California congressman urges global clearcutting of forests as way to fight climate change

A Republican congressman urged the State Department to look into subsidizing clear-cutting of forests around the world as a mechanism to fight climate change.

The suggestion by U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., came Wednesday during an oversight hearing conducted by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

"Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?" Rohrabacher asked Todd Stern, the Obama administration's special envoy for climate change. "Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?"

The proposal, if carried out, would actually exacerbate the warming of Earth's atmosphere because trees absorb huge quantities of carbon dioxide.

Stern pointed out that climate change policies around the planet focus on retaining forests for that reason.

Rohrabacher argued that nature is primarily responsible for climate change.

The continued warming of Earth's atmosphere is actually caused by the greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities.

Obama's speech to British parliament does not focus on climate change

President Barack Obama's speech to the British parliament Wednesday made mention of climate change, but did not focus on the issue.

Obama emphasized that the continuing build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses "dangers" and appeared to chastise China and India for being unwilling to commit to emission reductions.

"The successes and failures of our own past can serve as an example for emerging economies: that it's possible to grow without polluting, that lasting prosperity comes not from what a nation consumes, but from what it produces and from the investments it makes in its people and its infrastructure," Obama said to members of the House of Commons and House of Lords.

The administration has appeared to reduce the priority it gave to efforts to lower American greenhouse gas emissions since a greenhouse gas emissions bill died in Congress in 2010.

The Environmental Protection Agency has also recently backed off on several proposals to increase regulation of air pollution, control mountaintop removal mining, and set rules for the storage of coal ash.

Official White House photo of President Barack Obama speaking at Westminster Hall in London, May 25, 2011, by Pete Souza.

New Jersey to withdraw from regional climate change compact

New Jersey will withdraw from the ten-state regional compact set up by northeastern states to coordinate greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Gov. Christopher Christie announced Thursday that he would pull the Garden State out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative by the end of the year.

Christie labeled the RGGI a "failure" during a Trenton news conference.

However, a statement by the nine remaining members indicated that Christie's decision will not affect the compact's ongoing activities.

"With each state exercising its independent authority to achieve low-cost greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the RGGI market-based program has widespread support across the region and will continue," the statement said.

The member states of the RGGI aim to lower greenhouse gas emissions within their borders by ten percent by 2018. To do so, each state limits emissions from electric power plants. Regulated entities can purchase permission to pollute through auctions, with regulated entities in the region able to take advantage of pollution allowances made available in any of the member states.

Funds generated through the emission allowance auctions are used to fund clean energy projects. As of February about $860 million had been invested in these programs.

The RGGI's cap-and-trade program was the first market-based mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

New Hampshire, another of the RGGI's members, experienced earlier this year an effort by legislative Republicans to force the state's withdrawal from the compact. The attempt was blocked in the state senate.

New Jersey has been a member since 2008.

U.S. Commerce Dep't IG clears NOAA scientists of Inhofe fraud claims

A federal government investigator has rejected a powerful U.S. senator's claim that National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration scientists may have fabricated data to support the agency's case that climate change is ongoing.

Inhofe's allegation arose from his interpretation of email sent to and from scientists at East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit. Many skeptics of the scientific consensus that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases are causing Earth's atmosphere to warm have raised a similar charge.

"In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures," U.S. Department of Commerce inspector general Todd J. Zinser wrote in a Feb. 18 letter to Inhofe that was released to the public Thursday.

Zinser was referring to the Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly dataset, which is maintained by NOAA's National Climactic Data Center.

He also concluded that NOAA adhered to appropriate peer review procedures before releasing the historical climate change data about which Inhofe expressed concern.

The e-mails Zinser investigated were among 1,073 stolen and leaked to the public in Nov. 2009. Zinser and his team of investigators examined all of those emails but focused their attention on 289 that involved NOAA in some manner.

The inspector general's staff conducted a more detailed investigation of eight particular e-mails that were the principal source of Inhofe's expression of concern.

One of those eight e-mails, which was sent by CRU's deputy director, asked colleagues not to "let [the Co-Chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report Working Group 1] (or [a researcher at Pennsylvania State University]) push you (us) beyond where we know is right." The sender was referring to "conclusions beyond what we can securely justify."

