It was cold last week, wasn’t it? And it’s gonna be a cold winter.

How do we know?

Well, we don’t know, in the sense of being certain beyond a scintilla of doubt. But we do have some pretty good info telling us it might be a good idea to make sure we have enough long-johns and sweaters for the coming months.

And no, this info does not come from the Farmers Almanac, which claims to be “known for its traditionally 80 percent accurate forecasts,” but does not reveal by whom it is so known.

Kind of fun, the Farmer’s Almanac, but even if it no longer uses the “pig spleen method” or the “ol’ goose bone method” of weather forecasting, its reliance on “a secret formula that was devised by (founder) Robert B. Thomas” in 1872 does not inspire confidence in its results, especially when its proprietors sum up their approach by proclaiming that they “believe that nothing in the universe happens haphazardly.”

Oh, sure it does.

Instead of secret formulas, this projection that a cold winter lies ahead comes from scientists both public and private, who project colder than usual weather for the entire Northeast, and who, being scientists, acknowledge a certain margin of error in their projections.

As AccuWeather.com’s Chief Meteorologist and Expert Long Range Forecaster (yes, all those capital letters are AccuWeather’s idea) Joe Bastardi, put it, this winter’s likely “fading El Niño results in the stormiest and coldest pattern in recent years.”

But don’t panic. First of all, the National Weather Service agrees about the cold, but not the storms. And even Bastardi thinks that most of those storms will be south of Boston, and therefore safely south of Vermont. Boston and northward, he said, should see “normal snowfall with temperatures slightly below normal this winter.”

That possible “fading El Nino” will make it colder because the stronger and longer-lasting the El Nino (“A change in the surface water temperature in the Pacific Ocean that produces a warm current”), the warmer it is all over the United States, even this far from the Pacific.

This far, though, the meteorological impact will be small, hence the projection of temperatures “slightly below normal.” No one is predicting a deep freeze.

The economic and political impacts are harder to predict. If winter precipitation is normal, the snow-plowing budgets should follow suit. On the other hand, colder weather is likely to prompt Vermonters to spend more money and/or split more logs to heat their homes. (Of course, the more logs one splits, the less fuel one needs, the act of splitting itself providing ample warmth).

The political prediction should be more qualified than the long-range weather forecast, but a cold winter is likely to energize the global warming denier crowd, even though a cold winter provides exactly zero evidence to refute the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the earth.

Alas, evidence or lack thereof seems no hindrance to the climate change deniers, who are inspired by impulses from within, not data from without. Consider the blogger calling himself “NORTHERNVT” who complained in Sunday’s Burlington Free Press that “global warming is a load of crappp,” his “evidence’ being that it was chilly out. This is not an argument based on evidence; it is a blurt based on resentment, specifically, in this case, of Al Gore and his movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Not that Gore et al don’t sometimes overstate their case. In the movie (reportedly; the News Guy did not see it) Gore makes much of the melting of the “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” famous because Ernest Hemingway made those words the title of one of his brilliant short stories.

The snow and ice on the mountain are melting, but not, according to some scientists, because of global warming. Significantly, though, these very scientists think the ice atop many other African mountains is melting because of global warming.

Aside from the occasional bleat, global warming denial has been an insignificant force in Vermont, where no major elected official seems to deny the overwhelming evidence of anthropogenic (the fancy term for “human-caused”) warming. The only deniers hereabouts are a commentator or two whom few take seriously to begin with.

But a bit of a counter-attack — on the face of it a most ineffectual counter-attack — is coming nationally, so if this winter is colder than usual, one might expect a little more noise from the local deniers.

The counter-attack comes in an about-to-be-published book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, a sequel to their much praised best-seller, Freakonomics. The sequel is Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Purchase Life Insurance (Harperluxe), which is a funny title, but the book seems to say (according to several discussions on line) that the earth has actually been getting cooler “over the past several years.”

Uhhh, no. The last two months were the second hottest August and Septembers on record. This year is likely to be the fifth hottest year on record, meaning that all ten hottest years will have occurred in the past 15 years.

