I never thought I would say this, but Evo Morales is right (this time). The Bolivian president asked the nation’s Congress to pass a law that would take his country out of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The bill already passed the lower chamber of Congress and is likely to be approved by the Senate where Morales enjoys a two-thirds majority.

Bolivia is withdrawing from the UN Convention over the country’s failed efforts to have the coca leaf removed from the list of international illicit drugs. Chewing coca leaf is an ancestral and common practice in Bolivia and neighboring Andean countries. It helps people cope with fatigue and high altitude (I’ve tried it myself during a visit to the province of Jujuy in Argentina). The Bolivian amendment to the UN Convention was defeated after strong opposition from the United States and other developed countries.

This is precisely the kind of “drug control imperialism” that was recently denounced by the groundbreaking report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. It rightly states that the UN (as a result of pressure from the U.S. government in particular), has “worked strenuously over the past 50 years to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy –the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement.”

Given the obstinate resistance of Washington to allow even the most timid and sensible changes in international treaties such as declassifying the coca leaf as an illegal substance, one must applaud the decision of the government in La Paz to denounce the UN Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

Bolivia Withdraws From UN Drug Convention is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Why are we still in Iraq?
• Despite the world’s greatest nation-building efforts, things in Bosnia are still getting worse.
• Vouchers offer parents more choice in education than they currently have, but education tax credits are still better at helping the poor.
• Although federal courts have already held parts of current National Security Letter statutes unconstitutional, we still have a way to go in restoring civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.
• While Osama bin Laden has been dispatched, we still have many issues to navigate in our national security strategy. Please join us on Facebook at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, where Cato legal policy analyst David Rittgers, who served three tours in Afghanistan with Army Special Forces, receiving an Army Commendation Medal with “V” Device for valorous action and two Bronze Star Medals, will give a LIVE video update on the future of national security policy and strategy. Submit your questions for him here.

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• It is false to assume that GM’s earnings report means the auto bailout was a success.
• It is false that, among other things, failing to raise the debt limit means defaulting on our obligations.
• It is false that Osama bin Laden’s death means torture is a good idea.
• It is false that international institutions can deliver what they say they can deliver.
• It is false that oil speculators are to blame for fluctuating oil prices:

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama’s speech last evening offers a chance to assess the implications of the war in Libya.

President Obama is not the first president to order attacks on another nation without the authorization of Congress.  This case, however, seems different. Prior to the intervention, the President’s national security advisors had determined that the nation had no vital interest at stake in the Libyan civil war. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has repeated that conclusion after the intervention began. For his part, President Obama emphasized in last night’s speech and before, that the war would preclude a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Why did that rationale win out over the realism of his advisors?

President Obama tends to see our nation and the world as divided between oppressors (victimizers) and the oppressed (victims).  In this view, politics should help the oppressed and do justice (i.e. harm) to the oppressor.  In Libya, this outlook provides a clear division between a oppressor (Qaddafi and his loyalists) and his victims (the rebels). Morality thus demands war against the oppressor on behalf of his victims.

But there is a problem with America acting alone. Many people in the Middle East and elsewhere see the United States not as a vindicator of the oppressed but rather as a oppressor.  Truth be told, more than few Americans share that view.

Those who share this view believe that the United States cannot act unilaterally to help the victims in Libya. This would be true even if Congress authorizes the war as required under Article I of the United States Constitution.  The authorization to go to war must come from someone else other than an American political official or institution.

Hence, President Obama sought international authorization for the war in Libya. True, he sought that authority for pragmatic reasons. A coalition meant shared burdens and (Obama believes) a quick way out of Libya. But the authorizations by the U.N. Security Council and earlier by the Arab League also could be seen as giving legitimacy to the enterprise. Those authorizations meant the United States could go to Libya as a true protector of the oppressed.

