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This past October, in our report “Ausra’s Solar Thermal Power,” we reported on this newcomer in the rapidly growing solar thermal power industry, with at least two innovations that could make them a major participant in this sector which is finally taking off. One of Ausra’s innovations is the design of their solar field – they have taken the single axis parabolic trough design, and revised it so that instead of one linear heat exchanger being positioned at the focal point of each mirrored parabolic trough, ten mirrors focus on one shared linear heat exchanger. In terms of mirrors vs. heat exchangers, going from one-to-one to ten-to-one saves a lot of money in plumbing costs, and makes an awful lot of intuitive sense.

SOLAR RADIATION – CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES

Average kWh per square meter per day – the yellow areas absorb 7-8, the blue areas average around 1-2. (Source: Sandia National Labs)

Ausra’s other innovation may be more significant, however, as well as harder to understand. Ausra claims they have a proprietary method to store steam from the solar field, so their solar thermal power plant will be able to continue to generate electricity after the sunlight has faded. This is important because the solar peak is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and the demand peak is between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. If you can store the surplus thermal energy captured during peak sunlight and discharge it during peak demand six hours later, you will eliminate the biggest challenge facing solar power, which is that grid demand for electricity doesn’t exactly track with the availability of solar energy.

Storing steam is not easy. Today we talked with Greg Kolb, who is a distinguished member of the technical staff for concentrating solar power at Sandia Labs in New Mexico. Kolb stated that to-date thermal storage has usually used molten salt. Kolb explained that salt has been easier to work with because it is cheap, with nitrate salt there are no corrosion issues, it has twice the density of water, the molten salt can run directly through the heat exchangers in the solar field (just like water), and unlike water, molton salt doesn’t require high pressure vessels. Kolb claimed that “to get any economics with steam you would need a 1,500 PSI vessel.” And if Ausra’s 1 square mile solar field feeds steam to a 175 megawatt turbine that they want to run for, say, two hours after the sun is way past peak, even at a modern turbine efficiency of 50%, they are going to have to store 700 megawatt-hours of energy in the form of steam. At 1,170 BTUs per pound stored in steam at 1,500 PSI, at a weight density of .277 cubic feet per pound, 700 megawatt-hours of steam storage will require a steam storage volume of 16,000 cubic meters. And if they want to produce electricity 24 hours per day, they’ll need a lot more than that.

A few weeks ago at the AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit West conference, an engineer explained the difficulties with steam. Basically, the greater the volume of storage you need to keep under pressure, the stronger the walls of the pressure vessel will need to be. To use a basic example, if you have a cubic meter of interior storage, the 1,500 PSI energy contained in a cubic meter of volume is pushing against 6 square meters of interior vessel surface (a surface area to volume ratio of 6 to 1). But if you double the dimensions to 2 meters on a side, you have 24 square meters of interior surface area to contain 8 cubic meters of 1,500 PSI energy (a surface area to volume ratio of 3 to 1). That is to say, using this example, if the amount of interior surface relative to the amount of energy stored inside has halved, the walls have to be at least twice as thick in the larger vessel. Based on all this, it appears likely Ausra’s solution will employ multiple steam storage units.

Clearly if Ausra has figured this out, then they will be offering a huge step forward to the solar industry. Solar and wind energy cannot realize their full potential until there are viable, economic, storage technologies. And steam isn’t the only method where you can make a case for an economically viable solar thermal storage alternative. Kolb made a convincing case for using molton salt storage technology, and this method is being used in other installations around the world, primarily in Spain. One of the biggest companies active today in solar thermal utility scale electricity is Acciona Energia, based in Spain with installations all over the world. While they have experimented with steam storage as a 30 minute buffer to assist a solar field to provide even power through “cloud transients,” the heavy lifting 24 hour storage technology they are betting on is molten salts.

The most salient observation we can think of regarding solar thermal today is its seeming inevitability. Whether utility scale solar thermal storage arrives using molten salt, steam, or some other technology, it appears to be solveable, and the prospect of sub $.10 kWh renewable electricity with virtually no externalities is going to be a good business proposition for a very long time.

Is climate change endangering the Polar Bear?

Al Gore delivering his famous presentation. But are his arguments really beyond debate?

In October 2007 the High Court in London identified nine “errors” in the movie An Inconvenient Truth. The judge had stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note, he would have made a finding that the Government’s distribution of the film to all English secondary schools had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children.

A Gore spokesperson and “environment advisor,” Ms. Kalee Kreider, has issued a questionable response to this news. She begins by saying that the film presented “thousands and thousands of facts.” It did not: just 2,000 “facts” in 93 minutes would have been one fact every three seconds. The film contained only a few dozen points, most of which will be seen to have been substantially inaccurate. The judge concentrated only on nine points which even the UK Government, to which Gore is a climate-change advisor, had to admit did not represent mainstream scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider then states, incorrectly, that the judge himself had never used the term “errors.” In fact, the judge used the term “errors,” in inverted commas, throughout his judgment.

Next, Ms. Kreider makes some unjustifiable ad hominem attacks on Mr. Stewart Dimmock, the lorry driver, school governor and father of two school-age children who was the plaintiff in the case. This memorandum, however, will eschew any ad hominem response, and will concentrate exclusively on the 35 scientific inaccuracies and exaggerations in Gore’s movie.

Ms. Kreider then says, “The process of creating a 90-minute documentary from the original peer-reviewed science for an audience of moviegoers in the U.S. and around the world is complex.” However, the single web-page entitled “The Science” on the movie’s official website contains only two references to articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. There is also a reference to a document of the IPCC, but its documents are not independently peer-reviewed in the usual understanding of the term.

Ms. Kreider then says, “The judge stated clearly that he was not attempting to perform an analysis of the scientific questions in his ruling.” He did not need to. Each of the nine “errors” which he identified had been admitted by the UK Government to be inconsistent with the mainstream of scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider says the IPCC’s results are sometimes “conservative,” and continues: “Vice President Gore tried to convey in good faith those threats that he views as the most serious.” Readers of the long list of errors described in this memorandum will decide for themselves whether Mr. Gore was acting in good faith. However, in this connection it is significant that each of the 35 errors listed below misstates the conclusions of the scientific literature or states that there is a threat where there is none or exaggerates the threat where there may be one. All of the errors point in one direction – towards undue alarmism. Not one of the errors falls in the direction of underestimating the degree of concern in the scientific community. The likelihood that all 35 of the errors listed below could have fallen in one direction purely by inadvertence is less than 1 in 34 billion.

We now itemize 35 of the scientific errors and exaggerations in Al Gore’s movie. The first nine were listed by the judge in the High Court in London in October 2007 as being “errors.” The remaining 26 errors are just as inaccurate or exaggerated as the nine spelt out by the judge, who made it plain during the proceedings that the Court had not had time to consider more than these few errors. The judge found these errors serious enough to require the UK Government to pay substantial costs to the plaintiff.

