Deep Politics Forum

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Climate Change skeptic suggests scientists should go to jail[/SIZE]

A FoxNews.com article questioned whether 2012 was actually the hottest year on record, quoting "skeptics" who suggest a government office is manipulating data to fabricate proof of rising temperatures. In fact, statistical adjustments made by the agency are required, publicly-documented changes to correct for errors and known sources of bias in the raw data.
In January, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) announced that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous U.S. - an announcement that Fox News ignored until one of Fox News' few liberal commentators, Bob Beckel, tried to bring it up on The Five. Soon after, FoxNews.com reporter Maxim Lott solicited the views of a few professional climate "skeptics" to claim that scientists made unjustified data adjustments to exaggerate 2012's heat.

Under the headline "Hottest year ever? Skeptics question revisions to climate data," Lott quoted Roy Spencer, a rare climate contrarian scientist who considers it his job to "minimize the role of government," and Steve Goddard, a climate denier-cum-birther writing under a pseudonym, to cast doubt on the temperature record. According to Goddard, the U.S. only "appears" to have warmed as a result of the agency's adjustments, making the data "meaningless garbage." Lott gave the final word to former television weatherman and blogger Anthony Watts, who said, "In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data."
But the NCDC has publicly explained that it needs to make adjustments to the raw temperature data to account for flaws that can result, for example, when stations are moved, are measuring temperatures at different times of day, or are measuring temperature with different instruments. The NCDC carefully applies these adjustments after publishing their methods in multiple peer-reviewed papers. As several scientists tried to explain to FoxNews.com, these adjustments make the temperature data more accurate:
Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites who was quoted by FoxNews.com, wrote in an email to Media Matters that recent changes to the data served to improve accuracy. The changes were posted prominently by NCDC in the September 2012 State of the Climate report and, according to Thorne, were "supported by extensive documentation" and "flagged with significant due process undertaken prior to release."
John Abraham, an IPCC reviewer concluded that Fox News had "misinformed its readers about climate change again."

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/01/11/...hot/192185

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January 11, 2013 02:25 PM EST [/TD]
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[TD="class: story, colspan: 2"]Human activities play a primary role in causing climate change, and evidence is mounting that those changes will lead to more frequent extreme weather events, according to a major draft report released Friday.

The draft of the third National Climate Assessment comes as the Northeast continues to recover from devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy and just days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States.

The draft report, which runs more than 1,000 pages and was approved for release Friday by a federal advisory committee, warns that "human induced climate change is projected to continue and accelerate significantly if emissions of heat trapping gases continue to increase."

But don't hold your breath for serious action on climate change in Congress. Republicans and some moderate Democrats remain opposed to measures to address climate change. The Obama administration, meanwhile, is moving forward with its own efforts on climate change, including beefed-up fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas regulations for new power plants.

The report also stresses that climate change harms public health.

"Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, diseases transmitted by insects, food and water and threats to mental health," the report says.

And it warns that the effects of climate change including sea level rise, storm surges and extreme heat could have wide-ranging negative effects on the country's infrastructure, findings that could gain traction in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The report also says climate change will threaten water supplies across large swaths of the United States, including the Southwest, the Great Plains and the Southeast, along with "adverse impacts to crops and livestock over the next 100 years."

The report predicts that temperatures will rise 2-4 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming decades in most areas. By the end of the century, temperatures could increase 3-5 degrees "under a lower emissions scenario involving substantial reductions" and 5-10 degrees "under a higher emissions scenario assuming continued increases in emissions."

"The chances of record-breaking high temperature extremes will continue to increase as the climate continues to change. There has been an increasing trend in persistently high nighttime temperatures, which have widespread impacts because people and livestock get no respite from the heat. In other places, prolonged periods of record high temperatures associated with droughts contribute to conditions that are driving larger and more frequent wildfires. There is strong evidence to indicate that human influence on the climate has already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat events like the record-breaking summer of 2011 in Texas and Oklahoma," the report says.

