Eschew Obfuscation: Category Global Warming

Electric Cars Best Way To Reduce U.S. Oil Dependency

Max Dunn — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:11:00 -0700

A new report from Rice University confirms what I have been saying for a long time – electric vehicles (EVs) are the best way to reduce America’s oil dependency.

The report found that if only 30% of vehicles are electrified by 2050, oil usage would be reduced by 2.5 million barrels a day and carbon emissions cut by 7% – even if the electric generation mix remains the same as today. They also found that a carbon tax of $30 a ton would actually increase US dependence on foreign natural gas!

So even if our government is not able to get its act together and institute a comprehensive renewable energy policy, the widespread adoption of EVs will do the job anyways.

(Source: AllCarsElectric.com)

Is the Global Warming Movement Dead?

Max Dunn — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:58:00 -0800

There is more evidence coming out that some of the catastrophic claims put forth by global warming advocates and the IPCC do not have a lot of scientific basis.

The Globe and Mail just published ‘The great global warming collapse’ by Margaret Wente that posits: “as the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.”

Walter Russell Mead agrees that “the global warming movement as we have known it is dead.”

Regarding the IPCC claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035, Wente states that “the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it.”

Wente describes Climategate as “a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties.”

Wente continues:

“Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming . . . but the sole source for that claim . . . was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article ‘a mess.’”

“None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

“By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe.”

Unfortunately, I have to agree with her conclusion.

Coal Tax Needed

Max Dunn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:00:00 -0800

I just went to an interesting talk about distributed solar and found out that prices of solar PV panels are dropping dramatically. Soon, PV will be about $4 per watt installed (in large installations) which works out to about $0.17 per kWh.

By comparison, coal-fired electricity sells for about $0.05 per kWh. This includes about $0.02 for the coal itself ($2.15 per MMBtu and 1 MMBTU produces about 100 kWh) and $0.03 for all other expenses.

Adding in a $30 per ton CO2 tax would add about $0.03 per kWh to this price, (coal produces about 2 lbs of CO2 per kWh) for a total of $0.08 per kWh.

So even with a CO2 tax, coal electricity will still be half the cost of PV.

Therefore, for coal electricity to cost about the same as PV electricity, a tax of 400% would need to be added to coal!

Electric Power Plant Cost Comparison

Max Dunn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:43:00 -0800

While looking for the external costs of coal, I ran into a great table that shows how much it costs to build and run various types of electric power plants.

It is interesting to note that while a convention coal plant costs much less to build than a solar thermal plant, the coal plant costs more to maintain so over 30 years, the total costs would be equal.

Table 1: Specification of electric power technologies used in GMM model. All costs are given in $(1998). The progress ratio (pr) is the rate at which the cost declines each time the cumulative production doubles. The data presented in the table comes from various sources: IIASA MESSAGE model database, literature reviews. Characteristics of technologies with CO2 removal are adopted from [8].

(Reference: Internalisation of external cost in the power generation sector)

Hydrogen Hype

Max Dunn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:17:00 -0800

Natural Capitalism is a terrific book. But it got one thing wrong – its hope for hydrogen cars. Dan Neil at the LA Times put it well: "Any way you look at it, hydrogen is a lousy way to move cars." (Ref) Here are a few of the reasons why hydrogen won’t work:

Hydrogen is only an energy carrier. It is not an energy source. (Ref)
Hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. And this will likely be the case for the next several decades. (Ref)
Hydrogen production produces CO2. (Ref) For instance, the Honda FCX Clarity hydrogen car indirectly produces 176g CO2/mile while the Toyota Prius hybrid produces less CO2 at 167g CO2/mile. (Ref)
Hydrogen cars are very expensive. The FCX Clarity costs several hundred thousand dollars and it will take many years to even drop below $100,000. (Ref)
Hydrogen leaks. A hydrogen car left in an airport parking lot for two week could lose 50% of its hydrogen. (Ref )
Hydrogen isn’t very efficient. (Ref) Only 20% to 25% of the energy needed to make hydrogen can be recovered. (Ref) Even using renewable energy, battery powered vehicles can still go 3-times further on the same electricity than hydrogen vehicles. (Ref)
Hydrogen cars fill up slowly. It currently it takes about 30 minutes to fill up a hydrogen tank. (Ref)

