RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Russian Scientists Debunk Kyoto

The Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gases has no scientific basis and puts the Russian economy at risk, Russia's leading scientists said in official advice to President Vladimir Putin. In the document, obtained by Reuters on Monday, the Russian Academy of Sciences said the global treaty would not stabilise greenhouse gases even if it came into force.

The Academy drew up the summary after a request from Putin, who has the power to kill off the treaty worldwide by refusing to pass it to parliament for ratification. Some diplomats hope for a decision on the matter by the end of the week. "The Kyoto Protocol has no scientific foundation," said the first of the Academy's conclusions, adopted in a closed session last Friday.

Debate has intensified over the treaty, which aims to slow global warming, in advance of a self-imposed May 20 deadline for state bodies to give Putin their advice. One Putin aide attacked the treaty as an "international Aushwitz" that will strangle Russia's recovering economy.

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A well-known scandal happened in 1991, when physicists of the USSR Academy of Sciences demanded that government cease to support charlatans working on "microlepton fields' (distant biological influence of army and civil inhabitants with "torsion radiation'). About $500 million had been spent on such "investigations.' Fortunately, the Supreme Soviet Committee stopped this waste of money.

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...even those who support radical cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions are realizing that the Kyoto Protocol is a failed instrument for achieving their goals. "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge," says British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

He can say that again. India and China, which are exempt from Kyoto's emissions cuts, have no plans to submit to those mandates any time soon, though China is the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The U.S. has also consistently rejected Kyoto. This has been true throughout the Bush years, but it was equally so during the Clinton ones. In 1997, the U.S. Senate adopted the Byrd-Hagel Resolution by 95-0, urging the Clinton Administration not to sign any climate-change protocol that "would result in serious harm to the economy." In 1998 Al Gore signed the Protocol. Yet President Clinton, who was in Montreal yesterday to scold the Bush Administration for its inaction, never submitted it to the Senate.

And then there is the performance of Kyoto's signatories in meeting their own targets. Kyoto requires developed nations to bring their total greenhouse-gas emissions to 5% below their 1990 levels by 2012. Yet in 2003, emissions were above the 1990 baseline by more than 10% in Italy and Japan, more than 20% in Ireland and Canada, and more than 40% in Spain.

Germany and Britain have met their Kyoto targets, but this is the result of one-time events: the collapse of British coal and the shuttering of much of the former East Germany's industrial base. Given Germany's anemic economy and Britain's reduced growth forecasts, the appetite in either country for costly environmental virtue is not likely to increase.

Nor should it. For even as the Montreal crowd treats man-made global warming as established fact, the science behind the long-term forecasts remains ambiguous and sketchy, while the benefits of "doing something about it" are by no means clear.

Of the original 15 European Union ratifiers of Kyoto, at best four are on course to meet the treaty's target of an 8% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2008-2012 from the 1990 base-year level.

But this becomes less disappointing once you learn Kyoto's dirty little secret. Even supporters concede that if all countries complied, the amount of warming prevented by 2100 would be at most 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit, except that 0.2 degrees is immeasurable. Certainly it won't save a single polar bear.

Of course, Europe could continue setting goals and failing to meet them; but the EU is becoming irrelevant anyway. "By 2010, the net reduction in global emissions from Europe meeting the Kyoto Protocol will be only 0.1%," said Margo Thorning, senior vice president for the free-market American Council for Capital Formation, in recent congressional testimony. That's "because all the growth is coming in places like India, China, and Brazil."

And bizarrely, while these countries have ratified the treaty, they are exempt from its requirements because, until fairly recently, they weren't major greenhouse gas producers.

That's also why Kyoto signatory Canada is producing 24% more carbon dioxide than in 1990 while the U.S. is producing only 13% more. None of which prevented Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin from emitting a noxious gaseous emission accusing his southern neighbor of lacking "a global conscience."

The conference should call for ramped-up production of Not that the effort's been a total waste. It's taught us that massive international undertakings require just a bit more than making sanctimonious speeches and signing a sheet of paper.