#1 – Sea Level Rising Six Meters:

Gore says that a sea-level rise of up to 6 m (20 ft) will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland. Though Gore does not say that the sea-level rise will occur in the near future, the judge found that, in the context, it was clear that this is what he had meant, since he showed expensive graphical representations of the effect of his imagined 6 m (20 ft) sea-level rise on existing populations, and he quantified the numbers who would be displaced by the sea-level rise.

The IPCC says sea-level increases up to 7 m (23 ft) above today’s levels have happened naturally in the past climate, and would only be likely to happen again after several millennia. In the next 100 years, according to calculations based on figures in the IPCC’s 2007 report, these two ice sheets between them will add a little over 6 cm (2.5 inches) to sea level, not 6 m (this figure of 6 cm is 15% of the IPCC’s total central estimate of a 43 cm or 1 ft 5 in sea-level rise over the next century). Gore has accordingly exaggerated the official sea-level estimate by nearly 10,000 percent.

Ms. Kreider says the IPCC estimates a sea-level rise of “59 cm” by 2100. She fails to point out that this amounts to less than 2 ft, not the 20 ft imagined by Gore. She also fails to point out that this is the IPCC’s upper estimate, on its most extreme scenario. And she fails to state that the IPCC, faced with a stream of peer-reviewed articles stating that sea-level rise is not a threat, has reduced this upper estimate from 3 ft in 2001 to less than 2 ft (i.e. half the mean centennial sea-level rise that has occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago) in 2007.

Ms. Kreider says the IPCC’s 2007 sea-level calculations excluded contributions from Greenland and West Antarctica because they could not be quantified. However, Table SPM1 of the 2007 report quantifies the contributions of these two ice-sheets to sea-level rise as representing about 15% of the total change.

The report also mentions the possibility that there may be an unquantified further contribution in future from these two ice sheets arising from “dynamical ice flow.” However, the Greenland ice sheet rests in a depression in the bedrock created by its own weight, wherefore “dynamical ice flow” is impossible, and the IPCC says that temperature would have to be sustained at more than 5.5 degrees C above its present level for several millennia before half the Greenland ice sheet could melt, causing sea level to rise by some 3 m (10 ft).

Finally, the IPCC’s 2007 report estimates that the likelihood that humankind is having any influence on sea level at all is little better than 50:50.

The judge was accordingly correct in finding that Gore’s presentation of the imagined imminent threat of a 6 m (20 ft) sea-level rise, with his account of the supposed impact on the present-day populations of Manhattan, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, etc., etc, was not a correct statement of the mainstream science on this question.

#2 – Pacific islands “drowning”

Gore says low-lying inhabited Pacific coral atolls are already being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming, leading to the evacuation of several island populations to New Zealand. However, the atolls are not being inundated, except where dynamiting of reefs or over-extraction of fresh water by local populations has caused damage.

Furthermore, corals can grow at ten times the predicted rate of increase in sea level. It is not by some accident or coincidence that so many atolls reach just a few feet above the ocean surface.

Ms. Kreider says, “The IPCC estimates that 150 million environmental refugees could exist by the year 2050, due mainly to the effects of coastal flooding, shoreline erosion and agricultural disruption.” However, the IPCC cannot be basing its estimate on sea-level rise, since even its maximum projected rise of just 30 cm (1 ft) by 2050 would not cause significant coastal flooding or shoreline erosion. There are several coastlines (the east coast of England, for instance) where the land is sinking as a consequence of post-ice-age isostatic recovery, or where (as in Bangladesh) tectonic subduction is similarly causing the land to sink. But such natural causes owe nothing to sea-level rise.

There have been no mass evacuations of populations of islanders as suggested by Gore, though some residents of Tuvalu have asked to be moved to New Zealand, even though the tide-gauges maintained until recently by the National Tidal Facility of Australia show a mean annual sea-level rise over the past half-century equivalent to the thickness of a human hair. The problem with the Carteret Islands, mentioned by Ms. Kreider, arose not because of rising sea levels but because of imprudent dynamiting of the reefs by local fishermen.

In the Maldives, a detailed recent study showed that sea levels were unchanged today compared with 1250 years ago, though they have been higher in much of the intervening period, and have very seldom been lower.

A well-established tree very close to the Maldivian shoreline and only inches above sea level was recently uprooted by Australian environmentalists anxious to destroy this visible proof that sea level cannot have risen very far.

#3 – Thermohaline circulation “stopping”

Gore says “global warming” may shut down the thermohaline circulation in the oceans, which he calls the “ocean conveyor,” plunging Europe into an ice age. It will not. A paper published in 2006 says: “Analyses of ocean observations and model simulations suggest that changes in the thermohaline circulation during the last century are likely the result of natural multidecadal climate variability. Indications of a sustained thermohaline circulation weakening are not seen during the last few decades. Instead, a strengthening since the 1980s is observed.”

Ms. Kreider, for Mr. Gore, says that “multiple scientists” have claimed that we cannot exclude the possibility of the disruption or shutdown of the Conveyor. Disruption, perhaps: shutdown, no. It is now near-universally accepted that the thermohaline circulation cannot be and will not be shut down by “global warming,” and the film should have been corrected to reflect the consensus.

#4 – CO2 “driving temperature”

Gore says that in each of the last four interglacial warm periods it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that caused changes in temperature. It was the other way about. Changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 concentration by between 800 and 2800 years, as scientific papers including the paper on which Gore’s film had relied had made clear.

Ms. Kreider says it is true that “greenhouse gas levels and temperature changes in the ice signals have a complicated relationship but they do fit.” This does not address Gore’s error at all. The judge found that Gore had very clearly implied that it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that had led to changes in temperature in the palaeoclimate, when the scientific literature is unanimous (save only for a single paper by James Hansen, whom Gore trusts) to the effect that the relationship was in fact the other way about, with a carbon dioxide feedback contributing only a comparatively insignificant further increase to temperature after the temperature change had itself initiated a change in carbon dioxide concentration.

The significance of this error was explained during the court proceedings, and was accepted by the judge. Gore says that the 100 ppmv difference between carbon dioxide concentrations during ice-age temperature minima and interglacial temperature maxima represents “the difference between a nice day and a mile of ice above your head.” This would imply a CO2 effect on temperature about 10 times greater than that regarded as plausible by the consensus of mainstream scientific opinion (see Error 10).

Ms. Kreider refers readers to a “more complete description” available at a website maintained by, among others, two of the three authors of the now-discredited “hockey stick” graph that falsely attempted to abolish the Mediaeval Warm Period. The National Academy of Sciences in the US had found that graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from zero” – i.e., the graph was useless.

#5 – Snows of Kilimanjaro “melting”

Gore says “global warming” has been melting the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. It is not.

The melting of the Furtwangler Glacier at the summit of the mountain began 125 years ago. More of the glacier had melted before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936 than afterward.