In the long-term, maybe the challenges with hydrogen cars will be solved. However, it is also likely that the few remaining problems with battery powered vehicles will be solved too. Physics will then remain firmly on the side of battery powered vehicles and it will be easier and more efficient to just transfer renewable electricity over power lines to charge battery vehicles than to convert the electricity to hydrogen, ship it, and convert it back into electricity again.

Carbon Indulgences

Max Dunn — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:21:00 -0800

In the late thirteenth century, the church came up with the idea of indulgences, which was paying someone else to do the good works demanded of you. Church officials argued that clergy were doing more good works then they needed to, so why not sell them to raise money?

Are carbon offsets like these medieval indulgences? Just reducing our guilt without really helping the planet? Let’s look a little more closely at them.

Coming Chaos? Maybe Not

Max Dunn — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:24:00 -0800

Here is an interesting article written by Michael W. Foley, a former professor in the social sciences, that looks at various examples around the world where there was social breakdown, what the factors led to ensuing violence, and how the US might react given a similar crisis situation:

Coming Chaos? Maybe Not

He found that while there were many cases where economic and ecological collapse led to violence, there were also many cases where it didn’t. The major determining factors were:

Political motivation
Police
Leadership
Community

His conclusion is that prospects for violence in the US following a “hard landing” are very small, except in some isolated locations where police and community support break down.

Climate Change Recalculated - Saul Griffith

Max Dunn — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:41:00 -0800

On January 16th, the Long Now Foundation sponsored a very interesting talk at Fort Mason by Saul Griffith entitled “Climate Change Recalculated”.

Saul first went through a calculation of his energy usage. However, he did it in a different way – instead of using energy (kilo-watt-hours or kWh) he used continuous power expended (kilo-watts or kW) because this made it easier to add up and compare.

After adding up all his plane trips, driving, food, energy usage and embodied energy in the stuff he buys (which accounts for 1/4 of his energy use), he calculated that he used 18kW. By comparison, a person in Qatar uses 27kW but the average person in the US uses 11kW and the global average is 2.2kW. So he uses a lot more than the average American and way more than the global average. So he decided to shoot for 2.2kW and see how he would have to change his life.

First, he would be able to fly to the East Coast only once per year, and fly to Australia only once every 5 years. He would need to have a car that got 100 MPG, and then could only drive 20 miles per day. He could eat meat only once a week and would need to buy 1/10 of the stuff he does now and make it last 10 times longer. He isn’t quite there yet but has cut down on his travel and the stuff he buys and now is using only 12kW. Interestingly, this has also increased his quality of life. For instance, he isn’t traveling as much so is spending more time with his family.

Next he talked about climate change and what would be necessary to hold CO2 to 450 ppm. Humanity currently uses 16TW (tera-watts or 10^12 watts or a million-million watts) and in order to hold the CO2 limit, we can only burn 3TW of fossil fuels. Since 1.5TW already comes from renewable resources we would need an additional 11.5TW from new renewable sources. To meet this, we would need to produce 2TW of power each year for the next 25 years (not sure how he got this from the 11.5TW figure?), and this would require installing:

Photovoltaic: 100 m2 per second
Solar thermal: 50 m2 per second
Wind: one every 5 or 6 seconds
Nuclear: one new plant every 3 weeks

This is a lot! However, if GM and Ford stopped making cars and started making just wind turbines, they could meet the goal of creating a wind turbine every 5 seconds.

Summary: We need to reduce the power we all use – which we can do but is not easy. We also need to dramatically increase the amount of renewable power production – which we can do but it won’t be easy.

