New on the Web: Climate data disagree with climate models: Anthropogenic effects evidently are minor compared to natural climate changes: So says a research paper by D.H. Douglass and S.F. Singer at AGU Annual Meeting, Dec. 2005. Until models are validated, one cannot and should not rely on their predictions of future warming.
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Montreal Climate Conference (COP-11 and MOP-1): In the first formal meeting since the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, the lame-duck Canadian environment minister tries vainly to launch a Montreal Action Plan (MAP); but it only calls for more talk. One can argue cynically: COP conferences will continue year after year -- with endless talk and no accomplishments except self-congratulations. After all, some 10,000 people (incl nearly 200 national delegations) are making this their life career. Why should they give it up a good thing?

We present different views of Montreal (slightly edited): BBC News gushing euphoria (Item #1). Washington Post cautious appraisal (Item #2). Former Congress member and presidential candidate Jack Kemp's exposure of Kyoto as an economic disaster (Item #3) - supporting Bush and contradicting Clinton. The National Review Online says Montreal is just hot air (Item #4). And Fred Singer shows that Montreal is a fraud (Item #5).

Finally, Timo Hameranta questions: Do we know if the Earth is actually warming? (Item #6)
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1. Last-minute climate deals reached: BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4515898.stm
Published: 2005/12/10 12:11:52 GMT

Ministers at the climate change conference in Montreal have made a series of breakthroughs in plans to combat global warming. On the conference's last day, Kyoto Protocol signatories agreed to extend the treaty on emissions reductions beyond its 2012 deadline. And a broader group of countries including the US agreed to non-binding talks on long-term measures.

The US had refused to accept any deal leading to commitments to cuts. Earlier, former President Bill Clinton said the US approach was "flat wrong".

The BBC's Tim Hirsch in Montreal says the deal was finally agreed in a mood of some euphoria after a last-minute procedural objection by the Russians held up the talks for several hours. Our correspondent says that, crucially, it sets the scene for discussing how large developing countries like India and China could be brought into the system of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

Agreement among Kyoto signatories on plan to deepen emissions cuts after 2012. US and other Kyoto non-signatories persuaded to take part in non-binding dialogue workshops

Formal talks can now begin over the precise targets, which will be set when the first phase of the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012.

Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion, who is hosting the conference, described the agreement as "a map for the future, the Montreal Action Plan, the MAP".

Last week delegates finalised a rule book for Kyoto, formally making it fully operational after years of negotiation and ratification. The 1997 treaty commits industrialised countries to cut their combined carbon emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

The US appears to have been stung by negative coverage in the US media after it walked out in protest at Canadian attempts to get it to accept mandatory targets, as well as by Mr Clinton's strong comments, our correspondent says.

There is no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities: Bill Clinton, former US president. Mr Clinton attacked a central plank of the Bush administration's resistance to targets for cutting emissions - that it would harm the US economy. "If the US "had a serious, disciplined effort to apply on a large scale existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies... we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economies," he said.

The US has still not budged on its opposition to the Kyoto treaty, and faced heavy criticism for its stance. Jennifer Morgan, climate-change expert for environmental group WWF, said US negotiator Harlan Watson's decision to leave the talks overnight showed "just how willing the US administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities".

The US rejected the criticism. "If you want to talk about global consciousness, I'd say there's one country that is focused on action... dialogue... co-operation and... helping the developing world, and that's the United States," said state department spokesman Adam Ereli in Washington.

Despite the row, environmentalists said the conference had been in most respects a success, reaching agreements on how to quantify gas emissions and how to penalise nations for failing to meet Kyoto targets.
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2. U.S. Won't Join in Binding Climate Talks: Administration Agrees to Separate Dialogue
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, December 11, 2005

MONTREAL, Dec. 10 -- Despite the Bush administration's adamant resistance, nearly every industrialized nation agreed early Saturday to engage in talks aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect beginning in 2012.

In a separate accord, a broader coalition of nearly 200 nations -- including the United States -- agreed to a much more modest "open and nonbinding" dialogue that would not lead to any "new commitments" to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with climate change. [emphasis added]

The outcome of Saturday's negotiations -- which nearly collapsed at the eleventh hour after Russia and the United States raised separate objections -- underscored the promise and limits of international talks aimed at confronting one of the world's most far-reaching problems. The results also showed that foreign negotiators have concluded they must press ahead without the Bush administration's assent on the assumption that a burgeoning grass-roots movement will eventually bring the United States back to the negotiating table.

