OPINION/COMMENTARY

Greens vs. Levees

With all that has happened in the state, it’s understandable that the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club may not have updated its website. But when its members get around to it, they may want to change the wording of one item in particular. The site brags that the group is “working to keep the Atchafalaya Basin,” which adjoins the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans, “wet and wild.” These words may seem especially inappropriate after the breaking of the levee that caused the tragic events in New Orleans last week. But “wet and wild” has a larger significance in light of those events, and so does the group using the phrase. The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees. The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.” But a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.” The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.” In addition to the Sierra Club, other parties to the suit were the group American Rivers, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, and the Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations. The lawsuit was settled in 1997 with the Corps agreeing to hold off on some work while doing an additional two-year environmental impact study. Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain. But it is just one illustration of a destructive river-management philosophy that took hold in the ‘90s, influenced the Clinton administration, and had serious policy consequences. Put simply, it’s impossible to understand the delays in building levees without being aware of the opposition of the environmental groups to dams, levees, and anything that interfered with the “natural” river flow. The group American Rivers, which leads coalitions of eco-groups on river policy, has for years actually called its campaign, “Rivers Unplugged.” Over the past few years, levees came to occupy the same status for environmental groups as roads in forests — an artificial barrier to nature. They frequently campaigned against levees being built and shored up on the nation’s rivers, including on the Mississippi....

Turning Science Into Hot Air

With America's eyes fixed on Hurricane Katrina's destructive force, we naturally look for an explanation or a cause. Eyes in times past would have roved upward to the heavens; now they fix themselves firmly on science, eager to hear explanations of a link between global warming and impressive natural disasters. There are many out there ready to indulge this notion and use a terrible calamity to further their own political ends. They glibly contend hurricanes are exactly the sort of result we can expect if we keep contributing to global warming and that New Orleans has reaped the fruit of our irresponsibility. Yet there is much evidence this is all just hot air. The alarmists notably fail to cite the cyclical nature of hurricane behavior. From the late 1920s to the 1960s there was high hurricane activity. If global warming is to blame for more hurricanes now, what caused the last cycle? As leading hurricane scientist William Gray argues, North Atlantic surface temperatures vary naturally. They were cool from the 1970s to the 1990s, but warm during the last period of intense hurricane activity from the late '20s to the 1960s. He says, "Instead of seeing a long-term trend up or down, we do see a quasicyclic multidecade regime that alternates between active and quiet phases for major Atlantic hurricanes on the scale of 25-40 years each." The global warming-hurricane theory is flawed; Mr. Emanuel and others have tracked the buildup of a natural cycle, not discovered a linear trend. It is apparent the intuitive ideas forwarded by the likes of Mr. Emanuel inevitably result from classic "cherry picking" science. Given that patterns in hurricanes seem driven by 20-40 year cycles, to draw solid conclusions from a period that began in the 1970s and neglect prior natural patterns is a bit like staying up from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. and finding there is a trend the Earth is getting brighter....

Gang Green: CRC lists the worst environmental groups

1 Rainforest Action Network The Rainforest Action Network’s current targets include Ford Motor Company and Wells Fargo. In its Jumpstart Ford campaign, RAN makes ridiculous demands of asking Ford to increase its fuel economy to 50 mpg by 2010 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2020. Thus far, Ford has tried to appease RAN by meeting with the to “better understand their perspective” (page 10 of the Corporate Citizenship Report). Problem is, RAN understands one thing: capitulation to its demands.
2 Greenpeace Fund Greenpeace’s current campaign is called “Project Thin Ice 2005.” The campaign involves the Greenpeace ship Artic Sunrise to scare people into believing that “Global Warming is real.” The ship is currently touring the ice sheet in Greenland, no doubt looking for lots of “scientific evidence.” “Ten per cent of the world’s fresh water is locked up in the Greenland ice cap, and if global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels continues unchecked, the entire ice sheet is in danger of melting.” The Greenpeace website warns. “Should that come to pass, then sea level around the world will increase by 23 feet (7 meters), inundating low lying cities in the U.S., the entire nation of Bangladesh, and many Pacific island nations.” However, as Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute points out, that scenario is based on junk science....

Hurricanes Aren’t Caused by Global Warming but Political Hot Air Is

At the 27th annual National Hurricane Conference University of Colorado atmospheric scientist, Dr. William Gray, explained that nature is responsible for hurricane cycles, not humans. Periodically changing ocean circulation patterns, he explained, led to the cycle of increasing hurricane activity that the world is currently experiencing. 2004’s above average hurricane season was part of a completely natural and normal cycle that scientists have monitored for more than 100 years. In fact, for about the past 25 years there has been a relative lull in hurricane activity in the U.S. We have recently begun to emerge from that cycle into a more active cycle of hurricane activity like those from the 1930s through 1950s. Indeed, according to the National Hurricane Center, category 3,4 and 5 hurricane numbers peaked in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s with an average of 9 per decade. In the 1940’s alone, 23 hurricanes hit the U.S. mainland, 8 were category-3 or stronger storms. By contrast, since the 1980s when environmentalists first began to argue that humans were causing catastrophic climate change, the number of category 3 or higher hurricanes have averaged 5 per decade. Recently, a paper by six noted tropical cyclone experts, Hurricanes and Global Warming, in the the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, made three main points. First, that no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes. Second, the scientific consensus is that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small and within the context of observed natural variability. And third, the politics of linking hurricanes to global warming threatens to undermine support for legitimate climate research and could result in ineffective hurricane policies....

Strategic reserves -- no strategy

Hurricane Katrina slashed U.S. oil production by 1.4 million barrels a day -- the global equivalent of suddenly losing two-thirds of all oil produced by Iraq or Kuwait. "President George W. Bush has responded quickly to Hurricane Katrina," said a Bloomberg report, "suggesting that Hurricane Ivan last year taught him a lesson about opening up the reserve." Energy Secretary Bodman announced he had "approved a request for a loan of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve" and "continues to review other requests as they come in.'' That announcement should have been made by the president at least a week before the hurricane actually hit. He should have said, "The United States stands ready to replace all oil production loss resulting from the hurricane for as long as necessary." If that had happened, oil would now be at least $10 a barrel cheaper than it is. Since 1991, however, it has always been safe for traders to bet against the SPR being used in such a serious way. The new SPR loans did arrive a few days sooner than the expensive11-day lag following Hurricane Ivan. But a loan is just a loan. To loan oil from the SPR (rather than sell it) does not add a drop to world oil supply over the medium term. On the contrary, it ultimately reduces world oil supply because those who borrow oil have to return more than they borrowed, as interest....

===