Global Warming – Page 20 – artdiamondblog.com

Expert Says Australian Cow Burps Add to Global Warming

“Athol Klieve, an expert on cattle stomachs, with steers used for research on reducing methane emissions from belching cattle.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A14) GATTON, Australia — To hear Athol Klieve tell it, a key to reducing Australia’s enormous carbon emissions is to make a cow more like this country’s iconic animal — the kangaroo.
. . .
Australia contributes more greenhouse gases per capita than just about any other country, with its coal-fired power plants leading the way. But more than 10 percent of those gases come from what bureaucrats call livestock emissions — animals’ burping.
At any given point, after munching and regurgitating grass, tens of millions of Australian cattle, as well as sheep, are belching methane gases nonstop into the air. With methane considered 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere, the burping has given ammunition to environmentalists, vegetarians and other critics of beef while initially putting the large meat industry on the defensive.
. . .
Ruminants release methane because of the peculiar way they digest their food. Inside a cow’s foregut, which can contain more than 200 pounds of grass at any given time, fermentation of the food leads to the release of hydrogen, a byproduct that would slow down the fermentation. Microbes known as methanogens help the ruminants get rid of the excess hydrogen by producing methane gases that the animals release into the atmosphere.
In other animals known as hindgut fermenters, including humans — in which food is fermented after going through their stomachs — methane is sometimes released through flatulence, a fact that, Mr. Klieve said, has led to misunderstanding about his work
“We’ve had to put up with that all the time,” Mr. Klieve said. “It comes from the front end! In the cow, it comes from the front end. But if you’re a hindgut fermenter, it goes the other way.”
. . .
Like cattle, kangaroos are also foregut fermenters. But instead of relying on methanogens to get rid of the unwanted hydrogen, kangaroos use different microbes that reduce hydrogen by producing not methane, but harmless acetic acids, the basis of vinegar.
. . .
“It’s going to be very difficult to meet the current production needs, particularly for the current global population, with kangaroo,” Ms. Henry said. “You need something like 10 kangaroos to produce the same amount of meat as one steer. You can’t herd them or fence them in.”
Undaunted, a few kangaroo meat entrepreneurs are pressing ahead, seeing methane emissions as a business opportunity.

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI. “Gatton Journal; Trying to Stop Cattle Burps From Heating Up Planet.” The New York Times (Weds., July 14, 2010): A14.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 13, 2010.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

More on How Federal Regulations Delay Oil Cleanup

(p. A15) First, the Environmental Protection Agency can relax restrictions on the amount of oil in discharged water, currently limited to 15 parts per million. In normal times, this rule sensibly controls the amount of pollution that can be added to relatively clean ocean water. But this is not a normal time.

Various skimmers and tankers (some of them very large) are available that could eliminate most of the oil from seawater, discharging the mostly clean water while storing the oil onboard. While this would clean vast amounts of water efficiently, the EPA is unwilling to grant a temporary waiver of its regulations.
Next, the Obama administration can waive the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from operating in U.S. coastal waters. Many foreign countries (such as the Netherlands and Belgium) have ships and technologies that would greatly advance the cleanup. So far, the U.S. has refused to waive the restrictions of this law and allow these ships to participate in the effort.
The combination of these two regulations is delaying and may even prevent the world’s largest skimmer, the Taiwanese owned “A Whale,” from deploying. This 10-story high ship can remove almost as much oil in a day as has been removed in total–roughly 500,000 barrels of oily water per day. The tanker is steaming towards the Gulf, hoping it will receive Coast Guard and EPA approval before it arrives.

For the full story, see:

PAUL H. RUBIN. “Why Is the Gulf Cleanup So Slow? There are obvious actions to speed things up, but the government oddly resists taking them..” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 2, 2010): A15.

Defenders of Climategate Benefit from Global Warming Fears

(p. A15) Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.”
. . .
One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)–the source of the Climategate emails–was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others–one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.
It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking.

For the full commentary, see
PATRICK J. MICHAELS. “The Climategate Whitewash Continues; Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year’s data manipulation scandal. Don’t believe the ‘independent’ reviews..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., JULY 12, 2010): A15.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated JULY 10, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Global Warming Would Benefit British Sparkling Wine Growers

“Mike Roberts, at Ridgeview in 2007, says making wine is easier now.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) DITCHLING, England–The English invented sparkling wine in the 17th century, but failed to profit from it because their cold, dank summers yielded crummy grapes. Three decades later, a French monk named Dom Pérignon adapted the idea and devised a winning tipple, Champagne.

