The chancellor is under fire from both Labour and Conservative MPs over the changes he announced to annual road tax (vehicle excise duty, or VED) in this year's budget. What has united these critics is the proposal to raise – and, in many cases, double – the road tax on those cars with the worst emissions that are already on the road. Cars in Band F that were bought between 2001 and 2006 are currently charged £210 a year. From 2010, this will go up to between £270 and £455, depending on the amount of their emissions.
This is unfair, say the critics. Green tax is meant to change behaviour – otherwise, it's just a tax. Unlike fuel duty, VED doesn't vary with the amount you drive. So changing behaviour, in the case of VED, can only mean changing people's mind about which car to buy. But how can people change their mind about a car that has already been bought?
The boom in flatscreen television could be fuelling global warming more than official estimates, scientists have warned.
Experts in California estimate that production of a powerful greenhouse gas used in their production has hit 4,000 tonnes a year - enough to match the annual carbon dioxide emissions of Austria.
Research published in New Scientist estimates that the industrial component - known as "NF3" - is 17,000 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But it is not covered by the Kyoto protocol because it was only made in tiny amounts when the agreement was signed in 1997.
Two recent polls attempting to judge the public mood about climate change have revealed contradictory results. Last week's Ipsos Mori poll told us that most people doubt the human causes of climate change. Yesterday's Guardian/ICM poll told a slightly different story, one of a growing concern with climate change, with many people considering it a higher priority than the faltering economy.
The roots of scepticism can be traced to many sources. In this newspaper on Monday, Peter Wilby criticised the media for not doing its part to lend credibility to the argument. Some have pointed the finger at that fateful Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle; others at the sometimes contradictory messages from environmentalists. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that many people still remain unsure of the causes of climate change, and the seriousness with which we need to tackle it.
The scientists and campaigners have done their best. The IPCC's latest report states that there is a 90% chance that humans are the main cause of climate change. Al Gore has gone around the world with graphs and arresting photographs of the melting Arctic ice, proving that climate change really is happening. And, of course, there is the anecdotal evidence: everyone knows someone who has witnessed an extreme storm, or had their house flooded, or watched from a balcony as the Asian tsunami leapt from the sea.
A 100-year flood occurs once every 100 years.
Right? Wrong, experts say.
In fact, since 1973, four 100-year or 500-year storms have hit the Midwest, said Tony Lupo, chairman of the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. It may be time to rethink “what we call a 100-year flood,” Lupo said.
A 100-year flood is defined as a flood so big that it has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. A 500-year flood is one with a 0.2 percent chance of happening in a given year — a 1-in-500 chance.
Lupo and some other scientists and disaster officials say the use of terms such as “100-year flood” should be re-evaluated because they are often misunderstood and can give the public a false sense of security.
“Whoever invented that term should be shot,” said Villanova University professor Robert Traver, who specializes in storm-water management.
A 100-year flood could occur once in 200 years. Or, said hydrologist Gary Wilson of the U.S. Geological Survey Missouri Water Science Center in Rolla, “it could happen twice a year, if you’re unlucky.”
What is the most pressing environmental issue we face today? "Global warming"? The "greenhouse effect"? At the Oscar ceremonies, Al Gore referred to a "climate crisis," but in his State of the Union address President Bush chose the comparatively anodyne phrase "climate change." They all refer to the same thing, but the first rule of modern political discourse is that before addressing any empirical problem each side must "frame the debate" in the most favorable way. If you doubt it, just try to get a Republican to utter the phrase "estate tax" rather than "death tax." Behind the overt campaign to head off whatever it is—environmental heating? thermal catastrophe?—is a covert struggle over what we should even call it.
In recent years this has played out largely as a contest between "global warming" and "climate change." Bush's use of the latter was consistent with Republican practice, which calls for de-emphasizing the urgency of the situation, as recommended in a 2002 memo by strategist Frank Luntz. Unlike the "catastrophic" connotations of global warming, Luntz wrote, "climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge." So should activists favor "global warming"? Well, not necessarily. Richard C.J. Somerville, a leading researcher on—um, worldwide calorification?—at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks "global warming" is problematic because it puts the focus on worldwide average temperature, rather than the more serious regional dangers of storms, floods and drought.
In a ruling believed to be unprecedented, a Georgia judge halted the construction of Dynegy's Longleaf coal-fired power plant because it had not made provisions for reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most widely implicated in man-made global warming.
The judge ruled that the plant must limit its pollution, according to the Sierra Club, which has been waging a campaign against Dynegy, an energy company with plans to build more coal-fired power plants than any other.
The Supreme Court has ruled that carbon dioxide can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, but the state judge's ruling applies that decision to a specific plant before any state or federal regulations have been set in place. For that reason, the impact of the decision is unclear, according to the New York Times.
Just when you might of started thinking that California was not run by a bunch of whack jobs, another state sponsored “Green” initiative to raise awareness of “global warming” has been foisted upon the auto industry. California has bought on to the Great Global Warming Swindle hook line and sinker. And if you are a resident of the state, you get to be a part of it whether you like it or not. The Detroit News is reporting that all new vehicles sold in California starting next year will have to display window labels that rate their “environmental score”.
The “Green Stickers” will carry scores, from 1-10, to supposedly reflect the level to which vehicles contribute to “global warming” and smog. So, if the score is low, you are a dirty dog who is killing the planet one tank at a time. If the score is high, you are better than everyone else and drive with your nose in the air. Being printed and designed by the California Air Resources Board, you also get the pious admonition on the sticker: "Protect the environment, choose vehicles with higher scores."
At an AEI event in early June on how to control global warming, scientists and climate policy experts examined a unique idea called geoengineering--that is, employing technologies that would change features of the earth's environment in ways that would counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases.
"There is not much question that there is some real risk that the consequences of warming may prove to be significant, and possibly catastrophic," AEI's Samuel Thernstrom said, and geoengineering could be a "safety valve" if other mitigation policies do not work. Thernstrom, along with AEI's Lee Lane, directs a new project at AEI that will explore the policy implications of geoengineering, which, according to Thernstrom, is the "most original and potentially important idea in climate policy--and also the most controversial."
A team of water experts says the pattern of droughts and floods in South Africa shows our global warming was triggered by the variability of the sun’s irradiance rather than by human-emitted CO2. They say variations in South African rainfall patterns are keyed to periodic reversals of the sun’s magnetic field—and to the constantly changing distance between the sun and the earth as both move through space.
In South Africa, alternate 11-year sunspot cycles produce opposite rainfall results. One complete “double sun cycle” occurs every 20.8 years: the “first” cycle brings a big flood, followed by a small drought; the next brings a big drought, followed by a small flood.
Lead author Will Alexander used the double sunspot cycle to publicly predict the end of major South African droughts in both 1995 and 2006. He notes that South African droughts have often been broken at 11-year intervals by severe floods associated with sunspot maxima—as in 1822, 1841, 1863, 1874 and 1885. The research summary appears in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering.
The South Africans’ conclusion is reinforced by Dr. Robert Baker of Australia, who told a recent meeting of the International Geographical Union that he has found the same 21-year cycle in Australian drought and rainfall. Baker says “the sun is like a musical instrument, vibrating in complex patterns,” with all of the planets moving in similar relationships.
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