[pagebreak:Top Ten Green Giants for 2011]

While startups have played a crucial role in getting the green industry off the ground, the future will likely be dominated by the green giants, i.e., large, sprawling conglomerates with decades of experience under their belts.

Why? Green technology essentially involves revamping the physical infrastructure of the modern world: replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines, building homes from materials concocted in chemistry laboratories, and swapping out engines for electric motors. Established companies are simply in a far better position to muster the capital, technological depth, and factory capacity that will all be needed to make the transition.

Familiarity plays a big role, too. Millions have flocked to play Farmville, but you won't see the same sort of giddy enthusiasm for unheralded newcomers among utilities and industrialists to try high voltage power lines or sewage-to-drinking-water plants. If the internet boom was embodied by a twenty-something billionaire, cleantech is a science teacher with a comb-over.

We came out with a Top Ten Green Giants for 2010. Here is this year’s list to watch, followed by an update on 2010's group:

1. France
2. ABB
3. Samsung
4. Waste Management
5. NRG Energy
6. DuPont
7. Netflix
8. Ford Motor Company
9. Lockheed Martin
10. Tata Group
11. Update on 2010

[pagebreak:France]

1. France (ca. 20,000 B.C. Formerly named Gaul.)

Not many people realize this, but green technology is a contemporary of Victor Hugo.

In 1839, Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect while experimenting with an electrolyte cell. A year later, August Mouchet proposed the idea of solar-powered steam engines. Then, in 1859, 150 years ago, Gaston Plante invented the lead acid battery. He demonstrated it at the French Academy of Sciences a year later.

A wide array of companies has helped to bring France back to the forefront. Schneider Electric, the electrical services and equipment giant that served Napoleon III, has bought five companies since December. Saint-Gobain, supplier of mirrors to Versailles, invested $80M in energy efficient window-maker Sage Electrochromics.

Areva, the nuclear expert, is working in various nations on reactors. It also purchased Ausra and has retooled that company’s solar thermal technology to lower the cost. With interest in high-speed rail growing, one can anticipate that French engineering firms will be able to export expertise. Renault Nissan became the first large automaker to strongly advocate all-electric cars.

Veolia, also from France, has begun to invest in and partner with water startups.

Why is this occurring? Europeans don’t specialize in startups. Instead, Europe tends to cultivate staid conglomerates with large research labs and employees that stay at the same company for decades. In other words, the kind of places where green ideas can get the room and time they need to develop.  

Not everything comes from China.

[pagebreak:ABB]

2. ABB (1883)

Four years ago, ABB didn’t come up much in conversations in Silicon Valley. Now, the Swiss-Swedish equipment manufacturer and grid builder represents one of the best exit paths for startups in efficiency and grid equipment.

Over the past year, ABB has bought electric motor maker Baldor Electric for $4.2 billion, virtual power plant developer Ventyx for $1 billion, and Insert Key Solutions, which specializes in asset management software. And Ventyx, an independent ABB subsidiary, recently bought Obvient. The VC group has also plunked money into companies like car charger Ecotality. (Note: Andy Tang at ABB's VC arm is not the same Andy Tang who is associated with PG&E, but they do get confused for one another frequently, says Tang of PG&E.)

Despite the company's European heritage, it's also becoming one of the larger green employers in the U.S. All of those acquisitions listed above are companies based in the U.S. ABB this month broke ground on a high voltage cable factory in North Carolina. The $90 million factory will employ more than 100.

With the acquisition race on in smart grid, expect to see the name continue to pop up.

[pagebreak:Samsung]

3. Samsung (1938)

Back in 2009, Samsung announced that it wanted to be one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers by 2015. Some were skeptical. Green energy had been hot for a few years and the move looked opportunistic. Why would a company that can sell high-end TVs build factories to make solar panels, complex products that get sold for commodity prices?

It turns out Samsung is serious. The South Korean conglomerate plans to invest $20.6 billion and employ 45,000 to become a major player in solar, power plants, green electronics, LED lights and other markets. Samsung, sources have told us, actually bought more LED equipment in 2010 than most of the rest of the industry combined. Samsung Electronics alone has 111 subsidiaries and produces everything from components to household appliances.

Recently, it also lured Steve Fludder, who headed up ecomagination for General Electric, to run its energy efforts.

While many conglomerates often become saddled by bureaucratic inertia, internal politics and conservative product planning, Samsung has shown itself to be nimble and aggressive. It topped Sony in consumer electronics and moved from being a second-tier manufacturer to a premier brand.

The company is also adept at marketing -- it has already hired a phalanx of blogging moms to tout its appliances in South Korea.

Be afraid.

[pagebreak:Waste Management]

4. Waste Management (1894)

The General Electric of garbage. Recycling and refurbishing have lagged some of the larger green markets like solar and energy efficiency, but the tide may begin to turn. We’re up to our necks in garbage (each American generates an average of 4.5 pounds of waste a day), oil prices are rising, and new regulations like California’s carpet recycling tax are all conspiring to make reusing consumables and raw materials economical and interesting.

In this environment, WM is the undisputed leader. The company has begun to position itself as a resource management firm, rather than a trash hauler. Wal-Mart, for instance, contracted with WM to help it reduce the solid waste from its stores by 95 percent. Five years ago, that would have been viewed as a threat to the company's core business: WM, after all, manages 290 landfills.

Nonetheless, the company helped Wal-Mart come up with a recycling strategy. The solid waste stream from California Wal-Mart stores dropped from 1,200 containers to 60. Revenue from Wal-Mart's California operations, however, rose 28 percent and profitability went up 25 percent.

WM also worked with a famous doll maker to make its product more recyclable.

"If you told me when I went to Waste Management that I would give plastic surgery to Barbie, I wouldn't have believed you," CEO David Steiner told us last year.

It is also experimenting with technologies like landfill-to-methane systems. A few weeks ago, WM announced that it will work with Genomatica to develop microbes for recycling raw materials. It also invested in Harvest Power, which turns waste into mulch and power. Expect it to be on the forefront of regulatory change: Steiner is an attorney.

[pagebreak:NRG Energy]

5. NRG Energy (1989)

Need cash? NRG is there.

The power provider was founded in 1989, so it’s relatively young compared to others on this list, but its tentacles have spread far and wide. Overall, Princeton-based NRG has over 50 facilities and controls 26 megawatts of capacity. Yes, it has coal and nuclear facilities, but the portfolio sports district heating, solar and other types of projects. It’s also a big player in natural gas, which, like it or not, seems destined to become part of the U.S. clean energy portfolio.

Last October, NRG Solar plunked $300 million into BrightSource Energy, the solar thermal developer and money vacuum. Months later, NRG announced it would buy the 250-megawatt California Solar Ranch project, a PV farm inaugurated by SunPower, and the 290-megawatt Agua Caliente project from First Solar.  

It is also a partner in Energy Technology Ventures, a venture firm that has invested in, among others, Alta Devices, which wants to make solar cells from gallium arsenide. Potentially, NRG could become a pipeline for novel solar cells or concentrators.

[pagebreak:Dupont]

6. DuPont (1802)

Material science is one of the fundamental disciplines of green technology. You wouldn’t see advances in desalination membranes, LEDs, solar wafers, wind turbines or electrodes without dedicated labs of chemists cooking tinkering with molecule sets.

Last year, we saluted Dow Chemical on this list for its activities in water, lithium-ion batteries and solar. DuPont participates in the same markets, but last year also purchased industrial enzyme maker Danisco for $6.3 billion. Danisco not only already makes a green rubber for tires, it produces a large number of additives for food.

Keep your eyes on 3M, which showed off an interesting thin-film solar concentrator at Solar Power International, and Monsanto, which invested in algae maker Sapphire Energy.

[pagebreak: Netflix]

7. Netflix (1997)

The obligatory weird selection for a top-ten list. I was going to name Autodesk for its software that allows others to design products with less embedded energy and packaging, but the miracle of being able to watch Dr. Dolittle 2 instantly got the better of me.

Netflix doesn’t make energy equipment. The company, though, has popularized a concept -- downloading movies -- that was discussed by futurists for years. In turn, the required bandwidth will put more pressure on computer makers and data centers to improve the energy efficiency of computing. Expect to see demand for flash memory, compression algorithms, new types of cooling systems, data center management tools and other technologies to get pulled in its wake.

The pipeline buildup will additionally help pave the way for arguably the world's most cost-effective green technology: videoconferencing. SAP says its $300,000 videoconferencing system paid for itself in a year. Microsoft has cut per capita travel costs by 30 percent. Getting rid of jewel cases for DVDs helps too: a Stanford study last year estimated that downloads cut 40 percent to 80 percent of the energy out of the music industry supply chain.

For the profligate number of computing cycles that you’ve inspired the public to consume for mammoth video files, we -- and the consultants from IBM and HP that will get hired to solve some of these problems -- salute you.

[pagebreak: Ford Motor Company]

8. Ford Motor Company (1903)

Like other large car manufacturers, Ford plans to wheel out an array of plug-in hybrids, all-electrics and plain hybrids. It even put an oversized charger in the coming all-electric Focus to cut down on charging time and help eliminate range anxiety. And like GM and others, it is tinkering with software and psychology to come up with apps to make electric cars more engaging. 25 percent of Ford's cars will be hybrids, electrics, or plug in hybrids by 2025 with the vast majority of the total being regular hybrids.

But the biggest push at the company will revolve around improving gas and diesel engines and that's why company made the list. EcoBoost, Ford's efficient gas engine that acts sort of like a diesel, can boost mileage by 10 percent to 15 percent and EcoBoost engines have been popping up in more models. More technology will follow. CAFE standards will require auto makers to boost their average fleet mileage from the low 20 mile per gallon range to 35 miles per gallon by 2016 and may further require them to hit 42 miles per gallon or more by 2020. Considering that electric cars will only constitute a small percentage of overall sales by 2020, achieving the higher standard will likely have to be accomplished hrough things like microhybrid technology, novel opposed piston engines and devices that can recover waste heat from engines to power air conditioners.

Advanced engine companies like Achates Power hope big automakers will license their technologies. Ford might license, but it is also in better shape than many competitors development-wise. CEO Smilin' Alan Mulally reorganized the company after coming to Ford in 2006 and placed a particular emphasis on ensuring that the best-of-breed ideas at the company percolated globally. The old days of producing good cars in Europe and questionable ones for the U.S. effectively began to end.

 Additionally, Ford has also been at the forefront on incorporating recycled materials into its cars. Just a few days ago, it announced it would convert 4.1 million pounds of carpet into cylinder heads.

[pagebreak: Lockheed Martin]

9.Lockheed Martin (1912)

Back in 2009, we predicted the rise of the Utility-Industrial Complex, or an increasing number of partnerships and deals between utilities and companies like Boeing, Raytheon, Bechtel and Lockheed often associated with DoD contracts.

These companies continue to participate in green markets, but the trend hasn’t become as big, or moved as fast, as we expected. Some have speculated that the pecuniary budgets of utilities and the ‘build first, budget later’ attitude of some military contractors were not a perfect fit.

Still, the intermingling goes on and Lockheed generally has one of the more diverse portfolios in the industry. It is working on microgrids at Fort Bliss, Texas and trying to figure out ways to better tie home networking into demand response systems with Tendril.

It also examines technologies from startups like Power Tagging, and, in the “might be crazy, but it might work” department, it is working on ocean thermal technology for producing power.  (Look, we even almost got through an entire article without mentioning it also has looked at EEStor.)

[pagebreak: Tata Group]

10. Tata Group (1868)

Like Samsung, but more sprawling. The Indian conglomerate is known to many in the West for producing the Nano, the $2,500 car. But it also produces steel, chemicals, energy, beverages, composites, electronics, owns hotels and has consultants around the world. Jaguar and Daewoo are two sub-brands.

Thus, it is both a big consumer and a producer of energy. The current goal is to replace 25 percent of its own fossil fuel consumption with renewables by 2017. Like others on the list, it has startup investments: It owns a piece of Sun Catalytix, the MIT spinout that wants to convert water to hydrogen with sunlight and proprietary catalysts.

On top of that, the conglomerate -- and the Tata family behind it -- remains one of the most important and influential in India when it comes to pursuing social goals through technology. (The family built the Indian Institute of Science.) As green grows in India and Southeast Asia, so will this group.

[pagebreak:Class of 2010]

How did the class of 2010 fare?

The companies on this year’s list didn’t knock off the 2010 nominees. Instead, they are additive. But here’s an update on what happened with the inaugural group of green giants.

1. People’s Republic of China. No comment needed. One interesting development is China’s willingness to embrace Western technology. Innovalight signed a number of deals for its solar ink with Chinese solar makers. Both Johnson Controls and Honeywell also announced plans to help develop building efficiency there.

2. General Electric. The sprawling conglomerate last June said it will spend $10 billion on research and development for products for the ecomagination group over the next five years, doubling the $5 billion spent in the inaugural five years of the program. This next five-year plan will pay particular attention to exploiting hardware and software.

3. Siemens. The acquisition juggernaut slowed a bit, but Siemens still found time to scoop up SiteControls for building management. It also signed a deal with Enphase Energy.

4. Nissan. The Leaf made it out. Not many have been produced, but it’s out and the hoopla seems to have convinced others like Mitsubishi that electrics can be affordable and attractive.

5. Dow Chemical. See above.

6. Panasonic. In October, Panasonic president Fumio Ohtsubo told a group of us reporters in Tokyo that the company would become the top supplier of green electronics by 2018, the company's 100th anniversary.  Earlier this year it finalized the acquisition of Sanyo to expand its reach in solar and batteries. We've been talking up Panasonic since 2008, so hats off to us for this early prediction.

7. Johnson Controls and Honeywell. Along with the Chinese deals, JC and H both snapped up companies in building management.

8. Wal-Mart. Last year it announced its green supply chain initiative. Hopefully, results will come over the next few years. On a personal note, I actually shopped at one for the first time recently when I needed snow boots in a pinch.

9. Veolia. Go team France.

10. Cisco. We’re waiting. Maybe it’s the lull before the storm.

And the Senate is still passing bills.  Another day in Trenton is about to begin. Bills will be before us about the tourism district in Atlantic City, revising casino industry regulations and abolishing COAH.  I will be speaking and lobbying for two bills - the first amending our State medicaid plan to  cover more folks for family planning services.  Let's see if we can get a few Republican votes for this in the Senate.  I'm counting on a few thinking "R" colleagues to join in putting forth this "no brainer" since the state gets $9 for every $1 of match it allocates.

Since the Governor vetoed the last family planning money, two sites in Browns Mills and Mt. Holley in Burlington have stopped seeing family planning patients.  In the past year these health centers saw over 2300 patients. The Dover Health Center will close at the end of this month and in the past year this center saw over 3900 patients. The Planned Parenthood of Northern New Jersey in Elizabeth will probably see more than 800 fewer patients due to reductions and restructuring.  Mercer, Ocean and Somerset County centers will also be affected. Each of those numbers represents a real person in need of services. This is just the tip of the coming iceberg in poor women's access to health services. What is the Governor and some of his party stalwarts proving with these cuts?  Come on guys and gals, time to set "right" at least a few of these "wrongs"!

And speaking of setting things right, Governor Corzine signed a bill into law literally his last moments in office.  A bill that came out of a Middlesex community where a bunch of "upstarts" (read: reformers) attempted to change the form of government in one of their communities.  After hard work, they got the government change on the ballot and came within a few votes of winning.  Leaders of the party (read: my own party) got a little nervous.  So what was there to do?  Oh we can change the law and require that a government change referendum (even after a loss) cannot be brought up again for ten years rather than the three years in the then current law!  That will teach those citizens. By the time 10 years pass, most of them will either be gone or they'll have given up. Not very (read: small d) democratic! We will be considering my bill today which returns the law to the 2009 version: three years in between referendum after a loss and five years if there was a win and the government actually changed. Keep your fingers crossed that Senator Vitale and I have enough votes in our Democratic caucus to get this passed. Watch the vote tally on this one.

It was a good day Saturday with the repeal of DADT. It is sad though to see what's happened to the really brave war hero, Sen. John McCain. First Sarah Palin, then a prediction that our military will fall apart with this repeal.  And Arizona doesn't need counseling for veterans facing mental health problems as a result of their service to our country - but maybe New Jersey does? We should all be as angry as Congressman Holt is. Years of cruel imprisonment couldn't vanquish John McCain, but the pressure of partisan politics seems to have done the job on him. There's not much more to say about that. The repeal of DADT is a giant step forward for our country and for granting full civil rights to the gay community. We all know what's still missing. Looking forward to the courts doing the "right thing" (read: marriage) here too.

And let's hope the Governor did something right by selecting Christopher Cerf of Montclair as the next Education Commissioner. Don't know that much about him yet, but others have said he is smart and knows how to build consensus. I just hope Mr. Christie will not throw him out if he manages to attract the NJEA to join him in a grant application or to build  agreement on a program to improve our schools.

