Lynas Recants Views on Genetically Modified Food

Mark Lynas, one of the environmental activists who helped to organize  the opposition to genetically modified organisms, has recanted and now apologizes for his actions, according to a recent Slate article by Tori Bosch.  It appears that he now acknowledges that to insist on food purity, and to oppose development of   GMO crops and animals that could feed the world, would condemn hundreds of millions to lives of hardship and starvation.  Kudos for him to for having the courage to change his mind when he better understood the facts.

You can see his full presentation to the Oxford Farming Conference on January 3, 2013 here.

The True Cost of Climate Change Hysteria

This is taken from a comment by rgb@duke on a post  at  Watts Up With That (the comment is on January 17 at 9:29 a.m.).  He is a professor at Duke University who occasionally comments on the scientific aspects of climate change.  This nonscientific portion of his comment struck a chord with me, and summarizes better than I could the incredible human cost of climate change hysteria.

In the meantime, prudence suggests that we concentrate on the ongoing disaster of global energy poverty first as it is a certain disaster that is happening now and forces 1/3 of the world’s population to live in near prehistoric levels of poverty and misery. Even if CO_2 were precisely as disastrous as the worst-case CAGW scenarios suggest — which few people believe any more, including climate scientists — the impact of a 2.5-3.5 C rise in global temperature by the end of the century will be smaller than the impact of a century more of global energy poverty, even if the ocean does rise a full meter or more, even if storms do actually get discernibly worse eventually, even if there is increased desertification, none of which are currently observible. 

Somewhere in the world, as I type this, not one but hundreds of millions of people are cooking a sparse day’s meal on animal dung or a small charcoal fire. Their children are breathing in particulates and smoke and suffering from malnutrition and diseases. Their clothes must be hand washed, if they are washed at all. They have neither fresh, clean water nor anything but the great outdoors as a sewer system. Some two billion people will light their homes — if one can call a tin shanty or mud or grass hut a home — with an oil lamp or nothing at all tonight. The children of those two billion people will not go to school tomorrow, cannot read or do simple arithmetic, and will go to bed hungry (indeed, live always hungry, as they do not take in enough food to support their growth). They will grow up stunted in stature and damaged in their brains, all because they lack access to cheap electricity, running clean water and sewer facilities and clothes washing and refrigeration and schools and houses and adequate supplies of fertilizer-grown food that electricity enables. Many will die young, or live to become “criminals” as they do what they must to stay alive, or will become cannon fodder for anyone who promises to give them a better life if they will fight and die for them. 

They, not the threat of a supposed apocalypse that might or might not happen in a century, are the moral imperative of the twenty-first century. There is no need for 1/3 of the world’s population to live in squalid misery — not any more. We have the technology, we have the wealth, to utterly eliminate global poverty within a few decades. What we lack is the will and the vision to do so. 

And we will never succeed in doing so at the same time we make energy more expensive and discourage its use. The poverty in question is energy poverty. Fundamentally. With enough, cheap enough, energy, we can make the deserts bloom, create jobs in the heart of Africa or India or South America, bring medicine and electric lights and running water to the world. Cheap, clean energy solves all problems; it is the fundamental scarcity.

NRDC Embarrasses Itself With Climate Change Report

The Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, has alleged that West Virginia ranked among the top 10 states for percentage of  extreme weather events in 2012.  Ken Ward and the  Charleston Gazette made it the lead story, with a headline that said "W. Va. among 'extreme weather' states in 2012".  The story includes dire predictions of worsening weather due to global warming.

Really?  Did anyone actually look at the NRDC's report, or take a moment to consider  carefully their claims of record-breaking heat, snow, rain and wildfires?

You could start any number of places in evaluating the NRDC's report, but let's look at the criteria NRDC used.  Record breaking snow?  That's  a sign of global warming?  If you look at the data the NRDC provided, you see that all the records came from the cold front that hit the state October 29 and 30, about the time  Sandy dropped a  ton of rain on us.  You can't blame the earth-heating greenhouse gas effect for unusual cold that time of year.

As for precipitation, from Sandy or otherwise, wasn't the prediction just a few years back that we would have more drought as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, because the land was going to sizzle and dry up?  So why is rainfall being blamed on global warming? Furthermore, look at the data used by the NRDC.  Six of the 17 rainfall records were set at Queen Shoals, which the NRDC could not even locate, and the previous record rainfall was  . . . .0, or .01 inch.  What does that mean? Here's the NRDC's criteria:

The record-breaking events we used are daily records that are higher than recorded rainfall for any day in that month in the period of record for that station.

In other words, in May, July, August, October and December it had never rained at Queen Shoals.   Is there any place in West Virginia that has had five months  with no precipitation whatsoever?  They said they used stations with at least 30 years of data, but that simply cannot be.

