (Bob Ryan has a more thorough explanation.) It got back on its feet again down south, where severe thunderstorm warnings were in effect Sunday for Coffee, Appling and Bacon counties in Georgia – a sign of how deep the storm scooped and also that Georgia has food on the brain. Hail the size of softballs smashed car windows and ripped open house sidings. Check out this video of it bouncing like Super Balls.

Our weather this week will be less dramatic but not without its twists and turns. There are two chances for rain – one on Tuesday night into Wednesday that could feature some wintry mix, the other on Friday. Then there’s the lingering cold streak. Sunday marked the fourth day in a row with temperatures 15 to 20 degrees below 60, the seasonal average. Today’s warmest moment is likely to be more than 10 degrees below 60 and the nippy temperatures are expected to last into Friday.

“Here we are at the end of March, and it feels more like the end of winter,” says ABC7 meteorologist Steve Rudin. “There’s just this area of high pressure locked over the region bringing in a lot of cold air from Canada.”

Rudin says that some weather models show the briskness lasting for a couple of weeks. The graphic you see above, from the Climate Prediction Center, gives the Northeast a heightened probability of below-average temperatures all during next week. Let’s hope they're wrong.

We have big snow here in Boston and through the Northeast US. See #snowloko on Twitter.MIT and Tufts are closed.Check WBZ site for updates .The local office of the National Weather Service offers information for the state, including: •Preliminary Climate Data for Other Locations in Southern New England•Miscellaneous Climate Records and Averages•Southern New England Snow Storms/Previous Event Calendar•Hydrologic Observations•Plots and Images of Hydrologic Observations.The site also offeres great links to sites like:National Centers for Environmental Prediction Model Analyses & GuidanceThe Model Analyses and Guidance (MAG) website showcases the National Weather Service’s observational database and graphical suite of numerical model analysis and guidance. The site is maintained by National Centers for Environmental Prediction Central Operations (NCEP/NCO) and NOAA’s Web Operations Center (WOC). During the past fifteen months, the current NWS/NCEP Model Analysis and Forecast website was redesigned to create a more professional and interactive interface. More links here.

It would be easier to take if we didn't have nine months in a row with above average temperatures leading into December.  It is as if Mother Nature threw a switch on December 1st and arctic air swept in and took up residence.  12 out of 14 days this month have been below average.  When it has been colder than average this December, it has really been colder than average.  The 12 days below average have averaged a deficit of 10 degrees.  The two days above average were only a degree above normals.

 

The new 6-10 day outlook from the Climate Prediction Center keeps Illinois and much of the eastern third of the country below average.  That brings us right up to Christmas Eve. Most of the western half of the country from the Rockies through the west coast is progged to be above average.

That could be bad news for citrus farmers in Florida. The orange crops seemed to withstand the most recent intrusion of Arctic air but more is on the way.

 air but more is on the way.

www.facebook.com/TimMcGillWeatherGuy

http://twitter.com/WGNWeatherGuy

 

Articles in the Daily Mail show the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused his catastrophic mistakes about Iraq

You can divide people into two categories: those who learn from their mistakes and those who don't. There is no third category: we all mess up from time to time.

Journalism is a mistake waiting to happen. With tight deadlines, big rewards for shock and awe and small rewards for methodical, less spectacular work, with an inverse relationship between volume and truth in public life, reporters tend to stumble from one accident to another.

The only hope journalists have of retaining any kind of self-respect is to question themselves repeatedly, ask whether they are being manipulated and whether they are seeing the whole story. So where does this leave David Rose?

I don't want to credit the media with more power than it has, but from time to time it is pivotal to public policy. One such moment was the build up to the Iraq war. The UK might not have joined Bush's war if it didn't have broad support from the press, and particularly from sections of the

liberal press.

The Observer was more influential in the build-up to the war than any other outlet, as the position it took – strongly in favour – was so unexpected. Its editorial line caused huge ructions within the paper and plenty of conflict with journalists at its sister-paper the Guardian (I'm

painfully aware of this, having had a shouting match with the Observer's then political editor, Kamal Ahmed, in the building's stairwell). It also emboldened some wavering Labour MPs and helped Tony Blair make his case.

The Observer's position was strongly influenced by Rose's reporting. Though others warned that his sources should not be trusted, Rose's articles for the paper uncritically reported the claims made by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi later admitted that they were incorrect.

The chain of causality is a long one, and I don't want to pull on it too hard, but it is arguable that the Observer could not have sustained its position were it not for Rose's reporting; that Blair could not have contained the Labour revolt were it not for the Observer; and that Bush could not have gone to war were it not for Blair's support.

In May 2004, over a year after the war began, Rose, to his credit, admitted that he'd got it wrong. By then, of course, it was far too late to undo the damage. He wrote a partial apology in an article titled: "Iraqi defectors tricked us with WMD lies, but we must not be fooled again".

A vain hope. Admitting it, it seems, is one thing; learning from it quite another.

Since the Iraq debacle, Rose has latterly been writing articles attacking climate science for the Daily Mail. He has distinguished himself by the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused his catastrophic mistakes about Iraq. He has made a long series of basic errors and – far worse – has kept making them even after they've been exposed. Here are just a few examples:

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate.php

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_still_growing.php

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php

• http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/15/rosegate-dailymail-error-riddled-articles-misquote-credibility-science/

• http://deepclimate.org/2010/01/11/mojib-latif-slams-daily-mail/

But now he has published his longest list of errors yet, in an article in Monday's Daily Mail. Every one of them would have been easy to check and disprove, had he been inclined to do so. But the Mail pays well for this crap, and checking, under these circumstances, is likely to be an expensive pastime.

I don't have time to deal with every one of the mistakes his article contains – it takes 100 times as long to show why a claim is wrong as it does to make it - but here's a quick breakdown, beginning with the first sentence: (I've been able to pull this together with the help of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which put me in touch with the relevant scientists and pointed me to the primary datasets.)

Rose:

"A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, 'is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record' – a deeply
worrying 0.58C above the 1961-1990 average."

"A year ago tomorrow" would have been 7 December. The Met Office issued its forecast (not a "prediction") on 10 December.

And there was nothing "confident" about it. The press release said that a record warm year "is not a certainty, especially if the current El Niño was to unexpectedly decline rapidly near the start of 2010, or if there was a large volcanic eruption." As it happened, El Niño did decline rapidly, and was replaced by a very strong La Niña.

Rose:

"Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met."

Rose provides no source for this claim (or for any of the claims here). The Met Office tells me it was not trying to influence policy, simply to report the facts.

Rose:

"Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere"

I challenge Rose to find a single occasion on which these bodies have said that temperatures will rise "in step" with CO₂. As Professor Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research tells me: "One should not be misled by seizing on an individual value or year and citing trends for that, because natural variability such as from El Niño creates ups and downs all the time."

Does Rose expect warming to proceed along a straight line?

Rose:

"Last week at Cancún, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20bn immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5C higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production."

I can find no evidence at all for this. The Institute did release a report last week, but it doesn't even mention 6.5C, let alone predict that temperatures would climb to that point. In fact it makes no predictions whatever about global warming: it simply explains what is likely to happen to agriculture at different temperature scenarios, none of which extend as far as 6.5C. It is not easy to see how Rose could have got this so wrong.

Rose:

"Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Niño' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for 10, but for the past 15 years."

All the datasets, including the Met Office/CRU figures show that the current decade is the warmest in the instrumental record.

Rose:

"They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all."

Professor Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia (yes, the Phil Jones), tells me: "The error of estimate of global averages or the forecasts for subsequent years is completely unrelated to the trend of warming. This is comparing apples with oranges."

Rose:

"Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C. That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8C, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat."

In fact 14.52C (which means 0.52C above the long-term average) is equal to the record set in 1998. The Met Office figures show that - for January-October - 2010 is the equal warmest year on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Nasa databases, which record anomalies of 0.54C and 0.58C respectively, suggest that so far it's the warmest year on record.

Phil Jones tells me:

"The forecast of 14.58 for 2010 was well within the error range if the final number was 14.52. The difference is 0.06 and the error range is +/- 0.10 approx".

Rose:

"Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Niño was at its peak."

This, again, is utter nonsense, and goes to show what happens when you rely on untrustworthy sources. As you can see from all three global datasets (CRU, NOAA and Nasa) all the months this year for which the data has so far been collated (January-October) were anomalously warm.

Phil Jones points out: "Looking at these, it is clear that they have used the land-only values!!!!!!"

Amazing. I can't imagine what the fuss would have been like if climate scientists had made the same mistake as the Global Warming Policy Foundation has done.

Rose:

"The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005."

Perhaps Rose could explain how he has obtained the data from October to the end of the year. Is he employing Mystic Meg as his researcher?

Rose:

"Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1,000AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now."

Rose, as usual, provides no reference for this paper, and none of the scientists I've contacted, including Mann, has any idea what he's talking about. But Mann points out that neither "we, nor any other researchers, have ever denied there was a period of relative warmth sometime during medieval for many regions. What we - and other competent researchers - have all found is that the warmth was far more regional than modern warmth, with some large regions, like the tropical Pacific, having been unusually *cold* at the time, and when you average over the globe, the warmth of the medieval warm period/medieval climate anomaly simply doesn't reach modern warmth. Every peer-reviewed scientific study of the matter comes to the same conclusions."

Rose:

"Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th-century warming."

Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M; University says: "I have no idea what "research" they are talking about." He recently analysed of all the data and showed that there is no evidence for such claims.

Dessler continues: "This is really a classic "sceptic" argument. When it was originally brought up in the early 1990s, it was a legitimate uncertainty in our understanding. Scientists, however, view uncertainty like a starving wolf views red meat, and so the problem was thoroughly attacked over the next 15 years. In particular, about eight years ago Nasa launched the atmospheric infrared sounder on board the Aqua satellite, which measures water vapour distribution with great accuracy. These data have really settled the question. However, just like the monster in a horror movie, this argument just won't die."

Anthony del Genio of Nasa also tells me: "I know of no evidence for the statement that cyclical changes in water vapour are responsible for much of the 20th-century warming, unless there is a new paper of which I am not aware that makes such a claim."

He continues: "The important thing is that the inter-annual changes of water vapour and everything else associated with El Niño are not systematic long-term variations, rather they go up and down every 2-5 years or so. So they don't cause a long-term trend. CO₂ changes, however, do cause long-term changes in CO₂. Because CO₂ is itself a greenhouse gas, it warms the atmosphere and surface of the planet, which causes more water to evaporate from the oceans and build up in the atmosphere. The resulting warming due to the water vapour is in fact larger than the initial warming due to the CO₂ that forced it to happen, and this is the point of the Lacis paper - yes, water vapour is a more important greenhouse gas than CO₂, but water vapour doesn't change systematically with time UNLESS CO₂ is changing and initiating a warming that sets into motion the surface and atmospheric processes that allow water vapour to systematically increase. So CO₂ changes are the root cause of whatever water vapour feedback winds up occurring."

Rose:

"Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a little-noticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995."

Phil Jones replies: "The key statement here is 'not statistically significant'. It wasn't for these years at the 95% level, but it would have been at the 90% level. If you add the value of 0.52 in for 2010 and look at 1995 to 2010 then the warming is statistically significant at the 95% level." [What this means is that the warming trend for the past few years previously met a lower test of statistical significance. With addition of the results so far for 2010, it now means the higher test.]

Rose:

"One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports. He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'"

Here's what Trenberth says on his website:

"It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often. It stems from a paper I published this year bemoaning our inability to effectively monitor the energy flows associated with short- term climate variability. It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability."

It is hard to believe that Rose was unaware of this explanation.

Rose:

"The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?"

The question now emerging for Rose is very simple. Just how many mistakes does he have to make before the thesis that these are innocent errors starts to collapse?

www.monbiot.com

Tuesday, 02 September 2008, 23:30
C O N F I D E N T I A L STATE 093970
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 09/02/2018
TAGS SENV, PREL, UNEP, WMO, KGHG, IR, ML, AR, MA, MO
SUBJECT: LIFELINES FOR IPCC WORKING GROUP ELECTION
Classified By: Classified by IO/DAS Gerald Anderson for reasons 1.4(b) and (d)

1. (U) This is an action message. Please see paragraph 3.

2. (C) Summary. Missions should be prepared to assist the U.S. Delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its efforts to secure a positive outcome to elections for working group co-chair positions at the IPCC Plenary being held in Geneva, August 31-September 4. USDEL is working actively to prevent the election of an Iranian scientist to the developing-nation co-chairmanship of Working Group Two, a position which would pair him with a U.S. scientist running unopposed for developed-nation co-chair of the same group. The focus of USG efforts is to support an alternate candidacy for the position, although the full slate of active candidates and their potential for election will not be known until the later stages of the plenary sessions. Curricula vitae of some of the leading candidates are at paras 6-10. End Summary.

3. (C) Action Request. Missions should assign a Point-of-Contact for this issue and provide phone and e-mail information to the US Mission to the UN in Geneva. USUN should appoint its own POC and relay contact information for all POCs to USDEL IPCC. In the event that USDEL requires assistance in working with counterpart delegations (e.g., coming to a consensus on a single strong alternate candidate to support), USDEL may contact Mission POCs directly, or via US Mission Geneva, to ask that Missions apprise host governments of the situation, with a view to arranging for instructions from capitals. Missions should do everything possible to assist USDEL if they receive such a request. Until such a call is received, however, Missions should take no action on this issue; USDEL will be interacting directly with host-country expert delegations in Geneva, and premature contacts/demarches with host country government officials in capitals, even to preview the background of the situation, could be highly counter-productive. Point of Contact for USDEL is OES/EGC,s Donna Lee XXXXXXXXXXXX.

4. (C) Background. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (http://www.ipcc.ch) is a highly influential body established by the World Meteological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to assess scientific issues related to climate change. This year, the U.S. has nominated Stanford Professor Christopher Field to the developed-country chair of IPCC Working Group Two, which assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change and the options for adaptation. His nomination is unopposed. Iran, however, has nominated Dr. Mostafa Jafari to be the developing-country co-chair of the same working group. Jafari is a highly-qualified scientist with research ties to the UK and Japan, but he is also a senior Iranian government employee who has represented Iran in international negotiations. Co-chair appointments are for a minimum of four years, and require close collaboration and often travel to or extended residencies in each others, countries. Having U.S. and Iranian co-chairs would be problematic and potentially at odds with overall U.S. policy towards Iran, and would significantly complicate the U.S. commitment to funding the Working Group Two secretariat. U.S. withdrawal of its nominee, however, would effectively give Iran a veto over future U.S. nominees in UN bodies. Moreover, having a U.S. co-chair at the IPCC significantly bolsters U.S. interests on climate change, a key foreign policy issue.

5. (C) Background continued. Prior to arrival in Geneva, USDEL contacted IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri (please protect), who agreed to work on this issue to avoid the potential for disruption to one the organization,s three core working groupsXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Next, USDEL contacted the Austrian delegate serving as EU representative on the nominating committee that manages the election process, who showed an understanding of U.S. equities. USDEL contacted the Malian and Argentinean delegations, who have nominated highly-qualified co-chair candidates (see below), and the German delegation, who have been interested in advancing the Malian for co-chair of Working Group Three, for which Germany has nominated an unopposed candidate as developed-country co-chair. The Malians subsequently told USDEL that their candidate, Dr. Yauba Sokona, prefers Working Group Two to Working Group Three. Also prior to arrival in Geneva, USDEL contacted the UK and Netherlands delegations, both of which we have worked closely with in the past. Based on experience at prior IPCC plenaries, events related to the Working Group elections will likely unfold unpredictably and rapidly, necessitating a rapid and flexible USG response.