The report adds: "The rate of global sea level rise measured by satellites has been roughly twice the rate observed over the last century." And sea level rises will continue, with the report estimating 1- to 4-foot increases this century.

"The stakes are high, as nearly 5 million Americans live within 4 feet of the local high-tide level," the report says.

But there is at least some good news for farmers in the near term.

"Over the next 25 years or so, the agriculture sector is projected to be relatively resilient, even though there will be increasing disruptions from extreme heat, drought, and heavy downpours. U.S. food security and farm incomes will also depend on how agricultural systems adapt to climate changes in other regions of the world," the draft report says.

The report also breaks down the effects of climate change by region. In the Northeast for example, the report warns of "heat waves, coastal flooding due to sea level rise and storm surge, and river flooding due to more extreme precipitation events."

And in Alaska, "summer sea ice is receding rapidly, glaciers are shrinking and permafrost is thawing." The changes are causing major changes to the ecosystem that are impacting Alaskan native communities.

Additionally, the report warns of ocean acidification and the "alteration of marine ecosystems" because oceans absorb about one-quarter of human-caused carbon emissions and 90 percent of heat that results from warming.

The National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee reached consensus at a meeting Friday morning to release its draft National Climate Assessment, which will be available online later Friday afternoon.
The report fulfills the requirements of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which requires a climate change assessment be provided to the president and Congress every four years. This is the third National Climate Assessment.

The report is coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 13-agency working group. But it is written by NCADAC, an advisory committee that consists of 60 scientists and other experts.
The federal government and the public will have the opportunity to make comments and recommend changes to the report before it is finalized. The comment period ends in April 2013. The final report is slated to be released in early 2014.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 2:12 p.m. on January 11, 2013.
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Corn and wheat prices surged today. The immediate reason appeared to be the year-end USDA report, that showed supplies were lower than projected.

But concurrent with that report was the release of the Commerce Department's National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee National Climate Assessment survey.
One of the findings: we can expect up to a century of drought.

Here's a chart from the report projecting percent of the country in drought conditions in the coming years.
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Commerce/NOAA
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The red line is based on observed temperature and precipitation. The blue line is from the average of 19 different climate models. The gray lines in the background are individual results from over 70 different simulations from these models.

The projections are derived from the Palmer Drought Severity Index, one of the most widely used measure of drought, the report says.
"These results suggest an increasing probability of drought over this century throughout most of the U.S.," the committee says. "Droughts have become more frequent and intense in some regions, and confidence is that these trends are projected to continue."

Tim Flannery[URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian"]
The Guardian[/URL], Friday 11 January 2013 13.59 EST

This summer, life in Australia resembles a compulsory and very unpleasant game of Russian roulette. A pool of hot air more than 1,000 miles wide has formed across the inland. It covers much of the continent, and has proved astonishingly persistent. Periodically, low pressure systems spill the heat towards the coast, where most Australians live. At Christmas it was Perth. Then the heat struck Adelaide, followed by Tasmania, Victoria, and southern New South Wales and Canberra. Over this weekend, it's southern Queensland and northern New South Wales that look set to face the gun. And with every heatwave, the incidences of bushfires and heat-related deaths and injuries spike.

Australians are used to hot summers. We normally love them. But the conditions prevailing now are something new. Temperature records are being broken everywhere. At Leonora, in the Western Australian interior, it reached 49C this week the national high and just one record temperature among many. The nation's overall temperature record was set on 7 January. Then the following day that record was exceeded, by half a degree Celsius.

The breaking of so many temperature records indicates that Australia's climate is shifting. This is supported by analysis of the long-term trend. Over the past 40 years we've seen a decline in the number of very cold days, and the occurrence of many more very hot days. All of this was predicted by climate scientists decades ago, and is consistent with the increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

The new conditions have seen the Bureau of Meteorology add two new colour categories to Australia's weather prediction maps. Temperatures of 48-50C used to be the highest, and where such extremes were anticipated, the weather map was marked black. Over the last week, purple patches have begun to appear on some maps. They mark temperatures above 50C. Pink, which is yet to be deployed, will denote temperatures above 52C.