The NRDC report is internally inconsistent in what it offers as evidence of man-made climate change.  It cites "the worst drought in 50 years", but doesn't that mean that there was  a worse drought in the 60's, before carbon dioxide levels climbed?  Actually, there were worse droughts in the 1950s.  And have they forgotten the Dust Bowl of the 1930s?  But even if the droughts are worse now, how does that jibe with their claims of  greater precipitation as a result of global warming?

Last year  was a bad year for wildfires?  Couldn't prove it by me.  I recall many worse years, when the smoke carried all the way from the southern coal fields, and Department of Forestry workers were pressed into manning firelines.  Nothing like that in 2012.

The temperature records are a joke as well.  Many of the record high temperatures are high minimum temperatures.  Hardly something that one worries about when considering the effects of global warming. And even for the high records, you see Wayne County had 3 sites  all set records on the same day - the airport, sewage plant, and Dunlow.  That obviously increases the number of "records" but it's misleading as evidence of widespread heat records.
 
What struck me most about the NRDC's report was how few records were broken.  Think of all the weather stations in West Virginia.  (I tried to find a list, but couldn't)  There are dozens, probably hundreds, of  reporting stations - cities and towns, the airports, state parks, and sewage treatment plants were among those the NRDC relied upon.   With hundreds of stations, and looking at monthly records, there are going to be hundreds  of opportunities for breaking records in a given year.  Now multiply the   number of stations and months by the number of records one could keep, such as:  highest temperature maximum, lowest temperature maximum, highest temperature minimum, lowest temperature minimum, windspeed, total precipitation, rainfall, snowfall, consecutive days with rain, consecutive days without rain, highest windchill, lowest windchill, highest humidity, lowest humidity  . . . the list is almost endless.  The chances of breaking a record for  the month in one of those categories once during the year  is pretty good for any individual station, and it's a certainty that there will be records somewhere in the state for one or more of those categories.

I could go on.  For example, did the NRDC look at record lows that were set in West Virginia last year?  Or at the lowest maximum temperatures on record?  Of course not, that would have interfered with the misleading tale they wanted to tell. The NRDC is working hard to make hay while the sun shines, while Americans remember a warm summer in 2012.  What they cannot avoid is that once again, on a global basis, there has been no rise in temperatures for the last 16 year, and even the big global warming proponents are conceding it will be a few years before they begin to rise again, if ever.  The predictions of temperature increases made by the Intergvernmental Panel on Climate Change have been shown to be horribly wrong, and they are trying to repackage their story as one of "extreme weather."  They should be ashamed of themselves.

No Contamination from Fracking in the Fayetteville Shale

AS EPA proceeds with its evaluation of the environmental effects of hydraulic fracking, it is noteworthy that the USGS found no evidence of groundwater contamination as a result of drilling in the Fayetteville Shale. Pam Kasey reports on it in the State Journal

Radon Test Your House

I've never done radon testing, but maybe I should.  Here's a notification from EPA of the importance of getting your house tested. 

PHILADELPHIA (January 8, 2013) - January is national Radon Action Month and the
U. S. Environmental Protection Agency encourages everyone to test their homes for radon. January is an especially good time to test homes and schools because windows and doors are closed tightly and people spend more time indoors.

Unsafe levels of radon can lead to serious illness. The Surgeon General has warned that
radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States with an estimated 21,000 deaths a year. Only smoking causes more lung cancer deaths. By making simple fixes in a home or building people can lower their health risks from radon.

Radon is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas; so testing is the only way to know if radon is present in your home or school. Test kits are available in home improvement centers and hardware stores and costs approximately $20. The kits are simple to use with easy testing and mailing instructions.

Make the commitment to protect your family. Test for radon. Fix the problem if you find elevated radon levels. Save a life!

For more information about radon and radon testing see: http://www.epa.gov/radon/ .

Apply for West Virginia Make It Shine Clean Up Campaign

Applications are now available for West Virginians to sign up for this year’s Make It Shine Statewide Spring Cleanup. Volunteers have until March 1 to register with the state Department of Environmental Protection. The annual event is jointly sponsored by the DEP and the state Division of Highways.

During the first two weeks of April, the DEP’s Make It Shine program will provide resources such as cleanup materials, waste hauling and landfill fees to citizens volunteering to remove litter from the state’s landscape. Cleanups must be conducted on public lands. Community drop off sites, household garbage collection and cleanups on private property do not qualify.

Last year, more than 4,800 volunteers participated in the spring cleanup and removed roughly 220 tons of litter and debris from West Virginia’s public lands and waters.

To obtain a Make It Shine application, contact Travis Cooper at 1-800-322-5530, or email: Travis.L.Cooper@wv.gov. Applications may also be downloaded via the net at: www.dep.wv.gov. Click on “REAP” under the Land Section on the DEP homepage. 

20 Years of Temperature Stability

The British Meteorological Office quietly announced on December 24 that it has revised its estimates of future warming.  It is now predicting that temperature increases will not exceed 1998 levels until about 2017, which would represent 20 years of no temperature increase, despite steady increases in greenhouse gases.  You can see a report on it here.

