Saturday, March 29, 2008

5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit

When we burn oil (or the gasoline that comes from it) we are producing CO2, which has been linked to global warming. But we also, according to some, are supporting terrorists:

In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: "The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States." Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America's foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.


But the hype doesn't match reality. Remember, the two largest suppliers of crude to the U.S. market are Canada and Mexico -- neither exactly known as a belligerent terrorist haven.


Robert Bryce is a fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. Read about his views on energy independence here. Just a few things to keep in mind, while we hear more hype on the subject from the candidates this election year. Reason has a good interview with him here.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Global warming 'may cut deaths'

Lomborg pointed out that we need to look at the effects of any change in climate, cooling or warming, and weigh both the damages and benefits. We don't hear much about the number of cold related deaths, and how they can be expected to drop in a warmer world.

A seriously hot summer between now and 2017 could claim more than 6,000 lives, the Department of Health report warns.


But it also stresses that milder winters mean deaths during this time of year - which far outstrip heat-related mortality - will continue to decline.


The report is to help health services prepare for climate change effects.


A panel of scientific experts commissioned by the Department of Health and Health Protection Agency (HPA) has looked at the way the UK has responded to rising temperatures since the 1970s, and how the risks are likely to change.


While summers in the UK became warmer in the period 1971 - 2003, there was no change in heat-related deaths, but annual cold-related mortality fell by 3% as winters became milder - so overall fewer people died as a result of extreme temperatures.


Read the whole piece here.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Adapt to Climate Change

Lomborg isn't the only one saying that "it would be easier and cheaper to adapt than fight climate change." Critics fear Greenland will melt though, as it did in a movie.

The disastrous hurricanes of recent years have become the poster children of global warming.

But Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wondered whether the billions of dollars of damage was caused by more intense storms or more coastal development.

After analyzing decades of hurricane data, Pielke concluded that rising levels of carbon dioxide had little to do with hurricane damage. Rather, it boiled down to a simple equation: Build more, lose more.

"Everything has been put on the back of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide cannot carry that weight," he said.

Pielke's analysis, published last month in the journal Natural Hazards Review, is part of a controversial movement that argues global warming over the rest of this century will play a much smaller role in unleashing planetary havoc than most scientists think.

His research has led him to believe that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt to global warming than to fight it.

Instead of spending trillions of dollars to stabilize carbon dioxide levels across the planet -- an enormously complex and expensive proposition -- the world could work on reducing hunger, storm damage and disease now, thereby neutralizing some of the most feared future problems of global warming.


Read the whole piece here.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Book Review: Cool It


Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg is a short (164 pages, if you don’t count Notes and Index) book, but a thought provoking one. Amid some of the dire predictions of catastrophe we hear and read on this topic, he takes a reasoned look at the problem and makes some worthwhile points. These include:

We have other major issues to deal with, namely HIV, malnutrition and malaria, in the Third World – the very part of the world that could suffer the most from global warming. Yet we have relatively affordable means of addressing these problems right now, rather than what problems they might face decades from now due to climate change.

The catastrophe shown in An Inconvenient Truth – cities disappearing because of a rise in sea level of 20 feet – is not supported by the models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which shows a worst case rise closer to around 2 feet over this century.

Damages due to extreme weather events are increasing, but not because of a proven link between these events and global warming. We have more people living along the coastal regions today, and they have more valuable assets to lose.

Malaria, widespread in tropical areas, was a major health problem in the US at one time, but isn’t any longer. It was eradicated not because of a change in climate, but because of increases in wealth and technology, which made spraying, draining and medical treatment all possible.

While deaths from heat waves will likely increase, a significant number of cold deaths still occur in winter, and these deaths will decrease in a warmer world.

Considering that the Kyoto Protocol was going to bring about at best a very small reduction in green house gas emissions at a rather high cost, we could do more good in the world by spending our money on micronutrients and mosquito nets to save Third World children from dying today, rather than drastic, expensive cuts in CO2 emissions in hope of saving them decades from now. In a world of finite resources and with real problems of this magnitude, we need to get the most bang for our buck. And this book is a good place to start the discussion on how to do that.