(For more details, see Climate Change Recalculated)

The next by the Long Now Foundation is Social Collapse Best Practices on February 13th and features Dmitry Orlov who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and how it survived and applies these insights into how the US might not be able to cope as well with a similar collapse. Should be interesting too!

Biggest Threat to Polar Bears

Max Dunn — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:22:00 -0800

With all the talk about global warming, we sometimes forget that man is damaging the planet in far worse ways. Take for instance, polar bears. They have become a cover issue for global warming and are prominent in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. One study found a decline of 15 bears per year in the western coast of Hudson Bay and there was a sighting of 4 drowned bears after an abrupt windstorm. Both of these have been attributed to global warming.

However, in Baffin Bay the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board will allow 105 bears to be killed this year, even though biologist feel that the quota should be 64 or less to avoid overhunting.

Whatever the number, whether 64 or 105, it is obvious that man is responsible for directly killing more polar bears than are harmed by global warming.

CFL versus LED bulbs

Max Dunn — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:05:00 -0800

I have always thought that LED bulbs should provide the best energy efficiency and lowest lifetime cost of any bulb. However, looking into this more, I am not so sure.

An article on Salon by Ask Pablo (who happens to be a graduate of the Presidio School of Management) showed this comparison:

Bulb	Cost	Output	Power	Efficiency	Lifetime Bulb Cost	Lifetime Power Cost	Lifetime Total Cost
CFL	$7	500 lumens	10 watts	50 lumens/watt	$35	$55	$90
LED	$60	500 lumens	7 watts	71 lumens/watt	$60	$38	$98

(Note: Lifetime is 50,000 hours, and I used an electricity cost of $0.11/kWh)

Even though LED bulbs are much more expensive than CFLs (compact fluorescent), they are also about 40% more efficient, so adding in lifetime electricity costs their total cost would be about the same.

However, there is a catch. If an LED bulb is used 4 hours per day, it would last almost 35 years – and what is the chance that over those 35 years the LED bulb gets broken or there is a power surge that damages it? Probably pretty good! So assuming that LED bulbs actually last on average only 10 years, this would make them twice as expensive as CFLs.

So until the cost of LED bulbs come down quite a bit, CFLs will still be the better buy.

Does Protecting Old Forests Help Reduce CO2?

Max Dunn — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:31:00 -0700

In a previous post, I discussed some of the problems with carbon credits. Here is another example of a project that doesn’t seem like it is really reducing CO2.

The Garcia River Forest project is a certified carbon offset project that PG&E is sponsoring and protects trees that would otherwise be harvested. This seems like a good thing – leaving forests standing rather than cutting them down seems like it would reduce CO2. Right?

However, there is a problem. A growing forest sequesters a lot more carbon than a mature one. Of course, if the forest was cleared by burning, that would be bad because it would release a lot of CO2. But, if the forest was responsibly and sustainably harvested to make lumber, the CO2 would effectively be sequestered and then the young forest would soak up additional CO2.

So for maximum CO2 sequestration, it would actually be better to harvest as many forests as possible for lumber and re-plant them! Of course forests offer a lot of other benefits besides just CO2 sequestration, so we would never want to cut them all down. But the point is, if we really want to make a dent in CO2, we have to look carefully at all the effects of our efforts and not just make quick assumptions.

GCEP Fourth Symposium

Max Dunn — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:45:00 -0700

The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) held its fourth annual energy research symposium at the beginning of October.

GCEP is an interesting group based at Stanford University that seeks new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment. With funding of $225 million from Exxon, GE, Schlumberger and Toyota, GCEP supports a lot of diverse high-risk and high-reward projects in areas such as solar energy, batteries, cellulosic ethanol, hydrogen, CO2 capture and storage, advanced combustion and more

This was a fantastic symposium where researchers from Stanford and around the world discussed GCEP’s projects. Some of the highlights for me were:

Burning coal in super-critical water to capture all CO2 and other emissions
The benefits of using miscanthus for cellulosic ethanol (which is better than switchgrass)
Using nano structures to improve photovoltaics
Using biological organisms to split hydrogen
Various techniques to make fermenting cellulosic ethanol a reality
Improvements in lithium-ion battery cathodes

For more information, see my notes of the symposium presentations..

