The title may have led you to believe that the temperature is rising worse than expected, but the comment is about the data itself. The various sets of temperature data that we have to do climate modeling are not very good, especially as you go back in time. This shouldn’t be surprising, when we’re trying to detect changes in temperature on the order of a few tenths of a degree C per decade, and the state of sensors and data collection networks prior to the PC and Internet eras.

One of the common arguments for a cap and trade system for GHG is that it establishes a price for carbon which will drive changes in investment and behavior. However, the current draft of the proposed Waxman-Markey bill (W-M) has introduced a wide range of allowances, offsets, and other mechanisms which may alter the actual price of carbon on a case-by-case basis. So even though there may be a market price for allowances that are traded among large emitters, that price will usually have nothing to do with the price for carbon that is actually paid by an energy consumer.

A useful discussion of offsets in Good Magazine.

In my role of Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun, I take part in an annual discussion of whether the company should purchase carbon offsets as part of our GHG reduction plan. Since we can buy carbon offsets at a price which is lower than what it costs us to reduce our GHG directly, we have four different approaches available to us: use offsets to report a greater emissions reduction at the same price as if we only did internal projects use offsets to report the same emissions as internal projects, but at a lower price ignore offsets and just do internal projects some mix of offsets and internal projects So far, each year we have elected to only invest in internal projects.

Here’s some links to key documents related to the proposed Waxman-Markey GHG reduction bill: Text of the draft bill EPA analysis of cost impact Appendix to EPA analysis

The Green Grid has cool new tools and maps for datacenter efficiency: Fresh air cooling map of North America (shown above) Water side cooling map of North America Free cooling calculation tool The image above is a snapshot of the fresh air cooling map All of them are here. Green Grid members have access to the higher res versions. Great job, Green Grid!

Roger Pielke, Jr on Why Cap and Trade Will Become Law….

Andrew Revkin’s Friday Times Dot Earth piece, Study: Cool Spells Normal in Warming World talks about how climate change is communicated and understood. He starts by noting an upcoming academic publication that reinforces the point that an upward temperature trend may still have decade or two long periods without warming or even moderate cooling. This, of course, is important for both sides of the argument: we need to be careful reading too much into short term trends (of course that argument applies in both directions, which could have deserved some mention).

Two pretty amazing votes in the Senate yesterday which will have a major impact on any future cap and trade proposal. The first was an 89-8 vote on an amendment on the Budget Resolution introduced by Senator John Thune (R-SD) that states that any climate change legislation cannot increase gasoline or electricity prices. Pretty much cuts out the heart of any proposed cap and trade system. Roger Pielke Jr. provides more insight here.

On 3/18 the WSJ reported that Energy Secretary Steven Chu “advocated adjusting trade duties as a ‘weapon’ to protect U.S. manufacturing”. Basically, the threat is that we’ll increase tariffs to protect energy-intensive industries where they compete with products coming from countries that don’t apply a tax on CO2. What interests me in this article and many others lately is that somehow a carbon tax (or cap and trade, there’s little difference for most people in the economy other than how the price is set) is somehow different than just another tax.