No secession vote for Alaska, state Supreme Court rules

‘I WANT INDEPENDENCE’: Consultant had sought to change the constitution.

adn.com | Jan 22, 2010

By MEGAN HOLLAND

The Alaska Supreme Court has rejected an Anchorage man’s effort to change the Alaska Constitution so that he could call a vote for secession from the United States.

“Alaskans’ political lives are inextricably tied to both the government of the State of Alaska and the government of the United States of America,” wrote Justice Dana Fabe in the court’s unanimous decision in Scott Kohlhaas’ case.

Kohlhaas, a 50-year-old political consultant who is also chair of the Alaska Libertarian Party, wants Alaska to be its own country.

“I want independence,” he said in an interview this week. “This is our land. These are our people. And we have the right to choose our own destiny.”

Kohlhaas tried to bring the independence question to voters in 2003 but the lieutenant governor refused to certify his ballot initiative and Kohlhaas took the case to the courts. The Supreme Court rejected his efforts, saying at the time: “When the forty-nine star flag was first raised in Juneau, we Alaskans committed ourselves to that indestructible Union, for good or ill, in perpetuity.”

Kohlhaas’ 2007 effort was slightly different. It was for a ballot initiative asking voters to change existing law and Alaska Constitution provisions to authorize secession.

The Supreme Court ruled the core of both measures remains the same — secession — and that’s still illegal.

Ballot initiatives are to propose and enact legislation. The lieutenant governor’s office can refuse to certify initiatives that are clearly illegal, Fabe said.

In issuing the unanimous decision, Fabe quoted President Abraham Lincoln, saying, “The Union of these States is perpetual.”

Fabe noted that the Alaska Constitution created a state government that is linked to the United States government, including a provision that disqualifies from public office anyone who advocates, or belongs to an organization that advocates, violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

But Kohlhaas insists Alaska would be better off independent.

“We’d be living like kings, no doubt about it,” he said. “With private ownership of the land, we could have a real economy, we could have real jobs, manufacturing. I see Anchorage like a Hong Kong — free banking, free commerce, just an incredible place to live.”

Lynette Clark, chair of the Alaskan Independence Party, was also part of the 2007 initiative. She’s a gold miner at the El Dorado Gold Mine, a tourist attraction, and lives outside Fairbanks. She said the rest of the country treats the state “like an ugly stepchild.”

She can envision an Alaska divorced from the U.S. “We would be very similar to what we are now: independent, kind, caring, giving, sometimes a bit grouchy and scratchy. A batch of folks that believe in taking care of the land.”

Vic Fischer, a former Democratic legislator and delegate to the state constitutional convention in the mid-1950s, said secession is just not allowed: “We fought for years for statehood and we are doing real well. It’s sort of silly arguing that we’d get more if we weren’t a part of the United States.”

Without the help of the federal government, Alaska “would fall flat on its face,” he said.

Kohlhaas says Alaskans may not vote in favor of independence — he is realistic about that — but he says he will continue to fight for the right.

‘Peak water’ could flush civilisation author claims

Early civilisations prospered by taming rivers, but as water gets scarce in some regions, populations rise and lifestyles remain the same, we might not be far from warring over water, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

Irish Times | Jan 23, 2010

FORGET PEAK OIL. Forget climate change. Peak water is where it’s at, according to Scottish journalist and broadcaster, Alexander Bell, who has just written a fascinating book, Peak Water (Luath Press, Scotland).

“It’s the coming issue of our age,” says Bell. “Civilisation is thirsty. It has never stopped to think about what would happen if the water ran out.” And while Bell acknowledges tackling climate change is important, he firmly states peak water would have happened with or without it.

“You could say that it’s a re-framing of the climate change [issues] and what we are doing with the planet. With climate change, we’ve become conditioned to the idea of disaster but by focusing on water, you can’t say there is nothing you can do. Water is a precious resource that is running out in various parts of the world and even if it’s not running out in Ireland or Scotland, we will lose food, clothing and stability of the world order as we know it because of water shortages.”

Writing for the non-expert reader, Bell offers a fascinating journey through civilisations, charting how important access to water was in their growth and, in many cases, their demise. He brings us back to ancient civilisations in Persia, Egypt, China and Peru, with details of canal transport, aqueducts, dams and irrigation schemes. Bell argues that when humankind began to lose its connection to the river, we got the water to follow us rather than us following it.

“The triumph of the early empires is that they tame unpredictable flows but from about 1,000 BC on, civilisation begins to take the control of water for granted and something that has been magical becomes a given. It is still the source of power and the determinant to an empire’s success but the gradual process of burying water under the complexity of the state begins,” he writes.

This process, according to Bell, was evident in Greek and Roman civilisations where the source of food moved farther from the cities, and water became more associated with cleanliness than with basic survival.

“Two thousand years ago, places to wash in Rome were as common as coffee shops today,” he writes. “And a whole body of jurisprudence existed to govern the ownership and rights to water flow.” Some of the current problems with water shortages stem from our luxurious approach to water, particularly in places where there is very little. Bell is particularly fascinated by Dubai, which “has the highest water consumption per capita in the world. It sucks up water for construction, agriculture and industry. It gulps in the name of luxury and cleanliness,” he writes.