Temperature at the summit never rises above freezing and is at an average of 7 Celsius. The cause of the melting is long-term climate shifts exacerbated by imprudent regional deforestation, and has nothing to do with “global warming.”

Ms. Kreider says, “Every tropical glacier for which we have documented evidence shows that glaciers are retreating.” However, a recent survey of the glaciers in the tropical Andes shows that they were largely ice-free in the past 10,000 years, except on the very highest peaks. The mere fact of warming or melting, therefore, tells us nothing of the cause.

Ms. Kreider says, “Global warming exacerbates the stresses that ecosystems (and humans) are already experiencing.” However, since the temperature at the summit of Kilimanjaro remains below freezing and has not risen in 30 years, “global warming” is not “exacerbating the stresses” at the summit of Kilimanjaro.

#6 – Lake Chad “drying up”

Gore says “global warming” dried up Lake Chad in Africa. It did not. Over-extraction of water and changing agricultural patterns dried the lake, which was also dry in 8500BC, 5500BC, 1000BC and 100BC. Ms. Kreider says, “There are multiple stresses upon Lake Chad.” However, the scientific consensus is that at present those “stresses” do not include “global warming.”

#7 – Hurricane Katrina “man made”

Gore says Hurricane Katrina, that devastated New Orleans in 2005, was caused by “global warming.” It was not. It was caused by the failure of Gore’s party, in the administration of New Orleans, to heed 30 years of warnings by the Corps of Engineers that the levees dams that kept New Orleans dry could not stand a direct hit by a hurricane. Katrina was only Category 3 when it struck the levees. They failed, as the Engineers had said they would. Gore’s party, not “global warming,” was to blame for the consequent death and destruction.

Ms. Kreider says, “Mr. Gore has never addressed the issue of climate change and hurricane frequency.” What Gore actually says, however, addresses the frequency not only of hurricanes but also of typhoons and tornadoes

“We have seen in the last couple of years, a lot of big hurricanes. Hurricanes Jean, Francis and Ivan were among them. In the same year we had that string of big hurricanes; we also set an all time record for tornadoes in the United States. Japan again didn’t get as much attention in our news media, but they set an all time record for typhoons. The previous record was seven. Here are all ten of the ones they had in 2004.”

For the record, however, the number of Atlantic hurricanes shows no trend over the past half century; the number of typhoons has fallen throughout the past 30 years; the number of tornadoes has risen only because of better detection systems for smaller tornadoes; but the number of larger tornadoes in the US has fallen.

#8 – Polar bear “dying”

Gore says a scientific study shows that polar bears are being killed swimming long distances to find ice that has melted away because of “global warming.” They are not. The study, by Monnett & Gleason (2005), mentioned just four dead bears. They had died in an exceptional storm, with high winds and waves in the Beaufort Sea. The amount of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea has grown over the past 30 years. A report for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bears, which are warm-blooded, have grown in numbers where temperature has increased, and have become fewer where temperature has fallen. Polar bears evolved from brown bears 200,000 years ago, and survived the last interglacial period, when global temperature was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and there was probably no Arctic ice-cap at all. The real threat to polar bears is not “global warming” but hunting. In 1940, there were just 5,000 polar bears worldwide. Now that hunting is controlled, there are 25,000.

Ms. Kreider says sea-ice “was the lowest ever measured for minimum extent in 2007.” She does not say that the measurements, which are done by satellite, go back only 29 years. She does not say that the North-West Passage, a good proxy for Arctic sea-ice extent, was open to shipping in 1945, or that Amundsen passed through in a sailing vessel in 1903.

#9 – Coral reefs “bleaching”

Gore says coral reefs are “bleaching” because of “global warming.” They are not. There was some bleaching in 1998, but this was caused by the exceptional El Nino Southern Oscillation that year. Two similarly severe El Ninos over the past 250 years also caused extensive bleaching. “Global warming” was nothing to do with it.

Ms. Kreider says, “The IPCC and other scientific bodies have long identified increases in ocean temperatures with the bleaching of coral reefs.” So they have: but the bleaching in 1998 occurred as a result not of “global warming” but of a rare, though not unique, severe El Nino Southern Oscillation.

#10 – 100 ppmv of CO2 “melting mile-thick ice”

Gore implies that the difference of just 100 parts per million by volume in CO2 concentration between an interglacial temperature maximum and an ice-age temperature minimum causes “the difference between a nice day and having a mile of ice above your head.” It does not. Gore’s implication has the effect of overstating the mainstream consensus estimate of the effect of CO2 on temperature at least tenfold.

Temperature changes by up to 12 degrees C between glacial minima and interglacial maxima, but CO2 concentration changes by no more than 100 ppmv. Gore is accordingly implying that 100 ppmv can cause a temperature increase of up to 12 degrees C. However, the consensus as expressed by the IPCC is that 100 ppmv of increased CO2 concentration, from 180 to 280 ppmv, would increase radiant energy flux in the atmosphere by 2.33 watts per square meter, or less than 1.2 degrees Celsius including the effect of temperature feedbacks.

#11 – Hurricane Caterina “manmade”

Gore says that Hurricane Caterina, the only hurricane ever to strike the coast of Brazil, was caused by “global warming.” It was not. In 2004, Brazil’s summer sea surface temperatures were cooler than normal, not warmer. But air temperatures were the coldest in 25 years. The air was so much colder than the water that it caused a heat flux from the water to the air similar to that which fuels hurricanes in warm seas.

#12 – Japanese typhoons “a new record”

Gore says that 2004 set a new record for the number of typhoons striking Japan. It did not. The trend in the number of typhoons, and of tropical cyclones, has fallen throughout the past 50 years. The trend in rainfall from cyclones has also fallen, and there has been no trend in monsoon rainfall.

#13 – Hurricanes “getting stronger”

Gore says scientists had been giving warnings that hurricanes will get stronger because of “global warming.” They will not. Over the past 60 years there has been no change in the strength of hurricanes, even though hydrocarbon use went up six-fold in the same period. Research by Dr. Kerry Emanuel, cited by Ms. Kreider, has been discredited by more recent findings that wind-shear effects tend to nullify the amplification of hurricane strength which he had suggested, and, of course, by the observed failure of hurricanes to gain strength during the past 60 years of “global warming.”

#14 – Big storm insurances losses “increasing”

Gore says insurance losses arising from large storms and other extreme-weather events are increasing, by implication because of “global warming.” They are not. Insured losses, as a percentage of the population of coastal areas in the path of hurricanes, were lower even in 2005 than they had been in 1925. In 2006, a very quiet hurricane season, Lloyds of London posted their biggest-ever profit: £3.6 billion.

#15 – Mumbai “flooding”

Gore says flooding in Mumbai is increasing, by implication because of “global warming.” It is not. Rainfall trends at the two major weather stations in Mumbai show no increase in heavy rainfall over the past 48 years.

