Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: “The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.”

This creates an exquisite philosophical dilemma:  can the planet be warming if it isn’t warming?  I’m sure the Goracle will be able to enlighten us.

Of course, the computer models tell us that warming will eventually restart.  But didn’t those same models tells us that we would be warming now?  Hmm …

Moral authorities of varied stripes have weighed in. In 2006, London’s Anglican Bishop John Chartres said flying abroad to vacation is a “symptom of sin” because it ignores “an overriding imperative to walk more lightly upon the earth.” Environmentalists have also framed flying as a moral issue since it allegedly causes harm in pursuit of unnecessary ends. “You can be an environmental saint – drive a hybrid car, recycle, conserve your water – and if you take one air flight, it actually blows your carbon budget right out of the water,” says Elle Morrell, director of a green-lifestyle program at the Australian Conservation Foundation. One round-trip flight from Sydney to New York City, she says, generates as much in carbon-dioxide emissions per passenger as an average Australian would generate in an entire flightless year.

Of course, this ignores the value of travel.  Even some environmentalists recognize that tourism sustains the environment in some countries. 

Airlines aren’t alone in making an ethics-based case for flying. Another defender is Martha Honey, executive director of The Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. She notes that nature preserves in many developing countries can sustain their missions only with support from foreign visitors who fly there.

“Of everything involved in tourism, airplane travel is doing the most damage in terms of climate change. That’s absolutely true,” Honey says. “But the movement in Europe saying, ‘Stay home; don’t get on a plane’ is disastrous for poor countries … whose most important source of income is from nature-based tourism. It’s also disastrous for us as a human race to not travel and see the world. The question is, ‘How do you do it, and do it smartly?’ “

It might be worth serious effort to reduce CO2 emissions.  But to stop doing what makes life worth living would rather miss the most basic point of life.

Of course, as Doug Bandow noted earlier today, eating animals can also save endangered species by giving people an incentive to harvest them rather than destroying their habitat or exterminating them.  People owning animals helps ensure their survival, too: that’s part of why there are a heck of a lot more chickens than passenger pigeons (a now extinct species which were once as numerous in America as chickens are today), and far more cattle than buffalo.

Eating locally, touted as good for the environment, often isn’t: one study found it was better for the environment for English people to eat lamb that was imported from New Zealand rather than raised in England.  And culinary prejudices often keep people from eating local foods that truly do tax the environment less, like cicadas, which are very tasty when microwaved for just a short time, but which few people eat despite the fact that they can easily be collected in large quantities when they periodically emerge from the earth.  (In the Washington, D.C. suburbs, they come out in huge numbers once every 17 years).

Capita, the company that set up the system and operated it for the Mayor, was said to have been given a £250 million contract over five years, but the Mayor refused to reveal the details. Then it emerged an extra £31 million was paid to Capita in the first year, raising concerns that costs would reduce revenues promised by the Mayor. Last year Capita was paid £130 million, more than 60 per cent of the money taken in by the charge over the year.

What about congestion? TFL’s own spin figures suggests that congestion is down by a paltry 16 percent overall. However, as The Bow Group has shown, most of this relates to a drop-off in people entering London after 11am. There has been precious little effect on congestion in the rush hour. And journey times - where the real economic benefit of reduced congestion should appear - have not been affected.

Once again, an environmental tax, disguised as a market mechanism, has failed to achieve its own objectives, while making some people rich at the expense of commuters. Diffuse costs, concentrated benefits, indeed.

Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.

He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.

Yet this example of pester power at work would also help explain one phenomenon that is infuriating to the environmental movement. Consistently, Americans have said they are concerned about global warming, but when asked to rank it among urgent issues that action must be taken on, they rank it next to or right at the bottom. For instance, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll in January found it ranked right at the bottom, tied with “making the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Even a minority of Democrat supporters called it a “top priority.” I suspect this is compatible with an agenda in the household set by people who don’t have to make the hard decisions.

What will be interesting is how this translates as these children leave school and start having to square living a “sustainable” life with working for a living and having to satisfy other needs. Perhaps they will put a higher value on the environment than their parents (and if prosperity continues to increase, I think this is going to happen in any event), but if times get hard as a direct result of environmental policy, then the choices made will be very interesting.

Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.

A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” 

In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing.  Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”

By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment.  Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit.  But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.

Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA).  Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds.  And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies.  So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one.  That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Earth Day was Tuesday, and NBC Universal has extended the celebration into “Earth Week.” Reprising its “Green Week” from last fall, NBC and its affiliates worked some sort of environmental message into all of its programming this week.

Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

This is all also part of of GE’s must discussed “ecomagination” campaign, which so far seems mostly to have produced ever more imaginative ways of getting U.S. taxpayers to pay GE to manufacture technologies consumers don’t want.