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. James Taranto of the WSJ has an interesting take on BBC report
Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto has an interesting take on the latest predictions by a team of scientists who had predicted that summer Arctic ice would disappear by 2013. Under the heading "Warm Salami," Taranto writes:
"New Warning on Arctic Sea Ice Melt" reads a headline on the BBC website. Ho hum, another global-warming alarm, right? But it turns out it’s even less alarming than you think. The "new warning" is the same as the old warning, only less urgent:
Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.
The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model–compiled partly in response to those criticisms–that produces a "best guess" date of 2016.
Well, our best guess is that in 2015 they’ll have a new best guess of 2020; in 2019 it’ll be 2024, etc. This is what’s known, in another discipline, as "salami economics," in which economists make repeated minor revisions to their estimates and hope you won’t notice that when added up they are a major revision.
Or let’s try this another way. Our best guess is that Wieslaw Maslowski will die before the end of the year. If he’s still alive in December, we’ll modify that and guess he’ll die in 2012. We can keep changing our guess every year. The difference between our guesses and his is that one of ours is bound to be right sooner or later.
2. Wetlands mitigation projects in North Carolina show dramatic improvement in meeting regulatory requirements
According to this story in the Wilmington Morning Star, a new study funded by the EPA concludes that North Carolina developers have made significant improvements in meeting regulatory requirements on wetland mitigation. As the Star points out:
North Carolina has complex regulations that require construction projects to offset any damage they may do to streams or wetlands by either creating new wetlands or improving streams and wetlands, either on-site or off-site.
According to the study,
75 percent of the wetland and stream mitigation projects were successful in meeting their regulatory requirements. And, according to the Division of Water Quality, this is a great improvement over two studies done in 1995. One showed a 20 percent success rate for wetlands and another showed a 42 percent success rate.
3. A blast from the past: 50 million climate refugees by 2010
The year, 2005. The publication, the (UK) Guardian. The headline, "50m climate refugees by the end of the decade." The lead paragraph:
Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warn today. Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10 million people a year, and the situation would get worse.
Click here for the Environmental Update archive.