If you doubt any of this, examine closely what the President has said about the war. In his speech, the rebels become victims at the mercy of an oppressor. Congress gets a fleeting mention related to consultation about, rather than authorization of, war. True legitimacy for the war comes from a “U.N. mandate and international support.” In his letter to Congress announcing the war, the first sentence reads “at my direction, U.S. military forces commenced operations to assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council and undertaken with the support of European allies and Arab partners, to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe…” Here again the legitimacy for the war comes the United Nations, the European allies, and the Arab League. Congress has neither power to deny the president nor legitimacy to bestow on his work.

There is much to say about these reasons for war. Some people might see in Libya a civil war between two armed gangs. Lacking the frame of oppressor and victims, they will be less willing than the President to assume that the people in the territory called Libya wear either black or white hats. We may learn to our cost that our new allies are victims now and oppressors later.  If we take the President seriously, we will be obligated to make war against them, too.

We have now taken on a default obligation to help every victim and to punish every oppressor throughout the world. We have two constraints on fulfilling that obligation. The first, mentioned by the president, is costs. Eventually the financial markets may limit our efforts on behalf of victims. Second, and more important legally, a president must seek authorization for war from the United Nations, the European union, the Arab League or….well, anyone except the United States Congress.

It is not just that this president, like others before him, ignored Article I of the Constitution. Nor is this president the first to shun moral complexity in favor of a Manichean outlook. President Obama is the first, however, to assert that his broad powers to initiate war should be limited primarily by people who are outside the American social compact.  On this account, sotto voce, the Constitution is not just ignored. It is irrelevant.

The Legitimacy of the Libyan War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Shifting America’s focus away from individual liberty is waging war on the future, not winning it.
• U.N. “authorization” is the Emperor’s new fig leaf for war with Libya.
• Why are we fighting Mexico’s drug war?
• David Boaz remembers Geraldine Ferraro, who helped advance the war against gender discrimination in politics.
• Chris Preble eulogizes the Weinberger/Powell doctrine against the backdrop of the Libyan war:

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

***********

It seems like everyone, from exalted climate scientists to late-night amateur tweeters, can get a bit over-excited about short-term fluctuations, reading into them deep cosmic and political meaning, when they are likely the statistical hiccups of our mathematically surly atmosphere.

There’s been some major errors in forecasts of recent trends. Perhaps the most famous  were made by NASA’s James Hansen in 1988, who overestimated warming between then and now by a whopping 40% or so.

But it is easy to  get snookered by short-term fluctuations.  As shown in Figure 1, it is quite obvious that there has been virtually no net change in temperature since 1997, allowing for the fact that measurement errors in global average surface temperature are easily a tenth of a degree or more. (The magnitude of those errors will be considered in a future Current Wisdom).

Figure 1. Annual global average surface temperature anomaly (°C), 1997-2010 (data source: Hadley Center).

Some who are concerned about environmental regulation without good science have seized upon this 13-year stretch as “proof” that there is no such thing as global warming driven by carbon dioxide.  More on that at the end of this Wisdom.

Similarly, periods of seemingly rapid warming can prompt scientists to see changes where there aren’t any.

Consider a landmark paper published in 2000 in Geophysical Research Letters by Tom Karl, a prominent researcher who is the head of our National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and who just finished a stint as President of the American Meteorological Society.  He couldn’t resist the climatic blip that was occurred prior  to the current stagnation of warming, namely the very warm episode of the late 1990s. 

Cooler heads at the time noted that it was an artifact of the great El Nino of 1997-98, a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that has been coming and going for millions of years. 

Nonetheless, the paper was published and accompanied by a flashy press release titled “Global warming may be accelerating.”  

What Karl did was to examine the 16 consecutive months of record-high temperatures (beginning in May, 1997) and to calculate the chance that this could happen, given the fairly pokey warming rate—approximately 0.17°C (0.31°F) per  decade, that was occurring.  He concluded there was less than a five percent probability, unless the warming rate had suddenly increased.

