London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
ENN: The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert's history published in the journal Science.
Related news story
Sahara gradually dried up over 6000 years NPR
Washingtonpost.com: The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday proposed tightening the federal limits for lead in the air, but the proposal fell short of what its own scientists said is required to protect public health.
Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.
 The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.
Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.
With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.
These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.
Science: As climate-change skeptics like to point out, worldwide temperatures haven't risen much in the past decade. If global warming is such hot stuff, they ask, why hasn't it soared beyond the El Niño-driven global warmth of 1998? Mainstream climate researchers reply that greenhouse warming isn't the only factor at work. And in a new paper, they put some numbers on that rebuttal. They show that regional and even global temperatures are being held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents. The study "shows how natural climate variability can mask the global warming effect of greenhouse gases," says climate researcher Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., "but only for a few years."
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
Wired News: The Arctic will remain on thinning ice, and climate warming is expected to begin affecting the Antarctic also, scientists said Friday. "The long-term prognosis is not very optimistic," atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University said at a briefing. Last summer sea ice in the North shrank to a record low, a change many attribute to global warming. But while solar radiation and amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are similar at the poles, to date the regions have responded differently, with little change in the South, explained oceanographer James Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What researchers have concluded was happening, was that in the North, global warming and natural variability of climate were reinforcing one another, sending the Arctic into a new state with much less sea ice than in the past.
ScienceNOW: Researchers have assembled the most detailed picture of ocean currents ever produced, and in so doing they have revealed a vast array of striated currents that roughly parallel the equator. This new level of resolution should improve understanding of a wide variety of ocean-related phenomena
The Guardian: Global warming is set to stall over the next 10 years as natural variations in ocean currents counteract manmade climate change. Researchers modelling the climate of Europe and North America found that a major ocean current that brings warm water northwards is set to weaken, potentially offsetting temperature rises caused by human activity.
National Geographic News: Earth's jet streams—high-altitude winds that influence storm direction—may be changing due to global warming, possibly making it easier for hurricanes to form, a new study says. Jet streams in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have moved toward the poles and are slightly higher now than they were in 1979, according to analyses of data collected between 1979 to 2001. Researchers also discovered that the jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere, which can affect the formation of hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean, is a little weaker than it was two decades ago. More studies are needed to conclusively link the shifts to global warming, the scientists say.
NPR: In order for scientists to measure the strength of a hurricane, they typically must rely on the tricky maneuver of flying an airplane through the storm. But a discovery from the field of underwater acoustics means it's possible to measure a hurricane's strength just by listening to the sounds it makes — under the sea.
New York Times: At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth. Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
Science: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has substantially modified the way it updates a database on chemical hazards that influences how chemicals are regulated. The agency says the changes should make the process more transparent and more rigorous, and speedier. But critics argue that the new procedure is more secretive and gives too much clout to federal agencies that pollute or face massive cleanup costs. One result, they say, will be further delays in regulation.
Science: The international team of climate change scientists that produced an influential series of reports last year--and won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize--will be doing things a little differently in the future. Government delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting last week in Budapest, Hungary, approved a plan for the 20-year, 100-nation enterprise that would generate more precise and relevant information on climate change--without taking any longer than the current 6-year gap between reports. To do so, the delegates endorsed procedural changes that scientists had proposed to streamline the process.
Various: More than 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say they have personally experienced political interference in their work, according to a survey released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report has been picked up by ScienceNOW, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post
"Our investigation found an agency in crisis," said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself."
The survey results show "an agency under siege from political pressures," says UCS while in a statement EPA says that the concerns may largely reflect a misunderstanding of how policy is made. EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said the findings will not change anything.
The survey was sent to the majority of 7000 scientists at EPA last summer, and 1586 filled it out.
Among the UCS report's findings:
– 889 scientists (60 percent) said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.
– 394 scientists (31 percent) personally experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."
– 285 scientists (22 percent) said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome."
– 224 scientists (17 percent) said they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document."
– Of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, 409 scientists (43 percent) said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4 percent) said interference occurred less often.
– Hundreds of scientists reported being unable to openly express concerns about the EPA's work without fear of retaliation; 492 (31 percent) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.
