date: Wed, 10 May 2006 07:24:43 -0600 (MDT)
from: wigley@ucar.edu
subject: [Fwd: CCNet: "COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY 
to: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk

Keith,

See the last item. Why don't you just give these people the raw data?
Are you hiding something -- your apparent refusal to be forthcoming sure
makes it look as though you are.

Tom.
==========


---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: CCNet: "COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY SOON
BECOME WORTHLESS
From:    "Peiser, Benny" <B.J.Peiser@ljmu.ac.uk>
Date:    Wed, May 10, 2006 4:50 am
To:      "cambridge-conference" <cambridge-conference@livjm.ac.uk>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

CCNet 73/06 - 10 May 2006
"COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY SOON BECOME WORTHLESS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Europe next week will likely reveal a key flaw in its flagship strategy to
tackle climate change -- a net surplus of pollution permits, says Louis
Redshaw, Head of Environmental Markets at Barclays Capital. The price of
permits -- or carbon credits -- could then fall as low as 5 euros, having
already collapsed to 12 euros on Monday from a peak of 31 euros three
weeks ago, Redshaw said. Such a price fall would almost certainly trigger
further drops in power prices across Europe. Ultimately the balance of
emissions and permits would only become clear at the end of the first
phase of the EU trading scheme in 2007, and only then could the price
collapse to near zero, he said.
        --Gerard Wynn, Reuters, 9 May 2006



Australia has not signed onto the Kyoto accord on greenhouse-gas emissions,
and Harper's environment minister, Rona Ambrose, has made it clear that
this government will do nothing much to honour the old Liberal signature
on that deal. Still, Harper and Ambrose have promised detailed environmental
policies by fall, including plans for controlling - nobody has said
reducing - greenhouse-gas emissions. So Howard's visit could be an
opportunity
for Canada to announce plans for adherence to the Asia Pacific Partnership
on Clean Development and Climate, a sort of club for Kyoto skeptics.
        --The Montreal Gazette, 10 May 2006



New research calls into question the linkage between major Atlantic
hurricanes
and global warming. That is one of the conclusions from a University of
Virginia
study to appear in the May 10, 2006 issue of the journal Geophysical Research
Letters. Unlike prior studies, the U.Va. climatologists specifically examined
water temperatures along the path of each storm, providing a more precise
picture
of the tropical environment involved in each hurricane's development. They
found
that increasing water temperatures can account for only about half of the
increase
in strong hurricanes over the past 25 years; therefore the remaining
storminess
increase must be related to other factors.
       --AScribe Newswire, 9 May 2006



(1) "COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY SOON BECOME
WORTHLESS
    Gerard Wynn, Reuters, 9 May 2006

(2) MEDIA SPECULATION: CANADA TO JOIN ASIA-PACIFIC CLIMATE PACT?
    The Montreal Gazette, 10 May 2006

(3) NEW STUDY QUESTIONS LINKAGE BETWEEN MAJOR HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING
    AScribe Newswire, 9 May 2006

(4) SEA-SURFACE TEMPERATURES AND TROPICAL CYCLONES IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN
    Patrick J. Michaels et al. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, 10 May 2006

(5) RIVER DISCHARGE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN: 1964-2000
    CO2 Science Magazine, 10 May 2006

(6) A PAN-ARCTIC EVALUATION OF CHANGES IN RIVER DISCHARGE, 1964-2000
    James W. McClelland et al., GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, 2006

(7) GLOBAL WARMING AND EL NINOS
    CO2 Science Magazine, 10 May 2006

(8) RARE-EVENT EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS (REPP)
    Andy Smith <astrosafe22000@yahoo.com>

(9) ASTEROIDS  & HYDROGEN-BORON FUSION
    Mark Bahner <mark.bahner@verizon.net>

(10) AND FINALLY: SCIENCE SHENANGIGANS GO ON
     Steve McIntyre, 9 May 2006


===========
(1) "COLLAPSE TO NEAR ZERO?" EUROPE'S CARBON CREDITS MAY SOON BECOME
WORTHLESS

Reuters, 9 May 2006
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/36274/story.htm

By Gerard Wynn

LONDON - Europe next week will likely reveal a key flaw in its flagship
strategy to tackle climate change -- a net surplus of pollution permits,
says Louis Redshaw, Head of Environmental Markets at Barclays Capital.