From the press release:

Karl and colleagues conclude that there is only a small chance that the string of record high temperatures in 1997-98 was simply an unusual event, rather than a change point, the start of a new and faster ongoing trend.

He also gave a number:  “…the probability of observing the record temperatures is more likely with high average rates of warming, around 3°C [5.4°F]/century,” which works out to 0.3°C per decade.

Our Figure 2 shows what was probabilistically forecast beginning in May, 1997, and what actually happened.  Between then and now, according to this paper, global temperatures should have warmed around 0.4°C (0.7°F).  The observed warming rate for the last 13.5 years—which includes the dramatically warming temperatures beginning in 1997—was a paltry 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade. 

Figure 2. Prior to mid-1997, the observed warming trend (dashed line) was 0.17°/decade.  Karl said there was a greater than 95% probability that 1997-8 would mark a “change point”, where warming would accelerate to around 0.30°/decade.  Since then, the rate has been 0.06°/decade, or 20% of what was forecast.

Karl did provide some statistical wiggle room.  While noting the less than 5% chance that the warming rate hadn’t increased, he wrote that “unusual events can occur” and that there still was a chance (given as less than 5%) that 97-98 was just a statistical hiccup, which it ultimately proved to be.

The press release couldn’t resist the “it’s worse than we thought” mindset that pervades climate science:

Since completing the research, the data for 1999 has been compiled.  The researchers found that 1999 was the fifth warmest year on record, although as a La Nina year it would normally be cooler” [than what?ed].

“La Nina” is cool phase of El Nino, which drops temperatures about as much as El Nino raises them. What the press release and the GRL paper completely neglected to mention is that the great warm year of 1998 was a result of the “natural”  El Nino superimposed upon the overall slight warming trend.

In other words, there was every reason to believe at that time that the anomalous temperatures were indeed a statistical blip resulting from a very high-amplitude version of a natural oscillation in the earth’s climate that occurred every few years.

Now, back to the last 13 years. The puny recent changes may also just be our atmosphere’s make-up call for the sudden warming of the late 1990s, or another hiccup.

It is characteristic for climate models whose carbon dioxide increase resembles that which is being observed to produce constant rates of warming.  There’s a good reason for this.  Temperature responds logarithmically—i.e.less and less—to changes in this gas as its concentration increases.  But the concentration tends to increase exponentially—i.e. more and more.  The combination of an increasingly damped response to an ever increasing rate of input tends to resemble a straight line, or a constant rate of warming.

Indeed, Karl noted in his paper (and I have noted in virtually every public lecture I give), that “projections of temperature change in the next [i.e. the 21^st] century, using [the United Nations’] business as usual scenarios…have relatively constant rates of global temperature increase”.  It’s just that their constant rates tend to be higher than the one that is being observed.  The average rate of warming predicted for this century by the UN is about 2.5°C, while the observed value has been, as predicted, constant—but with a lower value of 1.7°.  As Figure 3 shows, this rate has been remarkably constant for over three decades.

Figure 3. Annual global average surface temperature anomaly (°C), 1976-2010 (data source: Hadley Center).  It’s hard to imagine a more constant trend, despite the 1998 peak and the subsequent torpid warming.

The bottom line is that short-term trends are not your friends when talking about long-term climate change.

References

Hansen, J.E., et al., 1988. Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. Journal of Geophysical Research, 93, 9341-9364.

Karl, T. R., R. W. Knight, and B. Baker, 2000. The record breaking global temperatures of 1997 and 1998” Evidence for an increase in the rate of global warming? Geophysical Research Letters, 27, 719-722.

Michaels, P. J., and P. C. Knappenberger, 2009. Scientific Shortcomings in the EPA’s Endangerment Finding from Greenhouse Gases, Cato Journal, 29, 497-521, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n3/cj29n3-8.pdf.