How Much Does Clean Coal Cost?

Max Dunn — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:07:00 -0700

So how much does it cost to clean the CO2 from a coal-fired electricity power plant? The numbers of FutureGen’s clean-coal project at the 275 MW Matoon Illinois plant gives an indication. The DOE pulled back on the project last December over the concerns of cost overruns that would likely propel FutureGen’s $1.5 billion cost estimate to $1.8 billion or higher.

Let’s look at the numbers here to see how much this carbon capture would cost. Over a 30 year lifetime, if the plant was operating 80% of the time, it would log 210,000 hours (24 * 365 * 30 * 0.8). So the 275 MW (megawatt) plant would produce 58 billion kWh of electricity over this time. (275,000 * 210,000). So the $1.8 billion cost would add about $0.03 to each kWh of electricity produced (1.8 / 58). Since a coal power plant produces electricity at about $0.03 to $0.04 per kWh, this would effectively double the cost of the electricity it produces. And this doesn’t take into account any ongoing costs of sequestering the carbon.

So with all this talk about clean-coal, we have yet to see an implementation of it at a utility scale power plant and it appears that the cost of carbon capture at a coal-fired power plant using today’s technology would make it uneconomical.

Slight of Hand - 20 Foot Sea Level Rise

Max Dunn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:58:00 -0700

There are many ways to distort the truth. One of them is to suggest something as a possibility and then let uncritical minds repeat it as a fact. This is what is happening with Al Gore’s look at a 20 foot sea level rise.

Book Review - Zoom, The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future

Max Dunn — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:03:00 -0700

ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
by Vijay Vaitheeswaran

I wanted to like this book – I really did. With a name like "Zoom" and the promise to show the car of the future, I was excited to read it. But in the end, the book turned out to be at best a dud, and at worst misleading and harmful to the future of transportation.

Easy CO2 Calculation for Vehicles

Max Dunn — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:05:00 -0700

Sometimes you will hear that electric vehicles produce more CO2 than gas vehicles, however, this isn’t true. Let’s look at an easy CO2 calculation to see why.

Burning a gallon of gas creates 20 lbs of CO2. So a car that gets an average of 20 MPG produces 1 lb of CO2 per mile. Ok so far?

Electric cars get an average of 3 miles per kWh and 1 kWh creates an average of 1.3 lbs of CO2. So an electric car produces about 0.4 lbs of CO2 per mile. So electric cars produce only about 40% as much CO2 as gas cars. Easy, right?

Friedman: Our Political Brownout on Energy Policy

Max Dunn — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:40:00 -0700

Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The World is Flat just wrote a very intelligent op-ed piece for the New York Times titled: ‘Dumb as We Wanna Be’. Here are some edited excerpts:

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy – this is money laundering. The idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away.
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

China's CO2 Explosion

Max Dunn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:02:00 -0700

China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and a new study shows it growing much faster than expected.

Previously, experts put growth at 2.5% to 5% per year, but the real rate may be 11%, according to a new study. If this is the case, then between 2000 and 2010, the increase in China’s CO2 emissions will be more than 5 times greater than all the reductions that were expected under the Kyoto Protocol.

(From BusinessWeek, March 24, 2008)

Independent Summary For Policymakers (ISPM)

Max Dunn — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:07:00 -0800

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific body that researches climate change for the United Nations (UN) and released their Fourth Assesment Report (AR4) in 2007. There are numerous experts participating in the IPCC, and a lot of good science is contained in these reports.

However, there is a big problem with the summary that is included with the IPCC report – the Summary For Policymakers (SPM). This summary is not written by the scientists themselves but by unnamed bureaucratic delegates from the participating countries. As such, they tend to oversimplify and bias the actual results contained in the full report.