The UCS investigation also revealed that EPA scientists cannot freely communicate their findings to the media, public or colleagues. Seven-hundred-eighty-three respondents (51 percent) said EPA policies do not let scientists speak freely to the news media about their findings. Scientists also shared anecdotes about being barred from presenting their research at conferences and their difficulties clearing research publication articles with EPA managers.
Scientists who reported political interference tended to work in offices that write regulations rather than in basic research labs. Hundreds said they feared retaliation by officials if they voiced concerns about EPA regulations.
In optional essays, scientists repeatedly singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, accusing officials there of inserting themselves into decision-making at early stages in a way that shaped the outcome of their inquiries. They also alleged that the OMB delayed rules not to its liking. EPA actions "are held hostage" until changes are made, a scientist from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation wrote.
Science: Earth is a complex system in which many biological and physical components interact across all space and time scales. To understand this system, earth scientists have traditionally built large, multi-component models. However, it is difficult to know when such a model has become sufficiently detailed for its task and how confident one can be in its predictions. In a generic linear system with feedbacks, Roe and Baker have shown that normally distributed feedbacks give rise to a highly skewed distribution of responses, similar to those seen for climate sensitivity in ensembles of global models. Even relatively narrow ranges of uncertainty in the feedbacks can be amplified in the response. Thus, besides refining the feedback uncertainties in traditional earth system models, scientists and policy-makers must explore complementary approaches to modeling.
The Guardian: Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.
The Guardian: Sir Nicholas Stern has warned that the gloomy predictions of his high-profile review of the future effects of global warming underestimated the risks, and that climate change poses a bigger threat than he realised. Stern said this week that new scientific findings showed greenhouse gas emissions were causing more damage than was understood in 2006, when he prepared his study for the government. He pointed to last year's reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and new research which shows that the planet's oceans and forests are soaking up less carbon dioxide than expected.
Stern said the new findings vindicated his report, which has been criticised by climate sceptics and some economists as exaggerating the possible damage. "People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong," he told a conference in London.
Reuters: China will complete a new research station in the interior of Antarctica next year, state media said on Sunday, expanding its presence on the continent. The official Xinhua news agency cited Sun Bo, head of the Chinese Antarctic expedition team, as saying that an expedition to start in November would build the main structure of the new station situated on Dome A, the highest point on the continent at 4,093 meters above sea level. The country's third scientific research station on the continent, it is expected to be finished by next January, Xinhua cited Sun as saying after returning from the country's 24th scientific expedition there.
ENN: The world needs tougher action to combat global warming than a plan by President George W. Bush to halt a rise in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions only by 2025, delegates at a climate conference in Paris said on Thursday. South Africa, one of 17 nations at the two-day global warming talks that started on Thursday, called Bush's proposals "disappointing" and unambitious when many other industrialized economies are already cutting emissions.
Nature: Eruption in 1600 may have plunged the globe into cold climate chaos.
New York Times: It was the end of January 2005, during the spawning season for a fish appropriately called the black drum. Nightly mating calls were at a crescendo. But no one living in the area seemed to realize the din was of aquatic origin.
James Locascio, a doctoral student in marine science at the University of South Florida, explains that at 100 to 500 hertz, black drum mating calls travel at a low enough frequency and long enough wavelength to carry through sea walls, into the ground and through the construction of waterfront homes like the throbbing beat in a passing car.
“Black drum have taken a liking to the canal system in Cape Coral,” Mr. Locascio said. “Their nightly booming is like a water drip torture that lasts for months.”
New York Times reporter Nonny de la Pena investigates the mystery of how fish make sound, and how the National Marine Fisheries Service is listening to fish sounds in an attempt to discover a new noninvasive way of managing declining fish stocks.
Wired.com: A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.
New Scientist: A small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have wide-scale impact outside of the region by destroying most of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays, says Michael Mills of the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Their research is based on computer simulations in which each country launches 50 devices of 15 kilotons, roughly half the available warheads each side possesses.
Mills and colleagues found that a regional nuclear war in South Asia would deplete up to 40% of the ozone layer in the mid latitudes and up to 70% in the high northern latitudes.
"The models show this magnitude of ozone loss would persist for five years, and we would see substantial losses continuing for at least another five years," says Mills.