The Current Wisdom: The Short-Term Climate Trend Is Not Your Friend is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

History to Repeat:  Greenland’s Ice to Survive, United Nations to Continue Holiday Party

This year’s installment of the United Nations’ annual climate summit (technically known as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change) has come and gone in Cancun. Nothing substantial came of it policy-wise; just the usual attempts by the developing world to shake down our already shaky economy in the name of climate change.   News-wise probably the biggest story was that during the conference, Cancun broke an all time daily low temperature record.  Last year’s confab in Copenhagen was pelted by snowstorms and subsumed in miserable cold.  President Obama attended, failed to forge any meaningful agreement, and fled back to beat a rare Washington blizzard. He lost.

But surely as every holiday season now includes one of these enormous jamborees, dire climate stories appeared daily.  Polar bear cubs are endangered!  Glaciers are melting!!

Or so beat the largely overhyped drums, based upon this or that press release from Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.

And, of course, no one bothered to mention a blockbuster paper appearing in Nature the day before the end of the Cancun confab, which reassures us that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers are a lot more stable than alarmists would have us believe.  That would include Al Gore, fond of his lurid maps showing the melting all of Greenland’s ice submerging Florida.

Ain’t gonna happen.

The disaster scenario goes like this:  Summer temperatures in Greenland are warming, leading to increased melting and the formation of ephemeral lakes on the ice surface.  This water eventually finds a crevasse and then a way down thousands of feet to the bottom of a glacier, where it lubricates the underlying surface, accelerating the seaward march of the ice.  Increase the temperature even more and massive amounts deposit into the ocean by the year 2100, catastrophically raising sea levels.

According to Christian Schoof of the University of British Columbia (UBC), “The conventional view has been that meltwater permeates the ice from the surface and pools under the base of the ice sheet….This water then serves as a lubricant between the glacier and the earth underneath it….”

And, according to Schoof, that’s just not the way things work. A UBC press release about his Nature article noted that he found that “a steady meltwater supply from gradual warming may in fact slow down the glacier flow, while sudden water input could cause glaciers to speed up and spread.”

Indeed, Schoof finds that sudden water inputs, such as would occur with heavy rain, are responsible for glacial accelerations, but these last only one or a few days.

The bottom line?  A warming climate has very little to do with accelerating ice flow, but weather events do.

How important is this?  According to University of Leeds Professor Andrew Shepherd, who studies glaciers via satellite, “This study provides an elegant solution to one of the two key ice sheet instability problems” noted by the United Nations in their last (2007) climate compendium.  “It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, Greenland ice sheet flow might not be accelerated by increased melting after all,” he added.

I’m not so sure that those who hold the “popular belief” can explain why Greenland’s ice didn’t melt away thousands of years ago.  For millennia, after the end of the last ice age (approximately 11,000 years ago) strong evidence indicates that the Eurasian arctic averaged nearly 13°F warmer in July than it is now.

That’s because there are trees buried and preserved in the acidic Siberian tundra, and they can be carbon dated.  Where there is no forest today—because it’s too cold in summer—there were trees, all the way to the Arctic Ocean and even on some of the remote Arctic islands that are bare today. And, back then, thanks to the remnants of continental ice, the Arctic Ocean was smaller and the North American and Eurasian landmasses extended further north.

That work was by Glen MacDonald, from UCLA’s Geography Department. In his landmark 2000 paper in Quaternary Research, he noted that the only way that the Arctic could become so warm is for there to be a massive incursion of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean.  The only “gate” through which that can flow is the Greenland Strait, between Greenland and Scandinavia.

So, Greenland had to have been warmer for several millennia, too.

Now let’s do a little math to see if the “popular belief” about Greenland ever had any basis in reality.

In 2009 University of Copenhagen’s B. M. Vinther and 13 coauthors published the definitive history of Greenland climate back to the ice age, studying ice cores taken over the entire landmass. An  exceedingly conservative interpretation of  their results is that Greenland was 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer for the period from 5,000-9000 years ago, which is also the warm period in Eurasia that MacDonald detected.  The integrated warming is given by multiplying the time (4,000 years) by the warming (1.5°), and works out (in Celsius) to 6,000 “degree-years.” 