Margaret Beckett, Britain's environment secretary, warned reporters in the past week that such negotiations often offer "first false euphoria, followed by false despair." But on Saturday she said the two pacts prove policymakers have finally summoned the political will to combat global warming.

"The reason why collectively the world community succeeded here is because the debate itself is changing on the costs and benefits of climate change," Beckett said. "There is growing recognition of the costs of not taking action and of the opportunities that come with taking action itself."

But other parties to the agreements, which came at the end of a two-week conference sponsored by the United Nations, question whether they will have much impact, and prominent scientists such as James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warn that nations may need to make deeper emissions cuts in the coming decade if they hope to avoid even more damaging warming. In a speech Dec. 6 in San Francisco, Hansen said, "Action must be prompt" to avoid a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that "will make it impractical to keep further global warming" within sustainable limits. [NB: Acc. to IPCC, stabilization of atmospheric CO2 requires emission cuts - worldwide -- between 60 and 80 percent.]

One hundred fifty-seven countries, including every major developed nation except the United States and Australia, have agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to cut their 1990 greenhouse gas levels by an average of 5 percent over the next seven years. Now the question is whether the new round of talks -- minus U.S. participation -- will produce more ambitious emission reductions after 2012, when Kyoto expires.

"We need much deeper cuts beyond 2012," said Peter Carl, the European Union Commission's director general for the environment. Carl said that although it may be difficult to obtain such commitments, he is optimistic because he had been "deeply impressed by the atmosphere during this conference."

The United States, which produces one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, objects to mandatory limits on the grounds that they could damage the nation's economy and because developing nations, such as China and India, which are burning increasing amounts of fossil fuel, have not embraced binding emissions cuts. Under Saturday's nonbinding agreement, however, China and India pledged to pursue voluntary emissions reductions.

China and India contend that their populations emit far smaller amounts of greenhouse gas per capita than people in the United States.

European delegates said they became convinced over the course of the conference that they could move ahead on climate change because so many Americans -- including state and local officials, senators, students and even former president Bill Clinton -- journeyed to Montreal to urge negotiators to embark on a new round of binding talks.

"Just because the Bush administration doesn't want this doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't see this as the right thing to do. What is apparent here is the U.S. is very split on this," Danish negotiator Eva Jensen said. She said Clinton's speech Friday extolling the economic and social benefits of cutting greenhouse gases "gives the world the idea that even though the U.S. at the moment isn't being very constructive in the negotiations, this might change over time."

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, whose city won a major global environmental award last week for cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 5 percent in the past three years, said state and local officials are "basically leaving the administration in the dust. The next administration will have little choice but to finally work in collaboration with the rest of the international community."

But several negotiators said they had to do a better job of enlisting the United States' aid in cutting the use of fossil fuels. Corrado Clini, director general of the Italian Ministry of Environment and Territory, said that even if the European Union meets its Kyoto targets in 2012, global emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent.

"I don't think, without a partnership between the European Union and the United States, we will be able to address climate change," Clini said. "It is like a marriage. The real risk is we are aging before the marriage, and when we marry, it will be too late to be effective."

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) was even more skeptical of Saturday's pact, saying it would lead only to "a dead end economically… Two weeks of costly deliberation only resulted in an agreement to deliberate some more, so Montreal was essentially a meeting about the next meeting," Inhofe said in a statement. "The Kyoto Protocol . . . is a complete failure."

As tenuous as Saturday's agreements may appear, they almost did not happen at all. The U.S. delegation, which did not return calls or e-mails Saturday, balked until late Friday night at the prospect of engaging in even nonbinding climate change talks. And Russia almost derailed the pact on future negotiations about mandatory emissions cuts when it proposed language that would have established a specific way for countries to count voluntary emission cuts as part of the binding agreement.

In the end, negotiators agreed on language that showed how far apart the two camps remain. Climate policy expert Myron Ebell at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute called the decision to move forward with a binding agreement "a futile exercise." Environmentalist Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Montreal "the tipping point. This is when the world got serious about dealing with this issue."
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3. Defining Prosperity Down
By Jack Kemp, Copley News Service

Over the weekend, the United States government wisely refused to yield to pressure by other industrialized nations to enter into formal negotiations that would create new binding limits on so-called "greenhouse-gas" emissions to take effect in 2012. The US did, however agree to engage in "open and nonbonding" discussions with 200 other nations on global warming and carbon dioxide emissions.