Science and reality are causing people all over the world to wake up to the realization that, like socialism, Kyoto environmentalism has no future. A brief review should suffice to demonstrate the way the tide is flowing.

First, Kyoto isn't working. As the European Commission itself admits, western Europe is likely to miss its Kyoto targets. Canada, which has signed on to the protocol, has increased its emissions more than the USA, which famously has not. Japan is also unlikely to meet its targets. New Zealand, which thought it would be able to meet its targets easily, is now facing a massive bill of $NZ1 billion to be able to live up to its commitments.

Second, the science that supposedly drove Kyoto is looking shakier. Paleoclimatologists have recently admitted that the role of natural factors in driving temperatures may well be greater than supposed, "devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future predicted scenarios." They go on, "If that turns out to be the case, agreements such as the Kyoto protocol that intend to reduce emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, would be less effective than thought." Meanwhile, other scientists have found that "Natural climatic excursions may be much larger than we imagine. So large, perhaps, that they render insignificant the changes, human-induced or otherwise, observed during the past century."

At the same time, other scientists are finding greater evidence for the role of solar influence on climate, or non-greenhouse anthropogenic sources such as changes in land use. On top of the role of aerosols in cooling the atmosphere and black carbon (soot) in heating it up, it seems that there are far more factors feeding in to the global temperature variable than were thought important even a couple of years ago. There certainly seem to be many human-caused sources of warming, but whether these are the prime drivers of the recent warming trend is once again open to doubt, and not all of them are to do with fossil fuel emissions. Kyoto, which its supporters admit even if fully implemented would avert just 0.07°C of warming by 2050, may prove to be less effective at controlling global temperature than thought.

Science is even hacking away at some of the other assumptions behind Kyoto. One of the assumptions that brought several countries round to backing it was that forests act as carbon "sinks," soaking up large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away. So, under the terms of the protocol, countries can offset emissions by planting more trees. Groups such as Future Forests (now The Carbon Neutral Company) grew up to capitalize on this assumption. Now, however, it seems that plants themselves are a much more important source of another, more potent greenhouse gas, Methane, than was previously realized. What this means for the Kyoto provision has yet to be decided, but it is possible that the value of carbon sinks in Kyoto will have to be downgraded, costing countries like New Zealand even more. And those celebrities and organizations who have excused the carbon dioxide they produce jetting around the world to global warming conferences by planting trees may have to find new indulgences to buy.

Finally, it has often been said that Kyoto may not be perfect, but it is the only game in town. No longer. Last week, the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate met in Australia. Its members, including Australia, China, India, and the U.S., are all committed to improving the climate without imposing unrealistic targets for energy starvation.

When the greatest present and future emitters of greenhouse gases are prepared to get together and address the issue practically, while the Kyoto signatories fail to live up to their commitments, progress is made. These countries have awoken from the Kyoto slumber. For the rest, unless they recognize that Kyoto is actually pretty vacant, there really is no future.

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First Amongst Daves said:
And therein lies the vested interests. What are scientists doing talking about economics?

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The Tungushka object, not human emissions, caused the slight 20th century warming

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil.

Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.

Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

The Tunguska Event, sometimes known as the Tungus Meteorite is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. The event released as much energy as fifteen one-megaton atomic bombs. As well as blasting an enormous amount of dust into the atmosphere, felling 60 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres. Shaidurov suggests that this explosion would have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere and change its structure." Such meteoric disruption was the trigger for the subsequent rise in global temperatures.

Global warming is thought to be caused by the "greenhouse effect". Energy from the sun reaches the earth's surface and warms it, without the greenhouse effect most of this energy is then lost as the heat radiates back into space. However, the presence of so-called greenhouse gases at high altitude absorb much of this energy and then radiate a proportion back towards the earth's surface. Causing temperatures to rise.