Climate extremes have a way of stacking up to produce unpleasant consequences. Two years ago, the ocean temperature off northwestern Australia reached a record high, and evaporation of the warm seawater led to Australia's wettest year on record. This was followed, in central Australia, by the longest period without rain on record. The vegetation that had thrived in the wet now lies dried and curing, a perfect fuel for fires.

With abundant fuel and increased temperatures, the nature of bushfires is changing. Australians have long rated fire risk on the MacArthur index. On it, a rating of 100 the conditions that prevailed in the lead-up to the devastating 1939 bushfires represents "extreme" risk. But after the 2009 fires a new level of risk was required. "Catastrophic" represents a risk rating above 100. Under such conditions fires behave very differently. The Black Saturday fires of 2009, which killed 173 people, were rated at between 120 and 190. They spread so fast, and burned so hot, that the communities they advanced upon were utterly helpless.

The superheated air currently monstering the continent is fickle. This week, Sydneysiders watched in relative thermal comfort as those living just 100km to the south endured scorching heat, blustering winds, and unstoppable fires. The forecast for coming days indicates that Sydney might once again be lucky, with the worst fire conditions striking 50km to the north of the city. But, of course, things might work out differently.

The unprecedented conditions of recent weeks have seen many Australians rethinking their attitude to climate change. A good friend of mine farms just outside Canberra. A few years ago the drought was so severe that his 300 year-old gum trees died of thirst. Then the rains came on so violently that they stripped the precious topsoil, filling his dams with mud and sheep droppings. This week he watched as his cousin's property at Yass was reduced to ashes. When I called he was trying to secure his own historic homestead and outbuildings from fire. He asked me if I thought the family would still be farming the area 50 years from now. All I could say was that it depended upon how quickly Australia, and the world, reduced their greenhouse gas emissions.

Australia's average temperature has increased by just 0.9 of a degree celsius over the past century. Within the next 90 years we're on track to warm by at least another three degrees. Having seen what 0.9 of a degree has done to heatwaves and fire extremes, I dread to think about the kind of country my grandchildren will live in. Even our best agricultural land will be under threat if that future is realised. And large parts of the continent will be uninhabitable, not just by humans, but by Australia's spectacular biodiversity as well.

This week's extreme conditions have once again raised the political heat around climate change. The Greens party condoned an anti-coal activist who created a false press release claiming that the ANZ bank had withdrawn support for a major coal project, causing its share price to plunge. Meanwhile the acting leader of the (conservative) opposition, Warren Truss, said it was simplistic to link the hot spell to climate change, and "utterly simplistic to suggest that we have these fires because of climate change".

Australia is the world's largest coal exporter, and the mining lobby is exceptionally strong. As calls to combat climate change have increased, the miners have argued that "mum and dad investors" will lose out if any effort is made to reduce the export or use of fossil fuels. But the smart money is no longer backing fossil fuels. In South Australia, wind energy has gone from 1% to 26% of the mix in just seven years, and nationally solar panel installations are 13 years ahead of official projections. Last year, in fact, Australia led the world in terms of number of individual solar installations.

And finally, with a carbon price in place, Australia's emissions curve is beginning to flatten out. Despite these efforts, Australians are already enduring the kind of conditions they'd hoped to avoid if strong, early action had been taken. Now, more than ever, we're in a race against time to avoid a truly catastrophic outcome.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...g-too-late

The Climategate and Jerry Sandusky Scandals: A Common Thread

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/t...z2HnxTlfLz
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

America, it's time to meet your newest top-secret government employee: a professional cover-up artist with a radical agenda.

Graham Spanier is the former Penn State University president who was fired during the Jerry Sandusky investigation for failing to properly investigate Sandusky when the pedophilia allegations first surfaced. Spanier's "investigation" of Jerry Sandusky was so thoroughly inept that it got him fired. When it was completed, Spanier stated that he had "complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations against Sandusky," and he was fired very shortly thereafter. The recent Freeh report indicates that the investigation was conducted for the purpose of finding nothing. In other words, it was a cover-up.