Temperatures rise and fall in cycles, and you can draw whatever conclusion you like from the temperature record, depending on where you decide to start and stop.  If you compare the high world average temperatures from 1936 with those from 2011, you'd see 75 years of almost no increase in temperature.  If you look at the end of the 1960s until 2011, you'll see a more pronounced increase. If you look at the temperature record from the early 1800's to the present, you'll see an increase in temperatures, in fits and starts,  that is clearly not affected in any significant way by the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere after World War II.  That post war period has, not coincidentally, provided some of the greatest agricultural production and increased living standards  in history.

Environmental Law and Economics

Daniel Cole writes in his blog about the reasons he stopped going to environmental law conferences and  started the Society  for Environmental Law and Economics.

It's long past time that my fellow environmental law scholars realized that: (1) economic theory is not our enemy - it is not at odds with sensible environmental protection measures (including higher levels of protection than current policies provide); to the contrary, (2) the basic theory of welfare-economics strongly supports internalization of inefficient negative externalities, including units of pollution that generate net social costs; and (3) whatever their utopian environmental designs, arguments about environmental policy that ignore economics are never likely to make headway in the real world.

I agree that it's past time to consider the economic consequences of regulation and non-regulation, for that matter.  The idea that national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS)  should be established without regard to cost-effectiveness is crazy.

What Dispute? US Supreme Court Issues Decision in Los Angeles County Appeal

The much-anticipated opinion in Los Angeles County Flood Control District  v. Natural Resources Defense Council has been issued by the US Supreme Court, although it ended with more of a whimper than a bang. Rather than a seminal discussion of what constitutes a point source discharge, which many of us had been hoping for, the decision  turned on the sole question of whether flow of polluted water  from a concreted part of the river into an unconcreted portion  constitutes a point source discharge.    Based on  South Fla. Water Management District v. Miccousukee Tribe 541 US 95 (2004), the answer to that question was clearly no, and the Ninth Circuit was reversed.

The interesting point to me was that, during oral argument,  all parties to the case and the US as amicus curiae had agreed  that the flow of water from one section of the Los Angeles River (the concreted portion) to the natural section was not a point source. Since that was the sole point the Supreme Court agreed to decide, the result was a foregone conclusion.  The NRDC tried to persuade the Court that  the Ninth Circuit reached the right conclusion for the wrong reason.  They argued that the fact that water quality  monitors in the lower part of the river  showed the existence of water quality standard violations was sufficient to establish the District's liability for its storm water discharges that occurred upstream of the monitoring points. The Supreme Court (Ginsberg) offered no opinion on that question, pointedly noted that it was not the question they agreed to decide.

It had been my understanding, after reading the Ninth Circuit's decision, that it had decided a different question - whether Los Angeles County was responsible for the storm water discharges into the Los Angeles River, where it is merely providing a conduit for the storm water, and is not itself adding pollutants. I would be embarrassed by that misreading, except that Justice Ginsburg notes in a footnote that the NRDC and the US "suggest that the Court of Appeals misperceived the facts, erroneously believing that the monitoring stations for the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers 'were sampling water from a portion of the MS4 [storm water collection system] that was distinct from the rivers themselves and from which discharges through an outfall to the rivers subsequently occurred.'"  So  I wasn't the only one mislead by the Ninth Circuit, it appears.

Natural Gas Report Published by EIA

The US  Energy Information Administration has published its annual report on natural gas, using data through 2011. It's a  compendium of  every fact you'd ever want to know about natural gas production and usage in this country. Pam Kasey of the State Journal has been through it, and reports that it shows that natural gas production in West Virginia  is up 50% over 2010.

Court Rejects Storm Water Flow TMDL for Accotink Creek in Virginia

The federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled last week in Virginia Department of Transportation v. US EPA that EPA could not set a total maximum daily load (TMDL) for storm water flow.  The TMDL had been developed using a flow limitation in Accotink Creek as a proxy for sediment, which it believed (perhaps correctly) was causing excessive sedimentation in the creek, resulting in  harmful impacts on benthic life.  The court ruled that EPA could not use flow in the stream, which is not a pollutant under the Clean Water Act, to regulate a pollutant such as sediment.

Some news outlets have reported that the court forbade EPA from limiting one pollutant as a surrogate for another. That is incorrect.  The court did not prohibit the use of one pollutant as a surrogate for another (e.g., TSS as a surrogate for sedimentation).  Rather, it rejected the limitation of one measurable parameter that is not a pollutant ( stream flow) as a substitute for a pollutant (sediment). 

Some  WVNPDES permits contain surrogate limits, and these are not per se prohibited under the  court’s decision.  

Saving the Planet and Punishing the Poor

In his usual entertaining fashion, Willis Eschenbach explains why placing taxes on fossil fuels to decrease their use, and thereby abate climate change, is a bad idea, particularly for the poor.  I particularly liked the comparison he drew between the 1 kilowatt the average person can generate in a 10 hour day of hard work and  the low cost of acquiring that same kilowatt from the grid.  You can see his post here.