Diversion: This Tiny Sphere Is All the World's Water

If you gathered all the world's water--from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything--into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles.

For more, see This Tiny Sphere Is All the World's Water by Veronique Greenwood, May 14, 2012 at 80beats.

Climate: The Heartland Institute's Climate Denial Machine

Internal Heartland Institute strategy and funding documents obtained by DeSmogBlog expose the heart of the climate denial machine — its current plans, many of its funders, and details that confirm what DeSmogBlog and others have reported for years. The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) RJR Tobacco and more.

For example ...

funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.

And ...

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

For more, see Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine by Brendan Demelle, February 14, 2012 at DeSmogBlog.com.

Climate: Climate Proposal Puts Practicality Ahead of Sacrifice

The current issue of the journal Science contains a proposal to slow global warming that is extraordinary for a couple of reasons:

1. In theory, it would help people living in poor countries now, instead of mainly benefiting their descendants.

2. In practice, it might actually work.

This proposal comes from an international team of researchers — in climate modeling, atmospheric chemistry, economics, agriculture and public health — who started off with a question that borders on heresy in some green circles: Could something be done about global warming besides forcing everyone around the world to use less fossil fuel?

Ever since the Kyoto Protocol imposed restrictions in industrial countries, the first priority of environmentalists has been to further limit the emission of carbon dioxide. Burning fewer fossil fuels is the most obvious way to counteract the greenhouse effect, and the notion has always had a wonderfully virtuous political appeal — as long as it's being done by someone else.

But as soon as people are asked to do it themselves, they follow a principle identified by Roger Pielke Jr. in his book The Climate Fix. Dr. Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, calls it iron law of climate policy: When there's a conflict between policies promoting economic growth and policies restricting carbon dioxide, economic growth wins every time.

After looking at hundreds of ways to control these pollutants, the researchers determined the 14 most effective measures for reducing climate change, like encouraging a switch to cleaner diesel engines and cookstoves, building more efficient kilns and coke ovens, capturing methane at landfills and oil wells, and reducing methane emissions from rice paddies by draining them more often.

If these strategies became widespread, the researchers calculate, the amount of global warming in 2050 would be reduced by about one degree Fahrenheit, roughly a third of the warming projected if nothing is done. This impact on temperatures in 2050 would be significantly larger than the projected impact of the commonly proposed measures for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Not incidentally, the researchers calculate, these reductions in low-level ozone and black carbon would yield lots of benefits long before 2050. Because people would be breathing cleaner air, 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths would be avoided each year. Thanks to improved crop yields, farmers would produce at least 30 million more metric tons of food annually.

The beauty of these pollution-control measures is that over five to 10 years they pay for themselves in the developing world, says Drew Shindell, the lead author of the proposal, who is a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and at Columbia University. They slow global warming, but there are local benefits, too. If you make black carbon reductions in China or India, you get most of the benefits in China or India.

For more, see Climate Proposal Puts Practicality Ahead of Sacrifice by John Tierney, January 16, 2012 at NYTimes.com.

Environment: Taking Fears of Acid Oceans with a Grain of Salt

Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The central concern is that lower pH will make it harder for corals, clams and other "calcifier" creatures to make calcium carbonate skeletons and shells. Yet this concern also may be overstated. Off Papua New Guinea and the Italian island of Ischia, where natural carbon-dioxide bubbles from volcanic vents make the sea less alkaline, and off the Yucatan, where underwater springs make seawater actually acidic, studies have shown that at least some kinds of calcifiers still thrive—at least as far down as pH 7.8.

In a recent experiment in the Mediterranean, reported in Nature Climate Change, corals and mollusks were transplanted to lower pH sites, where they proved "able to calcify and grow at even faster than normal rates when exposed to the high [carbon-dioxide] levels projected for the next 300 years." In any case, freshwater mussels thrive in Scottish rivers, where the pH is as low as five.

Laboratory experiments find that more marine creatures thrive than suffer when carbon dioxide lowers the pH level to 7.8. This is because the carbon dioxide dissolves mainly as bicarbonate, which many calcifiers use as raw material for carbonate.

Human beings have indeed placed marine ecosystems under terrible pressure, but the chief culprits are overfishing and pollution. By comparison, a very slow reduction in the alkalinity of the oceans, well within the range of natural variation, is a modest threat, and it certainly does not merit apocalyptic headlines.

For more, see Taking Fears of Acid Oceans with a Grain of Salt, January 7, 2012 at WSJ.com.

Environment: Chinese Cleaning Up

Despite being the world's most prominent polluter, China's investments into clean technology far surpass the United States. According to Ernst & Young, China is the most attractive location to invest in renewable energy projects. The firm says that the United States slipped to second place last year on the Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indices, which grades countries on a 100 point scale in national renewable energy markets, renewable energy infrastructure, and suitability for individual technology.

For more, see Chinese Expansion Critical to American Superconductor and Satcon Technology's Growth by The Bedford Report, July 27, 2011 at Yahoo! Finance.

Climate: Is This Tornado Season the Worst Ever?

... because of the looseness of the reporting record, it is hard to say April 2011 was the worst tornado month ever, or even the worst in recent memory. For starters, due to increases in population density, there are more people to report tornadoes. Most storms today are caught on camera and many are uploaded to the Internet within minutes. However, in the years before everyone owned a convenient camera or settled in particular locales, many tornadoes simply went unreported in rural areas. Therefore, bigger outbreaks may have happened in the past, but we will never know.

The rash of storms also brought another suspect into the public discussion: climate change. While this makes for interesting discussion, scientists are not yet sure of the fate of tornado frequency in the future. Global climate models indicate that some of the ingredients necessary for tornado-producing storms, such as instability, will increase. But others, like wind shear, may decrease.

