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This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.

1. Aliens may attack earth over global warming–NASA/Penn. State research suggests

NASA and Penn. State scientists have teamed up to produce research suggesting that our "non-sustainable" ways with respect to CO2 emission could (I’m not making this up) provoke aliens to attack humans to save the earth. Here’s the story as reported by IB Times:

Beyond endangering the earthly inhabitants, humans may have posed a serious threat to the entire galaxy, possibly prompting aliens to destroy humanity in order to end global warming and save the rest of the galaxy from being contaminated as well… "A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand," the study says. "Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions."

Remember, this is a study coming from a federal government agency and a state university–your tax dollars at work.

 

2. New research from MIT climatologist–climate far less sensitive to increases in CO2 than originally predicted

A new study from MIT’s Richard Lindzen and coauthor Yong Sang-Choi argues that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would only bring a 0.7 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures. This is far less than the IPCC’s weakest impact scenario. Here is one summary of the results:

You may be interested in single result: the climate sensitivity (warming from CO2 doubling) is 0.7 oC or, with a 99-percent near-certainty, between 0.5 oC and 1.3 oC.

This interval – which doesn’t even overlap with the IPCC’s 2.0-4.5 oC interval – would mean that the man-made contribution to the global temperature change between now and 2080 when CO2 will be near 560 ppm is approximately 0 oC while the interval is between -0.3 and +0.7 oC at the 99 percent confidence level. (I subtracted the warming that has already occurred, and assumed that the non-CO2 contributions were approximately zero.) The error margin is just the uncertainty of the CO2 greenhouse contribution. There will surely be other contributions so the total warming by 2080 is more likely than 1% to be outside this interval.

The entire paper can be accessed here.

 

3. Weekly Ozone Report

Each week during the summer ozone season this newsletter will report how many, if any, high-ozone days have been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. While many environmental groups express concern about air quality, the John Locke Foundation is the only organization that keeps up-to-date track of the actual ozone data and reports it in an unfiltered manner on a regular basis.

The ozone season began on April 1 and ends October 31. All reported data are from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

During the period from August 15 through August 21 there was one reported high-ozone reading in the state of North Carolina. So far this season there have been 84 readings on various North Carolina monitors over 23 days that have exceeded federal standards of 0.75 parts per billion.

 

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