The price of permits -- or carbon credits -- could then fall as low as 5
euros, having already collapsed to 12 euros on Monday from a peak of 31
euros three weeks ago, Redshaw said.
Such a price fall would almost certainly trigger further drops in power
prices across Europe.

The European Union last year handed its heavy industry the tradeable
credits at the launch of its carbon market to cut emissions of
heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2).

Crucially for the market to work there had to be fewer credits than actual
emissions, to drive pollution cuts, but this is now looking unlikely.

"Based on the trend we're seeing we'd expect the whole market to be long
in year 1," Redshaw said. A UBS report last Friday also saw the market
long on credits.

Already a clutch of EU countries have reported their 2005 carbon
emissions, and all but Spain revealed emissions below their permit quota,
triggering the recent price collapse.

The European Commission will publish data on remaining countries on May 15.

Redshaw saw a price fall to as low as 5 euros a possibility, but did not
expect a complete collapse yet because of continuing uncertainty about
future energy and therefore carbon demand.

At the end of every financial year companies included in the scheme, such
as power producers, have to balance their books, having one carbon credit
for every tonne of emissions.

Some are happy to buy at present prices, despite the bearish news of
credit surpluses and a possible price collapse, just in case for example a
cold winter increases demand for power and pushes carbon credit prices
back up.

"Buying carbon now is a hedging strategy. (And) There's still plenty of
value -- you can make margins on producing electricity (at a 12 euro
carbon price)," said Redshaw.

HEDGE

Ultimately the balance of emissions and permits would only become clear at
the end of the first phase of the EU trading scheme in 2007, and only then
could the price collapse to near zero, he said.

The market is currently awaiting news from big economies such as Germany,
Britain and Italy to discover the overall EU carbon market position for
2005, whether or not it is in surplus.

But according to Redshaw the near to medium-term prospects for carbon
credit prices depended on how long it took power firms to hedge themselves
fully.

"When they stop buying there could be more weakness," he said.

Copyright 2006, Reuters

============
(2) MEDIA SPECULATION: CANADA TO JOIN ASIA-PACIFIC CLIMATE PACT?

The Montreal Gazette, 10 May 2006
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=048162c0-c0e1-49f8-a2cb-860d9e8bcbeb

A left-centre political party, in office for 13 long years, had grown
tired and unfocused and was ethically challenged. So it was no surprise
when a resurgent conservative party won the national election.

And so it was, in 1996, that John Howard became prime minister of
Australia. He's still in the job today, at 66, and next week he will visit
Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has invited the Australian leader to
address a joint session of Parliament, a rare honour.

This visit might be an opportunity for Canadians to learn some more about
the foreign policy of the Harper government. We hope so, because except on
Afghanistan and relations with the United States, we still know little
about the new government's view of our place in the world.

In Howard, our prime minister has a potential mentor, not to say a soul
mate. The Australian leader is charisma-free, holds firmly to free-market
ideas and has abundant confidence in his own intellectual ability. Sound
familiar?

During last winter's election campaign, a Toronto newspaper reported that
Brian Loughnane, a senior official of Howard's Liberal Party, had been
advising Harper's Conservatives. Howard has won four straight elections -
and, riding high in the polls, is expected to stick around for a fifth -
on the basis of support from what he calls "mainstream Australians" in the
"mortgage belt" - the Antipodean version of the suburban soccer moms (and
dads) who voted for Harper.

Australia has not signed onto the Kyoto accord on greenhouse-gas
emissions, and Harper's environment minister, Rona Ambrose, has made it
clear that this government will do nothing much to honour the old Liberal
signature on that deal. Still, Harper and Ambrose have promised detailed
environmental policies by fall, including plans for controlling - nobody
has said reducing - greenhouse-gas emissions.

So Howard's visit could be an opportunity for Canada to announce plans for
adherence to the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and
Climate, a sort of club for Kyoto skeptics. Members are Australia, China,
India, Japan, South Korea and the United States.

