Steve Levitt is the author of Freakonomics a perennial bestseller which looks for unexpected consequences or outcomes of economic (and other) reports and encourages you to think about everyday things more critically and not just accept the conventional wisdom.  Remember, statistics are your friend, you can make them do anything you want.  He writes on his New York Times Blog:

A recent Lancet article argued that obesity is contributing to global warming because the obese consume more calories.

Since making food releases carbon, that means an obese person, on average, is worse for global warming than a skinny person.

But he than turns it around based on some back of the envelope calculations.

But as long as we are having the conversation, if we want to blame the obese for global warming, those who engage in recreational exercise like jogging or biking for pleasure should surely be discouraged from doing so because of global warming.

Someone who jogs an hour per day burns an extra 1,000 calories daily … far more than an obese person. Such wasteful burning of calories must be discouraged if we are to save the planet.

I hereby call for the next president of the United States to pass legislation imposing a carbon tax of 10 cents per hour on all recreational burning of calories. To save the planet, we must encourage people to sit at home and burn as few calories as possible.

photo credit: Foto43

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It has been a tenet of the climate change crowd that global warning would worsen the number and strength of hurricanes.  The New York Times reports on a new study from research meteorologist Tom Knutson who was formerly in the climate change/global warming camp. 

Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.

It appears that Knutson has changed his mind.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues ”against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.

The number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and its neighbors — anywhere west of Puerto Rico — will drop by 30 percent because of wind factors.

The biggest storms — those with winds of more than 110 mph — would only decrease in frequency by 8 percent. Tropical storms, those with winds between 39 and 73 mph, would decrease by 27 percent.

Hat Tip: Instapundit
photo credit: joiseyshowaa

From that bastion of conservative reporting, the New York Times comes the following story:

Hurricane Expert Reassesses Link to Warming

The research is important because the lead author is Kerry Emanuel, the M.I.T. climate scientist who in the 1980’s foresaw a rise in hurricane intensity in a human-warmed world and in 2005, just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a Nature paper that he had found statistical evidence linking rising hurricane energy and warming.

…

The new study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is hardly definitive in its own right, essentially raising more questions than it resolves. But it definitely rolls back Dr. Emanuel’s sense of confidence about a recent role for global warming. (The abstract is here. A pdf is downloadable on Dr. Emanuel’s ftp page.)

It seems we don’t know what we don’t know. More basic research needs to be done, before we plow billions into remedies that may be unneeded and may not even produce the result we seek.

As Dr. Emanuel told Eric in the Chronicle:

“The take-home message is that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Emanuel said. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some places it will go down.”

This is on the heels of a BBC article from a couple of weeks back.

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

But this year’s temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

What they don’t say, is that if 1998 was the record year, the subsequent years (1999 until 2007) would have to have had had lower temperatures than the record year.

To be fair, the article continues…

The WMO points out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C.

and finally the conclusion from the BBC article:

This would mean that temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the world.

Watching trends

A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted.

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

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Two quotes for this one:

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

Bill Vaughan

It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Enrico Fermi
US (Italian-born) physicist (1901 - 1954)

Much has been written about the problems with an Imperial Presidency, and the lack or perceived lack of checks and balances. Now if the shoe is on the other foot and it a cause you support it seems at least for some an Imperial Presidency is a good thing.

The globe is warming quickly. Congress is moving slowly.

That’s the idea behind a new study from a team of researchers at the University of Colorado law school, who worked full time for nearly six months on a project that could help the next U.S. president make sweeping climate-change policies — fast. The new report probes the edges of executive orders and lays out the authority the next president could use to introduce global-warming policies without waiting for legislation to wind its way through the notoriously slow congressional machine.

“Given the extreme importance of climate change, this is a way for the next president to be able to take rapid action,” said Kevin Doran, a researcher at CU’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security.

But I thought an Imperial Presidency was a bad thing?

photo credit: karynsig

A new game from Activision?

Hat Tip: Amazon

NPR, hardly the bastion of the anti-global warming crowd had the following article.  Now it could be a case of we don’t know what we don’t know; but it seems we should find out more before we spend billions to try to change what we don’t understand

The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat

  Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

…

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.”

photo credit: DeaPeaJay

While not considered politically correct these days, one of Rudyard Kipkling’s poems can give us instruction for how to conduct ourselves in this our any other year.

IF
by: Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man my son!