Al Gore? It's a possibility. Former Vice President Gore has been nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring the dangers of global warming to the attention of the public. Two Norwegian members of parliament, conservative Boerge Brende and Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left joined with Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier to nominate Gore before the deadline Thursday.

"This is clearly some of the most import conflict prevention work that is being done. Climate change could lead to enormous waves of refugees, the likes of which the world has never seen before," Heidi Soerensen, a Socialist Left MP who nominated Gore and Watt-Cloutier, told daily Aftenposten on Thursday.

"One hundred million climate refugees, major changes in drinking water supplies and a reduction in biological diversity ... will rapidly become a major security threat," co-nominator Boerge Brende, of the Conservative party, told the paper.

The winner of the prize will be announced in October, but the presentation of the award does not occur until December 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

A tip of that hat to commenter Steve G. for pointing me to an article from yesterday on an Australian study predicting a deadly spike in temperatures by 2070. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization said average annual temperatures in Sydney will rise from the current 78.8 to around 88 by 2070. The rise in temperatures could increase heat-related deaths in people over 65 from the current average of 176 per year to over 1,300 per year, and droughts and fire risk would increase as well.

The study was commissioned by New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney.

Australia's prime minister, John Howard, has been repeatedly criticized for not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, making Australia and the Unitie States the only major industrial nations to reject the treaty. China and India were deemed "developing" and thus exempt from Kyoto's restrictions.

Australian power companies issued a report Wednesday saying the best way to slow greenhouse emissions is through the use of nuclear power and retrofitting coal-fired plants to capture carbon dioxide. Prime Minister Howard agreed with those findings.

The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released late last night. I'd recommend everyone with an honest interest in the most up-to-date climate science take the time to listen to the webcast of the press conference and read the 21 page Summary for Policymakers. I will be reading the summary and commenting on it later today.

After some delay, I've finished the IPCC Working Group 1 Summary for Policy Makers, which discusses the physical science basis of the 4th Assessment report. The summary is not very heavy in the actual science, being written for nonscientists. I'd recommend people with an interest in the subject of global warming and in the debate over global warming policy take the time to read the summary. If 21 pages seems too overwhelming, I'd especially point to pages 10-13, the Projections of Future Changes in Climate and to the figures on pages 15 and following.

For those who will only read a few pages of the report, I'd like to summarize some of the abbreviations used in the report used in the report. TAR is the Third Assessment Report, the IPCC's 2001 report on climate change. AR4 is the 4th Assessment Report. SRES is the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios. The summary uses terms to describe mathematical probabilities, with Virtually certain > than 99% probability of occurrence, Extremely likely >95%, Very likely >90%, Likely >66%, More likely than not >50%, Unlikely <33%, Very unlikely <10%, Extremely Unlikely <5%. Very high confidence is at least a 9 out of 10 chance of being correct and high confidence about 8 out of 10 chance of being correct.

The summary includes references (in the squiggly brackets) to the chapters in the full report where each point is supported. I wish I had access to the whole thing, but at this point I don't.

As has been widely reported, the conclusions of the summary are that warming is happening, and humans are "very likely" to blame for it. It's hard for me to assess the evidence without access to the full report - like everyone else, I have to take the summary at its word. I know that many of the regular readers here are cynical to say the least about anything that comes out of the U.N. I choose to believe these scientists have no ulterior motives.

It is clear from reading the summary that, if these scientists are correct, warming will be with us for a long time, no matter what we do about our emissions. Thinking about ways to adapt to our changing climate may be equal in importance to coming up with ways of cutting emissions.

In a related story, the UK's Guardian Unlimited reported Friday that scientists have been offered cash by lobby group/think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) - a group funded by ExxonMobil - for articles undermining the IPCC report.

On February 1, the American Meteorological Society Council adopted a statement on climate change. The statement acknowledges that not everyone is in agreement on the issue of climate change, and that there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds, but, as the statement says, it is "consistent with the vast weight of current scientific understanding as expressed in assessments and reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program."

After some late-week technical difficulties last week, we've got the anticipated Michael Mann interview for you today.

I wrote an entry late last week about a California lawmaker pushing to ban incandescent light bulbs. I was going to post that today, but I happened upon an editorial by Canadian skeptic Dr. Timothy Ball that I thought would spark even more discussion. Dr. Ball is a consultant to Canadian lobby group Friends of Science, a group which has been criticized because a large portion of its funding comes from the oil and gas industry.

In some off-topic notes, I apologize that I've fallen behind on publishing comments - I will get to them tomorrow. I do want to say that I want the tone here to change. I'm drawing the line on the insults in the comments. Before people scream censorship, I want to state again I don't care what your opinion is. State it in a civil manner and I will publish it. Call someone else an idiot because they disagree with you and I will not. Period.

I'll publish that light bulb piece tomorrow, too....that's interesting stuff.

Over the past several months, California has taken many steps which position it as the leader in the nation in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, I was a little surprised to see that California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine plans to introduce a bill to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012. I understand that the technology behind incandescents is almost 125 years old and they are tremendously inefficient - with only about 5 percent of the energy they receive being converted to light. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) use at least 2/3 less energy and last much longer. They also produce up to 70 percent less heat than an incandescent lamp. As I said earlier this week, I LOVE efficiency, but this.....