Now let’s assume that our dreaded emissions of carbon dioxide spike the temperature there some 4°C.  Since we cannot burn fossil fuel forever, let’s put this in over 200 years.  That’s a pretty liberal estimate given that the temperature there still hasn’t exceeded values seen before in the 20^th century.  Anyway, we get 800 (4 x 200) degree-years.

If the ice didn’t come tumbling off Greenland after 6,000 degree-years, how is it going to do so after only 800?  The integrated warming of Greenland in the post-ice-age warming (referred to as the “climatic optimum” in textbooks published prior to global warming hysteria) is over seven times what humans can accomplish in 200 years.  Why do we even worry about this?

So we can all sleep a bit better.  Florida will survive.  And, we can also rest assured that the UN will continue its outrageous holiday parties, accomplishing nothing, but living large.  Next year’s is in Durban, South Africa, yet another remote warm spot hours of Jet-A away.

References:

MacDonald, G. M., et al., 2000.  Holocene treeline history and climatic change across Northern Eurasia.  Quaternary Research 53, 302-311.

Schoof, C., 2010. Ice-sheet acceleration driven by melt supply variability. Nature 468, 803-805.

Vinther, B.M., et al., 2009.  Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet. Nature 461, 385-388.

The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos has stated that if Proposition 19 passes next week in California and marijuana is legalized in the state, it could force his country to rethink its drug policy.

“Tell me if there is a way to explain to a Colombian peasant that if he produces marijuana we are going to put him in jail… [while] the same product is legal [in California]. That’s going to produce a comprehensive discussion on the approach we have taken on the fight against drug trafficking,” said Santos, who, a couple of months earlier, endorsed the call for a debate on drug legalization made by Mexican president Felipe Calderón. However, Santos has also said that he believes that legalization will increase drug consumption, a presumption that has been rebutted by evidence in countries with liberal drug policies such as Portugal.

Today, in his opening remarks at a Latin American presidential summit held in the Colombian city of Cartagena, Santos brought up [in Spanish] the subject again : “If we don’t act in a consistent way on this issue, if all we are doing is to send our fellow citizens to jail while in other latitudes the market is being legalized, then we have to ask ourselves: isn’t it time to review the global strategy against drugs?”

Santos’ statements have been backed by his Minister of Foreign Relations, who even said in an interview with El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, that the country’s new seat on the UN Security Council could be “a good place” to start a “worldwide discussion” on the way that the war on drugs is being conducted.

It’s ironic–and gratifying–that the president of Washington’s closest ally in Latin America is the leading voice in the region questioning the wisdom of the war on drugs. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though. Back in 1998 Juan Manuel Santos signed a public letter to then Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan denouncing the war on drugs as a “failed and futile” experiment, and calling for drug policies to be based on “common sense, science, public health and human rights.”

Even though the impact of Proposition 19 in California and the United States could be limited, Juan Manuel Santos’ statements show that its reverberations in Latin America could be significant.

Santos: ‘Proposition 19 Could Change Colombia’s Drug Policy’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

NOTE:  This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

The Iceman Goeth:  Good News from Greenland and Antarctica

How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000?  There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.

Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.

Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.

Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.

The catastrophic sea level rise proposition is built upon the idea that large parts of the ice fields that lay atop Greenland and Antarctica will rapidly melt and slip into the sea as temperatures there rise.  Proponents of this idea claim that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent (2007) Assessment Report,  was far too conservative in its projections of future sea level rise—the mean value of which is a rise by the year 2100 of about 15 inches.