There are more than enough other outrageous errors in the climate change chapter to prevent any reasonable person from taking it seriously.

Which is not to say that reasonable people shouldn’t keep an open mind. Like all other scientific conclusions, the anthropogenic global warming consensus is tentative. The first time a dissenter puts his or her doubts into scientific form, submits the product to the climatologists (peer review), and the climatologists can’t immediately dismiss it, then the rest of us will have to go back to square one.

So far, no such paper has been submitted.

photo by Bidgee

On this wet and chilly Tuesday, the News Guy was tracking down several interesting stories but catching up with none.

Happens sometimes in the news biz, especially in the summer, when some of the folks who help the tracking process are on vacation.

Never fear, though. The News Guy is a saver of string, enabling him to achieve the goal of occasionally providing readers with information about stuff going on around the world that Vermont’s conventional news outfits tend to ignore though they might one day have some impact on – or at least relevance to – the state and its citizens.

Speaking of wet and chilly, whatever happened to Global Warming? This summer’s weather seems enough to make a person doubt the scientific consensus. But beware of confusing subjective impressions with reality.

John Hinderaker, the Global Warming-denying, Minneapolis-based proprietor of the conservative web site Power Line seems to have insufficiently bewared. The other day he said that, “2009 may go down in history, in some parts of the U.S. at least, as another year with barely any summer. Here in Minnesota and across the Midwest, temperatures are abnormally cold.”

Except that they aren’t. As liberal blogger Nate Silver (with perhaps a touch more glee than needed?) pointed out in his site, 538.com, Minneapolis temperatures this summer have been exactly average.

And in Vermont? Well, the evenings have been cooler than usual, but daytime high temperatures have been in the 70s and low 80s, just as a majority of them have been for decades.

Besides, at least around here, global warming doesn’t mean hotter summers as much as it means warmer winters. According to a 2008 study by the meteorology department at Lyndon State College Institute of Applied Meteorology, “The temperature in both summer and winter is shown to be increasing… This implies a general warming of Vermont throughout the year… winter temperatures are increasing faster than summer temperatures.”

Looking for a villain to blame for the slow pace of recovery from the recession? Maybe Vermont is to blame.

Not Vermont alone. Vermont and almost every other state, which cut their budgets and increased taxes. Just as the federal government was taxing less and spending more to stimulate the economy, Vermont and the other states did the opposite, diminishing the impact of the federal stimulus.

Vermont is of course a minor offender here; its combined tax increases and spending cuts amount to a few tens of millions. California just cut its budget by $26 billion. Not that any of the states had too much choice. With one exception, their constitutions require balanced budgets.

The one exception? Vermont. But for all practical (and political) purposes, it has to balance its budget, too. (Actually, they all cheat, but that’s a subject for another day).

Maybe the problem is that there are states to begin with. Such is the suggestion of James Surowiecki in this week’s New Yorker Magazine.

“Federalism, often described as one of the great strengths of the American system, has become a serious impediment to reversing the downturn,” Surowiecki wrote.

He has a point. With 50 (sort of) sovereign states, each controlling its own budget, there’s little to prevent them from raising taxes and cutting spending, “amplifying the effects of the downturn, instead of mitigating them.” As Surowiecki said.

He did not suggest that states be abolished. Every once in a while, though, somebody makes that suggestion, and from the purely rational perspective, the suggestion makes sense. It would be much more logical and efficient, for instance, if New York City, northern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut were part of one administrative division – perhaps a “department,” a la France – than for the city to have to depend on appropriations approved by lawmakers from Plattsburgh and Horseheads, as it now does.

But the purely rational, taken to its logical conclusion, becomes…irrational. Vermonters, it seems safe to say, would rather live in Vermont than in some subdivision drawn by experts without regard for the state’s history and culture. Tennesseeans and Montanans no doubt feel the same way about where they live. The states, for better and for worse, will survive.