The effect is far greater than was calculated in the 1980s in a study that modelled the effect of global nuclear war. Mills says old models did not take into account the impact of columns of soot that would rise up to 80 kilometres into the atmosphere.
The Guardian: Energy companies are planning to revive a polluting technology developed by the Nazis to replace dwindling supplies of oil with synthetic fuels derived from coal.
Senior industry figures told a high-level conference in Paris this week that coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology could fuel cars and aircraft for decades to come.
Green campaigners reacted with alarm because the process produces twice as much greenhouse gas as using oil. Supporters say much of the carbon pollution could be captured and stored underground, and that the synthetic fuel burns cleaner than conventional diesel.
Various: Imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies isn't working fast enough to combat an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency say a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy. "It will be too little and come too late," writes Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times.
What is needed says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in Scientific American, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which will only come about with greatly increased government spending by what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development.
A different mindset is highlighted by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post who writes about a public discussion between climate scientist James E. Hansen and Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers, an energy company company with a number of coal-fied power plants. Hansen was complaining that two new power plants built by Duke Energy did not include any carbon-capture technologies to reduce their emissions.
Rogers, said the scientist's demand reflects a "snap-your-fingers, instant transition of the economy" mind-set. "My requirement is to balance reliability, affordability and clean energy," Rogers said. "He's apparently focused on the clean perspective."
Globally, the number of coal power plants that will have carbon capture and storge units is limited. "You don't have other countries lining up and investing serious funding" in this technology," says Rachel Crisp, deputy director of Britain's cleaner fossil fuels unit to the Washington Post.
Sacramento Bee: Attorney General Jerry Brown joined officials in 17 other states Wednesday to demand that the federal Environmental Protection Agency release its internal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health.
The move comes after EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson wrote last week that he plans to open a months-long public comment period on greenhouse gas emissions, a procedure critics say serves to delay action on emissions until after President Bush leaves office.
The states, joined by environmental groups, filed their legal demand Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking that EPA release the finding within 60 days.
NPR: Projections for the evolution of green technologies to help curb greenhouse gas emissions are overly optimist, according to researchers writing in Nature. They say policymakers will need to implement stronger measures to reverse global warming.
Salon.com: Global warming demands more than do-gooder actions. It demands "geoengineering" -- like blocking the sun's rays with stratospheric dirt.
The Guardian: Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government's leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it.
In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.
"If one started to use biofuels ... and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane," Watson said. "It would certainly be a perverse outcome.
BBC: A chunk of ice the size of the Isle of Man has started to break away from Antarctica in what scientists say is further evidence of a warming climate.
The Guardian: Soot produced by burning coal, diesel, wood and dung causes significantly more damage to the environment than previously thought, according to research published today in Nature Geosciences (doi:10.1038/ngeo156). So-called "black carbon" could cause up to 60% of the current warming effect of carbon dioxide, according to the US researchers, making it an important target for efforts to slow global warming.
 Around 400,000 people are estimated to die each year due to inhaling soot particles, particularly because of indoor cooking on wood and dung stoves in developing countries. These deaths are mainly among women and children. Greg Carmichael, of the University of Iowa, one of the two authors of the study, said: "Trying to develop strategies that really go after black carbon is really a very good short-term strategy and a win-win strategy for both climate and air pollution perspectives."
The Independent: A fear that sea levels will rise far faster than predicted this century has led to a revision of the plan to protect London from a devastating flood caused by the sort of storm surge in the North Sea that resulted in the closure of the Thames Barrier yesterday.
 It was the 108th time that the barrier had to be closed since it became operational in 1982 but scientists are concerned that rapidly rising sea levels could significantly shorten the expected lifespan of one of the world's biggest anti-flood structures.
When the Thames Barrier was being designed in the 1970s, global average sea levels were rising at about 1.8 millimetres a year and global warming was not seen as a threat, but in the past 15 years the rate has nearly doubled to about 3.1mm a year and many scientists expect it to accelerate still further.
A report on the options open to the UK government if sea levels rise faster than expected is due to be completed next year. If sea levels are forecast to rise by two metres or more, a bigger and more expensive barrage will have to be built and raised permanently.