It wasn't the only time Spanier rigged an inept investigation for the purpose of finding nothing. In 2010, his investigators found that Penn State climatologist Michael Mann had done nothing wrong when he invented his 'hockey stick trick," to "hide the decline" and lend false credibility to climate change theory. The difference between the Mann investigation and the Sandusky investigation is that one covered up a sex offender and the other covered up a fraud.

The Climategate "Investigation"

The methodology, however, was equally bad. The "Climategate" investigation was conducted by five Penn State employees. It is available here. The five internal investigators were given a list of four specific allegations of academic fraud, and they proceeded to dismiss the three most significant allegations outright, without investigating them at all. The next step was to read 376 e-mails written by Mann and dismiss 329 of them. After this, they conducted a two-hour interview with Michael Mann, in which he (shocker!) denied doing anything wrong.

The next step was to interview two outside climatologists, noted within the report itself for their personal support of Mann himself and his science, named Dr. Gerald North from Texas A&M and Dr. Donald Kennedy from Stanford University. Naturally, these two friends supported Mann. Next, they interviewed Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT, who accused them of ignoring the most important allegations. They ignored him and moved on. The report actually states this. "We did not respond to him."

After this, the investigators deemed that Michael Mann hadn't done anything wrong. They did not investigate three quarters of the allegations against him, and they did not interview anyone with an opposing viewpoint. President Spanier then stated, "I know they have taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides." This statement is blatantly untrue, as the report itself indicates. It also sounds disturbingly similar to Spanier's statement about the Sandusky cover-up -- "I have complete confidence in how they handled the allegations against Sandusky" -- which got him fired.

When Graham Spanier organizies an internal investigation of his own celebrity employees, he finds what he wants to find, and he doesn't seem to care a lick whether it is true. An internal investigation overseen by Spanier is about as credible as a child rape investigation by the U.N.

This brings us back to Jerry Sandusky, the child rapist. There are two reasons Graham Spanier helped cover for Sandusky. First is Spanier's well-known instinct to protect his friends. Second is that Spanier himself has a radical sexual agenda.

The Child Rape Cover-Ups
His career started in the early '70s, when he became one of the world's leading academic voices for "swinging," or mate-swapping. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject, and he frequently published additional essays throughout the 1970s. His conclusion was that mate-swapping is good for marriages as long as it is not done in secret. In an article on mate-swapping that he co-wrote with Charles L. Cole from 1975, we find this gem: "We choose to view deviant behavior simply as behavior that some value and others consider wrong. An individual's behavior becomes deviant only when others define it as deviant."

With this attitude toward sexual morality, does it surprise you that Spanier himself personally refused to investigate a completely different sex scandal just a few days before the allegations against Sandusky were first brought to his attention?
In February 2002, a man named Paul McLaughlin spoke personally with Graham Spanier and told him that he had been sexually molested as a child by a Penn State professor named John Neisworth, on the Penn State campus. McLaughlin offered Spanier a copy of a tape recording in which the professor admitted the abuse.

Spanier told him, "Don't bother," and never pursued the case at all. A few days later, on March 1, football assistant Mike McQuery reported finding Jerry Sandusky anally raping a boy in the shower, and Spanier again dismissed the allegation, eventually leading to the current shambles of Penn State. The crime was evil. The cover-up destroyed an institution.

If you are counting at home, that is two charges of child rape in one week that Graham Spanier personally refused to investigate. The reason the Neisworth abuse case isn't more famous is because it didn't involve a celebrity football coach. We know that the charges were true on both counts. Sandusky is in jail, and in 2005, Neisworth was charged with additional cases of child sexual abuse. In 2006 he agreed to an out-of-court six-figure payment to McLaughlin.