Many natural gases and some of those released by conventional power stations, vehicle and aircraft exhausts act as greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide, natural gas, or methane, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are all potent greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide and methane are found naturally in the atmosphere, but it is the gradual rise in levels of these gases since the industrial revolution, and in particular the beginning of the twentieth century, that scientists have blamed for the gradual rise in recorded global temperature. Attempts to reverse global warming, such as the Kyoto Protocol, have centred on controlling and even reducing CO2 emissions.

However, the most potent greenhouse gas is water, explains Shaidurov and it is this compound on which his study focuses. According to Shaidurov, only small changes in the atmospheric levels of water, in the form of vapour and ice crystals can contribute to significant changes to the temperature of the earth's surface, which far outweighs the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.

The role of water vapour in controlling our planet's temperature was hinted at almost 150 years ago by Irish scientist John Tyndall. Tyndall, who also provided an explanation as to why the sky is blue, explained the problem: "The strongest radiant heat absorber, is the most important gas controlling Earth's temperature. Without water vapour, he wrote, the Earth's surface would be 'held fast in the iron grip of frost'." Thin clouds at high altitude allow sunlight to reach the earth's surface, but reflect back radiated heat, acting as an insulating greenhouse layer.

Water vapour levels are even less within our control than CO levels. According to Andrew E. Dessler of the Texas A & M University writing in 'The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change', "Human activities do not control all greenhouse gases, however. The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour, he says, "Human activities have little direct control over its atmospheric abundance, which is controlled instead by the worldwide balance between evaporation from the oceans and precipitation."

As such, Shaidurov has concluded that only an enormous natural phenomenon, such as an asteroid or comet impact or airburst, could seriously disturb atmospheric water levels, destroying persistent so-called 'silver', or noctilucent, clouds composed of ice crystals in the high altitude mesosphere (50 to 85km). The Tunguska Event was just such an event, and coincides with the period of time during which global temperatures appear to have been rising the most steadily - the twentieth century. There are many hypothetical mechanisms of how this mesosphere catastrophe might have occurred, and future research is needed to provide a definitive answer.

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the G-man said:

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First Amongst Daves said:
And therein lies the vested interests. What are scientists doing talking about economics?

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Others would argue the "vested interests" are the ones arguing for Kyoto:

The global warming theory has caused an absolute shower of research money to fall down upon the heads of atmospheric scientists -- people who once got little funding. So few atmospheric scientists question the theory outright. It would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Even when they find something good about global warming they manage to make it sound bad.

So the only scientists who often question the theory are Russian scientists (they don't get much in the way of research grants anyway) and retired scientists (their research grant days are over).

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Wonder Boy said:
I found this to be an interesting development, that Kyoto could be accepted on a local level, if not a national level.

PBS News story: Local U.S. cities implement compliance to the Kyoto accord, despite Presidential, House and Senate rejection

It gives the U. S. a chance to see if it turns out to be a benefit in the regions where it is adopted.
Or whether it proves to be a smarter decision to reject it, in the regions that choose not to accept it.

Also, many places are finding there's economic benefit to implementing Kyoto-based pollution control standards, that small businesses are developing to fill the need, to creatively find cost-efficient ways to deal with pollution, that develops better ways to combat pollution while keeping costs down.

And that part surprised me most:
That fighting pollution is widely considered to be a drain of resources that hurts the economy, while instead it has resulted in forming an environmental control industry, that actually builds the economy.

But I think this slower implementation might be the right path:
1) gradually testing the water for implementation, to show that compliance with Kyoto can be done without hurting the economy,
2) testing new technologies in a capitalist way that encourages innovation to fill the need.

As opposed to a wasteful federally-imposed implementation that would result in a lot of waste before the nation was ready to fully implement Kyoto-type environmental controls.

Locally electing to implement Kyoto is the American way !

Elective participation, innovation, cost-efficient capitalism.

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from my linked PBS News article:
So far, 153 countries have ratified the treaty, constituting more than 61 percent of global emissions.
The treaty was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, but did not go into effect until February 2005.