New York Times: Utility executives in Kansas were shocked last fall when a state environmental official rejected two coal-fired power plants because of the millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions they could produce. In a state where coal generates 73 percent of the electricity, the pro-coal forces were unable to work their will.
That ineffectiveness will be underscored as early as Friday if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as expected, vetoes an effort by the Kansas State Legislature to ensure the plants are approved. A handful of lawmakers seeking a new energy policy are blocking the attempt to override.
The struggle over those plants is an example of a growing trend in climate-change politics. In the absence of clear federal mandates for emissions from smokestack industries, states that have been proving grounds for new environmental approaches to energy are becoming battlegrounds as well
NPR (audio): Over the last five years an ocean observation system called Argo has sent home a puzzling result. Argo, which consists of some 3,000 scientific robots that dive to a depth of nearly a 1 km to measure ocean temperature, 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 Argo is telling them.
 This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Joshua Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can.
"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."
In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.
Alternately, the data could be misinterpreted, which happened with earlier results from Argo.
The Independent: So much water is now stored in dams that it's having a profound influence on the rate at which sea levels are rising says a new paper by Chao, Wu, and Li of the National Central University in Taiwan. Their research was recently published in Science Express.
The new research suggests that, over the past 50 years, new dams and reservoirs have held back some 10,800 cubic kilometres of water, which would have been enough to raise global sea levels by about 30mm says Steve Connor, the Independent's science reporter. In other words, the rises we have seen so far due to global warming might have been considerably larger if it were not for the huge numbers of dams and reservoirs built from the 1950s onwards.
Related Link
Impact of Artificial Reservoir Water Impoundment on Global Sea Level (Science Express)
Wall Street Journal: Every winter since 1917, people in Nenana, a village 55 miles southwest of Fairbanks, have wagered on the exact moment that the ice breaks up on the nearby Tanana River. For the 450 townsfolk, the annual Alaska ice lottery, called the Nenana Ice Classic, is a financial lifeline that offers some their year's only employment. Winners last year shared a jackpot of $303,272.
 But for many geophysicists, the contest itself is something more valuable than any monetary prize.
The Ice Classic has given them a rare, reliable climate history that has documented to the minute the onset of the annual thaw as it shifted across 91 years. By this measure, spring comes to central Alaska 10 days earlier than in 1960, said geophysicist Martin Jeffries at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks -- and that trend is accelerating. "The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century," Dr. Jeffries said.
Related Link
Ice Thaw measurements
Melting Pace of Glaciers Is Accelerating, Report Says (New York Times)
Washington Post: A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to close several of its 26 research libraries did not fully account for the impact on government staffers and the public, who rely on the libraries for hard-to-find environmental data, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
The report by the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA effort, begun in 2006 to comply with a $2 million funding cut sought by the White House, may have hurt access to materials and services in the 37-year-old library network.
Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said the report reveals a "grim picture" of mismanagement at the EPA.
Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.
EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.
"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.
According to the Washington Post, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard. On Friday, EPA Press Secretary, Jonathan Shradar said in a statement "EPA is unaware of either Paul Clement or anyone else in the Solicitor General's office ever stating or advising that "the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court" as the Washington Post article today asserts."
Also on Friday US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called on EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to explain why he overruled the recommendation of scientific advisors, and decided to issue a weaker standard for air pollution. Feinstein chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. Feinstein also asked Johnson to address the White House's role in the matter, given the reports which suggest that it may have influenced a key part of his decision regarding ozone standards.
An unsigned editorial in the New York Times calls the move "permanently devalue the role of science while strengthening the hand of industry."
Related links
Press release from the EPA
Press Release from NRDC
Ozone rules weakened at Bush's Behest (Washington Post)
Statement by the U.S. EPA Press Secretary, Jonathan Shradar disavowing that Clement had provided advice
Press Release from Senator Feinstein
news.com: Spanish renewable energy firm Sener and Abu Dhabi's clean-energy initiative, Masdar, announced a joint venture on Wednesday to build several power plants fueled by the sun's heat.
The newly created firm, Torresol Energy, said it plans to build at least two large concentrating solar power plants a year with a goal of generating 320 megawatts over the next 5 years and 1,000 megawatts in 10 years. A large coal-fired power plant typically can produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity.