#16 – Severe tornadoes “more frequent”

Gore says that 2004 set an all-time record for tornadoes in the US. More tornadoes are being reported because detection systems are better than they were. But the number of severe tornadoes has been falling for more than 50 years.

#17 – The sun “heats the Arctic ocean”

Gore says that ice-melt allows the Sun to heat the Arctic Ocean, and a diagram shows the Sun’s rays heating it directly. It does not. The ocean emits radiant energy at the moment of absorption, and would freeze if there were no atmosphere. It is the atmosphere, not the Sun that warms the ocean. Also, Gore’s diagram confuses the tropopause with the ionosphere, and he makes a number of other errors indicating that he does not understand the elementary physics of radiative transfer.

#18 – Arctic “warming fastest”

Gore says the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the planet. It is not. While it is in general true that during periods of warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) the Arctic will warm faster than other regions, Gore does not mention that the Arctic has been cooling over the past 60 years, and is now one degree Celsius cooler than it was in the 1940s. There was a record amount of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in 2001. Several vessels were icebound in the Arctic in the spring of 2007, but few newspapers reported this. The newspapers reported that the North-West Passage was free of ice in 2007, and said that this was for the first time since records began: but the records, taken by satellites, had only begun 29 years previously. The North-West Passage had also been open for shipping in 1945, and, in 1903, the great Norwegian explorer Amundsen had passed through it in a sailing ship.

#19 – Greenland ice sheet “unstable”

Colors indicate ice-sheet elevation change rate in cm/year, based on satellite altimeter data, 1992-2003. The spatially averaged increase is 5.4 +- 0.2 cm/year

Gore says “global warming” is making the Greenland ice sheet unstable. It is not. Greenland ice grows 2in a year. The Greenland ice sheet survived each of the previous three interglacial periods, each of which was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the present. It survived atmospheric CO2 concentrations of up to 1000 ppmv (compared with today’s 400 ppmv). It last melted 850,000 years ago, when humankind did not exist and could not have caused the melting. There is a close correlation between variations in Solar activity and temperature anomalies in Greenland, but there is no correlation between variations in CO2 concentration and temperature changes in Greenland. The IPCC (2001) says that to melt even half the Greenland ice sheet would require temperature to rise by 5.5 degrees C and remain that high for several thousand years.

#20 – Himalayan glacial melt waters “failing”

Gore says 40% of the world’s population get their water supply from Himalayan glacial melt waters that are failing because of “global warming.” They don’t and they are not. The water comes almost entirely from snow-melt, not from ice-melt. Over the past 40 years there has been no decline in the amount of snow-melt in Eurasia.

#21 – Peruvian glaciers “disappearing”

Gore says that a Peruvian glacier is less extensive now than it was in the 1940s, implying that “global warming” is the cause. It is not. Except for the very highest peaks, the normal state of the Peruvian cordilleras has been ice-free throughout most of the past 10,000 years.

#22 – Mountain glaciers worldwide “disappearing”

Gore says that “the ice has a story to tell, and it is worldwide.” He shows several before-and-after pictures of glaciers disappearing. However, the glacial melt began in the 1820s, long before humankind could have had any effect, and has continued at a uniform rate since, showing no acceleration since humankind began increasing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. Total ice volumes in three of the last four Ice Ages were lower than they are today, and “global warming” had nothing to do with that.

#23 – Sahara desert “drying”

Gore says terrible tragedies are occurring in the southern Sahara because of drought which he blames on “global warming.” There is no drought caused by “global warming.” In 2007 there were record rains across the whole of the southern Sahara. In the past 25 years the Sahara has shrunk by some 300,000 square kilometers because of additional rainfall. Some scientists think “global warming” may actually mitigate pre-existing droughts because there will be more water vapor in the atmosphere. Before 1200 AD there were frequent, prolonged and severe droughts in the Great Plains. Since 1200 AD, there has been more rainfall. Likewise, the US has had more rainfall since the 1950s than it had in the earlier part of the 20th Century, when the great droughts which were then common were described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. South African rainfall was also more stable in the second half of the 20th Century, when human effect on climate is said to have become significant, than in the first half.

#24 – West Antarctic ice sheet “unstable”

Gore says disturbing changes have been measured under the West Antarctic ice sheet, implicitly because of “global warming.” Yet most of the recession in this ice sheet over the past 10,000 years has occurred in the absence of any sea-level or temperature forcing. In most of Antarctica, the ice is in fact growing thicker. Mean Antarctic temperature has actually fallen throughout the past half-century. In some Antarctic glens, environmental damage has been caused by temperature decreases of up to 2 degrees Celsius. Antarctic sea-ice spread to a 30-year record extent in late 2007.

#25 – Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves “breaking up”

Gore says half a dozen ice shelves each “larger than Rhode Island” have broken up and vanished from the Antarctic Peninsula recently, implicitly because of “global warming.” Global warming is unlikely to have been the cause. Gore does not explain that the ice shelves have melted before, as studies of seabed sediments have shown. The Antarctic Peninsula accounts for about 2% of the continent, in most of which the ice is growing thicker. All the recently-melted shelves, added together, amount to an area less than one-fifty-fifth the size of Texas.

#26 – Larsen B Ice Shelf “broke up because of ‘global warming’”

Gore focuses on the Larsen B ice shelf, saying that it completely disappeared in 35 days. Yet there has been extensive ice-shelf break-up throughout the past 10,000 years, and the maximum ice-shelf extent may have been in the Little Ice Age in the late 15th century.

#27 – Mosquitoes “climbing to higher altitudes”

Gore says that, because of “global warming”, mosquitoes are climbing to higher altitudes. They are not. Most recent outbreaks have been at lower levels than those of a century and more ago. He says that Nairobi was founded 1000 m above sea level so as to be above the mosquito line. It was not. In the period before anthropogenic warming could have had any significant effect, there were ten malaria outbreaks in Nairobi, one of which reached as far up as Eldoret, almost 3000 m above sea level. Malaria is not a tropical disease. Mosquitoes do not need tropical temperatures: they need no more than 15 degrees Celsius to breed. The largest malaria outbreak of modern times was in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, when 13 million were infected, 600,000 died and 30,000 died as far north as Arkhangelsk, on the Arctic Circle. There is no reason to suppose that malaria will spread even if the climate continues to become warmer.

#28 – Many tropical diseases “spread through ‘global warming’”

Gore says that, as well as malaria, “global warming” is spreading dengue fever, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, arena virus, avian flu, Ebola virus, E. Coli 0157:H7, Hanta virus, legionella, leptospirosis, multi-drug-resistant TB, Nipah virus, SARS and Vibrio Cholerae 0139. It is doing no such thing. Only the first four diseases are insect-borne, but none is tropical. Of the other diseases named by Gore either in his film or in the accompanying book, not one is sensitive to increasing temperature. They are spread not by warmer weather but by rats, chickens, primates, pigs, poor hygiene, ill-maintained air conditioning, or cold weather.