6. (SBU) CV of Iranian candidate:

Mostafa Jafari

Personal Information: DPoB: 1956, Tehran

Education: -- Post doctorate research in Plant Ecophysiology Methodology in 1997 (Japan). -- Ph.D. in Plant Science (Ecology) in 1990 (UK). -- Short course in Agricultural Economy in 1983 (Tehran). -- B.Sc. in Forest and Range graduated in 1978 (Iran). -- Diploma in 1974 (Tehran).

Membership in Professional Organizations: -- Japanese Forestry Society -- The British Grassland Society -- The British Ecological Society -- International Union of Forestry research Organization -- Asia-Pacific Association of Forestry Research Institutions -- New York Academy of Science -- The International Association for Ecology

Professional Responsibilities: -- Starting to work as chief of Agricultural committee in 1979 (Tehran). -- Member of Scientific Staff since 1990. -- Lecturer in Universities (Ecophysiology, Ecology, Range Rehabilitation, Plant Geography) and advisor of several postgraduate students in different universities. -- Head of High Council for Forest, Range and Soil in Forest and Range Organization (highest technical body in FRO) 1990-1993 (consideration and approval of more than 200 silviculture projects with cooperation of council members). -- Director General of Studies and Coordinating Office in Forest and Range Organization 1991-1994. -- Head of Coordinating Council for Forest, Range and Watershed Management, 1992 (nominated by Minister). -- Member of Agricultural Commission of National Research Council of I.R. Iran, 1992-1995 and 1995-1998 (nominated by First Deputy of President). -- Director (President) of Research Institute of Forest and Rangelands, I.R. Iran, from 1992 to Nov. 1997. (with 600 staff including 250 scientific researcher and 900 research projects, publishing 200 books in this period) -- Full authority representative of Minister and Member of Iranian National Sustainable Development Committee, 1993-1998. -- Chief, Sustainable Development Committee of Ministry, 1995-1998. -- Member of Expert and Academic Advisory Commission and Chief of Environmental Committee in Planning and Budget Organization, 1997-1998. -- Chief, Expert Committee of Forests and Rangelands (Agricultural Commission of National Research Council of I.R. Iran), 1997-1998. -- Advisor to the Minister, 1997-1998. -- Permanent Representative of I.R. Iran to FAO office, Rome, June 1998- March 2003. -- Advisor to the Deputy Minister and Head of FRWO, and National Forest Focal Point, from March 2003.to Oct. 2005 -- Head of TP Secretariat of Low Forest Cover Countries (LFCCs, International Intergovernmental Organization), Since, March 2003. -- International Affair Advisor to the Deputy Minister and Head of IRIMO, and Director of First Vice President Office of WMO, Since August 2004. http://www.weather.ir/farsi/about/IPCC/irani. asp -- Head of High Council for Forest, Range and Soil in Forest, Range and Watershed management Organization (highest technical body in FRWO) from Oct. 2005 to July 2006, (considering and approve of main Silvicultural project in FRWO with cooperation of council members). -- Scientific member of Research Institute of Forest and Rangelands,

Major Publications: Publication of 63 articles including five books and two university textbooks, including: -- Jafari, M. (1997a), The Present Status of Forestry Research in I.R. Iran, in Four Articles on Forests, Technical Publication No. 176-1997, Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, pp 121. -- Jafari, M. (1997b), Present Status of Afforestation Research in I.R. Iran, in Four Articles on Forests, Technical Publication No. 176-1997, Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, pp 121. -- Jafari, M. (2006), An Overview On Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) with An Introduction to Monitoring and Evaluation, ISBN: 964-6931-80-4, Pouneh Publisher, Tehran, Iran, pp 170. -- Jafari M. (2007a), Review on needfulness for plant ecophysiological study and investigation on climate change,s effects on forest, rangeland and desert ecosystems, presented in Workshop: Climate Change in South-Eastern European Countries: Causes, Impacts, Solutions, 26- 27 March 2007, Orangerie, Burggarten, Graz, Austria. -- Jafari M. (2007b), Climate Change and IPCC Assessments (Abstract of Keynote Lecture of the Symposium), in The Final Report of ICCAP, The Research Project on the Impact of Climate Changes on Agricultural Production System in Arid Areas, March 2007, ICCAP Publication 10-Japan, ISBN 4902325-09-8, pp 315-317. -- Cruz, R.V., M. Jafari, et al, 2007: Asia. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 469-506. -- Falkenmark M., C. M. Finlayson and L. J. Gordon (Coordinating lead authors), 2007, Agriculture, water, and ecosystems: avoiding the costs of going too far" Chapter 6, in book entitled "Water for Food, Water for Life" published by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), UK. (M. Jafari, Reviewer of chapter six).

Research projects: Managing director of research project in RIFR entitled: &Investigation; on Climate Change Effects on Forest Ecosystems in Gilan and Mazandaran Provinces with Emphasize of Wood Dendrology Studies8

Language knowledge: Persian, English (fluent); Italian, Arabic, French.

International negotiations: -- UNCED (Rio de Janeiro) Conference on Climate Change http://unfccc.int/cop4/resource/docs/1998/sbi /inf02.pdf http://unfccc.int/cop4/resource/docs/1998/sbi /inf02.htm -- Kyoto Protocol, Leading Author (LA) of Fourth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR4 of IPCC WG II / Chapter 10 Asia ) 2004-2007) http://www.gtp89.dial.pipex.com/10.pdf -- Biological Diversity, Combat Desertification, Forestry negotiations, IPF, IFF, UNFF, http://www.iisd.ca/forestry/unff/unff3/2june. html http://www.iisd.ca/download/pdf/sd/sdvol101nu m1e.pdf http://www.iisd.ca/forestry/unff/unff5/may17. html http://www.iisd.ca/forestry/unff/unff5/may25. html -- 10th World Forestry Congress, Paris (vice president of WFC X, chairman of two technical working groups); -- 12th World Forestry Congress, Quebec (vice president of WFC XII, chairman of two technical working groups and one open forum), http://www.iisd.ca/sd/wfc12/sdvol10num8e.html -- Head of Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) of Tehran Process Secretariat for Low Forest Cover Countries (TPS for LFCCs, International IGO) since 2003 (ftp:// ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/meeting/007/j2042E/j20 42E00.pdf)

7. (SBU) Biographic Summary of Malian candidate:

Youba Sokona Executive Secretary, Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS) PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION:

Dr. Youba Sokona has been Executive Secretary of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS) since June 2004. OSS is an independent international organization based in Tunisia, comprised of 22 African and European countries, regional and international organizations, and representatives of civil society organizations. The Executive Secretary directs program operations and implements the decisions taken by the Executive Board and General Assembly.

Throughout his career, Dr Sokona has served in various advisory capacities to African governments and organisations. He has published several books and articles on the issues of energy, environment and development with a focus on Africa. Prior to his appointment to OSS he was:

Coordinator, Energy Programme, and Executive Secretary for International Relations, Environement and Developpement du Tiers Monde (ENDA-TM), based in Dakar, Senegal (1982)2003); and

Professor, &Ecole; Nationale d,Ingenieurs de Bamako8 (National Engineering School, Bamako, Mali).

Dr. Sokona has participated in many international events on climate change, desertification, and biodiversity. He is often invited by African governments and international organisations, such as the World Bank, UNDP, UNEP, UNCCD, etc., to be a member of steering committees, to conduct programme evaluations, to chair high-level sessions in international conferences, and to contribute scientific and policy papers.

He took part in the international negotiations and follow-up events to the Rio process and the three UN environmental conventions on Climate Change, Desertification, and Biodiversity.

AWARDS, BOARD MEMBERSHIPS AND AFFILIATIONS:

Member, Technical Advisory Group of the joint UNDP/World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistant Program (present);

Board Member, International Institute for Environment and Development (present); and

Board Member, Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (present).

EDUCATION:

University of Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (PhD, Engineering and Earth Sciences)

Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris

Ecole Nationale d,Ingenieurs de Bamako (Mali)

8. (SBU) CV of Argentinean candidate:

Vicente Ricardo Barros

A PhD in Meteorological Science, Dr. Barros is a Chief Researcher at the Conicet and Climatology Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, School of Natural Sciences, where he heads the Masters program in Environmental Science. He has written more than one hundred papers on climatic problems, half of which have been published in international scientific magazines. He took part in drafting a chapter of the Third Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climatic Change in 2001.

Education:

1961-65 University of Buenos Aires (UBA): Licenciado in Meteorological Sciences

1969-71 The University of Michigan: Master of Science in Meteorology:

1972-73 UBA: Doctor in Meteorological Sciences

Management Position:

Faculty of Sciences (UBA) Director of the Masters program in Environmental Sciences (since 1999)

Scientific position:

National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) Senior scientist; and Department of Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences (DAOS) of the UBAx

Teaching position:

University of Buenos Aires; Full Professor in Climatology (since 1987)

Past management positions:

1989-92 Member of the Directory of the National Commission of Environmental Policies

1991-92 National Report to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and Environment, Rio de Janeiro 1992, 579 pp. 1991. Coordinator

1993-97 Director of the Department of Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences (UBA)

1994-02 Member of the Directive Council of the Faculty of Sciences (UBA)

1996-97 National Director of the Project: Greenhouse gasses emissions inventory and Climate Change Studies on Vulnerability and Mitigation. GEF-UNDP- SECYT

1997-98 President of the Commission of the Exact and non Biological Natural Sciences segment of the National plan on Science and Technology 1999-2001

1999 Technical Director of the Emission target study of greenhouse gases. EPA- UNDP

1999 Revision of the First National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,

Books:

El Cambio Climtico Global 2004. Ed, Libros del Zorzal, Buenos Aires 172 pp. Segunda edicion en 2006. Traducido al Checo y Publicado en 2006 por Mlada Fronta con el titulo Globalni zmena klimatu

El Cambio Climtico en el Ro de la Plata. 2005. Eds. V. Barros, A. Menendez and G, Nagy. CIMA. Buenos Aires

El Cambio Climtico en la Cuenca del Plata. 2006. Eds. V. Barros, R. Clarke and P. Silva Dias. CIMA. Buenos Aires.

Climate Change and Adaptation, Eds, Neil Leary, James Adejuwon, Vicente Barros, Ian Burton and Rodel Lasco, Earthscan Publishers, London 2007 Coordinator

Activities as an international expert:

1983 Project on basic information to develop wind energy in Uruguay. UNDP/WMO

1987 Planning of the wind energy use in Cuba. UNDP/WMO

1987-91 Project on wind energy in the Energy Department of Uruguay. UNDP/UNIDO

Activities in international organizations

1997-00 Member of the Atmospheric Observation Panel for Climate del Global Climate Observing System. WMO-UNEP

1999-00 Contributing author to the chapter on Detection and attribution of climate change of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

2001-03 Member of the panel on the Plata basin of VAMOS (CLIVAR)

Journal reviewer activities:

Acta Oceanografica (Argentina), Atmosfera (Mexico), Climate Research (Germany), Geoacta (Argentina), Geofisica Internacional (Mexico),Geophysical Research Letters (USA), Int. Journal of Climatology (United Kingdom), J. Climate (USA), J. Geophysical Research (USA), Meteorologica (Argentina), Magazine of the Academy of Sciences (Brazil), Revista Geofisica (IPGH), Journal of Hydrometeotology (USA), Journal of Arid Environments (Holanda), REGA (Brasil-Argentina)

Publications In Refereed Journals:

Climate variability over subtropical South America and the South American Monsoon: A Review 2003: V. Barros, M. Doyle, M. Gonzalez, I. Camilloni, R. Bejaran and R. Caffera. Meteorologica, 27, 34-58

Extreme discharge events in the Paran River and their climate forcing 2003:. I. Camilloni and V. Barros J. of Hydrology, 278, 94-106

Implications of a Dynamic Target of Greenhouse Gases Emission Reduction: the Case of Argentina 2002. Environmental and Development Economics, July 2002. Barros, V. and M. Conte Grand

Differences in the El Nio response over the Southern Hemisphere 2003. J. Climate.17, 1741-1753. Vera C., Silvestri, V. Barros and A. Carril.

Impact of Global Change on the Coastal Areas of the Rio de la Plata. AIACC Notes. Junio 2003.Vo 2, .9-12. Barros, V., Camilloni, I. and A. Menendez

La temperatura del Atlntico Sur y la diferencia de caudales del Rio Parana durante los eventos El Nio 1982-83 y 1997-98. 2004. Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia I. Camilloni y V. Barros.

The major discharge events in the Paraguay River; Magnitudes, source regions and climate forcings. J Hydrometeorology 2004 Vol 5, 1061-1070.. V. Barros, L Chamorro, G. Coronel and J. Baez

An Observed Trend in Central South American Precipitation 2004. J. Climate. 17: 4357-4367 B. Liebmann, Vera, C. Carvalho, L., Camilloni, I., Barros, V., Hoerling, M y Allured, D. A.

Observed trends in indices of daily temperature extremes in South America 1960-2000 2005. J. Climate, 18, 5011-5023. Vincent, L.A., T.C. Peterson, V.R. Barros, et al

Trends in total and extreme South American precipitation 1960-2000 and links with sea surface temperature 2006. J. Climate, 19, 1490-1512. Haylock M. R., Barros V. R., et al

Seasonal-to-decadal predictability and prediction of South American climate 2006. J. Climate, 19, 5988)6004. P. Nobre, J. Marengo, I. F. A. Cavalcanti, G. Obregon, V. Barros, I. Camilloni, N. Campos and A. G. Ferreira

How does Soil Moisture Influence the Early Stages of the South American Monsoon? 2008 J. Climate. 21. 185-213. E. Collini, E. Berbery, V. Barros and, M. Pyle.

Precipitation trends in southeastern South America: relationship with ENSO phases and the low-level circulation. 2008. Theoretical and Appl. Climatology. In press. V. Barros, M. Doyle and I. Camilloni.

Land use impact on the Uruguay River discharge 2008 Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, LXXXXX, Doi:10.1029/2008GL033707. Aceptado. R. Saurral, V. Barros, and D. Lettenmaier

Proceedings of congresses, workshops and other scientific meetings:

Interanual variability of the South Atlantic High and rainfall in southeastern South America during summer months. I. Camilloni, M. Doyle y V. Barros. CLIVAR. 2004

Climate change in the environmental agenda for Argentina V. Barros, H. Carlino, and Daniel Perczyk. Second AIACC Regional Workshop for Latin America and the Caribbean. Buenos Aires, 24-27 Agosto 2004.

Climate scenarios for the 21st century: influence on the discharges of the Plata basin I. Camilloni, R. Saurral, R. Mezhe and V. Barros. Fourth international workshop on development and management of dams in the Plata basin; Salto Grande, Noviembre 2005

Extreme Precipitations in Argentina, Trends and Climate Change. M. Re, R. Saurral and V. Barros. Fourth International Workshop on Development and Management of Dams in the Plata Basin; Salto Grande, November 2005.

Seasonal dependence of surface-atmosphere interactions for subtropical South America. Collini, E. A.; Berbery, E. H.; Barros, V. . 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography. Abril 2006, Foz de Iguazu. Proceedings pag. 999.