The partnership emphasizes commercially viable technological solutions, an
approach critics denounce as insufficiently rigorous. That's probably
correct - governments will have to lead if the world has any hope of
slowing the pace of climate change.

But look again at that membership list: These are countries that produce
serious quantities of greenhouse gases as well as other pollutants. Howard
is said to be a convert to belief in the urgency of climate-change action;
perhaps Harper, too, will be convinced by the evidence.

In any case, Canadians are waiting to learn more about the Harper
government's priorities and methods in dealing with the rest of the world,
and not least Asia, where so much seems to be happening these days.

Prime Minister Howard's visit should serve to remind Harper that despite
his famous focus on his five domestic priorities, there's a big
complicated world out there.

 The Gazette (Montreal) 2006

============
(3) NEW STUDY QUESTIONS LINKAGE BETWEEN MAJOR HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING

AScribe Newswire, 9 May 2006
http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20060509.142304&time=14%2053%20PDT&year=2006&public=0

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., May 9 (AScribe Newswire) -- New research calls into
question the linkage between major Atlantic hurricanes and global warming.
That is one of the conclusions from a University of Virginia study to
appear in the May 10, 2006 issue of the journal Geophysical Research
Letters.

In recent years, a large number of severe Atlantic hurricanes have fueled
a debate as to whether global warming is responsible. Because high
sea-surface temperatures fuel tropical cyclones, this linkage seems
logical. In fact, within the past year, several hurricane researchers have
correlated basin-wide warming trends with increasing hurricane severity
and have implicated a greenhouse-warming cause.

But unlike these prior studies, the U.Va. climatologists specifically
examined water temperatures along the path of each storm, providing a more
precise picture of the tropical environment involved in each hurricane's
development. They found that increasing water temperatures can account for
only about half of the increase in strong hurricanes over the past 25
years; therefore the remaining storminess increase must be related to
other factors.

"It is too simplistic to only implicate sea surface temperatures in the
dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said lead author
Patrick Michaels, U.Va. professor of environmental sciences and director
of the Virginia Climatology Office.

For a storm to reach the status of a major hurricane, a very specific set
of atmospheric conditions must be met within the region of the storm's
development, and only one of these factors is sufficiently high
sea-surface temperatures. The authors found that the ultimate strength of
a hurricane is not directly linked to the underlying water temperatures.
Instead, they found that a temperature threshold, 89 degrees Fahrenheit,
must be crossed before a weak tropical cyclone has the potential to become
a monster hurricane. Once the threshold is crossed, water temperature is
no longer an important factor. "At that point, other factors take over,
such as the vertical wind profile, and atmospheric temperature and
moisture gradients," Michaels said.

While there has been extensive recent discussion about whether or not
human-induced global warming is currently playing a role in the increased
frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, Michaels downplays this
impact, at least for the current climate.

"The projected impacts of global warming on Atlantic hurricanes are minor
compared with the major changes that we have observed over the past couple
of years," Michaels said. He points instead to naturally varying
components of the tropical environment as being the primary reason for the
recent enhanced activity.

"Some aspects of the tropical environment have evolved much differently
than they were expected to under the assumption that only increasing
greenhouse gases were involved. This leads me to believe that natural
oscillations have also been responsible for what we have seen," Michaels
said.

But what if sea-surface temperatures continue to rise into the future, if
the world continues to warm from an enhancing greenhouse effect? "In the
future we may expect to see more major hurricanes," Michaels said, "but we
don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that
we have seen in the past."

Michaels' co-authors are Robert E. Davis, associate professor of
environmental sciences and Paul C. Knappenberger, former U.Va. graduate
student in environmental sciences.

Reference: Michaels, P. J., P. C. Knappenberger, and R. E. Davis, 2006.
Sea-surface temperatures and tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin.
Geophysical Research Letters, 33, doi:10.1029/2006GL025757.