And so today, we in the Senate have a chance to "right" a few "wrongs". 'Tis the season to be kind to one another. Let's hope that "spirit" will pervade the Senate chambers today.

Merry Christmas. Thank you Blue Jersey for helping to build a community of progressives. Thank you to our bloggers, commenters, and readers for giving voice to many good ideas.

Keep your voices heard!

 

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

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

Mike Treder wrote an article called Are we in the future yet ? He laments failed predictions from the 1980s. Mike Treder does not know where or how to look for the "future".

Mike Treder notes several predictions and here is one - Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” - Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon, 1965

I covered an automation census 6 months ago. The article has points about how automation will effect each job category.

* There are probably about 11 million robots now (start of Q2 2010).
* About 1.3 million industrial robots
* It is estimated that self-service kiosk transactions will be worth more than $775 billion this year, and is expected to hit $1.3 trillion in 2013. The number of self-service kiosks in the United States and Canada is 1.2 million
* Self Service devices are growing at 15% per year.
* Financial kiosks and ATMs are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 9 percent to include more than 186,000 financial kiosks and more than 2.4 million ATMs by 2013

If you lose your video store job to a Redbox vending machine or the Netflix business model (mailed DVDs or downloaded movies), then it did not have to be an industrial robot in a brick and mortar store.




* “The first space colony, Island One, could be in place before 1990. This is possible, I must emphasize, within the limits of present-day conventional materials and technology.” - Professor Gerard O’Neill, 1975

* We have the International Space Station. An overpriced pork project that under-delivered for the money that was spent
* Bigelow aerospace inflatable space modules have scale systems in orbit and should have the first full sized system around 2015
* O'Neill said could be in place. I would argue that a far more ambitious space colony was technically feasible but maximum number of people in space was not a priority.

From Mike Treder -
# “If the scientific and medical resources of the United States alone were mobilized, aging would be conquered within a decade.” - Gerontologist Alex Comfort, 1978
# By the 1990s, the human lifespan will be “400 years or more.” - Dr. Paul Segall, UC-Berkeley, 1978

* the scientific and medical resources of the US were not mobilized to conquer aging.
* the scientific and medical resources of the US would be hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
SENS researchers review resveratrol and rapamycin.
SENS needs about $1 billion for full funding for the first major milestone of proving the repair of aging damage methods in a mouse.

So to accelerate the day when we have significant progress towards treating aging, then donate to SENS research

# “Within a generation…the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” - Marvin Minsky, 1967

Applications of artificial intelligence.

The methods of the 1960s did get developed into a global artificial intelligence industry with over ten billion dollars in revenue. Artificial vision systems, programmed trading, expert systems, etc... all are being commercially used.

Transportation
There are 13 new subway lines in Shanghai and first was built in 1995. There is a lot of high speed rail in China, Europe, and Japan.

Some amazing facts about high speed rail in China

* China now has 7400+ kilometers of high speed rail. They have more high speed rail than all of Europe
* China doubled its high speed rail with the completion and start of operation of new rail since May, 2010. China added nearly 4000 kilometers of high speed rail since May, 2010 which is more than the number 2 country France.
* China will nearly double its high speed rail by the end of 2012 to over 13,000 kilometers. This will put it at more high speed rail than the rest of the world has. Europe, Japan, Asia, etc...
* China is pushing to speed up high speed rail speed to 500 kph (312 mph)
* China high speed rail between Shanghai and Beijing will have 12 train cars with one leaving every 5 minutes. An estimated 220,000 passengers will use it every day
* By 2020, assuming budgets are met about $300 billion will have been spent to build 25,000 kilometers of high speed rail network that will span most of the country
* If China develops low air pressure tunnels around their high speed rail then they could increase the speed a lot. They would need to develop or redevelop high speed rail with maglev. Southwest Jiaotong University in China is developing a low pressure underground tubes and maglev train which will travel at 1,000 kilometers per hour (600 mph). This is double the speed of current maglev trains, which enable a larger one city economic growth effect. Even more advanced vacuum maglev would enables speeds up to 12000 miles per hour. The double speed only costs 10-20% more than regular maglev. China has shown the willingness to make more than one high speed line (between Shanghai and Hangzhou), so the faster evacuated vacuum tube maglev lines could be developed as a next wave of high speed rail. This could start with a demo line in the 2020-2025 timeframe.

Other Future Questions and Answers

Question→ Where are the L5 space colonies with ten thousand residents?
Answer : Where is the funding for many residents in space colonies and where is the business model ?
Bigelow Aerospace seems to have a business model and systems for deliverying relatively large space stations. By connecting several modules, they could hold hundreds of people.Spacex could play an important near term role in reducing launch costs. If there is no progress on launch costs then there will not be significant progress on space colonies.

The trillions dollars spent on space over the last few decades went for spy satellites, TV satellites, communication satellites and there was a lot of wasted money.

Question → Why haven’t we seen the end of aging?
Answer- Donate and spend the money on a well though out strategy to attack the problem of aging.

So to accelerate the day when we have significant progress towards treating aging, then donate to SENS research

Question → Is there no human cloning?
Answer - I think it is technologically possible, but there are ethical restrictions and few compelling reasons to do it. They have cloned monkeys. Human cloning is delayed twinning.

Question → And no molecular nanotechnology yet?
Answer - Billions were spent on relabeled chemistry and buildings with signs on them Center for Nanotechnology at universities . Shockingly we have better research from chemistry and many buildings that are called centers for the study of nanotechnology.

Zyvex has made progress towards are more precise and controlled chemical vapor deposition.

There has been the first experiments funded to validate the computational chemistry of diamond mechanosynthesis.

Question → Are we really still waiting for strong AI?
Answer - There are not that many funded efforts with a good plan and goal to achieve strong AGI.

Question - Don’t you remember all those promises of decades past, that our awesome technologies soon would enable us to eliminate illness, to banish poverty, end aging, and control the weather?

Answer- the fulfillment of almost all technological predictions would not be addressing the social issues.

There has been a lot of poverty relieved in China, but the economic rise of China has also increased the income inequality.

You have to think through what social impacts would result from technological or economic change.

Accurate technological predictions requires more effort than most people (even Nobel scientists or economist) put into it. Also, it takes a lot of description to clarify a prediction to accurately describe what is and is not being predicted and the assumptions involved and the current situation and the lead up to it.

There has been progress against aging. Expected lifespan has been increasing. Most of the gain has been from reduced childhood illness and improvements to public health. There has been progress against childhood illness and preventable disease (the UN millenial goals). Most of the progress has not been the result of UN programs but from progress different countries have made economically and with infrastructure projects and with other efforts.


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I think we are having a land hurricane here in Minnesota. The tree in front of my daughter's other house (her mom's place) that was topped by a tornado the week after we bought it has lost a big dead branch, a bunch of firs at the junction of 10 and 35W are down, a colleague of my wife lost a fence, traffic lights have been knocked out on University in Blaine, Monica lost power in the cities last night, all sorts of things like that happening as we experience a steady drum of 35 mph winds with gusts reaching 80 now and then, but more commonly, about 55 mph.

The precip is horizontal, but it is moving so fast it is hard to tell if it is rain or snow, and truthfully, it seems to be both. But I've seen no accumulation here. Just the occasional car dusted with slush, obviously come from a different micro-climate.

But then there was this: Driving south on 35W, I spotted what I thought was a chunk of slush snowy icy stuff like that which accumulates under a car behind a wheel, about soft-ball size. That would require snow on the ground, and I don't think there is any in short driving distance. So I convinced myself that it was a Styrofoam cup and not a chunk of snow. Never mind that Styrofoam cups are no longer used and you no longer see them along the highway, at least around these parts.

Then, three miles down the road we saw it. The same exact thing ... slush icy snow-stuff like would fall off the bottom of a car, but larger. About as big as a medium-size dog, a bit bigger than a bushel basket, roughly the dimensions of an old CRT TV. In the middle of the road, people driving around it. If it was blue, I would have figured it to be something that dropped out of an airplane. I have no idea how to explain this.

Meanwhile, in the tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean, we have this:

No really well organized storms, but two blobs that look like pre-tropical storm features. Each one is tagged by the Hurricane Prediction Center as having a mere 10% chance of forming into a storm over then next 48 hours, but there is a reasonable chance that either or both will eventually do so.

Shary and Tomas. Those are the next two names on the list. So now, we have the question: Which of the two blobs will turn into a storm and get named first, the westerly one or the easterly one, and will either one or the other, both or neither even do so?

I'm guessing they both will be named storms, the westerly forming first.

Read the comments on this post...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

anonymous writes "Does lightning predict the intensity of a tropical storm? What role does dust from the Sahara play? Do hurricanes form from the large-scale environment around a tropical storm or from small-scale formations 100 kilometers from the center? A team from NASA, NOAA, and NSF plan to find out. Starting Saturday, the team will conduct the largest hurricane study every undertaken. Among other things, a better understanding of hurricanes has ramifications for weather prediction, building codes, insurance policies, and disaster planning." One recent study found that hurricane creation is affected by plankton in the ocean.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PHOTO CAPTION: An extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory shows Monday's solar activity on the sun. Watch a video explaining the filament and the flare that were ejected from the sun on Sunday.

Alan Boyle writes: The first wave of stormy weather from the sun hit Earth today, setting the stage for slightly brighter northern lights tonight - but a bigger light show is expected on Thursday, when the second wave is due to hit.

Both waves were set off on Sunday, when a solar flare and a whooshing magnetic filament erupted on the sun, as seen in a series of images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, based in Colorado, say those two events sent two distinct waves of electrically charged particles toward Earth.

The first wave, sparked by the flare, began sweeping over our planet's magnetosphere at about 1 p.m. ET today and peaked at 3:30 p.m., based on real-time satellite readings of the proton flux. The arrival was heralded by elevated readings from the Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, or ACE. "We can see it hitting the ACE satellite even as we speak," Doug Biesecker, a spokesman for the Space Weather Prediction Center, told me today.

Biesecker said the relatively low-level magnetic disturbance may have caused some power-grid fluctuations and some weirdness for high-accuracy navigation systems, but he didn't expect the event to have any impact for "the average person on the street."

So how about tonight's auroral displays?

"It bodes well for folks in Canada, at least," he told me. "The strength of this storm is such that it's unlikely that people in the U.S. will have much of a chance. Except Alaska. They always have a chance."

Observers in northern Europe and Asia could conceivably have an advantage because their peak observing hours (midnight to dawn) are closer to the peak hours for geomagnetic activity. And Biesecker acknowledged that auroral displays could be more widespread than he and his colleagues expect.

Even if the northern lights can't be seen from your locale, it's still worth checking out the night sky, particularly if you can get away from city lights. After sunset, you can check out the planetary triangle that's forming in western skies. After midnight, you might spot some shooting stars, part of the buildup for this month's Perseid meteor shower. Before sunrise, you could catch the International Space Station as it flies overhead.

The forecast for northern lights is better for Thursday, when space weather forecasters expect another wave of particles from the filament ejection to hit Earth's magnetic field. The second wave is projected to have more of an effect than the first one. "It's a case of priming the pump with the first one," Biesecker explained. "The second one can do a little bit more than it could on its own."

There's a good chance of seeing an aurora from Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the northern parts of Minnesota and North Dakota. In fact, folks across the northern tier of the United States, from Maine and upstate New York to Washington state, could be well-placed to see rippling waves of reddish or greenish light in the sky.

Aurora-seeking skywatchers in the Carolinas or Georgia are likely to be disappointed, but you never know. Space weather forecasters, like your typical TV meteorologists, don't always nail their predictions 100 percent. Keep an eye on the three-hour Kp index (5 or higher is good for seeing the northern lights, but not so good for satellites).

Update for 5:09 p.m. ET Aug. 3: Here's another take on the aurora-viewing outlook from Christine Pulliam at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"We'll have multiple opportunities for a display of the Northern Lights over the next two days. The latest word from the solar scientists is that the sun erupted not just once, but four times. All four coronal mass ejections are headed toward Earth.

"Space weather forecasts are even more challenging than regular weather forecasts. Dr. Leon Golub says a coronal mass ejection is like a hurricane: It's large and fuzzy, and doesn't always move at the same speed. Currently, the estimated arrival times are:

Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 3 a.m. EDT
Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 1 p.m. EDT (aurorae not visible in daylight)
Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 8 p.m. EDT
Thursday, Aug. 5 - 2 a.m. EDT

"Any one of these events may or may not generate an aurora. It depends on details like magnetic field orientation. If the magnetic field in the oncoming solar plasma is directed opposite Earth's magnetic field, the result could be spectacular aurorae. If the fields line up, the coronal mass ejection could slide past our planet with nary a ripple.

"Viewing tips: No fancy equipment is needed to see the Northern Lights. You should seek a viewing location with dark skies, as far from city lights as possible. Then, look to the north. An aurora appears as a ghostly sheen of light, colored green or red, that slowly shimmers and undulates over time. An aurora can disappear within minutes or last for hours."

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET Aug. 3: One of the puzzles surrounding the sun has to do with the extended period of low activity during the most recent 11-year solar cycle. Why was the sun quiet for so long? An analysis just now being published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests an answer: The sun's conveyor belt took an unusually meandering course, stretching out the solar cycle. The solar conveyor belt transports super-hot plasma around the sun, much as Earth's ocean conveyor belt transports water and heat around our planet. Usually the flow gets no closer to the poles than 60 degrees latitude, but during solar cycle 23, the flow went all the way to the poles. Computer simulations showed that a stretched-out conveyor belt could stretch out the cycle's duration.

• added by: EthicalVegan  
• 2 comments

The patent describes a technique that uses data generated by vibration sensors (known as MEMS accelerometers) within computer hard disk drives to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis of seismic events, such as earthquakes. The invention also uses sensor data to assess and provide early warnings for tsunamis, which can follow earthquakes that occur at the ocean floor. Another benefit of this invention is the ability to rapidly measure and analyze the damage zone of an earthquake to help prioritize emergency response needed following an earthquake.

While the physics of earthquakes and earthquake detection is a well understood science, the seismograph technology used in this process is distributed over a broad area around the world. Consequently, earthquake data is limited to a few geographical locations and little post-event analysis is available to aid emergency response. In addition, the seismographs do not provide fine-grained data about where emergency response is needed and cannot predict impending events, such as tsunamis.

This can change and improve the effectiveness and timeliness of post-event rescue efforts in cities and other locations where efficient emergency response is essential following a natural disaster. It also provides a means to accurately predict the location and timing of subsequent catastrophic events, which will aid evacuation efforts.

The invention accomplishes this prediction by collecting hard drive sensor data and transmitting it via high speed networking to a data processing center, which can analyze the data, classify the events, and enrich the data -- in real time. Through this analysis, it can be determined exactly when a seismic event started, how long a seismic event lasted, the intensity of a seismic event, the frequency of motion of a seismic event, direction of motion of a seismic event, etc. The information is then delivered to decision makers for action, including the emergency response representatives, such as police, firefighters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency or other service providers.

U.S. Patent #7,693,663 was issued to inventors Robert Friedlander and James Kraemer

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.

We aren't the only ones feeling the heat these days.  Today will mark the 19th day in a row with temperatures above average.  This past January through June was the warmest on record for combined global land and ocean temperature.

That is particularly bad news for parts of the southwestern United States.   NOAA' s Climate Prediction Center seasonal drought outlook is forecasting dry conditions to worsen in portions of Arizona and New Mexico.  The summer monsoon there has started off weak with little rainfall.  I just spent a week there last week and can attest to the dry conditions.  While we had a few sprinkles, the bulk of the rain in isolated showers dried up before reaching the surface.

www.facebook.com/TimMcGillWeatherGuy

http://twitter.com/WGNWeatherGuy

NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures

are Warmest on Record

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.

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 – June

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 61.1°F (16.2°C), which is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20^th century average of 59.9°F (15.5°C).

• The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20^th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record.
  • Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the globe, with the most prominent warmth in Peru, the central and eastern contiguous U.S., and eastern and western Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included Scandinavia, southern China and the northwestern contiguous United States.
  • According to Beijing Climate Center, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin had their warmest June since national records began in 1951. Meanwhile, Guizhou experienced its coolest June on record.
  • According to Spain’s meteorological office, the nationwide average temperature was 0.7°F (0.4°C) above normal, Spain's coolest June since 1997.
• The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20^th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Sea surface temperature continued to decrease across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during June 2010, consistent with the end of El Niño. According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, La Niña conditions are likely to develop during the northern hemisphere summer 2010.

April – June 2010 and Year-to-Date

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April-June 2010 was 1.26°F (0.70°C) above the 20^th century average—the warmest April-June period on record.
• For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 57.5°F (14.2°C) was the warmest January-June period. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20^th century average.