Sea-level pressure patterns in South America and the adjacent oceans in the IPCC AR4 models. Di Luca, A.; Camilloni, I.; Barros, V. 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography. Abril 2006, Foz de Iguazu. Proceedings pag. 235.

Precipitation trends in southeastern South America: relationship with ENSO phases. Doyle, M.; Barros, V. 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography. Abril 2006, Foz de Iguazu. Proceedings pag. 1513

Assessing long-term discharges of the Plata River Saurral, R.; Mezher, R.; Barros, V. 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography. Abril 2006, Foz de Iguazu. Proceedings pag. 821.

Extreme precipitations in Argentina Re, M.; Saurral, R.; Barros, V. 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography. Abril 2006, Foz de Iguazu. Proceedings pag. 1575.

Other reports:

Planning:

- Implementacion de modelos matematicos para el pronostico del tiempo. 1972. SMN. Lichtenstein, E, C.Martinez, V. Barros, W. Vargas, H. Hordij y H. Ciapessoni. - Coordinacion de la presentacion del proyecto de desarrollo del CENPAT al Banco interamericano de Desarrollo. CONICET 1978. Barros, V. y J. Vercino

National policies:

- National Report to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and Environment, Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 579 pp. 1991 (in Spanish). - Background Report for the First National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997 (in Spanish).

- Greenhouse gasses emissions inventory and Climate Change Studies on Vulnerability and Mitigation. In Argentina, SECYT 1998, 5 volumes (in Spanish). - Background report for the Revision of the First National Communication to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Secretary of Sustainable Development and Environment, 1999, 104 pp (in Spanish). - Inventory of Greenhouse gasses of the Argentine Republic, year 1997. Secretary of Sustainable Development and Environment, 1999, 150 pp (in Spanish).

Conferences:

Since 1969, more than 100 conferences to scientific, diplomatic and business communities and for the public. In 1991 and 1992, numerous conferences about the Argentine Report to the Conference of United Nations on Environment and Sustainable Development of 1992. Similarly in 1997 and 1998 on climate change and the First Argentine Communication to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and on its revision in 1999.

9. (SBU) CV of Moroccan candidate:

Abdalah Mokssit

Head of the National Center on Climate and Meteorological Research (Direction Meteorologie Nationale), Casablanca.

Civil Engineer in Meteorology Specialization in Global Circulation Modelling

Areas of expertise: -- Numerical weather Prediction -- Climate variability -- Climate Rediction -- Climate Change dtection and attribution

Major Research Projects: -- Climatology: Dryness studies in Morocco and the world. -- Climate Change: Co-Chair of the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection CLL/WMO. -- Climate application impact studies: Climate change and water resource management in Morocco -- Climate change and agriculture in the Tadla region of Morocco

Speaks and writes Arabic, French and English fluently

Major Publications: -- H C Upadhayaya and A. Mokssit: Adiabatic on linear normal mode initialization for a grid point Global model; Processings of Indian Academy of Sciences, volume 100 Number 1, Mars 1991; model. Proceedings of Indian Academy of Sciences volume 100 Number 1 Mars 1991; -- Mokssit et R. Gnaoui: realisation d'un outil d'anlyse de Protocole Atlas 400; Mmoire de trvaux de fin d'etudes realise chez Transpac, juin 1987; -- Mokssit: Outil pour la reussi te du Management par Projets; Memoire realise dans le cadre du cycle superieur de management du ministre de l'equipement , juin 1997; -- Mokssit et al: Le point sur la secheresse au Maroc; dition du Ministere des travaux publics; 1996; -- Mokssit et al: La prevision a longue echeance au Maroc; Workshop on Long Range Forecasting; Nairobi 1998; -- Mokssit et al: Les changements Climatiques et Ressources en eau; etude realisee dans le cadre du projet Maghrebin (RAB/ G94 finance par le PNUD) sur les changements climatiques;

-- Mokssit et al: Changements climatiques et ressources en eau dans le bassin versant de l'OURGHA; -- Mokssit: la secheresse dans le climat Marocain; Atelier sur la prevention et la gestion des situations de scheresse dans les pays du Maghreb, Juin 1996; -- Mokssit: Numerical Simulation of Devastating Meteorological Situations; INM/WMO Symposium on Cycllones and Hasardous weather in Mediterranean, Avril 1997; -- Mokssit; Development of priority Climate Indices for Africa; paru dans regional Climate Studies/ Mediterranean Climate, February 2001; -- A. Dave Easterling, A. Mokssit et AL: Workshop Report on Climate Change Indices; BAMS (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society); -- Mokssit: Chapter 4 on Drought ( au niveau mondial), 7 eme revue de l'OMM sur le Climat Mondial; -- Mokssit: On climate change Extreme Indices; 7eme revue de l'OMM sur le Climat Mondial; -- F.Zwiers, H. Cattle, T.C. Peterson and A. Mokssit: Detecting climate: WMO bulletin Volume 52, No 3, July 2003

10. (SBU) Biographic Summary of Maldivan candidate:

Amjad Abdulla

Amjad Abdulla is the Director General at the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Water of Maldives and has been working in the Ministry since 1990 in various positions. He is the national focal point for the National Adaptation Programme of Action for Climate Change. He is the lead negotiator from the Maldives to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Mr. Abdulla was a member of National Commission for the Protection of the Environment (NCPE) from 2003 to 2006 and is also a member of a number of task forces and committees appointed by the President to develop the strategic plans and policies on environment and development. He has worked nationally and internationally as a freelance consultant on various environmental projects. He has also coordinated and managed several donor assisted projects at the Ministry.

Mr. Abdulla is also author and contributing author to several reports of high national significance: Maldives National Adaptation Programme of Action on Climate Change; First National Communication of Maldives to UNFCCC; Third Environment Action Plan; National Sustainable Development Strategy. He has also written and published several reports and research papers relating to environmental planning and the economic vulnerability of Small Island States. He is also has experience in planning and designing of several coastal developments, including, harbours, jetties, breakwater and other shore protection measures for several islands in the Maldives.

Mr. Abdulla has the distinction of having represented the Maldives at a number of international conferences including the negotiation to review the implementation of the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States and the Mauritius International meeting in 2005. He has also represented Maldives at the UNFCCC negotiations. Mr. Abdulla was the Vice-Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) under UNFCCC from December 2004 to December 2006 and chaired the 22nd and 23rd Session of the SBSTA. He is also a member of the Enforcement Branch of the Kyoto compliance committee and an alternate member of the Adaptation Fund Board under UNFCC. He is also the current chair of the LDC group for climate negotiations under UNFCCC.

Mr. Abdulla possesses an honours degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Brighton, UK and a MSc, in Environmental Science, Policy and Planning from the University of Bath, UK. His professional areas of interest include environmental economics, environmental planning, sustainable development and climate change. RICE

STAR Support Scientist
(Camp Springs, MD, US Citizenship Required)

CPI is seeking a scientist to provide science and programming support for the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) in Camp Springs, Maryland. STAR is the science arm of the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates the nation’s civilian operational Earth-observing satellites. NOAA/NESDIS provides surface solar radiation as an operational data product that is estimated from measurements obtained from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) imager instrument. These data products are distributed as the GOES Surface and Insolation Product (GSIP) and are used for a variety of applications, such as data assimilation for improved radiative forcing of numerical weather prediction (NWP), oceanic applications, and improved parameterizations of climate models at the air-land and air-sea interface. STAR is developing an improved system that will provide increased spatial resolution and extend coverage beyond the GOES domain. The STAR Support Scientist will be responsible for developing, modifying, running and evaluating the GSIP Version 2 (GSIP-v2) algorithm as well as collecting all relevant data, performing the analysis, and contributing to reports, scientific papers and presentations.

This position requires knowledge and background in meteorology, physics, or a related field, with experience in remote sensing and data analysis. Experience with GOES satellite data (McIDAS AREA files) is a plus. A PhD is preferred, although candidates with a Master’s degree and commensurate experience will also be considered. Recent PhD graduates are encouraged to apply. Specific skills must include knowledge of the Fortran 90 programming language and mathematic software packages such as IDL or Matlab, as well familiarity with writing C-shell scripts (or equivalent) on a Linux operating system. Candidate must have demonstrated a strong ability to solve analytical problems in a self-directed environment. US Citizenship is required.

CPI, an employee-owned company, offers competitive salaries that are commensurate with education and experience, and a comprehensive benefits package. Interested individuals are invited to send their resume in confidence to Human Resources, Computational Physics, Inc., 8001 Braddock Road, Suite 210, Springfield, VA 22151 or to employment"at"cpi.com.

CPI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Supercomputers are, as the name suggests, powerful devices. But the lightning-fast computers, which are used for everything from pharmaceutical research to climate prediction, can also be energy hogs. That's where the Green500 List comes in. The list evaluates the 500 fastest supercomputers on the planet and ranks them in the order of energy efficiency. As of this month, IBM can claim 15 of the top 25 most energy efficient supercomputers on the list.

The top computer on the Green500 is a prototype of IBM's next-generation Blue Gene computer, which is 77% more energy-efficient than the second most efficient model, the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Tsubame 2.0. IBM's Blue Gene is set to be deployed in 2012 by Lawrence Livermore and Argonne National Laboratories as part of an effort to study particle physics.

Blue Gene may be efficient, but it's not the fastest supercomputer available. The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin--the fastest supercomputer in the world--has a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops. That's much faster than Blue Gene's 653 teraflops.

But remember: Energy efficiency wasn't always a top concern in the world of supercomputers. Now that it is, more and more manufacturers will take it into account--and before long, the fastest supercomputers may also be the most efficient.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

Just as the holiday season gets underway next week with Thanksgiving and then Christmas exactly one month to the date after Turkey Day,
a lot of people, including myself are probably thinking about when our first snow will fall. Well, while none is in our forecast yet, I was doing a little peaking ahead and the forecast models are hinting at a change to a colder weather pattern by late November into early December. There is a hint at cold air coming south from Canada with an active southern storm track.
Yeah, if this trend indeed holds true, it could spell our first snowfall, but before diving too far into details that far out, I wanted to share with you a few tidbits on DC snowfall.

The DC area typically gets 15.2 inches of snow in the winter season; less than one inch typically falls in November with 1-2 inches on average in Decmber. The earliest  snow ever was October 10, 1979 when 0.3 inches fell. The most snow to ever fall in November was in 1987 when 11.5 inches blanketed the ground at Reagan National Airport, home of D.C.'s official weather records. Who can forget last December's blizzard that helped tally up 16.6 inches of snow, making December 2009 the snowiest on record.

Statistically, the chance of accumulating snow increases after about November 24th.

Now, one of the major factors guiding our weather this winter is the presence of La Nina, the cooling of the equatorial Pacific waters which alters  jet stream patterns across the U.S. A strong La Nina is forecast, and this typically means above average temperatures and below average snowfall  for the D.C. area.

As of right now, the Climate Prediction Center is indicating above average temperatures and near average precipitation for the Mid-Atlantic in December.

As we move forward into Meteorological Winter in just over a week (December 1st), stay with ABC7, WTOP Radio and TBD.com for the latest
forecasts.

Have a wonderful Holiday season and stay safe!

As we inch closer to winter many are asking if this year will be as snowy as last.  The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center is saying, no and they've been right in the past. 

Who knew Al Gore didn't invent man made global warming created by greenhouse gases as part of a scheme to destroy America and mach himself and a few greedy scientists rich? Well, Scientists back in the 1950's knew, that's who. When Al Gore was 8 years old this news recording was made demonstrating a John Hopkin's physicist, Gilbert Plass, was already speaking out about global warming as a result of industrial activity. Here's a GE radio show explaining Plass' research:

As the video shows, Plass, had already pinpointed carbon dioxide as the primary culprit. Plass was no crank. He was a respected physicist who was hired by the Defense Department to work on the development of heat seeking missiles.

Here's a brief discussion of Plass's career as a physicist at Wikipedia:

Plass worked most of his life as a physicist in the United States. He graduated from Harvard University in 1941 and earned a Ph.D in physics from Princeton University in 1947. He worked as an associate physicist at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Manhattan District) of the University of Chicago from 1942 to 1945. He became an instructor of physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1946, and eventually became an associate professor there. In 1955, leaving academics, he held a job for a year as a staff scientist with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He then joined the advanced research staff at the Aeronutronic division of the Ford Motor Company. In 1960, he became manager of the research lab at Ford’s theoretical physics department and a consulting editor of the journal Infrared Physics (now called Infrared Physics and Technology). In 1963, he accepted a position as the first professor of atmospheric and space science at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (now the University of Texas at Arlington), where he remained for five years. In 1968, he arrived at Texas A&M; University, where he served as professor of physics and head of the department.

In 1956 and onwards Plass published a series of articles on the effects of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and the potential implications of an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for global warming. The articles were partly based on advanced calculations of the absorption of infrared radiation, and Plass made use of early electronic computers. He predicted that a doubling of CO2 would warm the planet by 3.6ºC, that CO2 levels in 2000 would be 30% higher than in 1900 and that the planet would be about 1ºC warmer in 2000 than in 1900. In 2007 the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report estimated a climate sensitivity of 2 to 4.5ºC for CO2 doubling, a CO2 rise of 37% since pre-industrial times and a 1900-2000 warm-up of around 0.7ºC

Plass' prediction of warming as a result of CO2 in the 1950's was amazingly prescient considering he worked at a time when the computing power of a single microchip exceed the then existing room sized mainframe computers on which IBM made its fortune. So, the science of Climate change isn't the creation of a worldwide conspiracy of lying liberal money grubbing anti-capitalists who want to steal your freedoms. It was well known fact that the earth was warming and that increased carbon emissions by human activity was the likely culprit. As the GE program demonstrates, trhe theory of greenhouse gases creating warming and climate change was a well respected theory in the very year I was born.

Here's a discussion of Plass's work from Real Climate:

Gilbert Plass was one of the pioneers of the calculation of how solar and infrared radiation affects climate and climate change. In 1956 he published a series of papers on radiative transfer and the role of CO2, including a relatively ‘pop’ piece in American Scientist. ... Some of the intriguing things about this article are that Plass (writing in 1956 remember) estimates that a doubling of CO2 would cause the planet to warm 3.6ºC, that CO2 levels would rise 30% over the 20th Century and it would warm by about 1ºC over the same period. The relevant numbers from the IPCC AR4 are a climate sensitivity of 2 to 4.5ºC, a CO2 rise of 37% since the pre-industrial and a 1900-2000 trend of around 0.7ºC.

To understand if Plass should get full credit, we need to see his workings. These are mainly outlined in two more technical papers in Tellus and QJRMS earlier that year. In today’s parlance, Plass calculated the change in top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes given a doubling (or a halving) of CO2 while everything else stayed the same. He then took that number and using someone else’s estimate of the sensitivity of the TOA radiation to the surface temperature, he calculated the temperature change that would be necessary to compensate. Converting from the units he used, the radiative flux values for a doubling of CO2 were 8.3 W/m2 and 5.8 W/m2 for clear-sky (no clouds) and averagely cloudy conditions (all-sky) respectively (and slightly larger and of opposite sign for a halving). The sensitivity of the TOA flux to surface temperature he used was around 2.3 W/m2 per ºC (equivalent to a temperature sensitivity of 0.4 ºC/(W/m2)). However, this is a ‘no-feedback’ estimate (allowing only the surface temperature to change with a constant lapse rate, but with no changes to water vapour, albedo or clouds).