The Twisted Agenda

The truth is, in March of 2002, Graham Spanier didn't have time to investigate charges of sexual abuse among his faculty because he was too busy promoting it on campus. I was there. That very month, Penn State hosted a "Women's Health Conference" and a "Sex Faire." These events are not to be confused with the "C*nt Fest" and the "Tent of Consent," from a few months prior, but Spanier wanted to make sure his twisted sexual agenda was as clear as possible. Penn State knew what agenda they were getting. When they hired him in 1995, the student body president at the University of Nebraska (which Spanier had headed) warned Penn State, saying, "Watch out for his social agenda and make sure he doesn't make it a priority over academics." The warning was prescient.

The important keynote speaker at the Sex Faire and "Women's Health Conference" in 2002 was a person named Pat Califia, who has authored dozens of books and essays about sexual pervserion including S&M and pedophilia. Califia is quoted on the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) website with the following: Jerry Sandusky couldn't have said it better himself. Califia's words came from an interview in 1980, at a time when Spanier was one of the most prominent sociologists in the world, specializing in sexuality. It is impossible to imagine him being unaware of who Califia was. Penn State paid Califia with state-subsidized money within a month of President Spanier hearing of two seperate child rape allegations against his staff and actively covering them up.

The 2002 Sex Faire and related festivities were not an isolated incident. We had one the previous year as well, including a presentation of "The Vagina Monologues," a pornographic play. The Pennsylvania state legislature called Spanier to a hearing for using taxpayer subsidies to pay for it. At the hearing, when he was pressed on the question of whether the sex faire was wrong, Spanier reached into his Ph.D. bag of tricks and responded, "I don't understand what you mean by 'wrong.'" Indeed.

Spanier's deep history of pushing his twisted agenda and actively covering up wrongdoing by his faculty members is astonishing. The only reason he has avoided the media spotlight of the Jerry Sandusky scandal is because Joe Paterno was a celebrity football coach. A Google search for "Joe Paterno Scandal" actually retrieves 2.4 million more results than a search for "Jerry Sandusky Scandal." Graham Spanier deserves this kind of fame, too. Does any of this matter now that he has been fired, Sandusky is in jail, and Paterno is dead?

The Big Promotion

America, meet your newest secret consultant. Graham Spanier, the professional cover-up artist with a history of promoting and covering evil deeds, has now been hired by your federal government for a top-secret consulting job that is so secret that we aren't even allowed to know what it is. Sounds like a good fit. This man's primary skill is covering up dark things that make people look bad. They need him for something. They hired him as soon as he was available.

Don't believe another word they tell you.

T.S. Weidler is a Penn State graduate who personally witnessed (but did not participate in) the Sex Faire, the C*nt Fest, and many of the events mentioned in the article. Contact him at tsweidler at yahoo dot com.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/t...z2HnxK7zyF
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Greg

Thank you for Weidler's craniotomy of Spanier, that perfect presentation of Warrenite La-La-La We-Can't-Hear-You-With-The-Shower-Running.

We have had records for cold, for snow, for drought, for heat, and yet we are not dead.

Vikings closed their winery with the vineyards of Greenland under a blanket of white and frosty carbon from their smokestacks

The Guardian now resurrects the pedophilia agenda

Sandy as though bad weather should be banned from Camelot

Walter Duranty is proof Mann's hockey stick wasn't the first epic fraud on naive society

My grandfather got his degree in electrical engineering from Penn State, summers spent drilling on the PRR with a two-man device similar to

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A railroad carries a freight visible and tangible, valuable and utilitarian; Gorian blovation of the hockey-stick pedo-persuasion is too much the normal load of the ivied halls of academe today.

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CIA Report 1974, Figure 7

The x axis shows annual temperature in centigrade. The y axis is persons per hectare of arable land.

With respect to Figure 7, the CIA report states "As an example, Europe presently, with an annual mean temperature of 12°C (about 53°F), supports three persons per arable hectare. If, however, the temperature declines 1°C only a little over two persons per hectare could be supported and more than 20 percent of the population could be supported and more than 20 percent of the population could not be fed from domestic sources. China now supports over seven persons per arable hectare; a shift of 1°C would mean it could only support four persons per hectare a drop of over 43 percent.

