Global Warming – Page 40 – artdiamondblog.com

New York City Would Creatively Adapt to Global Warming

“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront In this MoMA show, a model by Architecture Research Office marries a wholly new landscape to Lower Manhattan’s streets.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Much is in doubt about “global warming” including how much the globe will warm, and how fast, to what extent the benefits of global warming would balance the costs, and what actions (such as Nathan Myhrvold’s creative plan) might be taken to counteract global warming.
But one certainty is that if governments leave innovative entrepreneurial capitalism alone, human creativity will find ways to adapt in order to increase the benefits and reduce the costs.
Few cities have displayed as much creative destruction in architecture as New York. (One book on New York architecture was even called The Creative Destruction of Manhattan“). The article quoted below describes some visions of how New York City might adapt to an increase in sea level that might result from global warming.

(p. C21) “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” a new show at the Museum of Modern Art, reflects a level of apocalyptic thinking about this city that we haven’t seen since it was at the edge of financial collapse in the 1970s, a time when muggers roamed freely, and graffiti covered everything.

Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the Modern’s curator of architecture and design, the show is a response to the effects that rising sea levels are expected to have on New York City and parts of New Jersey over the next 70 or so years, according to government studies. The solutions it proposes are impressively imaginative, ranging from spongelike sidewalks to housing projects suspended over water to transforming the Gowanus Canal into an oyster hatchery.
. . .
(p. C23) A general interest in re-examining parts of the urban fabric that we take for granted, like streets, piers and canals — as opposed to the more familiar desire to create striking visual objects — is one of the main strengths of the exhibition. A team led by Matthew Baird Architects, for example, has focused on a huge oil refinery in Bayonne, N.J., that, if current estimates hold, will be entirely under water before our toddlers have hit retirement age. Rather than taking the predictable and bland route of transforming the industrial site into a park, the team proposes a system of piers that would support bio-fuel and recycling plants, including one that would produce the building blocks for artificial reefs out of recycled glass.
Those large, multipronged objects, which the architects call “jacks,” could be dumped off boats in strategically chosen locations, where their forms would naturally interlock to create artificial reefs once they settled at the bottom of the harbor. The jacks are magical objects, at once tough and delicate, and when you see examples of them from across the room at MoMA, their heavy legs and crushed glass surfaces make them look almost like buildings.
But here again, what’s really commendable about the design is the desire to look deeper into how systems — in this case, global systems, both natural and economic — work. According to Mr. Baird’s research, the melting of the ice cap could one day create a northern shipping passage that would make New York Harbor virtually obsolete. The manufacturing component of the design is meant as part of a broader realignment of the city’s economy that anticipates that shift.

For the full story, see:
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF. “Architecture Review; The Future: A More Watery New York.” The New York Times (Fri., March 26, 2010): C21 & C23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: The online version of the article is dated March 25, 2010 and has the title “Architecture Review; ‘Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront’; Imagining a More Watery New York.”)

The book I mention in my comments is:
Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Minnesota Windmills Do Not Turn in Cold Weather

“Inspecting a windmill in Chaska, Minn. The blades on some in the area have been stationary.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A12) For those who suspect residents in places like Minnesota of embellishment when it comes to their tales of bitterly cold winter weather, consider this: even some wind turbines, it seems, cannot bear it.

Turbines, more than 100 feet tall, were installed last year in 11 Minnesota cities to provide power, and also to serve as educational symbols in a state that has mandated that a quarter of its electricity come from renewable resources by 2025.
One problem, though: The windmills, supposed to go online this winter, mostly just sat still, people in cities like North St. Paul and Chaska said, rarely if ever budging. Residents took note. Schoolchildren asked questions. Complaints accumulated.
“If people see a water tower, they expect it to stand still,” said Wally Wysopal, the city manager of North St. Paul. “If there’s a turbine, they want it to turn.”
No one knows for sure why these turbines do not. Officials believe there may be several reasons, but weather is the focus of much speculation.