The Bush Administration deserves enormous credit for resisting this thinly disguised political attempt to disadvantage America economically under the pretext of environmentalism and the pseudo-science of global warming. Scientists cannot even agree on whether global temperatures are rising, falling or staying the same, much less find scientific consensus on what might account for any changes in average temperatures. I hope the Administration uses the opportunity of these "open and nonbonding" discussions to expose the pseudo-science of global warming and to unmask the hostile, anti-American political agenda that lies beneath this nonsense.

According to University of Virginia scientist and professor emeritus Fred Singer, the data on global temperature are ambiguous, at best. The climate clearly warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before modern industrial activity consumed much energy. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial carbon emissions accelerated, the climate cooled and then warmed again for a brief five years. Since then, the most reliable data indicate the climate has been cooling just slightly. "Certainly," Singer says, "there is no evidence that man is causing the warming." (The most persuasive data on global temperature changes all point to variable solar activity as the driving force in cyclical temperature changes on earth.) All of the so-called "evidence" pointing to global warming comes from surface-temperature readings that are contaminated by other factors, such as urban "heat-island" effects.

Britain's chief scientific advisor Sir David King bellows, "Global warming is a greater threat than terrorism" and "Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked." Yet, the only basis for these claims-the Washington Post this past Saturday proclaimed that global warming constitutes "one of the world's most far-reaching problems"-is a set of computer-model predictions.

The only problem is, the computer-model predictions are not backed up by independent data from both weather satellites and balloons, which show no appreciable warming of the atmosphere. Worse yet, the very same computer models that predict catastrophic global warming in the future also "predict" current climatic conditions almost the opposite of those that actually prevail. The computer models on which global-warming doomsdayers rely insist the climate in the middle troposphere, i.e., above the surface, should be warming faster than the surface right now. That's not what the real-world observations show, however. If the models don't even square with what's going on now in the real world, how can any reasonable person place confidence in what they predict for the future, especially if taking action based on those dubious predictions means inflicting incredible damage on the economy and consigning people to a declining standard of living?

The hysterical calls for radical reductions in carbon emissions are pure and simple a frontal attack on American global economic preeminence and a pretext for replacing the current international system of sovereign nation states with a global government possessing the far-reaching authority to engage in economic leveling and redistribution. The best statement of this agenda can be found in a Harper's Magazine article this month by Bill McKibben entitled "The Great Leap."

McKibben excoriates former President George H.W. Bush for announcing on his way to the international meetings in Rio that gave birth to the Kyoto Accords that "the American way of life is not up for negotiation." That statement, according to McKibben, "defines a tragedy." McKibben revealed the real agenda behind Kyoto and its progeny when he said, "The goal of the twenty-first century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop (emphasis in original) those of the rich-to transfer enough technology and wealth that we're able to meet somewhere in the middle." And what is that "middle?" McKibben is unambiguous: "One name for this kind of statistical mean is Europe or Japan, whose citizens use half the energy of Americans."

So, there you have it. The pseudo-science of global warming is not really about the global climate at all; it's about global government turning the whole world into Old Europe or stagnating Japan. This most recent round of eco-hysteria along with its predecessors are simply thinly veiled efforts to do by international treaty, and eventually global government, what Communism failed to do, namely define global prosperity down in the name of "equality." The Bush Administration is doing the right thing by standing astride the rush to environmental extremism and calling "stop."
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4. Hot Air In Montreal
National Review Online, 13 December 2005
http://www.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors200512130526.asp

Every year, parties to the Kyoto Protocol meet. Every year the future of the Protocol is very much in question. And every year the meeting ends with environmental crusaders falsely claiming that the world has finally united behind the goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. This year's conference in Montreal followed the tired old pattern.

The parties agreed to little or nothing - but, hearing the way the conference has been spun, you'd think the environmentalists' every dream had been fulfilled. Greenpeace hailed the meeting as "historic," and enviros hither and yon felt the special frisson of Bill Clinton's saying, in a speech before the conference, that George W. Bush is "flat wrong" to think that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would harm the U.S. economy. The conference's supposed triumph was an agreement to proceed with talks on new emissions-reductions goals, to take effect after Kyoto's current targets expire in 2012. That the U.S. has agreed to participate in these talks is being taken as a major American reversal.