The sender told Zinser's investigators that the purpose of this email was to encourage scientists working on the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report were assuring a clear statement about the factual support for the conclusions they provided in that report they wrote.

Another involving a 2007 exchange between a group of scientists not employed by NOAA that mentioned values on a climate data curve being "shifted" was found by Zinser to reflect the scientists' adherence to a long-established procedure used to compensate for missing data.

The third, which related to a controversy relating to the extent of urban heat islands in China, had involved the NCDC director. Zinser concluded that he had not contributed the Chinese climate data at the center of the dispute, had not analyzed that data despite being a contributor to a 1990 academic article that critics thought had reached an erroneous conclusion about the impacts of climate change on Chinese metropolitan areas, and had, in a manner consistent with general practice in scientific fields of inquiry, worked only on his section of that paper.

The fourth email to which Inhofe pointed as possible evidence of fraud by NOAA scientists was sent by the CRU deputy director to a researcher at Pennsylvania State University. That email, which was sent Apr. 29, 2007, said that the writer was "particularly unhappy" that he could not get a "statement" relating to reinforcement of results obtained during the IPCC's Third Assessment Report into the Summary for Policymakers section of the Fourth Assessment Report.

The CRU deputy director said he had done his "best" to get the information included in the Fourth Assessment Report, but had been "basically railroaded" by the co-chair of Working Group 1.

Zinser concluded that the information that the CRU deputy director wanted to have included in the Fourth Assessment Report was not included because the co-chair of Working Group 1 decided that the report would have greater clarity about the "similarities and differences" between the Third Assessment Report and the Fourth Assessment Report. Since the Third Assessment Report's publication some research had indicated that there was a greater than anticipated historical variability in Northern Hemisphere temperatures.

Inhofe had also pointed to a fifth email, written by a university researcher to an NOAA scientist, asking that earlier emails showing that researcher's participation in the development of the Fourth Assessment Report be deleted.

Zinser found that the emails referenced in the researcher's message were deleted by the NOAA scientist, but that the NOAA scientist had received the request before he commenced government service and, therefore, no agency records retention policies had been violated.

A sixth email at issue related to a Freedom of Information Act request for NOAA data used to compile a temperature trend report contained in a 2008 academic article. NOAA had informed the requester that it did not have the information sought, but in fact CRU researchers may have had such data.

Zinser concluded that the particular data the requester had sought was never in the hands of any NOAA scientists and that the data that the CRU researchers in fact had was not the data that had been requested.

A seventh email referred to "quality control procedures" applied by NOAA on temperature data after it is collected by GHCN, instead of at the time the data is reported to the agency.

Zinser found that this method is justified as a means for the NOAA to take account of new information contained in late reports and that, in any event, it will be less essential after the agency deploys improvements to GHCN-M.

Finally, Zinser's investigators found that an Oct. 6, 2009 email referring to "data gaps" in NCDC's database, as compared to those maintained by CRU and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, referred to the separate collection of land and sea temperature data by NCDC or the omission of non-public data pursuant to NOAA policy. GISS researchers interpolate ocean data into a land temperature database, and vice versa, and both that agency and CRU may not have policies requiring the exclusion of proprietary data from their databases.

The report by the Commerce Department's inspector general is at least the sixth to conclude that the scientists who sent or received the 1,073 leaked emails did not engage in any improper behavior. There have been three inquiries in Britain and two in the United States, by the National Research Council and Pennsylvania State University.

Zinser's review and further investigation of two other emails did prompt some mild criticism of NOAA on grounds having nothing to do with adherence to proper research techniques or scientific methodology.

His report to Inhofe indicated that NOAA had improperly handled four requests for information under FOIA by failing to assure that individual scientists working for the agency were made aware of them. One other scientist who had been aware of the FOIA requests incorrectly concluded that the information they sought was the property of the IPCC.

Zinser suggested that NOAA review the CRU's compliance with the terms of two contracts awarded in 2002 and 2003 to conduct training on the impacts of the periodic La Nina and El Nino events. The total value of those contracts was $66,240.