Polar Sea Ice and Precipitation Highlights

• Arctic sea ice covered an average of 4.2 million square miles (10.9 million square kilometers) during June. This is 10.6 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the lowest June extent since records began in 1979. This was also the 19^th consecutive June with below-average Arctic sea ice extent.
• Antarctic sea ice extent in June was above average, 8.3 percent above the 1979-2000 average—resulting in the largest June extent on record.
• China had near-average precipitation. Regionally, Guizhou, Fujian and Qinghai had above-average precipitation during June 2010, resulting in the second wettest June since national records began in 1951—according to Beijing Climate Center. Meanwhile, the province of Jiangsu had its driest June on record, while Shanxi had its second driest on record.
• According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the continent had its fourth-driest June on record.
• The first six months of 2010 were the driest since 1929 for the United Kingdom, according to theUK Met Office. The average rainfall during January-June 2010 was 14.3 inches (362.5 mm), just 3.4 inches (86.8 mm) above January-June 1929. The January-June long-term average is 20.1 inches (511.7 mm).

Scientists, researchers and leaders in government and industry use NOAA’s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world's climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. Visithttp://www.noaa.gov.

NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures

are Warmest on Record

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.

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 – June

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 61.1°F (16.2°C), which is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20^th century average of 59.9°F (15.5°C).

• The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20^th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record.
  • Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the globe, with the most prominent warmth in Peru, the central and eastern contiguous U.S., and eastern and western Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included Scandinavia, southern China and the northwestern contiguous United States.
  • According to Beijing Climate Center, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin had their warmest June since national records began in 1951. Meanwhile, Guizhou experienced its coolest June on record.
  • According to Spain’s meteorological office, the nationwide average temperature was 0.7°F (0.4°C) above normal, Spain's coolest June since 1997.
• The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20^th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Sea surface temperature continued to decrease across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during June 2010, consistent with the end of El Niño. According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, La Niña conditions are likely to develop during the northern hemisphere summer 2010.

April – June 2010 and Year-to-Date

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April-June 2010 was 1.26°F (0.70°C) above the 20^th century average—the warmest April-June period on record.
• For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 57.5°F (14.2°C) was the warmest January-June period. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20^th century average.

Polar Sea Ice and Precipitation Highlights

• Arctic sea ice covered an average of 4.2 million square miles (10.9 million square kilometers) during June. This is 10.6 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the lowest June extent since records began in 1979. This was also the 19^th consecutive June with below-average Arctic sea ice extent.
• Antarctic sea ice extent in June was above average, 8.3 percent above the 1979-2000 average—resulting in the largest June extent on record.
• China had near-average precipitation. Regionally, Guizhou, Fujian and Qinghai had above-average precipitation during June 2010, resulting in the second wettest June since national records began in 1951—according to Beijing Climate Center. Meanwhile, the province of Jiangsu had its driest June on record, while Shanxi had its second driest on record.
• According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the continent had its fourth-driest June on record.
• The first six months of 2010 were the driest since 1929 for the United Kingdom, according to theUK Met Office. The average rainfall during January-June 2010 was 14.3 inches (362.5 mm), just 3.4 inches (86.8 mm) above January-June 1929. The January-June long-term average is 20.1 inches (511.7 mm).

Scientists, researchers and leaders in government and industry use NOAA’s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world's climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. Visithttp://www.noaa.gov.

A computer simulation of the possible spread of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill over the course of a full year has been released.

Created by researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the animation is not a detailed specific prediction but rather, as they describe, “a scenario that could help guide research and mitigation efforts.”

“After one year, about 20% of the particles initially released at the Deepwater Horizon location have been transported through the Straits of Florida and into the open Atlantic,” explains Axel Timmermann from the International Pacific Research Center in SOEST.

Read more of this story »

by Seth Shulman.

Warren Washington literally wrote the book on climate modeling. Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, which he co-authored with Claire L. Parkinson in 2005, is the classic graduate-level text in the field. A former head of the American Meteorological Society and an adviser to every president—Republican and Democrat alike—since Jimmy Carter, Washington has devoted his life to creating increasingly precise and accurate computer models of Earth’s climate.

“What people need to understand is that these are not untested models scientists have dreamed up,” says Washington, now a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “They are based on actual meteorological data and known physics of the atmosphere and oceans. And we have spent many years refining the models by comparing them with observed data.”

In that climate modeling work, as in almost every facet of his life, Washington was a pioneer. As a boy he was fascinated by science, devouring biographies of Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver the way some kids read adventure stories. Despite his passion and aptitude for science, his high school guidance counselor steered him away from college. Washington went anyway, to Oregon State, eventually earning a Ph.D. in meteorology.

Washington’s perseverance was evident early on. When his high school science teacher couldn’t explain what made an egg yolk yellow, young Washington studied chicken diets until he finally traced the yolk’s color to the sulfur in corn and seeds.

That rare blend of initiative and inquisitiveness would serve him well in a field as complex, uncharted, and exacting as the one Washington eventually chose.

When Washington started out, climate modelers were using bulky mainframe computers to test models for weather prediction. They would enter several days’ worth of weather measurements into the large mainframes, then compare their predictions against the actual weather patterns they had observed a few days later. The room-sized computer Washington worked on, called the ALWAC, had to be painstakingly programmed using paper tape.

Since then, both computing power and the variables built into climate models have increased exponentially, but the basic technique remains the same: first Earth, its oceans, and atmosphere are divided into a grid of boxes. Into each box scientists enter real-world data on temperature, pressure, and other variables. These are fed into complex equations based on the physics of fluid dynamics, the chemistry of reactions, various biological processes, and many other factors. The myriad data points then interact with one another to simulate the movements of the atmosphere and oceans that create climate patterns.

In 1978, working with the U.S. Department of Energy, Washington was one of the first scientists to use computer models to study the effects of carbon dioxide concentrations on global temperatures. By that time the computer models of weather were becoming so accurate that Washington and others realized they could use them to project climatic conditions many years into the future. They could also explore not just changes in weather patterns, but larger-scale changes in climate. What they soon saw, with the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, says Washington, “was the threat of a dramatic warming trend.”

His current team at NCAR soon became one of the first to practice parallel computing, in which researchers use multiple computer processors simultaneously as a way to include more information about natural variables, such as the effect of sunspots and volcanic eruptions, and about the human impact on climate via greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and from the tiny atmospheric particles that scientists call aerosols.

Today’s supercomputers use hundreds of processors to handle the billions of computations involved in running the latest versions of climate models. The modeling field has expanded in other ways too. In the early days, recalls Washington, there were only a handful of groups making climate models, with five or six scientists in each group. Today more than 350 scientists might attend a meeting on some highly specialized aspect of the ever-evolving climate models, such as refining treatment of ocean processes or more accurately accounting for changes in soils, vegetation, and permafrost.

Washington stresses that today’s climate models are reliable. They have been subjected to so many tests and trials over such a long period of time that scientists have a high level of confidence in their ability to project how the climate is likely to change when it is subjected to a range of highly specific scenarios. One such test, says Washington, is the so-called twentieth-century reconstruction. Researchers start the computer model with data from 1850 and run it to the present. Only when the model is accurate enough to reproduce the actual climate features of the twentieth century will scientists use it to estimate possible future climate change.

“The most important thing is not just that we can reproduce twentieth-century changes—which we can,” says Washington. “It is that we can go back and rerun the calculations, changing just one thing at a time. In this way the model becomes useful not only for future projections but also for understanding what factors have the most influence on changes in the climate.”

What comes out most clearly, Washington says, is that the model simply cannot reproduce today’s temperature record when scientists remove the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. “To get the kinds of climatic conditions we have today, you need that increase in carbon dioxide. For anyone doubtful about the effect of human activity on global warming, that finding really is a ‘smoking gun.’”

Related Links:

A Salon debate on cap-and-trade and energy politics: day three

Evidence of climate change springs ahead with blooming wildflowers

Are butterflies the silent harbingers of global warming?

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center says there’s a 75 percent chance that hurricane season in the eastern Pacific Ocean will be below normal this year.

If new projections prove accurate, the oil now spilling in the Gulf of Mexico will be hitting East Coast beaches in the next few months. Based on computer models, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are predicting that ocean currents will carry BP crude around the tip of Florida, up the coast to North Carolina, and out into the open Atlantic. Unfortunately, says NCAR researcher Synte Peacock, "our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida." There's only one word for this, says Kate Sheppard in Mother Jones: "Horrifying." Indeed, says Brian Caulfield in Forbes. And on a more practical level: It's time to "rethink renting a beach house." Watch the computer simulation:

Pasadena CA (JPL) May 31, 2010 - Hurricanes, air quality and Arctic ecosystems are among the research areas to be investigated during the next five years by new NASA airborne science missions announced.

The five competitively-selected proposals, including one from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are the first investigations in the new Venture-class series of low-to-moderate-cost projects established last year.

The Earth Venture missions are part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program. The small, targeted science investigations complement NASA's larger research missions. In 2007, the National Research Council recommended that NASA undertake these types of regularly solicited, quick-turnaround projects.

This year's selections are all airborne investigations. Future Venture proposals may include small, dedicated spacecraft and instruments flown on other spacecraft.

"I'm thrilled to be able to welcome these new principal investigators into NASA's Earth Venture series," said Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "These missions are considered a 'tier 1' priority in the National Research Council's Earth Science decadal survey. With this selection, NASA moves ahead into this exciting type of scientific endeavor."

The missions will be funded during the next five years at a total cost of not more than $30 million each. The cost includes initial development and deployment through analysis of data. Approximately $10 million was provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act toward the maximum $150 million funding ceiling for the missions.

Six NASA centers, 22 educational institutions, nine U.S. or international government agencies and three industrial partners are involved in these missions. The five missions were selected from 35 proposals.

The selected missions are:

1. Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment. Principal Investigator Charles Miller, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The release and absorption of carbon from Arctic ecosystems and its response to climate change are not well known because of a lack of detailed measurements. This investigation will collect an integrated set of data that will provide unprecedented experimental insights into Arctic carbon cycling, especially the release of important greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

Instruments will be flown on a Twin Otter aircraft to produce the first simultaneous measurements of surface characteristics that control carbon emissions and key atmospheric gases.

2. Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface. Principal Investigator Mahta Moghaddam, University of Michigan

North American ecosystems are critical components of the global exchange of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and other gases within the atmosphere. To better understand the size of this exchange on a continental scale, this investigation addresses the uncertainties in existing estimates by measuring soil moisture in the root zone of representative regions of major North American ecosystems.

Investigators will use NASA's Gulfstream-III aircraft to fly synthetic aperture radar that can penetrate vegetation and soil to depths of several feet.

3. Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment. Principal Investigator Eric Jensen, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

Water vapor in the stratosphere has a large impact on Earth's climate, the ozone layer and how much solar energy Earth retains. To improve our understanding of the processes that control the flow of atmospheric gases into this region, investigators will launch four airborne campaigns with NASA's Global Hawk remotely piloted aerial systems. The flights will study chemical and physical processes at different times of year from bases in California, Guam, Hawaii and Australia.

4. Deriving Information on Surface Conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality. Principal Investigator James Crawford, NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Satellites can measure air quality factors like aerosols and ozone-producing gases in an entire column of atmosphere below the spacecraft, but distinguishing the concentrations at the level where people live is a challenge. This investigation will provide integrated data of airborne, surface and satellite observations, taken at the same time, to study air quality as it evolves throughout the day. NASA's B-200 and P-3B research aircraft will fly together to sample a column of the atmosphere over instrumented ground stations.

5. Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel. Principal Investigator Scott Braun, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The prediction of the intensity of hurricanes is not as reliable as predictions of the location of hurricane landfall, in large part because of our poor understanding of the processes involved in intensity change.

This investigation focuses on studying hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean basin using two NASA Global Hawks flying high above the storms for up to 30 hours. The Hawks will deploy from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during the 2012 to 2014 Atlantic hurricane seasons.

"These new investigations, in concert with NASA's Earth-observing satellite capabilities, will provide unique new data sets that identify and characterize important phenomena, detect changes in the Earth system and lead to improvements in computer modeling of the Earth system," said Jack Kaye, associate director for research of NASA's Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate.

Langley manages the Earth System Pathfinder program for the Science Mission Directorate. The missions in this program provide an innovative approach to address Earth science research with periodic windows of opportunity to accommodate new scientific priorities.

Download audio file (051920109.mp3)
Download MP3 The answer to today's Geo Quiz is the Loop Current, a warm ocean current that comes up from the Caribbean. There's concern that it may play a role in spreading the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Anchor Marco Werman finds out more from Eric Chassignet of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University.

by Joseph Romm

It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record.

The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

Most significantly, NASA’s March prediction has come true: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.”

Software engineer (and former machinist mate in the U.S. Navy) Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March—and then easily set in April.

Actually, NASA first made its prediction back in January 2009:

Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

Of course, there never was any global cooling—see must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira—“To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

In fact, the 12-month record we just beat was set in … 2007!

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of recent warming went right
where scientists had predicted— into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening”):

Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al.  2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.

Another 2009 article details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth.”

Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m),  measured in 108 Jm-2.

Still warming, after all these years! And just where you’d expect it. This study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend. And the surface temperature is even more variable.

NASA’s recent draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the
past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming
trend of 0.15-0.20 degrees C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same
amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate
near 0.16 degrees C/decade (0.29 degrees F/decade) during the same 30-year period”—
once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite
records (see NOAA discussion here).

For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite
records (UAH and RSS),
which appear more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
than the land records.

I asked NASA’s James Hansen last month about the apparent 12-month
record confirming his prediction, and he noted, “that conclusion is
sensitive to how the global mean is defined ... We will compare several
alternatives in an invited review paper for Reviews of Geophysics—it should be ready within a few weeks.”

That caveat noted, it is also worth pointing out that “there are no
permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on
Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The U.K.‘s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the
NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the
nearest land-based stations.” Thus it is almost certainly the
case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA
says, and especially more than the U.K.’s Hadley Center says (see Why
are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public? and Finally,
the truth about the Hadley/CRU data).

After the endless disinformation-based global cooling stories of the past few years, it’s time for the media to start do some serious fact-based global warming stories (unlike this piece of he-said, she-said journalistic crap from the Boston Globe).

Related Post: Arctic poised to see record low sea ice volume this year

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Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential ca

BP Plc last September tapped into a new oilfield called Tiber, estimated to hold at least 3 billion barrels of crude, or six months’ worth of U.S. consumption.

Discovered through seismic imaging and data crunched on a supercomputer, the field is almost six miles (9.6 kilometers) beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s floor, in a spot where the water is almost one mile deep, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek in its May 10 issue.

To access it, the British oil company and its drilling contractor, Transocean Ltd., sank the deepest oil well ever. The $365 million rig that accomplished this feat was called the Deepwater Horizon, a floating thicket of machinery the size of two football fields, which held a crew of 130 and cost more than $500,000 a day to rent from Transocean.

The Deepwater Horizon, as a drilling rig, didn’t hang around to pump Tiber’s crude. The self-propelled behemoth motored to the site of its next exploration.

Today, the Deepwater Horizon lies upside down at the bottom of the Gulf under one mile of seawater in a place called Mississippi Canyon Block 252. Eleven of its crew are presumed dead. Oil from the last well it drilled, a much shallower, less complex job than Tiber called Macondo, is spewing out of control from the seafloor, with about 3 million gallons released at last estimate. A swath of the Gulf about the size of Delaware is covered by an iridescent, rusty orange sheen.

Exxon Valdez

Should the heaviest portion of the spill come ashore, it may cause damage rivaling the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, despoiling the breeding grounds of species in the fragile coastal-buffer zone that provides hurricane protection.

Already, the oil is threatening some of the most productive and profitable shrimping and fishing grounds in the world, part of a Gulf industry that provides a quarter of the seafood in the U.S. A sheen of oil was confirmed on the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana by the Coast Guard.

Should efforts to seal the well go awry, they could cause even larger volumes of oil to spill. In some scenarios, the Gulf of Mexico loop current could even carry the oil around Florida and up the East Coast. The unfolding environmental disaster might yet become the worst in U.S. history.

The Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 at a moment when U.S. energy policy was pivoting in favor of offshore drilling. After two years of partisan debate triggered by the $4-a-gallon gasoline prices of 2008, President Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders dropped their opposition to expanded offshore drilling.

Offshore Drilling Expansion

Obama on March 31 proposed opening areas off the East Coast and in the eastern Gulf and Alaskan waters beginning in 2012, part of a bargain that administration officials hoped would propel energy and climate legislation designed to lead the country beyond petroleum, as BP’s slogan declared.