Today, our current best guess for the forcing due to 2xCO2 is around 4 W/m2, and the ‘no-feedback’ sensitivity is around 0.3 ºC/(W/m2), giving an expected no-feedback temperature change of about 1.2 ºC, a factor of 3 smaller than the number Plass quoted, though since our number is for ‘all sky’ conditions, it would be a little better to compare it to his averagely cloudy number 2.5 ºC (so a factor of two higher). Note that Plass was a little casual in how he described his numbers and the ‘clear sky’ designation for the 3.6ºC number was not always made clear. However, Plass was well aware that the ‘no-feedback’ case was unrealistic and estimated that the water vapour, cloud and ice-albedo feedbacks would be amplifying, although he was not able to quantify them.

Moving now to the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere, Plass made a very good estimate as to how much human emissions of CO2 were increasing. His estimate was (again, in modern units) that then-current emissions were 1.5 GtC based on earlier estimates from Callendar, which actually was an underestimate. Our current best estimate for the anthropogenic emissions in 1956 is about 2.2 GtC. Given the increasing nature of the emissions, Plass then estimated that concentrations would rise about 30% by the end of the 20th Century. This however needs an estimate of how much of the emissions would be absorbed by the oceans and biosphere. Here, Plass has another impressive insight that the ocean chemistry would prevent quick uptake of the human CO2, a concept that wasn’t fully worked out until Revelle and Suess’s paper in 1957 (though possibly he may have been aware of some informal communications earlier). Plass actually assumed that none of the CO2 would be taken up in the short term. So his 30% growth estimate (the actual rise was 36%) was derived from an underestimate in emissions (and emissions growth) combined with an overestimate of the ‘airborne fraction’ (which is roughly 40% of total emissions).

I suppose that Plass would be called an alarmist today, but his back of the envelope, pre-supercomputer predictions regarding the increase of man-made CO2 and its effect on climate were quite extraordinary considering how much more data and evidence we have today to support his theory. Certainly he was considered a prominent and respected scientist considering his academic career and his recruitment by Lockheed and the Defense Department in the early to work on the national defense issues.

What is truly frightening is that here we are today, more than fifty years later, and still a few highly paid "skeptics" still denying what Gilbert Plass knew and fairly accurately predicted back in 1956, the year I was born. Plass was not a genius on the scale of an Einstein, but he knew enough from the historical record that existed over 54 years ago that mankind was playing with matches by continuing to rely on the burning of coal and oil the primary fossil fuels we continue to consume at ever increasing rates.

Of course, he wasn't a lone voice in the wilderness before Al Gore suddenly appeared on the scene. When Gore was 31 years old, a young Stephen Schneider in 1979 predicted an exponential increase in carbon emissions from humanity's use of fossil fuels.

Schneider went on to have a distinguished career as a climate scientist and died only recently. Here is a eulogy of him as a man and a scientist by Ben Santer:

Steve had the rare gift of being able to explain the complexities of climate science in plain English. He could always find the right story, the right metaphor, the right way of distilling difficult ideas and concepts down to their essence. Through his books, his extensive public speaking, and his many interactions with the media, Steve did for climate science what Carl Sagan did for astronomy.

But Steve was not only the world’s pre-eminent popularizer of climate science. He also made remarkable contributions to our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He performed pioneering research on the effects of aerosol particles on climate. This work eventually led to investigation of how planetary cooling might be caused by the aerosol particles arising from large-scale fires generated by a nuclear war. This clear scientific warning of the possible climatic consequences of nuclear war may have nudged our species onto a different – and hopefully more sustainable – pathway.

Steve was also a pioneer in the development and application of the numerical models we now use to study climate change. He and his collaborators employed both simple and complex computer models in early studies of the role of clouds in climate change, and in research on the climatic effects of massive volcanic eruptions. He was one of the first scientists to address what we now call the “signal detection problem” – the problem of determining where we might expect to see the first clear evidence of a human effect on global climate.

After spending many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Steve moved to Stanford in 1996. At Stanford, Steve and his wife Terry Root led ground-breaking research on the impacts of human-caused climate change on the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species. More recently, Steve kept intellectual company with some of the world’s leading experts on the economics of climate change, and attempted to estimate the cost of stabilizing our planet’s climate. Until his untimely death, he continued to produce cutting-edge scientific research on such diverse topics as abrupt climate change, policy options for mitigating and adapting to climate change, and whether we can usefully identify levels of planetary temperature increase beyond which we risk “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system.

Steve Schneider helped the world understand that the burning of fossil fuels had altered the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, and that this change in atmospheric composition had led to a discernible human influence on our planet’s climate. He worked tirelessly to bring this message to the attention of fellow scientists, policymakers, and the general public. His voice was clear and consistent, despite serious illness, and despite encountering vocal opposition by powerful forces – individuals who seek to make policy on the basis of wishful thinking and disinformation rather than sound science.

It should be noted that he served as a science adviser for every President since Nixon, which includes every Republican President. Sadly, none of them, despite his warnings and the threat posed to our national security from America's reliance on fossil fuels, never effectively put into practice a plan to limit our dependence on them as our nation's primary energy source.

When you have Republicans like Joe Barton apologizing to BP for Obama's criticism of BP's reckless and dangerous off shore well operations that cost us billion of dollars and devastated the ecosystems upon which the lives of people in the seafood and fishing economy of the Gulf Coast depended, that should come as no surprise.

When Republicans tout their objective to hold hearings to investigate "scientific fraud" in the field of climate science, and Republican James Inhofe calls on the Department of Justice to begin a criminal investigation of the leading scientists in the field, that also should come as no surprise.

When Republicans push an energy policy that is heavily reliant on increasing off shore drilling and hydrofracking despite the risks to our environment on land and sea, that again, is not a shock.

That respected scientists were pointing to CO2 as the principal culprit in global climate change more than half a century ago, though, belies their nonsense and exposes their hypocrisy. They depend on the corporate money of Big Oil and Big Coal. They could give a rat's ass about what is happening to this planet because of their corporate paymasters activities. As long as the money keeps flowing into their political campaign and they can become rich lobbyists when they resign from Congress they could care less what happens to us and our children and grandchildren. They have sold their souls and sold them cheaply for paltry sums compared to the profits the fossil fuel industry makes every year.

For more than fifty years they Big Oil and Coal, and their many minions, have lied to us (and perhaps in rare instances lied to themselves) that the real villains are not a TRILLION DOLLAR industry and the numerous billionaires that industry has created at the expense of our health, our drinking water, our lives and our planet. As Bill Moyers stated: Welcome to the Plutocracy and among our Corporate Overlords none is bigger than the Fossil Fuels Industry.

I wonder if Gilbert Plass predicted that back in 1956, too.

Discuss

http://www.onthesnow.com/news/12/a/13634/meteorologist-prognosticates-on-east-coast-winter-weather "The Climate Prediction Center forecasts a weak-to-moderate La Nina for this winter, which really means we have an equal chance of above or below normal temperatures and precipitation," Davis said.

Russia Needs $60 Oil to Guarantee Sustained Economic Recovery, Kudrin Says

Russia needs oil to average more than $60 a barrel next year to ensure a sustained recovery from its record slump in 2009, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said. That’s 21 percent less than this year’s average price.

Russia, the world’s biggest energy exporter, and other emerging markets face a better outlook and less uncertainty than developed economies, Kudrin told reporters late yesterday in Washington, where he’s taking part in the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting.

World oil output in focus as OPEC prepares to meet

LONDON — OPEC, which pumps 40 percent of the world’s oil, meets in Vienna this week to assess member output levels against a backdrop of steady prices and a huge jump in Iraq’s estimated reserves.

OPEC sees sluggish global growth

WASHINGTON: OPEC is seeing evidence of sluggish economic growth reflected in the demand for petroleum, and views weakness likely to persist into 2011, the cartel’s top official said Saturday.

OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri, speaking to global economic officials gathered in Washington, said there are signs global growth is sputtering now that many countries are ending their stimulus efforts.

Gulf states vow to stabilise oil market

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) - Oil ministers of the world's leading producers in the Gulf wound up a joint meeting on Sunday by vowing to achieve price stability on the international markets, ahead of an OPEC meeting.

"The oil market has witnessed many developments that obliged us as major producers to counter more challenges in the way of achieving stability of the oil price and markets," Kuwait's Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmad Abdullah al-Sabah told the gathering.

Fossil fuel will be civilization’s engine for long

All sorts of opinions can now be heard, hampering the very sentiments and psyche of the market. There are voices, and influential ones, emphasizing on absolute independence and moving away from the Middle Eastern oil. There are others talking of environmental considerations and the necessity of switching away from fossil fuel to alternatives. At the same time, the echo of ‘Peak Oil’ fails to die down. This all is despite the fact that most now acknowledge that the world needs fossil fuel, and in abundance, for many more decades to come. This uncertainty now is a cause of concern to all.

Unclear signals create chaos

Yet in the medium to long run, pressure seems to be building up on crude and a number of factors are contributing to it. That is not a good omen for the overall health of the industry.

Despite the fact that the global crude spare capacity is touching almost the six-million-barrels-a-day mark and new crude frontiers appear in plenty all around, resulting in a glut like situation in the market, the “Peak Oil” debate fails to die down. This is frightening!

Peak Oil Warning Gains DC Traction

Baldauf is a Texas-based oil executive, lifelong environmentalist and the key leader of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, USA (ASPO-USA). The group took a giant step forward in raising the visibility of its warnings this week by holding its first Washington, DC-based convention, plus a packed congressional briefing.

Algeria's LNG output falls in September Join our daily free Newsletter

(MENAFN) Waterborne LNG said in its latest report that Algerian liquefied natural gas production fell to a year low of 40.6 billion cubic feet (bcf) in September, half the country's production capacity of 81 bcf, Reuters reported.

According to the report, the fall to new lows coincides with the start-up of the Medgaz natural gas pipeline connecting Algeria to Europe's top LNG importer Spain.

Pakistan reopens Afghan border crossing NATO uses

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan reopened a key border crossing to NATO supply convoys heading into Afghanistan on Sunday, ending an 11-day blockade imposed after a U.S. helicopter strike killed two Pakistani soldiers.

The closing of the Torkham crossing to NATO vehicles stranded many fuel tankers at parking lots and on highways where they were vulnerable to militant attacks. More than 150 trucks were destroyed and some drivers and police were wounded in the near-daily attacks.

China eyes new Silk Road to Europe amid political rift

(ATHENS) - China is laying the groundwork for a new Silk Road to Europe, holding out the promise of lucrative investments to a continent limping to economic recovery -- despite the ideological gulf with the West.

America moves on from spill; coast feels abandoned

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- About 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Dave Edmonds is struggling to remind people about the BP oil spill.

There aren't many magazine covers with photos of oil-drenched birds now that BP has capped its massive gusher at the bottom of the sea. People aren't looking online for information about the historic spill like they were a few weeks ago.

Spill hasn't risen to campaign forefront

In political circles, the oil spill has become the dog that didn't bark, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

"Even in the Gulf Coast states, I can't think of one race where it's really having an impact," Sabato said. Instead, with the successful capping of the well in mid-July - and its permanent sealing in September - public attention has drifted away from the issue.

Canadian Oil Sands Provide Economic Boom with Environmental Risks

U.S. politicians often speak of reducing the nation's demand for imported oil from unfriendly nations. But the biggest foreign supplier of oil to the United States is Canada, a friendly nation on the northern border. Much of the 1.4 million barrels of petroleum Canada sends south each day comes from the so-called "oil sands."

Time for long play on UAE stocks

He noted that the upside for the UAE is that it is a high-growth oil economy and the approach of Peak Oil means that oil prices are going to go higher, and stay high.

Morningstar to Host Fifth Annual Stocks Forum for Investors Nov. 3-4 in Chicago

Other first-day sessions include a macro-economic outlook from Bob Johnson, Morningstar's director of economic analysis; a stock strategist session with Paul Larson, Morningstar equities strategist and StockInvestor newsletter editor; a dividend stock investing session with Josh Peters, equities strategist and DividendInvestor editor; as well as breakout sessions on opportunistic investing, peak oil, and investing across asset classes.

Hungary Official Calls Sludge Reservoir Wall `Unsalvageable,' MTI Reports

The red sludge reservoir in Hungary that burst last week is “unsalvageable” because of its cracked walls, said Zoltan Illes, a state secretary for the environment, according to MTI news service.

“The tragedy may occur within a day or within a month,” Illes said, MTI reported. Authorities are building a dike through a nearby village to prevent the sludge from spreading after a possible burst, he said, according to the Budapest-based news service.

Thomas L. Friedman: An X-Ray of Dysfunction

I still find it amazing that with all the climate, security, health and financial interests America has in reducing its dependence on oil, our Congress could not work out an energy bill over the past two years — especially when China, Japan and the European Union are all hurdling ahead on clean-tech. The fact that we failed to pass an energy bill — cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, efficiency standards, I don’t care which — is actually a reflection of a broader U.S. power failure. It is the failure of our political system to unite, even in a crisis, to produce the policy responses America needs to thrive in the 21st century. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib once noted: “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

Carbon penalties said route to $100 bln aid

OSLO (Reuters) - More penalties on greenhouse gas emissions could raise $100 billion a year from 2020 to help poor nations slow global warming, despite austerity in many rich countries, Norway's prime minister said.

Jens Stoltenberg, who will co-chair a U.N. advisory group about climate financing in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, said raising $100 billion a year was "feasible" but one of the hardest issues in talks on a new U.N. climate deal.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Casts for Collaboration in Its New Climate Change Response Plan

Climate change is a real, complex and widespread challenge that calls for a "new era of collaborative conservation." That's the message of a new strategic plan for dealing with the effects of global warming, released last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The blueprint is part of the U.S. Department of Interior's overarching framework for climate change response, established by a September 2009 order from Sec. Ken Salazar.

Rivers will die of thirst as the arguments get wetter

It was 11 years ago this month that The Advertiser in Adelaide reported that by 2020 water from the Murray River would be unfit to drink two days out of five. Then, only 20 per cent of the water that entered the river made it to the mouth at Goolwa. Over-allocation to irrigators by parochial state governments trying to hold on to rural seats, combined with wanton land clearing, robbed it of water and increased the salinity. And that was before the drought.

Since that report by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, no meaningful improvement has been achieved. The same selfish, parochial considerations that killed the river, by governments of all hues, have prevented it being fixed.

More sea-level monitoring needed: report

More thorough sea level monitoring is needed to protect $1 trillion worth of the world's infrastructure threatened by climate change, a leading ocean scientist says.

In the book Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability, released on Sunday, CSIRO oceanographer John Church says the best way to predict the impacts of climate change is to look at the sea.

"The oceans are absolutely central to climate change," he told AAP.

China glaciers set to shrink

TIANJIN - THE average area of glaciers in western China might shrink by about 30 per cent by 2050 because of global warming, damaging crop production and worsening droughts.

The dire prediction came Friday in a report released at the UN climate talks in north China's Tianjin Municipality.

The "Climate Changes and Poverty -- Case Study in China" report was jointly released by organizations including the Institute of Environment and Social and Sustainable Development in Agriculture with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center has issued an update on their El Niño and La Niña forecast. We’ve been experiencing La Niña conditions around the world for a few months and these conditions affect weather patterns, rainfall and hurricanes or storms around the world. La Niña is expected to last until spring 2011 and between [...]