The Brits are starting to claw back some ground. In January, a little-known bubbly from the U.K’s Nyetimber Estate was crowned “world’s best sparkling wine” at a prestigious taste-off in Italy, defeating a dozen Champagnes, including Roederer, Bollinger and Pommery. Last year, when Britain hosted the G-20 meeting, another effervescent Nyetimber was served to President Barack Obama, Germany’s Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
English bubbly is on the rise partly due to better winemaking techniques. But some vintners say they’re being helped by another, unexpected factor: a warming climate.
Official data indicate that the past 10 years were the warmest on record globally. In England, this led to plumper and riper grapes most seasons, especially for sparkling wines. The number of vineyards in the U.K. jumped to 416 in 2008 from 363 in 2000, according the trade group English Wine Producers
“Just 20 years ago, it was really difficult to make good wine in cooler climate areas,” says Gregory Jones, who studies the effect of climate change on the (p. A18) global wine industry at Southern Oregon University. “Now it’s not such a challenge.”
With the help of warmer summers, “some of the risk of making sparkling wine here is gone,” says Mike Roberts, founder and chief winemaker of the Ridgeview estate here, 45 miles south of London. “We have everything going for us to out-Champagne Champagne.”
Last year, the fifth-hottest on record, Ridgeview’s grapes ripened two weeks earlier than usual, allowing for the harvest to be brought in before the onset of wet October weather. Mr. Roberts and other English winemakers say 2009 was one of the best growing seasons they’ve seen.

For the full story, see:
GAUTAM NAIK. “‘Warmer Climate Gives Cheer to Makers of British Bubbly; Thanks to Milder Summers, England Takes Some Air Out of France’s Famous Tipple.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 11, 2010): A1 & A18.

Ridgeview Estate’s wine “to out-Champagne Champagne.”

Source of photo: http://www.goodfoodpages.co.uk/images/listings/1580/large/ridgeview.jpg Source of quote: Mike Roberts above.

“Climate Change Was One of the Forces that Led to the Triumph of Homo Sapiens”

“The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in Washington includes this 30,000-year-old handprint from France.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C32) The exhibition’s theme is “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” And the new image of the human it creates is different from the one from a century ago. It isn’t that nature has suddenly become a pastoral paradise. Some of the most unusual objects here are fossilized human bones bearing scars of animal attacks: a 3-year-old’s skull from about 2.3 million years ago is marked by eagle talons in the eye sockets; an early human’s foot shows the bite marks of a crocodile. In one of the exhibition’s interactive video stations, in which you are cleverly shown how excavated remains are interpreted, you learn that the teeth of a leopard’s lower jaw found in a cave at the Swartkrans site in South Africa match the puncture marks in a nearby early-human skull: evidence of a 1.8 million-year-old killing.

. . .
During the brief 200,000-year life of Homo sapiens, at least three other human species also existed. And while this might seem to diminish any remnants of pride left to the human animal in the wake of Darwin’s theory, the exhibition actually does the opposite. It puts the human at the center, tracing how through these varied species, central characteristics developed, and we became the sole survivors. The show humanizes evolution. It is, in part, a story of human triumph.
. . .
. . . at recent excavations in China, at Majuangou, stone tools were found in four layers of rock dating from 1.66 million to 1.32 million years ago; fossil pollen proved that each of these four time periods was also associated with a different habitat. “The toolmaker, Homo erectus,” we read, “was able to survive in all of these habitats.”
That ability was crucial. The hall emphasizes that enormous changes in the planet’s climate accompanied hominin development, suggesting that the ability to adapt to such differing circumstances was the human’s strength. Climate change was one of the forces that led to the triumph of Homo sapiens.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN. “Exhibition Review; Hall of Human Origins; Searching the Bones of Our Shared Past.” The New York Times (Fri., March 19, 2010): C25 & C32.
(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated March 18, 2010.)

New York City Would Creatively Adapt to Global Warming

“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront In this MoMA show, a model by Architecture Research Office marries a wholly new landscape to Lower Manhattan’s streets.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Much is in doubt about “global warming” including how much the globe will warm, and how fast, to what extent the benefits of global warming would balance the costs, and what actions (such as Nathan Myhrvold’s creative plan) might be taken to counteract global warming.
But one certainty is that if governments leave innovative entrepreneurial capitalism alone, human creativity will find ways to adapt in order to increase the benefits and reduce the costs.
Few cities have displayed as much creative destruction in architecture as New York. (One book on New York architecture was even called The Creative Destruction of Manhattan“). The article quoted below describes some visions of how New York City might adapt to an increase in sea level that might result from global warming.