For the oil industry, the Gulf of Mexico had been one of the few bright spots in a picture of flattening global production. After several years of decline, the amount of oil pumped in the Gulf has been rising as rigs move into deeper waters.

The U.S. Energy Department predicted this year that by 2035, offshore oil production from the Lower 48 states would rise more than 80 percent to account for about 38 percent of U.S. output, up from 30 percent now.

Until now, Gulf oil production had been expanding, with serious spills rare. Catastrophic accidents had been relegated to history by such gear as “blowout preventers” designed to shut off wells when pressures get out of control.

Hydraulic Shears

These valves and shears were the last line of defense. The federal Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore oil and gas production and collects reports on spills as small as a single barrel, was so confident of the system that it exempted BP from filing an environmental-impact statement for the Macondo operation.

The MMS commissioned studies on creative ways to cope with massive well blowouts and never implemented them. It promulgated rules and allowed the oil industry to obey them on a voluntary basis. “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” Obama said on April 2. “They are technologically very advanced.”

The Deepwater Horizon crisis has shifted the political conversation from seeking opportunity to avoiding risk. The Obama Administration announced a 30-day safety review. Florida Governor Charles Crist, who recently left the Republican Party to run for the U.S. Senate as an independent, backed away from his support for offshore drilling, as did California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Earth Day Origin

“It could have as big an impact as Santa Barbara,” said Philip Verleger, an oil-industry expert, referring to the 1969 oil spill off the California coast that was the catalyst for the first Earth Day in 1970.

Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive officer, slid into a booth at Copeland’s, a restaurant on the main drag of Houma, a southern Louisiana town of strip malls and honky tonks. It was May 2, some 12 days since the crisis began. His company had lost $30 billion, or 16 percent, of market value, and Hayward, over dinner with a Bloomberg News reporter, was sweaty and haggard; he picked at his ravioli and only sipped his beer.

Despite his weariness, the 52-year-old retained the determination that won him the top job over a pack of rivals at the London-based oil company. He repeated a phrase he says was coined by Winston Churchill: “When you are going through hell, keep going.”

Future in Doubt

He was succinct about the future of offshore drilling. “It all depends on how successful we are with our response,” he said. “If we deal with the situation in a way that minimizes the environmental impact, it will cause some debate. If the environmental impact is serious, as a consequence there won’t be much, if any, extension of offshore drilling.”

Hayward heard about the blowout at breakfast in London on April 21, about four hours after it began. He said his first reaction was “unprintable.” For the first few days, he kept a low profile. BP judged that Transocean, the owner of the drill rig, should take the lead. Later Hayward deferred to U.S. government agencies such as the Coast Guard.

In early May, BP changed strategies and put Hayward in front of the cameras. The company hired Marine Spill Response to deploy four 210-foot oil-skimming ships and two planes to spray dispersants on the oil. As the crisis mounted, Hayward tried everything at once.

Superheated Fluids

Even at a cost of $7 million a day, none of it stopped the leak. A mile below the surface, things can go to hell in an instant. The pressures and temperatures at work are otherworldly. Imagine an elephant sitting on your chest, and you get a sense of the weight of rock and water pressing down on the reservoir of oil and gas miles below the surface.

To keep the superheated, supercompressed fluids from shooting upward before the well is finished, drillers fill the hole with a heavy, synthetic “mud.” Then, to finish the well, they inject a high-tech cement. Each well requires its own unique formulation of mud and cement.

The cement is supposed to go down the middle of the drill pipe, a seven-inch tube surrounded by a larger pipe called the casing. When it reaches the bottom of the drill pipe, it oozes up into the gap between the pipe and its casing before drying in place, forming an impenetrable seal.

Cement Seal

The Deepwater Horizon accident occurred at the final stage of the job, as the rig crew was preparing to put a temporary seal on the well and move on to another site. The exact circumstances aren’t likely to be known for months, though it’s clear that pressurized natural gas was able to infiltrate upward, meaning the seal was imperfect. A 2007 MMS study found that cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 Gulf of Mexico blowouts over 14 years. The pressure surge from a gas bubble has a nickname: the kick.

Although there are procedures for recementing, those take time and money. Each extra day of leasing the drilling rig costs about $500,000. Halliburton Co. was in charge of cementing, under BP’s direction. Robert MacKenzie, a former cementing engineer who is now a securities analyst for FBR Capital Markets Corp., said he wants to know whether BP ordered a so-called cement bond-log test to evaluate the cementing. Such a test would have determined whether a remedial cement job was necessary. BP declined to comment.

Blowout Preventer

The last line of defense in a subsea well is the blowout preventer, which uses valves to close off the flow of oil and gas when pressures get too high. If the regular valves fail, the doomsday feature of the blowout preventer is a series of shear rams, giant pairs of hydraulically powered scissors that are supposed to close the opening by slicing through all the pipes.

The pressure the shear ram can exert is greater than the pressure on the struts of a landing, fully loaded Boeing 747 as the rear wheels hit the runway, said Satish Nagarajaiah, a Rice University professor of mechanical and civil engineering. The Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer had five hydraulic rams. For reasons that are still unknown, they didn’t do the job.

The blowout preventer, made by Houston-based Cameron International Corp., failed to close the flow of oil and gas. The gas came up the pipe to the rig and then, heavier than air, settled in low spots. Survivors later said they heard a thump, then a hissing.

The rig started to shake and explosions began at about 10 p.m. on April 20, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air. To Captain Michael Roberts, a commander of a supply vessel that arrived just a few hours later, “it appeared as if the sun was coming over the horizon,” he told CNN.

Leaks in Controls

Almost two weeks after the accident, rescue crews had not managed to get the blowout preventer working. “We have found that there are some leaks on the hydraulic controls” of the blowout preventer, Bob Fryar, senior vice-president of BP’s exploration and production operations in Angola, in southwestern Africa, told the Houston Chronicle.

Hayward said he was mystified that the blowout preventer failed. The last-ditch shear ram is rarely tested under real conditions because of the destruction it causes. In a 2002 laboratory test for the MMS, researchers found that three of six shear rams failed. Seven other makers declined to be tested.

Within a day of the accident, BP had sent as many as eight underwater robots to the scene. Hayward and other company executives watched from a special room inside the company’s suburban Houston complex as the robots, which look like sleds and are painted yellow to be visible at ocean depths, did their work.

Robots, Joysticks

Tethered to a mother ship by wire, they fed video images to their pilots, who use joysticks to move the vehicles and manipulate their tool arms. BP executives hoped the robots could pull external levers and get the blowout preventer to snap shut. A BP spokesman said the company no longer expects the robots to get the device working.

That doesn’t mean they are being put back in their boxes. Robots are the only eyes and ears that BP and other responders have below the sea. The company uses them constantly to monitor the wellhead and mile-long length of pipe that has fallen to the bottom of the Gulf. BP and its contractors are now deploying the robots in a new attempt to shut down the undersea leaks.

The company is constructing a four-story steel funnel that it will try to lower over the most serious of the three leaks. Once the device is in place, a cap attached to a pipe will be placed on top. The hope is that the captured oil, which is lighter than water, will rise up the pipe to a special surface vessel where it can be separated from water and disposed.

One Leak Stopped

BP estimates that if successful, the funnel could divert 85 percent of the oil flow. On May 5, the company succeeded in stopping the smallest of three leaks, a dribble from an oil- filled section of pipe that had broken off.

As the spill spread, BP assembled at least nine airplanes and hundreds of ships for cleanup. Its logistics base for the Gulf of Mexico, in Houma, has been turned into a command center where uniformed U.S. Coast Guard personnel mingle with specialists from BP and other oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp.

“There is no expense spared,” says Jacqueline Michel, president of Research Planning, an oil-spill consulting firm based in Columbia, South Carolina. Because oil is still flowing, a cleanup exercise may be in vain and even damaging to the most fragile areas, because it may have to be repeated.

Amoco, Arco

Before the accident, Hayward seemed to have BP on the right track after succeeding his mentor John Browne, who resigned amid personal scandal in 2007. Browne did the megadeals, a $62 billion merger and acquisition of Amoco in 1998 and a $32 billion deal with Arco in 2000, that propelled BP into the supermajor class.

Yet the company during his tenure was accident-prone in the U.S., its most important operating area. In 2005, a blast at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, killed 15 people and injured more than 180. In 2006, oil leaking from a pipeline forced BP to shut part of its key Prudhoe Bay oilfield in Alaska.

Hayward has improved BP’s safety record, accelerated much- delayed projects, and backed away from some of Browne’s investments in alternative energy that Hayward deemed uncommercial. Profit more than doubled to $5.6 billion for the quarter ending March 31.

BP has staked its future on aggressive projects in the deepwater Gulf.

“We don’t do simple things,” said Andy Inglis, the company’s exploration and production chief, in an interview last summer. “We are prepared to work on the frontier and manage the risks.”

Thunder Horse

Using seismic-imaging techniques, BP made big discoveries including Thunder Horse, now the second-largest producer in the U.S. at about 300,000 barrels per day. Last September’s Tiber discovery was one of the world’s most important for the year.

The Macondo prospect, where the accident occurred, was a much simpler job than Tiber. The well was only half as deep. Hayward insisted the accident was the fault of the drilling company, Transocean, not BP.

“It is not our rig, not our equipment, not our systems,” he told the BBC on May 3. “There may be a need to do more oversight of drilling equipment,” he said at dinner on May 2.

Inquests into the Deepwater Horizon disaster may find that complacency played a role. The four-story-tall steel funnel that BP fabricated in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, and plans to lower over the largest of the three leaks, was not expected to be operational until three weeks after the accident. Shouldn’t the industry already have several such chambers on standby in offshore drilling regions?

‘Steel Sombrero’

This isn’t exactly a fresh idea: In 1979, Brown & Root lowered a 40-foot-wide “steel sombrero” over the blowing Ixtoc I well in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, which spilled 35 million barrels before the sombrero helped stanch the flow.

Over the years, researchers funded by the MMS have proposed a variety of ideas for coping with well blowouts; few have gotten past the drawing board.

In 1985, Brown & Root recommended that an oil tanker be retrofitted to collect huge volumes of oil and seawater funneled from a blown well and to pump the liquid into separating tanks. Estimated cost: $59 million.

Without commenting on the merits of that particular idea, industry consultant Robert Peterson said it’s common for the industry to neglect promising innovations.

Lab to Application

“The transfer of the technology from the lab to a commercial application is where you see the highest mortality rate in terms of good ideas,” said Peterson, a Houston-based oil and gas expert at Charles River Associates. A spokesman for the Minerals Management Service did not respond to questions about past research.

The MMS’s own statisticians have never flagged the possibility of a serious spill. By design, the department’s Oil- Spill Risk Analysis model focuses on the likely frequency of spills rather than how big one might get. Projecting from the history of small spills over the past several decades, the MMS in 2007 predicted five spills of 10,000 barrels or more per 100 billion barrels of oil produced.

Ten thousand barrels is about what the Macondo well is thought to be leaking every two days.

The routine spills that the MMS used to calibrate its prediction model “have no bearing on dealing with major spills, predicting their frequency, or getting ready for them,” said Zvi Ziegler, a mathematician at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. The MMS press office did not return calls asking about the agency’s statistical methodology.

MMS Problems

Critics of the MMS have called it a captive of the companies it regulates. Last September, the Interior Department shut down an oil-royalty program run by the agency after audits found that the MMS was undercollecting millions of dollars worth of royalties.

The Interior Department inspector general’s office found that several MMS officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

In the latest incident, BP was one of three finalists for the agency’s annual safety award for major offshore producers. The ceremony, scheduled for May 3 at a conference in Houston, has been postponed.

In a letter to regulators last September, BP’s Richard Morrison, the company’s vice-president of Gulf of Mexico production, wrote to oppose new rules meant to reduce the risk of injuries and spills, saying that voluntary programs “have been and continue to be very successful.”

Atlantis Whistleblower

The biggest question now is unanswerable: whether the Macondo blowout was a fluke in an otherwise safe system or an indication of more trouble to come.

Earlier this year, 19 members of Congress wrote to the MMS asking for its response to accusations by an anonymous former contractor that BP did not complete crucial engineering drawings and other paperwork for subsea components of its Atlantis project, which began producing oil in 2007. The ex-contractor supplied what he claimed were internal BP e-mails expressing concern about the incomplete documentation.

In one such e-mail made public by the self-proclaimed whistleblower, a BP executive on the Atlantis team named Barry C. Duff writes that the incomplete documentation “could lead to catastrophic Operator errors.” Food & Water Watch, the organization that publicized the accusations, has refused to release the whistleblower’s name to the news media at the person’s request.

‘Too Risky’

An MMS spokesman declined to comment on the allegations. In a Jan. 15 letter to the House subcommittee on energy and minerals, BP did not dispute the authenticity of Duff’s e-mail but denied that it had mismanaged records or jeopardized the project.

Some of the industry’s most reliable supporters have been taken aback by the Macondo spill. “This is like a nuclear plant going out of line; it is too risky for the environment,” said Nansen Saleri, a former chief of reservoir management at Saudi Aramco. “This should be a lesson to learn and improve; offshore resources are too important to be written off.”

So far, President Obama has not backed off his proposal to expand offshore drilling. Aides say the administration is using the 30-day safety review to devise rules that could make offshore drilling safer and, perhaps, rescue his compromise of more drilling along with more efforts to boost clean energy and combat global warming.

Regardless, the crisis is likely to further splinter Congress. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey, is leading a drive to increase the industry’s liability for economic damages, which is currently capped at $75 million per incident.

As for BP’s Hayward, he will need both savvy and luck to avoid having this incident define his tenure, just as the Texas City refinery explosion defined his predecessor’s. Noting that he has spent his first three years as CEO restoring BP’s fortunes, Hayward said: “My task for the next three years is to put this event behind us.”

The Pacific Ocean warming phenomenon known as El Nino that helps retard development of Atlantic hurricanes will disappear by June, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center forecast said today.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Earth's oceans and atmosphere are engaged in a complex dance, continually exchanging heat and moisture. Ocean conditions directly influence the conditions of the atmosphere. To predict our weather, forecasters need the best information they can get about the state of affairs in the sea. That's where the Short-term Prediction Research and Transition, or SPoRT, project at the Marshall Space Flight Center steps in. The SPoRT team uses NASA Earth observation satellite sensors to provide ocean temperature updates to the National Weather Service four times daily. The SPoRT scientists recently enhanced their ability to detect changes in sea surface temperatures -- a variable that greatly affects weather in coastal regions -- and the public will benefit.

This weekend the president kicks back in the Blue Ridge Mountains for his 33rd golf outing since taking office. Dems battle over whether to reform Wall Street or follow Chris Dodd and the GOP. We celebrate the first week of our nutty newsletter at the Montana Society's 6th Annual Testicle Festival. This is HUFFPOST HILL for April 23RD, 2010:

BREAKING

JUST IN: BIDEN PREDICTS MORE JOB GROWTH - VPOTUS pool from Pittsburgh, by Tribune-Review's Mike Wereschagin: "All in all we're going to be creating somewhere between 100 and 200,000 jobs next month, I predict," Biden said, adding that he's "got in trouble" for a job growth prediction in March. "Even some in the White House said, 'hey, don't get ahead of yourself.' Well I'm here to tell you some time in the next couple of months we're going to be creating between 250,000 jobs a month and 500,000 jobs a month. Because I'm telling you something, folks. We caught a lot of bad breaks on the way down. We're going to catch a few good breaks because of good planning on the way up."

Road show: Biden and TIM GEITHNER hosting Middle Class Task Force meeting next Tuesday in Milwaukee.

ARIZONA GOVERNOR SIGNS IMMIGRATION LAW - Arizona Republic lede: "Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer today signed into law an immigration bill that gives the state toughest law in the nation, making it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requiring local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Brewer said she signed the bill in response to 'the crisis the federal government has refused to fix.' Hispanic leaders addressing the hundreds of protesters at the Capitol immediately vowed to wage a legal fight." http://bit.ly/cRy9Mp

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon: 'This is clearly unconstitutional' http://bit.ly/aN0jPJ

Rev. Jim Wallis: churches won't comply - "The law signed today by Arizona Gov. Brewer is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation... This law will make it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona, and will force us to disobey Jesus and his gospel. We will not comply."

Loretta Sanchez reacts tonight on Keith Olbermann, Bill Richardson weighs in with Rachel Maddow.

REFORM ENDGAME: WHAT THE TWO SIDES WILL FIGHT FOR THIS WEEKEND - While Obama vaycays in Asheville, Senate Dems fight over their Wall Street game plan. The caucus' progressive wing (which includes overnight populist hero Blanche Lincoln) will push for a bill with more chutzpah while Chris Dodd and White House senior staff seek to reconcile with the GOP . The heftier proposal contains tougher regulation of derivatives, consumer protection provisions and a comprehensive plan for failed megabanks -- or breaking them up entirely. The Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition, a coalition of businesses that want real derivatives reform, sent Reid a letter Friday afternoon, provided to HuffPost Hill, calling on him to include Lincoln's language in the Dodd bill.