La Niña expected to last into spring 2011 is a post from: www.Artemis.bm
Our catastrophe bond deal directory
Artemis.bm is owned by Steve Evans Ltd, an internet and e-commerce consultant

by Fred PearceAs climate science advances, forecasts about the extent of future warming and its effects are likely to become less - not more - precise. That may make it more difficult to convince the public of the reality of climate change, but it hardly diminishes the urgency of taking action. I think I can predict right now the headlines that will follow publication of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due in 2013. "Climate scientists back off predicting rate of warming: 'The more we know the less we can be sure of,' says UN panel." That is almost bound to be the drift if two-time IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth and others are right about what is happening to the new generation of climate models. And with public trust in climate science on the slide after the various scandals of the past year over e-mails and a mistaken forecast of Himalayan ice loss, it hardly seems likely scientists will be treated kindly. It may not matter much who is in charge at the IPCC by then: Whether or not current chairman Rajendra Pachauri keeps his job, the reception will be rough. And if climate negotiators have still failed to do a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which lapses at the end of 2012, the fallout will not be pretty, either diplomatically or climatically. Clearly, concerns about how climate scientists handle complex issues of scientific uncertainty are set to escalate. They were highlighted in a report about IPCC procedures published in late August in response to growing criticism about IPCC errors. The report highlighted distortions and exaggerations in IPCC reports, many of which involved not correctly representing uncertainty about specific predictions. But efforts to rectify the problems in the next IPCC climate-science assessment (AR5) are likely to further shake public confidence in the reliability of IPCC climate forecasts. Last January, Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., published a little-noticed commentary in Nature online. Headlined "More Knowledge, Less Certainty," it warned that "the uncertainty in AR5's predictions and projections will be much greater than in previous IPCC reports." He added that "this could present a major problem for public understanding of climate change." He can say that again. This plays out most obviously in the critical estimate of how much warming is likely between 1990, the baseline year for most IPCC work, and 2100. The current AR4 report says it will be between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3 to 7 degrees F). But the betting is now that the range offered next time will be wider, especially at the top end. The public has a simple view about scientific uncertainty. It can accept that science doesn't have all the answers, and that scientists try to encapsulate those uncertainties with devices like error bars and estimates of statistical significance. What even the wisest heads will have trouble with, though, is the notion that greater understanding results in wider errors bars than before. Trenberth explained in his Nature commentary why a widening is all but certain. "While our knowledge of certain factors [responsible for climate change] does increase," he wrote, "so does our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize." The trouble is this sounds dangerously like what Donald Rumsfeld, in the midst of the chaos of the Iraq War, famously called "unknown unknowns." I would guess that the IPCC will have even less luck than he did in explaining what it means by this. The latest climate modeling runs are trying to come to grips with a range of factors ignored or only sketchily dealt with in the past. The most troubling is the role of clouds. Clouds have always been recognized as a ticking timebomb in climate models, because nobody can work out whether warming will change them in a way that amplifies or moderates warming - still less how much. And their influence could be very large. "Clouds remain one of the largest uncertainties in the climate system's response to temperature changes," says Bruce Wielicki, a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center who is investigating the impact of clouds on the Earth's energy budget. An added problem in understanding clouds is the role of aerosols from industrial smogs, which dramatically influence the radiation properties of clouds. "Aerosols are a mess," says Thomas Charlock, a senior scientist at the Langley Research Center and co-investigator in a NASA project known as Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES). "We don't know how much is out there. We just can't estimate their influence with calculations alone." Trenberth noted in Nature, "Because different groups are using relatively new techniques for incorporating aerosol effects into the models, the spread of results will probably be much larger than before." A second problem for forecasting is the potential for warming to either enhance or destabilize existing natural sinks of carbon dioxide and methane in soils, forests, permafrost, and beneath the ocean. Again these could slow warming through negative feedbacks or - more likely, according to recent assessments - speed up warming, perhaps rather suddenly as the planetary system crosses critical thresholds. The next models will be working hard to take these factors into better account. Whether they go as far as some preliminary runs published in 2005, which suggested potential warming of 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) or more is not clear. Of course, uncertainty is to be expected, given the range of potential feedbacks that have to be taken into account. But it is going to be hard to explain why, when you put more and better information into climate models, they do not home in on a more precise answer. Yet it will be more honest, says Leonard Smith, a mathematician and statistician at the University of Oxford, England, who warns about the "naive realism" of past climate modeling. In the past, he says, models have been "over-interpreted and misinterpreted. We need to drop the pretense that they are nearly perfect. They are getting better. But as we change our predictions, how do we maintain the credibility of the science?" The only logical conclusion for a confused and increasingly wary public may be that if the error bars were wrong before, they cannot be trusted now. If they do not in some way encapsulate the "unknowns," what purpose do they have? Despite much handwringing, the IPCC has never worked out how to make sense of uncertainty. Take the progress of those errors bars in assessing warming between 1990 and 2100. The panel's first assessment, published back in 1990, predicted a warming of 3 degrees C by 2100, with no error bars. The second assessment, in 1995, suggested a warming of between 1 and 3.5 degrees C. The third, in 2001, widened the bars to project a warming of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C. The fourth assessment in 2007 contracted them again, from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C. I don't think the public will be so understanding if they are widened again, but that now seems likely. Trenberth is nobody's idea of someone anxious to rock the IPCC boat. He is an IPCC insider, having been lead author on key chapters in both 2001 and 2007, and recently appointed as a review editor for AR5. Back in 2005 he made waves by directly linking Hurricane Katrina to global warming. But in the past couple of years he has taken a growing interest in highlighting uncertainties in the climate science. Late last year, bloggers investigating the "climategate" emails highlighted a message he sent to colleagues in which he said it was a "travesty" that scientists could not explain cool years like 2008. His point, made earlier in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Stability, was that "it is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year is due to natural variability." Such explanations, he said, "do not provide the physical mechanisms involved." He wanted scientists to do better. In his Nature commentary, Trenberth wondered aloud whether the IPCC wouldn't be better off getting out of the prediction business. "Performing cutting edge science in public could easily lead to misinterpretation," he wrote. But the lesson of climategate is that efforts to keep such discussion away from the public have a habit of backfiring spectacularly. All scientific assessments have to grapple with how to present uncertainties. Inevitably they make compromises between the desire to convey complexity and the need to impart clear and understandable messages to a wider public. But the IPCC is caught on a particular dilemma because its founding purpose, in the late 1980s, was to reach consensus on climate science and report back to the world in a form that would allow momentous decisions to be taken. So the IPCC has always been under pressure to try to find consensus even where none exists. And critics argue that that has sometimes compromised its assessments of uncertainty. The last assessment was replete with terms like "extremely likely" and "high confidence." Critics charged that they often lacked credibility. And last August's blue-chip review of the IPCC's performance, by the InterAcademy Council, seemed to side with the critics. The council's chairman, Harold Shapiro of Princeton, said existing IPCC guidelines on presenting uncertainty "have not been consistently followed." In particular, its analysis of the likely impacts of climate change "contains many statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence." The predictions were not plucked from the air. But the charge against the IPCC is that its authors did not always correctly portray the uncertainty surrounding the predictions or present alternative scenarios. The most notorious failure was the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could all have melted by 2035. This was an egregious error resulting from cut-and-pasting a non-peer reviewed claim from a report by a non-governmental organization. So was a claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands lies below sea level. But other errors were failures to articulate uncertainties. The study highlighted a claim that even a mild loss of rainfall over the Amazon could destroy 40 percent of the rainforest, though only one modeling study has predicted this. Another headline claim in the report, in a chapter on Africa, was that "projected reductions in [crop] yield in some countries could be as much as 50 percent by 2020." The only source was an 11-page paper by a Moroccan named Ali Agoumi that covered only three of Africa's 53 countries (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria) and had not gone through peer review. It simply asserted that "studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown... deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 percent during the 2000-2020 period." No studies were named. And even Agoumi did not claim the changes were necessarily caused by climate change. In fact, harvests in North Africa already differ by 50 percent or more from one year to the next, depending on rainfall. In other words, Agoumi's paper said nothing at all about how climate change might or might not change farm yields across Africa. None of this was conveyed by the report. In general, the InterAcademy Council's report noted a tendency to "emphasise the negative impacts of climate change," many of which were "not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly." Efforts to eliminate these failings will necessarily widen the error bars on a range of predictions in the next assessment. We are all - authors and readers of IPCC reports alike - going to have to get used to greater caution in IPCC reports and greater uncertainty in imagining exactly how climate change will play out. This is probably healthy. It is certainly more honest. But it in no way undermines the case that we are already observing ample evidence that the world is on the threshold of profound and potentially catastrophic warming. And it in no way undermines the urgent need to do something to halt the forces behind the warming. Some argue that scientific uncertainty should make us refrain from action to slow climate change. The more rational response, given the scale of what we could face, is the precise opposite. Photo by Hans Kylberg/flickr/Creative Commons Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010.



Almanac - farmers-almanac - New England - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

Last spring, AccuWeather and the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered vastly different outlooks for the coming summer in Wichita.

Joe Bastardi, AccuWeather's chief long-range meteorologist, predicted a hot, dry summer for Wichita. The Climate Prediction Center called for a cool, damp summer in Kansas.

Summer has come and gone, so who was right?

Read more

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Sunday, Sept. 26, 2010.



Almanac - farmers-almanac - New England - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

From the San Diego Union Tribune: “We reported about a week ago (story) that the Climate Prediction Center says that La Nina is gaining strength in the equatorial Pacific, and that the natural, periodic climate change might result in below average rainfall this winter. Since then, NASA has released a new illustration of the emerging [...]

From the San Diego Union Tribune: “The U.S. Climate Prediction Center says that the La Nina that’s been brewing in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific grew stronger during August, raising the possibility that San Diego County and the rest of Southern California could receive below average rainfall this winter. But forecasters say it is [...]

From reader JenManzello: "An impressive corn field behind my home. Harvested by The Schultz Family of Gardner-South Wilmington, Il." See more photos and send us yours.

By Paul Dailey

With a mild high pressure air mass in place over the western Great Lakes and Midwest Monday, mostly sunny skies will overcome northwest breezes, pushing afternoon high temperatures to the 80-degree mark in many Chicago-area locations for the second consecutive day and the fifth time so far this month.

Northeast winds off Lake Michigan will cool things off a bit Tuesday and then clouds will slowly fill the skies from the west Wednesday as low pressure approaches.

Showers and thunderstorms are expected along with some downpours Wednesday night as the low moves across northern Illinois. An inch or more rain could fall in some Chicagoland locations.

Late September warm-up

After a brief late-workweek warm-up followed by a cooldown next weekend, the National Climate Prediction Center has predicted that much of Illinois, along with a large portion of the central United States, is in line for much above-normal temperatures the following week of Sept. 20-26.

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Friday, Sept. 10, 2010.



Almanac - farmers-almanac - Climate Prediction Center - New Hampshire - New England

The ocean phenomenon known as La Niña is strengthening, the nation's climate agency says, and that could mean a drier rainy season for Southern California.
An update Thursday from the Climate Prediction Center in Maryland says La Niña, a periodic...

The ocean phenomenon known as La Niña is strengthening, the nation’s climate agency says, and that could mean a drier rainy season for Southern California. An update Thursday from the Climate Prediction Center in Maryland says La Niña, a periodic cooling of waters in the equatorial Pacific, strengthened through the month of August, with those waters [...]

Scientists: La Niña growing stronger is a post from: OC Science

A new forecast by the nation's Climate prediction Center says the forecast La Nina conditions are getting stronger.

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Thursday, Sept. 9, 2010.



Almanac - farmers-almanac - Climate Prediction Center - New Hampshire - New England

Most of the country will see a colder-than-usual winter while summer and spring will be relatively cool and dry, according to the time-honored, complex calculations of the "Old Farmer's Almanac."

The 2011 issue of the almanac, which claims to be the nation's oldest continuously published periodical, was released today. It predicts that in the coming months, the Earth will continue to see a "gradual cooling of the atmosphere ... offset by any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases."

The "Old Farmer's Almanac" also is forecasting a weak La Nina -- a climate phenomenon marked by an unusual cooling of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Janice Stillman, editor of the almanac, said that means much of the eastern half of the United States will experience lower-than-normal temperatures with less snow while Mid-Atlantic states will see more snowfall than usual. The West will see a mild winter with average precipitation, she said.

Meanwhile, the South will experience a cold and wet summer and the Rockies should see a mild and dry winter, according to the New Hampshire-based "Old Farmer's Almanac."

"It'll be cold. There will be no mistaking winter," Stillman said. "But it may be a little shorter or we may see some small warm spells in places like the East Coast."

The 219-year-old "Old Farmer's Almanac" and its longtime competitor, the Maine-based "Farmers' Almanac," still draw droves of fans despite it being the age of the Internet and mobile phone apps. The books, which use secret formulas to predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and other information, are popular at farmers markets and bookstores and have maintained a fan base that sometimes spans generations of families.

Both books have a circulation of around 3.2 million and feature a mix of helpful hints, recipes, gardening tips, jokes and inspirational messages. Their websites are full of videos, blogs, podcasts, Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages.

In general, the almanacs' weather predictions are similar. The "Farmers' Almanac" predicts that it'll be cold but nothing like last winter.

"Overall, it looks like it's going to be a kinder and gentler winter, especially in the areas that had a rough winter last year," said managing editor Sandi Duncan.

But the almanacs' forecasts are at odds with the National Weather Service's long-range outlook for the meteorological winter, which runs from December through February.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center anticipates a warmer-than-normal winter for the mid-Atlantic and Southeast and colder-than-normal weather in the Northwest. That puts it at odds with the almanac.

Ed O'Lenic from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center said the scientific community doesn't accept tides, planetary alignment and sunspots as effective predictors of temperature or precipitation, but he stopped short of being critical of the almanac's meteorological methods.

Stillman said, however, she's confident about the weather predictions in the "Old Farmer's Almanac" because they tend to be 80 to 85 percent accurate -- the same accuracy rate boasted by the Maine almanac.

The dueling almanacs have enjoyed a long, mostly friendly rivalry that dates back nearly 200 years, said Judson Hale, the semiretired chairman and longtime pitchman for the "Old Farmer's Almanac." He said any time one of the almanac gets publicity, it helps the other.

But Hale is quick to say his publication is older and has more history: "We're the one in the Smithsonian. We're the one that Abraham Lincoln used in a murder trial. We're the one George Washington read. We are THE one."

Still, Hale said, both almanacs survive because they've maintained strong relationships with their readers for generations.

"I think it's very comforting for people to see that there's a constant in this world," he said. "There's something that, although brand-new every year, isn't changing. It is the same."

-- Associated Press

Most of the country will see a colder-than-usual winter while summer and spring will be relatively cool and dry, according to the time-honored, complex calculations of the "Old Farmer's Almanac."

The 2011 issue of the almanac, which claims to be the nation's oldest continuously published periodical, was released today. It predicts that in the coming months, the Earth will continue to see a "gradual cooling of the atmosphere ... offset by any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases."

The "Old Farmer's Almanac" also is forecasting a weak La Nina -- a climate phenomenon marked by an unusual cooling of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Janice Stillman, editor of the almanac, said that means much of the eastern half of the United States will experience lower-than-normal temperatures with less snow while Mid-Atlantic states will see more snowfall than usual. The West will see a mild winter with average precipitation, she said.