In fact, contrary to virtually all news coverage, the IPCC actually anticipates that Antarctica will gain ice mass (and lower sea level) as the climate warms, since the temperature there is too low to produce much melting even if it warms up several degrees, while the warmer air holds more moisture and therefore precipitates more snow. The IPCC projects Greenland to contribute a couple of inches of sea level rise as ice melts around its periphery.

Alarmist critics claim that the IPCC’s projections are based only on direct melt estimates rather than “dynamic” responses of the glaciers and ice fields to rising temperatures.

These include Al Gore’s favorite explanation—that melt water from the surface percolates down to the bottom of the glacier and lubricates its base, increasing flow and ultimately ice discharge. Alarmists like Gore and Hansen claim that Greenland and Antarctica’s glaciers will then “surge” into the sea, dumping an ever-increasing volume of ice and raising water levels worldwide.

The IPCC did not include this mechanism because it is very hypothetical and not well understood.  Rather, new science argues that the IPCC’s minuscule projections of sea level rise from these two great ice masses are being confirmed.

About a year ago, several different research teams reported that while glaciers may surge from time to time and increase ice discharge rates, these surges are not long-lived and that basal lubrication is not a major factor in these surges. One research group, led by Faezeh Nick and colleagues reported that “our modeling does not support enhanced basal lubrication as the governing process for the observed changes.” Nick and colleagues go on to find that short-term rapid increases in discharge rates are not stable and that “extreme mass loss cannot be dynamically maintained in the long term” and ultimately concluding that “[o]ur results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”

But this is actually old news. The new news is that the commonly-reported (and commonly hyped) satellite estimates of mass loss from both Greenland and Antarctica were a result of improper calibration, overestimating ice loss by  some 50%.

As with any new technology, it takes a while to get all the kinks worked out. In the case of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite-borne instrumentation, one of the major problems is interpreting just what exactly the satellites are measuring. When trying to ascertain mass changes (for instance, from ice loss) from changes in the earth’s gravity field, you first have to know how the actual land under the ice is vertically moving (in many places it is still slowly adjusting from the removal of the glacial ice load from the last ice age).

The latest research by a team led by Xiaoping Wu from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concludes that the adjustment models that were being used by previous researchers working with the GRACE data didn’t do that great of a job. Wu and colleagues enhanced the existing models by incorporating land movements from a network of GPS sensors, and employing more sophisticated statistics. What they found has been turning heads.

Using the GRACE measurements and the improved model, the new estimates of the rates of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica  are only about half as much as the old ones.

Instead of Greenland losing ~230 gigatons of ice each year since 2002, the new estimate is 104 Gt/yr. And for Antarctica, the old estimate of ~150 Gt/yr has been modified to be about 87 Gt/yr.

 How does this translate into sea level rise?

 It takes about 37.4 gigatons of ice loss to raise the global sea level 0.1 millimeter—four hundredths of an inch. In other words, ice loss from Greenland is currently contributing just over one-fourth of a millimeter of sea level rise per year, or one one-hundreth of an inch.  Antarctica’s contribution is just under one-fourth of a millimeter per year.  So together, these two regions—which contain 99% of all the land ice on earth—are losing ice at a rate which leads to an annual sea level rise of one half of one millimeter per year. This is equivalent to a bit less than 2 hundredths of an inch per year.  If this continues for the next 90 years, the total sea level rise contributed by Greenland and Antarctica by the year 2100 will amount to less than 2 inches.

 Couple this with maybe 6-8 inches from the fact that the ocean rises with increasing temperature,  temperatures and 2-3 inches from melting of other land-based ice, and you get a sum total of about one foot of additional rise by century’s end.

 This is about 1/3^rd of the 1 meter estimates and 1/20^th of the 6 meter estimates.

Things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.

So far, the 21^st century has been pretty much of a downer for global warming alarmists. Not only has the earth been warming at a rate considerably less than the average rate projected by climate models, but now the sea level rise is suffering a similar fate.

Little wonder that political schemes purporting to save us from these projected (non)calamities are also similarly failing to take hold.