#29 – West Nile virus in the US “spread through ‘global warming’”

Gore says that West Nile virus spread throughout the US in just two years, implicitly because of “global warming.” It did not. The climate in the US ranges from some of the world’s hottest deserts to some of its iciest tundra. West Nile virus flourishes in any climate. Warming of the climate, however caused, does not affect its incidence or prevalence.

#30 – Carbon dioxide is “pollution”

Gore describes carbon dioxide as “global warming pollution.” It is not. It is food for plants and trees. Tests have shown that even at concentrations 30 times those of the present day even the most delicate plants flourish. Well-managed forests, such as those of the United States, are growing at record rates because the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is feeding the trees. Carbon dioxide, in geological timescale, is at a very low concentration at present. Half a billion years ago it was at 7000 parts per million by volume, about 18 times today’s concentration.

#31 – The European heat wave of 2003 “killed 35,000″

Gore says, “A couple of years ago in Europe they had that heat wave that killed 35,000.” Though some scientists agree with Gore, the scientific consensus is that extreme warm anomalies more unusual than the 2003 heat wave occur regularly; extreme cold anomalies also occur regularly; El Niýo and volcanism appear to be of much greater importance than any general warming trend; and there is little evidence that regional heat or cold waves are significantly increasing or decreasing with time. In general, warm is better than cold, which is why the largest number of life-forms are in the tropics and the least number are at the poles. A cold snap in the winter following the European heat wave killed 20,000 in the UK alone. Though the IPCC says 150,000 people a year are being killed worldwide by “global warming,” it reaches this figure only by deliberately excluding the number of people who are not being killed because there is less cold weather. In the US alone, it has been estimated that 174,000 fewer people are being killed each year because there are fewer episodes of extreme cold.

#32 – Pied flycatchers “cannot feed their young”

Gore says “The peak arrival date for migratory birds 25 years ago was April 25. Their chicks hatched on June 3, just at the time when the caterpillars were coming out: Nature’s plan. But 20 years of warming later the caterpillars peaked two weeks earlier. The chicks tried to catch up with it, but they couldn’t. So they are in trouble.” Yet adaptation is easy for the flycatchers: they merely fly a few tens of kilometers further north and they will find caterpillars hatching at the appropriate time. Besides, though Gore does not say so, what is bad news for the pied flycatchers is good news for the caterpillars, and for the butterflies they will become.

#33 – Gore’s bogus pictures and film footage

In the book accompanying Gore’s film, the story of the pied flycatchers and the caterpillars is accompanied by a picture of a bird feeding her hungry chicks. However, closer inspection shows that the bird is not a pied flycatcher but a black tern; and that she is not carrying a caterpillar in her beak, but a small fish. Gore similarly misuses spectacular footage of a glacier apparently calving off enormous slabs of ice into the sea footage that is often shown on television to accompany stories about “global warming.” However, the glacier in question is one that is known to be advancing and to be doing so more rapidly and more often than previously. It is in southern Argentina, where its snout crosses and eventually dams, Lake Argentino. Water builds up behind the ice dam and eventually bursts it, causing the spectacular collapse of ice into the lake that is so misleadingly used as the iconic image of the effect of “global warming” on glaciers. The breaking of the ice dam used to occur every eight years or so: now, however, it occurs every five years, not because of “global warming” because of the regional cooling of the southern Atlantic.

#34 – The Thames Barrier “closing more frequently”

Gore says that rising sea levels are compelling the operators of the Thames Barrier to close it more frequently than when it was first built. They are not. The barrier is indeed closed more frequently than when it was built, but the reason has nothing to do with “global warming” or rising sea levels. The reason is a change of policy by which the barrier is closed during exceptionally low tides, so as to retain water in the tidal Thames rather than keeping it out. Yet even the present leader of the official Opposition in the UK Parliament recently used a major speech as the opportunity to mention today’s more frequent closing of the Thames Barrier as though it were a matter of grave concern.

35 – “No fact…in dispute by anybody.”

Gore says that his prediction that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will rise to more than 600 parts per million by volume as soon as 2050 is “not controversial in any way or in dispute by anybody.” However, not one of the half-dozen official projections of growth in CO2 concentration made by the IPCC shows as much as 600 parts per million by 2050.

About the Author: Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a retired British international business consultant, policy advisor, writer, and inventor. He served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and has attracted controversy for his public opposition to the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming and climate change. This story was originally released in October 2007 on the website of the Science & Public Policy Institute, among other places, and is republished here with permission.

If the present is problematic, that doesn’t mean the future has no potential. We have railed against the catastrophe in progress throughout the tropics, as the last rainforests are razed to grow sugar cane and oil palms. Over and over, we’ve reminded readers to beware of carbon taxes and carbon trading schemes, because European carbon offset payments are funding the destruction of Asian rainforests to grow biofuel. And considering the epic scale of the destruction occurring, right now, global environmental groups are virtually silent. But what about the future of biofuel?

Tropical corn doesn’t grow ears in the long days of temperate latitudes, and has high sugars in the stalk. (see “Tropical Maize”)

Last week Vinod Khosla, arguably the high priest of biofuel, made a lunch presentation at the Think Equity “Think Green” conference in San Francisco. Khosla is a numbers guy, which we absolutely love. His comments on the future of energy were unwaveringly optimistic, which we also love, and wholeheartedly agree with. He claims there are three nascent sources of energy that are rapidly scaleable; solar, “enhanced geothermal,” and biofuel. We cover solar avidly, and enhanced geothermal is something we’re going to need to get more familiar with – but back to biofuel.

In his remarks Khosla presented two charts showing “what’s possible” with biofuel. On the summary chart, the first year projection was for 2012, where he stated 5.0 million acres could yield 16.5 billion gallons of ethanol. The final year projection was for 2027, where he stated 49 million acres could yield 139 billion gallons of ethanol. We have crunched these numbers a bit, and here’s what we’ve determined:

The 2012 projections equate to 3,300 gallons per acre, or put another way, 50,286 barrels per square mile per year. His 2027 projections actually come in with slightly lower yields, 2,837 gallons per acre or 43,226 barrels per square mile – this probably reflects the assumption that by then most of the ethanol is extracted from cellulose, which has a somewhat lower yield per acre. But the real story is what this yield represents compared to today’s biofuel yields.

Currently the best ethanol yields anywhere come from Brazilian sugar cane, which using Khosla’s own data, are 6,000 litres per hectare; for comparison that equates to 9,775 barrels per square mile per year. Based on the research we’ve done, that is on the high side. But it is certainly in the ballpark, and here’s the question: How are you going to go from a yield of 9,775 barrels per square mile per year today to 50,286 barrels per square mile per year within the next 10-20 years, an increase of 5.1x? The implications are huge; at a yield of 50,000 barrels per square mile per year it would only take 160,710 square miles of farmland for bioethanol crops to replace 100% of the roughly 8.0 billion barrels of oil consumed each year in the USA. That is only 25% of the arable farmland in the USA, a not unthinkable amount to give over to these crops.

