Planetary Ruin

Dangerous heat will blanket most of the eastern half of the nation today, while drenching storms develop along the rim of the heat from the central Plains to the Great Lakes.

A large dome of high pressure over the Gulf Coast states is pumping hot air into most areas east of the Rockies. The Severe Weather Center lists the widespread heat-related Warnings and Advisories in effect through much of this week.

 Temperatures today will soar into the mid- to upper 90s across the southern Plains, the Ohio Valley and the Southeast. Some centers top the century mark and challenge record highs.

According to the East Regional News story, 90-degree heat will spread through the mid-Atlantic and parts of southern New England. Increased humidity will create dangerous RealFeel® temperatures near or above 100 degrees along the Interstate 95 corridor as far north as Massachusetts.

Residents should use extreme care during this heat wave to avoid suffering from heat-related illnesses.

Be sure to drink lots of water, wear loose and light-colored clothing, avoid strenuous activity and stay in air conditioned buildings. Children and pets should never be left in cars, even for a few minutes. The elderly, small children and chronically ill are especially vulnerable to the heat.

While the heat in the Northeast will ease slightly later in the week, there will be little or no relief from the sizzling temperatures in other regions.

The Southwest Regional News story reports the heat across the southern Plains during the upcoming days will be noteworthy. Today, the forecast high of 95 degrees in San Antonio, Tex., will be the first 95-degree day this year. By this date last year, the city had recorded more than 65 days of 95 degrees or higher.

Conditions could be brutal for the final major of the 2007 men’s professional golf season. The 89th PGA Championship begins Thursday at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla. High temperatures near or above 100 degrees will bake the fairways and greens, while excessive humidity will produce unbearable conditions for the players and fans alike.

Read more >>

A Senate bill to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would raise energy prices and also reduce American economic output by more than half a trillion dollars over two decades, according to a government report released on Monday.

Congress is expected to consider climate legislation this fall that would fight global warming. Many businesses worry the U.S. economy would suffer under a measure to impose tough mandatory cuts in emissions.

One proposal, introduced by Sens. Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, would gradually reduce total U.S. emissions by the year 2050 to 60 percent below 1990 levels.

The bill would require companies to report their yearly greenhouse gas emissions and submit a matching number of government-issued allowances to equal the emissions spewed. Companies that emit more would have to buy allowances from cleaner companies that produce fewer emissions.

However, the proposal would cut into the U.S. economy and raise gasoline and other energy prices paid by consumers, according to an analysis of the legislation by the Energy Information Administration.

The legislation “increases the cost of using energy, which reduces real economic output, reduces purchasing power, and lowers aggregate demand for goods and services,” the EIA said.

With companies trying to meet the shrinking emissions levels, U.S. economic output would be $533 billion lower over the 2009 to 2030 time period, the agency said.

In the transportation sector, gasoline and other petroleum products would cost more as oil refiners buy allowances to cover the emissions spewed by their facilities.

“The cost of the allowances will be included in the prices of the fuels,” the EIA said.

Gasoline prices are forecast to be 23 cents a gallon higher in 2020 and 41 cents more in 2030 because of the required emission cuts, the agency said.

The EIA said the fuel price increases would not be large enough “to create dramatic shifts in consumer behavior,” but there would be more demand for fuel efficient vehicles.

Read more >>

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing “ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” the magazine warned of an impending “drastic decline in food production.” Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect “just about every nation on earth.” Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you’d have known that the threat was: global cooling.

More than 30 years later, that little story is still being quoted regularly—as recently as last month on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the self-proclaimed scourge of climate alarmists. The article’s appeal to Inhofe, of course, is not its prescience, but the fact that it was so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future. Even by the time it appeared, a decades-long trend toward slightly cooler temperatures in the Northern hemisphere had already begun to reverse itself—although that wouldn’t be apparent in the data for a few years yet—leading to today’s widespread consensus among scientists that the real threat is actually human-caused global warming. In fact, as Inhofe pointed out, for more than 100 years journalists have quoted scientists predicting the destruction of civilization by, in alternation, either runaway heat or a new Ice Age. The implication he draws is that if you’re not worried about being trampled by a stampede of woolly mammoths through downtown Chicago, you don’t have to believe what the media is saying about global warming, either.

But is that the right lesson to draw?  How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn’t “wrong” in the journalistic sense of “inaccurate.” Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen—even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov—saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production. After all, Ice Ages were common in Earth’s history; if anything, the warm “interglacial” period in which human civilization evolved, and still exists, is the exception. The cause of these periodic climatic shifts is still being studied and debated, but many scientists believe they are influenced by small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (including its “eccentricity,” or the extent to which it deviates from a perfect circle) and the tilt of its rotation. As calculated by the mathematician Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s, these factors vary on interlocking cycles of around 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, and if nothing else changed they would be certain to bring on a new Ice Age at some time. In the 1970s, there were scientists who thought this shift might be imminent; more recent data, according to William Connolley, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has made a hobby of studying Ice Age predictions, suggest that it might be much farther off.

Read more >>

Climate change hardly qualifies as good news for anyone. But for advocates of nuclear energy, these are practically glory days. As the urgency of combating global warming has risen, even environmentalists and politicians who may have once chained themselves to the reactor gates are taking another look at the industry that has languished in regulatory and PR hell since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. The reason? Nuclear energy, which now generates 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, does not produce greenhouse gases. “If you believe that climate change is the issue of our generation, then it’s disingenuous to say that nuclear energy is off the table,” says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, who admits his own position on the issue has evolved from “skeptical” to “agnostic.”

He’s not alone. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, includes generous subsidies and tax credits for nuclear and other non-fossil fuels. President George W. Bush has consistently called for a revival of nuclear plant construction as a way of boosting domestic energy production-and curbing greenhouse gases. Even Al Gore recently told a House committee, “I am not an absolutist in being opposed to nuclear.”

Approval—or at least acceptance—also runs through the presidential field. Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are both strong proponents of nuclear power. Democratic contender John Edwards said at a recent CNN/YouTube debate that he is opposed to nuclear energy because of concerns over cost and waste disposal, but his competitors have been noticeably less critical. At the same debate, Hillary Clinton also described herself as a nuclear energy “agnostic,” while Barack Obama went further, with a call to “explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix.” Obama and Clinton have joined McCain as co-sponsors of the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007, which includes an additional $3 billion in funding and loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear plants using next-generation designs that improve efficiency. A2006poll sponsored by the nuclear industry (and conducted by the same firm that works for Clinton) found that public approval for nuclear energy rose significantly when those surveyed were told that the plants emit zero greenhouse gases.

For the nuclear industry, all this means that the political climate has not been more favorable in years.To bolster its powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, the industry recently launched a new public relations offensive, hiring former Bush EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman and former Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore as spokespeople. Moore, who quit Greenpeace years ago after a dispute, has since rebuked his former allies in the green movement for spreading “misinformation and hysteria” about nuclear energy during the 1970s and 80s. “I was caught up in the anti-nuclear fervor of the time in which we failed to distinguish between peaceful and military uses of nuclear technology,” Moore told Newsweek. “I’m sorry I did that.” Moore , an ecologist, says all other non-fossil energy sources “pale in comparison” to nuclear, which he expects will eventually provide half of the nation’s electricity. (Solar generated less than 0.01 percent last year.)

Read more >>

Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”

If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the “Live Earth” concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, “green” magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore’s best-selling book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

Read more >>