Meanwhile, the South will experience a cold and wet summer and the Rockies should see a mild and dry winter, according to the New Hampshire-based "Old Farmer's Almanac."

"It'll be cold. There will be no mistaking winter," Stillman said. "But it may be a little shorter or we may see some small warm spells in places like the East Coast."

The 219-year-old "Old Farmer's Almanac" and its longtime competitor, the Maine-based "Farmers' Almanac," still draw droves of fans despite it being the age of the Internet and mobile phone apps. The books, which use secret formulas to predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and other information, are popular at farmers markets and bookstores and have maintained a fan base that sometimes spans generations of families.

Both books have a circulation of around 3.2 million and feature a mix of helpful hints, recipes, gardening tips, jokes and inspirational messages. Their websites are full of videos, blogs, podcasts, Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages.

In general, the almanacs' weather predictions are similar. The "Farmers' Almanac" predicts that it'll be cold but nothing like last winter.

"Overall, it looks like it's going to be a kinder and gentler winter, especially in the areas that had a rough winter last year," said managing editor Sandi Duncan.

But the almanacs' forecasts are at odds with the National Weather Service's long-range outlook for the meteorological winter, which runs from December through February.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center anticipates a warmer-than-normal winter for the mid-Atlantic and Southeast and colder-than-normal weather in the Northwest. That puts it at odds with the almanac.

Ed O'Lenic from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center said the scientific community doesn't accept tides, planetary alignment and sunspots as effective predictors of temperature or precipitation, but he stopped short of being critical of the almanac's meteorological methods.

Stillman said, however, she's confident about the weather predictions in the "Old Farmer's Almanac" because they tend to be 80 to 85 percent accurate -- the same accuracy rate boasted by the Maine almanac.

The dueling almanacs have enjoyed a long, mostly friendly rivalry that dates back nearly 200 years, said Judson Hale, the semiretired chairman and longtime pitchman for the "Old Farmer's Almanac." He said any time one of the almanac gets publicity, it helps the other.

But Hale is quick to say his publication is older and has more history: "We're the one in the Smithsonian. We're the one that Abraham Lincoln used in a murder trial. We're the one George Washington read. We are THE one."

Still, Hale said, both almanacs survive because they've maintained strong relationships with their readers for generations.

"I think it's very comforting for people to see that there's a constant in this world," he said. "There's something that, although brand-new every year, isn't changing. It is the same."

-- Associated Press

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010.



almanac - New England - Farmers' Almanac - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Saturday, Sept. 4, 2010.



almanac - New England - Farmers' Almanac - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how "peak oil" might change the global economy and warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the Western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.

The document, which was leaked on the Internet, shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis following "peak oil" - a term used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline.

This would result in a permanent supply crisis - and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The study by the Future Analysis department of the German military's Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military, has parallels with recent reports from the U.K. Only last week the Guardian newspaper reported that the British Department of Energy and Climate Change is keeping documents secret that show the British government is far more concerned about an impending supply crisis than it cares to admit.

According to the Guardian, the DECC, the Bank of England and the British Ministry of Defence are working alongside industry representatives to develop a crisis plan to deal with possible shortfalls in energy supply.

According to the German report, there is "some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later." The prediction is consistent with those of well-known scientists who assume global oil production has either already passed its peak or will do so this year.

The political and economic impacts of peak oil on Germany have now been studied for the first time in depth. The German publication Der Spiegel consulted crude oil expert Steffen Bukold, who summarized the findings of the study, which was never intended for publication. Details of the central points can be read at Der Spiegel's Website, but in a nutshell they are:

• Oil will determine a country's power like never before;
• Oil-producing nations can be expected to become more nationalistic;
• A supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market;
• As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes;
• Peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets";
• A global chain reaction of economic crashes would occur;
• The study raises fears for the survival of democracy itself.

A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how "peak oil" might change the global economy and warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the Western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.

The document, which was leaked on the Internet, shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis following "peak oil" - a term used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline.

This would result in a permanent supply crisis - and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The study by the Future Analysis department of the German military's Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military, has parallels with recent reports from the U.K. Only last week the Guardian newspaper reported that the British Department of Energy and Climate Change is keeping documents secret that show the British government is far more concerned about an impending supply crisis than it cares to admit.

According to the Guardian, the DECC, the Bank of England and the British Ministry of Defence are working alongside industry representatives to develop a crisis plan to deal with possible shortfalls in energy supply.

According to the German report, there is "some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later." The prediction is consistent with those of well-known scientists who assume global oil production has either already passed its peak or will do so this year.

The political and economic impacts of peak oil on Germany have now been studied for the first time in depth. The German publication Der Spiegel consulted crude oil expert Steffen Bukold, who summarized the findings of the study, which was never intended for publication. Details of the central points can be read at Der Spiegel's Website, but in a nutshell they are:

• Oil will determine power like never before;
• Oil-producing nations can be expected to become more nationalistic;
• A supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market;
• As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes;
• Peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets";
• A global chain reaction of economic crashes would occur;
• The study raises fears for the survival of democracy itself.

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Friday, Sept. 3, 2010.



almanac - New England - Farmers' Almanac - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010.



almanac - New England - Farmers' Almanac - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

Active Hurricane Season Prediction for US Coastline Puts Property and Casualty Insurance Agents at Risk

Taking agency computing out of the office and into the cloud enables agents to service clients and run their business even during a disaster

PR Newswire — September 1, 2010

ATLANTA, Sept. 1 /PRNewswire/ — Expect four to six major hurricanes to threaten the US Atlantic coastline, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea over the next two months, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) in its “Updated 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook.” The report predicts that the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season has a 90 percent chance of being an above normal season — the eleventh above-normal season since 1995. And, with Hurricane Earl bearing down on the East coast of the U.S., thoughts turn to protecting life and property.

While it’s impossible to predict where a hurricane will hit and what extent the damage will be, the one certainty is that property and casualty insurance agencies in the affected area need to be able to operate in the aftermath to assist clients who have sustained damage. That may be impossible if the agent’s office and computers are destroyed or inaccessible. To eliminate this risk, many agents are moving their computing out of their offices and into the “cloud” to protect their businesses.

Cloud computing is also called “virtual computing,” “hosted computing,” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). Simply put, it enables users to access software applications from any Internet-enabled device. For agents and staff, this means that the agency’s insurance management system, customer records, and the other tools used to run the business such as rater and carrier software are available anytime, anywhere through a secure password-protected Web interface.

When a major storm hit southern Missouri earlier this year, R. Alan Hedrick, owner of Country Wide Insurance Agency, found out firsthand how valuable cloud computing really was. “The storm was so bad that it took five hours just to get out of the driveway to reach the office,” said Hedrick. “With the use of a generator, and thanks to our affiliation with The Kotter Group, we were up and running and able to respond to the over 200 claim calls we received that first day. We were totally prepared to help our customers and were 100 percent operational during the massive storm. We made a promise to serve our customers when they need us, and that is what we were proudly able to do.”

“During a disaster, property and casualty agents must be able to respond to their client’s needs,” said Adam Kotter, president of The Kotter Group. “Not being able to access client policies prolongs client distress and can be ruinous to the agency’s business. Cloud computing safeguards the business and enables the agent to service customers by maintaining the agency’s computer applications and client data in a highly secure, yet accessible, data center far from the site of the disaster.”

The Kotter Group, the insurance industry’s most trusted partner in remote application management solutions, addresses the IT challenges of growth-oriented property and casualty insurance agencies through remote application management to enable agents to gain instant access to mission-critical data, without the risks and downtime associated with costly in-house IT. The Kotter Group’s HyperDesktop leverages the power of the Internet and advances in technologies like virtualization to monitor, maintain, and upgrade agents’ critical applications and data and keep agencies in compliance with strict and ever-changing regulations, while also providing agents with unlimited access to agency and client data and applications in a safe, reliable and cost-efficient environment.

About The Kotter Group

The Kotter Group allows independent insurance agents to focus on selling insurance, not dealing with IT issues. The company is the insurance industry’s most trusted partner in secure, cost-effective virtual desktop services for agencies looking to securely access their data while reducing the total cost of IT ownership. Thousands of agents rely on The Kotter Group’s SAS70 Type II Certified data center to host mission-critical data, enabling them to focus on their primary goal – profitability in the insurance marketplace. For more information on Kotter Group solutions, please visit http://www.kotter.net.

SOURCE The Kotter Group

Subject Codes: PC/t.100901105000380, PT/lang.en, IN/INS, IN/ENV, IN/FIN, IN/ITE, IN/MLM, SU/SVY, RE/Georgia, PC/priority.r, PC/category.f, PC/class.1248, PC/WAVO_….k., PC/APT_….k, PC/trade_k, PC/wavo5_k, PC/class.1025, PC/WAVO_g….., PC/APT_g…., PC/state_g, PC/wavo1_g, PC/class.1278, PC/DataFeat_gaprn, PC/port_32, PC/Billing_F04, PC/Billing_GEO, PC/Billing_IRW, PC/Billing_RWB, PC/Billing_TNW, PC/1stAcc_965603, PC/bureau_NY, PC/port_01, PC/port_96, PC/port_31, PC/port_19, PC/port_91, PC/contact, PC/website, PC/id_NY58305

By United Press International
UPI Almanac for Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2010.



Almanacs - Farmers Almanac - New England - Great Lakes - Climate Prediction Center

Kurt Cobb - Personality profile: Do you "go with the flow" or do you "stock up" just in case?

Why is it that some people believe they can really store up much of anything? Yes, it is wise to have emergency supplies in case of a power outage or other disruption that might make it difficult to get food, heat and even water. But can one really stock up for a lifetime?

The illusion that we can is given to us by money. We are told that if we save enough, we can have a comfortable old age. But what is money other than a claim on the current flow of goods and services? It's not really a stockpile of anything. So, its value depends entirely on the smooth flow of energy and resources through the economy.

And yet, there are people who believe that money will somehow make them immune to the breakdown of this flow. Yes, enough money might make it easier for someone to get scarce goods during such a breakdown. But, ultimately a community that fails to function won't be able to provide you with anything no matter how much money you have.

Veils, Boomerangs, and Goldilocks

I don't have an answer to this question. I'm not sure anyone does. What I can say, however, is three things:

1. Whether from the wall or the brakes, a lot of us are going to get whiplash. There's no scenario I see to avoid some measure of hardship. But I'll take whiplash over broken bones. How about you?

2. I know we're on a train here, but if you haven't already, you might want to think about putting on a seat belt. The seat belt in this case is personal resilience and community resilience.

3. We increase our odds of stopping the train in time (and reducing casualties) if we help more and more people understand there's a wall up ahead.

A Hell of an Anniversary

HCN’s founder, Tom Bell, marks our 40th year with a prediction: We’re all doomed

How should progressives respond to the end of the Oil Age?

This serves as a valuable reminder that like most modern people, self-described progressives are also accustomed to technological fixes for nearly every problem and challenge, and the very possibility that some breakthrough technology or solution isn’t just around the corner is scarcely fathomable; that alternative energy might not be able to replace fossil fuels is so alien and so far removed from popular consciousness that this possibility need not even be discussed or rise to the level at which it is worthy of being dismissed in “The Progressive”: apparently it “goes without saying”-- the presumed untapped riches of renewable energy is, after all, “the only way”

U.S. Gulf Drilling Critical to U.S. Economy, Energy Security

The current drilling moratorium in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and proposed legislation that would add increased regulations, costs and taxes to offshore drilling pose a threat to U.S. energy and economic security, according to energy advisors with the Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions.

Adding layers of regulation will make it more difficult to drill for and develop U.S. resources, and rules that create a punitive tax and royalty regime likely will result in companies investing in projects overseas. For smaller companies with no overseas operations, the consequence of added regulation and associated costs may mean going out of business.

Kazakh tax has Western oil firms over a barrel

This month, Britain's BG Group and US oil giant Chevron faced a case of Hobson's choice – either start paying Kazakhstan more than $1m (£650,000) a day in unwarranted export duties, or see their oil and gas exports stopped dead at the border. There are no prizes for guessing which option they took.

Power Hungry: Iraqis Ask 'Where Is The Electricity?'

The country is generating almost double the amount of electricity it did immediately before the 2003 invasion, but the amount is still woefully inadequate to meet ordinary Iraqis' needs.

"It comes for one hour although it is not for a whole hour. It goes on and off all the time. Technically we have the electricity for about 20 minutes only," says one Baghdad resident who wished to remain anonymous.

'Iran seeks nuclear fuel self-sufficiency'

An Iranian political analyst says the inauguration of the country's first nuclear power plant has been a step in the direction of becoming self-sufficient in the field of nuclear energy.

Iran offers Lebanon upgrading of defence capabilities and solution to energy crisis

Beirut - The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Ghazanfar Roknabadi declared, according to An Nahar, that his country is prepared to support the Lebanese armed forces with equipment according to their needs and Iranian capacity.

Diminishing Returns From Middle East Projects

As my fellow blogger Malini Hariharan wrote last week "the projects environment in the Middle East has irrevocably changed" and with it the rather glib and outdated assumption still being frequently made that building capacity in the region represents a licence to print money.

First of all, as Malini pointed out, further supplies of advantaged gas feedstock are no longer available with high sulphur content meaning that extra processing costs could push non-associated prices to $4/mmBTU and above.

Malaysia: Pro-coal group adds new twist to coal controversy

KOTA KINABALU: The controversial proposal to build Sabah's first coal-fired power plant has taken a new twist with the arrival of a new pro-coal pressure group, the People's Assembly Action Committee (PAAC).

The newly formed pro-coal lobby has incurred the wrath of anti coal-fired power plant coalition, Green SURF (Sabah Unite to Re-Power the Future), for claiming that the people in the east coast of Sabah support the project.

For green movement, a change in climate

On Thursday, some of the country's most respected environmental groups - in the midst of their biggest political fight in two decades - sent a group of activists to Milwaukee with a message.

We're losing.

They put on what they called a "CarnivOil" - a fake carnival with a stilt-wearing barker, free "tar balls" (chocolate doughnuts), and a suit-wearing "oil executive" punching somebody dressed like a crab. It was supposed to be satire, but there was a bitter message underneath: When we fight the oil and gas industry, they win.

Prefab home assembled in hours wins green honor

In Newport Beach, Calif., a modern factory-built home assembled in hours and finished in days has recently earned a coveted green certification.

The two-story boxy model, ideal for narrow urban lots, won the top or platinum rating from the private U.S. Green Building Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program.

Greenest wines? Vintners avoid heavy glass bottles

Many vintners are striving to be organic and eco-minded in their farming, but only a handful have addressed the packaging issue, according to a 2010 ranking of 25 major wineries.

Biofuels Firms Buy Up African Land, Cause Deforestation, Food Output Loss

Biofuels companies from the U.K. to Brazil and China are buying up large swaths of Africa, causing deforestation and diverting land from food to fuel production, the environmental group Friends of the Earth said.

Across the continent almost 5 million hectares of land, an area bigger than the Netherlands, have been sold to cultivate crops for biofuels since 2006, Friends of the Earth’s Brussels- based European division said today in a 36-page study.

Crude Falls From Seven-Day High on Skepticism About U.S. Economic Recovery

Oil fell from its highest price in more than a week on concern that last week’s 2.3 percent gain was optimistic, given the outlook for fuel demand in the U.S., the world’s biggest user of crude.

