George Rebane

* The Environmental Cost of Running Climate Models
* The lunacy of the ‘endangered’ polar bear

The Environmental Cost of Running Climate Models.  A recent MIT Technology Report states that supercomputers running today’s climate models chalk up an annual electricity bill of $150 million and with new technology they are trying to reduce this cost.  Now here we’re talking about the models that project all kinds of dire 50 and 100-year futures due to global warming.  These are the very same models that could not and did not predict the current cooling trend that has been going on for the last eight years.  I did a little arithmetic from easily available conversion and power plant efficiency data, and was amazed at the result.  In addition to giving out bogus answers and costing taxpayers $150 million every year, the exercise of these models also requires that we annually burn an additional 550,000 tons of coal in our power plants which releases over 11,600 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.  And all of this is equivalent to another 2.4 million barrels of crude oil which we have to import.  Talk about garbage in garbage out.

The lunacy of the ‘endangered’ polar bear.  Today the Interior Department placed the polar bear on the endangered species list promising to impose a phalanx of legal hobbles on our energy independence programs.  The bear population is now about 25,000, growing rapidly, and, before this ruling, was expected to get as high as 50,000 before any leveling off occurs due to food supply limits.  These critters have been around for millions of years and successfully weathered climate changes exceeding anything trumpeted by Team Gore.  This again is a political decision not based on science – here’s a report.  Another loss for America and victory for OPEC along with their sponsored terrorists.

(16 May 2008 – This update from CATO) Patrick J. Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, comments:

“This is a political, not a scientific act. Polar bears are at or near record population levels today. They clearly survived eras in the past where Arctic climate was warmer than it is now. For several millennia after the end of the last ice age, summer temperatures in the Eurasian Arctic were 4-13°F warmer than modern temperatures. As some summer sea-ice is lost at today’s temperatures, it seems likely that it was probably absent during that era. Obviously the polar bear survived, as did the fledgling Inuit culture.

“This marks the first instance of a species being listed based upon a computer model of future climate from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There has been no net warming in the last decade, and scientists recently discovered that it is likely there will be little if any for the next decade. Not one of the IPCC’s models includes a two-decade hiatus in global warming. Consequently this listing is based upon obsolete science. This makes the listing of the Polar Bear obviously political and hardly scientific.”