If we take that extraordinary higher yield and calculate how how much the refined fuel extracted from the land each year would cover the land if it were poured over the surface, it actually only amounts to 0.12 inches in depth. So in terms of passing the smell test, this extraordinary yield of 50,000 barrels per square mile per year really doesn’t seem far fetched. Can we get there, and can we be sure there won’t be unintended environmental consequences?

Khosla Ventures has funded several companies working on advanced cellulosic extraction methods as well as ways to extract ethanol from other feedstock including various waste streams – some of these are Lanza Tech, Mascoma, Verenium, Range Fuels, and Coskata. Cellulosic fiber comes from plant mass, not from the fruit of plants, meaning there is far more material to break down into ethanol. Khosla mentioned a few other points relating to ethanol of interest – he claims agronomists now believe proper crop management can allow high yield ethanol crops to be grown that actually improve soil quality over the years. He also stated that higher compression internal combustion engines will get greater mileage from ethanol than standard high efficiency ICEs can get today from gasoline. Clearly ethanol is not something to bet against.

The difference between extracting 10,000 barrels per year from standard crops such as sugar cane in Brazil (or somewhat less than that from corn in America’s midwest), and extracting 50,000 barrels per year per square mile from plant mass using cellulosic methods is the difference between developing a supplemental fuel of some economic value, and a scaleable, viable fuel alternative that could literally replace petroleum.

Our post yesterday, “Taking on Smart Growth” prompted a lengthy exchange between the author and a very well informed critic. Despite our best efforts to communicate our point of view, ultimately the critic described our criticisms of new urbanism as coming from “Wingnuttia.” Rather than continue to argue the point on yesterday’s post, where these eight points of criticism are buried within one of the last of many comments, here they are:

The private yard – an endangered species, thanks to “New Urbanist” social engineers.

Eight Criticisms of New Urbanism:

1 – It supports “urban service boundaries” that makes land outside the boundary very hard to develop, which artificially (and some would say catastrophically) raises the price of land. This makes homes less affordable.

2 – It emphasizes public space, expensively maintained by public entities and paid for by taxpayers, over private space.

3 – It makes war on the car, despite the fact that most people prefer cars and despite the fact that cars are on the verge of becoming totally green. It advocates zero freeway upgrades despite massive population growth, in order to force people into mass transit.

4 – It promotes infill in quiet, preexisting suburbs where neighbors should not have to see their low density lifestyle destroyed through imposition of “special planning areas” where literally 10x as many new units are on an acre compared to within the neighborhood at large.

5 – It places a premium on open space, but offers no criticism of land use even more inefficient than low density homes and ranchettes, such as irrigated, subsidized corn ethanol farms.

6 – It presumes that social problems will be alleviated through forcing everyone to live in ultra high density neighborhoods; it supports cramming affordable housing units into higher income neighborhoods, undermining the incentives that inspired people to work hard and earn their way into a higher income neighborhood.

7 – It maintains there is a shortage of open space and farmland, and at least in the USA, there is not. California is projected to add 13 million people to their population within the next 25 years. If you put all of those people into homes on 1 acre lots with households of 3.5 people, you would only use up 6,500 square miles – that will never happen, because many people prefer high density living. But if they were dispersed in this manner, 6,500 square miles is a small fraction of California’s 158,000 square miles. In the entire USA, only about 4% of the land is urbanized – not much at all.

8 – New Urbanism pretends they have the final answer; that their precepts are beyond debate. The new urbanists share this trait with the anthropogenic CO2 alarmists; they also tend to march in lockstep with the anthropogenic global warming crowd, and use AGW concerns as trump cards to roll over opposition to their plans and policies. In reality, the AGW issue is nuanced – example: European carbon offset credits created the global market for subsidized biodiesel, which is the direct cause of massive deforestation throughout Asia (want to talk about heat islands?) – and for everyone’s sake debate on AGW and New Urbanism should be welcomed, not ridiculed.

Are these criticisms valid? Do they have any merit whatsoever?

When green technology delivers decentralized solutions to water and energy – from hi-tech and low maintenance, ultra-effective septic systems to affordable rooftop photovoltaics and electrical storage systems, there are a lot of public works contractors who will be looking for something to do.

A green mega-project: High rise agriculture for food & biofuel. (Photo: www.verticalfarm.com)

Fortunately, we have the answer: Mega-Projects. Before leveling off in the next couple of generations at approximately 8.0 billion, we will add nearly 2.0 billion more people to the world’s population.

This increase, combined with the well established trend of migration from rural areas to cities, means around the world, mega-cities will be built.

As rural and semi-rural areas transition to off-grid living, conversely, in the mega-cities populations will become more concentrated than ever, and massive infrastructure developments will be necessary to support their water and energy needs.

Further feeding this requirement is the imperative to leave more naturally available water for ecosystems and aquifers, meaning water supplies will have to be found that don’t deplete natural runoff. So if you can’t build the big energy and water grid anymore, but you still want to work, don’t worry. Here are some things to do:

(1) Construct massive desalination plants along ocean coastlines wherever there is an offshore current of 2 sverdrups or more.

(2) Construct solar thermal and nuclear electricity plants (take your choice) to power the desalination plants as well as provide supplemental power to mega-cities.

(3) Engage in massive ecological mitigation projects – for example, divert 10 cubic kilometers of the Ubangi river north per year to refill Lake Chad. For another example, divert 20 cubic kilometers of the Ob-Irtysh river south per year to refill the Aral Sea – you can also divert an equal amount southwest from the Volga into the Aral Basin.

(4) Build mega-structures, with embedded and pervasive, highly efficient energy and water harvesting and recycling systems.

(5) Build high-rise farms to grow food and biofuel, and reforest the tropics from the Amazon to the Congo to Borneo, and everywhere in between.

Today we received the following email:

“I keenly read your article “Let the Volga & Ob Refill the Aral Sea” dated September 27, 2004 by Ed Ring (is this you?). Seeing we are really playing a dangerous game of risk in regard to climate change there’s probably another possible outcome worth mentioning. Although rather an unknown there is also the risk that a continual reduction in the effect of the Atlantic Conveyor could well diminish or even stop the entire oceanic current system and cause the seas to become anoxic. Any levels of reduced oxygen in the oceans would of course cause much extinction to marine live, but even worse than that they could even cause the toxification of the entire atmosphere through mass oceanic hydrogen sulphide release. The world should really help Russia in this great project to dam the Volga and Ob as not only will it definitely restore the Aral which is fantastic, and as you say it would help re-strengthen the already weakening Atlantic Conveyor that brings so much winter mildness to Northern Europe but it just might save the entire world from a terrible catastrophe. How can I get more involved in movements who believe that we must embrace grand engineering projects in order to help solve our current climate problems?”