Dodd and Co. want to strike a deal with Banking's Ranking Richard Shelby that would weaken the aforementioned proposals. Rumors were circulating of Democrats threatening to oppose a vote on Monday to proceed to debate if the bill is weakened in a bipartisan deal, but HuffPost Hill found no such Dems willing to go on the record. Lincoln, for her part, is fighting to get her tough derivatives language into the bill Dodd will bring to the floor, battling it out in a contentious meeting Thursday, Roll Call's Emily Pierce reports. http://bit.ly/cKsd03

Bob Kuttner hearing about Senate Dem strife: "On Thursday, there was an uncharacteristically fractious meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus. On one side, leading progressives such as Maria Cantwell, Ted Kaufman, Dick Durbin, Byron Dorgan, and Jeff Merkley, argued that this was a moment to put forward floor amendments that would both strengthen the bill and force Republicans to take difficult votes either backing reforms or identifying themselves with Wall Street." http://huff.to/cbGh8v

The aggressive tact would allow for a vote Monday that would force the GOP into a seemingly pro-Wall St. crouch. It would be a major PR victory if the Dems were to pull it off -- and would effect serious reform, to boot. Dodd and the White House are concerned that the Dems won't be able to muster 50 votes in such a scenario. Despite his staff's support for the safer route, it's unclear whether the President will weigh in on either side.

FLOOR VOTE ON FED AUDIT AHEAD Bernie Sanders will make sure the Senate is on record on whether the Fed can continue to operate in secrecy. http://huff.to/c2yf3V

LATE-BREAKING: SEC IG WILL PROBE TIMING OF GOLDMAN FILING - Rep. Darrell Issa's office is giddy. From a release: Inspector General (IG) David Kotz announced today that at the request of...Issa, he would initiate an investigation examining the SEC's decision to move forward with action against Goldman Sachs. 'I have received the letter and do intend to conduct an investigation at the request of Congressman Issa," Kotz said while appearing today on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto. "We need to understand what led to the decision to announce or bring the case on that day. See if there was any undue influence involved and so we'll look very carefully to investigate that and see what we determine.'"

AXELROD GETS PERSONAL - Ax spoke last night to the National Jewish Democratic Council after he accepted the An excerpt: "Two people who aren't here in person tonight, but I know are here in spirit are my dad and my grandfather -- both immigrants from the pogroms, though from different shtetls in Eastern Europe. They fled persecution and violence for the freedom to practice their faith, and live a better life, and they found it in America. They passed on to me a great sense of appreciation for the freedom and boundless opportunity of the United States. (My grandfather worked as a butcher to put himself through dental school. Unfortunately for me and his other patients, he carried the talents of his old profession to the new. But that's another story. Mostly what he lived for were the daily minions and Shabbat services at the shul.) So my dad and grandfather would have been proud tonight as Jews, as Americans, but also as dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, who saw in the progressive values of our party that same spirit of Tikkun Olam - that obligation to look beyond our selves to make a better world. ... Once again I'm reminded of my grandfather. Although this time I hear his voice in my head, yelling at me, 'Duvid! Don't talk too long!'"

UNDER THE RADAR - Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin: 'Obama team works to head off new mideast war amid confusion about Syrian intentions' http://bit.ly/a5VoHR

MAYOR DALEY COMMENTS ON RAHM - "Sure, everybody would like to be mayor. This is a great city... It's not stepping on my toes. Rahm's a good friend of mine." http://huff.to/aUo06z

DEFICIT HAWK WOODSTOCK NEXT WEEK - It's like SXSW but with Brooks Brothers. America's top accountants and finance nerds will convene next Wednesday to discuss balancing the nation's checkbook. President Clinton, OMB Dir. Peter Orszag, CAP CEO John Podesta, Sen. Judd Gregg, Rep. Paul Ryan, CBPP Dir. Robert Greenstein, fmr Treasury Sec. Robert Rubin, EPI President Lawrence Mishel, and fmr Federal Reserve Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan.

BIDEN'S EUROTRIP - Vice President Biden will head to Brussels and Madrid early next month, will deliver what the WH calls a "major address" to the European Parliament. He'll also meet with Spain's King Juan Carlos and President Zapatero. No word yet on awkward goth photo-ops. http://huff.to/4cD5x1

Weekend caption contest: take a gander at this hyper uncomfortable picture of Euro-bound VP Biden huff.to/ddKjB1 and send us your wittiest caption. Entries to eliot@huffingtonpost.com or tweet @HuffPostHill #captioncontest

NY MAG NEXT WEEK - Cover story: SARAH PALIN INC: "Why would Sarah Palin want to be president of this country in 2012? She's already president of right wing America, a job that's paid her $14 million in just ten months." Also John Heilemann on THE POWER GRID: THE PRESIDENT AND THE PERSUADER: "Obama doesn't need a progressive on the court, he needs someone who can move it to the left."

ON THE TUBE - TONIGHT: Scott Garrett and Chris Van Hollen debate regulatory reform on Hardball.

Sunday Bloody Sunday: Dodd and Shelby square off on financial overhaul on Meet the Press. White House economist Austan Goolsbee, Sens. Sherrod Brown and Bob Corker talk Wall Street on This Week. Larry Summers is on Face the Nation. Mitch McConnell on Fox News Sunday.

THE WAPO FAMILY GROWS Felicitations are in order for two of DC's rising star journos. The Hill's Aaron Blake and National Journal's Felicia Sonmez who are moving to the Post to be Chris Cillizza's blog flunkies.

VACATION PICS - The Obamas arrived in North Carolina this afternoon and promptly barbecued. http://huff.to/coNG74

HANK JOHNSON GUAM WATCH - It has been 29 days since the Georgia congressman asked whether Guam would sink into the Pacific Ocean and we are happy to report that the tiny U.S. territory ***HAS NOT CAPSIZED***. GUAM NOT LOST...FOR NOW.

WANNA WORK FOR TPM? - Our new media counterparts will be seeking a Muckracker for their NYC headquarters: http://bit.ly/cpBmEX

UTAH TO EXECUTE MAN BY FIRING SQUAD - The cruelest thing to come out of Utah since the most recent season of "Big Love." A condemned man in the Beehive state has requested that he be executed by a firing squad. His wish will be granted, though his victim was a strong opponent of the death penalty, his friends say. http://huff.to/drOAOJ

FUNDRAISING POWERHAUS Ohio Republican Steve Chabot wants his seat back from Democrat Steve Driehaus, who booted him in 2008 with only $1.4 million to the incumbent's $2.4 million. Driehaus plans to have duckets on hand this time and has already raised more than a million, graced as he is with a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The Sunlight Foundation notes that Driehaus is eating lots of meals with lobbyists to ensure a safer path to a second term, including a breakfast at Bistro Bis on Wednesday. http://bit.ly/cJ4a61

HuffPost once tried to attend a Driehaus breakfast. #fail http://huff.to/EuXBZ

ANOTHER AMAZING READ FROM DELANEY The Ballad Of Francis Timothy Coleman
http://huff.to/9gx1y0

TOMORROW'S FRONT-PAGE TODAY - Financial Times tops 'Moody's admits failure over crisis' by Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Kevin Sieff.

SCOOP - Mike Allen NOT WORKING. Mikey's "off the grid," he informs us...via email.

COMFORT FOOD

- Apparently a Double Down isn't the worst thing you can put in your system. http://bit.ly/aOJUtH

- The Yankees pulled an around-the-horn triple play last night. http://bit.ly/ag2ISW

- The first YouTube video EVER, uploaded five years ago today. http://huff.to/bzNP0t

- We're not entirely sure why a college baseball game turned into an impromptu dance party and live-action Shake Weight commercial...but it did. http://bit.ly/9uhWz7

- The bodybuilders of Afghanistan. http://bit.ly/9KMWBo

- Ben Roethlisberger dumped by ZOO. http://huff.to/9UDSUi

- The stupidest pet products ever/best pet sex toys ever. http://huff.to/cpxnmT

- Someone get this hero pet a sex toy. Meet Schnautzie. http://bit.ly/9Xbjo2

TWITTERAMA

kevincmurphy: #ff 3.0: @HuffPostHill for a good round-up of daily DC/congressional goings-on, without the usual mind-numbing Politico-style wankery. http://bit.ly/9DrNJZ

dnewhauser: Carpenters picketing Tri-City Drywall at 901 K St: "What do we want?" "Money!" Don't we all... Slogan could use some work. http://bit.ly/9HIGPK

tylercowen: "I'm now convinced that "Epistemic Closure" would be a great name for a right-wing rock band." http://bit.ly/cfDzVw

jdickerson: Well now the SEC action against Ron Jermy makes sense. http://bit.ly/dwgyRU

ON TAP

TONIGHT:

8:00 pm - 11:00 pm: [Gay] Comedy Show at TOWN. Shawn Hollenbach hosts the laugh romp. Featuring Adam Lehman, Leah Dubie, Freddi Vernell and Erin Jackson. A meager $10 gets you three hours of comedy [TOWN, 2009 8th St NW].

9:45 pm: Jennifer Coolidge, best known as Stifler's mom and the boozy floozy from almost every Christopher Guest movie will be at Arlington Drafthouse doing a stand up bit [Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, 2903 Columbia Pike, Arlington].

SATURDAY:

3:00 pm: A suggested donation will get you access to the Sweetlife Festival benefiting DC's Farm-To-School Network. Hot Chip, U.S. Royalty, The Love Language will be performing [Sweetgreen Dupont parking lot].

10:00 pm: We'll let them do the talking: "The Wasabassco Traveling Burlesque Revue and Medicine Show returns to D.C. and The Palace of Wonders! Anita Cookie, GiGi La Femme, Jonny Porkpie, Nasty Canasta, and Doc Wasabassco return to entice you with near-nudity, sultry shenanigans, generous jackassery and the most delicious wasabi hot pepper sauce in the world!" [The Palace of Wonders, 1210 H ST NE].

7:00 pm - 10:00 pm: Got a hankering for bull testicles? Of course you do! Make an appearance at the Montana State Society's 6th Annual Testicle Festival which celebrates the state's famed Rocky Mountain Oysters. $20 entrance fee gets you all the bull testicles and beer you can fit in your stomach [The Scottish Rite, 2800 16th Street NW].

SPECIAL MONDAY MORNING ACTIVITIES EDITION:

10:00 am: Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) takes a break from stemming the tide of liberal urban elitism and hosts a spa fundraiser at the W Hotel [The W Hotel, 515 15th Street NW].

10:00 am: Are cucumber facial masks not your thing? How about shooting crap out of the sky? If you've got $500 and a deep-seeded insecurity about your manhood we suggest you join John Culberson (R-Texas) for a skeet shoot and BBQ luncheon [Prince George's County Trap & Skeet Center, 10400 Good Luck Road, Glen Dale].

Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com), Ryan Grim (ryan@huffingtonpost.com) or Nico Pitney (nico@huffingtonpost.com). Follow us on Twitter @HuffPostHill (twitter.com/HuffPostHill). Sign up here: http://huff.to/an2k2e

ITT Corporation announced today two of its weather sensors were successfully launched into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. ITT's Geospatial Systems team in Fort Wayne, Ind. designed and built the imager and sounder instruments flying on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-P (GOES-P). ITT has built the imagers and sounders for all NOAA geostationary satellites since 1990.

"We are extremely proud of the work of our people and the amazing quality of these instruments. We recognize the trust the nation has put in us and appreciate the fact that our imagers and sounders continue to be an integral part of our nation's weather forecast ability, especially for severe weather," said Rob Mitrevski, vice president, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance programs at ITT Geospatial Systems.

GOES-P is the last of the current generation of weather and environmental satellites built for NOAA in cooperation with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. After reaching geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the United States, GOES-P will undergo six months of extensive post-launch testing prior to being parked on-orbit and ready to be activated when the next GOES satellite needs to be replaced.

In addition to producing the now-familiar weather pictures seen daily on U.S. newscasts, GOES satellites provide early warnings of severe weather conditions like tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes. The satellites provide meteorologists with nearly continuous images as well as temperature and moisture data, enabling more accurate weather forecasts. GOES data are also used for climate/weather prediction models, ocean temperature charting, ice, snow and glacier mapping, land temperature measurement and monitoring agricultural crop conditions.

ITT has been designing and building space-borne meteorological instruments for nearly 50 years and is currently working with NOAA and NASA to build GOES-R. This next-generation environmental satellite will include the most advanced meteorological imaging instrument ever built for operational weather forecasting, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI).

ABI will monitor three times the number of atmospheric conditions currently measured and produce images that can discern objects as small as one-half kilometer in size. ABI is also much faster; updating data every 30 seconds versus the current rate of 7.5 minutes. At that speed, ABI can create a full-earth image in five minutes versus 30 minutes for the current imagers. ABI also will zoom in and track a single storm while simultaneously collecting continent-wide data and imagery. All of these improvements add up to faster and more accurate forecasts, improved hazardous weather tracking and an increased capability to study and monitor climate change.

Richard Heinberg: Life after growth - What if the economy doesn't recover?

In late 2009 and early 2010, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get "back to normal." But here's a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history's timeline?

It's an uncomfortable idea, but one that cannot be ignored: The "normal" late-20th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated.

That "normal" is gone. One way or another, a "new normal" will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters?

An Ominous Drilling Sign for the Truth

The Interior Department under Barack Obama offered for sale more acres of dry-land drilling on public lands than the Bush Administration had at the same point in 2008.

An economy in a state of rigor mortis doesn’t need oil to lubricate an engine that blew up on October 29, 2008, and our way of life won’t come back if the oil industry creates a handful of jobs or we reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Oil falls toward $80 after 2-day jump

A stronger dollar pushed oil prices down toward $80 a barrel Thursday after a two-day jump fueled by growing investor optimism that global crude demand is recovering.

By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark crude for April delivery was down 38 cents to $80.49 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract climbed $1.19 to settle at $80.87 on Wednesday after rising 98 cents on Tuesday.

Terrorist Group Planning Malacca Oil-Tanker Attacks

(Bloomberg) -- A terror alert from the Singapore navy to oil tankers in the Malacca Strait, a shipping lane that’s almost six times busier than the Suez Canal, may be linked to regional groups associated with al-Qaeda.

Singapore’s navy has “received indication” that a terrorist group is planning attacks on oil tankers in the Malacca Strait, according to an advisory today from its Information Fusion Centre.

“The warning should be taken seriously,” Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the Singapore-based International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, said in an interview. “There are terrorist groups in the region that have the intent to carry out terrorist attacks and some of these groups have relationships with al-Qaeda.”

FACTBOX - Malacca Strait is a strategic 'chokepoint'

REUTERS - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia said on Thursday they are stepping up security in the Strait of Malacca, a key shipping lane for world trade, following warnings of possible attacks on oil tankers in the area.

Here is some key information about the strait.

Nigeria rebel faction says attacks Agip oil facility

ABUJA (Reuters) - A militant faction in Nigeria's restive Niger Delta said on Thursday it had blown up an oil manifold operated by Italy's Agip in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

China, Russia Agree on Gas Supply Pricing Formula

(Bloomberg) -- China reached an initial agreement with Russia on the pricing formula for the supply of natural gas to the world’s second-biggest energy-consuming country.

Pricing was the “most difficult part” of the negotiations, Zhang Guobao, the head of China’s National Energy Administration, told reporters after a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the country’s legislature. Prices of Russian gas sold to China will be linked to oil prices under a formula, Zhang said, without elaborating.

Norway 2010 spending outlook cut

Norway’s national statistic agency today cut its oil and gas investment forecast for 2010 to Nkr135.6 billion ($23 billion), down Nkr3 billion from its forecast in the last quarter of 2009.

Iraq Opening to BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell for First Time Since 1972

(Bloomberg) -- BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one.

Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored.

Reliance Said to Have No Plans to Raise Lyondell Bid

(Bloomberg) -- Reliance Industries Ltd. has no plans to increase its bid for bankrupt chemicals maker LyondellBasell Industries AF following the rejection of its $14.5 billion offer, two people briefed on the matter said.

Market conditions didn’t justify raising the offer further, the people said yesterday, declining to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media. Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, may be prompted to spend Reliance’s $3.5 billion of cash elsewhere, analyst Victor Shum said.

Shell Aims for ‘New Nigeria’ as Qatari Plant Starts

(Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc spent $19 billion to build the world’s largest gas-to-liquids project, triple the original estimate. Now, it’s pay-off time and the plant may generate $6 billion a year for the company and Qatar.