For the full story, see:

MONICA DAVEY. “When Windmills Don’t Spin, People Expect Some Answers.” The New York Times (Fri., February 5, 2010): A12.
(Note: the online version of the article was dated February 4, 2010)

Myhrvold Innovates in Financing Innovation

“Nathan Myhrvold, chief of Intellectual Ventures, says patent holders are being treated unfairly.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

When Nathan Myhrvold was at Microsoft, he helped Bill Gates write The Road Ahead, a well-written book full of realistically optimistic speculation, forecast and analysis.
Besides his main initiative, discussed below, he has recently been in the news due to his bold and controversial suggestion for how to cheaply solve global warming.

(p. B1) BELLEVUE, Wash. — Nathan Myhrvold wants to shake up the marketplace for ideas. His mission and the activities of the company he heads, Intellectual Ventures, a secretive $5 billion investment firm that has scooped up 30,000 patents, inspire admiration and angst.

Admirers of Mr. Myhrvold, the scientist who led Microsoft’s technology development in the 1990s, see an innovator seeking to elevate the economic role and financial rewards for inventors whose patented ideas are often used without compensation by big technology companies. His detractors see a cynical operator deploying his bulging patent trove as a powerful bargaining chip, along with the implied threat of costly litigation, to prod high-tech companies to pay him lucrative fees. They call his company “Intellectual Vultures.”
White hat or black hat, Intellectual Ventures is growing rapidly and becoming a major force in the marketplace for intellectual capital. Its rise comes as Congress is considering legislation, championed by large technology companies, that would make it more difficult for patent holders to win large damage awards in court — changes that Mr. Myhrvold has opposed in Congressional testimony and that his company has lobbied against.
. . .
(p. B10) The issues surrounding Intellectual Ventures, viewed broadly, are the ground rules and incentives for innovation. “How this plays out will be crucial to the American economy,” said Josh Lerner, an economist and patent expert at the Harvard Business School.
Mr. Myhrvold certainly thinks so. He says he is trying to build a robust, efficient market for “invention capital,” much as private equity and venture capital developed in recent decades. “They started from nothing, were deeply misunderstood and were trashed by people threatened by new business models,” he said in his offices here.
Mr. Myhrvold presents his case at length in a 7,000-word article published on Thursday in the Harvard Business Review. “If we and firms like us succeed,” he writes, “the invention capital system will turbocharge technological progress, create many more new businesses, and change the world for the better.”
In the article and in conversation, Mr. Myhrvold describes the patent world as a vastly underdeveloped market, starved for private capital and too dependent on federal financing for universities and government agencies, which is mainly aimed at scientific discovery anyway. Eventually, he foresees patents being valued as a separate asset class, like real estate or securities.
His antagonists, he says, are the “cozy oligarchy” of big technology companies like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and others that typically reach cross-licensing agreements with each other, and then refuse to deal with or acknowledge the work of inventors or smaller companies.
. . .
Mr. Myhrvold personifies the term polymath. He is a prolific patent producer himself, with more than 100 held or applied for. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton and did postdoctorate research on quantum field theory under Stephen Hawking, before founding a start-up that Microsoft acquired.
He is an accomplished French chef, who has also won a national barbecue contest in Tennessee. He is an avid wildlife photographer, and he has dabbled in paleontology, working on research projects digging for dinosaur remains in the Rockies.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’.” The New York Times (Thur., February 18, 2010): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2010.)

The Bill Gates book is:
Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Myhrvold’s Harvard Business Review essay is:
Myhrvold, Nathan. “The Big Idea: Funding Eureka!” Harvard Business Review 88, no. 2 (March 2010): 40-50.

“Nathan Myhrvold with a machine that freeze-dries food. Intellectual Ventures so far has paid $315 million to individual inventors.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Briffa’s Tree Ring Evidence Undermines “Hockey Stick” Global Warming Graph

(p. A12) The problem: Using Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring techniques, researchers in the ’90s built charts suggesting temperatures in the late 20th century were the highest in a millennium. The charts were dubbed “hockey sticks” because they showed temperatures relatively flat for centuries, then angling higher recently.