He also cites the excessive use of water in the US, particularly in places such as Las Vegas where there is very little. “In gated communities, huge structures look out over green lawns and rolling golf courses and artificial lakes. Never mind that the water for Las Vegas is piped from miles away – this is 20th century civilisation, where water follows man – no matter the lunacy of the destination.” And while he acknowledges that the Las Vegas city council now offers incentives for planting desert grass and fines for wasting water, Bell predicts that cities such as Las Vegas will die by ecocide.

The great rivers of the world are already running dry. The Colorado doesn’t make it to the Pacific Ocean for half the year. The rivers that made China, the Yellow and the Yangtze, also fail to reach the sea for stretches of the year. It’s the same story with the Nile and the Ganges. As Bell puts it, “the iconic rivers of our imagination are drying up. The rivers are the visible, potent symbols of our deluded belief in water control. With them come wetlands, flood plains, natural irrigation and the steady, if slow, replenishment of underground water reserves.”

Bell argues that while the great empires of the east used water to establish a consistent food supply, the northern countries used it “to lubricate the growth of capital.

“In the east, water control meant simple social structures of a ruling elite and a labouring class. In the north, water helped create a more complex hierarchy, based on wealth and skill. This liberal society found water could drive the mills that kick-started major industries. This created factories and the lure of urban living and higher wages to draw people from the countryside. It could move barges full of coal and cotton. Steam powered larger engines, pumps, trains and then ships.” And while Bell acknowledges that some of our current crises are caused by global warming, he argues that unsustainable water usage is a key reason the ways of the world have to change.

LIKE BELL, MANY writers have raised the point that when population growth in places such as India and China is coupled with the desire for a more western lifestyle, this puts further pressure on natural resources including water. This is where the idea of valuing water as a precious resource links right into the same issues raised by climate change.

In fact, the idea of an individual water footprint has already been raised. A water footprint encompasses the reality that we affect water beyond our borders when countries that have a short supply of water grow and make things that have a heavy demand on water.

Bell suggests that revaluing water across the globe would take a radical shift. He explains how, because water is growing scarce in traditional wheat-, rice- and maize-growing areas of the US, India and Pakistan, it should be possible that the wet north could replace production, in part.

He also suggests that the north European (and now North American) model of industrialised, liberal, capitalist society may be best suited to wet countries. Secondly, he suggests we are quite used to making naturally occurring materials such as coal or oil into assets, so why not water? There is already a price on water in some places but putting a price on water that changes people’s usage habits (both personal and agricultural) is a broader issue.

Bell says: “We should be the ones who build new houses with composting toilets and reed beds to clean the waste water. We should instigate rainwater collection on a large scale . . . We should ensure that more food is grown for local consumption. The wet world should grow vital food for the dry world.”

BELL ALSO BRINGS up the widely held belief that the next wars to be fought in the world will be over water. In fact, he states that such wars have already occurred in some places – for example, between Pakistan and India. And the investment bank Goldman Sacks has dubbed water the petroleum for the next century.

“With the Cold War over and the threat from mass nuclear deployment apparently gone, we have switched our fears to a water war,” he writes.

According to Bell, what both threats show is that we fear our capacity to self-destruct (many would argue that much of the rhetoric around climate change comes from the same place).

He adds: “the reality of changing our water use is colossal. It calls for a new kind of civilisation built on global co-operation. The penalty for not doing this will be widespread social chaos.”

UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers

Claims of melting Himalayan glaciers have been cited in grant applications (AP Photo/Channi Anand)

London Times | Jan 24, 2010

by Jonathan Leake

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie’s website said: “The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

“One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region “will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages,”

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into “the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region” as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic Foundation which then channelled it, with Carnegie’s involvement, to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt.

It said: “”According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades.”

The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

He now heads Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, in order to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Pachauri and the IPCC.

The second grant, from the EU, totalled £2.5m and was designed to “to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers retreat”.

It was part of the EU’s HighNoon project, launched last May to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers.

In one presentation at last May’s launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission’s Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers’ money into the project.

Pachauri spoke at the same presentation and Hasnain is understood to have been present in the audience.

The EU grant was split between leading European research institutions including Britain’s Met Office, with TERI getting a major but unspecified share because it represented the host country.

The “Glaciergate” affair has seen Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a press conference yesterday (Saturday) where he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.

He said: “I have no intention of resigning from my position,” adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.

However, other questions remain. One of the most important is in connection with Pachauri’s earnings.

In an interview with The Sunday Times he said his only income came from his salary at TERI. However TERI does not publish his salary and he refused to divulge it.

In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri’s links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.

Critics say it is odd for a man committed to decarbonising energy supplies to be linked to an oil company.

The problems come at a bad time for the IPCC which is recruiting scientists for its fifth report into the science and impacts underlying global warming.