References:

Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale changes in Greenland outlet glacier dynamics triggered at the terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.

Titus, J.G., et al., 2009. State and Local Governments Plan for Development of Most Land Vulnerable to Rising Sea Level along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Environmental Research Letters 4 044008. (doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044008).

Wu, X., et al., 2010. Simultaneous estimation of global present-day water treansport and glacial isostatic adjustment. Nature Geoscience, published on-line August 15, 2010, doi: 10.1038/NGE0938.

The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Earlier this year, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama signed legislation that threatens U.S. residents with prison if they fail to purchase health insurance.

This week, his administration told the United Nations that this legislation shows the United States is making progress on human rights.

Making a Joke of Human Rights is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama’s address to the United Nations General Assembly this morning, and his chairing of the UN Security Council on Thursday, is a grand attempt to tell the world–after eight years of George W. Bush–that the United States will no longer go it alone.

The president has a very difficult task, however, if he expects to invest the United Nations with renewed credibility. The UN is a weak and fractured institution, whose limited power and authority has been steadily undermined by a progression of U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans. We should not forget that President Bill Clinton explicitly circumvented the UN Security Council when he chose to intervene militarily in Kosovo in 1999. Clinton’s evasion of the UNSC established a precedent for future military intervention that the Bush administration happily capitalized upon to send troops into Iraq in 2003.

Susan Rice, our current UN ambassador, endorsed this approach in 2006 when she called for U.S. military action against Sudan. Prior UN approval of such a mission was unlikely, but ultimately unnecessary, Rice argued at the time, because of the precedent set by President Clinton in Kosovo.

For American policymakers who have demonstrated such disdain for the UN in the past to now profess great respect for the institution should not surprise us. The UN is only as relevant as the member states wish it to be. In areas of common concern, the desire to cooperate and compromise may temporarily trump concerns over protecting state sovereignty and preserving freedom of action to deal with urgent security threats. In most cases, however, we can expect the member states, with the United States in the lead, to pursue policies that they believe (not always correctly, as we learned in Iraq) will advance their security. And if the UN weakly sanctions such actions after the fact, or refuses to do so, that will only reveal its irrelevance.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Americans Should Not Expect Much from Obama’s Visit to the UN is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The standard view in policy discussions is that emigration of skilled workers from poor countries to rich countries is bad for development becuase it deprives poor countries of much-needed human capital and it reduces growth.

A new study by Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development challenges this view. Clemens shows that efforts to slow the so-called brain drain “generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm.” There is little evidence that limiting skilled migration improves growth or public finances in poor countries, while following such a policy may reduce the demand for education, international trade and capital flows, and the diffusion of ideas and norms. There is also a gap between the policy discussion (that takes the negative aspects of the brain drain for granted) and the research literature (that reaches much more ambiguous conclusions). Clemens also rightly stresses choice and freedom as central factors to consider when formualting policy–an element so far missing from the policy discussions.

The study was first released this spring as a background paper to the UN’s forthcoming Human Development 2009 annual report, which will focus on migration and incorporate much of Clemens’ work.

In Praise of the Brain Drain is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The First Latin American Conference on Drug Policies was held last week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was a high-profile event sponsored by the United Nations, the Pan-American Health Organization, the Anti-Drug Latin American Initiative on Drugs and Democracy, the Open Society Foundation Institute, and the Dutch and British embassies. Among the participants were high ranking government officials and experts from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.

According to the Buenos Aires Herald, the main conclusion of the conference was that:

The tough approach adopted by Latin America and the US over the past two decades to combat drug trafficking and consumption has failed miserably and a new,  more humanitarian view focused on decriminalizing possession for personal consumption and helping addicts while concentrating efforts in fighting large traffickers must be adopted.

My colleague Ian Vásquez and I have written before on how Latin Americans are increasingly getting fed up with the War on Drugs. A serious and open debate about the future of drug policy in Latin America seems to be underway. The question remains on whether Washington is paying any attention to this.