So I found that the Independent Summary For Policymakers to be more balanced and representative of the actual report than the SPM itself. The ISPM was prepared by qualified experts, but who were not themselves IPCC chapter authors. The ISPM was subject to expert review and the reviewer’s responses are tabulated so there is a clear record to the extent that the reviewers agreed or disagreed with the ISPM.

Bike Riding for Errands

Max Dunn — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:30:00 -0800

I should ride my bike more. It is good exercise and saves the environment. However, I don’t like to ride my bike on everyday errands.

I was reminded of this today when I got new tires for our car. Like usual, I threw my bike in the back and rode home after dropping off the car. It isn’t far, about 2.5 miles, but I was hot and sweaty when I got home. I was smart this time and brought a piece of string to wrap around my pant leg. Usually I forget this and wind up getting chain oil on my pant leg.

When the car was ready, I rode back to the shop to pick it up, and I was a bit tired.

So it certainly worked out fine to ride my bike, but it isn’t something that I would normally do. Also, for the same reasons, I don’t think we can expect many Americans to forgo their cars and start doing a lot more bike riding either. Good thing I have my electric scooter to scoot around on!

My Global Warming Beliefs

Max Dunn — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:36:00 -0800

I have been reticent to publicly state my beliefs about global warming for a few reasons. One is that some of my friends are global warming believers and I don’t want to offend them. Another is that the global warming movement has gained so much momentum that it has becoming a core-belief of our society and to speak against it often makes a person seem crazy.

But the time has come for me to state my beliefs, and here they are:

Many parts of the world are experiencing rising temperatures or other climate changes
Man’s activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
This increased CO2 is contributing in part to climate changes
The effects from man’s contribution to climate change will not be as bad as many claim

On the other hand, I do believe that peak oil is going to be a gigantically huge problem and will be a major inflection point in the development and lifestyle of all civilization on this planet.

Conveniently, the actions to reduce CO2 are almost exactly the same ones that will help with peak oil. So I don’t mind riding the global warming train for now since it leads to the same place eventually!

Are Buses Bad for the Environment?

Max Dunn — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:05:00 -0800

It is common knowledge that buses are energy efficient, right? I mean shouldn’t we all ride the bus rather than drive a car? Well a study looked at this more closely and found out something interesting. Here are some figures for passenger miles per gallon (PMPG) for various forms of transportation:

Light rail – 120 PMPG
Trolley bus – 104 PMPG
Commuter rail – 86 PMPG
Intercity rail – 66 PMPG
Car, average trip – 44 PMPG
Transit bus – 33 PMPG

Wow, look at that: city buses only get about 33 PMPG – this is even less than a normal car with 2 people which gets 44 PMPG! I guess to be more green, we should all avoid the bus and drive our cars instead. :-)

Reference: Comparison of Energy Use & CO2 Emissions From Different Transportation Modes

Antarctic Cooling

Max Dunn — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:31:00 -0800

In my son’s 7th grade social studies class today, he was given an article that discussed how the warming of the Antarctic was melting ice sheets and reducing the population of some penguin colonies. However, while the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf was unexpectedly rapid, the Antarctic as a whole has actually had stable or decreasing temperatures and the overall ice pack has probably been growing. Even the IPCC recognizes this by stating:

“Antarctic sea ice extent continues to show interannual variability and localised changes but no statistically significant average trends, consistent with the lack of warming refl ected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region.” [1]

Another source confirms that:

“it is also clear from satellite data that surface temperatures decreased during the years 1982 through 2002” and “the Antarctic ice sheet had gained enough mass between 1992 and 2003 to slow sea level rise at a rate of about 1 cm/century” [2]

And one source states:

“over the past four decades, and during the time of the greatest build-up of greenhouse gases, Antarctica has been cooling!” [3]

These observations in no way disprove global warming in general. However, they do clearly show is that climate change is very complex science and that you can’t draw simple or universal conclusions based on it.

[1] IPCC AR4 Summary for Policymakers (Page 9)

[2] Is Antarctic climate changing?