Yesterday, Pachauri said he intended to remain as director of the IPCC to oversee the fifth IPCC assessment report dealing with sea level rise and ice sheets, oceans, clouds and carbon accounting. The report is expected by 2014.

UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report

London Times | Jan 23, 2010

by Jeremy Page

Rajenda Pachauri (Bob Strong/Reuters)

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani , an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report , who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

The “co-ordinating lead authors” were Rex Victor Cruz of the Philippines, Hideo Harasawa of Japan, Murari Lal of India and Wu Shaohong of China.

But Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction, said that responsibility had to lie with them. “It is the lead authors — blame goes to them,” he told The Times. “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report.”

He and other leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Professor Hasnain, who was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, said that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Dr Pachauri.

He said he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999, although he blamed the journalist for assigning the actual date.

He said that he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Dr Pachauri also said he did not learn about the mistakes until they were reported in the media about 10 days ago, at which time he contacted other IPCC members. He denied keeping quiet about the errors to avoid disrupting the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or discouraging funding for TERI’s own glacier programme.

But he too admitted that it was “really odd” that none of the world’s leading glaciologists had pointed out the mistakes to him earlier. “Frankly, it was a stupid error,” he said. “But no one brought it to my attention.”

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

London Times | Jan 24, 2010

by Jonathan Leake

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

Related

Pachauri won’t quit over glacier meltdown blunder

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm”.

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said: “We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific.”

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Climate Science Panel Apologizes for Himalayan Glacier Melt ‘Error’

NY Times | Jan 21, 2010

By LAUREN MORELLO

Leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change apologized yesterday for making a “poorly substantiated” claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The finding was included in the group’s 2007 report in an error-riddled paragraph that also misstates the total land area covered by Himalayan glaciers. Scientists who identified the mistakes say the IPCC report relied on news accounts that appear to misquote a scientific paper that estimated the glaciers could disappear by 2350, not 2035.

Experts said the gaffes that came to light in recent weeks don’t undermine the IPCC report’s main conclusion — that evidence for global warming is “unequivocal,” and human activities are driving the climate shift. But some said the incident indicates broader problems with the IPCC process and could provide fodder for climate skeptics.

Jeffrey Kargel, an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona who helped expose the IPCC’s errors, said the botched projections were “extremely embarrassing and damaging.”

“The damage was that IPCC had, or I think still has, such a stellar reputation that people view it as an authority — as indeed they should — and so they see a bullet that says Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and they take that as a fact,” he said.

Kargel is one of four scientists who addressed the issue in a letter that will be published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science. “These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected,” write the researchers.

One of the letter signers, University of Trent geography professor Graham Cogley, said his rough calculations show that Himalayan glaciers would have to melt 10 times faster than they are now in order to disappear by 2035. “It’s a date that doesn’t stand up to casual scrutiny,” he said.

Now, there’s a danger that the uproar over the IPCC’s erroneous paragraph could overshadow the scientific group’s broader conclusions about the effects of climate change, said Ben Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A ‘breakdown’ in the peer-review process

“Focusing on a mouse and ignoring the elephant would be a mistake,” he told reporters yesterday, especially since independent assessments by the National Academy of Sciences, the federal government and other sources echo the IPCC’s overall findings.

Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, agreed.

“Some errors can always get through the cracks,” he said. “These issues are very specific, and they do not detract from the overall findings of the IPCC. There’s a tremendous amount of data and evidence out there that points to human impact on our climate system.”

But other experts who follow climate science and policy said they believe the IPCC should re-examine how it vets information when compiling its reports.

Rick Piltz, director of the watchdog organization Climate Science Watch, noted that two separate groups within the IPCC produced very different findings about Himalayan glaciers in their contribution to the science panel’s Fourth Assessment Report.

The errors cropped up in a report by IPCC Working Group II, which “assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change and options for adapting to it.” But Working Group I, which examines the state of climate science, did not make similar claims.

“The IPCC are all overloaded and this one just got by them,” Piltz said. “The people from Working Group I with the real expertise did not look carefully at the Asia chapter of Working Group II. There’s a cross-working group vetting problem that needs to be handled better in the future.”

Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said scientists make mistakes all the time “and it isn’t a big deal.”

But Pielke also said he was concerned that, in this case, “a non-peer reviewed source [was] elevated to a finding by the IPCC,” especially given Austrian glaciologist — and IPCC Working Group I author — Georg Kaser’s recent assertion that he warned Working Group II of the error in 2006, and was ignored. That suggests “a breakdown in the peer-review process,” Pielke said.

Pielke said his concern is heightened because he believes Working Group II also misrepresented his research about the link between climate change and monetary damages of natural disasters, highlighting a white paper produced for a conference he organized — when ultimately, attendees at the conference “came up with a contrary conclusion to what the background paper said.”

The current controversy comes as the IPCC begins work on its next major report, which is due in 2013.

“I think that ultimately, a better Fifth Assessment will emerge from this, and that will be the lasting legacy of it,” Kargel said. “But it’s really painful to see what’s going on right now.”