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BBC convinced by Bush adviser that climate change is real

Breaking news: The US chief scientist has told the BBC that climate change is now a fact. Yes, if President Bush’s science advisor is 90 percent certain about it, then it must be true. It feels so good to finally know.

Lenders believe energy-efficient homeowners are less likely to default on mortgage payments

With all the bad news about mortgages, it is time for some good news: Mortgages that promote energy efficiency are on the rise.

The basic idea is simple. If you make your home more energy efficient, you reduce your monthly energy bill. And that means you have more money to pay your mortgage, and are less likely to default, so lenders are wisely encouraging this:

The Wall Street Journal has a very good article on this:

Global warming brings Greenlanders potatoes, destroys their heritage

It gets lost in all the gloom and doom, but global warming does have its upside. In the sub-Arctic south of Greenland, rising temperatures over the last five to 10 years have brought residents more potatoes, broccoli, and flowers, and have made officials optimistic about economically beneficial opportunities for drilling and mining as sea ice […]

EPA says oil spill in Brooklyn, N.Y., may be larger than originally thought

A giant oil spill that’s been languishing underground in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Greenpoint neighborhood since at least the 1950s might not be as big as first thought — it’s likely even bigger! Initial estimates pegged the spill, which came from a number of petroleum facilities in the 1950s, at 17 million gallons, but a new U.S. […]

It’s not that individuals can’t do anything about climate — they just can’t do it by themselves

I’ve been thinking about this debate over voluntary individual action and its place in the larger fight for sustainability (see here, here, and here). It’s missing something. A huge gulf has developed in America between public and private life. This has put green activism — all of progressivism, actually — on the horns of a […]

Peter Barnes looks at carbon-capping methods

Peter Barnes has a guest post on the Step It Up blog giving a good brief description of how a Sky Trust would work:

The great polar bear irony

For debunkers, Lomborg's work is a target-rich environment. There is even a Lomborg-errors website, where a Danish biologist catalogs Lomborg's mistakes and "attempts to document his dishonesty." Lomborg's latest work of disinformation, Cool It, isn't out yet in Europe to be debunked, so I'll fill the gap for now.

I will start with polar bears for two reasons. First, the nonironic reason: Lomborg starts his book with a chapter on polar bears, presumably because he thinks it's one of his strongest arguments -- it isn't.

Second, the ironic reason. "Bjorn" means "bear"! Yes, "Bear" Lomborg is misinformed about his namesake. Lomborg himself notes (p. 4):

Paddling across the ice, polar bears are beautiful animals. To Greenland -- part of my own nation, Denmark -- They are a symbol of pride. The loss of this animal would be a tragedy. But the real story of the polar bear is instructive. In many ways, this tale encapsulates the broader problem with the climate-change concern: once you look closely at the supporting data, the narrative falls apart.

Doubly ironic, then, that the polar bear is doomed thanks to people like Bear Lomborg, who urge inaction. Lomborg says (p. 7) polar bears "may eventually decline, though dramatic declines seem unlikely." Uh, no. Even the Bush Administration's own USGS says we'll lose two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population by 2050 in a best-case scenario for Arctic ice.

How will the bears survive the loss of their habitat? No problem, says Lomborg, they will evolve backwards (p. 6):

Human-powered irrigation can increase harvests for farmers

Recently, I wrote about treadle pumps that let human power replace diesel power for irrigation. As a one-to-one replacement it sounded pretty oppressive. But it turns out that it is not a one-to-one replacement.

Poor farmers who only earn a dollar or so, per person per day, can afford to do a lot more irrigation with treadles than they can renting diesel pumps from rich farmers and buying diesel fuel to run it. So they multiply the size of their harvests by two or three, their incomes by even more. Even in a formal efficiency analysis, you are probably increasing rather than decreasing the output per unit of labor. In human terms, you are increasing the amount of fresh vegetables the family can eat, and paying for things like school fees in areas where education is not necessarily completely tax-paid. So you are making life better for the farmers, and even slightly increasing their autonomy from richer neighbors.

Air pollution makes hail bigger

Caution: air pollution causes big ol’ hail.

Climate change will cause agricultural output to decline significantly, says study

Attention, people who eat: Climate change could cause global agriculture output to decline by up to 16 percent by 2080, according to a new study from the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Like life itself, the allocation won’t be fair: productivity is likely to generally decline in developing countries […]