(p. C21) “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” a new show at the Museum of Modern Art, reflects a level of apocalyptic thinking about this city that we haven’t seen since it was at the edge of financial collapse in the 1970s, a time when muggers roamed freely, and graffiti covered everything.

Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the Modern’s curator of architecture and design, the show is a response to the effects that rising sea levels are expected to have on New York City and parts of New Jersey over the next 70 or so years, according to government studies. The solutions it proposes are impressively imaginative, ranging from spongelike sidewalks to housing projects suspended over water to transforming the Gowanus Canal into an oyster hatchery.
. . .
(p. C23) A general interest in re-examining parts of the urban fabric that we take for granted, like streets, piers and canals — as opposed to the more familiar desire to create striking visual objects — is one of the main strengths of the exhibition. A team led by Matthew Baird Architects, for example, has focused on a huge oil refinery in Bayonne, N.J., that, if current estimates hold, will be entirely under water before our toddlers have hit retirement age. Rather than taking the predictable and bland route of transforming the industrial site into a park, the team proposes a system of piers that would support bio-fuel and recycling plants, including one that would produce the building blocks for artificial reefs out of recycled glass.
Those large, multipronged objects, which the architects call “jacks,” could be dumped off boats in strategically chosen locations, where their forms would naturally interlock to create artificial reefs once they settled at the bottom of the harbor. The jacks are magical objects, at once tough and delicate, and when you see examples of them from across the room at MoMA, their heavy legs and crushed glass surfaces make them look almost like buildings.
But here again, what’s really commendable about the design is the desire to look deeper into how systems — in this case, global systems, both natural and economic — work. According to Mr. Baird’s research, the melting of the ice cap could one day create a northern shipping passage that would make New York Harbor virtually obsolete. The manufacturing component of the design is meant as part of a broader realignment of the city’s economy that anticipates that shift.

For the full story, see:
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF. “Architecture Review; The Future: A More Watery New York.” The New York Times (Fri., March 26, 2010): C21 & C23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: The online version of the article is dated March 25, 2010 and has the title “Architecture Review; ‘Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront’; Imagining a More Watery New York.”)

The book I mention in my comments is:
Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Minnesota Windmills Do Not Turn in Cold Weather

“Inspecting a windmill in Chaska, Minn. The blades on some in the area have been stationary.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A12) For those who suspect residents in places like Minnesota of embellishment when it comes to their tales of bitterly cold winter weather, consider this: even some wind turbines, it seems, cannot bear it.

Turbines, more than 100 feet tall, were installed last year in 11 Minnesota cities to provide power, and also to serve as educational symbols in a state that has mandated that a quarter of its electricity come from renewable resources by 2025.
One problem, though: The windmills, supposed to go online this winter, mostly just sat still, people in cities like North St. Paul and Chaska said, rarely if ever budging. Residents took note. Schoolchildren asked questions. Complaints accumulated.
“If people see a water tower, they expect it to stand still,” said Wally Wysopal, the city manager of North St. Paul. “If there’s a turbine, they want it to turn.”
No one knows for sure why these turbines do not. Officials believe there may be several reasons, but weather is the focus of much speculation.

For the full story, see:

MONICA DAVEY. “When Windmills Don’t Spin, People Expect Some Answers.” The New York Times (Fri., February 5, 2010): A12.
(Note: the online version of the article was dated February 4, 2010)

Myhrvold Innovates in Financing Innovation

“Nathan Myhrvold, chief of Intellectual Ventures, says patent holders are being treated unfairly.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

When Nathan Myhrvold was at Microsoft, he helped Bill Gates write The Road Ahead, a well-written book full of realistically optimistic speculation, forecast and analysis.
Besides his main initiative, discussed below, he has recently been in the news due to his bold and controversial suggestion for how to cheaply solve global warming.

(p. B1) BELLEVUE, Wash. — Nathan Myhrvold wants to shake up the marketplace for ideas. His mission and the activities of the company he heads, Intellectual Ventures, a secretive $5 billion investment firm that has scooped up 30,000 patents, inspire admiration and angst.