CONTACTS:

Dr. Patrick Michaels, 434-825-6981, pjm8x@virginia.edu

Fariss Samarrai, U.Va. News, 434-924-3778, samarrai@virginia.edu

===========
(4) SEA-SURFACE TEMPERATURES AND TROPICAL CYCLONES IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L09708, doi:10.1029/2006GL025757, 2006
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL025757.shtml

Sea-surface temperatures and tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin

Patrick J. Michaels

Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Cato Institute, Washington, D. C., USA

Paul C. Knappenberger
New Hope Environmental Services, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia, USA


Robert E. Davis
Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

Abstract

Whereas there is a significant relationship between overall sea-surface
temperature (SST) and tropical cyclone intensity, the relationship is much
less clear in the upper range of SST normally associated with these
storms. There, we find a step-like, rather than a continuous, influence of
SST on cyclone strength, suggesting that there exists a SST threshold that
must be exceeded before tropical cyclones develop into major hurricanes.
Further, we show that the SST influence varies markedly over time, thereby
indicating that other aspects of the tropical environment are also
critically important for tropical cyclone intensification. These findings
highlight the complex nature of hurricane development and weaken the
notion of a simple cause-and-effect relationship between rising SST and
stronger Atlantic hurricanes.

Received 12 January 2006; accepted 29 March 2006; published 10 May 2006.

============
(5) RIVER DISCHARGE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN: 1964-2000

CO2 Science Magazine, 10 May 2006
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N19/C1.jsp

Reference
McClelland, J.W., Dery, S.J., Peterson, B.J., Holmes, R.M. and Wood, E.F.
2006. A pan-arctic evaluation of changes in river discharge during the
latter half of the 20th century. Geophysical Research Letters 33:
10.1029/2006GL025753.

Background
The authors note that "increasing freshwater inputs may slow North
Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation, a major driver of [the] Atlantic
meridional overturning circulation (MOC)," and that "a slowing or
cessation of [the] MOC in response to global warming could lead to
relative cooling in some regions and amplified warming in others," perhaps
the most significant of which phenomena is a postulated failure of the
Gulf Stream that is often claimed to have the potential to dramatically
cool much of Europe. The question they thus consider within the context of
their research is: "How may changes in arctic and subarctic river
discharge affect [the Atlantic] MOC?"

What was done
In a study designed to provide some perspective on the issue, McClelland
et al. analyzed discharge records of 16 Eurasian and 56 North American
rivers over the period 1964-2000. Of these rivers, all Eurasian ones and
14 of the North American ones flow directly into the Arctic Ocean, while
the other 42 North American rivers flow into the Hudson, James and Ungava
Bays (HJUBs).

What was learned
The five researchers determined that "discharge to the Arctic Ocean
increased by 5.6 km3/yr/yr during 1964-2000, the net result of a large
increase from Eurasia moderated by a small decrease from North America,"
but that "discharge to Hudson/James/Ungava Bays decreased by 2.5 km3/yr/yr
during 1964-2000."

What it means
McClelland et al. say they "expect decreasing river discharge to Hudson,
James, and Ungava Bays and increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean
to have opposing effects on NADW formation," which leads us to ask: How
significant is the net result for the maintenance of the Atlantic MOC?

The researchers go on to say that "the observed changes in river discharge
over 1964-2000 amount to an increase of about 0.007 Sv to the Arctic Ocean
and a decrease of about 0.003 Sv to HJUBs by the end of the record," and
that "these values are relatively small compared to the ~0.1 Sv [increase]
that lead[s] to abrupt reductions in NADW formation in a variety of models
(Clark et al., 2002; Rahmstorf, 2002)."

McClelland et al. are right on the mark in this assessment. In fact, the
net increase in freshwater discharge to the Arctic Ocean that is revealed
by their analysis to have occurred between 1964 and 2000 amounts to only
about 4% of the "tipping point" value that is predicted by some climate
models to lead to an abrupt Atlantic MOC reduction. Hence, there is little
cause for alarm in their findings. In addition, it has recently been noted
by Wunsch that the models that predict decreases in, or even a cessation
of, NADW formation and the Atlantic MOC are still too crude to be given
much credence. In fact, he reports that depending on how the mixing
coefficients are modified, fresh water additions can actually increase the
North Atlantic mass circulation (Nilsson et al., 2003).

In conclusion, the totality of these several observations suggests that
all of the hype surrounding the subject of a Gulf Stream shutdown due to a
warming-induced increase in freshwater input to the Arctic Ocean is
without a sound basis in either observation or theory.

