This is the first of a regular digest of global warming news published in the main academic journals.

The journal Climatic Change recently published a devastating review by Marc D Davison of the University of Amsterdam. Parallels in reactionary argumentation in the US congressional debates on the abolition of slavery and the Kyoto Protocol (PDF) aims to show that there were very similar arguments used in the historic US Congress debates on Slavery as have been used in regards to the Kyoto Protocol.

For example:

"the Central African race...had never existed in so comfortable, so respectable, or so civilized a condition as that which it now enjoyed in the Southern States”...Slavery was not “an evil. Not at all. It was a good – a great good.” -- John Caldwell Calhoun arguing on the senate floor in 1837

"Thus far, no one has seriously demonstrated any scientific proof that increased global temperatures would lead to the catastrophic predictions by alarmists. In fact, it appears just the opposite is true, that increases in global temperature have beneficial effect on how we live our lives. What gets obscured in the global warming debate is the fact that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is necessary for life. Numerous studies have shown that global warming can actually be beneficial to mankind...it would be beneficial to our environment and the economy.” -- Senator Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee 2003. Both quotes page 72 (PDF)

Whilst at first this sounds like an unlikely theory, it starts to fall into place. Slaves were a massive resource with powerful men standing to lose a lot if slavery was abolished. Senators argued first that there was no problem, then that the costs of change would be too great, that the cause was not proven and that doing the right thing before others would be counter-productive. Later the same things were argued about climate change. Which just goes to show - the obstructive arguments have a long history.

Over at the Nature Reports Climate Change podcast from the Journal Nature, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science explains how the White House attempted to gag him after a talk at the American Geophysical Union (PDF) meeting in 2005. Unbeknown to Hansen, senior public affairs officials at NASA were close to the fossil fuel lobby and along with the White House did not appreciate what was being said by these academics. He now suggests that American voters should ask presidential candidates to pledge to allow scientists to report the results of their research without political interference.

A group of scientists report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America about a particular problem associated with climate change - namely what happens if we bust a gut to meet reduction targets and nobody else bothers so that we are all totally screwed anyway? In simulations, where the consequences of failure were very high, participants were more self-giving than in simulations where the consequences were less serious and as a result the goal was reached more often. In some cases irrational behaviour meant that participants refused to pay more than their 'fair share' even when it was clear that the result was failure - showing that people value fairness over success. On a world scale that might mean that if the USA doesn't meet its commitments, China and India might just shrug their shoulders and say 'sod it, why should we do more than our share?'.

Climate Change Biology reports a study on the effects of an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere on food crops. Under controlled conditions, a range of food crops showed a measurable difference in their protein concentration, which could have worrying implications for human nutrition.

So, we're lied to, the scientists are obstructed, our inaction gives others an excuse to do nothing and we're indirectly causing nutritional changes in the food we will all eat in the future. Great.