For more, see Is This Tornado Season the Worst Ever? by Victor Gensini, May 22, 2011 at Popular Mechanics.

Fox News: The Fox News "Effect": A Few References

Clearly, there's much concern about Fox coverage. But many critics of the network seem unaware of what may be their best argument: the existence of several public opinion studies showing a correlation between watching Fox and being misinformed about one or more public policy issues.

These studies tend to take the same basic form. First, they survey Americans to determine their views about some matter of controversy. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the core facts of the issue--but not just that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox, or watch it frequently, are more likely to be misinformed.

Here are five such studies—and note that this list may be incomplete. This is just what I've come across so far:

1. Iraq War ....
2. Global Warming ....
3. Health Care ....
4. Ground Zero Mosque ....
5. 2010 Election ....

For details about the studies, see The Fox News "Effect": A Few References by Chris Mooney's, May 18, 2011 at DeSmogBlog.com.

Science: Groundwater Depletion Is Detected from Space

For decades, groundwater measurements in the United States had been made from points on the Earth's surface — by taking real-time soundings at 1,383 of the United States Geological Survey's observation wells and daily readings at 5,908 others. Those readings are supplemented by measuring water levels in hundreds of thousands of other wells, trenches and excavations.

The two satellites, each the size of a small car, travel in polar orbits about 135 miles apart. Each bombards the other with microwaves calibrating the distance between them down to intervals of less than the width of a human hair.

If the mass below the path of the leading satellite increases — because, say, the lower Mississippi basin is waterlogged — that satellite speeds up, and the distance between the two grows. Then the mass tugs on both, and the distance shortens. It increases again as the forward satellite moves out of range while the trailing satellite is held back.

For more, see Groundwater Depletion Is Detected from Space by Felicity Barringer, May 30, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Climate: Mitt Romney on Climate Change

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.

"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.

"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."

At an event in Manchester last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also running for president, said that climate change is "the newest excuse to take control of lives" by "left-wing intellectuals."

For more, see Mitt Romney on Climate Change: 'The World Is Getting Warmer... Humans Have Contributed', June 4, 2011 at The Huffington Post.

Environment: China Faces ‘Very Grave' Environmental Situation, Officials Say

In a blunt assessment of the problems facing the world's most populous country, officials from China's Ministry of Environmental Protection delivered their 2010 annual report. They pointed to two major advances: improvements in water and air quality — key goals that the ministry had set for itself to achieve over a five-year period ending last December.

Both targets were met, with pollutants in surface water down 31.9% over the period and sulfur dioxide emissions in cities down 19%.

But officials cautioned that many other problems were serious and scarcely under control.

Founded as an agency 13 years ago, the environmental protection office was upgraded to a ministry in 2007 but has still fought an uphill battle for funds and power. China's government has prioritized growth, worried that unemployment will lead to unrest.

Mr. Li said that over a fifth of the country's land set aside as nature reserves had been illegally developed by companies, often with local government collusion. But he said that the ministry had now deployed a satellite that can detect illegal development and would pressure local governments to stop the work. Failing this, Mr. Li said, the ministry has the power to influence officials' prospects for promotions because environmental compliance is now a part of their performance evaluation.

Independent observers say this is part of a gradual change toward giving the ministry more power.

For more, see China Faces ‘Very Grave' Environmental Situation, Officials Say by Ian Johnson, June 3, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Environment: Chemicals Were Injected into Wells, Report Says

Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.

The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas.

The inquiry over hydrofracking, which was initiated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee when Mr. Waxman led it last year, also found that 14 of the nation's most active hydraulic fracturing companies used 866 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products — not including water. More than 650 of these products contained chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or are listed as hazardous air pollutants, the report said.

Matt Armstrong, an energy attorney from Bracewell & Giuliani that represents several companies involved in natural gas drilling, faulted the methodology of the congressional report released Saturday and an earlier report by the same lawmakers.

"This report uses the same sleight of hand deployed in the last report on diesel use -- it compiles overall product volumes, not the volumes of the hazardous chemicals contained within those products," he said. "This generates big numbers but provides no context for the use of these chemicals over the many thousands of frac jobs that were conducted within the timeframe of the report."

For more, see Chemicals Were Injected into Wells, Report Says by Ian Urbina, April 16, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Environment: China Issues Warning on Climate and Growth

China's environment minister on Monday issued an unusually stark warning about the effects of unbridled development on the country's air, water and soil, saying the nation's current path could stifle long-term economic growth and feed social instability

Mr. Zhou's vow to weigh factors like climate change when approving new factories would be significant given that such policies were largely the domain of China's top economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, which had been reluctant to sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection.

With its increasing fixation on social stability, the Communist Party may have come to realize the benefits of balancing economic growth with the public's demands for uncontaminated food and water. In recent weeks, there has been a cascade of damaging news about the environment, from dangerously high smog levels in the capital to a study that found 10 percent of domestically grown rice contaminated with heavy metals.

Official vows to rein in environmental abuse are frequently announced, but many laws and policies are ultimately circumvented or ignored at the local level, in large part because of a system that encourages officials to pursue economic growth over environmental sustainability.

Still, the governing Communist Party has demonstrated its ability to make significant changes. Last summer, Mr. Wen vowed to use an iron hand to improve his country's energy efficiency. By the fall, more than 2,000 steel mills, cement plants and other energy-hogging factories had been closed.

For more, see China Issues Warning on Climate and Growth by Andrew Jacobs, February 28, 2011 at NYTimes.com.