Member nations must reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent compared to the year 1990.

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A new study provides experimental evidence that cosmic rays may be a major factor in causing the Earth’s climate to change.

Given the stakes in the current debate over global warming, the research may very well turn out to be one of the most important climate experiments of our time – if only the media would report the story.

Ten years ago, Danish researchers Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen first hypothesized that cosmic rays from space influence the Earth’s climate by effecting cloud formation in the lower atmosphere. Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover – that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth’s climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the sun’s magnetic field which shields the Earth from cosmic rays. According to the hypothesis, then, less cosmic radiation would mean less cloud formation and, ultimately, warmer temperatures – precisely what was observed during the 20th century.

If correct, the Svensmark hypothesis poses a serious challenge to the current global warming alarmism that attributes the 20th century’s warmer temperatures to manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Supreme Court hears arguments this week in a case that could determine whether the Bush administration must change course in how it deals with the threat of global warming.

A dozen states as well as environmental groups and large cities are trying to convince the court that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate, as a matter of public health, the amount of carbon dioxide that comes from vehicles.

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels are burned. It is the principal "greenhouse" gas that many scientists believe is flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, leading to a warming of the earth and widespread ecological changes.

The Bush administration intends to argue before the court on Wednesday that the EPA lacks the power under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The agency contends that even if it did have such authority, it would have discretion under the law on how to address the problem without imposing emissions controls.

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the G-man said:
Global Warming 'Can't Be Stopped'

So, an "international panel" says global warming and sea-level rises will continue regardless of greenhouse gas reduction.

So why bother destroying the US economy with all these proposed draconian regulations?

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klinton said:
Because the longer we continue ignoring the reality, the worse the outcome will be. At present, we have some50 odd years of worsening conditions, were we to return to living in sod houses today. It's a compound problem, not a 'the damage is already done so fuck it' scenario. The longer we remain hell bent on living as we do, the worse it will get.

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...and predicting that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will "continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution.

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It also said no matter how much civilization slows or reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and sea level rise will continue on for centuries.

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The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled "Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?"

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the G-man said:
HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER ICE STORM

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled "Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?"

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Karl Hungus said:
Are you that stupid? Global warming isn't a simple matter of it's hotter and there's no more cold, it's a complex balance of weather that is being effected. So warmer (even by a few degrees) water can seriously amp up storms.

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Beardguy57 said:
Some scientists say that, after enough global warming occurs, the currents of the oceans will be altered enough that it will cause global cooling, and then a new ice age.

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Very good, Jerry. And I'm sure they're compensated quite well for being such good little scientists and saying what the people funding their studies want to hear.

Part of [Gore's] scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

"I don't want to pick on Al Gore," Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. "But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." . . .

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate

In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

First, we are not in imminent danger of massive sea-level rises. In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore warns of seas rising by 20 feet, and shows a dramatic image of lower Manhattan flooded by the swollen Hudson River.

But this will only happen if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets disappear overnight — a highly unlikely event. The collected scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose word climate alarmists preach as gospel when convenient, estimates only 17 inches of sea-level rise this century.

Melting sufficient to flood New York would take millennia, never mind centuries. We should have plenty of time to build flood defenses.

Second, if global warming is as big a threat as claimed, it will not be averted by minor steps like changing a few light bulbs, buying carbon offsets or driving hybrid cars. Gore himself has talked of a “wrenching transformation” in our lifestyles (I won’t mention his heated pool).

That’s because everyone acknowledges that the Kyoto Protocol, even when fully and successfully implemented by all its parties, will avert a barely measurable 0.07°C of warming by 2050.

To stop the more extreme estimates of warming, we would need something like 30 Kyotos. President Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto process because of its likely cost of $100 billion to $400 billion annually to the U.S. economy.

Third, some national security hawks argue that we must reduce American use of petroleum because it funds Middle Eastern terrorists. This argument is overblown. America actually imports more oil from Africa than it does from the Middle East, which supplies only about 20 percent of our oil imports.