On the other hand, it’s not likely that any state on its own (or even in cooperation with its neighbors) will ever give serious attention to this interesting idea from author Christopher Steiner, based on the research of economist Charles Courtemanche, which might help make America cleaner, safer, and healthier.

In a book called $20 a gallon, Steiner says that raising the price of gasoline would make Americans so much healthier that it would be worth paying the price.

No, not $20 a gallon, but maybe about six bucks. In an article in Forbes magazine, Steiner said Courtemanche, a professor at the University of North Carolina, “has produced a study suggesting that permanent hikes in gas prices may slash obesity rates. The amount is hardly nominal: A sustained $1 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline equals a 10% dip in the nation’s obesity rate–that’s about 9 million fewer obese people clogging up health care systems and costing society (and themselves) money. ‘The price of gas is a powerful lever when it comes to medical expenses and mortality rates,’ Courtemanche says. ‘There’s a savings in this for all of us.’”

The secret, according to Courtemanche, is that as gasoline prices rise, people will drive less, walk and bike more. They also won’t eat as many meals in restaurants, meaning they’ll eat less expensively and…well, just less. Considering that almost a third of the adult population is now overweight –which costs society some $117 billion a year in both public and private expenses — less would probably be enough.

To be sure, Vermont, which has little in the way of public transportation and lots of small towns sprinkled throughout the countryside, would be unlikely to welcome this proposal. Welcome or not, though, something like $5-a-gallon gas might be the way it is in the not too distant future. Maybe it’s time to start pondering the possibility.

And finally, the reader who calls himself BP asked a perfectly reasonable question based on the assertion here last Friday (scroll down to read it all again) that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz took something of a political risk by boasting of her fund-raising successes on the liberal web site Daily Kos. “The blogosphere’s vibes have their negative connotations,” was how that paragraph ended.

“Maybe you could expand on this?” said BP (perhaps too politely; “What on earth do you mean?” might have been more appropriate). “Is a Vermont Democrat vulnerable for posting something on Daily Kos?”

To expand, which is certainly in order, a Vermont Democrat might be giving his/her opponent some ammunition if he/she is seen as the favorite of the Daily Kos set. Somewhat inaccurately, the site is often thought of as very far left. It isn’t. Its publisher/founder, Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga, is a fierce partisan more than an ideologue. It was probably his fierce opposition to the Iraq war that led some (mostly Republicans) to label the site as extremist.

But Moulitsas also has a policy (similar to the one at this site) of not censoring the comments of his readers, some of whom do hold views outside the mainstream. So with just a little deficiency of intellectual honesty (not uncommon in politics) an opponent can try to paint the Kos-linked candidate as an extremist.

Granted, that’s a harder sell in Vermont than in, say, Alabama. But even here, it isn’t all that hard to get middle-of-the-road voters (and there are many) to wonder whether a candidate might have funny friends.

That’s the chance you take.

If you live in Vermont you should be forgiven if you are unaware that the United States Government just released a major report about how the world is getting warmer, will continue to do so, and in the process leave our descendents a hotter, wetter, and very different part of the country.

Such absolution is called for because the state’s news media paid scant attention. Not that they ignored the report completely. The Montpelier Times Argus did run the Associated Press story out of Washington when the report was issued last week.

And Vermont Public Radio aired a good story by reporter John Dillon about the report’s projection that higher temperatures could endanger two of the state’s iconic industries – skiing and sugaring

The VPR story quoted one of the lead authors of the report, Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, saying that according to some forecasts, “maple trees are expected to decline rapidly in the Northeast, perhaps spelling the end of maple sugaring all together in this part of the U.S.”

But that was about it.

Let’s not be too hard on our journalistic colleagues. One could argue that the report was not “Big News,” as conventionally defined; it didn’t tell folks what they didn’t already know. Aside from the few who, for whatever reason, refuse to accept the overwhelming weight of the evidence, people know that fossil fuel emissions are making the world warmer. Furthermore, the report was not based on original research.

But the “authoritative scientific report “(in its own words) – 196 pages supported by 563 footnotes – did  aggregate an extraordinary amount of existing research as reviewed by scientists from 13 government agencies.