A unique aspect of the Wisconsin analysis was their estimate of the duration of this climatic change. An analysis by Dr J.E.Kutzbach (Wisconsin) on the rate of climate changes during the preceding 1,600 years indicates an ominous consistency in the rate of (sic) which the change takes place. The maximum temperature drop normally occurred within 40 years of inception. The earliest return occurred within 70 years (Figure 8). The longest period noted was 180 years."

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CIA Report 1974, Figure 8

The CIA Report warning on the impact of cooling on the stability of nations is supported by a 2007 study by Zhang et al:
The CIA Report of 1974 drew heavily on the work of Professor Kutzbach of the University of Wisconsin, who continues to warn of the danger posed by gobal cooling. Professor Kutzbach is a co-author of a study that modelled the effect of a 3.1°C cooler climate (Phillipon-Berthier et al 2010). The premise of the study is that using a carbon dioxide concentration of 240 ppm based on typical values reached during the latter stage of previous interglacials, the climate would 3.14°K cooler than it currently is. Of that cooling, 0.45°K is attributed to vegetation effects and the balance of 2.69°K is due to the carbon dioxide level being 150 ppm less than it is currently. The 2.69°K figure is an obvious and deliberate overstatement. Based on the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide, the true heating differential between 240 ppm and 390 ppm is 0.32°K, as shown by this figure:

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Figure 3: The logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide

In a world in which even papers in solar physics have to genuflect to global warming in order to get published, it is likely that this overstatement was necessary to get this paper published. Viewed in that light, it seems that the authors wanted to warn the world of the effects of a 3.0°C-odd cooling and the only way they could get the paper past the censors was to concoct a story based on carbon dioxide levels in previous interglacials. A 3.0°C cooling is very similar to what Libby and Pandolfi 1979 warned of, and what is predicted from the length of Solar Cycle 25 as determined by Altrock's green corona emissions diagram, as shown in [URL="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/"]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/08/solar-cycle-24-length-and-its-consequences/
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So what did the study find? Philippon-Berthier and colleagues calculated that as a result of the colder and drier conditions, along with lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (a plant fertilizer), terrestrial photosynthesis would decline by 39% and leaf area would decline by 30%. In the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, forest cover would decline by 60% and grassland area would decline by 17%. In the high latitudes, the area of boreal forests would drop by 69% while the area of polar desert would increase by 286%. And in the Tropics, grass area would decline by 3%, forest area by 15%, and the area of bare ground would increase by 344%.

Adding back the effect of current higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on plant growth, the decline in terrestrial photosynthesis would be about 25% rather than the calculated 39%. That is likely to be good estimate of the decline in food production, all things being equal, that humanity has in prospect over the next twenty-five years as solar-driven cooling continues per the Libby and Pandolfi and green corona emissions-derived forecasts.


Figure 4: Total grass (top) and tree (bottom) differences (percentages) from current climate conditions with a 3.1°K cooling (source: Philippon-Berthier et al., 2010).

References

CIA 1974, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems

Libby, L.M. and Pandolfi, L.J. 1979, Tree Thermometers and Commodities: Historic Climate Indicators, Environment International Vol 2, pp 317-333

Philippon-Berthier, G., et al., 2010. Role of plant physiology and dynamic vegetation feedbacks in the climate response to low GHG concentrations typical of the late stages of previous interglacials. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L08705, doi:10.1029/2010GL042905.

Peterson, T.C., et al. (2008): The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 89, 9, 1325-1337,doi:10.1175/2008BAMS2370.

Matt Lagarde manages a fleet of towboats in Louisiana and watched with dread as a drought last year seared crops across the farm belt 1,000 miles upstream on the Mississippi River.

Now the effects of the worst dry spell in 70 years are making their way to the river's delta, said Lagarde, 41, who has worked on the nation's busiest waterway for half his life.

"Things just look fairly dismal over the next couple of months," said Lagarde, with AEP River Operations LLC in Convent, 57 miles west of New Orleans. "In the next couple of weeks, you're really going to see things start to tighten out."