China all at sea over Japan island row

Japan's Okinotori Island, which has a Tokyo postal address even though it lies roughly 1,770 kilometers south of the capital and it is actually a pair of tiny islets, has become a bone of contention for China.

Among other things, China refuses to grant it island status, and refers to it instead as an atoll, reef or simply a rock. By doing so, China hopes to throttle back Japan's plan to create an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) there. The dispute over Okinotori, which Japan calls Okinotorishima, persists because it involves strategic concerns and rights to undersea resources over an area that is roughly equivalent to the entire land mass of the four main Japanese islands.

US, EU, urge Syria to drop nuclear secrecy

VIENNA -- The U.S. and the European Union are urging Syria to stop stonewalling attempts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate its nuclear activities.

Clinton Fails to Win Brazilian Support for UN Sanctions on Iran

(Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Brazil failed to win support for tougher United Nations penalties on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

China car sales speed past U.S. as world's top auto market

The Chinese auto industry grew nearly 50% last year after the government unleashed $15 billion in auto incentives, about five times the size of the U.S. auto industry's cash-for-clunkers program. But analysts question how much of the Chinese market's growth is sustainable. Manufacturers here are struggling to appeal to consumers in their own market. And the quality of Chinese brands, while improving, still lags behind foreign ones.

Hummer, symbol of machismo, may be headed to graveyard

A single sticky note, left on Russ Builta's 2005 Hummer, sums up the emotion stirred by the super-sized SUVs. "You are polluting our air and abusing our national resources," the unsigned note said. "And all because of greed and selfishness. You should be very ashamed of yourself."

Builta, who served in the Marine Corps, still gets mad: "It was not even on recycled paper!"

Builta installed a supercharger that gave his Hummer a whopping 600 horsepower. When he really mashed the pedal, it got 1 mile per gallon. "It would just move," he told CNN iReport.

Senators Want ‘Buy American’ Rule in Stimulus

Four Democratic senators are calling on the Obama administration to halt spending on a renewable energy program in the economic stimulus package until rules are in place to assure that the projects use predominantly American labor and materials.

The senators said that more than three-fourths of $2 billion spent on wind-energy projects supported by the stimulus package had gone to foreign companies. They said that effectively undercut the purpose of the stimulus program — formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — which is to jump-start the American economy and create jobs here.

Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting-Edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?

Just 37 technologies qualified for government funds, with each getting an average $4 million. They were selected from 3,700 applications and from among the 75 percent that weren't disqualified for violating the first or second law of thermodynamics, according to Arun Majumdar, ARPA-E's first director. Yet, the bulk of them are old ideas dusted off after years of storage.

From California, Chinese Solar Maker Looks East

Yingli, the Chinese solar module maker that captured nearly a third of the California market last year, has struck a deal to supply a New Jersey developer with more than 10 megawatts of photovoltaic panels.

The agreement announced Tuesday with SunDurance Energy for the first time brings Yingli’s reach to the East Coast. SunDurance, owned by a construction and engineering firm, the Conti Group, will install the Yingli solar panels on rooftops, in carports and in ground-mounted solar farms.

Wave, Tidal Energy May Power 1.4 Million U.K. Homes

(Bloomberg) -- Wave and tidal energy may provide 2,000 megawatts of power to the U.K. by 2020, enough for about 1.4 million homes, Energy and Climate-Change Minister David Kidney said.

“We have faith in these industries proving themselves and being a big contributor to fighting climate change,” the U.K. minister said today in London.

Report: SC depleted uranium likely unfit for Utah

SALT LAKE CITY — A report commissioned by an environmental group says several thousand tons of depleted uranium from a former nuclear weapons complex in South Carolina is likely unfit for disposal in Utah.

That includes some low-level radioactive waste that may already be buried in the state.

The report released by Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah on Wednesday says the amount and type of material doesn't meet the federal requirements for disposal at EnergySolutions Inc.'s site.

Can Wild Bison Repopulate the Plains?

After three years of meetings and study, a broad array of conservation groups, government scientists and other experts on North American wildlife policy have produced a road map for restoring some large free-roaming populations of bison in the North American plains.

The Earth has its own set of rules

By far our most prevalent view of nature derives from a rudimentary human desire for more. This is the basis of the economic model that currently directs our relationships with one another and with our environment. It has produced stupendous human population growth and dramatic, deleterious effects on nature. Recognizing these effects, efforts have been marshaled to change the self-serving economic model with notions of Earth "stewardship," eloquently advanced decades ago by then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and, most recently, to infiltrate the economic model with "ecosystem services" by assigning monetary values to functions performed by the Earth that are beneficial to people.

All of these views are fundamentally and dangerously flawed, because all are anthropocentric. They begin and end with humans. This isn't the way the Earth works.

Earth Charter Group To Hold Saturday Summit (Connecticut)

The Earth Charter Community of the Lower Valley will host its annual summit event on Saturday, March 6, at the Gelston House.

Keynote speaker for the event will be James Howard Kunstler, author of a number of books focused on ecology.

That Whole Internet Thing's Not Going To Work Out: How to suss out bad tech predictions

In 1995, Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, author, and mad-scientist type, published a column in Newsweek with a doozy of a headline: "The Internet? Bah!" The piece was based on Stoll's book, Silicon Snake Oil, in which he argued that we were all being taken for a ride by tech pundits who offered dreamy visions of a coming "information superhighway." "Baloney," Stoll wrote. "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

...Given how wrong they tend to be, it's generally a good idea to ignore all predictions. The future is unknowable — especially in the digital age, when we're constantly barraged with new technologies. Still, we'll never stop being obsessed with the future. With that in mind, it would be nice to have some idea of which predictions to trust and which to dismiss. Here are a few rules for separating the good from the bad.

Shifting Soil Threatens Homes’ Foundations

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association indicates that since the 1990s there has been an accelerating trend nationwide toward more extended dry periods followed by downpours. Whether due to random climate patterns or global warming, the swings between hot and dry weather and severe rain or snow have profoundly affected soil underneath buildings.

NAELS 2010 Staying Afloat: Adapting to Climate Change in the Gulf Coast and Beyond

Beginning March 4, 2010, the Environmental Law Society at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law will host the 2010 Annual NAELS Conference -- Staying Afloat: Adapting to Climate Change in the Gulf Coast and Beyond.

The Conference will bring together top attorneys, engineers, business leaders, environmentalists, scientists, and planners from New Orleans, Louisiana, the US, and the world to discuss how New Orleans, hundreds of low-lying coastal cities like it, and an interdependent world community will adapt to ever-increasing populations and a rapidly changing climate in the coming century.

France's sea walls battered by recent storm

L'AIGUILLON-SUR-MER, France - The moon was full, the wind roared, the tide was high and people died by the dozens.

After a wall of ocean water engulfed picturesque towns along France's Atlantic coast, residents, officials and experts are all asking why.

Was it due to climate change? A freak storm fueled by hurricane-force winds? The result of human greed over desirable land or bungling actions by government officials?

Katrina victims seek to sue greenhouse gas emitters

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Victims of Hurricane Katrina are seeking to sue carbon gas-emitting multinationals for helping fuel global warming and boosting the devastating 2005 storm, legal documents showed.

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

Texas-based refiners pledge to fund fight against California's global warming law

Two Texas-based refinery giants have pledged as much as $2 million to fund signature gathering for a ballot initiative to suspend California's landmark global warming law, according to Sacramento sources.

The companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., own refineries in California that would be forced under the law to slash emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Major change is needed if the IPCC hopes to survive

Well before the recent controversies, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was marred by an unwillingness to listen to dissenting points of view, an inadequate system for dealing with errors, conflicts of interest, and political advocacy. The latest allegations of inaccuracies should be an impetus for sweeping reform.

‘Missteps’ Don’t Negate Climate Science, Obama Adviser Says

(Bloomberg) -- The disclosure of research “missteps” hasn’t shaken the consensus that manmade emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to climate change, President Barack Obama’s top science adviser said.

The release of scientists’ e-mails and errors in a report by a United Nations climate panel show researchers are human, John Holdren said today at an energy conference in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The errors don’t alter the reality that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the earth, he said.

Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

...The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Rate of Glacier Melting May be Key Clue to Tracking Climate Change

The vast amounts of water stored in glaciers play crucial roles in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural production, contributing to steady run-off for Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus rivers in Asia and elsewhere.

But many are melting rapidly, with the pace picking up over the past decade, giving glaciers a central role in the debate over causes and impacts of climate change.

Stuart Staniford: The US in a High Emissions Scenario

Given that emissions are growing faster than the IPCC has studied, that the world has been unwilling or unable to agree on any meaningful global treaty, with the largest emitters, China and the United States, in particular unwilling to make any meaningful attempt to limit emissions, I wanted to look at the question "How bad are things in a high emissions scenario?" In particular, in this post, I look at the period 2080-2100. My children were born in 2000 and 2002, so 2080-2100 represents the likely end of their lives, all being well. So this is a summary of the changes they will experience over the course of their lives.

by Tracey de MorsellaEarlier this month, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced the decision to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency's climate science and service delivery capabilities as a way of addressing the growing demand for climate data vital to planning and operations. NOAA is also unveiling a new Web site - http://www.climate.gov - that serves as a single point-of-entry for NOAA's extensive climate information, data, products and services.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responds to millions of annual requests for climate data vital to planning and operations. Decision-makers and individuals across a broad spectrum of sectors - from transportation to agriculture to energy - increasingly are asking NOAA for information about climate change in order to make the best choices for their families, communities and businesses. Earlier this month, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced the decision to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency's climate science and service delivery capabilities as a way of addressing the growing demand for this type of information.More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives.NOAA is also unveiling a new Web site - http://www.climate.gov - that serves as a single point-of-entry for NOAA's extensive climate information, data, products and services. Known as the NOAA Climate Portal, the site addresses the needs of five broadly-defined user groups: decision makers and policy leaders, scientists and applications-oriented data users, educators, business users and the public.Highlights of the portal include an interactive "climate dashboard" that shows a range of constantly updating climate datasets (e.g., temperature, carbon dioxide concentration and sea level) over adjustable time scales; the new climate science magazine ClimateWatch, featuring videos and articles of scientists discussing recent climate research and findings; and an array of data products and educational resources."By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change," said Secretary Locke. "In the process, we'll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs.""Working closely with federal, regional, academic and other state and local government and private sector partners, the new NOAA Climate Service will build on our success transforming science into useable climate services," said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.They are unifying NOAA's climate capabilities under a single climate office to dintegrate the agency's climate science and services and make them more accessible to NOAA partners and other users. Planning has been, and continues to be, shaped by input from NOAA employees and stakeholders across the country, with close consideration given to the recommendations of the NOAA Science Advisory Board, National Academies and National Academy of Public Administration.NOAA Climate Service will encompass a core set of longstanding NOAA capabilities with proven success. The climate research, observations, modeling, predictions and assessments generated by NOAA's top scientists - including Nobel Peace Prize award-winners - will continue to provide the scientific foundation for extensive on-the-ground climate services that respond to millions of requests annually for data and other critical information.Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, will serve as transitional director of NOAA Climate Service. New positions for six NOAA Regional Climate Services Directors will be announced soon.Reprinted with permission from Green Economy Post

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center announced the latest data on Pacific Ocean water temperatures and trends, predicting at least three more months of El Nino conditions. In their prognostic discussion for long-lead  Hawaiian outlooks, they predict continuation of below normal levels of precipitation for the islands. The end of January 2010 found Hilo Airport [...]

The warning was ominous... its predictions dire: Oceanographers issued a bulletin telling Hawaii and other Pacific islands that a killer wave was heading their way with terrifying force and that "urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property." But the devastating tidal surge predicted after Chile"s magnitude 8.8-earthquake for areas far from the epicenter never materialized. And by Sunday... authorities had lifted the warning after waves half the predicted size tickled the shores of .
from ABC 7 News

The warning was ominous, its predictions dire: Oceanographers issued a bulletin telling Hawaii and other Pacific islands that a killer wave was heading their way with terrifying force and that "urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property." But the devastating tidal surge predicted after Chile's magnitude 8.8-earthquake for areas far from the epicenter never m...

The warning was ominous, its predictions dire: Oceanographers issued a bulletin telling Hawaii and other Pacific islands that a killer wave was heading their way with terrifying force and that "urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property." But the devastating tidal surge predicted after Chile's magnitude 8.8-earthquake for areas far from the epicenter never materialized and by Sunday, authorities had lifted the warning after waves half the predicted size tickled the shores of Hawaii and tourists once again jammed beaches and restaurants. (AP)

What was the real story yesterday? There was a massive earthquake in Chile yesterday, an 8.8 magnitude monster that was the fifth biggest tremor in recorded (i.e. on a seismometer) history. It produced a tsunami that would affect the entire Pacific Ocean basin. The coverage of the earthquake itself earns the news networks a C+, because they apparently still remember some of the science they learned six weeks ago in Haiti.

But...their coverage of the effects of the quake on the Pacific Basin and Hawaii? An F. Not even a gentleman's F+. They've done grievous damage to the entire concept of responsible journalism. They hated that the Indonesian tsunami struck without warning so that they couldn't plan for their coverage of a tragic human event. So this quake hits, and they have a half day's warning to prepare for the event in Hawaii. They were so incompetent that they could position stationary cameras in what seemed to be only three locations (including what seemed hours of pictures of one moronic surfer), and then breathlessly babbled for hours about the approaching maelstrom. The tsunami arrived, and they didn't recognize it happening in front of them. Then they acted disappointed that it wasn't the disaster they had been building up for hours. And they cut to commercials. This, of course, is what I was raging about yesterday.

The story they missed? A giant earthquake produced what could very well have been a colossal tsunami. The civil defense apparatus of the state of Hawaii gears up for the event, sounding the warning sirens hours ahead of the arrival of the tsunami surge, and doing an incredible job of warning the population of what could be coming. The people of Hawaii do the right thing, stocking up on emergency supplies and taking shelter in the appropriate locations. The evacuations run smoothly, from what little I hear, and if a monster tsunami had hit, the death toll would have been very low. The tsunami hits with an intensity at the lower end of the predictions, and a number of fascinating phenomena took place (and I am still waiting for some decent coverage of what actually happened). There was a collective sigh of relief, and life returns to normal, after a brief interruption and a little inconvenience. That was the real story, and it was for the most part untold.

The tsunami from Chile's devastating earthquake hit Japan's main islands and the shores of Russia on Sunday, but the smaller-than-expected waves prompted the lifting of a Pacific-wide alert. Hawaii and other Pacific islands were also spared. Hundreds of thousands of people fled shorelines for higher ground after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii warned 53 nations and territories that a tsunami had been generated by Saturday's magnitude-8.8 quake earthquake. After the center lifted its warning, some countries kept their own watches in place as a precaution. In Japan, the biggest wave hit the northern island of Hokkaido. There were no immediate reports of damage from the 4-foot-high wave, though some piers were briefly flooded. As it crossed the Pacific, the tsunami dealt populated areas — including the U.S. state of Hawaii — only a glancing blow. The tsunami raised fears Pacific nations could suffer from disastrous waves like those that killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean in December 2004, which happened with little-to-no warning and much confusion about the impending waves. Officials said the opposite occurred after the Chile quake: They overstated their predictions of the size of the waves and the threat. “We expected the waves to...

When I was 13 years old, science scared me. Not science itself, mind you, but the terrors of the future it foretold. News of the coming dark ages were delivered to our young ears through that most trusted of conduits, a high school science teacher. We’re killing the planet? I was shocked. What a bunch of jerks we all are! I remember so very clearly coming home from school, brow furrowed, and earnestly rebuking my parents for contributing to the destruction of the earth. RECYCLE! LIKE RIGHT NOW!! OR WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIEEEE!!!!!

My father, a professor himself, looked up calmly and said “why?” Well I didn’t really know why. Something about landfills and styrofoam and earth day. Newspapers were killing dolphins. Six packs of soda were strangling penguins. The hole in the ozone layer was letting all our air out into space. Or something. Whatever it was, it was URGENT that we recycle to fix it!!! FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!

Still, though. Why?

So now I’m thirty-five years old, and although I eventually broke free, environmental hysteria has surrounded me ever since that day. And there is no hysteria more rabid than that over man-made global warming (anthropogenic global warming, properly, or AGW). Assuming you haven’t been in an alternate dimension for the last decade or so, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The world is going to be destroyed, Al Gore tells us with the earnestness and oratorical flourish of any panicked 13-year old, if we don’t do something RIGHT NOW!! To which the “global community” replied with a resounding FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!!!!