No one bothers to point out that the U.S. is in no way committed to accepting whatever emissions targets are ultimately agreed upon. Given the reluctance of the vast majority of Americans -- and their elected representatives -- to emasculate the U.S. economy by enforcing a Green regime, we suspect Kyoto's supporters aren't going to get their way anytime soon. Moreover, the agreement to hold more talks is nothing new. It is, rather, simply a reaffirmation of an agreement in 1997 to hold discussions on post-2012 emissions targets no later than December of 2005. One man's historic breakthrough thus turns out to be another man's eight-year-old news.

In any case, the future talks are quite likely to run aground as soon as they turn to specific emissions targets. The truth is that Kyoto's parties are in serious trouble. The EU-15 countries, in particular, essentially admit that they won't be able to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to the Kyoto-required levels. Their solution is to buy "emissions credits" from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the developing world -- countries whose economic woes have kept them well below the high emissions levels that Kyoto allows them, freeing them to credit their "excess" reductions to whichever state bidder pays the highest price.

The trouble is that there almost certainly won't be enough such credits to make up for the developed countries' shortfall in meeting their targets. Moreover, it's tough to see what incentive the developing world has to keep its emissions down -- and, in so doing, to impair its economic growth -- simply so that Western Europe doesn't have to follow through on the cuts to which it has committed itself. After 15 years, negotiators have failed to find even a single developing country willing to make such a deal. According to the BBC, echoing recent comments by Tony Blair and even former European Commission president Romano Prodi, "Indian negotiator Andimuthu Raja said growth and the elimination of poverty must take precedence over mitigating the effects of climate change." Hear hear.

Before the conference, British environment secretary Margaret Beckett said that anyone wanting the Montreal meeting to agree to binding emissions-reduction targets post-2012 was "living in cloud cuckoo land." She was right - and all those news reports implying otherwise are strictly for the birds.

Copyright 2005, National Review
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5. Montreal Agreement is a Sham
Letter to Wash Post from SFS (sent 12/14/2005)

Your editorial "Quacking About Climate" [Dec. 14, 2005] fails to point out that the Kyoto Protocol is a sham -- and so is any likely post-2012 successor treaty. Emission trading is much ballyhooed as a market solution to reducing emissions. It is nothing of the sort: it is a legalized method of cheating. Buying unused emission rights (carbon credits) from Russia, for example, relieves European companies from reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. But as far as the atmosphere is concerned, there will be no global reduction in emitted GH gases -and, of course, absolutely no effect on climate.

The Montreal Accord's "flexibility" simply expands the supply of unused emission rights by including forests, thus lowering the price of carbon credits and removing any incentive to actually cut emissions or to generate and use energy resources more efficiently - or sustainably. Is that really the result you want?
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S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and president of the non-profit Science & Environmental Policy Project.
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6. Do we know if the Earth is actually warming?
By Timo Hameranta

The problem of errors in the surface temperature record is profound. Likely sources of bias in the surface temperature record of the last 150 years, which are well known and considerable, are ignored. The amount of warming is claimed to be known with a false degree of confidence. (Wojick E&E 2002)

Until a continuous climate observing system is established, both climate models and observations will remain uncertain. (Wielicki et al. Science June 21, 2002)
Thus, if the baseline against which current temperatures are compared were moved from the late 19th century to include the earlier warm period, the apparent warming at the end of the late 20th century would be correspondingly reduced. (Butler et al. Int. J Clim. June 2005)

We can no longer absolutely conclude whether globally the troposphere is cooling or warming relative to the surface. (Thorne et al. BAMS Oct 2005)

We suggest that the former situation, i.e. enhanced variability during pre-industrial times, would result in a redistribution of weight towards the role of natural factors in forcing temperature changes, thereby relatively devaluing the impact of anthropogenic emissions and affecting future predicted scenarios." (Esper et al. Quaternary Science Reviews Oct. 2005)

Frozen record of the past reveals models' shortcomings. It also reveals how little we understand about the way in which these gases influence global climate. (Nature News p. 536, Dec 1, 2005)

The origin of these (CO2) fluxes is not yet understood. (Bender et al., Global Biogeochem. Cycles Dec 7, 2005)

But could this warming be due to natural dynamics? Given what we know about the complexity, long-term persistence, and non-linearity of the climate system, it seems the answer might be yes. Finally, that reported trends are real yet insignificant indicates a worrisome possibility: natural climatic excursions may be much larger than we imagine. So large perhaps, that they render insignificant the changes, human-induced or otherwise, observed during the past century. (Cohn & Lins, GRL Dec 8, 2005)
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