Yet the Middle East produces oil more cheaply than anywhere else. That means that, if we were to use less gasoline, it would be the more expensive producers, like Canada and those African states, that would be the first to be hit by falling demand. If that made production in those countries uneconomic, there’s actually a chance that our supply of gas from the Middle East would rise.

Fourth, polar bears are not becoming extinct as a result of decreasing Arctic ice. We know that polar bears have survived warmer periods in the past, so there is no reason to suspect they will suffer a threat of extinction now.

The chief polar bear biologist for the Canadian province of Nunavut recently wrote: “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”

Yet if the polar bear is listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because of global warming, environmentalists will be able to block the new power stations and refineries the nation desperately needs.

Finally, the rest of the world is not waiting for America’s lead on climate change. Europe has attempted to put a price on carbon and has failed to reduce emissions because of its internal tensions. Measures attempted in Canada, Japan and New Zealand have also failed.

China, India, and the G-77 group of developing nations have outright refused to accept any restriction on their emissions (China could overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter later this year).

The rest of the world has two reasons for demanding American action: First, blaming America absolves them of responsibility and, second, emissions restrictions will hobble America’s economy, allowing the rest of the world to play catch-up.

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the G-man said (lotsa emphasis added):
The rest of the world has two reasons for demanding American action: First, blaming America absolves them of responsibility and, second, emissions restrictions will hobble America’s economy, allowing the rest of the world to play catch-up.

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Karl Hungus said:
the electric car worked. they even developed a battery to extend the mileage on it to that of a normal car with a full tank of gas.
we don't need carbon fuel cells or hybrid cars that still use oil unless our goal is to keep the billions rolling into texaco. had bush not pulled out of the federal mandate on zero emission vehicles we would be easily able to lower carbon emissions.

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the G-man said:

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Karl Hungus said:
the electric car worked. they even developed a battery to extend the mileage on it to that of a normal car with a full tank of gas.
we don't need carbon fuel cells or hybrid cars that still use oil unless our goal is to keep the billions rolling into texaco. had bush not pulled out of the federal mandate on zero emission vehicles we would be easily able to lower carbon emissions.

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Okay, assuming that the above is true, even if you suddenly mandated that every car made be "zero" emission vehicles, it would still take decades to replace every car currently on the road with a "zero emission" car.

And where do we get electricity? Power plants. What do power plants typically run on? Fossil fuels.

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actually charging the battery took about 60 cents worth of electricity.
And with the the $9billion lost on its way to Iraq and the billions more Haliburton ripped off from us the government could provide subsidy checks for people to buy the cars. And while the electric cars did cost $30,000 when they were leased (and then destroyed by the car company despite leasees wish to buy) that high cost was due to the low production. If they mass produced the cars they'd run the usual price.
But then again big oil (or George Bush's friends) would lose money so....

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the G-man said:

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Karl Hungus said:
the electric car worked. they even developed a battery to extend the mileage on it to that of a normal car with a full tank of gas.
we don't need carbon fuel cells or hybrid cars that still use oil unless our goal is to keep the billions rolling into texaco. had bush not pulled out of the federal mandate on zero emission vehicles we would be easily able to lower carbon emissions.

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Okay, assuming that the above is true, even if you suddenly mandated that every car made be "zero" emission vehicles, it would still take decades to replace every car currently on the road with a "zero emission" car.

And where do we get electricity? Power plants. What do power plants typically run on? Fossil fuels.

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the G-man said:
And you know who pushes windmill technology over here, among others? George W. Bush.

As such, it would be difficult to say that the US government hasn't embraced that particular method.

Unfortunately, the solution to replacing coal and other fossil fuels is going to boil down to one thing: nuclear power.

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the G-man said:
If electric cars would have been practical and profitable they wouldn't have been scrapped. No company stays in business by scrapping a good product in favor of a poor product.

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