From the UK comes the sweeping, 700 page Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Though this is an economic forecast, it contains quite a lot of climate science as well. You can read an AP report on the review here and find the review itself, along with the press release and some other materials here.

I will make no guarantee that I will slog through the full 700 page report, but I have found some interesting commentary on the review by people who have read it. I'll point you to a couple of entries at Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog, specifically the entries from October 29, 30 and 31. Richard Tol's comment (downloadable as a Word document) is particularly critical of the conclusions of the Stern Review.

Earlier this week, the Stern Review tackled the issue of the economics of global warming. Now, an article in The Independent Online questions whether the UK will be able to meet any sort of expectations on reduced emissions as airport expansions plan to treble the number of flights by 2030. The increases in air traffic will effectively eliminate Britain's ability to meet Kyoto targets.

So what is to be done? Eliminate growth to curb the potential for warming? That doesn't fly (pun intended) too well with the profit-driven West. Interestingly, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Group chairman, has proposed some efficiencies which could cut aviation carbon emissions by up to 25 percent globally. In addition, Branson announced back in September that he would take all the profits from his "dirty" businesses - such as Virgin Air - over the next ten years (estimated at 3 billion dollars) and invest them in the development of new fuels and renewable energy initiatives.

Sir Richard's not just being noble (oh! that was another pun) here. He's a businessman, and a shrewd one. He's fully expecting his energy initiatives to make even more money for the Virgin Group.

With the significant changes in leadership brought by Tuesday's election, expect a policy shift on global warming and other economic issues. Democrat Barbara Boxer of California takes over as chair of the Senate Environmental Public Works Committee and she is looking to California's aggressive response to the issue of global warming as a potential model for the nation.

Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard has changed his stand on global warming. After years of taking a pro-industry position on the issue, he is now willing to consider an international carbon trading system, according to MSNBC.

The article contains a brief discussion of the cap-and-trade system. For a somewhat more in-depth look, here's an article from the Bangor Daily News which summarizes how it works.

Boulder, Colorado has become the first city in the United States to adopt a carbon tax to fight global warming. The money collected through the tax is to be used to cut greenhouse gas emissions, mostly by improving the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

The Wall Street Journal online has a free feature today on the state of California's lawsuit against the 6 largest auto manufacturers over the GHGs emitted by the cars. It gives a pretty concise definition of the sort of suit it is (public nuisance rather than manufacturer liability), then features a debate between Russell Jackson, a defense-side lawyer who has worked on class-action and public nuisance suits, and David Bookbinder, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club in Washington, D.C.

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, senior fellows at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. have contributed an article to the Nov. 20 edition of the National Review Online. Since I'm not an economist, and things like cost-benefit analyses give me a headache, I will not add much to the discussion here.

An article today in the New York Times (registration required, but free) discusses many of the economic issues raised by addressing global warming. The article covers a lot of the familiar ground of cap-and-trade controls versus a carbon tax, including references to legislative proposals before Congress, including one from these two:

which envisions a cap-and-trade system. In nosing around looking for more information on the various legislative proposals, I found site with a couple of very interesting graphs comparing the different global warming bills before the 109th Congress. That site also includes a brief description of each of the proposals. It amazes me how much emissions have increased since 1990.

Back to the article in the Times - I had a quibble with this paragraph...

Yet it is increasingly clear that there is a considerable cost to carbon dioxide emissions, especially to future generations, as climate specialists warn of declines in farm output in poor tropical countries, fiercer hurricanes and coastal floods that could make many people refugees.

It seems to me that better examples of potential future threats could have been used. We've already discussed the "fiercer hurricanes" controversy - will they, won't they? No one really knows. As for farm output in poor tropical countries - why not hit Times readers where they live, or rather where they eat, by talking about America's breadbasket moving to Canada, as the NY Times Blog did just last week? I had to laugh at that blog entry, too...for the same reason one of the commenters over there did....it contains this quote from a news release:

In a world where 75 percent of poor people depend on agriculture, climate change will have a profound impact on their food security.

Do you know ANYONE who doesn't rely on agriculture? Unless some people have a Star Trek-style replicator, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, are completely reliant on hunting and gathering - I would guess EVERYONE depends on agriculture.

Ahhhhh....I've drifted a little off topic. That's what happens when I get up too early!

ExxonMobil should be getting used to this. In early September, the UK branch of ExxonMobil, Esso UK Limited, received a letter from the Royal Society, then in late October Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe sent a letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson asking the oil giant to cease funding of climate change "deniers." Heck, there's an entire web site focussed on "outing" ExxonMobil's funding of climate change skeptics. The Wall Street Journal, which has a bit of a skeptical bent on the global warming issue, comments extensively on the senators' letter.

I've got mixed feelings on this. First of all, the $19 million dollars spent by ExxonMobil since the late 1990s (7 or 8 years) seems to be a relative pittance, especially given the monstrous profits the company has generated in recent years. The think tank specifically mentioned in the letter, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has received just over $2 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 (through 2005) - that just doesn't seem like a lot to me.

Of course, it's always best to trust peer-reviewed science over research which hasn't come under the same scrutiny, but is peer review always fair? An April, 2006 editorial in the Wall Street Journal from Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, included this paragraph expressing his own frustration at the peer review process:

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Mr. Lindzen is criticized by some for taking consulting fees from oil and gas interests.

On ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos reported Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is "considering setting up a special committee in the House to deal with climate change and global warming." That was not confirmed by Rep. Henry Waxman of California. You can view the video just past the 12 minute mark at this link.

Waxman goes on to mention his 2006 bill, the Safe Climate Act, which sets a goal of 1990 emissions by the year 2020. This goal would be met through the use of a cap-and-trade system of controlling greenhouse gas emissions and also by requiring EPA to set standards for motor vehicle emissions which are at least as stringent as the current California standards. The National Academy of Sciences would be directed to review, at five-year intervals, the nation's progress toward avoiding "dangerous climate change."

Was the pressure too much, or too late? ExxonMobil has stopped funding groups skeptical of global warming, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Exxon stopped funding CEI in 2006, prior to the letter from Senators Snowe and Rockefeller as well as the UCS report, and the letter from England's Royal Society.

"Mark Boudreaux, a spokesman for Exxon, the world's biggest publicly traded company, said its position on climate change has been 'widely misunderstood and as a result of that, we have been clarifying and talking more about what our position is.'

Exxon's funding action was confirmed this week by its vice president for public affairs. Kenneth Cohen told the Wall Street Journal that Exxon decided in late 2005 that its 2006 nonprofit funding would not include CEI and 'five or six' similar groups.

Cohen declined to identify the other groups, but their names could become public this spring when Exxon releases its annual list of donations to nonprofit groups."

The oil company is also involved, along with representatives of 20 other companies, in talks sponsored by Resources for the Future, a D.C. based nonprofit. The talks, which began in December, should generate a report this fall with recommendations to legislators on how to regulate greenhouse emissions.

If ExxonMobil shows the same commitment to developing alternative fuels that BP and Shell have shown, we may yet shake our oil addiction.