Global warming not causing extreme weather

In a Senate hearing Thursday, environmental scientist Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado said it’s “incorrect” to claim that global warming is spurring more extreme weather disasters.“It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Pielke said in his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

“Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900,” Pielke added. “The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970.”Senate Democrats pointed to the increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes as evidence of global warming. California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer said that “climate change is real” and human activities were the cause, adding that people can “look out the window” to see evidence of it.

“Heat waves, droughts, wildfires and hands free access — all are now more frequent and intense,” said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address.Pielke, however, notes that U.S. floods have not increased in “frequency or intensity” since 1950 and economic losses from floods have dropped by 75 percent as a percentage of GDP since 1940. Tornado frequency, intensity, and normalized damages have also not increased since 1950, and Pielke even notes that there is some evidence that this has declined.

Pielke noted in his testimony that droughts have been shorter, less frequent, and have covered a smaller portion of the U.S over the last century. Globally, there has been very little change in the last 60 years, he said.“The absolute costs of disasters will increase significantly in coming years due to greater wealth and populations in locations exposed to extremes,” Pielke added. “Consequent, disasters will continue to be an important focus of policy, irrespective of the exact future course of climate change.”

Senators sparred over predictions and claims made about man-made global warming. Democrats argued that the effects of global warming can be felt today and Republicans argued that evidence of human-induced warming is thin.“I would note that it has not been titled ‘Global Warming: It’s Happening Now,’” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter. “Maybe that would have been too ironic given the Earth’s stagnant temperature for the past 15 years, a fact that is currently confounding climate scientists and modeling experts who predicted otherwise.”

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, a longtime critic of global warming claims, pointed to a set of Obama administration talking points on the “do’s and don’ts” when talking about global warming.This didn’t deter Senate Democrats who continued to argue that global warming could be seen today. Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, both pushed for taxing carbon emissions.

Republicans criticized the lack of White House testimony at the hearing.“It is unfortunate we don’t have any witnesses here from the Obama administration,” Vitter said. “Just weeks ago, President Obama announced a sweeping climate action plan, which will undoubtedly tighten the federal government’s grip on our economy.”

Welcome back to Kickstarter, Ouya: The little $100 gaming cube-sole that made its bones on Kickstarter last summer and sold out at launch a few weeks ago is returning to the crowdfunding platform by way of $1 million in matching funds it says it’ll offer as a cash incentive to developers who manage to raise money for Ouya-related projects via Kickstarter.

Promoting the campaign with an orange-silhouetted Ouya gamepad sporting angelic wings, Ouya’s calling the pile of cash its “Free the Games Fund.” Also a “first-of-its-kind” program, which sounds right. I don’t believe anyone else has offered matching funds to incentivize other Kickstarter projects — a significant first that’s sure to spur copycats.Ouya says it has more than 20,000 registered Ouya game developers at present, any of whom could have access to the matching funds. The catch: the games have to launch on Kickstarter between Aug. 9, 2013 and Aug. 10, 2014.

“Developers, we’ve set aside one million bucks to turn your ideas into reality,” teases Ouya on its promotional site. “It’s our way of giving back to the platform that helped us make Ouya a reality and to rewrite the ‘rules’ of how a game console is brought to market. Kickstarter was our beginning — here’s hoping it’s yours, too.”

Ouya’s being rather shrewd here (in a good way). Without content, a games console is nothing. The Wii U’s been struggling since launch to cough up games worth spending $350 (that’s for the system alone) to play. Had Nintendo launched with a new Zelda, say, and followed up with a smorgasbord of triple-A first- and third-party titles, we’d be having a very different conversation about the Wii U right now. Quality content is air, especially for a startup — without it, you suffocate.

It’s too early to say how well Ouya’s doing post-launch, incidentally. Reports had the console sold out, day one, which sounds like a good problem to have, save for the fact that Ouya goofed getting systems into the hands of all of its Kickstarter supporters first, stoking a minor PR kerfuffle that had Ouya’s CEO uttering expletives. At present, Ouya is in stock everywhere I checked, and user reviews at sites like Amazon, many of them quite detailed, are mixed-to-positive.

“There are two reasons why OUYA is on retail store shelves today: we had an innovative idea to build an affordable and open game console for the television, and we found fans who supported our idea and provided the funds to make it happen,” said Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman in a statement about the matching funds maneuver. “Since then, we’ve seen dozens of great games launch on Kickstarter, and now we are in the enviable position of being able to give back AND secure the best, exclusive games for OUYA.”

When I see a company offering incentives to drive development, I wonder whether it was planned all along or occurring because of worries that quality content isn’t moving down the pipe quickly enough. It’s hard to say, though surely the console lacks an abundance of Ouya-unique content — most of its library of 230 free-to-try games and media apps are shoe-in products available elsewhere.

In any case, if you want to drink from Ouya’s cup, in addition to launching and concluding your Kickstarter between the dates mentioned above, you’ll need to raise $50,000 minimum to be eligible, agree to make your game exclusive on Ouya for a minimum of six months and adhere to Ouya’s “light” submission guidelines. Ouya will match up to $250,000 per project, and the company’s throwing in a “Rock Star” bonus of an additional $100,000 to whosoever raises the most dough overall on Kickstarter by the program’s close.

Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.