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine plans to introduce the bill this week, saying the spiral light sources are so efficient that consumers should be forced to use them.

I have to say that makes me a little uncomfortable. It's just the use of the word "forced," I guess. I suppose that's how some motorcyclists feel about helmet laws - which I'm in favor of, by the way.

One of my first entries on this blog was about CFLs. I've been replacing most of the incandescents in my own home with CFLs as they've been burning out, and I've generally been very happy with the results. The only - minor - irritation is the extra beat it takes after flipping the switch for the lamp to light. I do have some fixtures that CFLs just would not look right in, and I wouldn't be happy to have my choice legislated away from me.

CFLs do contain mercury and need to be recycled accordingly. I read a piece on environmental blog treehugger.com which argues that CFLs actually reduce mercury pollution because most of our electricity is produced using fossil fuels, especially coal, which gives off mercury during its combustion.

Roger Pielke, Sr posted a blog entry on the AMS Statement on Climate Change which readers here may find interesting.

While you're over there, read Dr. Pielke's complaint about the misrepresentation of his position in an article in the Rocky Mountain News. Very interesting and telling that - so often journalists have their own story to tell rather than reporting facts.

I've used the "skeptic" category here, but I don't really like it. Dr. Pielke's conclusions summarize his findings about climate science, and particularly the impact humans have had on the climate.

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response
that would occur.

Five hundred million dollars. Even for big oil, that's quite a lot of money. And that's what BP PLC is investing in the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership with the University of California and the University of Illinois to develop new, clean sources of energy.

Teams from UC Berkeley and UI Urbana-Champaign will be working with researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop renewable fuels and clean energy. UC Berkeley brings expertise in engineering and life sciences and UI is a leader in crop biology, which makes it a natural for developing biofuels.

To me, it is only common sense for energy companies like BP to get in on the ground floor of new energy technologies. Will oil run out soon? No. But someday in the future this world is going to have to look elsewhere to meet its energy demands. Someday might as well start today.

Elliot Abrams gave me a call yesterday. "I've found an article that you should read," he said. It's from the January 30 issue of EOS, which is the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. I would link the article, but I'm not a subscriber. Elliot faxed me the hard copy of the article, titled A Perspective on Global Warming, Dimming and Brightening.

Global dimming is the reduction of solar radiation measured at the Earth's surface, which has been observed since the beginning of systematic measurements in the 1950s. That trend may have reversed over the past decade or so. It's believed that global dimming is probably due to an increase in aerosol particles in the atmosphere, but aerosols' impact on global temperatures continue to be poorly understood. The reduction in solar (shortwave) radiation from 1958 to 1992 was 20 watts per square meter, far more than the 2.4 w/m² increase in the positive longwave forcing believed to have occurred due to increases in greenhouse gases since the dawn of the industrial age.

The EOS article, written by Gerald Stanhill, raises questions about the IPCC, which has never, at least through the Third Assessment Report, made reference to changes in solar radiation at the Earth's surface. Considering that solar radiation is the primary driver of climate, Dr. Stanhill questions "the confidence that can be placed in a top-down, 'consensus' science system that ignores such a major and significant element of climate change."

It's getting tough to be a global warming skeptic within the public arena. Just ask Oregon state climatologist George Taylor, who may be fired by Gov. Ted Kulongoski for having views not in line with state policy on greenhouse gas reduction.

The article I linked refers to 3 other state climatologists (there are 47 all together) who hold skeptical views, Patrick Michaels of Virginia, David Legates of Delaware and John Christy (incorrectly spelled as Christie in the article) of Alabama (who was also a lead author on the 2001 IPCC Assessment and a contributing author on earlier IPCC reports).

A quick Google search for more information on Taylor led me to a response he wrote to an August, 2005 newspaper article in the Willamette Week in which Taylor addresses, point by point, the criticisms leveled at him in the article.

As an aside, I would encourage people to read the two page Policy Statement on Climate Variability and Change by the American Association of State Climatologists. It covers the difficulty of climate prediction and, perhaps more importantly, the difficulty of verifying the accuracy of climate prediction and also addresses public policy on climate change in a sensible, practical manner.

This week, Katie hits the global warming headlines and finishes off her interview with Michael Mann.

Sir Richard Branson announced today a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Obviously, CO₂ is not a pollutant in the way the toxic materials scrubbed out of smokestacks are pollutants - in fact, it's a necessary component of the atmosphere.

The prize, which Branson announced along with former Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, will initially be open for five years. The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years. $5 million of the prize money will be paid upfront, and the remaining $20 at the end.

How many trees would it take to remove one billions metric tons per year out of the atmosphere? YIKES.

According to Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, 200 metric gigatons of carbon have accumulated in the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million.

Will anyone step up and take this prize? It will be interesting to watch. Richard Branson continues to put his money where his mouth is on the subject of global warming, I respect him for that.