For at least three other reasons, the report deserved more attention. There was the political reason. As the AP story noted, the report contained “the most urgent language on climate change ever to come out of any White House,” a polite way of noting that the Bush Administration, even after it abandoned its climate change denial shtick, tried to act as if it were a minor annoyance rather than a cosmic crisis.

(And, as we learned Thursday, shamelessly hid evidence that water contaminated with coal ash posed a serious health threat to thousands of people).

The second reason is that, unlike some “studies” from both government agencies and private advocacy groups, this one backs up it claims. All those footnotes are not just there for show. So when the report says “the climate of the Northeastern U.S.” has already begun changing in noticeable ways,” it gives readers the source of that statement (in this case, an article called Past and future changes in climate and hydrological indicators in the U.S. Northeast, by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech university and nine other scientists in the journal. Climate Dynamics, Journal Number 28(4), pages 381-407).

The third reason  is the report’s regional specificity. Though it is  about”global climate change,” it is explicitly about its “impacts in the United States,” and it explained in some detail what those impacts would be in different regions, including this one. It all but laid out a road map so editors and news directors could find the “local angle” they so love.

Since they missed the ball, we’ll kick it around here.

Since 1970, the report said, the annual average temperature in the Northeast has increased by 2°F, with winter temperatures rising twice this much.”  For those seeking a silver lining in the cloud, there is one: longer growing seasons.

But also more “heavy downpours,” dirtier air leading to “increasing problems for human health,” and “severe flooding.”

Oh, and less snow. Perhaps a lot less snow.

Over the next several decades, those winter temperatures could rise at least another 2.5 degrees, perhaps as much as 4 degrees.

“The projected reduction in snow cover will adversely affect winter recreation and the industries that rely upon it,” the report says. “The length of the winter snow season would be cut in half across northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine…Winter snow and ice sports, which contribute $7.6 billion annually to the region’s economy, will be particularly affected by warming.”

In the woods, the report noted, the spruce and fur forests so important to northern New England are “declining already,” and are likely to continue doing so, replaced by maple and beach trees under the “lower possibility” of climate change, by oak and hickory under the “higher possibility.”

In addition, “large portions of the Northeast are likely to become unsuitable for growing popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries under a higheremissions scenario.”  As for maple trees and their prized sap, conditions suitable for maple forests “are expected to shift dramatically northward…eventually leaving only a small portion of the Northeast with a major maple sugar business.”

And if the grandchildren of today’s sugarers have to look for alternative sources of income, they’d be wise not to count on producing milk or running ski lodges. “By late this century,” the report says, “all but the northern parts of Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont are projected to suffer declines in July milk production under the higher emissions scenario, (and) warmer winters will shorten the average ski and snowboard seasons, increase artificial snowmaking

requirements, and drive up operating costs.

“While snowmaking can enhance the prospects for ski resort success, it requires a great deal of water and energy, as well as very cold nights, which are becoming less frequent. Without the opportunity to benefit from snowmaking, the prospects for the snowmobiling industry are even worse. Most of the region is likely to have a marginal or non-existent snowmobile season by mid-century.”

OK, now here’s the good news. The report does not present a “worst case” scenario, but it is based on the present case, and it does not assume that new steps will be taken to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Congress is now considering such steps, and while no one can be certain that it will pass any bill, much less an effective bill, the bleak future projected in the report might never come to be.

“It’s not too late to act,” said Jane Lubchenco,  a marine biologist who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as she briefed the press about the report last week. “Decisions made now will determine whether we get big changes or small ones.”

The report itself noted that, “reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would lessen warming over this century and beyond. Sizable early cuts in emissions would significantly reduce the pace and the overall amount of climate change.”

Cutting emissions, though, is not easy, not even in Vermont, or maybe especially in Vermont. Interestingly, this assessment comes from an environmentalist, Ann Ingerson, an economist for the Wilderness Society who works from her Craftsbury Common home.