But Mr. Briffa fretted about a potential issue. Thermometers show temperatures have risen since the ’60s, but tree-ring data don’t move in tandem, and sometimes show the opposite. (Average annual temperatures reached the highest on record in 2005, according to U.S. government data. They fell the next three years, and rose in 2009. All those years remain among the warmest on record.)
In his same 1999 email, Mr. Briffa said tree-ring data overall did show “unusually warm” conditions in recent decades. But, he added, “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In other words, maybe the chart shouldn’t resemble a hockey stick.
The data were the subject of heated back-and-forth before the IPCC’s 2001 report. John Christy, one of the section’s lead authors, said at the time that he tried in vain to make sure the report reflected the uncertainty.
Mr. Christy said in an interview that some of the pressure to downplay the uncertainty came from Michael Mann, a fellow lead author of that chapter, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University, and a developer of the original hockey-stick chart.
The “very prominent” use of the hockey-stick chart “overrules what tentativeness some of us actually intended,” Mr. Christy wrote to the National Research Council in the U.S. a month after the report was published. Mr. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, provided that email.
“I was suspicious of the hockey stick,” Mr. Christy said in an interview. Had Mr. Briffa’s concerns been more widely known, “The story coming out of the [report] may have been different in tone and confidence.”

For the full story, see:

JEFFREY BALL And KEITH JOHNSON. “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., February 26, 2010): A1 & A12.

Hockey stick graph is on top; more accurate, but much less publicized graph, is on bottom. Source of graphs: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Doubts on Sainthood for U.N.’s Global Warming Nobel Prize Winning Pachauri

“Rajendra K. Pachauri, right, the United Nations climate panel’s leader, at a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony with Al Gore in 2007.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist’s version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations’ climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.
They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.
The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.
But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri’s resignation last week.
Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.
They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.
The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.

For the full story, see:
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. “U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility.” The New York Times (Tues., February 9, 2010): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: The online version of the article is dated February 8, 2010, and has the title “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel.”)

Thousands Waited Hours in Subzero Cold Trying to Enter Global Warming Conference (“This Is What UN Efficiency Looks Like”)

(p. A10) As dozens of developing countries threatened to walk out of the Copenhagen climate-change summit, thousands of NGOs, journalists, lawyers, activists were still trying to get in.

The thousands queued from the early morning into the afternoon on Monday to register for the summit but found themselves in a line that barely budged for most of the day. Only those who already had accreditation — obtained during the first week of the summit or over the weekend — were let in; the rest braved subzero temperatures for some glimpse of a breakthrough.
Would-be attendees chanted “Let us in!” to Danish policemen ringing the Bella Center.
United Nations officials announced at one point that the process of accreditation would stop at 6 p.m. today, prompting boos and catcalls and cries of “shame” from those in line. One sign declared: “This is what UN efficiency looks like.”

For the full story, see:
Guy Chazan. “Copenhagen Dispatches; Some Walk Out of Gathering, But Many More Want In.” The Wall Street Jounal (Tues., December 15, 2009): A10.
(Note: the online version of the commentary had the title “Thousands Line Up for Climate Conference” and the date December 14, 2009.)

When the Green Pedalers Went Home, the Grid Powered the Christmas Tree

“The pedal-powered Christmas tree at City Hall Square.” Source of caption: the print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo (which appeared in the print, but not the online, version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below): http://www.chriskeam.com/blog/uploaded_images/Copenhagen-Xmas-tree-792971.jpg

(p. A16) Copenhagen has splashed out on every kind of green widget to shore up its environmental credentials as host of the world’s biggest climate change conference in years. Most of the emissions-free wizardry is familiar, such as electric cars. Here’s one you may not have seen yet: An extra “green” Christmas tree.

At the Danish capital’s City Hall Square, 15 to 20 volunteers can sit on stationary bikes located around a massive, decorated tree and pedal away to keep it light, at least during the day. The bikes are connected to electrical tie-ups that ultimately power hundreds of lights on the tree.
. . .
Late at night, the big tree continues to sparkle–but thanks to traditional power outlets, not pedal power–once the volunteers have gone home.