Admirers of Mr. Myhrvold, the scientist who led Microsoft’s technology development in the 1990s, see an innovator seeking to elevate the economic role and financial rewards for inventors whose patented ideas are often used without compensation by big technology companies. His detractors see a cynical operator deploying his bulging patent trove as a powerful bargaining chip, along with the implied threat of costly litigation, to prod high-tech companies to pay him lucrative fees. They call his company “Intellectual Vultures.”
White hat or black hat, Intellectual Ventures is growing rapidly and becoming a major force in the marketplace for intellectual capital. Its rise comes as Congress is considering legislation, championed by large technology companies, that would make it more difficult for patent holders to win large damage awards in court — changes that Mr. Myhrvold has opposed in Congressional testimony and that his company has lobbied against.
. . .
(p. B10) The issues surrounding Intellectual Ventures, viewed broadly, are the ground rules and incentives for innovation. “How this plays out will be crucial to the American economy,” said Josh Lerner, an economist and patent expert at the Harvard Business School.
Mr. Myhrvold certainly thinks so. He says he is trying to build a robust, efficient market for “invention capital,” much as private equity and venture capital developed in recent decades. “They started from nothing, were deeply misunderstood and were trashed by people threatened by new business models,” he said in his offices here.
Mr. Myhrvold presents his case at length in a 7,000-word article published on Thursday in the Harvard Business Review. “If we and firms like us succeed,” he writes, “the invention capital system will turbocharge technological progress, create many more new businesses, and change the world for the better.”
In the article and in conversation, Mr. Myhrvold describes the patent world as a vastly underdeveloped market, starved for private capital and too dependent on federal financing for universities and government agencies, which is mainly aimed at scientific discovery anyway. Eventually, he foresees patents being valued as a separate asset class, like real estate or securities.
His antagonists, he says, are the “cozy oligarchy” of big technology companies like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and others that typically reach cross-licensing agreements with each other, and then refuse to deal with or acknowledge the work of inventors or smaller companies.
. . .
Mr. Myhrvold personifies the term polymath. He is a prolific patent producer himself, with more than 100 held or applied for. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton and did postdoctorate research on quantum field theory under Stephen Hawking, before founding a start-up that Microsoft acquired.
He is an accomplished French chef, who has also won a national barbecue contest in Tennessee. He is an avid wildlife photographer, and he has dabbled in paleontology, working on research projects digging for dinosaur remains in the Rockies.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’.” The New York Times (Thur., February 18, 2010): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2010.)

The Bill Gates book is:
Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Myhrvold’s Harvard Business Review essay is:
Myhrvold, Nathan. “The Big Idea: Funding Eureka!” Harvard Business Review 88, no. 2 (March 2010): 40-50.

“Nathan Myhrvold with a machine that freeze-dries food. Intellectual Ventures so far has paid $315 million to individual inventors.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Briffa’s Tree Ring Evidence Undermines “Hockey Stick” Global Warming Graph

(p. A12) The problem: Using Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring techniques, researchers in the ’90s built charts suggesting temperatures in the late 20th century were the highest in a millennium. The charts were dubbed “hockey sticks” because they showed temperatures relatively flat for centuries, then angling higher recently.

But Mr. Briffa fretted about a potential issue. Thermometers show temperatures have risen since the ’60s, but tree-ring data don’t move in tandem, and sometimes show the opposite. (Average annual temperatures reached the highest on record in 2005, according to U.S. government data. They fell the next three years, and rose in 2009. All those years remain among the warmest on record.)
In his same 1999 email, Mr. Briffa said tree-ring data overall did show “unusually warm” conditions in recent decades. But, he added, “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In other words, maybe the chart shouldn’t resemble a hockey stick.
The data were the subject of heated back-and-forth before the IPCC’s 2001 report. John Christy, one of the section’s lead authors, said at the time that he tried in vain to make sure the report reflected the uncertainty.
Mr. Christy said in an interview that some of the pressure to downplay the uncertainty came from Michael Mann, a fellow lead author of that chapter, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University, and a developer of the original hockey-stick chart.
The “very prominent” use of the hockey-stick chart “overrules what tentativeness some of us actually intended,” Mr. Christy wrote to the National Research Council in the U.S. a month after the report was published. Mr. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, provided that email.
“I was suspicious of the hockey stick,” Mr. Christy said in an interview. Had Mr. Briffa’s concerns been more widely known, “The story coming out of the [report] may have been different in tone and confidence.”

For the full story, see:

JEFFREY BALL And KEITH JOHNSON. “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., February 26, 2010): A1 & A12.

Hockey stick graph is on top; more accurate, but much less publicized graph, is on bottom. Source of graphs: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Doubts on Sainthood for U.N.’s Global Warming Nobel Prize Winning Pachauri

“Rajendra K. Pachauri, right, the United Nations climate panel’s leader, at a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony with Al Gore in 2007.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist’s version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations’ climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.
They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.
The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.
But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri’s resignation last week.
Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.
They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.
The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.

For the full story, see:
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. “U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility.” The New York Times (Tues., February 9, 2010): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: The online version of the article is dated February 8, 2010, and has the title “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel.”)