“Vermont’s in an odd position because we don’t use a lot of fossil fuel for our energy, except for transportation,” she said

The state gets most of its electricity from nuclear or hydro power, and many Vermonters heat their homes with wood,  not nearly as harmful a greenhouse gas as coal or oil.

But Vermonters drive a lot, Ingerson noted.

“We’re very rural, with people living all over the place,” she said. “It’s not very efficient to use public transportation because we’re scattered,”

There are steps Vermonters can take, she said, such as participating in the forest offset plans she’s working on, in which “forest land owners (are encouraged) to accumulate more carbon in their forests” (essentially by leaving them alone) in return for payments from people or companies that want to reduce their “carbon footprint.”

But perhaps the most effective step Vermonters could take, Ingerson said, is a step they rebuff – living in town or in a village center instead of out in the woods.

“Everyone says we should develop in compact villages,” she said, “but then everyone wants their own little place in the country.

Including, she acknowledged, herself.

Including, he is now shamed into acknowledging, the News Guy.

Remember what Walt Kelly said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

These are good days for supporters of wind power in Vermont. In February, the state Supreme Court turned down a challenge to the Public Service Board’s approval of the proposed wind towers in Sheffield, removing the last major obstacle to development of that  16-turbine, 40-megawatt, wind generation facility.

At about the same time, officials of Vermont Electric Cooperative began talks with the owner of land on Lowell Mountain about buying power from a 17-tower wind generating plant he’d like to put up on his mountaintop. A new company called Kingdom Community Wind said it plans to apply for a Certificate of Public Good for the project late this year.

Lawmakers are cooperating, too. A state law that went into effect last year encourages electric utility companies to get more power from renewable sources. The federal “stimulus” plan includes “provisions to benefit the wind industry, including a grant program for renewable energy developers and a loan guarantee program for developers and manufacturers,” in the words of the web site of the American Wind Energy Association.

Even Gov. Jim Douglas, while not reversing his stated opposition to large, “industrial” wind facilities, has ignored the issue of late, perhaps aware that the top energy officials in his own administration seem not to share his concerns.

In fact, except for the people who live right near where the towers are slated to be built – with their blades extending 420 feet into the air and emanating a constant  hum –  almost nobody opposes wind power.

And those opponents, of course, can be dismissed as NIMBYs (“Not in My Backyard)  rather than public-spirited citizens trying to protect the state’s mountain vistas and environmental integrity.

Especially because the environmentalists are gung-ho for wind power. The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, generally considered the most uncompromising environmental group active in Vermont, features on its web site a “climate change call to action for New England  (which) defines five steps our region must take in five years to confront the climate threat,” including: “Build 2,000 megawatts of new wind power.”

The Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), challenges the state to “build renewable power like wind, solar and biomass to keep the lights on and create good-paying jobs(rather than) stay dependent on dirty and dangerous sources like Vermont Yankee and fossil fuels.”

The Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) is somewhat less enthusiastic. Still, Executive Director Elizabeth Courtney said, “we are pro-wind.”

Green-group endorsement helps explain why the general public seems to be on the side of building the wind towers. Though they should probably be viewed with some skepticism, such polls as have been taken on the matter show that most Vermonters favor developing wind power.

Nor is there any big mystery about why environmentalists are for more wind power. They are convinced that the greatest threat facing the world today is anthropogenic (that’s the fancy way of saying “human-created”) global warming. Humans create this warming primarily by burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas (though that last one isn’t as bad) in their cars, their factories, and to generate electricity.

So the more electricity that is produced without burning those fossil fuels, the less fossil fuel will be burned, putting less greenhouse-creating goop in the air and therefore easing (or at least not exacerbating) global warming. Right?

No. Wrong.

Or at least doubtful.

Unless the expansion of wind, solar, and other renewable power sources is accompanied by some mechanism to reduce the demand for – and therefore the production of – electricity from coal and oil.

The reason, according to many experts (and not refuted by any) is that the human demand – or at least the American human demand – for electricity is effectively infinite. The more that is produced, the more that will be consumed, as our technological and innovative (and somewhat hedonistic) society creates more electronic gadgets.