I won’t go over my journey from terrified teen to skeptical adult, but suffice it to say a shift in politics (from conservative, toward liberal, back to conservative) over my twenties (hereafter referred to as the lost decade) was part of the process. Indeed, in the United States, political persuasion is a trusted diagnostic tool for determining one’s level of acceptance of the theory of man-made global warming. The more to the right you are, the less likely you believe. The more to the left … FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

That should be a warning sign to anyone of a skeptical mind. What better indicator an issue has been politicized than that it breaks down almost perfectly along political dividing lines? Of course, on the right, we’ll claim it is because the left politicized the science. On the left, they’ll claim it’s because conservatives hate knowledge and also Rush Limbaugh is a doody-head. Nevertheless, the political point is important. Because, regardless of fault, there is now a definitive fault line. And that line is causing the most embarrassing breakdown in journalistic integrity in our lifetime.

But let’s get to that in a moment. Back to the story.

So the millennium arrived, Y2K failed to unleash an army of malevolent, self-aware toasters upon us, and George Bush was president of the United States. The UN, AGW’s town crier, was shopping around the Kyoto Protocol. The Bush administration declined, proving to everyone who is anyone that Republicans eat puppies and want to bring about the end times. (And in case you think I’m joking, I’m not). The EPA came to AGW circa 2002, and by 2005, if you weren’t on board you were pretty much a holocaust-denying lunatic. In 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their landmark, Nobel prize-winning manifesto: Global warming is real, it’s caused by man, and if you don’t agree we’ll shoot you in the face. Not with bullets but with SCIENCE!!

A funny thing happened at this point. Global warming, specifically, and science, generally, stopped being cited and started being invoked. People spoke of SCIENCE! not with dispassionate detachment but rather with the solemn reverence of a priest genuflecting. Suddenly, you were either with science, or you were against it. Either you agreed with the global scientific consensus regarding AGW, or you were an enemy of science, unpatriotic, and possibly a criminal. That is the atmosphere that lingers still today, three years and a flood of -gates later.

Let me tell you a little anecdote. In late 2008 I was in Turkey. I was with a group of journalists, think-tankers and bloggers. So in other words, liberals. And little old me. On our sixth and final night in Turkey, we were at a stunning rooftop bar in Istanbul, overlooking the city lights, with a breathtaking view of the Bosporus. Istanbul sprawls. Actively, like it is growing before your very eyes. And in every direction, the motion is punctuated by spires, modern and ancient. It’s a heady atmosphere. So there we sat, young and abroad, drinking wine, talking politics, and generally bonding. The conversation was lively, if meandering, and, as conversations between left and right inevitably do, it wandered to global warming. I sat quietly listening to the others discuss it. How terrible it was that the United States wouldn’t do our part. How urgent the crisis was. How the media gives too much play to the deniers … and then it was quiet. Liberal eyes traced slow paths over an art-deco table, eventually to fall lightly upon me.

“Is he one of them?” The question was obvious without speaking it. I think I may have smirked a little. I looked out over the city. Finally someone said “be honest.” That was all. I let the moment hang there between us briefly, and then said “I think global warming is probably real, and probably mankind has something to do with that.” They actually applauded. I’m not joking. I got a standing ovation from our little group. They patted my back. I felt like I’d converted. I had joined something. Something important. I didn’t know why, but FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!

The next morning, as I was walking through the Hagia Sophia with a fellow tourist I’d shared the cab fare with, reflecting on the history of the building around me, I felt … wrong. The Hagia Sophia is magnificent, but it is pointed. The conversion from Christian Basilica to Muslim Mosque was one of violence. A jewel torn from one crown and embedded in another. Seated at that table the evening before, no one presented me with any compelling evidence. There were no new papers to share or arguments to be made. It was not a discussion of science or reason. It was a discussion of faith. Would I, like the ancient structure I was to tour the next day, adorn myself with the trappings of a new faith? I didn’t profess to understanding anything, I professed to BELIEVE something. And in that moment of belief I became acceptable. But standing there under that impossible dome the next morning, head clear of the intoxication of Istanbul and acceptance, I knew how wrong that was. It wasn’t science. It was a club. No, a church. And if you weren’t a member, you were the enemy. Skepticism had become heresy, and to speak it aloud was the fastest way alienate yourself from polite society. “Consensus” was the new “evidence,” and to stand outside that consensus was to self-identify as a hater of the planet and all who walk upon it. A sad state of affairs even then. But now?

Many of you have, by now, heard about the infamous “climategate” emails. But you may not be aware of the real scope of the scandals currently rocking the world of AGW. Indeed, if Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey were not apparently the world’s most devoted fan of the British press, I might not be either. The IPCC’s report relied on many pillars for it’s foundation. Those pillars have been crumbling at a stunning rate over the last few months, thanks largely to an investigative UK press. It’s far more serious than the American media is willing to tell you. In fact, the left at large is doubling down, down-playing the emails and simply pretending the other scandals don’t even exist. Because the science is settled, you see. Consensus has been reached. The details don’t really matter anymore.

Only they do.

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level,” spake the IPCC unto man. “The science is settled,” the crowd chants back. “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,” sayeth the scientists. “The science is settled,” the masses intone.

“observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperature”
In simplest terms, let me summarize how this has changed. The data upon which this claim is largely based has been undone by the Climategate scandal. The damning emails show deliberate manipulation of data to produce the desired “increases in global average air and ocean temperature.” What’s worse, Phil Jones, the scientist at the epicenter of this scandal, “lost” all the original data, which might explain why he has ignored repeated Freedom of Information requests. Jones’ non-peer-reviewed findings are crucial to the famous “hockey stick” graph that alarmed Al Gore into an Oscar. Additionally, the emails show a disdain for the very notion of peer-review as well as active conspiracy to suppress dissenting points of view. And that’s not all.

A study that was peer-reviewed and recently published calls into question even the data we do have at hand.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

And still, that is not all. In an admission that rocked the British and Australian press and was mostly ignored here in the States, Professor Phil Jones himself has now conceded that the period of medieval global warming, the mere mention of which would have you swiftly decorated by a scarlett letter mere weeks ago, might, in fact, have actually been warmer than the predicted peak of the current warming. That is extremely significant. In the first place, it shows that the globe has warmed before without the aid of factories and hummers, and in the second place, because, well, there was no APOCALYPSE!!!!!!! as a result of the warming. Jones also revealed that a warming period between 1860 and 1880 occurred at a greater rate of increase than what the warmers themselves purport to be the increase of the past 30 years. These are extremely crucial points, as the extent of warming and the possible consequences are what drive any potential legislation such as what was proposed at Copenhagen in 2009.

And finally, the climategate emails make an important point indeed. For the last decade, the predicted global warming has not occurred. The lack of which, by the way, the guilty scientists referred to as a “travesty.” Of the notion that this was a concerted conspiracy among several key players, there can be little doubt.

“widespread melting of snow and ice”
The great glacial melt, the massive African famines, the extinction of the polar bears, and the destruction of South American rainforests are the key consequences we’re to see from AGW. Each of these points was made, and hammered upon, in the 2007 IPCC report. Each of these items has since been debunked thoroughly. The predicted devastation was a phantom. Al Gore today, and others in the past few weeks, have attempted to brush this under the carpet as immaterial, on the grounds that only a few of the points from their report have been debunked. What The Telegraph understands is what we should all understand: it’s the very most significant portions of the report that were falsified. The most sensational. The Al Goriest. And of course, that matters a great deal. It is the very direness of the moment that we’re all supposed to be terrified of. Polar bears therefore taxes and all that.

As scandals have rocked the AGW movement over the last few months, the American press has been loathe to report it. Once they treat global warming with skepticism, they don’t get invited to rooftop bars in Istanbul anymore, for one thing. But more than that, they, as individuals, have clearly bought in fully. Who hasn’t seen the disdain with which reporters and anchors discuss skeptics of AGW? It is not merely that they don’t wish to be excluded by the believers, it is that they themselves are among the faithful. “The science is settled” and “global consensus” are among the MSM’s most favored phrases.

So, too, democrats and the left at large. Not merely fearful of exclusion, they are the ones doing the excluding. They are the crowds setting up the pyres for the burning of witches. They aren’t trying to avoid the inquisition, they are the inquisitors. Doubting the existence of man-made global warming is thoughtcrime of the highest order in this country. What surprise can there be in that they don’t wish to report the scandals? They want to wave their hand and tell you that these are not the droids you were looking for, actually. Move along.

But we cannot move along. Our children are being indoctrinated. It’s not a matter of their being taught incorrect scientific data, it’s that they are being taught a fundamental untruth about science itself. Science isn’t in the business of consensus. We didn’t vote on gravity. If science is in the business of anything, it is skepticism! And truth-seeking. Many of you will recall that my oldest daughter was part of a global warming presentation in lieu of a “holiday” play a few years ago. The children told us that polar bears were on the verge of extinction, and that Myrtle Beach, SC, would be wiped off the map by a rising ocean WITHIN FIVE YEARS. And when you confront the purveyors of that alarmism they say what Al Gore and his priests and acolytes are currently saying. The details don’t really matter. It’s the big picture that matters. The Myrtle Beach threat is fake, you see, but true.

And this, of course, is how environmental science and activism have always operated, on issues from large to small. On a different occasion, my daughter, then in first grade, came home and expressed her great sadness at the demise of a particular type of bird in Hawaii. The encroachment of man, she assured me, was killing birdies. So I decided to look into it. A quick Google search revealed that not only was the pending extinction of the bird NOT due to man, but that it WAS due to nature taking it’s course. In fact, several environmental groups in Hawaii were opposing the intervention the state was considering, on the grounds that interference would upset the balance of nature. My child’s teacher could have looked up this data. But why would she? She “knows” the truth. Man is bad for earth. If something is dying, we did it.

People “know” we’re hurting the earth with pollution. They “know” greenhouse gases are heating up the earth. They “know” that will eventually cause catastrophic devastation. After all, there was a movie! The “know” the science is settled. They “know” all the scientists are in agreement. After all, there was Nobel prize!

It’s time now for people to know the real truth. You may think after all that I’ve written that I now demand retraction and apology. Perhaps in my high dudgeon I will require confession and absolution from the AGW faithful before I consider them once more acceptable. But I do not.

Because the most important part of the scandals here isn’t the relative reliability of the data or the relative accuracy of the predictions of global warming. The important lesson of the scandals is two things. Two very important things.

The first is that, with all the serious problems with the data and conclusions regarding global warming, we would be irresponsible stewards of our nation and guardians of our children’s futures if we now allowed ourselves to be seduced by another Kyoto or Copenhagen. We cannot let a do-good impulse to best our own reason and judgment. Cap and trade must die. Copenhagen must not be reborn.

The second, and perhaps in the long view the more important, is this: THE SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED. Even if you are still fully on-board the AGW train, you cannot continue to claim the science is settled. Scientists around the globe are expressing their doubts, and even the chief architects of the IPCC report have admitted for the record that there remain questions about both the data and the conclusions. People. This is the very definition of not settled. If you grant that debate continues apace, and you can’t not grant that without checking out from reality in full, then you must grant, you MUST grant, that there is no consensus. You must grant that the science is not settled. And I urge you to never again judge the relative accuracy of a scientific theory like you are voting for the prom queen and king. Something is true, or untrue, regardless of how many of your friends think it’s super-keen. Just ask Copernicus.

The scientific community is unsettled. Beyond our borders, the people are unsettled. The press is unsettled. And all because the science, it turns out, is unsettled. The hysteria must end. It’s time for science to de-cult and get back into the business of science.

So, to the press, to the left, and especially to the scientific community at large …
FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!!!!!!!!!

I.M. Systems Group (IMSG) www.imsg.com specializes in scientific and technical support to NOAA. We are soliciting highly qualified candidates for three Task Leader positions listed below for a potential multi-year contract to provide Scientific Support Services to the NOAA/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). Work will be performed at the EMC facility at the NOAA Science Center in Camp Springs, Maryland, expected starting in June 2010. The salary ranges will be from $80k to $110k, depending on qualifications.

IMSG is a well established company that has a reputation at NOAA for superior services at several major NOAA facilities, including EMC. We offer attractive salaries and a generous benefits program, including legal and financial support for foreign nationals’ working visas, green cards, and U.S. citizenships.

Duties for each Task Leader position:

NCS_E_n01 – Task Leader, Global Weather Modeling Support
The qualified candidate will play a leading role in the following areas:
• Advanced numerical modeling of the atmosphere and interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and land surfaces
• Development and maintenance of 4D data assimilation systems for conventional, satellite and other remotely-sensed observations including advanced radiative transfer codes
• Parameterization of sub-grid scale physical processes in the atmosphere, and physically-based coupling between the atmosphere, ocean, and land surfaces
• Impact studies to evaluate the contribution to forecast skill of current and future global observing systems
• Diagnostic studies of global model performance

NCS E n02 – Task Leader, Hurricane Modeling Support
The qualified candidate will play a leading role in the following areas:
• Developing components of the operational Hurricane Forecast System (HFS) using atmospheric model (Hurricane WRF), ocean model, wave model and land surface model to improve track and intensity forecasts and quantitative precipitation forecasts after landfall
• Providing support for community use of the HFS as required by the NOAA Development Testbed Center (DTC)
• Assimilating and improving use of airborne Doppler radar data into the HFS
• Interacting with community scientists to transition new technologies, such as ensemble techniques, and new physical parameterizations of convection, cloud microphysics and planetary boundary layer into operations.

NCS__n03 – Task Leader, Seasonal Climate Forecast Support
The qualified candidate will play a leading role in the following areas:
• Development of seasonal climate prediction methodologies, including initialization of seasonal forecasts construction of multi-model ensembles and product generation and evaluation
• Development of a global ocean model and 4D ocean data assimilation system applied to climate forecast time scales for the coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-SI forecast system over the global domain
• Developing and executing a climate reanalysis, including a data assimilation system, a coupled atmosphere-ocean-land-SI forecast system and associated products and functions such as archival, data access, and facilitation of reanalysis studies by the scientific community
• Developing data assimilation methods

Qualifications:

• PhD in atmospheric science, mathematics, hydrometeorology, oceanography, or other physical science, and 7 years of experience
• Extensive R&D; experience in related modeling field
• Personnel leadership with demonstrated record of successfully completed tasks
• Proficiency in (1) optimizing FORTRAN or FORTRAN-like code for multiprocessor computers, (2) numerical analysis of multi-dimensional partial differential equations or statistical analysis of physical problems, and (3) modeling or analysis of atmospheric, oceanographic, land surface or cryospheric phenomena
• Supercomputing experience
• Strong communication skills

To Apply:

Applicants should email their resume and three references to jobs@imsg.com and Dr. Le Jiang, IMSG Chief Scientist and Program Manager at jiangl@imsg.com . Please indicate which of the above three positions you are applying for by listing the reference code in the subject line of the email

IMSG is an equal opportunity employer

The Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction (CMOP), a NSF Science and Technology Center located at Oregon Health & Science University, seeks an exceptional candidate to fill the position of Marine Biogeochemistry Technician. The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary team of researchers whose collective focus is the integrated understanding of physical, chemical and biological processes of coastal margin environments. The candidate should have experience in laboratory chemistry or microbiology and exposure to or experience with the operation and maintenance of field-going oceanographic instrumentation. The position will be based out of Beaverton, Oregon which is located within minutes of downtown Portland.

The primary duties of this position will be to maintain and deploy biogeochemical instruments including in situ nutrient analyzers and advanced instrumentation to measure microbes and gene expression in the environment. Up to 7 weeks per year of work aboard research vessels is required. Regular trips to CMOP’s field station in Astoria, Oregon will also be part of the duties encompassed by this position. The research will be conducted in a cross-disciplinary team environment.

Examples of duties include, but are not limited to:
• Calibrate instruments for in situ deployments in the Columbia River estuary, plume and tidal freshwater
• Biological and chemical laboratory analyses
• Assume a leadership role for data collection and quality assurance for field based biogeochemical instrumentation
• Synthesize and communicate data output to researchers and students
• Participate in at least two oceanographic cruises per year, as well as several 1-day maintenance trips aboard smaller vessels and from the dock in the Columbia River estuary

Qualifications:
• MSc degree in a relevant field, such as chemistry, engineering, microbiology or oceanography, plus 3 years relevant experience; OR BS degree in relevant field, such as chemistry, engineering, microbiology, or oceanography, plus 7 years relevant experience
• Experience working with advanced analytical instrumentation
• Excellent laboratory and analytical skills
• Some computer programming experience
• Ability to work independently and as a member of a collaborative team
• Ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to diverse audiences

Location and eligibility:
• This position is located at the Oregon Health & Science University West Campus in Beaverton, OR, with occasional need to visit the field site in Astoria, OR.
• This is a full-time position, requiring occasional evening and weekend hours. Increased time commitments will be required during major projects and deadlines.
• Ability to regularly lift 25 pounds with occasional need to lift up to 50 pounds.
• Will involve extended time on the water, in both the Columbia River and open ocean.
• Members of underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.
• U.S. citizens or permanent residents are preferred for this position due to funding source requirements.