Reading this email was timely. As we debate land use decisions in the context of high technology obviating the need for many types of public works, it is clear these resources still can be put onto projects of compelling value. Many environmentalists eschew development projects of any kind – but to build the mega-cities of the future, which is necessary to deliver prosperity to a planet soon to have 8.0 billion people, mega-projects will be necessary. The only rational debate should be what to build, not whether to build.

A green mega-project: Water from the Volga & Ob-Irtysh refill the Aral Sea

Definition: “New Urbanism – the revival of our lost art of place-making, and promotes the creation and restoration of compact, walkable, mixed-use cities.”

It is completely impractical to make everything “walking distance” from everything else. People like cars. The car is the most liberating personal appliance ever invented. The new urbanist war on the car is based on a communalist ideology that completely fails in the real world. From an environmentalist perspective, the war on the car is already obsolete given the car is on the verge of becoming cradle to cradle green.

The utopian notions of the “smart growth” lobby are the reason homes are way too expensive for the average person. The massive expenditures in public amenities necessary to facilitate “smart growth” have created building fees that are now as high as $100K per home. This, combined with the complete (and artificial) lack of available land for building entitlements have restricted the supply of homes and driven prices into the stratosphere.

Understandably, public sector workers have a difficult conflict of interests here – higher property tax revenue means their pensions may remain solvent. But the rest of us pay higher taxes and can’t even afford annual property taxes when we’re old; forget about servicing a mortgage on social security. And we all get crammed into cluster homes, where people are piled on top of one another. There is plenty of land in the US, and open space should not be sacred. When you block suburban growth, you simply stimulate exurban growth.

There is an intrinsic conflict between advocating liberal immigration policies which cause rapid population growth and trying to protect open space. The new urbanist solution is to cram us all into ultra high density urban areas – this approach should be rejected. Either we stablize population via sensible immigration policies, or we allow market driven development onto open space.

There is nothing wrong with high density in the urban core, as long as it is car friendly. What is deplorable is high density on the urban fringe, or in neighborhoods that are preexisting and primarily low density. But the market should be allowed to sort this out, not new urbanist social engineers. Of course people want to live in cool high rises or condominiums or mixed use housing in the urban core. And if people want these types of developments, they should be built. But nobody should have to live in a neighborhood 20 miles from the city center in cluster homes where 20,000 people are packed into each square mile, when half that density would still ensure that very small percentages of open space are urbanized. The higher the density, the more likely there will be no canopy whatsoever among residential structures. They become imperious tree wastelands and heat islands. There is nothing smart about this. The only reason people buy single family dwellings with nonexistant yards is because it’s all they can afford and they want the mortgage interest deduction.

And private property is not a “mantra,” if that implies it has no moral basis and is simply something people repeat mindlessly to themselves without critically examining what they think. Wrong. Private property is a value that, when respected, creates the incentives that make people work hard and accomplish goals in life for themselves and their families. Take that away and you have the Soviet Union. Be careful when you dismiss the value of private property as nothing more than a “mantra.” Be careful what you wish for.

Thanks to new urbanism, restrictive zoning has made all housing less affordable. If someone wants to live in the city, great. But if someone actually likes to live on a nice big lot, they should be able to pay a reasonable price, not some over-inflated price that is only the result of artificially restricted supply. In the Sacramento region of Northern California, an acre of land within the “urban service boundary” may cost some $300K, while land barely across the street outside this arbitrary boundary can cost 1/10th that amount. This is a perversion of the market, that only inflates the price of housing, pricing ordinary people out of home ownership.

Definition: “New Urbanism – the revival of our lost art of place-making, and promotes the creation and restoration of compact, walkable, mixed-use cities.”

On one of www.TreeLink.org’s posts, I noticed the tag “urban forestry is America’s frontline defense against climate change.” I couldn’t agree more.

So how is this statement reconciled with “new urbanism” and “smart growth” that packs people into cluster homes and super high density suburbs where there isn’t room for trees on any private parcels? (read “California’s Land Use Choices”)

As someone active in urban forestry most of my life, I think “smart growth,” “infill,” and the “urban service boundary” is utterly destroying the urban canopy. Has anyone seen trees in these new communities, where “low density” is now defined as eight homes per acre, and cluster housing now goes as high as 20 homes per acre? These are heat island dead zones, not leafy suburbs. Perhaps it is time for urban forestry advocates to also advocate lower density zoning. There’s plenty of land.

CO2 from cars (if not CO2 in general) has little to do with climate change, and in any case cars are becoming green. You can have an enveloping canopy of trees in a low density suburb, but in a cluster home “smart growth” suburb you have no room for a tree canopy to shade the roads and rooftops. It is also incorrect to suggest low density requires increased infrastructure. Actually it is far more expensive to try to re-engineer and upgrade established infrastructure to accomodate high density infill; this along with much improved septic systems that don’t require utility interties (and rooftop solar energy systems) means the low density decentralized model actually generates less infrastructure requirements.

Greenbelts and urban service boundaries cause exurbs, super-leapfrog developments outside the boundary. Because people want yards and cars, all you do when you create a greenbelt is make them move further away and drive more.

The real issue here is communalism, which environmentalists tend to embrace, a value that causes them to set policy agendas not purely on ecological considerations. Force everyone out of their cars, out of their yards, and into expensive public transportation and public parks. These mandates increase the price of housing, which increases property tax revenues into public entities – the hidden agenda. The logical extension of adhering to smart growth rhetoric is to cram everyone into ultra high density cities and depopulate the rural areas. It has little to do with protecting the environment and must be challenged.

As for farmland, there’s plenty of it. Trends in corporate agriculture and the endangered family farm are phenomena quite independent of suburban and exurban development. If zoning laws weren’t so stringent, small farms could more easily coexist among scattered residential neighborhoods – it would be easier. But by letting government agencies and trial lawyers hired by nonprofit organizations have this level of control over land development, instead of property owners, only the big corporations can play – whether they’re agribusiness or land developers. That is one of the biggest ironies – the smart growth agenda actually helps the biggest corporations that new urbanists, typically, claim are so bad.

Here’s a comment from an arborist who apparently is also a new urbanist: “Green cities have dense housing developments, with services within walking distance or accessible by public transportation. Green space consists of public parks and school campuses, and forests and farms outside the dense urban core.” I disagree with pretty much every word of that. It reflects a disdain for private property, and suggests we should have totally managed, government controlled land use. What about affordable low density housing – without subsidies? No place for them in such a world. Only the super rich will be able to have land in the new urbanist world – another irony.

The new urbanist agenda of infill will destroy every beautiful semi rural suburb in America, and leave only government entities and huge corporations in charge of open space.

To follow up on yesterday’s post, it has become more clear than ever how land use decisions are the place where every tenant of environmentalism is applied, yet the centrality of land use, like the centrality of population demographics, is rarely the focus of environmental discussions. But if population demographics provide the primary preconditions for environmental challenges we face, land use decisions provide the primary evidence of what ideology and values we choose to apply to these challenges.