“Residential energy use has increased 23 percent over the past decade, as efficiency improvements have been more than offset by increase in air conditioning use and the introduction of new applications” said the most recent report of the Energy Information Administration.  By 2030, the report said, “total electricity use in the residential sector increases by 20 percent from 2007…”

So even if, as envisioned in the bill passed by the U.S. House earlier this week, non-fossil fuel power were to make up 25 percent of the total electricity used in 2025, the U.S. will still burn more greenhouse gas-producing coal and oil than it does now.

Unless, that is, the increase in solar and wind power is accompanied by something to raise the price of fossil fuel-generated power. In that case, wind power might well replace power produced from coal and oil instead of just supplementing it.

“I think that’s what cap and trade is aiming at,” said VNRC’s Courtney. ” If we can cap the amount of dirty carbon fuel that we produce, we can force ourselves into finding other sources.”

Cap and trade, in which the government sets a limit on the amount of carbon that can be emitted, and electric utilities have to buy permits to emit their share, is central to President Barack Obama’s  his energy policy. Right now, though, that proposal faces tough sledding in Congress, where almost all Republicans and some Democrats view it is a de facto tax increase.

It is, though probably not the $3,100-a-year per household tax hike that House Republican leader John Boehner proclaimed it to be yesterday. MIT Professor John Reilly, one of the authors of the study Boehner cited, said the actual per-household increase would probably be about $340 a year.

But it is a tax increase, and a reminder that there is probably no way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without paying for it. Without, in fact everyone paying for it.

In Vermont, there is a mandatory cap and trade regime in effect. It even has a name – Reggie – which is not a guy, but the an acronym for the Regional Greenhouse  Gas Initiative, in which the New England states, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York limit emissions from electric power plants.

But that’s not enough to raise the price of fossil fuel-produced power.

“It’s  really a very narrow program that only applies to electric generating units,” said Dick Valentinetti, the Director of the Agency of Natural Resources Center for Climate Change. It’s not economy wide. Until you get into an economy-wide program you’re not going to be able to see a substantial increase in the credits for greenhouse gases.”

None of this means there is no case to be made for wind power. It’s (potentially) inexpensive. It’s clean. It’s produced locally. It provides tax revenues for towns, generous rental income for land-owners and profits for developers (if  more from tax breaks than from actually selling electric power). But it is nether economically nor environmentally benign. The towers are unsightly to many, and could discourage tourism. Building and maintaining them requires cutting roads through wetlands, across steep slopes, and through delicate wildlife habitat.

All of which might be a worthwhile price to pay. But without some mechanism to reduce consumption of fossil fuel-based power, it will not help in the fight against global warming. Environmentalists who campaign for wind power in the hope that it will combat climate change run the risk of supporting environmental degradation in return for nothing.

Some environmentalists know that. “We don’t want to be trading one environmental value for another,” said Courtney, adding that being in favor of wind towers does not require being in favor of every wind tower proposal.

In its application for a Certificate of Public Good from the Public Service Board, First Wind, the company planning to build the Sheffield project, did not argue that the wind towers would reduce global warming. The industry is not making that claim. It is letting others do the job for  it.

There is, of course, another way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced by power generation: use less power.

That does not require slower economic growth, as demonstrated in one state – this one. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average annual increase in Vermont electricity consumption between 1980 and 2005 (while the state’s economy was growing at a healthy clip) was 1.5 percent, substantially below the national figure of 2.1 percent.

This didn’t just happen. One reason for Vermont’s success in holding down electricity use, Valentinetti said, is the state’s energy efficiency apparatus, Efficiency Vermont, run by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC).

Common sense, then, would indicate that the public and private sector in the state would be united in strengthening this non-profit corporation so that it could continue to reduce the amount of electricity Vermonters use without diminishing their comfort or prosperity.

Apparently not. Instead, VEIC is at the center of a political quarrel between Gov. Douglas and the Legislature. Something to examine at a later date.