[3] Antarctica: Warming, Cooling, or Both?

Electric Vehicles Produce a Lot Less CO2

Max Dunn — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 09:35:00 -0800

When I talk about how clean electric vehicles are, people sometimes ask if they really do reduce greenhouse gases since burning coal to produce electricity creates a lot of CO2. My standard answer to this question is that even in the worst case, electric cars are twice as clean as gas powered cars. However, while reading an article in Forbes about vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems. I realized that in general, electric cars are much cleaner than even this.

This article had an interesting chart that said electric cars produce about 1.1 tons of greenhouse gases a year while gas powered cars produce 6.3 tons – over 6 times more! Let’s see if we can verify these numbers.

The average car is driven 15,000 miles per year and electric vehicles normally get 4 miles per kWh, so it takes about 3,750 kWh of electricity a year to power an electric car. In California, the mix of electricity production produces about 0.6 lbs of greenhouse gases per kWh so this would produce 2,250 pounds, or 1.1 tons of greenhouse gases – right on the money with the Forbes chart.

A gas car, on the other hand, produces about 1 lb of CO2 for every mile driven (based on producing 20 lbs per gallon and getting 20 mpg). So 15,000 miles would produce 15,000 lbs of greenhouse gases, or about 7.5 tons – which is more than the Forbes estimate of 6.3 tons (maybe they are using a higher mpg).

So electric cars are even cleaner than I had thought, producing about one sixth as much greenhouse gases as a gas car.

Sources of Scientific Bias: Both Money and Beliefs

Max Dunn — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:03:00 -0800

When trying to discredit a scientist’s work, critics sometimes simply note: “They received funding from XYZZY corporation.” It is interesting that often nothing more is said, as if it is apparent that taking any money from a party with a vested interest will inevitably skew the results. This seems like a pretty harsh position, but there is some basis to this claim.

For instance, new research looked at drug studies and found that while the results of the study were not likely to be biased, the conclusion from those results were. In particular, they found that studies funded by a single drug company have a 55% rate of favorable results that is transformed into a 92% rate for favorable conclusions, representing a 37% gap. The gap shrinks to 21% (57% to 79%) when two or more drug companies provide support. Yet the gap vanishes entirely for studies done by non-profit institutions alone or even in conjunction with drug companies. These findings suggest a disconnect between the data that underlie the results and the interpretation or “spin” of these data that constitutes the conclusions.[1]

So it is apparent that receiving funding from a particular source that has a vested interest in the outcome will likely affect the conclusion of a study.

But are there other biases besides funding sources that can affect the results or conclusions of scientific work? What if a researcher isn’t taking any outside funding but has a passionate belief about what they are researching – will this affect their work as well?

Global Temperature Reconstruction

Max Dunn — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 09:43:00 -0800

The global temperature graph that appears in An Inconvenient Truth and also the one that the IPCC uses is usually referred to as the Mann or MBH98 graph.

However, this temperature reconstruction is controversial. One of its problems is that it doesn’t show the Medieval Warming Period or the Little Ice Age (LIA).

More recently, Loehle put together another temperature reconstruction that doesn’t use tree rings and this reconstruction does show the MWP and LIA.

Beliefs and Global Warming

Max Dunn — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 09:36:22 -0800

When talking to people about religion, you have to be careful. Many people don’t want to hear facts or ideas that contradict their point of view; they are only interested in hearing things that reinforce what they already believe.

This same phenomenon also happens when talking about global warming – most people have their minds made up on this issue and aren’t willing to consider any evidence that would challenge their beliefs.

The True Cost of Carbon Offsets

Max Dunn — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:29:00 -0700

There is a growing interest in buying carbon credits to offset our carbon footprints. However, there is evidence of widespread failings in the market for carbon offsets. Some of these failings include:

Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

In addition, many carbon offset projects don’t pay for the whole cost of CO2 removal projects they just kick in a little money and claim all the carbon credit of the project. Is this really going to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?