From that standpoint, based on the ideology that informs land use decisions today, private property and economic liberty the endangered species, and environmentalist elites are leading the charge. And as we’ve tried to point out, the irony is when private property rights and economic liberties are undermined, the environment is the biggest loser of all.

Land use decisions in the USA are dominated by a coalition of powerful environmental groups, mainstream media, and virtually all entrenched forces within government, whether it’s the professional planners, elected officials, or public sector unions. In practice, the collection of ideologies these interests promulgate – smart growth, new urbanism, carbon offsets, open space, environmental protection & mitigation in myriad formats – is monolithic and dogmatic and presented to the public as beyond debate. While private interests are aware of this mismatch, generally their challenges to the conventional wisdom are piecemeal. They lack the big picture rhetoric that is arrayed against them, rhetoric that employs grandiose terms such as “smart growth principles,” “new urbanism,” and “global warming impact.”

A sad example of how monolithic the smart growth mantras have become was discovered when I challenged the professional arborists on the list serve they have on www.treelink.org. I love this website – because it has one simple, noble mission, to help people plant trees in the urban environment, where they are needed the most. I have planted trees since I was 12 years old. I have grown from seed and given away thousands of trees; I’ve planted thousands of trees; I’ve been an urban forester for decades. It has been a healthy obsession, a labor of love. Except perhaps for the waves in the ocean, there is nothing more beautiful than a tree.

As I noted yesterday, I have been monitoring TreeLink’s list serve, and couldn’t help commenting on what I felt was a conflict between the smart growth principle of high density housing, and the need to find room to grow trees. And from the responses I got, it appeared the preference among these arborists, most all of whom work in the public sector, was that trees belong on public land, and that people shouldn’t be allowed to own enough private property to allow room for them to have trees. So in the next few posts I am going to share with EcoWorld’s audience some of the comments I made on TreeLink’s list serve.

We will return to green technology in subsequent posts. Because who cares if we clean up pollution if while we’re doing it, we create a society where only the super rich can afford to own a decent sized piece of land? A society where only a government employee can care for a tree – on government land?

Not long ago I learned of an excellent service for urban forestry, www.treelink.org, which has a list-serve that is possibly the most subscribed interlink for professional arborists in the United States, if not the world. For several weeks now I’ve been reading the emails that fly back and forth between these folks who have the good fortune to make their living from planting and nurturing trees, and it has nurtured my soul to monitor the dialogue.

Here’s your “smart growth,” zero trees, and hot as hell

But today something set me off. I notice the tag at the end of one writer’s email which stated “urban forestry is America’s frontline defense against climate change.” And I couldn’t agree more.

So how is this statement reconciled with “new urbanism” and “smart growth” that packs people into cluster homes and super high density suburbs where there isn’t room for trees on any private parcels?

As someone active in urban forestry most of my life I think “smart growth,” “infill,” and the “urban service boundary” is utterly destroying the urban canopy.

Have these foresters seen any trees in the “new urbanist,” “smart-growth” communities where “low density” is now defined as eight homes per acre, and cluster housing now goes as high as 20 homes per acre? These are heat island dead zones, not leafy suburbs.

Perhaps it is time for urban forestry advocates to also advocate lower density zoning. There’s plenty of land. For more on this read Infill is Insane, Leapfrog Infill, Why Homes Aren’t Affordable, Agency Unsustainability, and California’s Land Use Choices.

Needless to say, the sentiments I expressed on this illustrious forum were not shared by the arborists – which is disappointing. To list just one example, “New Urbanists” cite the evils of the car as a primary example of why we need ultra high density housing. But the car is within 20 years of being a cradle to cradle, energy self-sufficient appliance – plugged into the home power system at night to recharge, 100% recycled when it wears out.

When greenbelts are mandated – and they are – instead of reducing “leapfrog” development, they stimulate leapfrog development. But instead of leaping into the adjacent open land, they leap across the greenbelt. The solution is NOT to control all development, everywhere. They tried that in the Soviet Union. Is that where green ideology is taking us? Because that isn’t green, it’s red.

Way back in 1995, when EcoWorld was born online, we made a statement that is more true today than ever: “The precious bird of environmentalism has been flying for too long with one wing, the left one.” This must be challenged, for the sake of our freedom, our prosperity, and, ironically, for the sake of the environment.

We have just published an interview with noted climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr., a retired professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, and a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since July 2005 he has written and maintained Climate Science, a blog that serves as a scientific forum for dialogue and commentary on climate issues.

Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. “Scientific rigor has been sacrificed, and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.”

The timing is appropriate, insofar as this week the nations of the world gather in Bali, Indonesia, for another UN Climate Change Conference. Anyone concerned about climate change would be advised to read this interview with Dr. Pielke, because it appears the UN, the IPCC, Al Gore, and all the rest of them may have it wrong – what if burning fossil fuel is not the primary cause of climate change? What if land use changes – rainforest destruction in particular – is an equal or greater culprit?

In August 2007 Dr. Pielke organized a conference of scientists to look at the role of land use changes affecting climate, and here is what he said regarding the conclusions coming from that event: “This meeting reconfirmed the first order role of land management as a climate forcing mechanism. These findings supported the conclusions of the 2005 National Research Council report “Radiative Forcing of Climate Change: Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties,” which identified land use change as having a major effect on climate. Unfortunately, the role of land surface processes was underreported in the body of the IPCC report and was essentially ignored in the IPCC Statement for Policymakers.”

When asked if tropical forests can moderate extreme weather, and conversely, if tropical deforestation could be as significant a driver in climate change as anthropogenic CO2, Pielke didn’t mince words: “Tropical deforestation clearly has an effect on both regional and global climate that is at least as important as the radiative effect of adding CO2. When forests are removed, not only does the climate system lose the biodiversity and other benefits of that environment, the vegetation loses its ability to dynamically respond in ways that reduce extreme weather fluctuations. For example, when trees access deeper water through their roots, the resulting transpiration of water vapor into the atmosphere (making rain more likely) can help ameliorate dry conditions when the large-scale weather pattern is one of drought.”

And what about the IPCC? As Pielke states: “The same individuals who are doing primary research into humans’ impact on the climate system are being permitted to lead the assessment of that research… To date, either few people recognize this conflict, or those that do choose to ignore it because the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed, and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.”

As delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference gather in Indonesia this week, the burning rainforests of Borneo – to name just one heartbreaking example – cast a plume of smoke that is visible from space. Burning to make room for oil palm plantations, subsidized by European carbon offset payments. Pity the Orangutan who lived in these regions that remained pristine until the IPCC came along. And pity the rainforest lungs of this good earth – they are being destroyed in the name of fighting CO2 emissions, and well intentioned environmentalists whose activism encouraged this devastation are waking up too slow, too late. Will anyone stand up in Bali and expose this travesty; this tragedy?