Drug Policy Debate Is Under Way in Latin America. What About the U.S.? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. has rejoined the Human Rights Council, expressing hopes for positive cooperation in the future.  Reports the Associated Press:

The United States joined the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday, a body widely criticized for failing to confront abuses around the world and for acting primarily to condemn Israel, one of Washington’s closest allies.

U.S. officials pledged to work constructively in the 47-member council, which has frequently been hampered by ideological differences between rich and poor countries.

“The United States assumes its seat on the council with gratitude, with humility, and in the spirit of cooperation,” said Mark C. Storella, who is for the moment the top diplomat at the U.S. Mission to U.N. organizations in Geneva.

The decision in May to seek a seat on the Geneva-based body after three years of giving it the cold shoulder represented a major shift in line with President Barack Obama’s aim of showing that “a new era of engagement has begun.”

Council members, U.N. officials and independent pressure groups applauded the move as a sign the only remaining superpower is prepared to debate human rights with the rest of the world.

Alas, it’s a forlorn hope.  The Council is dominated by human rights abusers and their enablers.  The recent case of Cuba, as Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo pointed out,  is instructive.

I wrote up the story for American Spectator online.  The debate over Cuba’s record was particularly revealing:

Pakistan wished Cuba well in realizing “all human rights for all citizens.” Venezuela (you don’t have to be a member to comment) lauded “the iron will” of Cuba’s government. Russia said, “Cuba had taken a serious and responsible approach.” Uzbekistan “stressed Cuba’s work in the promotion of human rights.” China declared that “Cuba had made important contributions to the international human rights cause.” Egypt opined that “Cuba’s efforts were commendable.” And so it went.

Why should American taxpayers pay for such a farce?  Not only is it a waste of money, but it sets back the cause of human rights.  In general, the Obama administration’s emphasis on engagement is appropriate.  In this case, however, “engagement” is a mistake.

The UN and Human Rights: Never Shall the Twain Meet is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When people ask if the United Nations can serve any useful role, I find myself mumbling that maybe it can do some good on issues with cross-border impact, such as aiding refugees and improving health care. However, I always add, the record has not been good even there.

Now even the UN is admitting that it is hard to demonstrate that it has done any good on health care despite spending billions of dollars collected largely from American and other Western taxpayers.

Reports the Associated Press:

In the last two decades, the world has spent more than $20 billion trying to save people from death and disease in poor countries.

UPDATE: The AP has made a correction to their original story that reported the UN had spent $20 billion on health care programs. They meant to say nearly $200 billion:

LONDON (AP) — In the last two decades, the world has spent more than $196 billion trying to save people from death and disease in poor countries.

But just what the world’s gotten for its money isn’t clear, according to two studies published Friday in the medical journal Lancet.

Millions of people are now protected against diseases like yellow fever, sleeping under anti-malaria bed nets and taking AIDS drugs. Much beyond that, it’s tough to gauge the effectiveness of pricey programs led by the United Nations and its partners, and in some cases, big spending may even be counterproductive, the studies say.

I’m thinking of changing my answer the next time I’m asked if the UN has any positive roles to a simple and emphatic “no.”

The UN Can’t Even Promote Health is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Mexico’s former President, Vicente Fox, joins the growing chorus of Latin American ex-presidents calling for an end on the war on drugs. He’s proposing an open debate on drug legalization.

It’s a shame, though, that these leaders wait until they are out of office to voice their opposition to Washington’s prohibitionist drug strategy. While it’s true, as Fox points out, that any step towards legalization in the region must be supported by the United States, Latin American presidents skeptical of the status quo could use the pulpits at the United Nations, Organization of American States, or the Summits of the Americas to denounce the war on drugs and call for different approaches.

Still, Fox’s opinion on the matter is welcome.

Former President Fox: “Legalize Drugs” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog