Reading this WSJ article today is making me crazy...
First, I don't subscribe. I can't share the whole article, either, as a link to it was sent to me and is only good for so long. This was sent to me by a politico (young Republican) friend of mine who I often shake my head over, but remain friendly with... The local young Republicans don't like the old ones, but still have their heads in the clouds over "drill baby drill". When reading the anti-climate change related paragraph, I just couldn't believe people still write this stuff. And the writer's rant is over the aftermath of the train crash in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec...
"Like water, business has a way of tracing a course of least resistance. Pipelines are a hyper-regulated industry but rail transport isn't, so that's how we now move oil. As the Wall Street Journal's Tom Fowler reported in March, in 2008 the U.S. rail system moved 9,500 carloads of oil. In 2012, the figure surged to 233,811. During the same period, the total number of spills went from eight to 69. In March, a derailed train spilled 714 barrels of oil in western Minnesota.
Predictable, you would think. And ameliorable: Pipelines account for about half as much spillage as railways on a gallon-per-mile basis. Pipelines also tend not to go straight through exposed population centers like Lac-Mégantic. Nobody suggests that pipelines are perfectly reliable or safe, but what is? To think is to weigh alternatives. The habit of too many environmentalists is to evade them."
Here's where I thought...
My goodness, maybe the response is to ask why, over the course of time where the number of well pads and horizontal drilling was surging, maybe we should ask why was there so much production without any plan as to how to realistically transport it across state lines? To just say, "pipelines are a hyper-regulated industry" and acknowledge the slowness in winning over Obama and XL pipeline, but point to the culprit as rail transport is pretty lame. After the surge of oil (which could not be handled safely by pipeline, so why would rail have made sense?), the real question is, "Is this form of fossil fuel drilling worth transport to other nations?". My answer is that the WSJ is right wing, sure, but I'm also looking for facts in the author's next paragraph...
"Perhaps this is also the reason climate science is so prone to scientific embarrassment. In 2001, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that "global average surface temperatures [will rise] at rates very likely without precedent during the last 10,000 years," and that they would rise sharply and continuously."
Huh?
It would appear that the U.N.'s "Intergovernmental Panel" is being used as a scientific reference here. Anyone know of real data to back up that last paragraph?
= new reply since forum marked as read
…would be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) http://www.ipcc.ch/
In 2001, they released their Third Assessment Report (or TAR.)
In 2007, they released their Fourth Assessment Report (or AR4)
They are currently working on the Fifth Assessment Report (or AR5.)
The Third Assessment Report Summary for Policy Makers includes:
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/IPCC_tar//vol4/english/015.htm#figspm10b
Figure SPM-10b: Variations of the Earth's surface temperature: years 1000 to 2100. From year 1000 to year 1860 variations in average surface temperature of the Northern Hemisphere are shown (corresponding data from the Southern Hemisphere not available) reconstructed from proxy data (tree rings, corals, ice cores, and historical records). The line shows the 50-year average, the grey region the 95% confidence limit in the annual data. From years 1860 to 2000 are shown variations in observations of globally and annually averaged surface temperature from the instrumental record; the line shows the decadal average. From years 2000 to 2100 projections of globally averaged surface temperature are shown for the six illustrative SRES scenarios and IS92a using a model with average climate sensitivity. The grey region marked "several models all SRES envelope" shows the range of results from the full range of 35 SRES scenarios in addition to those from a range of models with different climate sensitivities. The temperature scale is departure from the 1990 value; the scale is different from that used in Figure SPM-2.
It also includes:
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/IPCC_tar//vol4/english/015.htm#figspm10b
Also, the WSJ article isn't following the point being shown in the data.
At any rate, thank you! 
Last edited Fri Jul 12, 2013, 11:04 AM - Edit history (1)
[font size=5]Stephens: Can Environmentalists Think?[/font]
[font size=4]Think of the Keystone XL pipeline as an IQ test for greens.[/font]
By BRET STEPHENS
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Predictable, you would think. And ameliorable: Pipelines account for about half as much spillage as railways on a gallon-per-mile basis. Pipelines also tend not to go straight through exposed population centers like Lac-Mégantic. Nobody suggests that pipelines are perfectly reliable or safe, but what is? To think is to weigh alternatives. The habit of too many environmentalists is to evade them.
Perhaps this explains why the environmental movement has excelled ideologically and failed politically. As in fashion, green is a nice color that rarely wears well. So the whole world (minus your correspondent) agrees that climate change is an urgent threat to life as we know it, yet every U.N. megasummit to save the planet ends on a whimpering note. So all Americans are convinced that the threat of climate change is real, but President Obama had to use executive fiat to impose regulations on the coal industry that Congress would have rejected out of hand.
Perhaps this is also the reason climate science is so prone to scientific embarrassment. In 2001, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that "global average surface temperatures [will rise] at rates very likely without precedent during the last 10,000 years," and that they would rise sharply and continuously.
Yet in the 15 years since 1998, surface air temperatures have held flat, a fact now grudgingly conceded by the climate-science establishment, despite more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide having been pumped into the atmosphere over the same period. "Nature is far more imaginative than we are," Stamatios Krimigis, the eminent Johns Hopkins physicist, said last month when readings from the Voyager spacecraft failed to match expectations for what it would find at the far edge of the solar system. That kind of humility in the face of data is tough for today's environmentalists, who have staked so much on their own models, predictions and certitudes.
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Sigh… I knew the Wall Street Journal had been bought by Murdoch. I didn’t realize it had become FOX News.
Notice the figure 15 years. Why 15? Why not 10? Why not 20? Why not “since 2001” (when the TAR was released?) Because 15 years takes us back to 1998, an especially warm year. However, he’s wrong. Temperatures have not held flat since then.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/719139main_2012_GISTEMP_summary.pdf
[font size=5]Global Temperature Update Through 2012[/font]
15 January 2013
J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy
[font size=3]Summary. Global surface temperature in 2012 was +0.56°C (1°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period average, despite much of the year being affected by a strong La Nina. Global temperature thus continues at a high level that is sufficient to cause a substantial increase in the frequency of extreme warm anomalies. The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.
An update through 2012 of our global analysis[font size=1]1[/font] (Fig. 1) reveals 2012 as having practically the same temperature as 2011, significantly lower than the maximum reached in 2010. These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure. 2012 is nominally the 9th warmest year, but it is indistinguishable in rank with several other years, as shown by the error estimate for comparing nearby years. Note that the 10 warmest years in the record all occurred since 1998.
The long-term warming trend, including continual warming since the mid-1970s, has been conclusively associated with the predominant global climate forcing, human-made greenhouse gases[font size=1]2[/font], which began to grow substantially early in the 20th century. The approximate stand-still of global temperature during 1940-1975 is generally attributed to an approximate balance of aerosol cooling and greenhouse gas warming during a period of rapid growth of fossil fuel use with little control on particulate air pollution, but satisfactory quantitative interpretation has been impossible because of the absence of adequate aerosol measurements[font size=1]3,4[/font].
Below we discuss the contributions to temperature change in the past decade from stochastic (unforced) climate variability and from climate forcings.
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