The inspector general also criticized one e-mail message, sent by a senior NCDC scientist to a CRU colleague, that contained an "inappropriate image."

The image was a caricature of Inhofe, created by another NCDC scientist, in which the Oklahoma Republican was shown, along with several other famous climate change skeptics, atop an ice floe in the Arctic ocean. The second scientist created the cartoon on his government-issued computer during work hours.

Zinser reported that NOAA has disciplined the two scientists.

Obama administration: No endangered status unless species nearly extinct in wild, and polar bear doesn't qualify

The Obama administration told a federal judge in Washington, D.C. Wednesday that a species may be considered "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act only if it is on the very precipice of disappearing from its native habitat.

Because the polar bear isn't that close to extinction, a government lawyer said, its status as a threatened species should stand.

The argument came in a hearing held on a challenge to the administration's decision to stick with the George W. Bush administration's 2008 designation of the polar bear's status under the ESA.

Listing the polar bear as "threatened" does not require the administration to protect its habitat from adverse impacts, whether from oil drilling or climate change. An "endangered" listing would impose that duty on the government.

Judge Emmet Sullivan seemed to indicate that he was not certain whether the courts have any statutory authority to force the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to do more for the polar bear.

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer representing environmental groups that are challenging the threatened listing, bluntly told the veteran jurist that the only way to save the polar bear is to require "deep and rapid greenhouse gas reductions."

However, the regulation that creates the dichotomy in the treatment of a listed species' habitat appears to stand in the way of such a mandate from a federal judge.

The rule, which former interior secretary Dirk Kempthorne issued on the same day he announced the polar bear's listing as a threatened species, aims to prevent the ESA from being used as a tool to force a lowering of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, has not attempted to revise or revoke it.

The environmental group plaintiffs maintain that, because the sea ice upon which polar bears depend for hunting is expected to continue disappearing, the species must be considered endangered.

Sea ice in the Arctic, which is essential habitat for the polar bear during the summer months, is being lost as Earth's atmosphere warms. The National Snow and Ice Data Center has reported that the rate of melt is increasing during every month of the year.

Elements of industry and the state of Alaska argue that the polar bear does not merit even a threatened species designation. They do not dispute that the sea ice habitat upon which polar bears depend is disappearing, but maintain that its loss does not necessarily mean that the species will go extinct.

Washington, on the other hand, seemed to take the position that the listing provisions of the ESA is not the critical mechanism available in an effort to save the polar bear.

Clifford Stevens, the government lawyer representing the Fish and Wildlife Service in the case, told Sullivan that the recent critical habitat designation is the tool upon which the administration will principally rely.

Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

High Country News article investigates Alaska's extensive predator control programs

The High Country News published in its Feb. 21 issue an insightful article exploring Alaska's ongoing and pervasive efforts to limit mammalian predator populations.

The article, by Tracy Ross, is worth a read.

U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari in case upholding spotted owl critical habitat

The U.S. Supreme Court sidestepped Tuesday an opportunity to review a lower court decision that upheld the designation of millions of acres of land as critical habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl.

The denial of a petition for certiorari came in a case filed by cattle ranchers in the southwest.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in June 2010 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had provided a valid economic analysis in support of the designation and did not violate the Endangered Species Act by including in the designation land that did not contain any owls.

In general, the ESA requires USFWS to designate critical habitat for a listed species at the time of listing.

In the case of the Mexican spotted owl, the administration of former President George W. Bush designated 8.6 million acres in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah as critical habitat in 2004.

The species was added to the list of threatened and endangered species in 1993. A previous critical habitat designation by the Clinton administration was withdrawn in 1998.

The Mexican spotted owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) is the smallest of the spotted owl species, which include the California spotted owl and the northern spotted owl. The species lives in old growth forests in mountains and canyons located in a range extending from southern Utah and Colorado through Arizona and New Mexico and into west Texas and northern and central Mexico.

A predatory animal, Mexican spotted owls are nocturnal. Climate change is the most significant risk to their forest habitat.

The case is Arizona Cattle Growers Association v. Salazar.

Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.