Though rain has been plentiful in Louisiana, operators all along the Mississippi have lost work as diminished crops sap export tonnage and low water narrows the channel and jams up barges. AEP, a unit of American Electric Power Co. (AEP), has had to shift workers around as it idled boats. It is working through January without the usual profit from the previous year to tide it over, Lagarde said.

Louisiana, a state sustained by river commerce, is braced for the impact as barge traffic slows in the shallow water. About 7,000 jobs in the state -- more than any other -- would be at risk if record-low water forced shipping to halt, according to the American Waterways Operators, an Arlington, Virginia- based industry group.

Grain Shipments

About $2.8 billion worth of cargo, including coal, fertilizer and crude oil, moves along the river in a typical January, the group estimates. Barges carried about 388,000 tons of grain on the river in the week ended Jan. 5, a 24 percent drop from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Jan. 10.

"Many shippers moved product in early December, anticipating navigation difficulties due to low flows," the agency said in its weekly "Grain Transportation Report." An unusually large amount of grain is traveling to New Orleans by rail or being stored in silos until the river rises, it said.

While grain shipments have declined, barge owners have had enough residual work from the harvest and shipments of other commodities to keep business afloat, said Lagarde.

"There's no question that this has the potential to be a crisis," John Little, terminals manager in the New Orleans area for International-Matex Tank Terminals, said in a phone interview. The company, which stores liquid products including vegetable oil that are delivered by barge, has no plans to dismiss workers for a "short-term blip like this," he said.

9 Feet

If the current situation lasts beyond May, it will cease to be short-term, he said.

The National Weather Service on Jan. 9 forecast that the river at St. Louis will fall to about 9 feet by the end of the month, a level most towboats can't navigate safely, according to the Waterways Operators. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed the first phase of emergency work to keep the river open, excavating rock obstacles near southern Illinois.

Those efforts aren't enough for some cargo carriers. American Commercial Lines Inc. can't send barges from Louisiana to St. Louis to fetch 200,000 tons of coal because the vessels can't reach the docks there, according Doug Faust, a licensed towboat captain who manages marine operations for the company in New Orleans.

Not Hiring

"If the water falls out and shuts down the river, they're trapped," Jeff Kindl, vice president of Gulf operations for American Commercial and chairman of the local port safety council, said in an interview after a council luncheon at the New Orleans Yacht Club on Lake Pontchartrain.
The company, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, has lost about $27 million in revenue and foregone business since the drought began and has idled boats and workers, he said.

"We're not hiring where we normally would be hiring," Kindl said.

Canal Barge Co. in New Orleans may consider restricting bonus pay and raises if conditions persist, Chief Executive Officer Merritt Lane said in an interview at the company's downtown headquarters. He said he wants to avoid furloughs that would cost him experienced workers.

The barge operator, which transports oil to refineries upriver for companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) of Irving, Texas, has experienced shipping delays, according to Lane.

Disrupted Business

"It hurts our customers because it's completely disrupting their business," he said. "Ultimately it's clear that the consumer gets hurt. There's going to be either scarcity or higher prices."

Unlike in New York and New Jersey, where cargo handling is clustered among a handful of waterfronts, the work in Louisiana is spread among an array of complexes dotting the river for more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) north of the Mississippi River delta.

Much agricultural cargo is unloaded with the help of machines at the Port of South Louisiana, which stretches for 54 miles along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. There the goods are transferred to grain elevators operated by companies including Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. (ADM) of Decatur, Illinois.

Cargo in 20- and 40-foot-long shipping containers goes through the Port of New Orleans. Longshoremen arrive at a hiring yard near the wharves there at 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily seeking work.

"The stevedores haven't been affected yet because there's a lot of inbound cargo" from the Gulf, said Frank Morton, director and founder of Turn Services Inc., an affiliate of stevedoring company Associated Terminals Inc. which manages and repairs barge fleets.
"The problem is the uncertainty," Morton said. "How long are we going to be able to do this?"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-14...river.html