Futures erased earlier gains after the dollar strengthened against the euro, making dollar-priced commodities less attractive for investors in other currencies. The Commerce Department reported on Aug. 27 the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the second quarter, down from an estimate of 2.4 percent last month.

U.S. Gasoline Falls to $2.6979 a Gallon as Crude Declines, Lundberg Says

The average price for regular gasoline at U.S. filling stations fell to $2.6979 a gallon as supplies of the motor fuel increased and crude prices dropped.

Gasoline declined 7.43 cents in the two weeks ended Aug. 27, according to a survey of 2,500 filling stations nationwide by Trilby Lundberg, an independent gasoline analyst in Camarillo, California.

Risk-Taking Rises as Oil Rigs in Gulf Drill Deeper

In a remote reach of the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 200 miles from shore, a floating oil platform thrusts its tentacles deep into the ocean like a giant steel octopus.

The $3 billion rig, called Perdido, can pump oil from dozens of wells nearly two miles under the sea while simultaneously drilling new ones. It is part of a wave of ultra-deep platforms — all far more sophisticated than the rig that was used to drill the ill-fated BP well that blew up in April. These platforms have sprung up far from shore and have pushed the frontiers of technology in the gulf, a region that now accounts for a quarter of the nation’s oil output.

Major offshore accidents are not common. But whether through equipment failure or human error, the risks increase as the rigs get larger and more complicated.

BP's life on 'frontiers' of energy industry at risk

LONDON — At a celebration of BP's centennial last October, CEO Tony Hayward boasted to guests that the oil company "lives on the frontiers of the energy industry."

But this week, in the first major sign that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may have caused lasting damage to the company's long-term strategy of embracing projects with high risks, BP was frozen out of a potentially lucrative license to drill for oil off the coast of Greenland.

In Oil Inquiry, Panel Sees No Single Smoking Gun

HOUSTON — More than four months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, there appears to be no single smoking gun that implicates one person or company in the disaster. Instead, several missteps and oversights by the crew are being explored by federal investigators as possible triggers of the emergency.

Mr. Feinberg and the Gulf Settlement

Mr. Feinberg’s plans for distributing BP’s money, announced last Monday, seem magnanimous and fair. They would provide swift, short-term relief for Gulf Coast residents, and a process for measuring — and appropriately compensating — long-term losses. Mr. Feinberg must be willing to make adjustments along the way. But everyone will get a hearing, and his fund is sure to be vastly better than the BP operation it replaces.

RWE joins Kurdistan’s gas effort

Kurdish hopes of exporting natural gas from northern Iraq have been bolstered by a German company’s offer of assistance.

On Friday, the big German gas and power company RWE signed a co-operation agreement with the regional government of the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. The object is to create pipeline routes and other infrastructure for marketing Kurdish gas.

Russia Will Boost Oil Exports to China With New Pipeline From East Siberia

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opened the Russian section of an oil pipeline that will boost oil exports to China from East Siberia.

“This is an important project because we are beginning to diversify the delivery of our energy resources,” Putin said at today’s opening of the pipeline in Skovorodino in Russia’s Far Eastern Amur region, in comments posted on his official website. “Thus far, shipments were made to our European partners.”

Shell near finishing new Nigeria pipe

Supermajor Shell said today its Nigerian joint venture, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), was close to completing a new $1.1 billion pipeline to the Bonny export terminal which will have a capacity of 600,000 barrels per day.

Chevron to explore for oil off Liberia

Reuters) - Chevron Corp has signed a deal with Liberia to explore for oil and gas in three deepwater blocks off the West African country's coast, an official in the president's office said.

Italian energy agency asks for ENI gas rule change

(Reuters) - Italian energy authorities want the government to amend gas market rules approved earlier this month that would let ENI (ENI.MI) control up to 65 percent of the Italian market, the Authority for Electrical Energy and Gas said on Monday.

Saudi and Kuwait make Khafji gas plans

A joint venture between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait plans to build gas and natural gas liquids collection and distribution facilities at the Khafji oilfield, according to reports.

'Lukoil must stay public'

Russia’s Lukoil should not buy back its remaining shares from ConocoPhillips according to the company’s chief executive Vagit Alekperov.

Alekperov, who had said the same before Lukoil decided to proceed with the first part of the buyback earlier this month, said that it would be hugely beneficial for Lukoil if the remaining stake were sold on an open market, the business daily Vedomosti reported.

Norway's natural gas production down in July

(Reuters) - Norway's natural gas production fell to a preliminary 7.5 billion cubic metres in July from actual production of 8.5 billion cubic metres in June, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said.

With Neighbors Unaware, Toxic Spill at a BP Plant

TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.

For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.

Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.

‘Central banks, governments can’t print barrels of oil and shale gas is no game changer’

In our view, shale gas is not a game changer.First and foremost, shale gas suffers from very high depletion rates.

The Republican Who Dared Tell the Truth About Oil

Matt Simmons understood the wages of addiction and wasn't afraid to sound warnings, even to George W. Bush.

Sign of the Times

Cook argued that even if we could buy ourselves a few more decades or even a century, a crisis was inevitable--one that would threaten the lives of billions around the world. Although people today tend to think mainly of how a declining oil supply would affect the economy, Cook was more concerned that without abundant fossil fuel or a renewable replacement for it, the global population would be unsustainable.

Losing our way on roads

Everyone pays for public transport, first through taxes and then through fares, and it is time everyone had access to it, just as they do to roads. Instead, Melbourne's transport planning has for decades been focused on building more roads while applying pain-killing injections to a moribund public transport network.

Transition movement eyes bleak future and sees opportunity to plan for change

Climate change. Dwindling oil supplies. A precarious economy. Disruptions to the national food supply.

The future, some believe, is likely to throw a large wrench into life as we know it. The assumptions that we make - that there will be food at the grocery store, gas at the filling station, a regular job to go to on Monday morning - may be tested in a way that's hard to imagine. And there could be considerable hardship if we don't put those assumptions aside and begin planning for change.

Environmental Sustainability, Peak Oil and World Hunger

Last year, The United Nations reported that over one billion people in the world are starving. That's more than 16% of the world population that are in extreme want for food; meanwhile industrialized nations waste almost equal to their consumption. And considering the general girth of industrial waistlines, that's a lot of food.

What's the value of home-grown food?

While my garden has so far been unprofitable, at least in financial terms, there are apparently people out there -- even in space-scarce cities -- who grow lots and lots of food in their backyards. Like enough to feed their families, or to make a significant dent in their grocery bills.

Curious how they do it, I set out to find someone whose backyard vegetable garden was a substantial source of food and a real money-saving venture.

European Commission Receives 19 National Renewable-Energy Plans, 8 Missing

The European Union’s regulatory body has received 19 national renewable-energy action plans and will prepare legal action against the remaining eight EU countries if their strategies aren’t submitted “very soon.”

German Solar-Power Capacity May Exceed Wind by 2020, State Adviser Says

Germany probably will have more production capacity at solar power plants than from wind-energy turbines within a decade, a government energy adviser said.

Europe’s biggest electricity producer by the end of the decade will likely have about 42 gigawatts of installed capacity from photovoltaic panels that turn sunlight into power, compared with 41.9 gigawatts of wind power, both onshore and offshore, Stefan Kohler, chairman of the DENA agency, an energy adviser to the government, said today at a briefing in Berlin.

Scale down industry call from climate change expert

SCALE down industry, strengthen local resilience and “include nature” in all development models.

That is the call from retired industrial chemist Hugh Laue, now a green business consultant, chairman of the Zwartkops Trust and a leading campaigner in Nelson Mandela Bay against climate change.

Japan plans to bind large firms to CO2 caps: draft

Japan's compulsory emissions trading scheme is set to start in April 2013 and cover large CO2 emitting companies, a draft of the government's proposals showed on Monday, but several issues are still open to debate.

UN climate change panel to face Himalaya error verdict

An international committee reviewing the "processes and procedures" of the UN's climate science panel is set to report on Monday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has faced mounting pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007.

The review was overseen by the Inter-Academy Council, which brings together bodies such as the UK's Royal Society.

The findings are to be unveiled at a news conference in New York.

FACTBOX - Errors, findings by UN panel of climate scientists

Following is an overview of errors and overall findings in a 2007 IPCC report:

Greenhouse-Gas Regulation Backed by a Majority in Defense Council's Poll

A majority of U.S. voters say the government should regulate greenhouse gases linked to global warming and that the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the job, a poll for the Natural Resources Defense Council found.

The Urgent Islands

If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? That is a question about which the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls — is now seeking expert legal advice. It is also a question the United States Senate might ask itself the next time it refuses to deal with climate change.

The Farmer's Almanac winter forecast is out and it is calling for a milder winter overall this year for the United States at least compared to last year's winter.  Winter 2009-2010 saw snow in 49 states and colder than normal weather had iguanas falling from trees in Florida.

 

The forecast for the Midwest is "cold & very snowy".  Last winter was the 6th snowiest on record for Chicago with 52.4" and the 45th coldest with an average temperature of 25.1 degrees.

The 2011 edition of the almanac is also forecasting frigid weather for much of the eastern half of the country while it should be a warmer than average winter for the western half of the country. 

That seems to contradict the "official" forecast from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.  Their models have the Northwest colder than normal and the mid-Atlantic through the Southeast milder than average.

www.facebook.com/TimMcGillWeatherGuy

http://twitter.com/WGNWeatherGuy

 

Oil analyst: U.S. policy detached from market reality

The world is running out of oil.

This prediction could be made today, of course, but it also has been stated with moral certainty numerous times since 1909, Princeton researcher Roger Stern said Monday night at the University of Tulsa. The problem is not only that the forecast has been wrong, but that this “oil scarcity syndrome” has driven U.S. national security policy in the Middle East for most of the past century, he added.

“U.S. policy is detached from market realities,” Stern told a crowd at Helmerich Hall. “So it has been led by allies such as the Saudis.”

The National Energy Policy Institute invited Stern to present his talk titled “Peak Oil, War and Illusion.” The think tank, based on the TU campus, is seeking domestic answers to help wean the U.S. off oil produced by hostile or duplicitous regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia.

Crude Oil Trades Near Seven-Week Low in New York Before U.S. Supply Report

Crude oil traded near its lowest level in seven weeks before a U.S. government report on fuel supplies, paring earlier gains as equity markets retreated.

The U.S. Energy Department will probably report today that crude stockpiles gained 300,000 barrels last week after three weeks of declines, a Bloomberg survey showed. European stock indexes declined, led by shares of oil and gas companies.

“U.S. consumption is still very low, product inventories are sky-high,” said Tobias Merath, Zurich-based head of commodity research at Credit Suisse Group AG. “In every market we’ve seen fears of a double-dip recession and oil has been particularly affected.”

Natural Gas Futures Premium at Narrowest in Seven Years

Natural gas for January delivery is trading at the smallest premium to September futures in seven years as traders speculate that economic growth will slow.

China's Crude Oil Demand Growth May Slow in Third Quarter as Economy Cools

China’s apparent crude demand growth may slow “noticeably” in the third quarter as the world’s fastest-growing major economy cools, said the China Petroleum & Chemical Industry Association.

Fuel Oil, Gasoil Refining Margins in Asia Increase as Supplies Fall: Wrap

Refining margins for fuel oil and gasoil rose for a second day on concern that supplies will fall as the region imports less and refiners reduce utilization rates amid slowing economic growth.

Growing dangers in new oil exploration

Cairn, the next BP? asks the stencilled message that has appeared on various walls and pavements across Scotland since the start of the climate change protests last week. It is a neat epigram for the dilemma facing humanity in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Regardless of how quickly renewable energy is developed, the world will depend on oil for many years to come, to keep the lights on and the traffic moving (as well as making the steel to build offshore wind turbines). But at what price?

Fossil Fuels Remain a Mainstay

Scientists generally agree that to limit global warming to less than 2.4 °C--and avoid the worst effects of climate change--greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced 50 percent by 2050. But humanity is a long way from being weaned from the petroleum, natural gas, and coal whose use causes much of this pollution.

In fact, global energy demand is expected to increase about 40 percent over the next two decades. By 2030, the use of petroleum, coal, and natural gas is expected to jump by 23 percent, 44 percent, and 37 percent, respectively. "You look at the world of renewables and you see a lot of progress, but they are not going to outpace the growing demand for energy," says Peter Jackson, a senior director at IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultancy and think tank.

Drillers May Face Months of Waiting Even After Obama Lifts Deep-Water Ban

President Barack Obama’s administration may agree to an early end for its moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling while backing new regulations that may keep rigs idle for months afterward.

Will Robots Clean Up Future Oil Spills?

One result of the recent undersea oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is the emergence of a hot market for remedial technologies that go beyond the hapless boom-burn-disperse approach traditionally used to handle such spills.

Norway launches more oil initiative

Norway’s Minister for Research and Higher Education Tora Aasland today launched a new research institute aimed at increasing safety and boosting oil recovery on the Norwegian shelf.

Shell plant shut in Nigeria amid protests

Shell has shut down an oil facility in southern Nigeria due to protests by a group of local women, a company spokesperson said on Wednesday, after a similar demonstration targeted a Chevron pipeline.

Brazil, Petrobras clash over reserve size - report

(Reuters) - Energy giant Petrobras and Brazil's government clashed over the size of oil reserves to be used in an oil-for-stock swap, Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reported on Wednesday, further complicating the operation amid a dispute over the price to be used for that oil.

The government believes an offshore area to be used in the exchange holds more than 4.5 billion barrels, while Petrobras management says the area holds less than 4 billion barrels, Folha reported, citing no sources.

Statoil May Seek Own Shale Gas Projects, Expansion in China, CEO Lund Says

Statoil ASA may take the lead on shale gas projects and is considering investments in China to tap demand in the world’s fastest growing major economy, Chief Executive Officer Helge Lund said.

Norway’s largest oil and gas company in 2008 bought a stake in U.S. gas shale areas from Chesapeake Energy Corp., which it added to this year, and it now has people working with the U.S. company to gain knowledge of how to extract the fuel. Resources are also in place in China for a potential expansion there, Lund said today in an interview in Stavanger, Norway.

The Best Peak Oil Investments: Why Invest for Peak Oil?

If increased volatility is not the result of speculation, it probably has to do with other changes in the structure of the oil market.

Except for geopolitical events such as the wars and oil embargoes mentioned above, the supply of oil tends not to be volatile. Demand fluctuates with changes in economic activity, and so the demand for oil will be more volatile when economic activity is more volatile. Hence, the price volatility associated with the large spike in oil prices leading up to 2008, along with the subsequent rapid decline and recovery may be attributable to changes in oil demand. However, the years from 2002 to 2007 were characterized by remarkably steady economic growth. Hernce the high oil price volatility during 2002-07 must indicate that the ability of the oil supply to respond to changing demand had decreased compared to earlier periods.

'One Hundred Mornings' without electricity

What would you do if the electric grid went dead tomorrow? If grocery stores shut down because trucks no longer had gas to make food deliveries? Self-sufficiency and food security are popular topics in the environmental community today — making for the popularity of books ranging from the somewhat ominous "The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook" to the more sanguine "Farm City".

And now, a film called "One Hundred Mornings" takes a look at the kind of life we might have in a post-petroleum scenario, when society breaks down and people have to quickly learn to fend for themselves.