The initial scope of the project is small compared to the total electrical consumption in the Middle East, but a report from the German Physical Society suggests that 50 years from now, the Middle East could be exporting liquid hydrogen to Europe from massive solar array complexes.
ScienceNow: Efforts to wean America's automobiles off gasoline are running into the law of unintended consequences. Methanol wears out engine components, and corn-based ethanol has squeezed corn supplies. Even bypassing liquid fuel altogether may be problematic: New research suggests that flooding the roads with plug-in vehicles could cause a significant, though potentially manageable, drain on regional water sources.
Washington Post: China is rapidly becoming a leading manufacturer of solar-cells. Unfortunately, the highly toxic waste -- silicon tetrachloride -- from the production of polysilicon, which is used to make solar cells, is polluting ground water and the surrounding villages around the plants. Unlike in the West where stricter environmental regulations are in effect, solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, writes Washington post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha.
"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University. Shi Jun, a former photovoltaic technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that Chinese companies are saving millions of dollars by not installing pollution recovery. "If this happened in the United States, you'd probably be arrested," he said.
Washington Post: The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.
Science: After a decade of making their case to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), scientists planning a major project for remote monitoring of the oceans thought they had cleared the final hurdle in December. That's when an external panel blessed the $331 million venture, called the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), and told NSF officials "to enter into the detailed design and construction phase" to build it. "We were ready to go, and the reviewers agreed," says Steven Bohlen of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C., which is managing the project.
So Bohlen and his colleagues were shocked last month when NSF omitted building funds for OOI and two other long-running projects on the verge of construction--the $100 million National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the $123 million Alaska Region Research Vessel (ARRV)--from its 2009 budget request to Congress. It's part of a new policy aimed at eliminating cost overruns that occur after construction is under way. Those overruns have not only forced NSF to borrow from other accounts, but they can also lead to last-minute changes that weaken a project's scientific capabilities. Under the previous policy, a project was approved based chiefly on its scientific merit; it might be years before NSF arrived at a final price based on all relevant factors. Now, NSF is requiring a firm cost estimate before asking Congress for construction funds
NPR (audio): The region of the ocean known as "the desert of the sea" has expanded dramatically over the past decade, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.
National Geographic: Self-induced drought and climate change may have caused the destruction of the Maya civilization, say scientists working with new satellite technology that monitors Central America's environment.
Associated Press: The US Navy must abide by limits on its sonar training off the Southern California because the exercises could harm dozens of species of whales and dolphins, a federal appeals court ruled. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday night rejected the Navy's appeal of restrictions that banned high-powered sonar within 12 nautical miles of the coast and set other limits that could affect Navy training exercises to begin this month.
Related Article
Legal battle over sonar testing heats up (Physics Today February 2008)
The New York Times: If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.
Nature: There’s not enough methane on Titan to sustain its weather.
Guardian Unlimited: Scientists have long agreed that climate change could have a profound impact on the planet; from melting ice sheets and withering rainforests, to flash floods and droughts.
Now a team of climate experts has ranked the most fragile and vulnerable regions on the planet, and warned they are in danger of sudden and catastrophic collapse before the end of the century.
ScienceNow: Officials with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have decided to add a key climate sensor to a satellite scheduled to launch in 2010, ScienceNOW has learned. Scientists say the move will help ensure a continuous 22-year data set on climate change, which has been threatened by a Pentagon plan to strip six climate sensors from a key Earth-observing satellite (Science, 31 August 2007, p.1167).
Nature: Although Europe's new energy plans may be too prescriptive on the means of achieving the goals, they offer the world an encouraging way forward.
Environmental News Network: The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reported last week record growth in wind power generation with 5,244 megawatts of capacity installed in 2007 — a 45% increase reflecting $9 billion in investment and 30% of all new power generating capacity in 2007.
The Baltimore Examiner: Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the world's most nuclear-energized nation lie, silent and deadly, beneath this jutting tip of Normandy. Above ground, cows graze and Atlantic waves crash into heather-covered hills.
The New York Times: School authorities’ cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided this small farming and ranching town at the base of the east side of the Rocky Mountains.
Nature: Shrinking continent is losing ice faster today than a decade ago.
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