For the full story, see:
Spencer Swartz. “Copenhagen Dispatches: Pedal Power: Copenhagen Lights Christmas Tree With Bikes.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., December 16, 2009): A16.
(Note: the title of the online version of the article is “Pedal Power: Copenhagen Lights Christmas Tree With Bikes” and is dated December 15, 2009.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

U.N. Glacial Melt Prediction Based on Decade-Old “Misquoted” Interview with One Scientist

In an earlier entry, evidence was quoted suggesting that many Himalayan glaciers are growing, rather than contracting as is widely claimed. Now The New York Times reveals that a “much-publicized” U.N. prediction of Himalayan glacier disappearance by 2035, was based on an old misquoted interview with a single scientist who now repudiates the prediction.

(p. A8) A much-publicized estimate from a United Nations panel about the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers from climate change is coming under fire as a gross exaggeration.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 — the same year it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore — that it was “very likely” that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 if current warming trends continued.
That date has been much quoted and a cause for enormous consternation, since hundreds of millions of people in Asia rely on ice and snow melt from these glaciers for their water supply.
The panel, the United Nations’ scientific advisory body on climate change, ranks its conclusions using a probability scale in which “very likely” means there is greater than 90 percent chance that an event will occur.
But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure is lacking. The scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, a glacier specialist with the government of the Indian state of Sikkim and currently a fellow at the TERI research institute in Delhi, said in an e-mail message that he was “misquoted” about the 2035 estimate in The New Scientist article. He has more recently said that his research suggests that only small glaciers could disappear entirely.

For the full story, see:
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. “U.N. Panel’s Glacier Warning Is Criticized as Exaggerated.” The New York Times (Tues., January 19, 2010): A8.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 18, 2010.)

Warming of Arctic Would Allow Faster, Safer Cable Route

Source of map: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4A) ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Global warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago: laying underwater fiber optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage.

The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London.
The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions. “Speed is the crux,” Ebell said. “You’re cutting the delay from 140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds.”
. . .
“It will provide the domestic market an alternative route not only to Europe – there’s lots of cable across the Atlantic – but it will provide the East Coast with an alternative, faster route to Asia as well,” he said.
The cable would pass mostly through U.S., Canadian international waters and avoid possible trouble spots along the way.
“You’re not susceptible to ‘events,’ I should say, that you might run into with a cable that runs across Russia or the cables that run down around Asia and go up through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea. You’re getting away from those choke points.”

For the full story, see:
DAN JOLING, Associated Press Writer. “Loss of Arctic Ice Opens Up New Cable Route.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., January 22, 2010): 4A.
(Note: the online version of the article had the title: Global warming opens up Arctic for undersea cable” and was dated January 21, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Green Danes Embrace Hot Air Escaping Through Open Doors

“Environmental displays in Copenhagen’s City Hall Square include pedal-powered smoothies.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I mainly liked the article cited below for the photo displayed above.
But there also was this bit, showing that beyond some silly green pretensions, not all is rotten in Denmark:

(p. A11) . . . , cracks in Copenhagen’s green facade were easy to spot on Friday at the nearby Stroget, a popular car-free shopping area in the city center. In the late afternoon every shop door was propped open, sending clouds of heated air into the chilly street.

Some cities impose fines on shopkeepers who allow excess energy to escape through open doors.
But Jan Michael Hansen, the executive director of Copenhagen City Center, an organization representing shops along the three-quarter-mile-long corridor, was nonplused. A closed door keeps customers away, which is bad for business, he explained.
He seemed puzzled that the visitor brought it up. “I have never had an inquiry like this before,” he said.

For the full story, see:
TOM ZELLER Jr. and ANDREW C. REVKIN. “Reporter’s Notebook; Global and Local Concerns Meet in ‘Hopenhagen’.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2009): A11.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 10, 2009.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Global Warming “Consensus” Achieved by Suppressing Skeptical Research

(p. A25) When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.
A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of “paleoclimate” studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.
In fact, that period, known as the “Medieval Warm Period” (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.
Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous “hockey stick” article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent “Little Ice Age” (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.
Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn’t like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU’s own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”
After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

For the full commentary, see:
PATRICK J. MICHAELS. “OPINION; How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus; The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., DECEMBER 18, 2009): A25.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated DECEMBER 17, 2009.)