To Apply: Please send cover letter and curriculum vitae to Prof. Antonio Baptista, c/o johnsamy@ohsu.edu.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Led by Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), CMOP is one of only 17 National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers. CMOP conducts interdisciplinary research, technology development, education, and knowledge transfer activities in order to achieve a better understanding of physical, chemical, and biological processes regulating river-to-ocean ecosystems.

Our vision is to enable a nearly ubiquitous, river-to-ocean observation of physical and ecological processes and to further our understanding of these processes in order to manage, operate, and sustain coastal resources and ecosystems effectively – while fostering technological innovation, and training a diverse, scientifically literate and technologically savvy workforce.

Links from del.icio.us, tagged with geology on February 19th, 2010: Science.gov Earth and Ocean Sciences Resources Science.gov topic Geothermal resources Earth System Research Lab Global Monitoring Division – Data Archive Climate Prediction Center Monitoring and Data Index Mapping News by Mapperz Chicxulub crater UCMP Web Time Machine Stress (mechanics) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rocks: Pictures of Igneous, Metamorphic and Sedimentary Rocks Archive: January 2010 [...]

Most experts agree that Google won't make us stupid. Indeed, 76% of technology stakeholders and critics interviewed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University believe that the Internet and search engines will enhance human intelligence by 2020. For this new report, the Pew Research Center conducted in-depth interviews with over 800 experts about what they think the Internet will look like in 2020.

Sponsor

Here are some of the key quotes from the report:

Will Google Make us Stupid?

"I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net's effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."- Nicholas Carr

"Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world." - Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

"It's a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things ('more stupid') requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information ('more intelligent')." - Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

"The problem isn't Google; it's what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves." - Esther Dyson, longtime Internet expert and investor

"People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I'm wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth." - Craig Newmark, founder Craig's List

"The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult." - John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

Will The Internet Enhance and Improve Writing, Reading and the Rendering of Knowledge?

"Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read." - Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

"This is a distinction without a metric. I think long‐form expressive fiction will suffer (though this suffering has been more or less constant since the invention of radio) while all numeric and graphic forms of rendering knowledge, from the creation and use of databases to all forms of visual display of data will be in a golden age, with ordinary non‐fiction writing getting a modest boost. So, English majors lose, engineering wins, and what looks like an Up or Down question says more about the demographic of the answerer than any prediction of the future." - Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

"When I was a boy, homework consisted of writing a paragraph. Now, youth writing paragraphs in a blink of an eye. They are mastering language only to reinvent it. They are using it in new forms. Tags. Labels. Acronyms. And the game becomes a written game of who can use written word most effectively. Reading, writing, and communicating will become much more fluid as youth are more engaged in the practice of these skills, and have a greater motivation to practice their skills." - Robert Cannon, senior counsel for internet law at Federal Communications Commission

"When writing itself appeared, philosophers feared that it would weaken memory and degrade intelligence. But it allowed for a great, albeit externalized memory and an enlarged, albeit shared intelligence. [...] The Internet will have similar effects, with some losses but, on balance, more gains." - Mark U. Edwards, senior advisor to the Dean, Harvard University Divinity School

"More people are reading and writing, and in more ways, for more readers and other writers, than ever before, and the sum of all of it goes up every day." - Doc Searls, co‐ author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto"

Will Online Anonymity Have Gone the Way of the Dodo by 2020?

"The privacy and civil liberties battles over the next decade will increasingly focus on the growing demands for identity credentials. New systems for authentication will bring new problems as more identity information will create new opportunities for criminals. Identity management companies will also go bankrupt and try to sell off their primary asset ‐‐ the biometric identifiers of their customers." - Marc Rotenberg, executive director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

"Anonymity online will gradually become a lot like anonymity in the real world. When we encounter it, we'll take a firm grip on our wallet and leave the neighborhood as soon as possible ‐‐ unless we're doing something we're ashamed of." - Stewart Baker,

"'It will be an archipelago of named users, who get a lot of value from participating in that part of the ecosystem, but still set in an ocean of anonymity." ‐‐ Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

"Anonymity will continue to have its place; that is the architecture of the web and it will be difficult to change that. Nonetheless, I believe that verified identity will come to be seen as an added value in transactions (including conversations) and as a way to recognize more value (reward in financial or ego terms)." ‐‐ Jeff Jarvis, prominent blogger, professor, City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

You can find the full report with almost 50 pages of quotes about a number of additional topics on the Pew Center's website.

Discuss

This is the next blog in the continuing series of interviews with top-echelon and renowned professionals. In this blog, I interview Rohit Talwar: Award-winning Global Top 10 Futurist, Strategic Thinker, Entrepreneur -- Rohit shares his extensive insights into future trends and how to leverage them

Rohit Talwar is an award winning futurist speaker, entrepreneur, specialist advisor and strategic change agent and the founder of the research and consultancy organization Fast Future. He was profiled as one of the top ten global future thinkers by the UK's Independent newspaper. He spends his time traveling the world, researching the ideas that will shape the future and meeting the people and organizations behind them. Rohit has spoken to audiences of leaders around the world. His book Designing Your Future was published in August 2008 (http://tinyurl.com/5trt4x). His next book FutureTweet 2012 will be published in the spring of 2010. His study for the UK government on future directions in science and technology and the implications for 'The shape of jobs' to come was published in January 2010.

He is currently in high demand for his inspirational speeches on Global Trends, Innovation, Winning in a Downturn and Future Focused Leadership. He has consulted with leading corporations, associations and government agencies globally on scenario planning, development of future strategy, and driving innovation and change.

He also has a particular interest in the evolution of China, India, their emerging economies and the future of associations, travel, tourism, meetings and events. Rohit partnered with ASAE & The Center on the Association of the Future research program - the first output of which was the book Designing Your Future. He has also led a major study on the Future of Travel and Tourism in the Middle East and on the mega-real estate developments across the region. Rohit has also completed major global studies on the Future of China's Economy - The Path to 2020 - and is working on scenarios for 2030 and the implications for global migration.

Rohit has spoken and consulted on 6 continents and in over 40 countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, The Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA and Zimbabwe.

In government he has worked with the US Department of Defense, the Singapore National Horizon Scanning Centre, the Saudi Government, The Finnish Foresight Programme and in the UK - the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, Defense Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL), Home Office, Environment Agency, Foreign Office, Health Modernisation Agency, Ministry of Defense and Office of Science and Technology and the Departments for Constitutional Affairs, Trade and Industry and Environment Food and Rural Affairs.

His clients include 3M, ABN Amro, Aerovista, Alliance and Leicester, The BBC, BT, British Aerospace, Bayer, Berwin Leighton Paisner, Chloride, Citibank, DeutscheBank, Diamond Trading Corporation (De Beers), DHL, EADS, Electrolux, Ernst & Young, GE, HBOS, Hyundai, IBM, ING, Intel, Intercontinental Hotels, KPMG, Linklaters, Marks and Spencer, Morgan Stanley, Nakheel, Nokia, Nomura, Novartis, Ocean Spray, Orange, Panasonic, Pepsi, Pfizer, Playtex, PwC, Qatar Airways, Royal Bank of Scotland, Samsung, Saudi Supreme Commission for Tourism, Shell, Siemens, Siraj Capital, Thames Water, Travelport, Wragge and Co. and Yellow Pages and governments in the US, UK, Finland, Dubai, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

Rohit's association and events industry clients include: Academy for Chief Executives, ASAE & The Center, Arabian Travel Market, Association Management Company Institute, British Business Group Dubai, California Workforce Association, CEO Club, Chief Executives Network, Confex, Corporate Responsibility Group, EIBTM, Entrepreneur's Organization, The European Food Service Network, Green Meetings Industry Council, ICCA, IMEX, Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland, Institute of Directors, International Bridge Tunnel and Turnpike Association, International Special Events Society, Meeting Planners International, The Middle East Duty Free Association, National Association of Broadcasters, Pacific Asia Travel Association, PCMA, Securities and Investment Institute, Travel Agents Association of India, and the World Student and Youth Travel Confederation.

Rohit has previously worked in research and consulting roles for GKN, BT, Andersen Consulting and BMS Bossard.

Education
MBA - London Business School - 1992
BA (Hons) 2:1 Electronics and Computer Science - University of Keele 1984

For more background on Rohit's Key Projects: rohit_talwar_projects.html

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:55:
You have an unusual job title - can you tell us a little about how you came to be a futurist and what your role involves?
"....I've always been very interested in economic developments and how economic power is shifting around the world and how the balance between developed and developing economies changes....I realized that there was an opportunity to help people think about what forces, in fact, were shaping the future and I discovered this whole field called futures research, foresight and the profession of being a futurist...."

:04:57:
Can you share some of the most important issues and challenges you've addressed over your lifetime and the essential lessons you wish to pass on from these experiences?
"....One is around childhood....The goal is to have a really positive conversation about the future we want to create for children and young people....The second one we are working on is in Nigeria, in the Niger Delta, one of the hardest hit areas in Bayelsa State. The state governor there says, "If you look out of my window it is completely acceptable to say that there is no future for these people. 70% of my people are unemployed, most earn less than a dollar a day, and if the past is anything to go by, they have no future prospects." His view is - why don't we give ourselves permission to believe that some other future might be possible for them....So we've been working with them on it...."

:12:47:
You talk about 10 global patterns of change that are shaping the future - can you tell us about them - what are the implications and what should we do to leverage your predictions?
"....The first is the demographic shift (the most important shift of all)....The second is the economic shift....The third pattern of change is a new level of geo-political complexity - a big shift where power sits on the planet and in how we deal with issues....The fourth area is that organizations themselves are going into a whole new era of how they design themselves. We are increasingly in a global world where we are just starting to learn how we truly manage on a global basis....Another set of challenges is understanding how our consumers and how our society has changed....The next area is the rate of evolution of science and technology....Another pattern of change is this whole expansion of communications technology....The next area is what needs to happen with talent, education and training in our world....Another area is the generational impact in an aging society....The next patterns of change are that attitudes are changing all over the world....The final big patterns of change are around natural resource challenges...."

:35:16:
What other key trends and emerging issues should we focus on for the next few years?
"...One is that there is a big power shift going on....The emerging economies have much more say....The second is that there has been a big shift in the way critical resources are being competed for....The third big trend is that there has been a big outflow of investments from developed economies to developing economies particularly during the downturn....A fourth critical trend is the embracing of social media....Another trend is on the political front and the social front; as I travel around the globe one of the things I see is a very uneven distribution of hope....The final trend is the notion of hyper-competition where in every sector we are seeing a downward pressure on pricing...."

:42:14:
Rohit comments on the youth demographics worldwide.

:45:54:
You have recently completed a study looking at science and technology developments over the next 20 years and the new jobs that could emerge as a result - can you tell us about the most interesting developments and jobs coming out of your research?
"....The nano-bio-info convergence....Developments that are coming in agriculture. We know that food demand is growing at twice the rate of production so we are going to need some very radical techniques for how we grow food and how we farm....An example is the notion of vertical farming...."

:54:41:
What are your top predictions for European Union (EU), North America (NA), Asia (particularly China)?
"....The challenges for China going forward....infrastructure....the environmental footprint....How it moves it forward with all fronts together is a very difficult one. I think what it's showing is that it is entering a new era and none of us really knows what the rules of the game are and China is one of the leaders in creating those rules....A lot of countries in the EU see a big value in the EU in terms of creating foreign policy, in terms of saving them money at the national level....The real challenges now to the EU are what are the right models going forward....In the US there are some encouraging noises coming about the reform of the banking system because we've all understood that it's very hard to grow a full economy without confidence....We must not forget that it is still the biggest economy in the world and everyone is hugely dependent on the US in many ways...."

:01:05:18:
Can your share your insights about the Future of China's Economy - The Path to 2020?
"....We did this study a couple of years ago where we asked people around the globe to give us their views about China's economy and their own plans for China. What was very clear from everyone who we surveyed (the vast majority) was that they were very clear that they were expecting China to be the world's biggest economy by 2030. Some of the most interesting things that came out were differences between the aspirations of businesses and the expectations of people coming from Asia versus Europe....We also saw some interesting things in terms of people expecting China to exert significantly more influence in key areas such as setting of product standards, expecting to see more Chinese leaders in global business that weren't run by Chinese businesses - but also to see more takeover businesses in other economies by Chinese corporations and bringing in a very different style of Chinese management....."

:01:07:24:
Looking at the top companies for market capitalization there are several Chinese companies in the top ten which were not there ten years ago and three of the top four banks are based out of China. What are the implications of all this?
"....I think it is a real challenge for us. We really don't understand China at all. Most of the analyses I've seen about China and Chinese policy starts with the position of either being very pro-China or anti-China or treating China as though it were another country in Europe or a city in the US, and not really understanding that there is a very different culture there, a very different political motivation, a very different history...."

:01:10:58:
What projects do you have in terms of that whole region?
"....We try to take projects that are cross regions, going by industry. What we are doing at the moment is looking at the whole future of the convention industry which cuts across every country on the globe. We are looking at the issues of how these industries grow....That is the kind of work that we tend to do - advisory work for other people looking to get into China, where we use our knowledge on the ground and people we know on the ground to give us the inside insights; to advise others who are trying to break into the Chinese market or to operate there...."

:01:13:48:
What are the key findings of the research you did for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on scenarios for 2030 and the implications for global migration?
"....The study was looking at about fifty different countries that are heavy producers of migrants to OECD countries. We looked at a number of different scenarios on how the global economy could play out over time....The challenge now is in domestic economies where there is a strong need for migrants; how do you deal with the policy issues how do you deal with the social integration issues. Most of the research over the years has demonstrated that migration also drives innovation (brings new ideas and skills)...."

:01:21:21:
What top lessons and tips can your share from the projects you have worked on?
"....Change your assumptions....Think the unthinkable....Have the conversations about the big undiscussibles....Industry timelines for the future....Be explicit about assumptions, and think about a range of possible futures...."

:01:24:05:
If you were conducting this interview, what questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers?
"....'How should we be educating our children to prepare them for the future?'....'How can we avoid a future economic meltdown of the scale we have just witnessed or worse?'....'How can we deal with big global governance challenges in the age of the internet?'....'Given the failure of the COP-15 climate change summit - what should we do next?'....'We have lived with an assumption that economic growth is essential - can this continue?'...."

:01:32:01:
Rohit shares his views on the IFIP IP3 program on professionalizing the IT profession. [http://www.IPThree.org].

SpeedBit, the folks behind Video Accelerator and Download Accelerator, is developing another service centered around web video. The new offering will potentially help web users find the best web video content suited to their interests, and will also identify viral videos before they become huge hits. By identifying viral videos early, Speedbit hopes to promote them to users who may potentially miss out when a video becomes popular very quickly, and is soon forgotten.

According to SpeedBit, their technology identified the infamous BBC report of an “indestructible” mobile phone from CES this year when the video only had 797 views. In its first three days online, the video received more than 1 million views.

SpeedBit CEO Ariel Yarnitsky spoke at the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference in Munich recently about the technology. During the panel discussion, Yarnitsky shared his vision for what the service will bring:

We are overwhelmed with a gigantic ocean of content that we need to find our way across… It’s about finding those very popular videos on YouTube that we like and identifying them early enough. It’s about building our own kind of personal TV guide so we know how to navigate across.

There’s certainly a need for services that will help users cull through the vast amounts of online video. Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron launched something similar with Magma, which charts the top videos across the web, and also offers a bit of viral prediction as well. It remains to be seen how SpeedBit’s currently unnamed service differs.

SpeedBit hasn’t announced a release date for the service, but they hint that we can expect it sometime soon.

Based in Haifa, Israel, SpeedBit has been around since 1999. The company has made a name for itself by offering several methods for users to take advantage of all their available broadband bandwidth.

Citing the incoming storm and risk of mudslides, county officials tonight warned foothill residents in Station Fire burn areas that mandatory evacuation orders will go into effect tomorrow morning. By 10 a.m., residents of over 500 homes (.pdf) must vacate their La Crescenta, La Canada Flintridge, and Acton neighborhoods, according to an alert stated.

In addition to text message alerts, Sheriff's deputies will be going door-to-door to notify residents, who have been told not to leave vehicles or trash bins in the street. "The evacuations have been ordered as a safety precaution following predictions of rainfall Tuesday and Wednesday," an alert stated (.pdf). "Residents are strongly urged to comply with the evacuation orders."

The storm last weekend was less intense than rainfall in January, but due to the cumulative effect of water buildup in the mudslide prone Station Fire area, 43 homes were damaged.

American Red Cross shelters will be set up at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, 2411 Montrose Avenue, Montrose, CA 91020 for La Canada and La Cresenta residents and at Acton Community Center, 3748 Nichols St., Acton, CA 93510 for Acton residents.