Grace Announces Rare Earth Surcharge for FCC Catalysts and Additives

COLUMBIA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Grace Davison, an operating segment of W. R. Grace & Co., today announced the implementation of a rare earth surcharge for its fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) catalysts and additives for the petroleum refining industry. Effective October 1, 2010, Grace will implement a global rare earth surcharge due to rapidly escalating prices as a result of recently imposed export tariffs and quota restrictions by major producers in the rare earth market.

The Gates Path to an Energy Revolution

Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of Technology Review, recently spoke with Bill Gates about everything from software entrepreneurship to promoting polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. But the heart of the conversation, published today on the magazine’s Web site, was about how to make non-polluting energy technologies so cheap that coal reverts to being the shiny black rock it was before the industrial revolution.

(The interview is here)

Biden: U.S. to halve cost of solar power by 2015

Vice President Joe Biden released a report Tuesday that says the United States is on track, within five years, to halve the cost of solar power -- putting its on par with grid electricity -- and slash by 70% the cost of batteries for electric vehicles.

Clean-power projects turn landfills' methane into electricity

Landfills, with the tendency to belch noxious greenhouse gases, have long gotten a bad rap from environmentalists.

But now several clean-power technology companies believe waste can be a source of environmentally friendly energy.

Province to test plug-in cars

If all goes according to plan, 5 per cent of all cars in Ontario will be electric by 2020 — and this week, the province is one car closer to its goal.

Well, sort of. At its Scarborough headquarters Tuesday, Toyota Canada handed over the keys to one of its new Prius Plug-In Hybrids, which it will be lending to Ontario for a year.

China to lift installed hydropower capacity by 50%

China will expand its installed hydropower capacity to 300 million kilowatts by 2015 from the current 200 million in an effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the country's top energy official said here Wednesday.

Zhang Guobao, director of the National Energy Administration (NEA), told the popular web port Sina.com in an on-line interview that such an expansion is needed for China's goal to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 40 to 45 percent by 2020.

Grand Canyon's future at 'grave risk,' report says

Haze blurs the skies over the Grand Canyon, tour planes break the backcountry silence, uranium mines are making a comeback near the canyon's rim and the Colorado River has lost its muddy mojo.

Add to those threats a perpetually underfunded budget and the picture that emerges is a national park where efforts to protect resources are increasingly compromised, a conservation group said Monday.

Russian gas tanker forges Arctic passage to China

MOSCOW (AFP) – A Russian gas tanker is this month making a historic voyage across the famed Northeast passage as receding ice opens up an elusive trade route from Asia to the West sought for centuries by explorers.

Pro-Environment Groups Outmatched, Outspent in Battle Over Climate Change Legislation

Clients in the oil and gas industry unleashed a fury of lobbying expenditures in 2009, spending $175 million -- easily an industry record -- and outpacing the pro-environmental groups by nearly eight-fold, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis.

James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren

Just how many more emissions could we let off before reaching such runaway warming? Hansen points to several signs that we are already on the verge, and that continued “business-as-usual” fossil fuel use will most certainly tip us over, quite possibly within the next few decades. Calculating the degree of climate forcings on the planet, Hansen argues we need to not only begin reducing fossil fuel consumption, but get back to a carbon dioxide level of 350 parts per million (ppm), down from our present (and steadily growing) 387 ppm.

How? Looking at various government and agency estimates of how many fossil fuels remain (an issue with little consensus, to say the least, with many arguing we may have already passed global peak oil production), Hansen determines that what oil and conventional gas remains is largely out of U.S. hands, but that runaway warming could be prevented by phasing out coal use, particularly since coal is more abundant and has a higher carbon output than oil or gas. To do so, Hansen calculates that we must half emissions by 2020, and phase out coal emissions by 2030.

Global Warming Deniers Aren't "Experts" At All: It's Time for a New View of Science

Imagine a gigantic banquet. Hundreds of millions of people come to eat. They eat and drink to their hearts’ content— eating food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens or Rome, or even in the palaces of medieval Europe. Then, one day, a man arrives, wearing a white dinner jacket. He says he is holding the bill. Not surprisingly, the diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal. One diner suggests that the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects. Finally, the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.

This is where we stand today on the subject of global warming. For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it. The great economist John Maynard Keynes famously summarized all of economic theory in a single phrase: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” And he was right. We have experienced prosperity unmatched in human history. We have feasted to our hearts’ content. But the lunch was not free.

Jeff Rubin: Unpaid environmental costs distort trade

Greening our economy isn’t just about what we produce—it’s also about what we consume. Sending smokestack industries off to distant shores in search of cheap labor markets to make the things we consume may lessen the carbon footprint of our own economies, but it sure doesn’t do much for the global footprint. And since there are no borders in the atmosphere, it’s really the global imprint that counts.

Take steel, for example. The mass migration of North American steel production to China certainly hasn’t lessened the industry’s global environmental footprint.

Courtesy of NOAA The combined global land and ocean surface temperature made this July the second warmest on record, behind 1998, and the warmest averaged January-July on record. The global average land surface temperature for July and January-July was warmest on record. The global ocean surface temperature for July was the fifth warmest, and for January-July 2010 was the second warmest on record, behind 1998. The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions. Global Temperature Highlights The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for July 2010 was the second warmest on record at 61.6°F (16.5°C), which is 1.19°F (0.66°C) above the 20th century average of 60.4°F (15.8°C). The averaged temperature for July 1998 was 61.7°F (16.5°C). The July worldwide land surface temperature was 1.85°F (1.03°C) above the 20th century average of 57.8°F (14.3°C) — the warmest July on record. Warmer-than-average conditions dominated land areas of the globe. The most prominent warmth was in Europe, western Russia and eastern Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included central Russia, Alaska and southern South America. According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland set a new all-time maximum temperature on July 29 when temperatures soared to 99.0°F (37.2°C), surpassing the previous record set in July 1914 by 2.3°F (1.3°C). Western Russia was engulfed by a severe heat wave during much of July. On July 30, Moscow set a new all-time temperature record when temperatures reached 102°F (39°C), exceeding the previous record of 99.0°F (37.2°C) set four days earlier. Before 2010, the highest maximum temperature recorded in Moscow was 98.2°F (36.8°C), set nine decades ago. According to the Beijing Climate Center, the July 2010 average temperature across China was 73.0°F (22.8°C), which is 2.5°F (1.4°C) above the 1971-2000 average and the warmest July since 1961. The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C) and the fifth warmest July on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean. La Niña conditions developed during July 2010, as sea surface temperatures (SST) continued to drop across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, La Niña is expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2010-2011. For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 58.1°F (14.5°C) was the warmest January-July period on record. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average. Polar Sea Ice and Precipitation Highlights Arctic sea ice covered an average of 3.2 million square miles (8.4 million square kilometers) during July. This is 16.9 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the second lowest July extent since records began in 1979. The record low July was set in 2007. This was the 14th consecutive July with below-average Arctic sea ice extent. July 1996 was the last year that had above-average sea ice extent. Antarctic sea ice extent in July was above average, 4.8 percent above the 1979-2000 average — resulting in the largest July sea ice extent on record. According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the continent received an average of 34.4 mm (1.35 inches) of precipitation during July 2010 — this is 55 percent above the 1961-1990 average and the highest value since 1998. Source: NOAA

by Seth Shulman.

If you’re one of the tens of millions of people who live in the southwestern United States, get ready for drier weather. That’s the message from Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The American Southwest, says Seager, is soon likely to experience a “permanent drought” condition on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

That rather frightening prediction is the most likely scenario for the region, given the global warming now underway. “It is a matter of simple thermodynamics,” says Seager. “The region will face a considerable increase in aridity over the coming decade.”

The Southwest is as dry as it is because the local atmospheric flow tends to export far more moisture than storms can carry into the region. This is the case in other parts of the so-called subtropics, those areas directly north and south of the equatorial tropics. But as earth’s atmosphere becomes laden with heat-trapping greenhouse gases, it will be able to retain even more moisture. That means more evaporation from lakes and rivers, more moisture loss from plants, and drier soil.

A critical player in this drying cycle is the planetary-scale circulation system known as the “Hadley cell.” This vast atmospheric system links rising air near the Equator with descending air in the subtropics, giving rise to the subtropical jet streams.

In the northern hemisphere the jet stream flows west to east across North America. Rising moist air condenses and forms thunderstorms in the tropics, but the moisture is largely lost by the time the air descends at subtropical latitudes. That’s why most of the world’s deserts are situated in the subtropics.

The Hadley cell is growing. Its expansion above a larger swath of the American Southwest, along with a shifting of the jet stream and many storms northward, is a worrisome trend, says Seager. It means there is little chance that the Southwest can avoid becoming drier in the coming decades. In fact, when Seager’s team analyzed some 49 computer projections of the region’s likely future climate, using 19 major climate models, all but three scenarios agreed: drought ahead.

Seager has been tracking changes in precipitation for nearly a quarter century. For his graduate thesis at Columbia University he used computer models to try and understand the role of sea-surface temperatures in driving precipitation patterns in the tropics and around the world.

Growing up in a working-class family in Norwich, England, Seager spent a lot of time outdoors with his family. Cycling and hiking the hills of England and Scotland sparked his interest in the physical world. It didn’t hurt his current professional interests that he grew up with “more weather than you would wish on anyone.”

One of his undergraduate tutors was the climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers. She had recently returned to England after working in James Hansen’s renowned climate science research center in New York. “She’s the one who suggested that I apply to graduate school in climate science in the U.S.,” says Seager. He and his brother were the first members of their family to earn college degrees.

Moving to New York for a graduate degree was a big step—and, as it turned out, a lasting one. Except for a stint as a postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle, Seager has remained at Columbia to conduct climate research ever since.

Seager recognizes that the stakes of his drought research are high. “The prospect of a drought on par with the 1930s is a matter of serious concern,” he says. “With some two million people displaced, the Dust Bowl was probably the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history—even counting the current oil spill in the Gulf.”

Seager is quick to add, however, that many features of the Dust Bowl are unlikely to be repeated. For one thing, he says, “we have learned an awful lot about soil conservation since the 1930s.”

As severe as the impending drought conditions now appear, Seager also emphasizes the vital mitigating role played by the Colorado River, which carries an enormous volume of water to the southwestern United States. The region, he notes, now diverts between 80 and 90 percent of that water for agricultural uses, but that could be changed.

Other regions are not as lucky. The Colorado River is barely a trickle of water by the time it reaches the border with northern Mexico, where the potential for water shortages is more immediate and more likely to lead to the displacement of people in coming years. 

Seager believes that part of his job is to inform people about these climatic changes. He often briefs water managers throughout the region, including those with the California Department of Water Resources and at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado River.

“It’s a comparatively small part of my job, because mostly I’m focused on doing the science,” Seager says, “but it is an important part. Much of our funding comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and a reasonable condition of the grants is that we do something to make sure the information gets out.”

One common complaint is that his work is neither precise enough nor at a large enough scale to be useful to water managers. He feels their pain. “There is still so much natural variability in the weather that I cannot say with certainty what will happen in their particular neck of the woods and exactly when,” he says. But he is hard at work trying to improve his modeling of the region’s climate.

For the past several years Seager has been studying naturally occurring droughts in the American Southwest all the way back to the Middle Ages. The man-made forces that are driving today’s climate change are clear, he says. But the extent to which naturally occurring cycles might mitigate or exacerbate the impending drought remain uncertain.

“When I first went into this field, it had little perceived practical relevance,” says Seager. “The field has developed rapidly to a point where it can offer practical predictions, and the goal now is to make these as precise as we possibly can.”

Water managers in the Southwest seem to be paying attention, and even taking action. “They understand that it’s going to get drier,” says Seager. “So it is probably not a good idea for them to sit around and wait until our models get better.”

Related Links:

Climate experts agree: Global warming caused Russian heat wave

The Climate Post: First They Came For The Bill; Now, the EPA

The spill is gone, but uncertainty haunts the Gulf

With the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service, predicting an...

Josiah Northey holds on as his mother, Colleen Northey, goes under water Monday at the Sea Otter swimming school in Loomis.

Worldwide, 2010 is on track to become the warmest year on record. Surprisingly, Sacramento has been one of the cool spots.

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported recently that the average global temperature was higher over the past 12 months than during any other 12-month period in history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released corroborating data, adding that the past four months, including June, have each individually been the hottest on record as well.

The global trend, however, has eluded the Central Valley, where abnormally low temperatures through May have stunted agriculture but granted a few pleasant extra weeks of spring.

The NASA findings were based on data from 5,000 weather stations around the world, said scientist Reto Ruedy, co-author of the study. Scientists used temperature anomalies, or departures from the baseline, rather than absolute measurements to account for differences in the instruments of individual stations.

The average global temperature, computed over a 12-month period, reached a new record in May and held steady for the month of June, he said. This was despite the recent minimum in solar activity, which should have had a cooling effect on Earth.

Apparently, Ruedy said, the solar cycle "has much less impact than the warming trend."

NOAA research meteorologist Tom Knutson doesn't find that surprising. The trend has existed since records began in the late 1800s.

The new finding comes on the tail of a NASA announcement that 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade in history.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Knutson said. "The models are projecting a substantial warming into the 21st century."

The temperature rise is caused by a fundamental imbalance, Ruedy said: "At this point, the Earth's atmosphere receives more energy from the sun than it emits as heat to the universe." The Earth will continue to warm until balance is re-established, at a higher global temperature.

That's another 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit if atmospheric composition does not change, according to the NASA institute's models. By comparison, global mean temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.

Meteorologist David Unger at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center in Maryland said that El Niño is likely a player in this year's record-setting warmth. 2010 began with "large areas of equatorial Pacific Ocean at above normal sea surface temperatures," he said. It's easier to set global temperature records when the tropics are exceptionally warm.

The El Niño phenomenon was also responsible for California's wetter-than-average winter and spring, he said. And its death, as the Pacific began to enter a cooler-than-average pattern, generated the unusually persistent trough that has brought Sacramento all that nice weather, he added.

April this year was 4.9 degrees cooler than average in downtown Sacramento. May was 5.3 degrees cooler. June 5 was the first 90-degree day of the year.

"What it did was it cooled the air over the entire region," said Dan Keeton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. "Most importantly for Sacramento, it enhanced the Delta breeze."

The Delta breeze is the region's natural air conditioner, he said. The ocean breeze follows the Sacramento River into the Central Valley.

"The influence can be pretty much Valley-wide in the strongest situations," Keeton said.

According to NOAA, California was one of the few spots in the world reporting below average temperatures from April through June.

On a large scale, only isolated regions in Southeast Asia and South America could say the same.

The departure from average early in the season delayed harvests in the Central Valley and tempered snowmelt in the higher elevations. But an almost average June and July have all but made up the difference.

Heat-loving tomatoes and melons fell behind schedule by several weeks in the early season, according to the Sacramento County Farm Bureau, but they are now on track for a full harvest. Cool weather and slow currents thinned rafting business on Central Valley's many rivers, but delayed snowmelt will keep reservoirs full well through the summer.

There's more unusually nice weather to look forward to this week. Forecasts are showing a string of 80s.

But as warmer Pacific waters become cooler-than-average seas, the global trends will catch up quickly, said Unger. Before the year is over, Sacramento will likely slip into above-average territory as well.

"Don't expect that what you've been enjoying will persist into the fall," Unger said.